Double Hamster on The Rocks

Keralites Rock

Weekly update (for this week at least):

Let's see: The bulk of the week was pretty slow.

A lawyer called a few days ago and told me to expect a subpoena related to the work that I was doing in 2002/2003/2004 (I can't remember which year). Someone is suing someone else and apparently I was involved in a project that has some bearing on the case and so I may need to fly back to the US to testify. Sometimes work just never leaves you.

I learned to jump on and off of a moving train yesterday morning.

I divide the learning session into three parts, w,t and f.

W: David and I arrive at the train station in Trivandrum. We are planning to catch the 10A M train at Aleppy in order to watch the annual Nehru snakeboat races (pics in flickr after I upload them today). We have tickets out to the races but lack tickets back and are asked to walk over to the reservations office to get tickets. The reservations office looks just like an American Dept. of Motor Vehicles office, which is pretty nostalgic for me.

As expected of the DMV, the ticket purchase takes some time and so we walk back and get to the railroad station tracks just at 10AM. David looks at the ticket and then at the signboard above track number 1: the numbers do not match. Okay, he thinks, this is not our train. He then notices that another train three tracks and an overpass/walkway away is starting to move out of the station.

T: He thinks that this has to be the train to Aleppy and starts running. We dart up the stairs and over the tracks and down the stairs and David, who is leading, keeps running and jumps on to the moving train. I jump on after him but I'm not as graceful so I slam into the doorway wall and lever myself in.

F: David walks through one car and then comes to the mid-car platform where he asks a bystander whether we are on the right train. The bystander says no and I think that we will pick up something else at the next station and then David looks back and then runs forward and jumps back out of the train, landing on the last third of the platform. The train is picking up some speed (the cars at the end of a train are moving pretty quickly by the time a train finishes a station exit) but he makes the jump and lands running. I follow and jump out without looking but spot some cement/ grain bags on the platform mid-leap and so I push myself farther out and let go of the handrail on the outside of the door. I pass over the bags, land harder, stagger for a few steps and then splay myself out over last part of the platform.

Several people jog up to us and ask if they can help. Where is the train? It is the first one that we saw, but we need to hurry since it is leaving the station. We run back to the point where we started and board that train before it starts moving. David thinks that I'm ridiculous for jumping off of the moving train without pausing to check for poles and other hazards. In retrospect, that could have gotten ugly.

Indian trains, at least in the CC class and above, are great. Lots of sleeper bunks. We were moved several times and had to pay another Rs 50 because we had an open instead of reserved ticket. Food vendors spent the entire trip walking back and forth along the compartments, hawking coffee (kopi, just like the kopi in Singapore), chai, briyani, banana chips, etc.

David met two of his friends, Madhu and Chris, after we disembarked in Aleppy. Madhu had waited for us instead of heading out to the race but he still manged to negotiate and secure a spot on one of the hundred or so boats that lined the racecourse on the water side. Thousands of spectators lined the bank and the racing boats were paddled down the middle.

We saw several classes of boats, all with super narrow, pencil thin shells that were barely visible above the water. These boats are called snakeboats because they look snakelike as they glide along, driven by the rowers. The smallest of these boats probably has 20 rowers while the largest class had 135 people, from 120 to 130 rowers to steering people to people to keep time during the race.

Three races stood out: an early men's heat, the final women's race, and the final race of the day, where the winning 135-man boats from the earlier heats raced down the waterway to establish an overall winner. This was the pinnacle race in the pinnacle snakeboat racing event and like many "best of the best" events it was very good. There was also a halftime water show and several of the boats sank during the races after taking on water.

By the last races, the people on two of the boats beside us were pretty drunk and started fighting. Fights are different here. The bottles and sticks and boards and even huge planks (intended for throwing at the crowd on the other boat) and bamboo poles came out early, but the two groups also cooled down pretty quickly. In part, this is because the police boats kept drifting by and here, as elsewhere in India, the police are not so keen on light touch diffusion tactics, preferring instead to use lathis: long, stiff sticks which are terribly effective when beating the hell out of someone (on a side note, I saw this in Gurgaon, when a driver became belligerent with a police officer over a parking matter. He argued, was surrounded, and the pulverized-- the whole thing probably took two minutes)

On the way back from the race, I managed to lose my wallet. I discovered this after Mathu and I ran over to a KRSTC super fast bus to Trivandarum and he helped me press in at the back of the bus.

And this is where I found the Keralites totally rock. I am standing at the very back of the bus and I can't find my wallet and I explain to the collections guy that he needs to come back to me after I find my wallet and then the bus is bouncing own the highway and I'm standing pressed against the emergency exit door and checking my bag and then a young lady asks me if I've lost my wallet and gives me Rs. 100 for the ticket and then a married couple sitting down in a seat near me gives me Rs 100 for the rickshaw trip from the station to my apartment and the, later in the trip, a third guy (an air conditioning repairman who lives in Saudi Arabia and visits his family twice a year in Trivandarum) gives me Rs. 50 for the heck of it. Ach, so kind. This allowed me to pay my ticket and get back and really check my bag and then start calling credit card companies, asking to cancel various cards. I gave each of the donors a business card and told them to contact me. I might take three families out to dinner at some point.

The cards will arrive in Signapore by the time that I arrive in Wednesday. I still have no idea what I did with my wallet. Also, standing up and slamming against the emergency exit door of a superfast bus for 2 hrs (I got a seat after hr two) is really tiring.

Midnight when I got back to the apartment. The gate was closed and locked and so I jumped it. The guard was asleep on a mat in the foyer of the apartment building and I woke him when I walked by.

Mumbai on the water

In Mumbai/ Bombay today, with the two other company people (two of us are permanently in India, the third runs the Innosight Asia and divides his time between India, Singapore, And the United States).

Expedia apparently had some ridiculous offer on a hotel on Mumbai's west side, so we are at a Hilton on Marine Drive, overlooking the water. This is pretty much the central park west of Mumbai. I spent part of the afternoon sitting out on the granite balustrade along the ocean, ten feet above the waterline maybe. The city had placed some cement water breaks between the waterline and the promenade and the breaks looked just like oversized cement jacks. At night, giants come down with little bouncy balls and scoop up the jacks out of the water. I'm sure of it. It was great to sit down over the water and listen to music and take a break.

Anyway, I love this city. It reminds me of New York. I went to dinner at Indigo, a restaurant in Bombay's equivalent of the village.

Curiously, I got to stay inside Delhi this week as well, at a little, shabby chic hotel in Karol Bagh, which made it easier to get to the Vietnam embassy. I spent the evening and then dawn wandering around in the city. This is very unusual since most of my travel is airport-to-hotel business style travel which really isn't interesting at all.

So, a lucky week. I fly back to Trivandarum on Wednesday morning and then I might take the scooter up to Ponmudi and wander around the tea plantations this coming weekend.
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Shnakes

Saw my first snake today, about 3.5 feet long, moving slowly along the cement trellis in the upper berm of the backyard. It had the gold/brown coloring that matched some cobra photographs I'd found but it was too far away to identify properly and I did not spot, at distance, any ridges along the neck that might indicate a hood so it was probably not a cobra.

But let's say it was a cobra. They are common enough here. Kerala is home to all four of the "big four" venomous snakes: the cobra, russel's viper, the krait and the hump-nosed pit viper. If I were a hump nosed pit viper I'd bite people just because of my name. I saw a mongoose walking through the side yard five days ago so it's as if a personal Rikki Tikki Tavi cycle has been completed.

So I realize that this was probably not a cobra but I've started looking in the corners of the rooms anyway. Cobras, like many other snakes, feed on lizards and my house is a bit lizard ridden. I spot at least one a day on my walls, and I like them because they eat the insects which I continually vote offstage in favor of the lizards. I'm not going to vote for snakes though. I'll stay with Lizards... little moving Geico commercials hanging to the ceiling above the churning fan blades... I wonder what they are thinking. Probably "no #&$^ cobra is going to get me up here, this is my own personal fiftieth floor on the skyscraper, one of them tries and I'll go all "Die Hard with a Vengeance" on it" Actually, those are my thoughts. The lizards are thinking "Insects, insects, insects, insects."

Anyway, I check the house (no window screens, only grates, and holes cut through the wall right at the ceiling, along with what I am sure is a miniature periscope so something poisonous can check out the room and wait until I am sleeping before climbing through the hole and dropping down on me) and then I notice that, while the neighbors had hired someone to cut back the brush in the yard, there is still all sorts of brush along the road leading from the house and then the grass along the roadside had not been cut and I think to myself that I will just keep an eye out for snakes when I am walking.

So I go to the store about 1/2 mile from the house and as I am walking back, a man about 10 feet in front of me suddenly shifts to the left away from the grass and begins saying "snake..snake..snake" I of course don't see anything.

"Where?"

"Back there.. you can see the mockingbird going after it"

I look back, and fifteen feet behind me (we were both still walking) a bird is pouncing on the grass and fighting with something that is thrashing around. I still can't make out the snake.

So much for spotting these things.

5 great things

1. Leaning over the sink to eat a mango ten minutes after I wake

2. Opening the doors and pulling the curtains aside instead of turning on the lights

3. The luffing sound of the ceiling fan, as opposed to the buzz of the AC

3. Hearing birds, insects and peepers when I go to sleep

4. Using power outages as an excuse for a walk

5. Afternoon break: lunch, shower, nap

An entry about cockroaches

I slept in the tent last night, on my bed. Well, on three bed frames that I pulled together from two rooms. I set the tent up after switching on the light in one of the house bathrooms and catching several cockroaches re-enacting what I can only guess was a scene from Die Hard II. I killed two of them (one with the base of a steel cup as it tried to scurry up the wall) and then walked out of the bathroom and saw two long antenna poking out of the sink overflow mouth in the living room basin. Between this, the mosquitoes (not very many, but they carry filarisis), and the biting ants (flesh eating might be a better term... Hari told me about them. He had an infestation in his house and woke up with tracks of blood down his legs) I chose to sleep in the tent. I may do this for a while. I have considered purchasing some fake grass mats for the bed.

So it looks like I will get my grass bed. But the grass will be plastic. And there will be a tent in the middle.

After a morning of moving and an afternoon of cleaning and setting up and running to the store, the author of this blog entry sits down at a table in an empty house in Kerala, India and thinks

Wow, this is going to be more difficult than I thought.

The Haircut

Found a barbershop (a gents haircut shop) today and got a haircut. The same haircut that I have had since 2002: number four on the sides, scissors on top to even it out. The results vary widely from barbershop to barbershop but this one was nice. My hair grows pretty fast, and faster on the side of my head than the top so a balloon head devil horn profile creeps in about once a month and then I search around.

I like barbershops because they vary only within a narrow range, leaving individual barbers to localize in the details. The haircut that I had today was basically like the haircut I had at Ruffini's in West Grove, PA when I went to high school. Both were run by an older guy who focused on the repeat customers while some newer guys took other walk-ins. Ruffini's had a television at the side of the room with a game of baseball or football on depending on the season. He always had the same 12 issues of Car and Driver and an issue of Motorsports world. I didn't see any magazines today but there were some waiting chairs and some newspapers and a radio playing in the background, which fitzed out after we lost power. Cricket season is over but I suspect that the dormant TV in the corner runs matches during the year.

Some small differences: the barbershop today strung curtains between the chairs to provide privacy and the barber put talc on the back of neck which he swept around with a brush. He also used a small circular comb instead of the regular straight comb and did a lot of fixing and straightening. No razor work (Ruffini's did the hot lather and razor touch up around the ears, which has to be great for hyperactive kids) but there was a razor in the jar of cleaning fluid. When I paid, the barber, a guy in his twenties, asked me to come back and I think that I will.

Of course this was a good haircut and there are notable haircuts and not so notable haircuts. I used to go to Johnny's in Central Square and then switched over to the Barber Shop on Dunster street in Harvard after Johnny hired an iffy haircut guy who tried to give everyone, even the mostly bald guys, a pompadour. No TV at Johnny's but I did watch someone walk in an try to fence a 40 inch set before Johnny threw him out.

Photo of an Indian barbershop by MarellaLuca, who has an entire series on Barbers

The Pizza Cone is a horrible concept

Pizza corner, over in Spencer's Junction in Trivandrum placed some fliers the front desk of the Ginger hotel. The fliers, about 4x7, show calzones, focaccia, pizza sandwiches and pizza cones. Nowhere do they show an actual pizza. I'm not even sure that they make it. I spent some time this morning trying to decide which was less appealing: the pizza sandwich or the pizza cone. Eventually I went with the pizza cone, which looks a bit like an ice cream cone, with a thicker, doughy base stuffed with wads of white cheese, red and green bell peppers, and mushrooms. It is the next best thing to saying "Look, I don't know what I want to eat this afternoon, why not just give me cheese in a tube?" Anyway, the pizza corner people call it a Conizza, which is not the most inspired name. What happened to "Cheese Horn" or "Pizza Round Spear Tip" or "Cheese Rocket." I'd buy a cheese rocket. It's the sort of thing a kid would ask for and eat while riding his radio flyer bike back to the picket fence house with the TV antenna in the kitchen at the end of the dirt road near the baseball diamond.

Auto rickshaws give you that immediate, fatalistic feel for traffic

The house came through today, a three bedroom condo in Trivandrum, in Belhaven Gardens.

Took an auto rickshaw 30Km back to the hotel room near Technopark. When I first arrived in Trivandrum, I was looking forward to the Technopark. My hopes were crushed when I found out that it was devoted to technology and business process outsourcing. Nary a synthesizer in sight.

I'm flying back to Gurgaon the week after next, then back to Singapore for a week at the end of May.

Television still acts as a cultural ambassador. It probably has the widest reach of any medium. I think about this when I flip through the hotel channels. MTV has altered itself for India and now plays music videos. Other shows are dubbed in Hindi (a good narrative would have given me a "moment of awakening" when I saw Skeletor speak in Hindi on the dubbed version of He-Man yesterday but still nothing happened). The only totally undubbed and unaltered channel is the WWF channel. Strangely, WWF is popular in the little India section of Singapore as well. Crowds of people sit in plastic chairs outside the beer joints in little India, watching WWF, drinking beer, and conversatin'. Activists might like to believe that the current administration has made a strong impact on Amercia's image in the world but I'm beginning to suspect that Vince McMahon and John Cena have had a bigger impact.

Why do hotels offer free letterhead in the room desks? It's not as if I want to convince someone that I am an employee of the hotel. Maybe the hotel staff just sits there, waiting, so they can say "ah-ha!.. you used the letterhead...you work for us now."

Hari and I have been discussing transportation. I'd like an Enfield Bullet but a motorcycle requires a license which can make things confusing from a residency standpoint so I might need to step down to a scooter. In the best of all worlds, I'd get an auto rickshaw and give it a custom paint job. It would look badass and I would not get soaked during the monsoon season. it is weird that nobody buys an auto rick unless they are running a taxi service. sure, they have very little power but they are darn handy for errands.

I have not gone hiking or been to a museum/ art gallery in months. I miss both of these things.

I'll bet that there are vampires with a sweet tooth who chase diabetics around.

I've been thinking a lot about the baby crying contest in Japan, where Sumo wrestlers pick up babies and make faces and the baby that cries the loudest wins. Given the way memory shapes itself in infants, it could be that this event becomes the first fixed memory for some of these kids. What sort of first memory is that?

I wonder whether event amnesia is a common feature among kids who are developing an active memory. I might see something (like the sumo wrestler) that could become my first permanent memory but then some part of my brain elects to "lose" that first memory, waiting for something more pleasant.

It would be fun to make iron-on placemats that I could permanently affix to my table.

Notes written on newspaper during 4hr flight from Delhi to Bangalore

1. This plane needs pillow lined video screens for people who want to rest their head on the back of forward seat

2. I want to set up a fortune telling screen that looks like one of those large announcement/ clacker boards at a railroad station

3. I've been thinking about geese that get sucked into jet engines. I'll bet that there is a goose legend about a plane engine that opens a doorway to a secret fantastical world with goose-elves and stuff like that or maybe about a goose that gets magical powers after getting sucked through the jet engine

4. I wonder if surgeons have a secret sword and the stone mythos, possibly centered around a difficult extraction procedure. Dentists, I am sure have a molar and a jaw myth. Even today there is a dentist somewhere waving about a pair of silver pliers, saving the west from imminent tooth decay

5. The Janitor at Mecca, sweeping up around the al-Haram, at the end of the day after everyone has left. What is that job like?

6. Is it now possible to exchange large amounts of money by swapping phone sim cards?

7. I'm glad that trees can't use their leaves as sharpened throwing stars because then nature hikes would suck

8. It would be better if doctors has someone drag their fingernails against a chalkboard when they administer a shot since you would be so horrified by the sound that you would not notice the shot.

9. There are other sounds that I can't stand: fingertips pulled across balloons, the sound of thread being pulled through particular fabrics and, occasionally, the sound of dental floss moving through my teeth.

10. In Singapore, floss refers to finely shredded meat-- normally pork-- I shudder to think of dental floss in Singapore. It might be made of finely shredded teeth.

11. I'll bet that astronomers totally fake each other out by re-orienting the high powered microscope toward the moon and then getting an unsuspecting astronomer to get moon blindness by looking through the eyepiece.

12. I've never been jealous of birds for their ability to fly but I am envious of their ability to sleep while standing up

13. I had a dream last night, about unicorns walking into a mall. As each one passed the sliding glass doors at the front of the mall, it took off it's horn and placed it in an umbrella stand

14. Why did GI Joe never have a special operator called Rikki Tikki Tavi?

15. Everyone should get a special message printed on a T-Shirt in a big font. Then they should wear that t-shirt every day because you never know when you will end up in the background of a live news cast

16. Whoever came up with the oversized Styrofoam finger, that person was a genius.

17. Someday I will own my own airplane and I will play the video of "grave of the Fireflies" during inflight because, if you think you seats are uncomfortable...

18. If I had a small country without a defense budget, I might be tempted to develop Styrofoam tanks to increase the perceived size of my army. How terrifying would it be to drive a Styrofoam tank? I'll bet that you would not be afraid of anything after that.

19. I've noticed that there are always a few people who stand up for long periods of time on flights. Airplanes should have a standing section for these people.

20. Mini golf on an airplane would be badass. Real golf, not so realistic.

21. Also, we need hand rails for people who are willing to lift themselves over sleeping passengers in order to get in and out of their seat

22. I liked Pirates of the Caribbean but it is clear to me that this Disney chose an easy ride for a movie plot. They should try extracting a plot from a more opaque ride, like the teacup ride.

Hot Days

High of 116 or 117 degrees predicted for today. 114/115 yesterday. It has been like this in Gurgaon for the last four days. I spend maybe an hour walking around in the afternoons an then I head back inside. I like the feeling of the sun, because it reminds me of a day that I spent walking around in Faro, on the southern tip of Portugal (I was carrying a thirty lb backpack at the time and did not have a hotel to go back to so the case was different). You can feel the heat in your joints and in the sensitive skin under your eyelids. When the wind picks up the air seems to get hotter. Everyone who works outside during the day seeks shelter in the afternoon so the streets are abandoned and strangely quiet, day laborers and barbers sleep in the shade of the trees along the sidewalks.

Now I've arrived in Kerala

Flew into Kerala yesterday and walked right past the man waving the "Mr. Johnny Poppia" sign, which was understandable because the connection between the Galaxy hotel phone and the Solty taxi service in Kerala was iffy at best.

Hari and I took the cab out the Ginger hotel- probably the first true budget business hotel in India. On the one hand, the hotel provides all basic amenities and the rate is less than Rs. 1000 (USD ~24.00) per night. On the other hand, the room looks exactly like one of those minimum security prison dorm rooms for transitional inmates, with heavy steel doors, miniature bed and desk, and mustard yellow walls. There is not really any shelving so it looks like I will be living out of the suitcase for a while.

Still, this room, at ten feet by ten feet with windows and an attached bathroom, is considerably better than the 5x10 windowless, unfurnished servant rooms that I saw in Gurgaon/ Delhi when looking for a house.

There is a roadway that runs below my window and the scooters, cars and lorrys start up at seven. I like this sound, so I keep my window open.

After dropping my stuff off in my room, Hari and I headed into town. I stopped by his house and said hello to his wife, who brought out squeezed ginger and lemon and who mentioned that she'd lived with Hari in Cincinnati a few years ago.

The cab driver took me to the beach, where I was accosted by engineering / management students from the local university. They let me go only after I handed over my business email address. Resumes may follow.

The Great Desi Wedding Ruckus

Aishwrya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan... the wedding is going on, probably right now. This is a big event in India, with lots of news coverage. Everything else is being squeezed for the headlines. The attendees are a who's who of Indian glitterati. Some of the gitterati have even been excluded. It's that exclusive. There are five security personnel for every attendee.

In case you don't know who this is, I've tracked down a picture of Aishwrya Rai:

Courtesy of an Australian Airbrushing firm called Powerstudios.

You know that you've arrived when complete strangers in foreign countries spend hours airbrushing your image on to the hood of a car. To the best of my knowledge, there is no "Princess Diana" car hood.

South of the Border Comes to India

Part of the shocking growth in Gurgaon, India is driven by a 28KM strip of sparkling expressway that starts at Km 14.3 in Delhi near Rao Tularam Marg and ends at Km 42.0 in Gurgaon, bisecting the city in the process. This is the first real expressway in India and it runs through India's only planned city, a bit like the Baltimore-DC highway running through an desi version of Columbia, MD. Real estate investors and local developers have built hotels and malls along this highway and drivers speed past cranes and construction equipment every day.

This is not to say that every developer seeks to build the most modern amenities in the best of taste. In at least one part of Gurgaon-- Sector 32-- some enterprising developers have decided to rebuild a miniature version of "South of the Border" the famously crappy hotel, restaurant and theme park jammed off of I-95 just south of the Border of North Carolina.

The Gurgaon version does not sit south of any particular border. Instead it is called th 32nd Milestone, since it is stationed both in Sector 32 and at mile 32 on the expressway.

Like its American counterpart, the 32nd Milestone has a hotel:

And a bungee jump near some batting cages:

And a restaurant-...with the best restaurant name ever.

Best of all, it has a killer pop art go kart track. If it were bigger, I would convince someone to re-film Talledega Nights here:

No...really. The go kart track- visible from the highway- is great:

I have a mental block about airline flight times

So I missed my flight to Delhi again. This time I had the day right but the time wrong. I've just bought another ticket and am hanging out at the airport. That is the third time I've missed a flight or lost a ticket in three months. I think that I have a mental block about this. I mean, I'm moving to India right? You'd think I'd remember the right time for my flight. Sheesh.