चेन्नई

The ride from the airport was my first chance to observe Indian city driving.  Traffic here is a different organism than U.S. traffic, and I don't just mean that we drive on the left side of the road.  The vehicles actively move between lanes, and honk whenever they get close to another car.  To give an idea, it seems like a driver here might honk about as often as an American driver would push the brake pedal, when driving in the city.  For a moment I wondered whether one is meant to drive on the lane dividers here rather than between them...

Finally, we arrived at the housing compound, a gated off area with a pair of sleepy security guards.  I logged in at 1:10am and was given keys to my padlocked room in the Guest House.  My quarters had versions of the usual hotel fare, with two beds, a television, a bathroom, and two lockable storage areas.  No Gideon Bible.

The plan was to meet my friend in the morning at 9am.   I spent some time trying to set an alarm on the clock, which seemed to be a feature of the telephone.   There were several buttons, two marked "Alarm" and "Set".  I couldn't figure out how to leave "Set" mode without the phone somehow redialing a previous number.  Also, i could enter in times (in fact I could enter in about 4 separate times), but when I tested them the alarm didn't go off.  Eventually I gave that up and went to sleep sans alarm, trusting that things would work out.

In fact, I woke up by myself around 5:30am. The shower was another puzzle, with four knobs, a bucket, a pitcher, and a water heater.  I'm happy to report that my years of training with videogames paid off (alarm setting troubles notwithstanding) and I took my first shower here.  I then killed time by watching some television.  There were many channels, some with gurus probably giving a sermon, some showing a panorama of spiritual activity set to music, along with the usual stuff.  One show seemed to depict the scene in the Mahabharata in which we meet the character Drona.  One station held an image like a comic strip panel, representing a scene from the movie Sholay.  Specifically, it showed a manacled cartoon Verru shouting "Basanti, don't dance for those dogs!" via a word balloon (for at least an hour).   I did a quick yoga practice set to the spiritual activity channel and rested until breakfast time.

Breakfast was not hard to find.  It was in a canteen; there was a little stand inside with breakfast items, a man there to serve the food, and a cashier.  I purchased a banana, an egg, an omelette, some dahl, and a box of orange juice with the the rupees that my friend Ravi gave me in Norman.  It was decent.   Afterwards I hung out on a plastic chair on the porch of the Guest House.

From the porch I could see a cricket field and the main road passing by the compound.  Folks seemed generally sleepy.  At some point five ladies with brightly colored saris walked by sweeping away leaves from the path with bundles of stiff fibers (not unlike brooms).  Around 9:30 I met my friend Amri.

Here he is.

Amritanshu Prasad and I were grad students at Chicago together.  He was a few years ahead of me, but we had the same adviser and were fairly sociable so we knew each other well.  He is now married with a son and doesn't travel very often.  I was surprised to find out that he has a paper  http://tandfprod.literatumonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00927870902747266 which solved a problem I had been curious about a few years ago, and has been working in this area.  He seemed interested in some directions I had considered, and I now have a good (academic) reason to visit Chennai later in the year.  I got a little tour of the facilities, met some other representation theorists (I study representation theory, by the way), and got a ride to the airport.

I arrived at the airport early enough to solve some more puzzles, and soon arrived in Mumbai.  Again I found a driver holding my name on a placard.  This time I used a cart for my luggage, and the crowd was less daunting, but the ride was longer.

Next: TIFR.