Flamingos

I made it back to Sewri yesterday. This time I went by train and in the late afternoon. The tide was pretty far out, but I did see that there were quite a few pink birds out there.



Wandering past the rusted hulks next to the pier where the kids were playing in the water the week before, a trio of young guys called me to come up and join them on the boat. I climbed up, we watched the birds, drank a little beer, and taught each other how to curse in our respective languages.

Waiting on the platform on the way home and inspired by Denny, I tried a little cameratossing.

Flamingos?

On Thursday night I joined the Ducrohets at a gathering of the French expats in Mumbai. It was held at a restaurant close by TIFR that Laurent had told me about, but that I had yet to explore myself. Like the parade of masochistic devotees last weekend, the cat feeder, Sunil the shoe shine guy (I've met him again, and discovered that he actually has legs, they are just rather small and not much good for walking on.), and TIFR itself, this place is one of the amazing incongruities that Bombay hosts. We stepped inside and into high-ceilinged, low-tabled rooms, with walls thick enough to block the street noise, and some low key techno playing on a good sound system that could have just as easily been in New York (or perhaps I'd be better to say Paris, since I've actually been there and since everyone who showed up that night was French).

I was struck during the course of the evening by how children are often treated so much more generously in India. While we were having our beers and Pizza Capricciosa (it seems that cheese does exist in India, if only in limited distribution) seated on low couches covered in raw silk, Brieuc was making the room into the jungle gym that is any room to a 3 year old. In between serving drinks and lighting Laurent's cigarettes, the waiters played with Brieuc, tickling him with the bolsters that he'd removed from the other couches as they set them back in place and relighting the candles when he blew them out. Though I've heard that places the don't allow kids exist in Mumbai, I've never encountered one, and the places like this one and Peshawar (where the manager once came out and scolded Laurent for keeping Brieuc from running amok while we were waiting for our dinner) are more common.

Yesterday, I went to an evening of short films on the roof of one of the hotels along Marine Drive. Yogi had mentioned it earlier in the day while a few of us were standing around outside, and though there were no plans fixed, Sreekar and I found ourselves on the same TIFR bus there, and when we found the roof of the Oceania, Yogi, Pablo, and Pablo's wife Anita were there, and Shoba was on her way. While we waited for the sky to darken enough for the films to show, Yogi and I watched the fruit bats cavorting in the twilight. "Are they showing off or what?" exclaimed the suave young Mumbaiker sharing our bit of terrace wall. A tree's canopy reached to a couple stories below the rooftop, and in it a dozen or so of them were congregated, close enough that we could see their pendulous acrobatics as they explored the branches for fruits. And when they floated in the evening breezes above Marine Drive, the streetlights shone through the thin skin of their wings, showing spindly finger bones splayed against the currents of air.

Eventually, the films started, and we made out way to the blankets set out in front of the chairs for the overflow seating. It seemed that we had happened upon a film club whose meeting night had been discovered by a weekly paper and suddenly the club had to deal with a few times the audience that was expected. The guy who introduced the films was effusively excited about the turnout, and promised to have more chairs over the weekend (there will be more films showing tonight and Sunday).

The first film was the best, a documentary on the flamingos that I didn't see last weekend. Apparently, high tide is not the best time to go and see them as we had thought, but instead about an hour or two before, when large parts of the mud flats are still exposed. I'll go this weekend and see if I can find them. The documentary described how sometime around 1994, 10,000-20,000 lesser and greater flamingos decided to converge on the Sewri mudflats. I don't know what Sewri means in Marathi, but it sounds like Sewery, which is an accurate enough description. However, it seems that the mix of sewage and industrial effluent creates a concoction such that the algae on which the birds feed really flourish. Unfortunately, there are also significant amounts of heavy metals being pumped into the water (ten times what India considers safe in many cases), quarrying operations that are rapidly changing the shape of Thane Creek (where the mudflats are), and there is a giant bridge going up soon that is slated to pass right through the mudflats. The film and the response that it garnered form the audience did quite a bit to shift me from my sour mood regarding the existence of environmentalism in Bombay, though Yogi and Shoba did have to explain to the old woman sitting next to us that seeing the birds in real life would be even better than seeing them in the film.

The rest of the films were more like what I was expecting; a comedy based on the difficulty of finding change, a spoof on the "separated at birth" theme that is rather popular in Hindi cinema, with a moral of national integration, a blundering mess of a mystery about a young couple found dead at the bottom of a cliff, and a story about a homeless guy who doesn't understand the concept of money, but happens on a briefcase full of it. After each film, the director would have a few minutes for questions. This was fun, and added to the film club atmosphere. Yogi, Shoba and I were amused that the only question the evening's anchor seemed to be able to ask was, "How much did the movie cost to make?" This was especially ironic when he asked it of the guy who made Paise...?, the film about the beggar who tried to eat a suitcase full of money and came up frustrated.

After the film, Yogi, Shoba and I went for dinner at the Tea Center. The food was great, but we ended up with more than we could eat. I find that this happens often when I go out to eat in India. It is a given at a thali place like Joshi's, but even at a regular place like this, food in Bombay seems to be feast or famine. It is hard to turn down a few more mouthfuls of a beautifully spiced dish, and easy to tip past the saturation point.

And in other news, I've been amusing myself and my streetside friends of the minute by letting people ride my bike, or at least try. When I first started out riding around in Bombay, I was really hesitant to let anyone take my bike for a spin. Other than one kid who I met on the very first day out, I tended to fend off any requests to take a spin. But after a certain point, I realized that there was no real reason for this, and that it is more friendly and more fun just to warn them and then watch. It turns out that the size of the bike and the fixed gear really do make it pretty much impossible for someone to just get on and ride.

It usually works about like this: I pass a group of guys hanging around on the sidewalk, or they gather when I stop somewhere. One of them is the most forward, and after a few questions about the bike, they ask if they can go for a ride. I show them the fixed wheel, and they nod like, "yeah, whatever, Gora, I know it's a bike." With some effort, they swing their leg over the seat which is at least four inches too high for them. On their tip-toes, straddling the top tube, they put a foot on a pedal and prepare to push off. Generally, the pedal they are putting weight on is not forward enough to carry them all the way into the seat, which they usually can't reach anyway, or for them to get their weight onto the other pedal, without passing the bottom of the arc, at which point they still have most of their weight on the initial pedal, and it stops the bike. Since they aren't really moving yet, they don't fall all the way over, but it is also not really a graceful dismount. At this point, the crowd of friends who I am standing with starts laughing and everyone is trying to figure out what is going on.

The experiment often ends there, and the bike is returned in a flurry of head wagging, but sometimes the would-be rider has more perseverance, and manages a few wobbly turns of the pedals. A few weeks ago, I spent a Sunday afternoon letting some people figure it out, and some of them did eventually. I had noticed a bike with an unusually large gear while out walking the day before, and the owner, Chandrakhar, asked me to come by and show him my bike. He was able to ride it pretty well after a little while. We went for a ride around the city that afternoon and last week I stopped off and though he wasn't there, I left him one of the copies of Cranked that Jill sent.

Solar powered tricycles, and where they might lead

A few years ago at Burning Man, I met Bob. Bob rolled into our camp in his solar-panel-and-windmill-powered RV with a fiery-crested stained glass bust of a horse at the prow. Bob's RV was neat and orderly on the inside, with a design aesthetic inspired by a small ocean going sailboat. His controls were a joystick on a cord that was long enough for him to be able to drive from anywhere in the vehicle. When driving into the wind, a properly timed jet of flame from the horse's crest would be caught by the windmill and split into a triple helix.

The next year, I ran into Bob again, and he was driving a giant tricycle that looked sort of like a praying mantis on a hang glider and hallucinogens.


(Photo by Waldemar Horwat)

I stopped in to chat with him one day while wandering around the playa. We snacked on guacamole and chips that the previous visitors had left, and Bob told about his life as a technician and engineer building devices at Stanford Medical School. We talked, among other things, of the future of transportation. Bob was convinced that the Lithium-ion battery was going to power the first successful electric car. His observation was that battery technology is increasingly driven by consumer electronics, and the threshold weight to cost to power density ratio to make a reasonable car is pretty much where we are now. These cell phones and laptops that we all can't live without now suck up a fair amount of juice, and one of the biggest factors in making them sell is making the batteries small and lightweight, while still being powerful and long lasting. These are also, of course key features of a battery that would power an electric vehicle, since in addition to moving the fat ass of the driver, it must move the batteries. In previous eras, the market impetus to make such batteries was a lot less significant than it is now at a time when 300 million Indians have mobile phones.

So anyway, at around the same time that Bob and I were eating guacamole, some folks in Silicon Valley (including the head of SpaceX) were starting a company to follow up exactly this idea. Their car is quite close to production, and it looks and sounds pretty damn sweet. The concept of the Tesla Roadster is to make a high end sports car (it is very similar in design to the Lotus Elise) that uses ability of an electric motor to blow the pants off of similarly designed gas powered cars. Now, these are stupidly expensive toys, but there are plenty of people who want to buy these stupidly expensive toys, and Tesla's plan is to make the money they make off of the Roadsters finance the development of a more practical version, and eventually get the price and models more in line with what the rest of everyone is interested in, car-wise. (The Tesla apparently does 0-60 in 4 seconds, has a 200 mile range and recharges in three hours from a wall outlet, and there are plans to sell it with a solar panel that will provide about 50 miles per day of charge.)

I personally still prefer the bicycle for an advanced technology, high fuel mileage, low emissions vehicle, and with products like the Stokemonkey coming out, it increases its usefulness and car replacing ability. I'm certainly not one of the people who disagree with technology like Tesla on the grounds that it is still a car. That sort of idealism doesn't allow for much compromise. The Tesla is a really neat next step, and I hope that they succeed. Tucker and DeLorean may have been knocked out of the car business by the big establisheds, but things really are different in today's market. Mostly because of the internet, distribution of information is much faster and wider. Also, this is a new product in a way that the Tucker and the DeLorean really weren't.

And since I mentioned the Stokemonkey, so I should say a little about how cool I think it is (cooler than the Tesla in many ways, but less likely to grab the attention). I've not actually seen one, much less ridden a bike with one, but I can still be excited about them. The Stokemonkey makes a bicycle into a human/electric hybrid vehicle. They are powered by NiCads instead of Lithium-ion (Lithium-ion is not the only battery technology that's being advanced by the consumer electronics market), and a compact electric motor provides a power assist, basically helping you pedal like the stoker on a tandem, putting out a good deal more power per pound than Lance Armstrong (of course, Lance eats sandwiches, not burning coal). Hybrid electric bikes aren't all that new, but this little device is the coolest implementation of the idea that I've seen. My favorite application that I've seen a picture of is this Sycip from the North American Handmade Bike Show. It is that little red thing.


(Photo by Alex)

Speaking of the NAHBS and of projects like Bob's praying mantis tricycle and fire-shooting horsehead chariot and the Tesla cars, I have to say that it makes me really happy that all of these smart and creative engineers and builders are working on projects like this and figuring out how to get people and their stuff from A to B more stylishly and more efficiently instead of getting jobs at Los Alamos and Sandia or Lockheed or Raytheon and figuring out how to be more efficient and stylish while killing people, or even just at GM, figuring out how to make cup holders more stylish and not giving a crap about efficiency. Of course, there are plenty of people doing the latter sorts of things, but my hope is that the bike builders and rocket scientists are enough cooler and more inspiring that the pendulum will continue to swing in this direction.

Clearly, a big part of the change that is happening is due to the new sexiness/practicality/popularity that environmentalism is finally acquiring in the US. Since perhaps the largest export of the US is desire, many of the changes in this regard that happen in the US eventually make it out into the rest of the world. The foreign money that is pouring into India in the form of outsourcing jobs is often spent on toys. As was recently commented on in an editorial over here, India's wealthy should really take a look at their own logs before demanding the right to growth at any cost because India consumes so much fewer resources compared to the West. The carbon sink of India's rich is India's poor. (In addition, I'm interested how these ecological footprint numbers are calculated, because there's a hell of a lot of polluting that goes on at the local level here because of nonexistent or unenforced laws that I'm not sure makes it into these guilt trip numbers that tell us how many times over we use up the planet. I just took one those tests with the data from my life here and my life in Seattle, and I apparently use 1.5 hectares here, and 26 in Seattle. There are supposedly 1.8 per person for the world. But I sure do like breathing the air and being outside better in the US than I do here, except when I'm up in the Himalayas...)

It is true that 80% of Mumbai uses public transportation, but that figure is falling, and that still means that at least 5 million don't. The local trains are famous for being crowded (over 6 million riders per day), but a good part of that is because the system hasn't been updated for decades. On the other hand, there is a growing number of SUVs on the roads here. I was talking about this to one of the other guys who lives in my apartment building last night, and he observed that (1) even a poor American probably has a car, and (2) Indians are comparatively less likely to make any sacrifices in terms of providing material goods for their family. (This guy has lived outside of India while he was a student, and he strikes me as an intelligent, open minded, somewhat conservative person. He is married and has a one year old son. His wife almost never talks to me, and if I am on the roof and she comes up there with her son but not her husband, she leaves immediately.)

Anyway, my point is that many people in urban India have bought or at least coevolved some significant parts of the 1950s era American Dream as far as consumption is concerned. But while there are many things that I wish people would do differently in India, most of them having to do with attitudes towards the environment in one way or another, one of India's main problems has been outsiders telling them how to run things for the last 300 years, and the last thing they need is another idealistic white guy who thinks certain attitudes should be reevaluated...

No Flamingos

An afternoon out on the streets of Mumbai tends to inspire at least a mild headache. If the dehydration from not being able to drink enough water doesn't do it, the sun will, or the horns and the general stress of being in the midst of so many people, or the dust, or the constant assault of smells - these days it's mostly garbage, sewage and truck exhaust since the dry season doesn't lend much moisture to the greener smells that filled the city when I first arrived. And then there is jar and chatter of biking on these roads if I chose to ride. For the most part, I'm keeping a low profile these days, holed up at TIFR and eating at McRajan's or the canteen, heading out just one or two times a week.

But today, I was lured out by the promise of seeing hundreds of flamingos who had stopped off in their migration at the mud flats of Sewri, just a few miles north of my part of Bombay. Arvind and Yogi went there this weekend and took some pictures. The theory was that if I went at high tide, I'd have the best chance of seeing them up close. Theory didn't pan out, but I did encounter some kids swimming off the end of a pier,



and a parade of people holding up buckets of water on long steel poles pierced through their cheeks,



and towing cars attached to hooks through the skin of their backs.



I also played in traffic on the way out. The string holding my tripod to my bars came loose, so part of the time the camera was looking at the ground, but you get the idea.

Demonstrations

One of the things that I'll be doing in Seattle next month is part of an amazing project that Lun-Yi has put together exploring the connections between mathematics and art.



I'll be giving a short talk in which I will try to convey some of the ideas underlying the process by which a mathematical theory turns a geometric object into abstraction, and then given an example of an abstraction of the sort that is produced by this process, reconstruct the geometric object. The analogy that I will be using is the process by which a cartographer draws a series of maps, and then how someone looking at a map develops a mental image of the land itself. My goal is to use the second part of this analogy to describe the so called Minimal Model Program, which is one of the largest industries within algebraic geometry.

I just came from our weekly seminar, where we have been working through a recent paper by Hacon and McKernan proving a very key step in the program. It is a technical result, and though I'd seen both of them give talks on it, I really had little idea of what was happening. Yogish, Narjmuddin, Amlendu and I have been taking turns presenting parts of the paper, and because Amlendu is going out of town next week, the length of our talks has gone from about 90 minutes (which is already almost twice as long as what I am used to) to a full two hours. At this time on Tuesdays we are all generally pretty burnt. But, with my lectures this week and last, we have finished working through their proof, and though I can't say I see it all perfectly, the picture is much more clear.

Game Over

NYT article on the Olympics being used to successfully put pressure on China regarding Darfur.

Hopefully this will be the first in a number of effective moves to get China to listen more to motivations other than greed and paranoia.

Quiet

As in, I haven't been posting.

That's mostly because there hasn't been anything worth posting about. It's warmer, hence I'm more lethargic, and less prone to being interested in going out into the city. This isn't that bad, as I have about one more uninterrupted month here in which to focus on math. Beginning when I come back to the States in May I'll suddenly be rather busy and then my schedule stays pretty chaotic until it ceases to exist.

But when it gets interesting again, I'll let you know. And maybe when I need something to procrastinate with, I'll let Team Red down from Sandakphu (though I hear that they like it up there).