नमस्ते

Hello everyone, and welcome to ``Diary of an American Indian", my weblog about my adventures as an expatriate living in India.  My name is Steven Spallone, and I'm a mathematician who has been moving around every couple years.  Before now I've lived in Philadelphia for my undergrad, followed by Chicago for grad school, and then Bonn (Germany), West Lafayette (IN), and Norman (OK) for postdoctoral work.  Phew, I'm getting pretty sick of moving!  India is next:  I have a good chance at long-term employment in the Mumbai region.  Right now I have a one-year research position at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, and I will soon be interviewing for a job in nearby Pune.  More about that later.  Right now I'm flying Jet Airways to the other side of the hemisphere.

So yeah...India.   The place is a huge mystery to me.  I've been finding out all sorts of things about India in the last couple of months, learning from books, Bollywood movies, the internet, my yoga friends, and of course my Indian friends.   It seems like life will be completely different.   It will change the way I approach food, water, and shelter.  I'll need to be aware of street urchins, bugs, animals, and weather or face sinister consequences.  There's a new currency, a new alphabet, and multiple languages.  I'll be on the lookout for a new world of social order, religion, and mythology.  I will (finally) be among people my own height, but I will nonetheless be a minority.  In these last few weeks before I leaving, I've felt like I should take in all the details about my homeland that I can, like the flora and fauna, television, waterworks...so that I can better compare the two. 

Photo courtesy of Bryan Crump

I'll be living in a guarded compound along the seashore in Colaba, not extremely far from ``Bollywood" apparently.  There will be other itinerant mathematicians there of course, and we will surely do some exploring together.  A good friend from my undergrad days lives in Mumbai, and we already have plans to meet up.

Just for fun, let me set some intentions for the coming year:

1. I will never get sick of Indian food.
2. I will never get (seriously) sick, period.
3. I will learn the Hindi alphabet, and some Hindi.  In this regard, I will limit the time that I hang out with expatriates.
4.  I will find a local juggling group, if there is one, and try to get something going if there isn't.
5.  I will see about being an extra in a Bollywood movie.
6.  I will be delighted if a monkey steals my groceries.
7.  I will take some yoga classes.
8.  I will get a lot of math done.

It will be fun to blog about all of this; in the long run I'm aiming to post every week or two.

See you then!

Next time:  यात्रा.