Egypt trip expenses

The local currency is Egyptian Pound (written as EGP, LE, or L£). Many places with accept USD. Make sure to allow international access on the cards you plan to use before leaving. Cash is used primarily but we did use card in a few places (mostly at the hotels).

Exchange Rate

The USD/EGP exchange rate as per Google or Oanda was 19.6 but fell to 23.1 towards the very end of our trip.

Street rate was 1 USD = 20 EGP. For example, we paid 40 EGP to a falafel vendor with a 5 USD note and got 60 EGP back. Similarly we paid 1400 EGP for the Abu Simbel ride which was quoted as 70$ (for two).

I used a forex card from BookMyForex. I also got a forex card from HDFC but the USD/INR exchange rate on that was 84+ instead of 82+ offered by BookMyForex. We loaded USD (and AED for our layover in Abu Dhabi) as EGP is not available as a forex currency in India. The usage (POS, online, ATM) was in in EGP but the forex card balance was in USD. This EGP/USD conversion cost us around 5% – the rate was 18.64 (as compared to 19.6) for bulk of this usage. Therefore our effective EGP/INR rate was around 4.4 (82.4/18.64)

The numbers below are in INR if the currency is not mentioned.

Flights and Hotels

We flew from Bangalore to Cairo via Abu Dhabi. We considered Etihad and Emirates and flew Etihad because it was cheaper. Flight from Bangalore to Cairo was around 43k per person. We booked an overnight layover in Abu Dhabi and visited Sheikh Zayed Mosque. The transit visa was free. Since it was not a “stopover”, we got our check-in bags in Cairo only.

In Egypt, we flew from Cairo to Aswan (1400 EGP on Nile Air), then took a Nile cruise to Luxor and flew back from Luxor to Cairo (2115 EGP on Air Cairo). We booked the domestic flights a little late so they were 6-8k per person. Booking a little earlier would have been cheaper.

Hotels were around 6k per night. Our Aswan Hotel was a little higher, otherwise the average would have been under 5k.

The two-night cruise from Aswan to Luxor was 75$ per person per night paid in cash (so 6000 EGP total for two). I read that these could go as low as 45$ (https://motohorek.life/en/2022/02/nile-cruise-egypt-on-budget/). The second night was not worth it since we reached Luxor before 5 PM and were docked in port far from the city. I don’t know if they sell tickets for one-night but I would take that option if available.

Food

Food was 100-320 EGP (around 400-1280 INR) for two. The exception was when we splurged on lunch at Marriott Mena House. A 2 liter water bottle cost 5 EGP in non-touristy parts of Cairo but we were paying 10 EGP in Luxor and Aswan.

Getting around

You need to hire a car/taxi to get around especially in Luxor and Aswan. In Cairo, we paid 500 EGP to get to the hotel from the airport (and the driver managed to take 100 EGP in tips!). Uber was a godsend in Cairo and the return trip from the hotel to the airport was only 160 EGP!

In Luxor and Aswan you would need to hire a car/taxi that would take you to the attractions and wait for you. We paid 300-500 EGP depending on our bargaining skills. We paid 35$ per person for the minibus tour to Abu Simbel from Aswan. In Luxor we found a decent driver and used his services on multiple days. This saved us time when we needed to leave early in the morning.

In Luxor we used taxis and horse carriages for trips to the market or restaurants. We paid 20 EGP everytime for short trips but had to bargain sometimes. Karnak temple wasn’t far away from our hotel so we took a regular taxi there which cost us 50 EGP each way.

Uber is only available in Cairo, but the Careem app works in Luxor. I was not able to register with an international number. Getting a local sim might be handy.

In total, we spent around 35k on car, taxis, Uber, and minibus rides!

Horse Carriage and felucca

We did a tour of the pyramids in a horse carriage. He lured us in with an offer of 350 EGP but upsold us to 600 EGP then said it was per person and finally extracted 400 EGP in tips! The ride was the highlight of the trip but a bit costly. Remember to negotiate the final amount before getting in.

We did a felucca (it is a type of sail boat) ride in Luxor for 150 EGP for an hour at sunset.

Tickets

Entry tickets were a bit expensive for foreigners. They ranged from 100-260 EGP per person. We spent around 16k(!) total on entry tickets for two people and nine places.

Cell phone

I got the 1199 INR plan from Airtel which had 1GB data and 100 min of calls. I hardly used the calls but ran out of data on the last day! I re-charged with the 755 INR plan which had 1 GB of data. The hotels generally had decent wifi (free) for making video calls, uploading pictures, net banking, booking tickets, or looking up stuff. The exception was on the cruise where the wifi was paid which we did not use.

Egypt visa for Indians

India was added to the e-visa list in 2021. To apply you need to visit https://visa2egypt.gov.eg

Indian citizens are allowed to apply for an e-visa only if traveling in a tour group.

“Current nationality is only available for it to submit a visa application if it is within a group with the guarantee of an approved tourist agent (please change the type of application to a group)”

The visa says “You will not be allowed to enter the country without the guarantee of an authorized tourist agent in Egypt. It must be present at the airport upon your arrival”.

As per reports on tripadvisor this rule is not enforced. Airline staff or immigration officials also did not ask about this guarantee while looking at the e-visa.

You cannot apply more than 90 days in advance – “Please enter a valid arrival date, arrival date MUST not be after 90 days from now.”

Our e-visa validity began on the date of issue. My visa application was submitted on Aug 2 evening and email with visa attached was received on Aug 4. The visa validity began on Aug 4 and was valid until Nov 2 (90 days). I had specified my travel date as Oct 31 (90 days from Aug 2) to Nov 14. Since the visa validity started immediately, it expired before my planned trip ended. I asked if they could change the validity but they replied that I could extend my stay by visiting the immigration authorities.

Luckily I had not booked flight tickets so I changed my plans to return before Nov 2.

It would have been better to wait and apply for the visa in mid August so that my visa was valid until mid November.

For the other person traveling with me and they sent two emails:

Email 1

Kindly be informed that you have to reattach both copies of the first page which includes the date and the second page which includes (Father’s Name), both copies should be in clear quality in which all the written data appears clearly including the personal photograph, the three words ‘PASSPORT’ on the top left of the attached image, the line on the top of the attached copy and the Machine Readable Zone ‘MRZ’ which is in the bottom of the attached passport page. Gently be noted that this is the last chance to reattach before final rejection.

Also please be informed that in case you reattach a better quality copy, you will receive another update email in order to write (Father’s name) in (Surname) field.

Email 2

We are sorry to inform you that we are unable to process your e-Visa request. Please login to Egypt eVisa Portal to re-attach your passport again due to Missing Attach Both Pages In One Attachment.

Please re-attach your passport photo-copy within 72 hours, otherwise your application will be rejected automatically and the service processing fee is non-refundable.

Kindly be noted that we review the following (Passport Number, Given name, Surname, Date of Birth, Nationality, Issue Date, Expiry Date, and Passport Type at the top left of the Travel Document), so please re-attach a high quality image of your Travel Document.

I had uploaded only the first page and as mentioned in the emails above they wanted the last page too. I had done the same for my application and did not face any issues!

I was refreshing the website and did not see these emails in time. The website also asked for the passport image to be re-uploaded but did not have this much information. The preview shown while attaching was resized the image without preserving the aspect ratio so I cropped the picture to only show the details thinking that’s what they might have been referring to.

Later when I saw the emails, I asked them if I could re-upload the image but they said that the application had to go through the stages. Then I received an email saying “We are sorry to inform you that your e-Visa request is declined, due to You Did Not Attach Both Pages In One Attachment.”

I re-applied with the correct image and the visa was approved. This led to waste of time and visa application fee (25$). It would have been better to read the email and respond rather than just look at the status on the website.

How to spend 3 days in South Goa

Getting There

We traveled to Goa from Bangalore by bus. We booked a Paolo travels bus through MakeMyTrip. We boarded the bus from Race Course Road around 10:30. The bus stopped somewhere after Dharwad towards the morning for bathroom break etc. and reached Goa by morning.

Dolphin watching in Goa

The bus went too Panjim first and took its sweet time getting to Margao. We were worried about early check-in but the bus ensured that we only reached our booked apartment around noon! Most passengers had got down at Panjim and there were not that many people or taxis at Margao bus stop. I think we had to pay 400 for a 20 minute ride in a Maruti Eeco to our apartment in Varca.

Day 1: Palolem, Agonda, and Cabo de Rama

Palolem beach, Agonda beach, and Cabo de Rama fort

We hired a taxi and the driver doubled as a tour guide also. We headed down south to Palolem beach first. Here we hired a boat for an hour. They showed as the Butterfly beach from afar and then took us to Honeymoon beach. We got off there but there wasn’t much to explore as the beach is quite small. We took some pictures and returned to Palolem. This took just above an hour and we ended up paying 2400 for it.

We then got back into our taxi and drove back up north to Agonda beach. The beach was quite deserted and we walked around for a bit. There were a few people offering boat rides but by now we knew better! Soon we were in the car again heading back north again.

Our final stop was an old fort called Cabo de Rama which offered stunning views of the sea through its battered stone walls. There weren’t that many people here either. We took some pictures of the old church (at least I thought it was an old church) and walked around the fort walls. It was getting dark so we were soon on the way back to our hotel in Varca.

Day 2: History, spice, temples, and churches

Old Portuguese house, big foot museum, spice farm, temples in Ponda, and Basilica of Bom Jesus

We went to visit an old Portuguese house (Casa Araujo Alvares). It was interesting to walk through the house and see how people lived there years ago. The place was somewhat crowded and we spent 20-30 min walking through the house. There were pictures showing various Hindi movies that have been shot there.

Next we visited the Big foot museum located across the street. There was a curious little depiction of how the villages looked back in the day and it was interesting to walk through it. The ‘big foot’ referred to a foot imprint in rock that has some legend associated with it. There were also some interesting stone carvings. We spent about 30 min here.

We then got into the car and headed to a spice plantation. There was buffet lunch here and there was a sizeable crowd here. The lunch was followed by a tour of the plantation. Then we headed to a couple of temples in Ponda – the Shanta Durga temple and the Mangesh temple. Then we went to the famous Basilica of Bom Jesus. This place was quite crowded given that it is quite famous. There was an actual wedding taking place here. We also went to the Se Cathedral across the street which was quite deserted in comparison.

Day 3: Dolphin watching

Dolphin watching and Fort Aguada in Candolim, North Goa beaches, and Chapora Fort

On our last day, we decided to see a bit of North Goa too. Our driver took us to a beach called Coco Beach where there were a lot of boats taking tourists on dolphin watching rides. They charged 300 per person and hurriedly ushered us into one of the half-filled boats which was soon full and we were off into the sea. We rode for 10-15 minutes and reached an area where the dolphins were supposed to be. We had to wait for a bit but soon we were able to see some dolphins emerge out of the water and swim nearby. This experience was the highlight of the trip.On the way back we were able to see Aguada fort up above. They also pointed out some houses and the various Hindi movies that had been shot there. We were soon back on the beach within around 45min from when we started.

We found our driver in the parking area and then headed off to Aguada fort. He dropped us off a bit away from the fort so we walked to the entrance and then walked inside to the ticket counter which was a bit crowded. We walked around enjoying the views of the sea and took some pictures. We must have spent around 30 minutes here.

We were again back in the car and heading north. Our next and final destination was Chapora fort. We passed by Candolim and Baga beaches but did not stop there. At Chapora fort, it was a short walk from the parking to the fort and then we had to climb a number of steps to get to the fort. As expected there were a lot of tourists here. When we reached inside there was somebody playing songs from Dil Chahta Hai loudly on a bluetooth speaker! We walked around the perimeter and the views from the far end were spectacular and we could see Vagator and Morjim beaches in the distance.

From here we headed back to the bus station which we reached around 5 which was a little early for our bus so we had some food while we waited. Later we reached the bus station and asked some shopkeepers where the bus might come since the bus station was quite large and there were no bays or platforms. The bus did arrive where they told us to wait and we reached Bangalore without incident. Bangalore was cloudy and a bit cold. It felt like we had arrived at a hill station after the hot and sunny weather in Goa!

Japanese visa in Bengaluru

I just got my visa to Japan. Applying for the visa in Bangalore is super smooth – easy to apply, quick turnaround and the visa fee is nominal (₹490 only!). We applied for the visa on 16th October. They take exactly five working days (so seven days counting the weekend) to process the visa and 18th and 19th were holidays in the consulate (and 20th/21st was the weekend). So we got our passports back on the 25th, but the visas issue date was 17th.

Consulate-General of Japan in Bengaluru

The Consulate-General of Japan is located on the first floor of Prestige Nebula near Cubbon Park (quite close to the Cubbon Park metro station). Their website lists the documents needed. No appointment is necessary for a visa application.

We wanted to get there when they open at 8:30 (visa application collection time is 8:30 – 11:30), but our cab was delayed a little and we reached there only around 8:45. When we entered the consulate, there were two security guards who watched us pass the metal detector and then made us enter our details in the guest register. We entered a small room which had these metal row seats that you commonly see in waiting areas. We sat in the front row facing the window and waited.

The window opened in a few minutes and there were a couple of other applicants waiting with us by then. We submitted our applications and other documents. In the cover letter, I had mentioned a rough itinerary. The visa officer gave us blank pieces of paper and asked us to break it down by day. We moved away from the window to write down an itinerary. I had spent weeks agonizing over what to see and do. This time I did not have the luxury. I basically looked up the sights on japan-guide.com and quickly filled out an itinerary. Since there weren’t too many people we got back at the end of the line. This time our application was accepted without any further issues.

I am always conflicted about booking flight tickets without a visa, so I only mentioned the flight itinerary. This was quite specific – listing out the exact flights we wanted to take. We ended up booking this exact itinerary but after getting the visa.

On the 25th, I went down to the consulate on my way back from lunch. The passport collection time is 14:00 – 16:00 and I was there before they were open. There were 2-3 people waiting before me. This time I had to wait outside before the guards let us in. The process was fairly quick. They informed me that the visa was granted. I paid the fee and collected the passports. Now the fun begins!

Serengeti Rules

Sean Carroll talks about his book Serengeti Rules in the videos below. Some notes follow.

Google Talk:

Royal Inst Talk:

Royal Inst Q&A:

• Half the world’s animals have disappeared since 1970.
• There are plans to build a road through Serengeti
• Carroll visits Serengeti with his family
• Notices so many wildebeest, so few topi
• What rules regulate ecosystems?

In 1950, Grzimek father-son duo film a documentary named Serengeti Shall Not Die.They count animals from an aerial survey and wonder if there are enough resources for the animal population to be sustainable.

In 1965, biologist Tony Sinclair notes that number of buffaloes had increased since 1950. His findings indicate that cattle vaccination led to the Rinderpest virus being eradicated in buffaloes by 1964.

The virus had come to Africa 1889 causing the cattle plague which also affected buffalo and wildebeest.

The wildebeest population grew from 263 thousand to 1.4 million during in 1961-77 due to the Rinderpest virus being gone from the population by 1963.

The rinderpest eradication in wildebeest led to shorter grass, causing fewer forest fires. This in turn led to more trees, and more food for giraffes leading to a increase in the giraffe population as well.

Carroll calls this Serengeti Rule 1: Some animals more equal than others. Such species are called keystone species (like a keystone which holds an arch together). The term was coined by Robert Paine of UW who found starfish to be a keystone species in the Washington coast. Another example of keystone species is the Pika in Himalayas.

Serengeti Rule 2: Some species have strong indirect effects on other species through trophic cascades . For example, disappearing sea otters led to increase in sea urchins which led to kelp disappearing.

Similarly, pesticide aimed at a rice insect planthopper caused it to actually increase because it wiped out it’s predator – spiders. Introducing wolf led to fewer elk – causign increase in aspen tree height and also leading to increase in willow and cottonwood trees. This also led to increase in beaver population which depends on willow trees.

Going back at the wildebeest population, it leveled off at 1 million  – down from the high of 1.4 million noted earlier.  So what is it that regulates wildebeest population. It turns out that some species are entirely regulated by predation e.g. Topi, Oribi etc. On the other end of the spectrum larger animal populations are entirely by food. Serengeti Rule 3: The regulation of some species depends on their density.

The population growth seen in wildebeest was not seen in buffaloes. An explanation is that this is because wildebeest migrate, buffalo don’t. Migrations ensures adequate food supply, and also safety from predators. Lions are not likely to follow migrating herds. In general, migrating species achieve higher densities than similar non migrating species.

Next, Carroll talks about a nature restoration project in Gorongosa Park in Mozambique. Due to a Civil War after independence from Portugal in 1975, animals were eaten, poached, and killed due to collateral damage. By 2000, there was a dramatic decline in large animal population – lions disappeared totally, and fewer than 1000 large animals remained.

In 2004, American philanthropist Greg Carr decided to work with the government to restore this park. By 2014, the populations had bounced back to around 71000 large animals.

Serengeti Rule 4: Given a chance (habitat, protection, time), population can rebound dramatically e.g. humpback whale, bald eagle, wolf.

An interesting statistic is that 60% of the elephants in Gorongosa are tusk-less – perhaps poaching selected against tusks.

 

Always On, Always Connected

These days, we are always connected to the internet via smartphones. We are always checking blogs, feeds, notifications. This is mostly just useless information that could do without.

Not only is this time wasted, but being bored is important for creativity. It is important to let your mind wander at times.

In this talk (and also in the NYT article Stop Googling, Let’s Talk), Sherry Turkle talks how this is affecting our conversations:

There was a study sometime back – people were asked to sit alone in an empty room. There was nothing they could do except administer themselves an electric shock. Most people could sit by themselves only for a few minutes before giving themselves an electric shock.

Not only is this harmful to us, it might be lowering the amount of empathy we have for others.

A 30-year study found that college students score 40 percent lower on empathy, with most of the decline taking place after 2010. In middle schools, teachers have reported 12-year old kids behaving like 8-year old kids in terms of lack of empathy.

The good news is that if kids are left without phones for 5 days (e.g. in summer camps), the empathic markers come right back up.

Turkle talks about the “seven minute rule”:

A college junior told me that she shied away from conversation because it demanded that one live by the rigors of what she calls the “seven minute rule.”

It takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold. You can’t go to your phone before those seven minutes are up. If the conversation goes quiet, you have to let it be.

For conversation, like life, has silences — what some young people I interviewed called “the boring bits.” It is often in the moments when we stumble, hesitate and fall silent that we most reveal ourselves to one another.

The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone

People have come up with the Rule of Three, which says that it’s only okay to look at your phone during a conversation of four or more people if at least three other people are paying attention.

Another example is where the company BCG tried an experiment of Predictable Time-Off, where employees were supposed to take a fixed time off from work.

Predictable time off is the name we gave to the designated periods of time that consultants were required to take off. This was in addition to time the consultants took off with the natural ebbs and flows of their work. These predictable periods were established at the start of a project and required individuals to be off completely–no checking of e-mail or voicemail. The concept was so foreign that we had to practically force some professionals to take their time off, especially when it coincided with periods of peak work intensity. Eventually, however, the consultants came to enjoy and anticipate having predictable time off, particularly as the benefits for their work became evident.

Botswana

I was taking the World IQ quiz on Bill Gates’ blog. If you have seen Hans Rosling’s TED talk, you can guess the correct answers for most questions by cheating — just choose the most extremely positive outcome! However, one of the questions that threw me off was this one about Botswana:

Botswana’s economy is mostly driven by diamond mining – it accounts for 40 percent of the GDP. Paradoxically, many resource-rich countries fall into what’s called the resource curse:

In the 1970s, when oil was discovered in Venezuela, former Oil Minister and OPEC co-founder Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo said: “Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you will see, oil will bring us ruin.” His phrase for oil was: “the devil’s excrement.”

Why are resources a curse? In a country blessed with no natural resources (think Japan), the only way forward for the ruling elite is the slow hard work of building public goods, so that GDP builds up, which then feeds back into the power and importance and utility of the ruling elite. When the ruling elite gets their wealth for free, without having to do the hard work of building public goods and thus GDP of the country, the rulers emphasise the wrong issues. That’s how Venezuela ended up with Hugo Chavez.

This is generally true, but there are exceptions, as an IMF study notes:

Economic growth has not been high in some other resource-abundant countries, such as Indonesia, Venezuela, and Nigeria, partly because of inadequate governance. On the otherhand, resource-scarce countries have sometimes attained relatively high economic growth, like the Maldives, which has good governance.

There are other anomalies: While Malaysia has abundant natural resources and good governance, it has low economic growth for this sample period. Albania is a resource-scarce country with poor governance that has somehow achieved marked growth. Therefore, not only governance but also other macroeconomic elements must affect the relationship between natural resource wealth and economic growth.

Some time back, I had noticed that Botswana was one of the surprising places that Google Maps’ Street View was available (look at the southern part of Africa – just north of South Africa).

Street View is available mostly in high and middle income countries – US, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Eastern Europe, South America, and South-East Asia.

They got Street View before Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam, and parts of Russia.

Street View (2013)

Street View (2015)

Botswana has achieved this by building sound institutions, and by having good governance, and low corruption. However, the flip side is that the diamond industry employs very few people (only 4 percent of the population), and Botswana has struggled to build other industries.

Being land-locked is a disadvantage for trade. Also it has been said that Botswana might suffer from something called the Dutch disease – once the currency becomes stronger due to growth in one industry’s exports, other industries might suffer because their exports are now more expensive. However, an IMF study found that this was not the case for Botswana.

Where do words come from

Talking about Urdu, and how a language is not defined by it’s vocabulary, Javed Akhtar gives this interesting example to show how many everyday words come from so disparate origins:

एक मकान के एक कमरे में एक गोरा चिट्टा आदमी और एक नन्हा मुन्ना बच्चा नाश्ता करने के लिए बैठे।

बावर्ची नाश्ता लाया, नाश्ते में उरद की दाल.

नाश्ता करने से पहले नहा लिए – एक बाल्टी पानी से , उसके बाद बावर्ची नाश्ता लाया , उरद की दाल और टोस्ट था।

नाश्ता करने के बाद वो उठा, चिक हटाई संदूक खोला उसमें से के पिस्तौल निकाला , दीवार पे टंगी बन्दूक लिया और चला गया।

बच्चा बेबस देखता रहा।

In this ordinary sentence of 80 words, there are 14 that have come into popular usage from various other languages:

मकान – Arabic
कमरा – Italian
बाल्टी – Portuguese
नन्हा – Gujarati
चिट्टा – Punjabi
बच्चा – Persian
उरद – Tamil
टोस्ट – English
चिक , संदूक – Turkish
पिस्तौल – English
दीवार – Persian
बन्दूक – Turkish
बेबस – Sanskrit

***

This reminds me of the piece of text called Uncleftish Beholding, which is composed of words that are only of Germanic origin – which is what English would look like without French, Greek or Latin loanwords:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

.
.
.

With enough strength, lightweight unclefts can be made to togethermelt. In the sun, through a row of strikings and lightrottings, four unclefts of waterstuff in this wise become one of sunstuff. Again some weight is lost as work, and again this is greatly big when set beside the work gotten from a minglingish doing such as fire.

Today we wield both kind of uncleftish doings in weapons, and kernelish splitting gives us heat and bernstoneness. We hope to do likewise with togethermelting, which would yield an unhemmed wellspring of work for mankindish goodgain.

Soothly we live in mighty years!

***

I was watching a movie which had some Russian dialogues, and I noticed that the Russian (and other Slavic language) word for defeat sounds very similar to the Hindi word पराजय (parājaya). This turns out to just be a conincidence because Sanskrit पराजय =  परा- (parā-) + जय (jaya) while поразить = по- (po-) + рази́ть (razítʹ).

поражение (porazheniye) – Russian
porážka – Slovak
poraz  – Bosnian
паражэнне (paražennie) – Belarusian
porážka – Czech
poraz – Croatian
porażka – Polish
поразку (porazku) – Ukrainian

Bogotá Change

These days we see initiatives like Cycle Day, Open Streets, Bus Rapid Transit (improved access and dedicated lanes for Buses) across Indian cities. Much of this originated in the capital of Colombia – Bogotá. (Note: The first BRT system was implemented in Curitiba, Brazil)

There were two maverick reformers who were mayors of Bogotá during the 1990s – Anatanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa. Both of them won mayoral elections in the 90s as independents – although Penalosa had a more political background.

Penalosa seems more reasonable of the two – but he is very headstrong and antagonistic in his approach. Mockus, while being the crazier of the two, says that we must show that “morality is compatible with efficiency”.

Basically, there are two approaches to bring about change – one is to take on the world and turn it on its head (revolutionary), and the other is to slip in changes slowly and steadily (evolutionary).

The revolutionary approach is all or nothing – you get big changes or you get nothing, while the evolutionary approach ensures steady progress.

This documentary talks about how Penalosa and Mockus brought about change to Bogotá in the 90s in their different ways.

In the 1990s, Bogota was in urban decay – beset by drugs, cartels, and poverty. It was probably one of the worst major cities on earth.

In 1994 a political metamorphosis started to happen. Penalosa was a candidate for Mayor. He started a door to door campaign – a first for Colombia – while skipping televised debates with other candidates.

Meanwhile, Mockus was the chancellor of the University of Bogotá. During a university event, where the students were constantly booing him, he decided to turn around on the stage and moon the audience. Promptly, he was fired.

In doing this, he somehow became a symbol of honesty. Loco (“Crazy”) Antanas – as he was named – decided to run for Mayor as an Independent candidate. He soon emerged an a popular opponent to Penalosa.

He would campaign in the streets – sometimes dressing up as a superhero. He invited reporters to interview him at his mothers house – but his mother had none of it and threw the reporters out.

He would throw excrements in the face of candidates, and at an election event a student took away his microphone. He got into a fight with the students and a pandemonium broke out on stage.

Cars and computers

A few days ago, car company Tesla issued a software update which turns existing Tesla Model S cars into self-driving cars (while Google and Apple are busy designing self-driving cars).

This reminded me of the old joke from the 90s which made a comparison of the progress made by cars and computers – “If cars were like Windows, they would crash for no reason — you would have to close all windows and restart the car”.

A few years have passed, and cars are essentially ‘drive-by-wire’ now – which means that there is a ton of software ‘under the hood’ (literally!). Meanwhile, Windows has improved in terms of reliability, so let’s see how the old joke holds up.

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

Computers still crash – sometimes spectacularly. But it’s not “twice a day” bad like the days of Windows 95/98 etc. . Since Windows 2000 moved to the NT kernel, things have improved. Cars have started crashing for no reason (Toyota unintended acceleration, failure to detect objects by Tesla etc.) Still I trust my car to run without crashing far more than I trust my laptop! Win for the old joke.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

I’m not sure what the joke referred to by repainting the lines in the context of computers, but technology does tend to get obsolete pretty quickly – especially smartphones these days that seem to be designed to last about two years.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the  windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

This happens to cars already (Infiniti EX35 shuts off while driving).

4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

I suppose they were referring to software crashes etc that would render the computer un-bootable. I would think this is pretty rare these days for typical computers.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.

While Apple is busy with it’s car plans, a self-driving car start-up (probably qualifies as “twice as easy to drive”) called Cruise has a car which can only drive around San Francisco!

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed an Illegal Operation” warning light.

This already happens – the Check Engine Light.

7. The air-bag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.

Fortunately, this does not happen, but there have been cases where the air-bags did not deploy due to software errors.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

This sort of happened to us once while we were renting a ZipCar which uses an app based system instead of keys. We were just not able to unlock the car and get in. Eventually, after some fiddling around and calls to customer care we were able to coax the car into letting us in.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

Car controls can be confusing too – Example : Unusual transmission controls could increase risk of accidents.

Car navigation systems and media centres can be pretty unintuitive.

10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off. “

This has happened already:

Computers have become more reliable over the years, but cars have now become computers on wheels. We can only hope car makers are able to stand up to the complexity of software systems!

Why is metro called metro?

As per Google, the usage comes from the name of the French Metro : Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris.

The English word company comes from the French compagnie.

Chemin means road; it’s Spanish cognate is Camino. El Camino Real (The royal road) is a famous road in the Bay Area, California. Fer means iron, from the Latin ferrous. Chemin de fer means railroad.

Metropolitain (metropolitan in English) comes from Greek: meter (mother) and polis (city).

So metro basically comes from the Greek for mother!

Here’s a few eye catching metro stations around the world: http://www.travelandleisure.com/slideshows/eye-catching-metro-stations

Wikipedia also says the same, although citations are needed:

Métro is the abbreviated name of the company that originally operated most of the network: La Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris (“The Paris Metropolitan Railway Company”), shortened to “Le Métropolitain”. That was quickly abbreviated to métro, which became a common word to designate all subway networks (or any rapid transit system) in France and in many cities elsewhere (a genericized trademark).

Interestingly, Paris Metro (started in 1900) was not the first metro in the world – that credit goes to the London Underground which had been operating since 1860. The London Underground integrated a section known as the Metropolitan Railway, and a section of the Underground is still known as the Metropolitan Line.

The use of the word Metro really took off during the 1960s – 1980s as this image from Google Books n-gram viewer shows:

This correlates with the naming of metros around the world. Most of the metros were build after this time (source), and more often than not, they had “metro” in the name:

Landing on a Comet

Mark McCaughrean: “Rosetta: to Catch a Coment”

Last year, the space probe Rosetta was in the news for landing Philae on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Mark McCaughrean talks about the mission in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

This was not the first time that a probe has been sent to a comet. In 1986, ESA sent a probe to fly by Haley’s comet which lasted a few minutes. One of the discoveries was that comets are pretty dark objects due to the amount of dust on the surface, and due to organic materials.

In 2005, NASA sent a probe Deep Impact to the comet Tempel 1. The probe carried an “impactor” which collided into the comet with the probe studying the impact. The idea behind colliding was to get to the core – the material on the outside is not representative of what’s on the inside.

Comets contain things like water (ice) and amino acids. In theory comets could have brought water to earth – it would take 100 million comets to account for all the water on earth.

Water on earth has a consistent deuterium-to-hydrogen(D/H) ratio (it’s a very small ratio – on the order of 10^-4). The D/H ratio on asteroids tends to be similar to earth, but higher on comets.

The launch of Rosetta was delayed when one of the Ariane 5 launches (not the one carrying Rosetta) failed. They had to wait until the failure was investigated, which meant that they missed the comet that they had originally picked.

Rosetta has the biggest solar panels ever used on a spacecraft but not enough to power a direct flight to the comet. The comet 67P’s orbit extends between Mars and Jupiter and the sun is pretty weak near Jupiter.

They decided to use gravitational assist which involves “slingshot-ting” around a planet. During this they flew by earth 3 times, Mars once and visited two asteroids.

During the final phase of the flight – when the probe was near Jupiter’s orbit, they decided to put the probe is deep space hibernation. This was done to save power. They had enough power to keep going, but not enough if they faced any problems.

Hibernation involves switching off most of the equipment on board – except heaters for fuel lines. There was an alarm to wake up the probe before rendezvous time. During hibernation, they also switched off the stabilising system, which meant that the antenna no longer pointed towards earth, and they had no way to communicate with the probe until it rebooted.

The rendezvous was far out in the solar system and they had a 3 month period to prepare for it – a process that normally takes years of preparation.

When the rendezvous time arrived, the reboot was delayed by 18 minutes which caused nervous moments at ESA.

They discovered that the comet was duck shaped instead of being potato shaped as expected. It’s the size of Mont Blanc but half as dense as water.

The craters on the comet not from impacts, but rather from escaping Carbon Dioxide.

Defining the “down” direction on 67P is tricky because it has such an irregular shape – the “down vector” is local. The gravity is pretty low too – a vertical jump of 4cm would be enough to reach escape velocity. A base jump from a cliff on the comet would take forever and you would arrive at the bottom at a walking pace. There is a lot of hydrogen sulphide and hydrogen cyanide which means that 67P stinks!

The D/H ratio on 67P is the highest observed on a comet.

Due to nature of its shape, 67P will eventually fall apart – and ESA hops to look inside for further scientific insights.

Landing Philae from Rosetta to 67P was like throwing a dart  (the distance ratios are similar). It ended up landing in the 25 (area marked yellow):

Philae landed successfully, but tumbled and ended in shadow. Since there wasn’t enough sunlight, it went into hibernate after the 60 hour battery was discharged.

Google displayed a doodle marking the landing – but they delayed it till successful landing.

Currently Philae is off but might be woken up one day. They might also decide to land Rosetta on the comet.

Fighting dangerous chemicals in consumer products

Arlene Blum: “Breaking Trail: Peaks, Public Health, and Policy”

Arlene Blum is a researcher, mountaineer and founder of the Green Science Policy Institute. She talks about her work in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

She attended Reed College in Portland where one of her teachers had a PhD in Chemistry from MIT. She (and the other three women in her class), went on to get PhDs in Chemistry.

Mt Hood, in Portland, was the first mountain she she climbed. She went on to climb Denali (in Alaska), and Annapurna (one of the 14 8000m tall peaks). She had a career in Chemistry in the 1970s, from which she took a 26 year break to climb mountains.

She published a paper in Science about the cancer-causing effects of Brominated Tris – a flame retardant added to children’s pajamas. This chemical was soon banned, but later manufacturers started using Chlorinated Tris which is also flame retardant that causes cancer.

The lesson here is that banning chemicals is incredibly hard – it takes a long time, and often a similar alternative emerges – which has similar health risks associated with it (Regrettable Substitution).

For example, asbestos has been known to cause cancer, but it is still not banned in US.

So, we know that it is hard to ban chemicals, and even after they are banned, a similar chemical might emerge. So how do we fight dangerous chemicals in consumer products?

The question we must ask is whether a chemical is even necessary, and if it is then is it worth it, and if so – are there alternatives?

The first one is an interesting one – Chlorinated Tris (first seen in childrens pajamas) soon found it’s way into foams used in couches. This was mostly due to a California law that mandated that the foam should be fire retardant. Since manufactures don’t want to have a separate process for California, this foam found it’s way across US. The chemicals in the couch are released by contact, and so babies and pets are especially affected.

It turns out that having fire retardant foam doesn’t help because the fabric catches fire first. Also, adding fire retardant makes the foam harder, so even the couch manufactures don’t want it. They introduced a bill in California to repeal the fire retardant regulation, but it was defeated due to advertising by the chemical manufactures. Chicago Tribune later did a investigation (which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) into the tactics used by the flame-retardant manufactures

So fighting these tens of thousands of chemicals is hard – especially through the regulatory route.

This is the approach that the came up with. The dangerous chemicals are classified into six broad categories:

– Highly fluorinated chemicals (“stain-resistant, nonstick, waterproof and lethal”!)
– Anti-microbials (triclosan, triclocarban)
– flame retardants
– Bisphenols and pthalates (used in plastics)
– Organic Solvents
– Metals (used in paints)

They decided to reach reach manufactures ,large retailers ,big buyers, and consumers about the harmful effects and alternatives for these classes of chemicals.

As a result,
– IKEA has banned a lot of these chemicals in a number of their products
– Target decided to drop triclosan from all personal products.
– Brands like H&M, Levis, Puma, Adidas and others eliminated fluorinated chemicals

They have set a goal of reducing the use of these classes of chemicals by:
– 50% in five years
– 90% in ten years

How did The Martian come about

Andy Weir talks about The Martian

Andy Weir, the author of the best-selling book (also made into a movie) The Martian talks about it in this Talks at Google video. Here is a summary of the talk.

Weir is from Livermore, California which is home to the Livermore and Sandia National Labs. He was a high-school intern at Sandia, where he started programming.

Later, he dropped out of college and became a programmer. He worked on a popular video game called Warcraft II, and later at AOL. He was laid off from AOL in 1999, and was forced to sell his stock-options at what turned out to be the peak price.

He then tried his hand at writing novels but eventually went back to a programming job in 2002. He quit his programming career in 2014 when he was working at MobileIron.

During his programming career, he continued writing fiction and webcomics. One of his fictional works – The Martian – was published on his blog 1 chapter at a time.  This became quite popular with about 3000 regular readers. It took about 3 years for the book to be completed.

People started asking for an e-reader version, since they found it more convenient than reading on the website. Once this was done, he started getting requests for the e-book to be posted on Amazon, so that it was more convenient for readers to download.

Once posted on Amazon, the book took off. It sold about 500 units per day, as opposed to other self-published books that sell only a few copies a day. Slowly, the book climbed the best-selling charts – No. 1 in sci-fi and top-20 across genres.

This started attracting agents and publishers. David Fugate became his agent and Crown Publishing (subsidiary of Random House) bought the rights to publish it. The movie rights were also purchased around the same time by Twentieth Century Fox. The print and movie deals happened four days apart, which is unusual for regular books.

The way movie deals work is that the studio acquires an exclusive option to produce the movie, and the full amount is paid only when the movie is produced. Otherwise, the author gets a smaller fee for signing the option contract. In Weir’s case, the studio activated the full contract on the day that they started filming the movie.

Even though, the movie deal was signed, less then 1 percent of options eventually get made into movies. Things started falling into place once other people started getting attached to this project.

Drew Goddard signed up as the screenwriter and was also supposed to direct the movie. However, he got an offer to direct the new Spiderman movie, so he was not able to direct this movie. Later, Matt Damon and Ridley Scott joined the project. The rest of the cast was stellar, and they agreed to do the movie for less than their normal fees.

The movie was shot between Nov 2014 and March 2015. Weir was involved during the movie for technical consultations. He mentions watching a test screen before the editing is complete. Since special effects is expensive ($100k per second), the test screenings have lots of rudimentary effects, and also plants, vehicles are visible in the Mars shots.

Water was recently found to be present at Mars, but Weir says that since Curiosity found water at Gale Crater, he can still claim that the area where the movie takes place might be a desert.

Responding to a question about inaccuracies, he found out that the process used for burning hydrogen to produce water would have raised the temperature of the HAB by 400 degree C. He jokes that the biggest inaccuracy is that such a mission would be funded at all!

Post-postmodernism

The origin of vaccination

There is an ongoing controversy in the United States regarding if vaccinations are safe.

Amidst this, this episode of PBS NOVA mentions that vaccinations may have originated in India more than a thousand years ago:

Narrator: As surprising as it may seem, vaccination began as a type of traditional therapy at least 1,000 years ago.

In India, when a wave of smallpox approached a town, there are tales of people doing something extraordinary—they were lining up to actually buy the disease. The healers, known as Brahmins, would take a cloth and rub the person’s upper arm. Then they would scratch the skin, just enough to draw blood. They would then apply dried smallpox scabs, taken from patients who had survived the disease.

Most people would get sick, but recover and from that point on, they were protected. Over 1,000 years ago, the Brahmins had observed one of the basic principles of immunity—that you rarely get infected twice.

The Big Bang Theory

When it came out in 2007, The Big Bang Theory was kind of disappointing – as the Google Trends graph shows:

It really came into its own around the 3rd-4th season.

From 2013 onwards, there has been a steady decline, which is also when The Big Blog Theory was last updated.

Indian Cities with population 500,000

144,770,495 people (~12% of India) live in cities with population 5 Lakh (500 thousand) or more.

222,267,435 people (~18% of India) live in cities with population 1 Lakh (100 thousand) or more.

Source: http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/paper2-vol2/prov_results_paper2_indiavol2.html

ये जो देस है तेरा !

Mitchell Point Hike

Reviews

Pirate Latitudes This is a book by Michael Crichton that was published posthumously. The book starts off with a glimpse of the colonial lifestyle sixteenth-century Jamaica. Soon enough, we are involved in the plotting of a “privateering” expedition. Now privateering is is pretty similar to pirating, except that it is sanctioned by the local governor. The planning part is classic Crichton and is reminiscent of The Great Train Robbery. From there on, however, the plot is predictable, barring sundry adventures on sea as well as land. On the whole, the book doesn’t rank among Crichton’s best.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones This movie is best known for Shahrukh Khan’s bit-part début. It seems to be inspired by Arundhati Roy’s experience in architecture school. Annie is actually a guy named Anand Grover. “Giving it those ones” is probably (90s?) Delhi college slang (see the Hinglish section at this page http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?206041 – “But now giving it those ones is the thing”).  Annie hardly seems to be some spunky rebel, contrary to what the title may suggest. He has been stuck in the final year for four years, maintains a hen coop in his hostel room, and dreams of planting 120000 miles of fruit trees alongside the 60000 miles of train tracks across the country. The other students – unshaven, un-showered, in need of a haircut – reminded me of college life and the farce that out education system can sometimes be. The rest of the plot wasn’t all that interesting.

Customer service

I was at the cable customer service centre to return the cable-box that my room-mate left behind when he moved.  I took a number and sat down,  assuming that the wait would be short.  The actual transaction did take less than two minutes, but I must have waited for around twenty minutes. At one point, they even locked the doors and asked us to not let anyone in (it was closing time). This led to a game of people-watching.

There was a bunch of people there – an old gentleman with an amazon.com box (so old people shop online too!), a thirty-something biker guy who made several DMV jokes and did a little jig when someone’s phone rang with an elaborate ringtone, the guy with the said elaborate ringtone, a girl who asked someone on the phone if you could die of insomnia, and other restless and agitated people.

The weirdest thing happened. I noticed a woman and a man sitting apart. Every now and then, the woman would gesticulate wildly at the guy in sign language (at least I thought it was sign language). The guy would just stare at her blankly. When she was not looking in his direction, he would make his set of angry gestures – which looked nothing like sign language. It seemed like there was a loud fight going on between them – only without words. And then, after a few minutes, a number was announced. The both got up and approached the counter – together! From what I could see from a distance, the woman appeared to be talking to the woman on the counter and the guy was standing next to her. No sign language involved. I had no idea what had just happened there.

I do not come to you by chance

You’ve probably received one of those infamous Nigerian scam emails. These scamster are often referred to as 419ers after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal code. Interestingly, this is very similar to the Indian name for fraudsters – char sau bees(420). This might not be as coincidental as it appears because the penal code of both countries date back to British colonial rule. This raises the question – what is the extra crime punishable in India but not in Nigeria? 🙂

The book I do not come to you by chance chronicles the life of one such scammer – how an average Nigerian guy turns into a fraudster. The plot is not a work of art by any stretch of imagination. It reminded me of the Hindi movies from the 70s and 80s where the protagonist is forced into a life of crime by a cruel society which doesn’t value education and honesty.

It may only be good for light reading, but the one thing special about it is the glimpse it provides into Nigerian society. A lot of the details about Nigerian society struck me as very similar to Indian society, albeit an India of 20 years ago. A few examples:

The protagonist’s father insists that Nigeria is a “land of milk and honey” but it’s just that the “milk is in bottles and honey is in jars”. I have heard people expressing similar sentiments in India. Then there are things like the firm belief in education, value of respect over dirty money, grueling entrance exams and importance of influence over qualification in getting jobs. There is the wide disparity between the cities and the rural areas, between the rich and the poor, the pathetic conditions of public infrastructure, rich corrupt politicians etc. There is also the extra fondness for the english language which acts as a class divide which is again evident in the way people overindulge in newly acquired riches.

All in all, a good read and a reminder that cultures aren’t as different as we think they are.

A few unrelated observations

About US gun culture, from the novel Headhunter

If this is true then recent statistics tell us quite a lot. For in 1980 the comparative figures for handgun deaths within a number of countries were as follows: Japan, 48; Great Britain, 8; Canada, 52; Israel, 58 Sweden, 21; West Germany, 42; United states, 10,728.

Even taking account of the population differences the conclusion is quite obvious: either the American male is in desperate need of psycho-sexual therapy. Or something is very, very wrong with US laws on gun control. The two women who left Vancouver for Seattle late that morning were counting on the latter conclusion as being the correct answer. At 4:20 that same afternoon they stopped at the Douglas Border Crossing to re-enter Canada. As a matter of routine Canada Customs searches every fiftieth car. Theirs was number fifty. So that was how, both in the trunk and under the back seat, a rather surprised Customs Officer found fifty-two loaded Smith and Wesson .38s purchased that day in Seattle.

As the slogan goes; You can’t rape a .38.

***

“80 percent of success is just showing up”  — Woody Allen

***
Kissinger, Gorbachev, Zbignew Brzezinski, Bill Gates Sr were recently (a few months ago now) guests on Charlie Rose. The youngest of them is probably 80+.

Portland

In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. For beyond the islands scattered west roll endless miles of ocean, while north-east at the city’s back jut jagged mountain peaks. With the slate-gray skies of autumn come the cyclone westerlies, raging winds and boiling clouds that sweep in from the sea. In waves these bloated clouds tear open on the peaks, and the rain which fills each gut spills and rattles down.

To live in this city, you learn to like rain.

Funny how sometimes you retain information from the unlikeliest of sources. I was in eleventh (or twelfth?) grade when I asked a friend if he had anything interesting to read. He lent me the novel Headhunter (Michael Slade). The plot is about Royal Canadian Mounted Police hunting down a serial killer in Vancouver. The passage above is how the story begins (after the first chapter which is more of a prologue). People who live in the pacific north-west would agree that the same passage applies to the other two big cities in this region — Seattle and Portland.

I must have been in fifth grade when I was doing a map (marking cities and lakes and rivers and mountains) of North America. One of the items was listed as “Vancouver (Canada)”. I did not know what Vancouver was; and, seeing Canada in parenthesis, I assumed they meant Canada (even though I had a feeling that couldn’t be right). Later, my sister laughed and told me that I was supposed to mark the city of Vancouver and not just Canada. So I learnt that Vancouver was a city and would later learn that it rained there all the time (courtesy the serial-killer tale above). A few year later, a friend of mine was interning at Starbucks in Seattle. “That is where Starbucks started.”, he told me, and “It rains here all the time.”. Just like Vancouver, I thought. It all made sense.

Almost exactly an year ago, I was having a phone interview. I already had a tentative offer (in Boston!) so I wasn’t taking the phone call seriously. I was on IM with a friend, planning to go to a 5 o’clock show of The Dark Knight. The interview went well and ended just in time for me to get to the movie in time. It was pouring. I got wet just walking across the parking lot. A couple of weeks later, I was in Portland interviewing for the job. It rained the whole day, almost exactly like the day I had been in Seattle, on another interview a few weeks back.

I never made it to Boston – not even for a face to face interview. I ended up taking the offer in Portland – a town that came close to being named Boston.

And that’s how I live in Portland now. In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. … To live in this city, you learn to like rain.

Test Match Special

Sometimes the feedback to the cricket commentary on the BBC website is priceless:

Robin from Co Kerry, Ireland “I love this form of cricket, so many great batsmen looking like waiters in a bouncy castle trying to hold a tray of glasses when they bat. Love the way you also make fun of the Aussies despite losing to Holland. I wonder if you guys will ever learn not to gloat until you do something yourselves worth shouting about like avoiding an Ashes whitewash.”

Simon in the TMS inbox “Doesn’t Robin (5/6th over) realise that for us to gloat at any Aussie failure is one of our basic human rights as Englishmen? What we do ourselves has no bearing on the matter at all. In fact it’s remarkably similar to the Irish attitude to any English failure…”

Paul in Lancs in the TMS inbox “As both determined neo-Kantian and utter pedant, I feel I must dispute Simon’s claim that gloating about Australian failure is one of our ‘basic human rights as Englishmen’. Such a statement flies in the face of the Categorcial Imperative formulation: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, in that you cannot validly have a human right solely for one part of the human race. This applies even when the ‘objects’ of such a right is Australians, who did not exist in the modern (Euro-centric) sense when Kant was alive. I accept that, had they been, he may have done things differently.”

TrickieDickie, Hollywood, in the TMS inbox “I agree, you are an utter pedant. Kant was familiar with the concept of schadenfreude (see his Lectures on Ethics) and whilst he felt it was a cruel and inhumane emotional response, I’m sure he would have found it hard not to raise a wry smile when the Aussies were ignominiously dumped out of this tournament.”

TrickieDickie, Hollywood, in the TMS inbox “You’re right, he did. Do you remember when Playaway devoted a whole show to existentialism and the pointlessness of the human condition? Seems a propos, as we sit staring at large squares of canvas, waiting for another dead rubber to begin. Honestly, Test matches in May and now pointless Twenty20 games in June. What are the (dis)organisers putting in their tea?”

Paul in Lancs in the TMS inbox “Trickiedickie – I think, then, we are broadly in agreement on the specificity of schadenfreude when it comes to the Aussies. The Australian cricket team, has by virtue of its dominance imbued with arrogance, completely altered the whole face of moral philosophy as we knew it, and created a new epistemological framework for the social sciences. Ricky Ponting should rest easy in Leicester. His work is done.”

Miscellany

Most license plates here in Oregon are 3 numbers followed by 3 alphabets. I don’t know how these numbers are generated but they don’t seem to be you usual machine-generated random permutations. I have seen license plates ending in EAT, DRY or a bunch of other combinations that sound like common words or acronyms. The one that takes the cake, though, is eax (though not remarkable to who has never looked at x86 assembly code). The other day, I was driving and pointed out to my friend that the license plate of the car ahead us ended in eax. It took him a while to get the reference — by that time the car had turned right and we were at the next stop light and guess what the license plate of the car now ahead of us was – another eax!. Not only that, I glanced to the left and there was a car with a license plate ending in ebx! If only there was a mov in the leftmost lane 🙂

***

I do not remember much from 1988. Except that one day in class we were pretty excited after writing that day’s date – 8/8/88. What I do remember is that the presidents of both India and Pakistan had names starting with the letter j/z – Jia-ul Haq and Jail Singh. While Gyani Jail Singh might or might not have represented all things good and beautiful, Jia-ul Haq certianly, even then, represented all things evil. After all, he was the president of Pakistan! I do remember his death then, in a plane crash, was much like the killing of Ravana. Good over evil.

I recently read a book called A case of exploding mangoes which takes a satirical and very funny take on the episode. The narrator is a Pakistani armyman and describes the incidents leading up to the plane crash in which killed Jia-ul haq and the American ambassador plus others.

Far from this opera for evermore!

I just remembered these crazy soft drinks that I had a long long time ago in a land far far away.

***

Why do “immigrant” authors have to write about “loss and alienation” all the time? Even when the actual immigrants were their parents? Although, sometimes their experiences can be funny. For example, I heard this bit from Samina Ali (author of Madras on Rainy Days) on an NPR story

Everyone spoke Urdu, everyone was Muslim, everyone ate Indian food, and for a long time my son thought that that was India. He would tell people all the time, ‘I’ve been to India! We’ve gone to India; I just was there last weekend!’ And I would tell him, ‘No, that was actually Minnesota!’ And you can tell from his perspective how insular it is.”

***

What would happen if France had a black president? His new motto would be Liberté, égalité and booté!
That’s from last weekend’s Saturday Night Live (not available outside US). That guy is good – incroyablé!

Computer Science enrollment in US universities

Some interesting stats from the 2007-08 Computing Research Association Talbee Computer Science Enrollment Survey:

While only 6.2% CS undergrads come from the outside US, the number of non-resident aliens in Master’s and Ph.D. degrees is roughly 56% – which is not really surprising.

Also, while only 12% undergrads are females, they form about 21% of the master’s and phd students.

Another interesting stat is that 55.8% of master’s degrees are awarded by schools ranked 37 or lower (and 66% by schools ranked 25 and below). A lot of schools use MS in CS as a revenue stream as there is a never ending stream of foreign students to bolster demand.

Link: http://www.cra.org/statistics/

Also see :  NCSU – Fall 2008 International Graduates

Salaam Bombay

I watched Salaam Bombay a few months ago along with the DVD extras : the director’s commentary, the special featurettes and the director of photographer’s commentary.

To be honest, I found the movie a bit tedious after about half-way through – it felt like watching a documentary. Later, during Mira Nair’s commentary I found out why — she had only shot documentaries before she made this movie and they used real people and locations for the movie. At times, they incorporated real-life incidents because they were shooting on a limited budget and time.

The DVD extras talked about the lives of some of the child actors, who were actually street children. The makers of the movie established a centre for children called Salaam Balak. The child-actor who played Keeda was adopted by Sandy, the Director of Photography, and moved to America. It wasn’t the same fairy tale for the others. The protagonist, who won the Best Child Actor National Award, tried to carve a career as an actor but now works in Bangalore as a camera person; the girl Manju lives in Bombay and is into the bartan for kapda business. At least they didn’t end up hopeless and destitute.

A movie can be just two hours of entertainment, but Salaam Bombay not only showed the real lives of people but actually changed a lot of lives for the better.

Terrorist – John Updike

John Updike’s Terrorist is a tale of the times that we live in. At first look, it is the story of the Ahmad – an inner city teenager who turns into a terrorist. The plot can be summed up in five pages, but what forms the meat of the book is Updike’s examination of the various characters that occupy this drama. On each occasion the characters are seen through the lens of the identity that they represent rather than their individuality. Somewhat paradoxically, Ahmad is radically different from most people that he shares his surroundings with, yet he is what he is due to the same surroundings.

Born to an absent Egyptian immigrant father and an irresponsible Irish American mother, Ahmad is another inner city kid with little direction in life. He latches on to his absent father’s identity – adopting his last name in favour of his mother’s and even his(?) Muslim faith. His world view seems to have been moulded by his Imam, whom he visits regularly for his religious lessons. He spurns a college education (“bad philosophy and bad literature”) and questions the “Western religion of freedom” :

“I see to walk the Straight Path,” Ahmad admits. “In this country, it is not easy. There are too many paths, too much selling of many useless things. They brag of freedom, but freedom to no purpose becomes a kind of prison.”

“She is a victim of the American religion of freedom, freedom above all, though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air.”

Updike clearly sees it as a culture clash – Us (the West) versus Them (cultures where terrorists might come from). Yet it is surprising how much the two sides agree on. Similar to the radical views on American freedom above, some of the “Us” voices have the following to say:

“Even out vaunted freedom is nothing much to be proud of, with the Commies out of the running; it just makes it easier for terrorists to move about, renting airplanes and vans and settings up Web sites.”

“If there’s anything wrong with this country — and I’m not saying there is, compared to any other, France and Norway included — is we have too many rights and not enough duties. Well, when the Arab League takes over the country, people’ll learn what duties are.”

Both sides have a pretty gloomy view of the world they live in. Jack Levy, Ahmad’s guidance counsellor, and his wife Beth yearn for the time gone by. Times that once had “loving parents innermost and a moralistic popular culture outermost, with lots of advice between.” but now “children who seem to have no flesh-and-blood parents”. On the other hand, the “Them” voices of Ahmad and his Imam see America as a materialistic, hedonist and Godless society whose total obsession with “this life” appears arrogant to them.

Another occasion when Updike makes an interesting comparison is when he talks about George Washington and the Revolutionary War:

“The was Georgie. He learned to take what came, to fight guerilla-style. …. He was the Ho Chi Minh of his day. We were like Hamas. We were Al-Qaida”

Ahmad’s paradoxical journey makes for a very interesting read. It is at the same time very bewildering – his faith, his absolute conviction. Yet the path he takes appears predictable, even natural.

I’ll wrap up with a passage from the book:

“All I’m saying is that kids like Ahmad need to have something they don’t get from society any more. Society doesn’t let them be innocent any more. The crazy Arabs are right — hedonism, nihilism, that’s all we offer. Listen to the lyrics of these rock and rap stars — just kids themselves, with smart agents. Kids have to make more decisions then they used to, because adults can’t tell them what to do. We don’t know what to do, we don’t have the answers we used to; we just futz along, trying not to think. Nobody accepts responsibility , so the kids, some of the kids, take it on. Even at a dump like Central High, where the demographics are stacked against the whole school population, you see it — this wish to do right, to be good, to sign up for something — the Army, the marching band, the gang, the choir, the student council, the Boy Scouts even”

Don’t judge a library book by it’s cover

Judge it by what the previous borrower left between the covers – a plane ticket, or a Sunday Matinee ticket to the Oregon Symphony 🙂

Writing

This is one of the criticisms about the recently deceased writer John Updike(about the book Terrorist from Wikipedia):

In the case of Ahmad, however, it is arguable that an American high school student, even one of Ahmad’s intelligence and principled views, would possess so sophisticated a grasp of the world and (English) language as Updike seeks to impute to him.

Well, if Updike was susceptible to such errors, we might have to cut the likes of Arvind Adiga and Vikas Swaroop some slack.

See also: “Terrorist – John Updike”

NCSU – Fall 2008 International Graduates

Countries with five or more graduates

Some observations:

The number of foreign undergrads is negligible compared to foreign grad students.

India sends way more grad students compared to any other country.

The ratio of MS vs PhD students is way too skewed when it comes to India. All other countries have more balance between MS and PhD student enrollments.

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20090307083015/http://www.ncsu.edu/registrar/publications/graduation/degree_inter.html

Jurassic Park

I spotted an old copy of the novel Jurassic Park at a used-book sale. The cover proclaimed Soon to be made into a major motion picture!. I recently finished reading it. When I told a coworker that I was reading that book, I was met with a laugh. “Surely you’re joking! Who reads Jurassic Park!”

Usually when people talk of science fiction they mean authors like Asimov and Clarke.  Sci-fi is usually set in the far future, with time travel, space etc being the common themes. I never thought of Michael Crichton as a science fiction writer although now that I think of it there was definitely a lot of science and a lot of fiction in his works. Does science fiction have to have time travel or be set in the future?

As far as the movie is considered, I thought this was a case of very good adaptation. The movie remains faithful to the book (except some minor changes) and and the things that it leaves out are well suited in the book but would have been tedious in the movie. For example, the book is structured around chaos theory. The mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) studies the park and predicts that the island would eventually go out of control. The book is divided into “iterations” demonstrating how complex unpredictable structures emerge out of simple structures. There are some very interesting explanations about chaos theory, genome sequencing and even programming.

A situation in the book that I found really interesting was when they discover that the animals must be reproducing but they aren’t sure. The program that searches for the animals appears to report the correct number. Then they discover that the program stops when the number of animals it is searching for is reached. It assumes that only error condition is when there are missing animals and not extra animals  – it is a very believable bug.

Also quite interesting is the way the mathematician Malcolm deduces that the animals are breeding – the height distribution is a normal distribution and not a tri-modal distribution you would expect given that there are three batches produced at different times.

Lastly, Nedry, the programmer, played by “Newman” — His back story is that he was made to make changes late into the program and wasn’t being paid to do so – enough to make any programmer mad!

Slumdog Millionaire versus Q&A

In my experience, movies based on books rarely live up to the promise of the book. But as I started reading Q&A by Vikas Swarup while comparing it to Slumdog Millionaire I found it hard to unequivocally decide which was better – the book or the movie. So I decided to do it the quantitative way!. I wanted to compare the two and assign points as I went along. Eventually I gave up because it turned into a no contest.

First of all we have the issue to of language/medium. I am okay with everyone talking in English because that is the language of the movie (and the book), but the movie is inconsistent with it’s usage of language. It is as if the director couldn’t make up his movie whether he wanted to use Hindi or not. In the book, this problem is not there but there is another, more serious, problem. The author dumps thoughts and experiences on the narrator that the narrator could not possibly have ever had. I don’t have the book with me right now and I read it a few weeks ago, so I do not have an example, but if you have read The White Tiger or A Fine Balance you would know what I am talking about.
Book: 0 Movie: 0

In the book, the show is called Who Will Win a Billion or W3B. The protagonist wins the jackpot before even the first episode is aired. The producers don’t have the revenue to afford a billion rupee prize until the first eight months. They offer the commissioner of police a cut of 10% (of what?) to prove the protagonist guilty. The police have a confession almost signed before a young female lawyer mysteriously appears and rescues our guy.

I thought that the book was more irreverent and cynical (a prize of a billion! the biggest prize ever!) and the producers have a more credible motive of denying the prize. Book wins.

The first question in the book concerns Armaan Ali (and not Amitabh Bachchan) who is the next big superstar in the tradition of Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan. It is the hero’s friend (not brother Salim) who is a devoted fan of the film star, not the hero himself. The whole episode is quite silly in the book but handled pretty well in the movie. Movie wins this one.

In the book, the protagonist is abandoned at a church. He is adopted by a Christian family but his adopted mother runs away and his adopted father returns him to the church where he grows up without realizing the difference between father and Father. The church undergoes the danger of being attacked for “conversions” so the boy is renamed Ram Mohammed Thomas (after a brief debate over the merits of names Ram Thomas and Mohammed Thomas)

The movie turns him into a Muslim boy orphaned by rioting Hindus. More dramatic but I like the book version (even though the book character sounds like Anthony Gonsalves). Book wins.

At some point the stories in the movie and the book start to diverge. A point to note here is that, unlike the movie, in the book the order of the questions does not chronologically align with the incidents of the protagonists life. Thus, the narration jumps back and forth making you do the guesswork to fill the gaps between the different story fragments. I find is hard to understand why the director would throw out this interesting non-linear narration in favour of the straight line and predictable story line in the movie. Book wins again.

In the book I kept waiting for Latika to show up. There happens to be a girl on the train though who Thomas rescues from a dacoit but she is quickly forgotten. There is no mention of the three musketeers. Should the movie lose a point for being too lovey-dovey? Was Danny Boyle attempting a “Bollywood” take on the story here? Not so sure here.

Book: ? Movie: ?

Okay, so after a point, the book loses it completely. No point bothering with the scores because halfway through the story, the book becomes too *fantastic* using too many coincidences and doesn’t even pretend to be realistic. Given that the movie itself is fantasy-like, you have to imagine how worse the book would be.

Netherland

I recently read Netherland by Jospeh O’Neill. It is a great read and, at the same time, hard to categorize because it touches so many themes. One review (in New York Times) starts off comparing it to 9/11 novels; in another review it’s described as “an Indian novel” .

It is the story of a banker who moves with his family from London to New York where the couple begin to drift apart. The wife moves back to London leaving him alone to brood over his life. During this time he discovers cricket -the game he played as a child – being played by a bunch of  (mostly) West Indian and South Asian immigrants. He also meets a guy called Chuck Ramkissoon who is described by reviewers as a “Gatsby-like” figure.

The book is simultaneously funny, insightful, informative (unless you know a lot about birds of Trinidad etc), melancholic and overwhelming. Consider the following excerpts:

Even I had heard of Faruk, author of Wandering in the Light and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos.

“The Wild West”, Schulz said thoughtfully as he wandered off to absorb the view from atop a nearby boulder. I saw that each of my other companeros had likewise assumed a solitary station on the ridge, so that the four of us stood in a row and squinted into the desert like existentialist gunslingers. It was undoubtedly a moment of reckoning, a rare and altogether golden opportunity for a Milwaukeean or Hollander of conscience to consider certain awesome drifts of history or geology and philosophy, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel lessened by the immensity of the undertaking and by the poverty of the associations one brought to bear on the instant, which in my case included recollections, for the first time in years, of Lucky Luke, the cartoon-strip cowboy who often rode among the buttes and drew a pistol faster than his own shadow. It briefly entranced me, that remembered seminal image, on the back cover of all the Lucky Luke books, of the yellow-shirted, white-hatted cowboy plugging a hole in the belly of his dark counterpart. To gun down one’s shadow … The exploit struck me, chewing mutton under the sun, as possessing a tantalizing metaphysical significance; and it isn’t an overstatement, I believe, to say that this train of thought, though of course inconclusive and soon reduced to nothing more than nostalgia for the adventure books of my childhood, offered me sanctuary: for where else, outside of reverie’s holy space, was I to find it? “

Sometimes when you read a book you wonder how much of it derives from the author’s own life experiences.

A few days ago, I was watching Charlie Rose interviewing a german author Bernhard Schlink (writer of The Reader). Schlink said that all novels are autobiographical, for, how can you write about that which you have not experienced.

In the novel Netherland, the narrator Hans has a lot in common with the author. E.g. the narrator grows up in Holland and lives in England before moving to New York city where, at some point, he stays at the Chelsea Hotel. The author’s prior job as a food reviewer and his review of C L R James’ book also make their way into the novel.

Now these are superficial details but it makes you wonder about some of the more personal life experiences – how much are they from the author’s own experiences or the people around him and how comfortable he or the people around him are with what goes into the book to be read by possibly millions of people.

Cricket

Sports is fun when there are great moments like the two fourth innings chases from India and South Africa recently.

Not so much when India decided to play for a draw on the last day in Mohali.

For a team aspiring to be called the number one team in the world, this was a pathetic display of a fear of losing. A team that feels that it should hold the top spot should display confidence. Like Australia at its best (remember the 99 aus-sa tie?).

If they had no intention for going for a win and wanted a draw, why did they even declare? They could just have enjoyed batting for the rest of the day.

***

Quote from TV news: “Are the ski resorts close to opening?”

Last night on TV

Frieda Pinto (Latika from Slumdog Millionaire) was on The Tonight Show (with Jay Leno) last night.  She seemed to be a little nervous but carried it off quite well. She was talkative, funny and looked great. Definitely not the car crash that Aishwarya Rai was on Letterman.

*

On the Big Bang Theory show yesterday, Sheldon likens Ashwarya Rai to a poor man’s Madhuri Dixit and then says to Raj, “Clearly you know nothing about Indian cinema”. The goof there was that when Sheldon points to the TV and says “Isn’t that Aishwarya Rai?”, the song playing was from Kaho Na Pyaar Hai.

*
Quote from Scarface: “Nothing exceeds like excess”.

Driving across America

Maybe it was when a friend of mine mentioned that he had driven 2800 miles from Pittsburgh to Santa Clara in four days that the thought first came to my mind – of driving across the continent. And I did it finally – last month.

Green river twin I-80 tunnels near Green River, WY

I had been prepared to do it solo, but in September I mentioned the idea to Shirish and he said that he might be willing to come along. However, I was delayed by a few days and he couldn’t make it. I met my advisor before leaving the univ and mentioned the trip to him. He didn’t seem enthused by the idea and suggested the possibility of snow. I decided to take the I-80 route rather than I-90 (which is more to the north) so that the possibility of snow would be lower. I had exactly one week to reach Portland, so there wouldn’t be any time for sightseeing anyway. In hindsight, it would have been better to take a bit longer but that would have meant cutting my India trip shorter or pushing my joining date farther. I was already not spending a lot of time in India and Lehman brothers collapsed when I was enroute to India, so it was not the best time to delay starting a job!

The route taken

Monday, October 13th: Raleigh to Cincinnati (529 miles through North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio): The rear passenger window of my car had started to slide down on its own. I had tried to hold it together with superglue, but a more permanent fix was necessary for a trip this long. I visited my mechanic “Mr Kim” who offered to put in a nut to hold up the window. This was a good quick fix under the circumstances (a couple of weeks later I would regret not being able to break into my car!).

I found that while I was in India, my roommate had given my GPS navigator to someone and I absolutely needed it to be able to make the trip. After weighing all options, including buying a GPS, he finally borrowed a TomTom GPS from some friend. So I started from Raleigh only at noon, and I had to start the trip with an unfamiliar GPS device! After missing a turn, which I blamed on the GPS, I modified some of the settings because of which I got a non-optimal route. On the way to Cincinnati I did a lot of driving on state highways, some of which were quite windy and even single lane. Eventually I reached Cincinnati without losing much time.

Tuesday (in Cincinnati): We decided that I should stay there for a day. The day was spent visiting a lake, borrowing DVDs from the library (we watched Match Point) and in the evening we went to Newport which is across the river from Cincinnati and has a wonderful view of the downtown area. I had also left my cellphone charger back in Raleigh so I had to buy a new one ( I got a deal for $6 which works both indoors and in the car). I also got a pair of sunglasses (which came in handy given I was driving West) and borrowed contact lens solution from Shirish who wasn’t using it.

Rain in Illinois

Wednesday: Cincinnati to Omaha (722 miles through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska): I started at a more reasonable time (compared to Monday) and quickly crossed from Ohio into Indiana after a refueling stop. At some point I noticed that the car was pulling to the right. I thought I might need to get the wheels looked at, but then I rolled down the windows and realized there was a furious crosswinds blowing across the (corn?) fields which the interstate cut through.

At lunch time, I was sitting at a Subway in Urbana – pretty close to UIUC. It would’ve been a good opportunity to meet another wingmate of mine if I had done this trip a few months earlier. Turns out he moved to Seattle in the summer having driven all the way from Urbana to Seattle. He did the smart thing of buying a new car in Urbana and I wondered if I should have done that. Since he had done the trip in summer and had more time on his hand, he had taken the I-90 route with a friend. I think they visited Yellowstone National Park along the way. In any case, my sandwich was finished and I had to start at the new job on Monday, so I got moving again.

There was a bit of rain in the afternoon but apart from this, the weather was good throughout the trip. Towards the night, as the song goes, I found myself on a long and lonesome highway east of Omaha (if you’re wondering the song is Turn the Page by Bob Seger and later also by Metallica). I was feeling tired and I found a Motel 6 near an exit just past Omaha. I grabbed some fast food and was off to bed soon after.

• 

  Most boring highway: I-80 in Nebraska

• 

  Kearney Arch

• 

  Lunch at Kimball, NE

• 

  Kimball County Courthouse

Thursday: Omaha to Rawlins, WY (644 miles through Nebraska and Wyoming): I started again around 9. There was some light frost on my car windshield, but thankfully I did not encounter any snow during the trip. There was a lot of driving dead straight on a very flat terrain (see top left). There wasn’t much to see barring the odd attraction like the Kearney Archway (see top right pic) The vehicular traffic was also pretty sparse, mostly consisting of long hauling truckers who kept to the rightmost lane. So the “driving” was mostly engaging cruise control and keeping alert, especially when passing. Lunch was again at a Subway – this time in Kimball, NE.

Wyoming winds are no laughing matter

As I kept driving west, the elevation started to increase and there were very strong headwinds. My car was barely able to keep up, maxing out at 45-50 MPH. I pulled over at a gas station in Buford, WY (a town of population one!) and took a look around the car to see if everything was okay. I got back on the highway again and noticed a sign saying the wind speed was more than 45 MPH! No wonder my poor car was struggling.

Elk Mountain

By the time I crossed Elk Mountain, the clouds cleared and the winds eased up, but it was soon dark and I started feeling very tired. This part of the country is very sparsely populated and it was a while before I reached the town of Rawlins, WY. This is probably the sleepiest I have felt while driving. I found a motel near the exit (another Motel 6) but they did not have rooms available. There was another motel nearby (funnily named Motel 7!) run by a desi gentleman. It was cheap but pretty dingy, but I was asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

Souvenir from the Little America truck stop on I-80

Friday: Rawlins, WY to Meridian, Idaho (594 miles through Wyoming, Utah and Idaho): Having crossed the mountains the day before, this day again started with long straight endless roads. I think the stretch in the picture below is called the “Highway to Heaven”

• 

  Highway to Heaven

• 

  Looking back

I crossed into Utah and turned onto I-84, and soon I was at Weber canyon where the scenery changed dramatically and I could see snow capped mountains right from the highway.

I-84 rest stop near Mountain Green, UT before entering Weber Canyon

Later in the day the terrain flattened out. I-84 shares part of the route with the old US-30 highway, so this part was along narrower surface streets and headed exactly west with the sun shining directly into my eyes. I stopped at a gas station and it looked more like a mom-and-pop store. Then I realized it was part of a campground – right on I-84!  I reached Boise in the evening and checked into a Hampton Inn (an upgrade from Motel 6!) in a town called Meridian nearby. They had a heated pool so I took a much needed dip after a long day of driving.

Saturday: Meridian, Idaho to Hillsboro (439 miles through Idaho and Oregon): This was the last day of my trip. Starting from Meridian, I drove through the scenic Blue Mountains. Soon, though, I was driving through a steep winding downhill road (6% grade). It was quite an experience to navigate that stretch and even some semi trucks were passing me! I stopped at the first exit once we reached flatter ground and went into the Arrowhead Travel Plaza. There I found that the shop was selling t-shirts for surviving this stretch (appropriately called Deadman Pass)!

T-shirt being sold at travel plaza at the bottom of Cabbage Hill

From this point onward, the driving was much easier and in an hour or so I was driving next to the Columbia River and then in the Columbia River Gorge.

Looking at the Columbia River from an I-84 rest stop

I was at my friend’s place by four pm. The trip meter which had started in Raleigh read “095” because it only had three digits. I had driven 3095 miles in six days!

***

When America started expanding westwards, the wagons would take six months to travel from Missouri to Oregon on a route which is loosely similar to the route I had driven. When automobiles became popular, the wagon trails were replaced by the Lincoln Highway (the Little America stop where I stopped was established in this era) which was the first coast-to-coast highway in America. It was succeeded by the US-30 (and other) highways and eventually by the interstate system that we have today. A journey that would take six months 150 years ago took me just five days of driving and $300 in gas!

Car trouble

Tuesday morning. I had to be at work by 8:30. I get out in the morning and it is dark and foggy as hell. And I am in a hurry. So while getting out of the parking lot I scratch my car against the pole. I note the damage, curse a little and try to get to work on time. I drive through the dark and foggy morning, drop my friend and eventually I make it just in time.

At lunch time, I go out to get something from the car. When I try to lock it using the little button on the door nothing happens. I have to lock it with the key. I come back thinking that the car is falling apart. First the scratch then this.

It’s evening and I am ready to go home. As I get into the car, it occurs to me that the button on the passenger side door might still work. I try that. Nope, not working. I sigh and turn the ignition. No lights come up. Nothing. Oops battery is gone. The car is really falling apart. But wait! The button is battery operated. So that is probably still alright. But why is the battery out? It was alright in the morning. Face hits palm. Remember the fog in the morning. I must have left the lights on in the hurry. Sure enough the light switch is on. I switch it back. Sigh again.

I call AAA. Wait for the guy to come and give me a jump-start (It occurred to me after calling AAA that I could have asked someone in the parking lot). About 40 minutes later the guy arrives. The car starts. I ask him if there’s somewhere nearby where I could get the battery charged. He tells me that most places would be closed at the time but suggests a place nearby that might still be open. I leave work, pick up my friend and get to the battery place. It’s closed. At this point I’m considering leaving the car there overnight.

Yes I’m dumb enough not to know whether the battery gets charged when the car is running. I call a friend and ask him this. He recommends that I drive around and let the car run for some time which will charge the battery enough to get it started the next time. I drive home and drop my friend. I think I should let the car run a little more. I drive around aimlessly for about a minute. I start hearing (or imagining) all kinds of weird sounds. I think I should better drive back. I park the car at the apartment parking lot but let the engine be on for a bit. I get out of the car and close the door.

Oops! I have locked myself out. Remember the little lock button? Well, I had toggled it a fair bit to test that it was indeed related to the battery and it was set to the “lock” position when I get out. Well, maybe the passenger side door is unlocked – was the the rattling sound I heard? Nope. locked as well as it can be. Wait there’s a spare key in my laptop bag. Aargh, there’s the laptop bag inside the car. A little bit of backstory – the rear door window in my car was defective. The window used to slide down as the cable that connects the motor and the glass had broken. I had secured it using superglue but that didn’t hold it too well. If it was still held by superglue I might have tried to pull it down. But no, a week ago I went and had the mechanic put in a nut to hold up the glass permanently.

I call AAA. They send a locksmith. I have never seen anyone do anything as fast as the locksmith is in getting the door open. I switch off the engine, lock the car and take the spare key into the house.

Of cars and cricket

“If we can have BMW and Mercedes as separate companies why can’t we have both IPL and ICL?”
Kapil Dev ponders why the feud of the ‘leagues’ should continue in India

This analogy would be correct if the two leagues were actual competitors. In this case, BCCI (which runs IPL) also owns the market.

Jinhe naaz hai hind par wo kahan hain

Rabbi Shergill has a new album called Avengi Ja Nahin after Rabbi: The Album and Delhi Heights.

I haven’t paid much attention to all songs except one called Bilquis. I have been listening to it for the past two days.

It references various contemporary incidents such as Gujarat victims, Satyendra Dubey, Manjunath murders and Navleen Kumar murders both in the lyrics and the powerful visuals. I think it also references the song Jinhe Naaz Hai from the movie Pyaasa, but I am not sure.

It is a (not so subtle) take on young urban Indian apathy just like Rang De Basanti and Summer 2007.

It is great to hear something like this (reminds me of Bob Dylan) coming from the Indian non-Bollywood music scene which is known more for it’s crappy DJ-remix type of music.

More on the album is here

Chetan Bhagat

Chetan Bhagat has hit the jackpot. After Five Point Someone, one would have thought that he would be a one-hit wonder, but his second book sold more and the latest one has outdone the previous two. Although Five Point Someone was a good read, I didn’t care so much for the second one and haven’t read the third.

His second book has now been made into a movie , and the director Atul Agnihotri has managed to rope his brother-in-law Salman Khan and Salman’s girlfriend Katrina (Atul Agnihotri is married to actor Salman Khan’s sister, Alvira Khan [no, not Priety Zinta’s character from Jhoom Barabar Jhoom :)]).

His first book is also being made into a movie 3 Idiots starring big names Aamir Khan, Madhavan, Sharman Joshi and Kareena Kapoor and is being directed-produced by the team that brought the Munnabhai series.

If that is not hitting a jackpot, I wonder what is.

My interest is purely academic, but I have a feeling these movies are going to be a big hit with “his fanbase”.

By the way, if you are really interested in the Indian Campus Novel genre, I would recommend Amitabha Bagchi’s Above Average. If there’s one that you think is better, your suggestions are welcome!

A day in Rome

I was sitting in the metro train at the Barberini station, looking at the poster on the opposite wall. I was trying to figure out if it was indeed Eva Longoria on the poster and why was she plastered all over Rome.

The closing train doors interrupted my thoughts and I turned to my right to look at the little screen inside the train car. Vittima di Razzismo ?, the ad enquired. It then proceeded to provide a toll-free number and other information if you were indeed a victim.

That reminded me of the previous day in Bari. I had to kill time while waiting for my train to Rome. I went to a McDonald’s in front of Bari Centrale, where I saw a couple of skinhead types who were staring at me. I am not entirely sure that they were skinheads – unless in Italy even skinheads are fashion conscious and wear t-shirts with designer labels. After lunch I went on a walk and found myself in a park.

skinheads bari, proclaimed a graffiti. The next one said, no immigrazioni, but ironically there was a man sitting on top of the sign who most probably was an immigrant.

In Italy, I noticed a lot of people who might have been African immigrants, and a lot of police surveillance in the. There are probably racism and immigration related problems in Italy, but thankfully I didn’t face any such problems during my short trip.

The only unpleasant situation I faced was when I left the Sistine Chapel and was walking towards the metro station. A tourist holding a map asked me directions to some place but I told him that I too was a tourist. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a man appeared and said he was a cop. He then said that there were a lot of drug problems and he was working for “Control” and wanted to see our papers.

I gave him my passport. He looked at it and returned it ot me and then asked us to hand over our wallets. I had read about such scams in Lonely Planet (or online, I’m not sure), and had been in a similar situation before. I started walking away towards the metro station. He was looking through the other guy’s wallet and he yelled at me to stop, but I kept walking without looking back and he didn’t follow me. I don’t know what happened to the other guy. It does occur to me now that he might have been an accomplice.

Finally, I leave you with pictures of the day I spent in Rome.

Türkiye

Kos is so close to Turkey that you can actually spot it across the sea. Bodrum, in Turkey, is only 4 km away. One of the people in my group went to see Turkey after the conference. He asked me if I was interested, but getting the visa would have been a problem (which amused him).

Turkey seen in the distance across the Aegean Sea from Kos

Kos was actually under Turkish rule under the Ottoman Empire. One of the conference attendees returned from a jog and said that he had just seen Turkey. “The bird?”, I thought. After living in America I have become like the people on the Stupid American videos. But even stupid people are aware of the existence of a country called Turkey.

You would also probably remember Turkey as the place Gurukant Desai chose to go to over Yemen. It’s perceived liberal Islam attracts bad filmmakers to make terrorism based movies involving an ensemble cast of relegated actors, but it is in fact a secular country.

Turkey is located right in the center of the northern hemisphere. Well, almost. The point midway between Equator and North Pole lies about 16 km north of the 45°N line (because the earth is oblate – yay Wikipedia!). That point lies in the Black Sea – a little to the north of Turkey. Longitudinally too, Turkey strides across Europe and Asia, acting as a bridge between the West and East. People who have been there tell me that you would wonder whether you are in Saudi Arabia or Europe.

Some people don’t even consider Turkey to be in Asia:

Depends where you come from. In New Zealand, at least, we don’t group everyone east of Turkey as being Asian. People from India are considered just Indians, separate from people from the Middle East, separate from Asians which would be everyone native from Burma eastwards. Even then that seems overly broad. Have you noticed the difference between Tamils and Ladakis in India?

But these days everything seems to be a matter of opinion – even things that were facts earlier. Like how many planets are there in our solar system? Just the other day my friends were debating the number of continents in the world!

I did not realize until recently that Turkey was only two countries away from India. It is almost possible to do a train journey from Turkey to India – from Turkey you go to Iran, then Pakistan and then into India taking the Samjhauta Express.The only point where no trains run is a stretch between Bam and Zehedan in Iran (near Pakistan border) which has been “under construction” forever.

The Turkish enjoy their football as much as any other European country. Ergo, they have crazy football fans. I saw a lot of cars with huge Turkish flags, and heard from other people that they constantly drive around honking their horns before, during and after matches. I happened to be in Innsbruck Fan Camp during the Turkey-Czech Republic quarter-final match. There was match-viewing area where a huge number of Turkish fans had gathered to watch the match on a giant screen. I had reached there late and just in time to catch the penalties. Tur-ki-ye. Tur-ki-ye. Tur-ki-ye. The fans were going wild.

When the Turkish won, the place almost exploded with excitement.

Winning that match put them into the semi-final where they were supposed to play Germany. Now Germany has a huge Turkish population (I guess Turkey is to Germany what Mexico is to USA). I had carefully calculated to be in Germany in time for that match, but my careful calculations turned out to be useless because the match was a day later than what I had assumed.

These days Yahoo Mail has been bombarding me with travel ads. The occasional “Where do you want to go” ad and half a dozen Go Turkey ads.

Maybe, some day.

Connect.

Connect Pulp Fiction, Black Eyed Peas and Cash (Hindi movie).

This song (Misrlou by Dick Dale):

Simple is beautiful

When I was a young graduate student and read a paper that I didn’t understand, I thought “Gee, I must be dumb.” Today I will read the same paper and think “Boy, this is a lousy paper. The authors did not do a good job explaining and presenting their work.” If I am reviewing that paper, such a reaction is enough for me to reject the paper.

… from the graduate school survival guide

East versus West?

My friend Ashwin and I were discussing some differences between Indian (or Asian) and American (or Western) philosophies. I mentioned some articles/blogs that I’d read related to our discussion.
I’m quickly posting the links and relvant texts below :

East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. … In fact, the person who is too concerned with logic may be considered immature

Link

Several dozen subplots later, and I’m fascinated by how romantic love and familial love are presented — not as warring factions, but as extensions of each other. In the West, our parents couldn’t be more annoying or expendable. In Bollywood, all kinds of love are different shades and expressions of the same thing. This makes the Romeo and Juliet plot far more interesting. For us, the lovers have no internal conflict — their whole problem consists of climbing the trellis without getting caught. But Bollywood aches with anguishing dilemmas. Way, way more fun.

Link

To many non-asian cultures, living at home is a common and healthy practice because there is no need for a sense of individuality and self-reliance. In Western Culture, where every child is made to believe that they can become rock stars or sports sensations, individualism thrives. In fact, living at home is a strange and embarrassing situation that can usually leave one’s parents’ parenting to question. Not for Asians, though.

Link

“…we live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.” – Obama

Link

 

Beautiful word art

Thanks Siddhartha for pointing out this site to me. Beautiful word art – I think I should print these on tshirts 🙂