ProcrastiBlog

For the benefit of future foreign MSRI employees and other Americans in possession of a Citibank Suvidha account:

1) It is possible to transfer your Rupees to a US bank, see below.
2) I have not been able to use my Citibank India ATM card in the US, but I haven't actually tried very hard. It is not a PIN issue, as I can check my balance---it just won't let me take out cash.

To transfer your money to the US, you need to:

a) Have your passport, visa, and pay slips that have been signed and sealed by the company. In my case, I brought every single pay slip and they were stamped and signed by HR.

a) Go to the Citibank Suvidha office in the Prestige Meridien building on MG Road. This is not the regular Citibank branch office out front, but a special office which is reached by walking around the building to the left, up a staircase, and past a Cafe Coffee Day. You will be asked to sign in. You need to talk to, IIRC, Shamila at the second desk on the left.

b) Fill out a form requesting "Remission for the Maintenence of Family". Do not ask to close your account. This will cause a controversy. For the amount you will write something like "X Rupees in USD" to signify the conversion of your Rupee balance to US dollars. I believe there is a fee of Rs 1200 for the transfer.

c) Be careful when you sign the forms. The most commonly heard phrase in the Suvidha office is "signature mismatch". (Do you actually know how to sign your own name? You'll get to find out!)

D) Et voila. Your money will appear in your US bank account within a week.

[UPDATE 9/9/2006] ATM card works in U.S. Citibank ATMs. Has not worked as yet in non-Citibank ATMs.

On August 21, 2006, the company purchased me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label* which I promptly turned over to Jonathan, who had gifted me the stolen whiskey. By some twisted Indian logic, this event was precipitated by my mentor's threat to buy me a bottle of whiskey himself by the end of the day if the company wouldn't. Thus endeth the Story of the Whiskey.

* Let's ignore the difference between Tennessee and Scotland and call it even.

So, yes, I am back in NY. I arrived back last Sunday. It is surprisingly not-weird to be here. It feels just like... being home.

I dropped off the face of the blogging Earth two weeks ago because (a) I had an enormous amount of work to do before I left Bangalore, (b) I've been just totally disoriented since I got back, and (c) NYU handed me a new laptop on Monday and I've spent all of my computer fiddling time since then trying to get wireless and "suspend to RAM" (i.e., sleep) working under Linux* (not responding to email, catching up on blogs, or getting any real work done).

I've actually got a bunch of things stacked up that I need to blog about, including: an end to the Saga of the Whiskey, the final lessons of India, the irritating trip home amid the Liquid Explosives Scare of '06, the Ballad of the Lost Bag, and "closeted gay friends: what's the deal?" Stay tuned.

* Anybody? Tips? The PC's a Dell Inspiron 6400, the wireless card's a Broadcom 1390, which I finally got working with a custom-compiled ndiswrapper**. Suspend to RAM seems hopeless.***

** NDIS!! Oh, how I loathe you!

*** As a result of my summer employment, I am feeling marginally more inclined to fuck it and just run Windows XP. The thing is, I spent an inordinate amount of my summer trying to get Cygwin and MSVC to play nice together and I long for a nice, reasonable command shell and a compiler to go with it.

There's this project on Flickr to have lots of people submit photos they took at exactly 2:42pm GMT, 19 August 2006. At the appointed hour (as ajudged by my insanely accurate timepiece), Carolyn and I were stuck in traffic coming back from Koramangala. I'm not sure what the exact rules are wrt sub-minute accuracy and what-not, but I now have three candidate pictures for submission. Let's take a vote!

The auto driver next to us (not our auto driver!), who thought we were two completely insane tourists:


Carloyn, centered and washed out by the flash, with a hint of another auto driver giving us the skunk eye:


Carolyn, off-kilter and trying to simultaneously take a picture of me:


Vote in comments.

Vijay invited us to visit his Dad's business, which is AFAIK to train pilots, build specialty aircraft, and sell aviation novelties.
I didn't even realize it was Vijay's family business until we were already there and he said, "Do you want anything? Just take it."



After a while I got bored and decided to just annoy Deb.



Later, we went to Cunningham Rd and had a disappointing meal.



What a day!

This is classic. And more here. Via Becks.

May I suggest a conservative over-approximation for Ms. Mackey Paisley Passey that avoids the arrogance charge? "I do not accept romantic propositions that I receive from strangers via email or blog comments. Thanks but no thanks." Wasn't that easy?

[UPDATE 8/20/2006] As Ms. Wei points out in comments there's more fun here. Executive summary: ugly people beat their girlfriends and poor people are immoral. You go girl!

Sitting in front of the Taj Mahal (which, for my American readers, was built by the Muslim Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his wife, incorporates verses of the Qu'ran into its design, and has an on-site mosque), I remember asking Hilleary what Osama bin Laden would think of it. The pinnacle of Muslim civilization's accomplishments or an impious despot's folly?

She said she had no idea and that predicting Osama bin Laden's thought patterns is not an activity that interests her.

I think this helps answer my question. (Although, it is not clear how legitimate this threat is or how well it ties in with the Islamo-whatsist world-view.)

Gilbird just handed me a bill of Rs 120 for 2 bottles of beer. So they weren't intended as repayment for the Jack Daniel's.

I spoke with Lepakshi on the phone and asked why I had received the beer. He said I received it because I had asked for it. But I hadn't. Gilbird says he was pulled away from his other work to go on an emergency beer run on my behalf.

This is all very strange, no? But I like beer. I even told Gilbird I am willing to pay for it (it's a fair price and I am glad to drink it), but he refused to take the money. He wants to get to the bottom of this. Good luck, man! I give up!

[UPDATE 9/4/2006] I paid for the beer before I left (at least I tried to). And Gilbird quit.

Not so easy to mix up. Via Kevin Drum.

Bonus happy talk about terrorism from John Rogers:

Who the hell am I supposed to be scared of? Joseph Padilla, dirty bomber who didn't actually know how to build a bomb, had no allies or supplies, and against whom the government case is so weak they're now shuffling him from court to court to avoid the public embarassment of a trial? The fuckwits who were going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches? Richard Reid, the Zeppo of suicide bombers? The great Canadian plot that had organized over the internet, was penetrated by the Mounties on day one, and we were told had a TRUCK FULL OF EXPLOSIVES ... which they had bought from the Mounties in a sting operation but hey let's skip right over that. Or how about the "compound" of Christian cultists in Florida who were planning on blowing up the Sears Tower with ... kung fu?

I have never been particularly interested in the the JonBenet Ramsey murder, partly because I just don't get into this sort of tabloid-y stuff and partly because the whole gestalt was just so Ick-Ick-Icky. But the story of this guy who claims to have murdered her is just really interesting. The dude looks exactly like a child murderer is supposed to look. He says he was “with JonBenet when she died.” He was picked up in Thailand, to which he had traveled in order to quasi-legally fuck children.

This is a tabloid story, people. Not Kate and Chris. Get real!

[UPDATE] His wife says he was in Alabama. Could this face tell a lie?

Josh Marshall flunks rhetoric, but captures my heart...

Is there anyone in the country who can say honestly, in their heart of hearts, that when that moment of fear hit them after the recent reports out of London, they said to themselves, "God, I'm glad we're in Iraq"?

Anyone?

Either (1) the mangosteens I bought the other day were not the best of the batch, (2) those damn ants got in there and ruined them, or (3) they don't take well to refrigeration (although it stuns and/or kills the ants). Mangosteen, my exalted queen! Why have you forsaken me?

Just the thing to take your mind off the end of the world.

My hand has healed to the point where I can make use of it in most normal situations. There's still some swelling, which pushes my knuckle out of whack, and it still hurts if pressed, squeezed, or twisted.

Which brings me to handshaking. I suppose I am a bit of a handshaking pedant, feeling that a handshake which is neither too limp nor too firm (the Goldilocks shake) is an essential aspect of good character. The predicament of having a fractured hand without a cast puts me in something of a characterological double bind.

My strategy at first was to simply offer my hand and pray that my shaking partner was not one of those confounded knuckle grinders. This usually did not turn out well.

Then I tried offering my left hand. This is awkward.

Another course is to hold up my hand and declare, "I am injured," thereby excusing myself from the shake. This is lame.

Putting my comfort ahead of my reputation, I have stumbled across a foolproof strategy. As the hands come together, I conspire to make sure that only my fingers end up in the other party's palm. The result is the ultimate in a weak handshake---the action is essentially equivalent to offering up my hand to be kissed.

Well, it has proven to be an effective anti-knuckle-crunching prophylactic. And nobody has kicked my ass yet.

Photo by liz_dalton via Flickr.

I'm sitting in bed, eating a mangosteen*, when I look down and my bowl is absolutely crawling with ants. "Huh. That's fast work," I thought. "Where did those ants come from?" Then I looked at my hand. And the fruit. Which were both covered in ants. Ack!

This might explain why only 2 of the 6 fruits in that batch were edible.

* Yes, mangosteen**. Which is not a kind of mango.

** Wikipedia says, "Mangosteen juice is a dye which can be almost impossible to remove from fabric (the reason why they are banned from some hotels in countries where they are available)." My bedsheets can attest to this fact.

Gilbird came over tonight with two bottles of beer, sent courtesy of Lepakshi. Thanks, Lepakshi! 40 more bottles like that and we'll be in the ballpark!

* I apologize for this unimaginative, generic title. This could have been the title of every single post I've done in the last 3 months...

[UPDATE 8/19/2006] Beer actually sent courtesy of my line of credit.

On July 4, 2006, Jonathan gave me the present of 1 liter of Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey. Unlike some brands of liquor, which are franchised to Indian distillers and sold for Rs 400-500, Jack Daniel's is imported from the US and costs more than Rs 3000.

Over the course of the next few weeks, no more than 5 shots of whiskey were poured. When we left for Delhi and points North on July 21, 2006, the bottle was more than 3/4 full.

When we arrived back in Bangalore on August 3, 2006, as I briefly mentioned, the whiskey was almost entirely gone. And to the extent that the contents had been diluted in the fashion of a homeopathic remedy, it was just plain gone.

The only people who had been in the guest house in those two weeks were two other MSR employees (who are moderate of habit and, in fact, teetotallers) and the household help.

Since I hadn't actually paid for the whiskey, I felt awkard about complaining. But at the same time, the housekeepers absolutely should not be drinking my liquor. So I complained to the appropriate persons in the lab.

Two days later, on August 7, 2006, I was informed that the culprit had been identified, had confessed, and would be made to pay. "Tomorrow."

Six days later, on August 13, 2006, the new housekeeper, Gilbird, informed me that the accused had "left the state" and was now denying that he ever drank the whiskey. "He cleaned the toilet and made the bed only. On his mother he swears."

Today, August 14, 2006, Gilbird, his manager Lepakshi, and the accused housecleaner knocked on my door at 10:00 AM. (Was the accused extradicted or had he given himself up? I don't know.) Lepakshi told me this was the boy who stole my whiskey, but he claims now to not have stolen it (and again with the toilet and the bed and the mother), and what did I want to say about that?

Um...

[UPDATE 8/15/2006] Two bottles of beer appear.

[UPDATE 8/19/2006] And are billed to my account. Word is that a resolution is pending... "Tomorrow"?

[UPDATE 9/4/2006] A bottle of Johnnie Walker appears. Close enough.

New photo set.

The good parts:

A really good breakfast at Kamat's on Mysore Road. Maybe the best meal I've had since Haridwar.

The falls:


The temple:


The hysterical laughing on the car ride home.

The bad parts:

The potholes:


The Qualis:


The 3 or 4 hours driving over potholes in the Qualis.

I really don't understand where this question comes from. I guess it's a clumsy translation of the local formalities. My answer is always "Christopher" (which inevitably comes back as "Mr. Christopher"), since "Chris" can easily become "Krishna" and "Conway" is just a waste of everybody's time. People here know the name "Christopher" the same way Americans know... Um... Are there any Indian names that Americans know? "Vijay"? "Ravi"? (Stupid Americans.)

Damn it. Felt on the verge of something all day yesterday and today I've woken up with a wicked sore throat.

Funny thing is I've been taking Cipro for unrelated stomach problems*, so either this is a viral infection or I've been breeding super-bacteria in my throat.

Another funny thing is that I'm realizing Hilleary was kind of lucky to get sick while we were traveling, because we could just call room service and ask for lemon or ginger tea. Whereas I'm about to go to the supermarket to go buy lemons and ginger and assemble a tea myself in the guest house kitchen. I think there's a knife in there somewhere...

I'm also going to the pharmacist to see if he will sell me anything like the Halls Defense lozenges that H and I swear by at times like these and to replenish my stock of ibuprofen, the only over-the-counter medication that I don't have a 200 or 300% overstock of**.

* It's a sign of the times that, after two days of the shits, I am only declaring myself sick now that my throat is sore.

** I have a gross oversupply of diarrhea and gas medicine, which I haven't taken at all, and Benedryl and loratadine, which I have taken only rarely. I don't have any cold medicine (e.g., Dayquil, Nyquil), which is now on Hilleary's "don't leave home without it" list. I went to the pharmacist in Jodhpur with a list of the active ingredients in Dayquil, which led to some rummaging in the back and the production of two dusty bottles of "expectorant". When we went to the hospital, H was prescribed 6 different medicines at once, which were (I have the receipt right here): Zifi LBX, Dilosyn, Zyrtec D, Sporlac, Flexon, and Pantop-D. Dayquil, people! It's good stuff!

Hilleary reports that, after we spent twenty minutes going from the curb to the terminal entrance and parted, it took her another two hours to reach her departure gate. (I'm not sure how bad the queues were inside the terminal or how much line-cutting this figure incorporates, but H can get pretty feisty when she's stressed out.) World Class Airport!

H left a bunch of good pictures out of her batch yesterday, so I've uploaded some more. Here are the new ones all in one place, or you can find them in context in the previously linked sets, below.

Chandra the houseboy has been replaced with a... houseman? (Gilbird, I think. Is that a name?) Inviting friends over to watch our TV has been replaced with scheduling a time to mop the floors and make the bed. He didn't just leave lunch on the table; he started to set a place for me (before I told him not to bother). Then he made me sign for my lunch. Then he cleaned my room and bathroom and asked me to check it to make sure I was satisfied. Five years of hotel experience, he claims.

This is a little much.

P.S. I assume that Gilbird (??? that can't be right...) is not responsible for the liter of Jack Daniel's whiskey that disappeared while we were away, replaced with 50 ml of a 2 parts water/1 part Jack Daniel's mixture.

Hilleary, departing
Originally uploaded by C+H.

My God, those six weeks went by fast.

H left last night for America via a stunning assortment of other intermediary destinations. The scene at the airport was absurd: a crowd of hundreds of people waiting to get through the front door of the terminal. Note: this was not the line to check in or to get through security. It took us at least twenty minutes---maneuvering through a typically chaotic Indian "queue"---to get from the curb to the terminal entrance, where I had to say goodbye, because (if I recall the sign correctly (meant to get a picture, but I got all discombobulated bidding farewell)), "Visitor entrance prohibited. Inconvenience caused is regretted."

(BTW, according to our driver, the back-up was totally normal and not the result of, e.g., enhanced security measures. Just a typical evening at the Worst Airport Ever*.)

And so, for me, 12 weeks down, 3 weeks to go. I'm going to miss Hilleary, but after spending 6 weeks apart in May and June, I feel like the next 3 will go by in the blink of an eye. Then again, considering I have no plans whatsoever for the rest of the month except to work until my eyes bleed, I may be unpleasantly surprised.

* It's not really the airport's fault, I should note. The airport (and the buses and the roads and the trains, etc) of Bangalore were designed for a city like Palm Springs (the Bangalore of 25 years ago), not for a city like San Jose (the Bangalore of today). The infrastructure of the city is lagging about 10 years behind its economy.

New photo sets:
Shimla and Chandigarh
Haridwar
Delhi, Rajasthan, and Agra

Ha!
Originally uploaded by C+H.

"We take pictures of goats eating garbage. And they take pictures of us."

A five hundred year old city sitting in the desert with a fort looming overhead. And somebody got the bright idea to paint half the buildings powder blue. And everybody flies kites.

In the middle of our Day of Woe, Hilleary lost her passport. After tearing the hotel room apart, we traced our steps back to an Internet cafe where we had been trying to change our train reservations at least five hours before. The proprietor produced the passport with a flourish the moment we stepped through the door.

It's pretty unnerving to walk around seeing so many white faces. This was understandable in a small resort village like Mamallapuram, but seems preposterous in a city the size of New Delhi. At breakfast, there were three copies of the Lonely Planet guide on two adjacent tables. Of course, we were staying along the Main Bazaar near the New Delhi train station, which is tourist central.

[UPDATE 8/5/2006] See?

Friday turned into a convalescence day. On the train back from Haridwar Thursday night, I had the shits, the shakes, and the dry heaves. I took a hit of Cipro and slept off the worst of it on the train. When we arrived in Delhi, we realized we had made a rookie's mistake: we scheduled our trip to Agra for Friday, the day that the Taj Mahal is closed. This casts our itinerary into disarray. Jaiselmer had to be sacrificed. Then Hilleary took ill with a cough and flu-like symptoms. Sprinkle in some hotel nonsense that I won't even get into and we spent most of our time skulking around the Main Bazaar in New Delhi, still not seeing a damn thing worth seeing in that stinking town...

Everywhere we go, people* ask if they can take a** picture with us. What's up with this? We're not in Papua, New Guinea, or even in the less-travelled parts of India. There are always other white people around. Is it because I'm tall? Or because H is particularly pretty? Or do Indian boys collect pictures of white people*** the way American boys collect trading cards?

* Mostly teenage boys. But just yesterday (for the first time) we were asked by what appeared to be a couple of young married women.

** They always ask if they can take "a picture" but they usually take six, with every combination of people present.

*** Or just white women? They usually seem creepily more interested in H than me.

Indian experts, please weigh in. We will append more questions as necessary...

[C] What's the deal with bathing in the Ganges anyway?

[C] Does the Ganges form a kind of cloak of invisibility around the bare-breasted women who are bathing in it? Women who would never wear a skirt above the ankle or a sleeve above the shoulder on a non-Ganges-bathing day? Am I not actually seeing the naked breasts I think I'm seeing?

[H] Pilgrimages: substitute for a family vacation, or something altogether different? Do you take the whole family for a quick dip in the river, say a prayer, and then on to the amusement park? Or do parents and kids and all spend large chunks of time pilgraming together? Do you get pilgramage time off work?

[C] Might you take a quick bath on your way home from work, or is the Ganges a special-occasion-only bath?

You would think it is a fundamental matter of human physiology that we are repelled by loud and shrill noises, and not a matter of cultural conditioning. Not so.

I'm not referring to the sounds of Indian pop music, which can be somewhat shrill to the untrained ear. I am referring to the sounds of that same music when played at top volume through a cheap hand-held cassette player on a train or a bus. I am referring to the man who, lacking a hand-held cassette player, decided to play monophonic ring tones on his mobile for six hours on the train. I am referring to the prevalance of the SOS ring tone on mobiles through the country ("bipbipbip BEEP BEEP BEEP bipbipbip"). I am referring to bus drivers who spend more than 50% of the time leaning on their (LOUD) horns*. None of this seems to faze the common India. Whereas H and I sit next to one another in various phases of homocidal mania.

* They spend an equal proportion of their time passing other cars, buses, pedestrians, and domesticated animals on the left, right, and middle sides of the road.

The only thing worse than the Indian train reservation website is... the reservation booth at any train station in India. There is no such thing as an orderly queue at the train station.

H and I had a pretty bad day trying to deal with the trains yesterday, which I guess climaxed at the ticket window in Chandigarh where I put my arm over the shoulder of a man who had shamelessly cut in front of me, shoved the reservation slip through the window*, and exclaimed, "Look at me with my long arms! I guess I'm in front of you! How about that? I'm number one!" and then laughed maniacally.

I'm not proud of it. Much.

* This is the only factor which determines who is helped and when in the train station line. It doesn't matter when you joined the line, where you are standing, or even how loud you shout and how hard you shove... All that matters is whether your reservation slip and cash are within the most convenient reach of the clerk.

The bottom line is: you can't "do" the Himalayas in 3-4 days. So we retreated after 2 mostly-pleasant days in Shimla, took the toy train down the hills in the unreserved car with a thousand Punjabi Boy Scouts and their alcoholic Sikh scoutmaster, and spontaneously jumped off the Delhi train in Chandigarh...

Question of the day: "How do you make chapati where you are from?"

Who knew there would be rain and fog in the mountains during monsoon season? Cooling our heels here in Shimla for another 24 hours before we try moving to Kalpa, another 1,000 meters up, because we slept in and missed the bus. Enjoying curry and pooris for breakfast and samosas for lunch. Walked up a very steep hill yesterday to see nothing but fog and monkeys. Walked down with a nice boy who wanted nothing from us and even paid our bus fare.

And I am not blogging Hillearys freak out on the train. (Ask me over a beer sometime.)

Blogging will be light-to-nonexistent for the next two weeks as we set off for points North: Delhi, Shimla, Jaipur, Agra... The usual suspects mostly. We'll check in at odd Internet cafes along the way, but we may still be keeping the world safe for freedom and the tubes may be narrow. A happy, sweltering July to you all.

Adding to H's previous post, one perplexing detail is I have been able to access the blog from work all week. This is because, through some routing trickery or other, MSR connects to the Internet via Singapore. So, if you want to plan a terrorist attack in India using a blog, join MSR*. If you want to chew gum** and surf the Internet at the same time, stick with Airtel.

* This is very, very obviously a joke. I have no desire to see the Indian version of Guantanamo.

** OK, that was supposed to be a lame throw-away Singapore chewing gum ban reference, but this is too weird not to point out: there is an exception to the Singapore law for "therapeutic" gum. There is also a proposal to allow the importation of small quantities for personal use!

This is weird. We haven't been able to read anything on Blogspot or Typepad on the internet connection in our apartment for a couple of days, although we could post just fine. We thought it was just a strange and irritating glitch. But apparently it's because Indian ISPs have been instructed by the government to Block Blogs. You know, to fight terror! Um, okay.

Help, help, we're being repressed!

(If you're in India and having this problem, go here.)

Update: It was just a misunderstanding, says the Indian consulate in NY! ISPs were told to block Some blogs, and instead blocked All blogs. To be fixed soon, they say. So dumb, the entire thing.

Last night was Tobi's last in Bangalore. He's off to Delhi to stand outside the Pakistani embassy for four days in the rain*. A bunch of us went out to Opus to bid him farewell. Tobi is a lot of fun; I will miss him.



When we left Opus, we went back to the office and set up some drums on the roof. Then we jammed.



After jamming a while, we started playing with the kickboxing equipment. I put on some boxing gloves and hit this punching bag about as hard as I could.



Turns out the punching bag is filled with sand and has been sitting on the roof for months. So it's filled with wet sand. Which might as well be concrete. My hand hurt.

It hurt really bad actually. But I could move my fingers and everything, so I figured I was OK. But when I went to work this morning and tried to type, I couldn't really do anything without wanting to cry. Prasad recommended a doctor.



Who recommended an X-ray.



It seems I may have a hairline fracture near my wrist. She prescribed an Ace bandage and some Extra Strength Tylenol. The total cost for my visit, X-ray, bandage and all, was Rs 620 (about US $14).



Now I'm all better. Except I can't use my damn hand.

* By choice. He wants to travel through Pakistan**.

** Also by choice.

The land of stone carvers and goats and white people. Photo set here.

[UPDATE] I was hoping to see temples under the sea, but according to the student-just-practicing-English-who-wasn't-a-guide-and-wasn't-selling-anything, they are only visible in May, when I guess the sea level subsides somewhat. There are even more temples which only became visible after the 2004 tsunami.

Hilleary says all I ever do on the blog is bitch and Tobi says I have ruled out every possible mode of transportation, so let me take a moment to talk happy about transport...

Air Deccan sucks, but both Jet Airways and Indian Airlines were quite pleasant. Indian Airlines actually served a meal on our one hour flight: the cart rolled down the aisle soon after we levelled off and they picked up the trays just before we descended for our landing. And the meal was pretty good too.

The online reservation system for Indian trains sucks and the arrival/departure information in the stations is usually lacking, but the trains themselves are not too bad, especially if you skip the riot scene in steerage and go for an A/C car. The 2nd class sleeper cars are surprisingly acceptable, though by no means luxurious.

As long as you can communicate where you want to go and keep an eye out for any idiosyncratic route changes, autorickshaws are a servicable means of transport. (Even if they screw you, it's usually cheaper than the NYC subway.)

I have nothing nice to say about the buses.

The cancelled our first outgoing flight, then they rescheduled our make-up flight. So we set out about eight hours later than we had planned. Then they delayed our return flight. Twice. By a total of about six and a half hours*.

In fairness, in every case we were informed of the change before we had left for the airport** (by SMS, to boot). And the flights themselves were not as unpleasant as I had been led to expect. I saw no rats on board, for example. And I did not have to throw any elbows to secure an unreserved seat.

Still, I shan't be flying them again.

* Here's customer service for you: our flight was delayed so much that it took off after the next Air Deccan flight to Bangalore. Which we were not informed existed, much less offered a seat on.

** If H and I had spend 8 hours in the Bangalore airport, at least one of us would be dead. For sure.

Healthful and helpful signs
Originally uploaded by PinkHamsters.

Prasad: "They're not eating garbage. They're eating food that people have thrown away."

Jerry Seinfeld: "Adjacent to refuse is refuse."

Mysore Palace at Night
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Photo set here.

Why is Snoopy brown?



Note: Snoopy is not brown on Sunday. The great and good Indian people know that Snoopy is not brown.

Equally perplexing, if less dramatic: why is Calvin yellow?



Why lay down a light yellow background on an otherwise monochrome strip? (Dennis gets the same treatment. The Wizard of Id does not.)

2

Are a pain in the butt. They have a dizzying array of classes (pictures here). To book in advance you have to figure out how to use a terrible website (IE only; best used in conjunction with this other, slightly less terrible website). Trains are sold out weeks in advance. When you try to book in advance, your browser crashes!

The only thing worse? Indian buses! Because, really, who needs destinations, routes, timetables, or booking information? Real men just go to the bus station and hope for the best!

You should never buy a guidebook that doesn't provide place names in the local script. Both the Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide books on India get this wrong*. While it is true that you can generally make yourself understood in English**, it is nice to be able to find your own way some of the time (and it is sometimes necessary to spot-check an auto driver's route planning). An English-language map does not help if most of the street signs, bus stops, and train timetables are in Kannada script.

I don't remember having as much of a problem with this in other non-Roman-script countries I've been to, although that's probably because I didn't know where I was supposed to be half the time anyway. We had a difficult time in Japan, but Japan is notoriously tricky to navigate (kanji would have helped, though). I remember having some trouble in Russia, which I guess I dealt with by being very conservative about cabs, buses, and trains. When you're staying someplace for several months, it is pretty depressing to feel like any given cab ride could end in Tamil Nadu.

* As does the Time Out Tokyo guide. Lonely Planet Japan gets this partly right, so it's not uniform across their titles.
** Oddly, this is least true inside Bangalore, which is fairly cosmopolitan, but has a rather small tourist trade and a rather large pro-Kannada chip on its shoulder.

Remember the elevator console Chris was so impressed by?



With a sense of perspective, it's interesting to even non-computer geeks.



(Sadly, I do not see much of the World's Largest Calculator. Because after having worked in this apartment for a week or so I feel that I have a good estimate of the probability of the power going out at any given moment, and feel that the elevator is not the safest bet, unless you want to spend some quality time with the calculator.)

I'm adding Matthew Yglesias' blog to my Blogroll as of today---despite his rank over-exposure as a blogger at Josh Marshall's site, The American Prospect, and his own personal site, as well as having the dubious honor of being in Andrew Sullivan's eponymous awards pantheon---and despite his frequent mis-spellings, his blind spot for homonyms, and his, you know, verbal tics---and despite his being only 25 and having been a prominent liberal pundit before he even graduated college, which puts me in a murder-suicide frame of mind---because the man is always right about everything.

Other recent additions: the brother-in-law; the pseudonymous friend with a great idea and no business plan.

A cross-browser HTML rendering bug has caused the bodies of my posts to disappear in IE for the past I-don't-know-how-many days. My bad. I only ever use Firefox unless I need to access the MS payroll site or something.

For those who care, the problem was I introduced some HTML comments to the blog template, using "--!>" as a terminator. This works in Firefox, but not in IE. The result is the entire post becomes a comment and doesn't display in the browser window. (It's still there if you View Source, of course.)

Comment poll: who visited the site and didn't see anything? Who visited the site and didn't see anything and didn't bother to email me about it? Or are all my hordes of readers non-IE? (If so, you should really consider some of Microsoft's fine products.)

Had a Fourth of July party last night, attended by a majority of the American ex-pats in the office. In the run-up, I think I convinced my Indian co-workers I'm a John Bircher, which is pretty funny considering how much time I've spent thinking about what country I will move to in 2008* if George Allen becomes president**.

We did all the things Americans like to do: drinking beer, eating hot dogs (thanks Jonathan!), talking about television, confusing the German, and teasing the Canadians. In a show of progressive internationalism, we sat through 119 scoreless minutes of soccer*** with only moderate whining. (Granted, that last minute was pretty damn exciting. And I jumped out of my chair as the only other foreign country I've been in for more than 2 weeks earned its spot in the finals.)

God Bless America. Especially the Supreme Court. Happy belated Fourth!

* Not that I didn't spend plenty of time on similar themes in 2004/2005, but other factors intervened. I might actually be finished with my degree by 2008, knock on wood.

** I pose George Allen as a most-likely/least-acceptable exemplar---he is a deeply odd and odious character. Bill Frist and Sam Brownback would be similarly unacceptable. I'd probably stick around to see how John McCain turns out...

*** For a while, I tried to be "culturally sensitive" and call it football, but you know what? "Soccer" is semantically unambiguous. You know what I'm talking about. Get over it.

Joel Spolky cites Nick Gravgaard's inane proposal* on tabs vs. spaces. Gee, Joel, where'd you get that idea?

But here at the Procrastiblog, we're used to getting sniped by high-profile bloggers without credit. We've got our eye on you, Joel. Shape up.

* Nick says "elastic tabstops" that "expand or shrink to fit their contents" would have "a nice side effect---proportional fonts can now be used." Here I thought the entire programming universe would soon be using Consolas.

Apparently, the Internet is "not a truck. It's a series of tubes." Also, apparently, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AL) is a gibbering moron. If you've got two and a half minutes to spare, listen to the audio. It is appalling, even if you don't understand the technical issues and even if you agree with his underlying point---a person has to work very hard to make this little sense.

Ha!
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Kochi: not my thing. Reminded me a lot of Charleston, SC, in a weird way: both are old shipping centers with nothing much going on that attract tourists and antiquers. The synagogue was pretty nice (the city has a historic Jewish community---Jew Town (no kidding)---that now consists of 14 people from 3 families).

Something which turned out to be really worthwhile that you would think was a suckers' game is the "you buy we cook" fish stands down by the waterfront. Maybe we got ripped off in relative terms (we paid around Rs 600 for a 3 crabs and 2 lobsters, and another Rs 150 to get them cooked), but the food was really yummy. A tip: curry crab should be cracked away from the diner and should not be eaten in a rush.

P.S. Lots of goats and cats, not so many cows and dogs. Why is that?

P.P.S. Deb asked pretty much every local he met for the first two days where he could get some crab and the answer was invariably "no chance" since it was out of season. Every fish guy on the waterfront was selling crab, and most of it was alive (and therefore fresh). WTF?!

P.P.P.S. We showed up on the one day of every month when alchohol is not permitted to be sold anywhere in the city. We happened across a place that was selling beer out of a hole in the wall---seriously---but we didn't have the good sense to purchase it or the guts to photograph the hole.

Happy
Originally uploaded by C+H.

Went to Kerala for the weekend and spent Friday and Saturday morning on a houseboat in the backwaters of Kumarakom (photo set here). This was an incredibly nice experience. The boat, which had two bedrooms sleeping four people, cost Rs 4750 (that's almost exactly USD 100) for about 24 hours of floating, drifting, idling, and relaxing (incl. a crew of three men, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a basket of bananas). You would think this sort of arrangement would involve docking at various villages where people would be lined up to sell us useless knick-knacks and handicrafts. Nope. The docking was entirely non-commercial in nature. The only up-selling attempted was: Rs 800 for a kilogram of prawns with dinner (not worth it), Rs 100 for 2 liters of toddy (kind of disgusting), and Rs 800 for a massage (we said no). Everybody, everywhere: go do this! It's fun! (Caveat emptor: these are off-season rates. Prices include a fair chance of monsoons.)

POSTSCRIPT: Shout out to the nice people at the Tharavadu Heritage Home who kindly helped us arrange for the boat in exchange for, at best, a kickback from the boat's proprietor (we didn't give them any money, anyway).

If your houseboy should spend the weekend watching your TV with his friends, or if he should take naps in your bed when you are not around, it is not worth your effort to complain about it. It is not worth it to explain the subtleties of your unease to the accomodations manager, who will ignore them anyway and scold the boy for some vaguely related misdeed. It is not worth it when the boy will act abashed for about five minutes and then continue to do exactly the same things over and over again. Not. Worth. It. At all.

Every time I enter a new workplace, I find myself looking up this essay: "Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War". It fills me with a feeling of peace and serenity, and reminds me how to customize my .emacs file.

With all due respect to my blogging/life partner, this explanation is no more credible than if she claimed to be establishing a model democracy in the middle of my face. Whatever after-the-fact justifications H might provide in order to maintain public support for her bellicose position, it is clear to me---and, I think, to any reasonable observer---that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy of removing my beard.

Extrapolating from my first 24 hours in the presence of the beard, I calculate that some variant of the phrase "You have some Indian food in your beard" would be repeated approximately 125 times over the next six weeks. Which would be clearly unreasonable.

As some of you (if not most of you) (if not all of you) know, I have recently been joined in India by my wife, Hilleary. I've asked her to start blogging with me, adding another ignorant American's perspective to the picture. My suggestion for her first post: "Why the Beard Had to Go".

Matthew Yglesias takes on Andrew Sullivan's latest on Iraq. Sullivan is against "any timetable for withdrawal" from "a war conducted by an administration whose key players are manifestly incompetent and reckless." He is for... prayer. Yglesias:

This gets us toward what is, I think, a fairly fundamental point of political morality -- it's wrong, seriously wrong and seriously irresponsible, to support military action that has no likely prospects of success. It's one thing to ask young men and women to kill and die for a good cause. It's another thing entirely to ask them to kill and die as a token of your support for a good cause.

Clearly, my first-choice scenario for the world would be one in which the nominal goals of American Iraq policy -- killing terrorists, preventing a civil war, building a stable liberal democracy -- are achieved. But I can't support the war -- can't say it was a good idea to launch it, and can't say I think it's a good idea to continue it -- precisely because I don't think the war is accomplishing its goals, don't think it stands a good chance of accomplishing them, and don't think it ever did stand a good chance of accomplishing them.

How hot can "hot red paprika" be? Very hot. "Crisp capsicum" can be pretty hot too, although I think "capsicum" sounds a little more suspicious than "paprika", which is after all most commonly a fairly bland and inert spice. But I guess "paprika" is just a generic word for a pepper here and I suspect what I got is something along the lines of a red serrano.

Which is a long way around to discussing Pizza Hut's Indian-themed pizza offerings. The best I've had so far was the Tandoori Murg, which has chunks of chicken and a non-standard, Indian-spiced sauce that I found very pleasing. The Tandoori Paneer pizza was disappointing, with bland chunks of paneer and the aforementioned chunks of hot, hot peppers. (I guess my paper menu is a misprint, because it didn't even have a little red pepper next to it.) The other pizzas I've tried are more or less as you would expect: a little spicier than an American pie, but nothing too far out (unlike Pizza Corner, which packs a fairly strong punch).

And to those who wonder why I'm eating pizza at all: eat daal and chapati for 6 weeks straight and get back to me.

Coffee Maker, the Second
Originally uploaded by C+H.

The Nova died. That was a bad Rs 1000 investment. I place my trust (and my Rs 1800) in the hands of the Philips Corporation of the Netherlands. Can you last two months, little helper?

Don't know how I'm getting stuck on women's health issues. The following appalling item showed up in the Times of India today: "Is it Vaccine or Virginity Test? Ethical and Scientific Issues Raised in Cervical Cancer Trial". I'll try to post a link if one becomes available.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approve [a] vaccine, Gardasil, designed to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV) infection that causes cervical cancer, and it's used on girls aged 9-26.... The company says the vaccine will not work for pre-existing infection, which is usually transmitted sexually. "How do we ensure the candidate is not infected? The only way is to do a cervical smear, where a spatula is inserted into the vagina to take a smear of the cervix. How ethical is it it conduct such a test on unmarried women? Or, on a nine-year-old? Isn't it akin to a virginity test?" asks Dr M Radhakrishna Pillai, director, Rajiv Gandhi Centre For Biotechnology, Thiruvananthapuram.

Apparently, it's never occurred to anyone to just give the girl the damn vaccine either way and let her virginity remain between her and her God (and, realistically, her husband and parents). The article goes on to more relevant points, like the cost of the vaccine (Rs 16,000) in comparison to basic PAP smears (Rs 100), which are not routinely performed in this country.

I think what's going on here---beside a basic and unhealthy preoccupation with female virginity (which is not unknown, if different in form, in the US)---is a cost-benefit calculation that just doesn't translate to my American mindset. From the Indian point of view, it is unthinkable to waste good medicine on someone who doesn't need it, even if the net benefit (socially and medically) of this wastage is apparent.

"Condoms Found to Block a Virus Harmful to Women":

Women whose male partners used condoms every time they had sexual intercourse had less than half the rate of infection as did women whose partners used condoms less than 5 percent of the time.... Experts on infectious diseases say they believe that condoms, when properly used, are effective in preventing papillomavirus and virtually all other sexually transmitted infections.

I am one of these people. Help!

It has come to my attention that my oh-so-anonymous friend AC, of being-design*sponge's-boyfriend fame, has started a blog. This has inspired me to start a Blogroll, at right. Blogroll policy will be as follows:

• I will link to friends, family, and to blogs I enjoy which are not already in the Technorati Top 500.


• Links will be in strictly alphabetical order.


• I will take cash for links and deliver unto you my massive and acquisitive audience. Prices start at one lakh rupees.

Elevator Console
Originally uploaded by C+H.

I have been meaning to blog this wonder of interface design all week. This is the console in the elevator in my building. Rather than having a button for each floor---as in every elevator I've ever seen in my life---this elevator has a calculator-style keypad. There are only 4 floors in the building (numbered 0 to 3, which makes the CS nerd in me very happy and the American in me very sad), as well as the basement/garage, which you get to by keying in "-1". The numbers 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 on this console serve no purpose. If you press any of these, the display reads "Er", which can be read either as "Error" or as "Er... Are you sure you want to do that?"

Reading the Frank Bruni restaurant review, I'm struck with this odd feeling that I am not a New Yorker... He's talking about restaurants that have been open for several years in the East Village and I have never heard of them. And I start to wonder if chopped mackeral goes better with naan or chapati?

Last night there was a power surge which apparently blew a fuse or tripped a breaker---none of the kitchen appliances are running this morning. When the houseboy arrived, I demonstrated to him that the fridge was not running and that the washing machine and microwave were not receiving current. He immediately lept in to action and I retired to my bedroom to drink coffee (Nescafe made with water boiled on the gas range) and eat toast.

Ten minutes later, he steps into the bedroom and says, "Sir, come, come," so I follow him into the kitchen, where he demonstrates to me that the toaster is working, which apparently refutes my contention that the fridge is not running.

I know the toaster is working! I'm eating toast! Will you please just call your boss and have somebody bring a damn fuse?!

It is 11:30 at night and you are in an autorickshaw with a young woman you have only just recently met, trying to get home from the bus station. You have spent ten hours on a bus, driving on rural roads and are exhausted and hungry. The auto driver has ignored the name of the neighborhood you have asked to go to and taken you instead to another dis-similarly named neighborhood with a similarly named traffic circle. You have no idea where you are and the driver seems to have no idea where you want to go. Do you: (a) get out of the auto and find some other way to get home, this guy is obviously trouble, or (b) give the auto driver a second chance, it was an honest misunderstanding?

---

You chose (b).

You give the driver a second chance. He starts driving. At times he seems to be on the right track, but he keeps veering off on odd tangents. You are pretty sure you have driven past your destination and are now moving away from it, but you have no idea where you actually are. Do you: (a) stay in the auto, the driver will figure things out eventually, or (b) get the hell out, this guy is obviously an idiot?

---

You chose (b).

You tap on the driver's shoulder and tell him you want to get out. He's confused by this, which is not surprising---he's been confused about pretty much everything that's gone on since you got in his auto. Do you: (a) pay the man what you agreed (1.5 times the meter), he did his best, or (b) refuse to pay the man, he hasn't gotten you where you wanted to go and he has run up the meter well past where it would be if he had done so directly?

---

You chose (b).

You refuse to pay the man. After all, it's his job to know how to get around in the city and he has manifestly failed to do his job. The driver jumps out of his auto and demands to be paid. You continue to refuse. The driver asks you to accompany him to the police station. Do you: (a) go with him, you're sure the police will be able to sort this out, or (b) make an obscene remark about the driver's mother?

---

You chose (b).

In so many words, you inform the driver that his mother was neither chaste nor hygienic. Speaking just barely enough English to negotiate fares, he stares at you blankly for a moment, gets back into his auto, and drives away. You and your female companion are now alone on a dark street corner. You do not know where you are and you do not know which direction you need to go. Do you: (a) hail another rickshaw, he's probably not an idiot and its not like they're all in cahoots, or (b) call the company car service, this isn't strictly speaking a business trip, but you're running out of options?

---

You chose (b).

You call the company car service. They know you well by know, having brought you home drunk from Tobi and Deb's flat and taken you to Commerical St. when you wanted to buy a backpack and even dropped you off at the bus station this morning when you set of for your Very Official Company Visit to Some Waterfalls. You tell them what you think you know about where you are and they say they'll be there within 15 minutes. Around this time, the autorickshaw driver returns with a policeman in tow. Do you: (a) apologize and pay the driver, there's no hope of convincing the policeman that you're in the right, or (b) tell the policeman exactly what you told the driver (omitting the choicest bits about the driver's mother), he's probably a reasonable man who's bound to see it your way?

---

You chose (b).

You tell the policeman it will be a cold day in Hell when you pay the auto driver. He patiently explains to you that autos have meters and it is customary for the passenger to pay the amount of the meter when he or she leaves the auto. The driver says something agitatedly in Kannada. You say something agitatedly in English. The policeman sighs. Do you: (a) continue your argument, it's clear that your position is carrying the day, or (b) give the driver his damn money, it's only 100 rupees?

---

You chose (b).

In a spirit of great magnanimity, you hand the driver a 100 rupee note. He isn't satisfied! He doesn't just want the money. He wants an opportunity to regain his pride by seeing you through to your destination. Do you: (a) get back in the rickshaw, the policeman probably knows the way and you've all learned a valuable lesson, or (b) swear another oath on the driver's progenitors and refuse, you've had enough adventure for one evening?

---

You chose (b).

You tell the driver just exactly what you think of his bloodline. He gets back in his rickshaw and drives away. The policeman also goes on his way. Five minutes later, the company car arrives and you climb in. After a half kilometer, you realize where you are. In another kilometer, you are home. You realize that if you had carefully studied your map, you could have managed to walk home in less than 15 minutes time. Do you: (a) curl up and cry yourself to sleep, or (b) hold it in, burying your resentment until you finally snap?

So, I took a day trip to Hogenakal Falls yesterday and it was ultimately a pretty unpleasant experience. The actual time spent at Hogenakal* was perfectly nice, as evidenced by my pictures. What I'd like to focus on in this post is the ten-plus hours we spent on buses.**

The trip down was actually not that bad. We went from Bangalore to Dharmapuri (which took about 3.5 hours) and from there to Hagenakal (just about 1 hour). The road from Bangalore to Dharmapuri is an only-mildly-pothole-y highway*** and the bus was never more than mostly full and often half-empty. The road to Hagenakal was more primitive and the bus quite full, but we were filled with the golden glow of anticipation for the great adventure before us...

On the way back, we decided to get on the bus to Hosur, which turned out to be a "shortcut"---in the sense that the general direction of our travel was always more-or-less "towards" Bangalore, whereas Dharmapuri is several dozen kilometers "out of the way"---though what may be "short" as the crow flies seemed like a pretty frikkin long way on winding, rural roads through small villages and around small mountains, along which the driver would often have to slow down and honk loudly while waiting for cows, goats, dogs, chickens, and---only occasionally---people to get out of the way.

When we started off, I was standing. This would not normally be a major problem for me, but I am about four inches taller than your average Indian bus, so I had to spend a lot of effort as the bus careened to not bang my head into the hand-rail and developing a major crick in my neck. Much to the people of India's credit, I politely declined at least 4 offers of seats from sympathetic short people.

This lasted about 30 minutes, until a man and his wife got off, leaving a reasonably comfortable seat open along the aisle near the front door.

This lasted about an hour, until we pulled into a village and the lady seated by the window next to me got off. I stood up to let her pass and before I could sit down again, a man (let's call him Ass Face) and his wife had taken both of the seats on my bench. When I looked at this guy, like, "What the fuck?!," he just looked right back, like, "Can I help you?" Now, I don't know if this is some Indian law-of-the-jungle thing, or whether this guy was just, well, an Ass Face, or what---though I will note that the ticket taker seemed just as flustered by Ass Face's brass balls as I was.**** The issue was quickly settled by a young man behind me, who scooted over and offered to share his seat in a spirit of brotherly good will that must have seemed outlandish to our Ass Face.

Now I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there was one little problem with this young man's seat and that was that the bus driver's gear shift was where my legs wanted to be and the hump of the engine (which was hot!) was where my feet wanted to be (in the case that they couldn't be at the end of my legs where my legs wanted to be (where the gear shift was)). So I'm sitting sideways in my seat and twisting to grab the bar behind me so I don't fall on top of the engine as we teetered and tilted along the mountain roads. Meanwhile, the bus's aisle is filling up, so I can't even really put my legs there anymore.

This lasted another hour, at which point I leaned forward to let the ticket taker past me, only to find when I leaned back again that some lady's ass was where my shoulder wanted to be. Now this Ass Lady (who at least had the good fortune to not have an ass for a face) was dug in, and wasn't having any of my nudges and twitches, so I just twisted around into the least uncomfortable position I could find, with my legs not in front of me and my feet not on the hump and my shoulder not up Ass Lady's ass.

This lasted about half an hour, until we pulled into another village and took a longish chai-and-chat pit-stop and Ass Lady along with a fair proportion of the people crowding the aisles got off the bus. I spent the last hour and a half of the trip to Hosur in the comparative luxury of the next seat over, where I still had to be careful not to put my feet where they wanted to be, lest they interfere with the operation of the gears, but where I could occasionally stretch out my legs when the ticket taker got up to move around the bus, and where I was seated next to Nandakumar, a very nice tailor from Bangalore who invited me to his house for dinner sometime.*****

With that, I'll end my story. The trip from Hosur to Bangalore was relatively uneventful (though it did include a 9-year-old version of Ass Lady, who I nevertheless developed tender feelings for****** when the roof began to leak rain water on her head as she tried to sleep) and the trip from the bus station home is the subject of another post.

POSTSCRIPT: We didn't even see the main waterfalls.*******

POSTSCRIPT 2: Would it make the above seem worse or better if I added that nearly the entire time (since we were on "super-luxury" buses) we were treated to low quality bootleg DVDs of Bollywood musicals at high volume?

* Or Hogenakkal, transliteration being as it is.

** Now you might say, "Ten hours on a bus? That doesn't sound like a day trip to me. That sounds like a day on a bus." And you'd be right. The culprits here are Tobi, optimism, naivete, and---oh, yeah---Tobi. It's hard to imagine it could take 5 hours to travel 130 km (that's about 80 miles for you metri-phobes). For comparison's sake, it's almost 200 miles from New York to Boston, with notoriously bad traffic, and 5 hours travel is on the high side of average. In India, you must bear in mind: (1) the roads are shitty and (2) the buses have the effective horsepower of a moped.

*** Woe, but were the potholes doozies! It might have been the suspension on the bus, or the fact that we were sitting in the back, but the potholes would literally send us flying out of our seats---several inches, in fact---only to come crashing down, wondering if all our vertebrae will still in their proper places.

**** A most peculiar anatomy had he, that Ass Face.

***** Is this the kind of thing that random Indians just disingenuously say they'll do sometimes, or might this actually happen? Stay tuned.

****** Pipe down, sicky.

******* That's according to Prasad. Who's kind of a dick for even bringing it up.********

******** I say that in good fun, which I'm sure Prasad knows---one dick to another.

Tobi acheives en-wetten-ment
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

New photo set available here. I have a long post in me about our trip to Hogenakal, but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow.

Translations of common yoga prayers from Prasad:

Om Om Om
Asatho maa sath gamaya
Thamaso maa jyothir gamaya
Mruthyor maa amrutham gamaya.
Om Shanthi. Shanthi. Shanthi.

Om Om Om
Lead me from unreal to real (untruth to truth)
Lead me from darkness to light (ignorance to knowledge)
Lead me from death to immortality (temporary to the eternal)
Peace, peace, peace be to all.

Sarve janaha suhkino bhavantu
Sarve santu niraamaya ha,
Sarve bhadraani pashyaantu,
Ma kaschid dukha bhaak bhaved.

May all live happily
May all be healthy
May all look to the good of others (May welfare be unto all)
May none experience distress.

Yogena chitasya padena vacham
Malam sarirasya cha vaiyakena
Yopakarottam pravaram muninam
Patanjalim pranjaliranato´smi

Let us bow before the noblest of sages,
Patanjali, who gave yoga for serenity and sanctity of mind,
grammar for clarity and purity of speech,
and medicine for perfection of health.

BONUS YOGA TIP: The trick to Vrksasana (Tree Pose) is to push your foot really hard into your thigh. I don't know why this helps, but trust me it does. I normally can't hold Tree Pose for more than a few seconds; doing this I didn't teeter once. (Thanks to Prasad, again.)

You will probably not regret watching this. Via this post from John C. Dvorak.

A German medical intern here in Bangalore assures me that this behavior leads to bad outcomes. So there.

Goats chillin near Russell Market
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

Err, mutton?! And chickens. At Russell Market.

The list of my most viewed photos on Flickr is perplexing. Obviously some photos just have popular keywords that make people I don't know want to look at them. But why do so many people want to look at this picture? Are lots of people searching for "shoes bangalore"? (It's not even in the Top 50 for "shoes", which goes to show how odd Flickr users can be. (I include myself in that statement.) And why is this the most popular photo from my Savandurga set? I guess people love to hate poor little village boys.

OK, I'm throwing down. Please add a comment to this post explaining what kind of pictures you like and why. The upshot is I will try to accomodate audience interests. On the downside, you will have to prove you are not a robot.

P.S. I have a feeling this is going to end in much the same humiliation as the "first caller gets a $20 bill" contest on my WNYU AM radio show: The prize went unclaimed. I unilaterally cancelled the show shortly thereafter. :-(

[UPDATE 6/22/2006] Self-fulfilling prophecy? Thanks to my wife for providing me a statistically random sample...

Snacks in the MSR pantry
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

I forgot about the snacks! Every day between 5 and 6 (i.e., about an hour before dinner), they bring out snacks in the MSR pantry. Typically there are two kinds of juice (e.g., watermelon, mango, grape, pomegranate) or milkshakes (that's what they call them, but I don't think they have ice cream in them), a variety of sandwichs (Bombay*, fruit, chili and cheese), potato chips (which they just call chips, in spite of the English influence), and some kind of "salad" slathered in something like mayonnaise.

The sandwiches and chips come in little take-away boxes with 2 sandwiches and a handful of chips each. This is a silly system, since the chips are more popular than the sandwichs---everybody just digs through the boxes for a pile of chips and you end up having to search for them in various opened boxes with untouched sandwiches.

In addition to the evening snacks, the pantry is always stocked with half a dozen kinds of fruit, a similar selection of cookies, raw almonds, soft drinks, coconut water, and of course, coffee and tea. So basically, I sit around all day and eat delicious junk food. It's all so... un-American.

* I still haven't quite figured out what a Bombay sandwich is. It's grilled and it has a variety of vegetables inside it and it's somewhat spicy.

A survey of "sexually progressive, young Indians" in India Today magazine caused much merriment and despair amongst my single comrades from abroad. Some sample questions:

Do you think it is okay to have sex before marriage?
Yes 20%
No 79%

(7% of females responded Yes.)

Would you be willing to [live] with a person you love before marriage?
Yes 28%
No 70%

(16% of females responded Yes.)

Do you agree with the statement: It is not necessary to marry the person you date?
Yes 42%
No 54%

(58% of females responded No.)

Which type of marriage do you think is more successful: arranged or love?
Arranged 73%
Love 24%

Source: India Today, 20 Feb 2006. Available online to subscribers only.

On the street near my house. It's the first cat I've seen, believe it or not. I did not get a picture of it.

For those keeping score:

Animals I have seen and not photographed: cows, donkeys, lizards, chipmunks, and a cat.

Animals I have seen and photographed: horses, monkeys, and---oh, yeah---dogs.

I had a dream as I was falling asleep last night that I was playing frisbee and when I jumped to catch the disc I woke up with a strong sensation that I had just jumped face-first into a wall, which was actually my bed. Weird.

Rusty Bracket on Lamp Post
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

Many of the lamp posts in my neighborhood have these seemingly useless brackets with sharp, rusty corners mounted conveniently at forehead level. Luckily, I'm up to date on my tetanus shots.

MSRI lunch
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

My Indian diarrhea weight loss program is not working out as planned. I haven't had any major problems with the food, as it turns out. A spot of indigestion because it's pretty relentlessly spicy, but no creepy-crawlies in my gut that I've detected. They serve us a nice buffet lunch every day on the roof of MSR---I find myself going back for seconds and sweets pretty often (although sweets are usually some variation of rasgulla, which I haven't acquired a taste for yet; gulab jamun is more my speed (which is very Western of me, apparently)).

I also had vague intentions of trying to eat vegetarian when I came here, since it would be so easy to do (it is, in fact, usually easier than the alternative). But the meat here is so good! Mutton! (Which means goat!) The MSR lunch usually has 4-5 vegetarian dishes and one with meat, and the meat dish is often the tastiest. I am ashamed of myself.

The following words have triggered the Blocklist on my wiki in the last 24 hours: tramadol anal-porn meridia cialis asian-sex candid acyclovir adipex alprazolam carisoprodol celebrex diazepam phentermine propecia viagra xanax.

Question #1: How did "candid" get in there?

Question #2: Whither porn?

Question #3: How do you run a legitimate Wiki concerning prescription drugs?

Hot water heater in my guest house bathroom
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

It took me two weeks to figure out how to operate the hot water heater in my guest house. I guess it's a sign of my own prejudice, when there was no hot water I just thought, "This is India, you can't expect hot water every day." It turns out you (pretty much) can. There is a switch just outside the bathroom that turns on the heater. You flip this 20-30 minutes before you want to shower and you have hot water. It lasts just barely long enough to lather up and rinse, and does not include time for reverie, but it does consistently work. So, yay!

Monkeys doing strange things to each other under the Banyan Tree.
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

Also here and (to a lesser extent) here. Kedar, you are forgiven.

View of the River
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

New photo set: Savandurga climb

He volunteers at an orphanage. Evil.

Sleepy dog at the Bazaar
Originally uploaded by Chris & Hilleary.

A new photo set: The dogs of Bangalore.

Just so you know, I haven't been blogging every single picture I take. Not every photo I take necessarily has universal appeal and I recognize that. Nevertheless, completists can subscribe to my Flickr RSS feed or bookmark http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisandhilleary.

Via Jeff Wells.

This counts neither as original political analysis, nor as particularly relevant to what I usually blog about, the this story is too funny not to link to. Harry Reid: a man who does not like to be bribed.

Why would the houseboy steal my nail clippers? Is he just trying to fuck with me?