Can it get more WTF ?

Apparently Dumbledore is gay. If I had heard just that, I would have said, “OK, whatever” and forgotten about this, but then I read this. And so I have to go…WTF?

Back at the desk

After almost a month of traveling and almost a month before that of nearly complete chaos, I am back at my desk for what I hope is an uninterrupted stint of atleast a few months (the next anticipated travel and craziness as things stand now is in March). I had fun. Paris was hectic and might as well have been in the States or anywhere else in the world for all the Parisian things I got to do. Spain was fun. It was hectic there too, but atleast I got to do a few things, like eat the world’s best chocolate cake at Habanita’s, a little natural foods eatery in Sevilla, while having interesting conversations with old friends and some new ones as well. And then I went home. To Madras Nalla Madras.

I went back with apprehension. The place must have changed, I clearly have changed. Will I still have the euphoric sensation I used to have in days past whenever I had been away for any stretch (short trips of a week or so when I was a kid to a few months at a time when I was in college) and I saw the first signpost, either on the road or on the train station, proclaiming I was in Madras? You know what? I did! And it was not an illusion in that the subsequent two weeks I had so much fun and fitted right in!

Lots of things have changed. I was completely unable to make my way around madras, what with all the roads being one-way now and most right turns that used to be there eliminated. My only consolation was that my dad and almost every autowallah I talked to said they had the same problem as the whole system was apparently still dynamic and evolving! The former cool places have now moved to second rung with other new places taking the forefront. An instance of the magnitude of change is the picture here of the Madras Bangalore highway, where the toll booths are now open and only a few miles of the road is still “under construction” and they appear to be actually constructing in the said patches.

Did a lot of traveling as well, so as to reintroduce myself to the theoretical physics community in India to facilitate the job search that must start shortly. Even if I wished for it and I have not decided if I do or do not yet, I cannot stay a post doc for ever, can I? And Tangled, sorry I did not get to meet you in B’lore. I was only there for about 48 hours and two seminars I had to give and family took up every minute of it.

That’s it then. I am assiduously weeding through my feed reader to get caught up on what all of you guys have been talking about. I am down to 600 something posts now. Will be back to normal on all fronts in a week or so I hope and “pray”! :))

Travel Snapshots 1

Air India : In spite of accumulating a very large number of transatlantic miles over the years, this was my first time flying Air India. Have not been able to make up my mind whether better food and more leg room is fair trade for the stewardesses treating you like ill behaved school children on a picnic.

South of spain : Beautiful! I had forgotten how much I liked Sevilla. Too much work and hence too little site seeing, but just walking around the crowded town was fun enough. And the town has changed some, and become cleaner and prettier. I like it better, even though you will be hard pressed to find a local that agrees with me.

Madras airport : Super cool! Much nicer immigration hall, and every phone, escalator and restroom I saw were in good shape. I was impressed. But I still had people cutting me in the lines, so that has not changed.

Food on the streets of Madras: American Sweet Corn at every corner, restaurants serving burgers and fish and chips and lasagna! Not that I ate any of this, I just saw them. The last time I was here, these were expensive places for the few, but now they are everywhere and only about as expensive as the 50 Rs cups of coffee everybody appears to be drinking here!

TV: Bol, India Bol…the catch line for the reliance mobile ad, my man ARR in the Airtel ad, the former MP getting the death sentence leading the news, the story about the bad wheat in the PDS on IBN, T.I.M.E Now dwelling on the Snehashish Ganguly story (with oh so many WTF comments)

Simple Pleasures so far : The Hindu and coffee at 6 am. Pani poori, uthappam, home cooked food I did not make.
Ok ...off to watch India vs Australia to the sound of hindi commentry on DD now.

Am back!

I have been gone so long from this world, I don’t know where to start my “re-entry program”! So, I will just begin what I hope will be a sequence of travel posts till I am back in New York and then resume more serious blogging/catching up. Let us see how this goes.

Busy busy busy

I am back here after a long time. My feed reader says I have 450 unread posts. So I think I am just going to go ahead and mark everything as read and try to start afresh. And in the real world, I have been traveling. The most interesting of my many trips turned out to be the one to Ottawa. For example, I was walking around downtown Ottawa practicing my favorite hobby, people watching, when an old man walks up to me and says “Gandhi has been assassinated!” as if that is the hottest news of the day. Turns out he was drunk and slightly crazy. We took the conversation from there and went on to other things like how many engineers India produces every year and so on till I walked him home. I did not find out his name or what he had done for a living when he was younger and he did not ask me anything either, but we talked all the way to his house as if we were long lost buddies or something! So, this gives me one more data point in the “Canadians are crazy” experiment.

Also, in the midst of all this, my dad popped up in the US of A and I had to go visit him as well. And more traveling coming up, Paris, Sevilla, Madras, Bangalore, Bombay and then back. So I am not sure if I will be able to blog or read your blogs until all of this craziness is done with. And just in case BaL stops by here, I am drafting a new post for SC that is about the physics of flocking behavior in animals and fish, but again, that keeps getting pushed down my list of things to do to make room for the more work-related things that keep popping up. Hope everyone is doing well and having fun!

Where does the day go?

I have so much "unaccounted for" time this past couple of weeks, it makes me question my sanity at times. If I think about it, I have not done anything too bad except sleep eight or nine hours when I can most certainly not afford it. But I am way behind on my various projects and have a ton of travel coming up starting next week, one cannot help but wonder if I am going to survive. Anyways, the bottom line is I don't have a coherent thought in my head to share with anyone. So I am just going to say I have my first post up at scientific curiousity about rainbows that I suggest you go and read and leave a comment to tell me if I made sense and if I did not, ask me about it.

And here is a "musical genius" named Erik Mongrain for your entertainment (the words within quotes are for you bhup).



More coherent thoughts later.

On Weddings

Yesterday, I went to the wedding of a friend and colleague. They had a cute little civic ceremony. The girl here is the theoretical physicist. The guy is a farmer. A real one, with his own orchard and fruit shop and tractor and everything. The ceremony was set in their orchard. The parents of the bride and groom spoke. Then the bride and the groom sang a song together. Then, they tossed a coin to decide who should say the wows first. The girl won the toss. They exchanged wows, a judge that was hanging around in the background in his robe, pronounced them husband and wife and said “You may now kiss the bride again” (for they had been hugging and kissing all through the ceremony so far, no pretence of virginal purity or any such hypocrisy any where in sight), and they got onto the tractor of the groom and drove away. Cool, huh?

And as always this got me thinking about Indian wedding ceremonies I have been to. I have only been to south Indian tam-bram weddings. And I haven’t been to one in a while as I had decided that I will not go to these “extended-family-no-alcohol-parties” unless I was friends with the bride or the groom and most of my friends got married at inconvenient times and in inconvenient places (in India when I was not able to travel for example). But of course I have distinct memories of the many weddings I went to before I left home for college. And I had an advantage, in that I sat through the ceremonial part of the wedding with my great-granddad, who explained to me the significance of the various aspects of the wedding. But again, his explanation always had a religious tilt to them and over the years I have come to associate social or sociological rationalizations to them as well.

As a consequence, I have categorized the bits and pieces of the ceremony into the adult and the child parts. For example, the “oonjal”, where the bride and groom sit on a swing and are rocked and fed sweet things and sung to, or when the they have the “nalangu”, which are essentially slapstick games of breaking stuff on each other and throwing things and being carried on the shoulder of relatives to see who can be lifted higher must all clearly belong to the “child” category, included to make 8 or 10 year old kids that used to be the bride and groom once upon a time comfortable with the whole process. Then there are the really cute things that broadly belong in the adult category, like the woman following the man when he takes her hand to signify her support for him, or the “ammi mithikkardhu” part, when the man takes the woman’s feet in his hands and puts on the “metti”, to say I am your slave as much as you are mine. If you are not able to see the cuteness, imagine it in the context of 16 year olds in love for the first time.

But in today’s day and age, when 30-somethings are the ones getting married, all of this takes a rather ridiculous bent, doesn’t it? I wonder if our ceremonial weddings have evolved to better fit the social context today. Do you know? And if they haven’t then here is to hoping that they will in very short order!