amalex5/andrew-india-notes.md

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    delhi

6 december 2014

delhi is great!


the SMELL---i smelled it the moment i stepped out of the airport, and i can still smell it outside the YMCA. not the smell of trash or excrement or anything bad---but the same smell i associate with late-summer japan. i've smelled this smell only one other time---driving across northern new mexico in june 2011. there was a huge fire near raton, and the entire northern horizon was black---and i realized that this smell, the smell i associate with late-summer japan, is actually the smell of brush fires.  maybe the arid climate has something to do with it. that's the other thing i noticed---how similar (physically and geographically, if not anthropologically) delhi is to japan. the arid climate. the dry warmth. the lack of wet, dark-colored earth---all the exposed dirt is dry and light brown and dusty. (san francisco is like this, too.) the flora. even a lot of the architecture: the poorly-maintained, midcentury white concrete-block-and-stucco buildings. the new delhi ymca could have had the same architect as my elementary school in tsukuba. (architect should have then been disbarred for aesthetic crimes, but...)


the spell-check on the computer here in the YMCA just flagged the "colored" as a misspelling. i forgot i'm in the former raj: i should have written "coloured." ah, there we go.


sheremetyvo airport lived up to my expectations: gray, rainy, and gray. even the aeroflot livery is GRAY. the international terminal itself is quite modern and generic and could have been anywhere (likewise for delhi's international terminal). there were so many duty-free shops that it felt more like an upscale mall decorated with a handful of boarding gates. two most unexpected things were 1) crab-flavored lay's potato chips, and 2) fresh-squeezed orange juice vending machines. they have one of these machines at a cafe in cornell: it's a robot that takes oranges out of a bin, slices them in half, and squeezes fresh orange juice out of them while you watch, for only 100 rubles!


walking around delhi, i ran across---completely by accident---the university of chicago's delhi center. (i remembered reading about it opening up a few years ago.) it's a large office and meeting space in between a bank and an audi dealership, with a giant "UCHICAGO CENTER IN DELHI" sign, as well as multiple university crests. the u of c law school is co-sponsoring a conference there this weekend, about tuberculosis, human rights, and the law.


there are huge birds circling overhead everywhere in delhi. i don't think they're vultures---they seem to be raptors. i watched one of them swoop down and snatch something (too small to see) up from a field.


my aeroflot A330 from jfk to moscow was named after andrei sakharov! (aeroflot, like lufthansa and jetblue, and probably a few other airlines, names their planes.) that name may not mean much to you, but sakharov was one of the most important (the most important?) dissident physicists in the USSR. really excited to be on his eponymous plane. (no idea who the guy was who the next plane was named after.)


i cleared customs at delhi around 4:30 am, and spent the next two hours until it got light sitting in the coffee shop in the departure lounge. then i took the train (modern, fancy, way nicer than the stupid subway/SkyTrain i took to JFK) into downtown. then i walked around delhi for the next six hours until check-in time at the YMCA. really fun. eating samosas the size of my HAND (or rather, the size of my clenched fist)(and i have big hands!)


7a) to file under "weirdest examples of old meeting new": to ride the delhi airport express train ,you have to buy tokens (old!). but the tokens are RFID enabled, so actually you just wave them at the turnstile rather than deposit them (new!)(also, confusing, since i kept looking for a slot to deposit my token into).


lots of english-language newspapers. really interesting.


surprised at the number of feral dogs. i always assume that this swath of the world is really anti-canine. i guess that's not incompatible with large amounts of feral ones, just that the motivations may be coming from a different place than, e.g., all the feral dogs in santiago (which everyone loves and knits sweaters for and refuses to spay/neuter because that would be cruel).


the biggest terror attacks in kashmir in a decade two days ago---militants attacking some sort of indian military compound. there's some sort of election going on (indian elections are drawn-out rather than single-day) and modi is visiting kashmir to campaign for his party next week.


really, really pleased with aeroflot's long-haul service. i have to say, every long-haul international flight i've taken in the last ten years has been absolutely fantastic. (this is a sample that includes delta, lufthansa, air france, air canada, and now aeroflot.) they've all got these really fancy personal entertainment systems even in coach, and such comprehensive in-flight feeding/watering systems. during takeoff and landing, the video screens were showing a live view out the front of the plane, which would have been really incredible were it not pitch-black outside.


hi, grandma:
some more quick notes. feel free to circulate.


bodh gaya. december 9th.


i'm in a tiny basement internet cafe with three sort-of working computers, sitting on a plastic lawn chair next to a saffron-robed monk checking his facebook page.


flight to bodh gaya was delayed two hours because of late inbound flights from rangoon and bangkok. 90% of the passengers were connecting from those flights. plane was a creaky air india a320. i sat next to a buddha-sized buddhist monk, wearing robes and a saffron-colored polarfleece. at first he was tinkering with the tray table and the recline button like he had never been on a plane before (recline. unrecline! recline. unrecline!). then he spent the entire flight tapping away on his smartphone. maybe 50% of the people on the plane were monks. both thai and burmese, i guess.


dusty sunset landing in bodh gaya. atmosphere acting as a diffuser. polluted desert twilight. flight deplaned onto the tarmac, and all the monks wandered around taking photos of themselves. the long sight-lines of an airport tarmac, and the beautiful, golden-hour light. two indian air force helicopters were heli-taxiing 200 feet away.


beautiful sunsets notwithstanding, the pollution is mostly an aesthetic disadvantage. taking off from delhi the views were about as good as had i rubbed my corneas with coarse-grit sandpaper, and then squeezed my lenses out of focus. in bodh gaya the horizon is always dark and looks like it's about to rain, but the darkness is caused by smog and not moisture. of course the environmental and physiological costs of pollution are more important. breathing here has all the health benefits of smoking and none of the fun.


landed at bodh gaya at the same time as another flight---two of the four weekly flights! almost everyone else hopped onto big tour buses and sped off.


india, like iran, is full of bored soldiers standing around with ak-47s everywhere.


bodh gaya has not just feral dogs but feral goats. the goats are tiny---half the size, or maybe even smaller, than the goats all my organic-farmer friends have. chickens, too. the chickens are tiny not compared to enormous obese fast-food poultry farm chickens, but tiny compared to dan & lisa's backyard chickens. emaciated.


i can't stop being reminded of japan at every turn. not just the smell (which is overwhelming---lighting up neural rooms that have been dark for a decade), but the dust---the aridity---the plants---the rice paddies---the way all the rural roads are on levees. meanwhile, to my father everything reminds him of indonesia.


the hotel in bodh gaya looks like what you get if you do a google image search for "tibetan architecture", except that it also appears to have been quarried out of marble. everything is marble: all the floors, all the walls. even the stupid built-in shelving in my room is entirely marble. (unpleasant flashbacks of the one time i've lost money on a security deposit,  which involved marble countertops and a three-liter jug of olive oil.) the rooms all open up onto breezeways arranged around a central, rectangular, three-story courtyard.


i have seen multiple government-affiliated "milk parlor" retail kiosks. and i've had two separate street interrogations that after the normal pleasantries of "where are you from?" and "how many wives do you have?", have turned to "in america, do you drink hot milk?" not really sure what the deal is. i think water buffalo might be involved. speaking of which, why don't we have water buffalo in the US? i mean, they're not native, but that's never stopped us before. do they have no function other than as beasts of burden? you can milk them, right? two weeks ago at a thanksgiving party in trumansburg i got into a long conversation with a girl who is a sheep dairy entrepreneur---she's started a sheep dairy, and sells sheep cheese and milk. sheep are apparently really hard to milk, because there's less, uh, room to grip, than with goats or cows.


bodh gaya is a tourist town, but not for western tourists---it's a tourist trap for asian buddhists. every country has its own temple (there's a burmese temple, a nepali temple, a tibetan temple, etc.), as does every buddhist sect. there are posters around town for various conferences going on this week. including, not making this up, "INTERNATIONAL DHARMA CONFERENCE". this would be unremarkably new-agey if it were in, say, berkeley, but these are real buddhists here! not western hippies! every other person on the street is a foreign monk walking around in robes. you could do a street-fashion column here based on the diversity of buddhist monk robes: all the different shades between yellow and red, and all the different ways of folding it.


on a long walk through the middle of nowhere this morning we came across an enormous temple that, it turns out, is the seat of some lama who is the head of some buddhist sect. we spent an hour there. really beautiful, really opulent: everything clean and neat and freshy painted. gilded dragons and fancy decorations everywhere. the contrast between the material splendor of the religion and the abject poverty of rural india (clare wolfe tells me that this state, bihar, is the poorest in india) is really hard to stomach. the buddhist monks are the rich people in town. walking around with their clean robes and tapping away on smartphones and tablets. i saw one monk with a giant, sports-photographer SLR that made my camera look like a doll accessory.
the analogy is to the vatican, which a) is disgustingly opulent and rich in material splendor, and b) is the prime tourist destination for every catholic worldwide. except, instead of the vatican being located in the (relatively) wealthy city of rome, imagine it airlifted and plopped down right into the slums of rio de janeiro. with all of the majesty and splendor intact, and all of the malnourished brazilians ignored.
i am 100% in support of the immaterial aims of religion, i just... wish there'd be more consistency. if you want to ignore poverty because you believe that the spiritual life transcends any material difficulties (and i'm sympathetic to that view)(or at least the premise, if not the conclusion); that's fine, just... live in poverty yourself.


i've been using persian numbers to count here, and it seems to be understood. persian and hindi are pretty different, so it's the equivalent of going to a bakery on the left bank and ordering uno/dos/tres baugettes, but at least it makes me feel like vaguely less of an american asshole. (flashback to ordering food in japanese at the seoul airport in 1998.) truthfully, though, given the prevalence of english, i don't know how i should feel about using it: i mean, as opposed to, say, germany, where everyone knows english but only uses it if they need to, english is actually used in the day-to-day life of the professional class here.


obama is coming to india for their independence day ("Republic Day," or just "R-Day") next month, and everyone here is excited. articles every day in the paper about the preparations. (talk about asymmetry. you're american---did you know that obama was headed to india next month? of course not.) the current sub-conversation is about how he has apparently just been diagnosed with bad heartburn, and how this might affect the state dinner. from the times of india: "If Modi had plans to have Obama gorge on the likes of Gujarati dhokla when he lands in India for Republic Day, he may have to think again."


fun fact about indian english: it uses the word "lakh" for "100 thousand." not just as a counter ("this car costs Rs 3 lakh") but as an alone-standing word ("... employing more than a lakh people..."). it comes from hindi. linguistic breakpoints for counters are interesting. in english, we have thousand (10^3), million (10^7), billion (10^10), and so on, with a new counter every 10^3. hindi has "hazar" for thousand (10^3), but then "lakh" (10^6) and "karor" (10^8). not sure where it goes from there. japanese is really big on counting in units of "man" (= 10,000 = 10^4).


speaking of which: not only do persian and hindi share the word for "5" ("panj"), but in both languages "panj" also means "hand". get it?!? (look at your hand.)


really love the traffic here. like a real-life frogger. walking down the street turns into a video game! traffic as a self-organizing system of aggregated individual decisions. lots of fun to be a pedestrian, not so much fun to be a passenger in a car. (as a pedestrian you at least have some control over your fate; as a passenger, you outsource your life to your driver.)


the economist here only costs Rs 220 = USD $3.67!!! fantastic deal!


really enjoyed delhi. can't wait to go back on the way out! dad, uncle dave, and grandpa paul's stay at the YMCA must have been such a historic visit that in their honor they've kept everything untouched since 1973. no renovation, no maintenance, not even any cleaning! the only concession to the last 41 years is to be their dot-matrix/impact receipt printer (it has to be dot-matrix, because that way it can print onto carbon paper) which probably dates from about 1985. (this is a printer printing onto carbon paper. think about that for a moment.)


now the people behind me in the internet cafe are speaking SPANISH. i overheard a lady at our hotel today trying to speak to the receptionist in japanese. hindi, thai, vietnamese, burmese, nepali, tibetan, chinese---every asian language you could possibly want is here in bodh gaya!


love,
andrew

jaipur, december 19th

we saw a factory today! actually, we saw two factories, both of which were real, working factories, rather than tourist shops with demos.

first was a block-printing factory. we spent about three hours being led around by lena, a young designer at the factory about my age. the factory makes block-printed textiles, primarily for export (to clients in europe, north america, and the rest of the developed world, with order sizes ranging from 1 (for really high-end interior decorators) to 80K (retail stuff sold with a "made in india" tag.) we got to see the whole process: the guys who make the blocks, the block-printers block-printing, followed by tailors tailoring, other tailors tailoring some more, quality control, pressing, and packaging. really incredible to see all stages of production---all in an actual, working factory. the chaos! the mess! the busyness! the activity! and again, this wasn't some tourist thing. lena says they have tours maybe once a month---usually big groups in buses who come through.

the packaging department was in the midst of packing up a big order for a danish company, "bungalow," and the packaging material included the following description:

For thousands of years, craftsmen of India have been making decorative block-printed cottons, enchanting and inspiring others around the world.
Skilled craftsmen stamp the cloth using carved wooden blocks to imprint the designs unto the fabric. Depending on the number of colours and the inticracy of the designs the printer hand stamps the cloth 500-2000 times to complete a set of bedlinen.
The art of block-printing is passed down from generation to generation and to achieve the highest quality we are working with some of the best block-printers in India.

of course this sounds like the description of every overpriced orientalist product for sale in the educated, mass-affluent west. so seeing exactly where the products come from was hilarious. not that the factory was a sweatshop---it was clearly a place producing good work with what at least appeared to be content, competent employees. but it was also a factory---you know, a respectable, profit-making business! a real business run by real adults---just as real as the real businesses that those chic danes work at and run. right? the issue here is one of respect: the idea of quaint "artisans," laboring away for the love of the craft, using techniques passed down for the last twenty generations---it can be condescending.
some other observations:
a) the tables on which they did the block printing. the tables were covered with several layers of fabric (like, so they felt more like really thick ironing boards), but the way all of the ink had soaked through was absolutely BEAUTIFUL. all those colors coming together. like a mark rothko painting, but with multiple colors. i took so many pictures of just those stained tabletops.
b) they keep the ink in trays, but not just sloshing around. instead, they pile fabric into the trays---sort of like a DIY inkpad. so you ink the blocks by pressing them into the pad. what the guide said was that it helps coat the blocks more evenly---and depending on the detail of the design on the block, they use fabric with bigger or smaller pores, depending on the resolution they need. this was really, really fascinating. i think of ink and printing as sort of abstractly working, but this was a reminder that actually the human scale---and certainly the scale of making fine designs---is right up against the physical limits, due to the surface tension of water.
(years ago my friend luke, who worked for a while as a type designer, was telling me about a font his boss had been comissioned to make for the wall street journal. the font was for printing the stock charts, so it had to be really, really small, and as such had to a) be readable despite being so small, and b) taking into account the fact that ink bleed is a big problem when you're trying to print so small. so, he ended up making it by sort of cutting out chunks of the letters at interior corners---i'd have to draw a sketch to explain---but so it was a reminder that ink is not some abstract image transfer, but actually has physical properties, as a medium.)
c) this place was so cool and so incredible i actually bought something. they had a small shop full of their quality-control rejects, and there were two placements that immediately caught my eye. i only paid a dollar for each of them. the first souvenirs i've bought! (hopefully the last?)
d) on our itinerary, this was listed as a "block printing workshop," which also happened. we got to block-print our own scarves! i was really pleased with mine. we even got block stamps of our signatures made---we signed a piece of paper with a sharpie, and an hour later, a guy came in with my signature, in reverse, on a piece of wood. (shoot---what was the name of the wood? something really hard.) i really enjoyed the process of printing---it rewards decisiveness! you line up your stamp, carefully, slowly, and then---WHAM! you bang in it, hard, and decisively. no gentleness. no indecision. indecision begets smudges and pigments bleeding---the process of printing rewards decisiveness, and punishes hesitancy.

we also saw a PAPER FACTORY! this was really exciting for me, since i remember being obsessed with pictures of paper factories when i was in preschool, and yet i'd never seen one---until TODAY! giant bags of shredded old clothes and to-be-recycled paper in a corner. huge vats mixing and shredding and turning it into hot cotton pulp. settling tanks for hand-screened paper, and two giant roller machines for machine-rolled paper. an enormous press pressing down on two feet of paper, with water seeping out the sides. groups of women sitting on the floor prying wet sheets of paper apart. ancient iron paper cutters that cut through four inches of paper in months. a "flattener." etc., etc., etc. and all of this resulting in the fancy paper shopping bags that you get at high-end boutiques. we saw all sorts of samples: one had the name of a japanese clothing brand on it. two guys who just sit at grommeting machines all day and add grommets to the paper bags all day. groups of women threading rope handles into the grommets.

incredible. all the MACHINES! so old, and un-fancy-looking! yet effective! the immense amount of human labor involved---i sort of equate "factory" in my mind with those pictures of fully roboticized car factories. the idea that factories actually involve humans startles me. (i guess what really startles me is the low cost of labor that makes it possible---the fact that it's actually cost-effective to have human beings do tasks that are so simple and so repetitive.)

actually, we quickly saw some screen-printing factories, too. really amazing to watch. the whole process of printing---how procedural it is. you have to decide how many prints you want to make, and each color is a different pass.

some other observations:


camels are used as beasts of burden in jaipur. all these sad-looking camels dragging huge carts behind them (with penny-farthing-sized wheels, and cart platforms five feet above the road).


stuck in traffic next to us: a girl, sitting in second position on a motorcycle, studying an electrical engineering textbook. taking a picture and zooming in, i can even read her marginalia. she's reading about programmable logic devices.


along a busy alley in jaipur: an internet cafe with typewriters. tiny shopfront: along one wall are computer monitors that are BEIGE (they must date from the 90s) and appear to be running windows 95. along the other wall, a half-dozen typewriters.


absolutely wonderful sweet discovery: cubes of candied pumpkin, infused with rosewater.


our hotel in jaipur (like many hotels in rajahstan, apparently) is in a converted palace. the opulence is apparent in the DIMENSIONS. in terms of finishings or stuff, i've been in far nicer places, but---the height of the ceilings! the sizes of the doorways! the size of the windows! i could double in height and everything would still be huge. the palace is fairly new: it was built in 1928 by some associate of the maharaja. there are peacocks wandering around all about the grounds. huge ostentatious turkeys.


really incredible site/sight on the ride into jaipur: this place dug out of the ground that functioned as a hindu temple, summer residence for some maharaja, and open-air rainwater reservoir. visually one of the most amazing things i've seen here---because, unlike almost all architecture, it is entirely built from negative space. an inverted pyramid, 120 feet into the ground, with geometrically terraced sides and staircases. dad compared it to an open-pit copper mine. do a google image search for "chand baori" to see more.


varanasi, december 14


in front of the bodh gaya archaeological museum. an elderly man and woman, cutting the grass by hand with tiny scythes. (dad says kasram used to do this for you in indonesia. i saw some of the scythes for sale in the market---they were SERRATED!)


want to re-emphasize what a weird place bodh gaya was: an effing united nations of buddhism. countries/ethnic groups represented: thailand, cambodia, burma, nepal, tibet, sikkim, bhutan, japan, china, taiwan, vietnam. (no koreans---are ALL of them christianized?) put this place right up there with santa fe on my list of inexplicable towns. zero westerners, other than the tour group of weirdo germans staying in our hotel.


more observations about street samosas: the ones i've had that are fresh---still hot and still sizzling with oil---have been better than any samosa i've had in the us. (also SPICIER---i'm not sure that i've ever had spicy samosas in the US. but they're so much better spicy! hot in temperature AND temperament!) on the other hand, the non-fresh street samosas have been worse than the typical samosas i've had in the us. this sort of makes sense: samosas are a fried food, and fried food doesn't keep well. but the samosas i've had in the us, all things considered, have been pretty good. what gives?


it seems like the right analogy is to french fries. french fries are always better fresh and hot---but home fries are perfectly fine cold. it's only the super-fried, finger-cut french fries that are unpalatable at room temperature. so i guess samosas in the us are expected to spend long times sitting in buffet warming trays, and so the recipes are adjusted with that in mind---whereas here, they're intended to be eaten right away, so no such adjustments are necessary.


the chickens here that aren't feral are really, really beautiful. they're incredibly colorful and their feathers are OPALESCENT---they SHIMMER---and they're full of detailed, intricate patterns. they look like tiny peacocks, not future mcnuggets.


one of the breeds of cows here has this enormous lump of something growing on their haunches. it feels gelatinous. fat? is it some sort of camel-style water-storage adaptation?


the napkins here are weirdly plasticky (which is a TERRIBLE design for something intended to be absorbent). not sure whether it's because they're somehow coated with oil, or made with a high proportion of synthetic fibers.


archaeological museum in varanasi: full of huge group of indian school children, wearing identical british-prep-school uniforms. kids more interesting than the relics.


in front of the varanasi archaeological museum: a guard with a BAYONET. carrying this long-barreled rifle, with a twelve-inch-long knife mounted to the underside of the barrel.


the most surprising thing about the feral dogs isn't how mangy, or scrawny, or unhealthy they look: it's how they have boobs. one forgets: bitches lactate! of course in the us our dogs are more or less all spayed (and if they're not, their reproduction is carefully controlled). but here there are dogs walking around everywhere with sagging teats. never any puppies around---just the mothers. single mothers.


i've discovered the most wonderful, as-yet-unknown food imaginable. rosewater foam. no idea what the actual name is, but i saw all these street vendors selling it, and all these people standing around eating it, so i tried some. imagine whipped cream, but less dense, flavored with rosewater, and with chopped pistachios on top. whipped cream isn't the right description---it's way lighter than whipped cream, and more bubbly. more like the thick milk foam on top of a cappuccino. but with those wonderful, iranian, rosewater/pistachio flavors. it gets concocted in a paella-sized, meter-wide wok, and served at room temperature. i have no idea what it is, or how to make it, or why i've never had or heard of it before. (do my foam-obsessed molecular gastronomy friends know of it?)


other observation: at least here in varanasi, both the rosewater foam and street-vendor-chai get served in disposable ceramic containers. the chai cups are shaped like bowls---broad mouth, narrow bottom, rotational symmetry--but tiny, holding only a shot of chai. the rosewater foam ones are a bit bigger. they're unglazed. and totally disposable: around every chai or rosewater-foam stand are piles of broken cups/bowls. (like a future archaeology site: so THIS is how national geographic features on carefully digging up pottery shards begin!) twice i saw guys riding cargo bikes around varnasi (well, we'd call them cargo bikes; doesn't seem like the right description here) filled with hundreds of them---literally, six feet by four feet of nested ceramic chai cups, resting on a bed of straw. why ceramic instead of paper or plastic? maybe this is another strange consequence of the low cost of labor here.


other strange disposable tableware: bowls made out of leaves. people eat street curry out of these. a layer of leaves, two or three thick, pressed into a bowl shape. they're consistent and precise enough in shape, given the materials, that it must be done with a die and press (and then trimmed/cut at the edges). and of course they only last long enough for you to eat your non-solid food with. probably won't be around for archaeologists in 3014 to dig up.


cows and water buffalo feeding on leftovers from street produce market. bovine street cleaners. a guy with a giant cargo bike piled six feet high with bananas, biking along, oblivious to the water buffalo trotting along behind him helping himself to his bananas.


how come no one ever RIDES cows? surely they're strong enough. it would be like an equestrian hot-air balloon: just aimless slow wandering, with no control over the direction. the prevailing whims of the cow rather than prevailing winds.


bank security guard with a double-barreled shotgun. (what if there are THREE bank robbers?)


japanese-speaking indian tour guide in a buddhist temple, describing "shiva kami-sama" to japanese tourists (all wearing facemasks, of course).


i've been communicating with dad, during bargaining conversations, in japanese and german.


there are metal detectors everywhere, but most of them seem either not to work, or to be ignored (by walking through them confidently, or just by walking around them)


multiple sets of kids playing cricket on the steps on the banks of the ganges


further thoughts on the traffic: it's BEAUTIFUL. the comparison to western traffic---the theme of central organization vs. spontaneous order---is powerful. individual decisions vs central control.


suppose i were to walk down the street of an indian city totally obliviously (blindfolded, say). i don't think i'd be in any danger. (well, at least not any MORE danger than everyone here is on the street, all the time.) if i were to walk obliviously through the streets of san francisco, i'd get run over, because all of the traffic would expect me to obey the normal rules, conventions, and protocols. but here no one expects anything of anyone else: you are the only person responsible for your road safety! the assumption is that everyone else is going to crash into you. so you take evasive action rather than expect others to do so. so for one person to be genuinely incompetent---it seems like i'd be fine. (don't worry, grandma! i'm not planning to experiment---i couldn't convince dad to put the blindfold on.)
analogy here is to herd immunity in vaccinations. it's fine if a small percentage of the population isn't vaccinated---as long as most people are vaccinated, diseases can't spread and die out. but slowly increase the percentage of unvaccinateds---at some point you get an abrupt phase transition, and everyone dies of the plague or whatever.
20b) the other beautiful thing about traffic is the WAY those individual decisions get made. how to decide where to move, based on where everyone near to you and further away from you is, and where THEY are moving. it's DANCE. no, really! the subtlety in the decision making that even i can somehow pull off---it's really incredible.


there are huge diesel generators outside of sufficiently important buildings. slightly less moneyed buildings (like our current hotel) have a set of off-the-shelf UPSes hooked up to what appear to be huge lead-acid batteries.


mammals we've seen so far, in loose order of frequency: humans, dogs, goats, chickens, cows, water buffalo, pigs, monkeys, rats, and one cat.


dogs curled up fast asleep 18 inches away from speeding traffic. apparently unbothered or unconcerned.


varanasi has no sky---it's just gray, gray, gray. sometimes such a thick gray that the river and the sky become indistinguishable. (same sort of conditions that jfk jr's plane went down in.) i couldn't tell whether the gray was fog, or whether it was smoke. water or fire? it doesn't lift like morning fog does, and it smells so intensely of smoke. but there's so much of the gray, and the river is so big; some of it MUST be fog.


we went to one of the burning ghats, where hindus cremate their dead. it was deeply moving. i didn't recognize it at first---i thought it was just a landfill on the banks of the ganges. a liminal landfill. piles of detritus everywhere. small fires burning and dogs and goats poking around for things to eat. but it's not a landfill: it's a crematorium. walking around the fires---the heat was overwhelming, especially from (relatively) small fires. imagine the heat of a big summer bonfire, but imagine a dozen of those, each a dozen feet apart. but they're small fires, not big ones. i guess they must burn for a very long time, to create such hot coals. (i thought wood didn't burn hot enough to destroy bone? apparently not.) our guide said that each pyre takes between 60 and 200kg of wood. there were enormous stacks of firewood everywhere. i've never seen so much firewood piled up in one place. the pyres weren't huge ceremonial structures---they were small. just campfires just enough to burn the body. the guide pointed out a tibia sticking out the river-side of one of the fires. it was dripping. like when you burn wet wood, and all the moisture flows to the least-burny end of the log and bubbles and drips out. but this was a body, not wood.


the grayness of varanasi is BOTH smoke and fog---both fire and water---and watching the burning ghats, it occurred to me how appropriate that is. fire and water combine to become one, in the air. i thought of LITTLE GIDDING, the final of eliot's four quartets, all of which are thematically structured around the elements. you can see which one little gidding is about:

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire.
...
We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.


agra. december 16th.


a couple more comments about varanasi that apparently didn't make it into my last set of notes:

a) for the first week we were here, i had been disappointed that india wasn't living up to my expectations of it from all those bollywood movies i had to sit through in college. no one was spontaneously breaking out into song and dance! then, driving in from the airport in varanasi, we saw it: a huge group of people in the street, enthusiastically singing and dancing to some sort of indian pop music. TWICE. like a pop-up nightclub, in the middle of the road, but a bollywood/bhangra nightclub.
b) drive in from the varanasi airport i) was in an autorickshaw, and ii) took an hour. it also took a horrifying turn, literally and metaphorically, when the driver decided that the main bridge over the ganges was too busy, pulled a U into the shoulder, and proceeded north along the ganges. not at all in the direction of the hotel, or in any direction that might lead to directions toward the hotel. dad was following our route on his iphone---he had downloaded a map beforehand, and was able to get location data from the cell towers. there was no other bridge crossing the ganges. i was convinced the driver was taking us to a different hotel. (i was already irritated at our transportation-selection algorithm, which consisted of saying yes to the first tout who accosted us off the train, asking him what the price would be, and agreeing without bargaining.) after twenty minutes of crowded 10pm bazaar traffic, he turned onto an unlit dirt path, down towards the banks of the ganges. (at this point i thought we were going to be robbed.) the autorickshaw bounced and bounced down what was basically a hiking trail to the bank---and then we saw it. some enterprising autodidact engineer had constructed their own bridge across the ganges. it was about fifteen feet wide and made out of steel drums and wood. (bigger than 55-gallon drums, but not that much bigger.) you know the floating bridge across lake union in seattle? like that. but the archaeological version. totally unlit, too. maybe wide enough for two autorickshaws, though thankfully, none were coming in the opposite direction. no cars. just pedestrians, motorcycles, and a horse. (and a LOT of pedestrians and motorcycles, too. horrifyingly popular.)
it wasn't on the map, because... well, it was a mile-long, homemade bridge. logs lashed to empty oil drums. the surface had been "improved" by laying down steel plates---you know the kind you occasionally see as temporary covers for construction holes in the street? the 4'x8', inch-thick steel plates? yeah. the bridge had been mostly covered with those---but not in any particularly orderly fashion, and so there were all sorts of weird gaps and overlaps and absolutely the LAST place you want to be bumping up and down and up and down violently violently violently is on a tiny bridge in the middle of a mile-wide river in the middle of the night. (i almost added "... that's one of the most polluted rivers in the world," but probably pollution would be a secondary concern. like starving to death on everest.)
anyway, we're still alive.

indian airport security: it's just as ridiculous as in the US, but in a very different way. in the US, airports have a single security checkpoint---one that is comprehensive and invasive and occasionally perverted, but once you're in, you're in. then all you do is flash your boarding pass at a bored gate agent. in india, no security check is particularly onerous---but there are FIVE MILLION of them. or at least it seems that way. at the varanasi airport, i had to show my boarding pass and passport no fewer than NINE times. what does it take to board an agra-bound flight in varanasi? let's explore:

a) first, you have to show your boarding pass and passport to get INSIDE the airport. you also have to go through a metal detector, and send all of your luggage through an x-ray.
b) then you're in the lobby. it has a few chairs, a kiosk, and nothing else. to proceed to the check-in counter, you show your passport and boarding pass to another soldier. (you just did this 30 feet ago.) if you have checked baggage, you send it through another x-ray here.
c) then you stand in line at the check-in counter, even if you already printed out your boarding pass, and even if you don't have any bags to check, because you need to get tags for your carry-ons. you know those stupid little paper luggage tags that every airline has? you didn't think air india would just GIVE you those, did you? and if you don't need one, or don't want one, too bad, because you HAVE to have one. everyone flying air india has to have a fresh paper luggage tag on their bags.
d) you show your boarding pass and passport to another soldier. he (she, actually) lets you stand in line at what in the US would be the main security checkpoint. you wait.
e) finally you get to the front of the line. you can leave your shoes and belt on---thank god! (thank krishna?) but from your backpack you must remove not just your laptop, but also your camera, your cell phone, your ipod, your american cell phone, and your flashlight. anything with a transistor. you shove your luggage toward the x-ray. but a soldier intercepts it, and asks for your boarding pass and passport. he looks at them, and compares them to what you've written on your paper luggage tag. they match. he stamps your luggage tag. the stamp is very official-looking and includes today's date. better not try to reuse that luggage tag!
f) at this stage the one good indian air-security innovation happens: each of the trays for electronics is numbered, and comes with a matching laminated number card. so rather than let your brand new nikon go off on an adventure from the other end of the x-ray, the tray gets pulled aside, and you'll claim it with your matching number card. (the indian soldiers are still welcome to take your nikon for an adventure, though.)
g) you go through a metal detector. like all metal detectors in india, it's not clear that this one actually works. but it doesn't matter, because you're going to be wanded down anyway. (seriously. metal detectors here are apparently just big omnipresent sculptures that announce, "you are about to be wanded/patted down.") an elderly mustachioed soldier plays you like a theremin. then he looks at your boarding pass and passport. he stamps your boarding pass, twice. then he realizes the date on his stamp is wrong, so he adjusts it, and stamps it again. twice.
h) finally, you are in the departure lounge! have some tea. have a lot of tea, because without explanation or announcements, your plane will be an hour late.
i) you recognize the hindi numbers for "four," "six", and "two" over the loudspeaker. your flight is AI 462. along with everyone else, you run towards the one gate in the airport. thanks to the lack of a formal queue, you are able to shove your way to the front.
j) the gate agent looks at your passport and boarding pass. she lets you walk to the jetway, ten feet away.
k) at the top of the jetway, you give your boarding pass and passport to another guy. he's not a soldier, but he wants to see it anyway. he lets you walk down the jetway.
l) at the bottom of the jetway, another man wants to see your boarding pass and passport. (seriously. you can't make this stuff up.) he lets you board the plane.
m) three steps onto the plane, the stewardess asks for your boarding pass. she tells you that you are seated in 6A. yes. you can read.
n) you sit down. in the seatback pocket is a folded-up copy of some indian business/financial newspaper. you read it as the plane taxis. "looser regulations will propel india to growth in 2015," a columnist declares.
(note that this was the EASY version of indian airport security, as i had only a carry-on. i can't even imagine what it would be like with checked bags...)

this hotel we're staying at in agra describes itself as a "five-star hotel." i'm not sure they understand that that's an honor they can't give to themselves; nevertheless, i'm really embarrassed to be here. some comments:

a) why do all of these indian hotels have super-dressed-up sikh doormen? not just the fancy hotels---even the YMCA in new delhi had a guy standing out front who looked like he just stepped off the set of some period drama about the raj.
b) the room service menu includes cigarettes---NINE different varieties! up at the rooftop restaurant---the choice of which as our dinner venue was not mine, i must emphasize---the menu includes both cigarettes AND cigars. five different kinds of cigarettes and two kinds of cigars---both at the end of the drinks menu.
c) the room arrangement comes with a tea service, which would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that as stirrers, the hotel provides neither i) teaspoons nor ii) those stupid plastic swizzle sticks we have in the US. instead, they have tiny plastic FIELD HOCKEY STICKS as swizzlers. big, teaspoon-sized, solid plastic field hockey sticks. they're quite distinctive.

as a general observation: indians use marble the way russians use fake gold leaf. any time anyone needs to create an air of luxury or opulence: just add marble! put some marble on it! not just the floor, but the walls, the ceiling, the entire bathroom vanity, the shelves---make it all out of marble!!!


srinagar, jammu and kashmir province

21 december

oh wow. where to begin?? yesterday, my first day in kashmir, was absolutely the best day of this trip so far. (and i SWEAR it's just a coincidence that it was the first day away from my parents!)
i'm staying on a houseboat as a homestay. yesterday evening i spent an hour playing with legos and talking to the eight-year-old son of the couple who runs the houseboat (and lives on the adjacent houseboat). the kid, of course, speaks totally fluent english. he only had a small handful of legos, but was so excited to show me all the things he could make with them: a robot! a tank! a submarine! eagles! i was amazed at the level of abstraction inherent in all of those: e.g., the "eagles" were just two 4x2 blocks, snapped together in a certain way. ("imagination" is the word that usually gets used, but "abstraction" seems just as appropriate---more respectful to the actual mental capabilities of even young children.) he also showed me his religion book---a government-issued primer, written in english, on islam. the family is muslim (everyone in the kashmir valley is muslim), and at one point the dad went into the next room to pray. the muslim prayers are really beautiful---the way they're SUNG, not spoken. then he came back out and studied the koran.
some other notes, in no order:


all of kashmir was absolutely devastated by floods in september. in srinagar there is mud and dirt and wreckage everywhere. it makes me really sad. poor srinagar. people have brought it up in every conversation. water up to the second story in srinagar, for over two weeks. ("water for sixteen days," the father/proprietor of the houseboat said. "eighteen days," his eight-year-old son quickly corrected.) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/asia/kashmiris-cope-with-flooding-and-resentment-of-india.html


everyone hear wears long woolen cloaks to stay warm. they're long---knee- or ankle-length. my first thought is to south american ponchos, but ponchos are just squares of fabric with a hole cut out for the neck---these are actually tailored to fit a body. they have sleeves, but people don't usually use the sleeves, because underneath the cloaks they keep these baskets of burning coals. (more fun fire safety failures! after about an hour on the houseboat i had cataloged a list of about a dozen ways i would probably die---with the kashmiri insurgency being the absolute last on the list.) but seriously---they are these clay pots inside a wicker basket, filled with what seems to be a mixture of sand and hot, glowing embers. so you keep under your cloak, and it keeps you warm. half the men walking down the street look both pregnant and armless as a result.


i was given a cloak and fire pit to wear while sitting around playing legos with the eight-year-old (christ, i feel like such a jerk for never remembering names), and was convinced i was going a) to spill it and set fire to the houseboat, b) set fire to my cloak, or c) otherwise burn myself. the analogy here is to japanese kotatsus: tables with built-in blankets and heaters. but imagine personal, portable kotatsus.


driving in from the airport, something looked immediately different---not like the rest of india. was it the pine trees? those were certainly different, but no, it wasn't that. ah! pitched roofs! all of the roofs here have angles! which you need in areas with snow load.


the mountains here are enormous. srinagar is at the eastern edge of the valley. so right at the edge of town are these gigantic mountains. but because the air quality is so poor---not sure whether it's pollution or fog or both---the mountains are just featureless blue cardboard cutouts. which is what ALL mountains look like from sufficiently far away---but these mountains are, like, RIGHT HERE. they're like 30 degrees high---and yet they're just dark gray-blue outlines!


they drink a special tea here, which involves sugar, saffron, walnuts, pistachio, and cinnamon. (it's not clear to me whether it includes any tea leaves, or whether it's just some sort of herbal infusion.)


srinagar, december 27th


really have been having such an amazing time here in kashmir. (lack of internet for the last week a testament to the amazingness!) i need to find someway to describe what i've been doing in a way that isn't just unreadable word-diarrhea. but, ahead of that, here are two quick comments that i jotted down the other day.


GEYSERS: indian hot water comes from geysers, which brings to mind a gushing hot spring---turn on the shower, and old faithful sprays right in your face! unfortunately, the indian english pronunciation, "geezer," is a more accurate description of its capabilities. you know how most of the non-US world uses on-demand water heaters, whereas in the US we mostly use hot water storage tanks? think of a "geezer" as being the worst of both worlds. they're tiny, wall-mounted water heaters that neither have sufficient heating power to provide continuous hot water, nor enough storage capacity to actually let you take a shower.


our hotel in jaipur---the converted palace---had this luxurious-looking overhead rainfall showerhead. "yes!," i thought. "i'm going to take such a great shower!" and i did. for about sixty seconds. then the water went cold, and i had to wait an hour for more hot water. the showers/bathtubs all come with buckets, so i guess you're supposed to fill them up with hot water and take a sponge bath.
plus: you know the shocking latin american practice of mounting hot water heaters directly above the shower, with tangled-up and sometimes bare wires out in the open? same in india! you get to splash water only inches away from 220 volts! and it gets better: geysers are all mounted about six feet up on rusty angle brackets (which are usually starting to pull out of the wall). so not only might you get electrocuted, you might be crushed by a falling metal barrel of hot water.

CHANGE. i remain deeply, genuinely confused by the indian attitudes towards change: namely, that they don't like to, or have difficulty, making it. in the US the burden is on businesses to make change, at least up to an order of magnitude, if i pay for my $2 coffee with a $20, that's completely normal, and if the coffee shop has difficulty making change, they're apologetic. but in india, the burden is on the customer to make change: even paying for something that costs 50 rupees with a 100-rupee note is often a problem.

here's why it's fascinating: in the US, cash is an abstraction. it makes no difference whether my twenty bucks is in the form of 20 ones or one 20. not so in india---there's a huge difference between having a 100-rupee note and having 10 10-rupee notes. the abstraction layer fails---like reading a news article online and seeing HTML tags showing up in the test.  the failure makes you think in new ways: you always have to be thinking not just about how much money you have, but in what FORM the money is. you have to structure your purchases to maximize your bill diversity. and so you make purchases you don't want (buying a coke just to split a big bill), and you don't make purchases you do want (not buying tea because you have no small bills). (there are a lot of problems in algorithms/combinatorics that relate to this kind of thinking---the "knapsack problem" and so forth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem).
so why does this happen? why is it so difficult to get change in india? some hypotheses, all rejected:
a) maybe this is a way of getting leverage in price negotiations. but in almost all of the situations i've been in, this hasn't been the case: prices have been fixed/standardized (10 rupees for tea), or already agreed upon.
b) maybe this is a consequence of being poor. keeping cash around with which to make change is expensive---that's money that could be spent or reinvested. ("cash drag" is i guess the business term.) in the US, businesses are wealthy enough that keeping $100 in the register isn't a big deal. not so in india. yet, this doesn't explain everything, either, becaue multiple times i've had immense difficulty getting change at the (stupidly) high-end luxury tourist hotels i was staying at with my parents.
once i tried to pay for a 1,050 rupee meal with a Rs 1000 note and an Rs 100 note. the waiter looked at my cash, and asked me if i had any change. i didn't. so he took the cash and disappeared. five minutes later, he came back, and asked again if i had any change. i still didn't. he disappeared again. five minutes later, he came back with my fifty rupees of change. he said he had gotten it from the bellhop. to put this in context (including the disgusting opulence of the hotel and of my dinner): this is like paying for a $95 meal with a $100 bill and having the restaurant struggle to find a $5 to give back.
c) maybe it's just the culture.psychology. in india, consumers are expected to be the change-makers; in the US, businesses are. but this doesn't totally make sense, either. you've got a tea stand, and all day people are handing you Rs 10 notes for tea, and then someone hands you a Rs 100 note, and you can't find nine Rs 10 notes to give back? what happened to the thirty Rs 10 notes you've accepted in the last hour? you haven't ALREADY spent them! and yet, i've watched people genuinely struggle to make change---it's not that they don't want to; it's that it's genuinely difficult.
i'm saying all this not out of anger, but genuine befuddlement. there must be some sort of real force that causes all these difficulties with change---but what? what economic dark matter makes purchases such a hassle?

delhi. december 29th.


delhi is covered in thick, thick fog. the flight in from srinagar was delayed three hours because of it. it's not smoke---it doesn't smell like everything---but it's everywhere. even the arrival hall at the airport was full of fog. the underground platform at the metro---fog. the lobby of the YMCA--fog. by the time i went to bed at midnight, the fog had gotten so thick that it had filled up the hallways, and i couldn't even see the next building from my window.

the amazing thing about the fog is that it gives light three dimensions. no longer is light something projected onto surfaces---lights actually exist in the air, in spheres and shapes and platonic solids---right in the atmosphere. chunks of space have light and dark and colors. no longer is the atmosphere an optical vacuum. even the streetlights are incredible: huge moonbeams and rays of light coming out of streetlights---incredible visual drama from something so benign. the sky all lit up---like the orange chicago sky, but way more so.
i wonder if you could engineer this. meaning, playing with light is already a common artistic/architectural thing. (flashback to a fantastic seminar at the university of chicago physics department in 2007: a talk given by the jamie carpenter, who's an architect, not a physicist, but had been a physics major as an undergrad, and now does amazing things with light and buildings.) so i wonder what sorts of things you could do by blowing around small dust particles---varying the size and reflectivity of the dust particles, maybe with a few sources and sinks. you could probably do really amazing three-dimensional atmospheric sculptures with light. (audience might need to wear a respirator, though.) i guess fog machines are already often part of laser light shows? but i'm thinking way more than that.


ordered room service for the first time in my life last night. somehow my postal obligations this time came to forty-three postcards---a combination of family and close friends i usually postcard, plus some looser connections i thought i should reinforce, plus the result of an open call for postcards on facebook. 43 is way too many---i had to write almost all of them last night, and my hand was cramping up. i hope no one wants ORIGINAL text. anyway, room service at the YMCA will bring you a huge thermos of tea for only 30 rupees! great deal!


security at the srinagar airport yesterday wasn't as bad as i thought it'd be. everyone talks about how awful it is, and having already experienced indian airport security elsewhere, i was bracing myself. but it wasn't so bad---the only differences were that to enter the airport compound, you need to x-ray your bags and go through a metal detector, and your car has to be searched (this is to allow you the privlege of driving a quarter-mile to the airport building). then, later, you have to walk out onto the tarmac, and point to your checked bag. so, not so bad---i probably had to show my passport and boarding pass less than 15 times, and only went through four metal detectors.


off to go mail all these postcards! my flight out of delhi is at 12:45 AM tonight (hopefully it wasn't this morning). i connect through moscow, and land in JFK, and then i'll spend the night at a friend's apartment in new york, and then decide whether to go to a new year's eve party in new york or in ithaca (leaning towards the latter).


new york. december 31st.


my last day in india was busy, exhausting, delicious, not what i had planned, and full of stimulation---so, a fantastic and appropriate way to end.

it began with the disastrous finale of my disastrous last-minute postcarding. i'd rather repress the details. years from now they can come out in therapy. suffice it to say that most of my postcards got written, and all of those that got written got mailed. the positive things i can say are that a) the actual text of the postcards i was pretty happy with ("text," singular), and b) i was also really happy to pay 25 rupees (= 40 cents) for international postcards. (from switzerland it was like a buck.) we'll see if they make it across the ponds.
when i finally finished that, around 4 PM, i took the metro up to old delhi. "hang out in old delhi" had been my plan for the entire day (with "walking" the preferred conveyance), but, better short than not at all. and i hadn't tried out the subway in delhi, so that was a new experience. the trip was only 10 rupees (though cost is a function of distance, like japanese subways and san francisco's BART). i've never seen a more crowded subway, ever. you know those photos everyone always shows of attendants pushing people into japanese subway cars? i'd never experienced that in japan, but delhi needed pushers. i've never been in a more packed subway in my life. there was no need to hang on as we accelerated out of the station---that's how crowded the car was.
also, there was a metal detector and x-ray to get into the subway. again, with indians having metal detectors and x-rays guarding any sufficiently important space. but queuing up in a 200-person line to go through a metal detector in a crowded subway at rush hour is not my idea of efficiency. the line moved surprisingly quickly, though.
in old delhi i ate all of the street food that i could. tea. deep-fried something. deep-fried something else. bread. deep-fried fractals of honey. peanut brittle. which, weirdly, is sold on the street, typically by the peanut roasters: there are all these guys who roast peanuts in huge woks. the woks are usually filled with a mixture of peanuts and sand---i guess the sand acts as some sort of heat diffuser/thermal mass. so in addition to the roasted peanuts, they sell (apparently factory-made) frisbees of peanut brittle.
i'm being repetitive here. but i want to comment again on delhi's urban design.
the way that old delhi is designed---for that matter, most of urban india---is fascinating. it's NOT designed---people just put up buildings. there's no attention paid to urban design, or anything beyond the scale of the individual building. no central planning. people care about individual buildings and individual plots of land (because they own them)---no one cares about the neighborhood as a whole. so it evolves on a very different scale. SCALE is the key word here. no one cares about the NEIGHBORHOOD's self-interest; they just care about their OWN self-interest----and the ordinary way of equating the latter with the former (capital) doesn't, or can't, really happen. (not only is there no central planning to make things orderly, there are also no wealthy developers who can raze an acre or two and put up nice new buildings and make a profit.) so as a result, you get caught in local maxima very quickly, and it's very hard to get off.
i wonder what sorts of computer simulations you could make here. thinking in particular about scale. the simulated annealing of urban design. in old delhi, and the rest of the urban labyrinth.
of course this is not a delhi thing, or even an indian thing, or even an asian thing---just a feature of older cities. (venice is a good example of the same style of urban non-design, or, for that matter, any "old city" neighborhood in any european city.)
but what's amazing about delhi is that it has BOTH---both the unorganized, spontaneously-organized system of labyrinthine streets and buildings, AND the hyper-organized, DC/paris enlightenmently planned city part. in one part of delhi, you have carefully-organized boulevards and circles, with plenty of room, logical navigation, and streets named after important historic figures----in the other part, you have a random walk.
the closest american example i can think of is the contrast in boston between neat, orderly back bay, and the twisty narrowness of beacon hill. but that's like orders of magnitude less dramatic than delhi.
years ago, the art institute of chicago did an exhibit on daniel burnham's 1909 master plan for the city of chicago. (100th anniversary or something.) the plan was never carried out, but boy, the drawings were so beautiful---imagine chicago, but instead of a perfect latticework of streets---a PRISON of a GRID---imagine that latticework transversed by a beautiful series of diagonal streets, all at different angles. (so, imagine DC.) burnham did the same thing for san francisco---some museum there did an exhibit on it a few years ago---but it never got built, either. right after the 1906 earthquake, he sketched out this GORGEOUS san francisco of boulevards and civic monuments and so forth. never built, either.
hausmann's paris, l'enfant's DC, burnham's chicago---and luyten's delhi. that's how they refer to it in delhi, after edward luytens, the british colonial narcissist who drew it up in 1911.
in old delhi: cement with doggy pawprints on them.
i ran around old delhi until it was dark. then i took the metro back to the YMCA, picked up my backpack, and went to the airport.

i drank the water! actually, i started doing this up in the mountains in kashmir. i had intended, since the beginning of my trip, for my final act to be to drink some tap water, as a departing toast to the subcontinent. in varanasi some of the stuff i was eating off the street was clearly made with unsterlized water---and i felt it, gut-wrenchingly, for several days. (no regrets, though! that rosewater foam was delicious, and had i known it would have caused me such pain, i would have had even MORE, just to put a thumb on the cost-benefit scales.) but then in kashmir, i had dinner with the family i was staying with the first night, and felt noticeable but only mild GI distress. so i figured i could experiment more. so i drank the water up in the mountains, and i was fine, and then i drank the water in srinagar and delhi, and i've been totally fine.

i'm almost disappointed! i had a vision of some momentous, first-and-final drink during my last moments in india, resulting in the shittiest plane ride of my life---and none of that happened. the only upsetting part is that the water at the YMCA in delhi tasted gross. but it was fine.
2b) which reminds me: the water at the YMCA---it tasted REALLY gross. i drank it, because i was thirsty, but it tasted really gross. i'm annoyed, and was annoyed at the time, that i don't really know how to describe how it tasted, other than that it didn't taste good. i don't have any words for talking about how water tastes. i guess i've tasted water that i've been able to describe as tasting sulfurous, or ferrous (northern minnesota water! faris drinks ferrous water), but that's about it. we have wine snobs---what about WATER snobs? "how about i bring out a bottle of 2004 north cascades reserve from the cellar?" i guess that's not too far off from the questionable marketing claims of bottled water companies. which happens in india, too: the popularest bottled water brand is "Himalayan Pure," which claims to be glacial melt from everest. for god's sake, the GANGES is glacial melt from everest. the ganges is DISGUSTING. do you want to drink the ganges?!?
2c) also: what i'm curious about his how all of the doxycycline i've been taking has affected my GI tract. how has it been interacting with all of the foreign bacterial flora i've been ingesting? i've been taking 100mg a day as a malaria prophylactic. bonnie and faris sent some azithromycin as a potential traveler's diarrhea antidote. (i never took it, deliberately, even when i was really sick. though i did make liberal use of the rehydration formula they sent.) but doxy is a pretty powerful antibiotic, too. surely it must have SOME effect? sadly, we have two variables confounded: i was eating all these strange new microorganisms, and i was on grams and grams of antibiotics. not a very controlled experiment.

sitting at the delhi airport, waiting for my 12:45 am flight.

i bought the last $4 copy of the economist i'll ever buy from a newsstand. may as well have been a $2 copy of the economist, since it was the holiday double issue! correspondent D. points out that his subscription to the economist costs him about a dollar an issue, so getting excited about paying less than more than i should is absurd. but still!
staring at the departure boards. the fantasies of the possible! the thrill of geographic potential!
flashback to years ago, waiting at LAX for a red-eye, and seeing the nighttime last flights of the day into all the sad little california towns: merced, bakersfield, fresno, stockton, yuma. (the last of those being in what i call "east california.")
the delhi departure boards had all of the global regulars: dubai, london, singapore. like the socialites who get invited to every party. but like every airport it also had its own collection of weird high-school friends it still hangs out with. small-town dropouts mingling with global power brokers. at o'hare you can get a flight to frankfurt, and you can get a flight to moline.
of course delhi didn't go to the same high school i did, and so had different friends---friends i had never met before: tashkent. dushanbe. almaty. KABUL. air india has a daily flight into KABUL. an hour and a half, and i could be in afghanistan. i wonder how much that would cost. my flight to srinagar was an hour and a half on air india, and it only cost $100. kathmandu. tehran. some place called "lucknow". sounds like a bad chinese attempt at duplicating las vegas. another place i didn't recognize: "paro". no, wait---i know where that is. BHUTAN. paro is the only airport in bhutan. my friend alla went there a couple years ago.


aboard SU 233. the aeroflot magazine's route map shows crimea as a part of russia. it also might or might not show georgia as a part of russia---it's not clear whether the lack of distinction is due to georgia being in the same time zone as neighboring russia but a different time zone as its caucasian neighbors, or whether this is graphic design as geopolitical aspiration.


at sheremetyevo. all of the early morning flights were to germany. no joke. munich, frankfurt, hamburg. huge lines waiting to board. why do all these muscovites need to be in deutschland so early in the morning? on the plus side, in the international terminal there was a flight to odessa, so i guess they haven't annexed even more of ukraine recently.


i splurged on food in delhi and at the delhi airport---both because of price and quality---so i wasn't planning on eating anything in moscow. but the economist says that the ruble has collapsed by 40% against the dollar over the course of the month. ("a russian recession in 2015 now seems certain.") i'm 40% richer than i was last time i was in russia! so i splurged. i went to a coffee shop and bought a hot chocolate and a piece of cake.
there was a t-shirt vending machine vending t-shirts with putin on them. no joke. i didn't notice this a month ago. one of the shirts is a mid-century-style vacation postcard, with a stylized drawing of putin wearing a hawaiian shirt and drinking a cocktail underneath the large headline, "Crimea". the machine also sold iphone covers with images of putin on them. so it was really more of a vladmir putin souvenir vending machine.

flying from moscow. the cloudy skies cleared over labrador. so we could see LABRADOR! exotic uninhabited canada! seven miles down, and totally clear. ice and frozen lakes and mountains. we flew over labrador and into quebec, then right over the mouth of the st lawrence, over the gaspe and into maine. perfectly clear the entire time. i just stared out the window. way better than anything on the entertainment system. we saw KATAHDIN! recognizable with its bowl. distinctly snowier and icier than its surroundings. larger, too---it wasn't a two-dimensional satellite picture so much as it was a MOUNTAIN, sticking up out of the earth, in all three dimensions. we flew just south of the white mountains. i was able to pick out lowell, massachusetts---remembering the night i spent sleeping in the graveyard there in 2007---and then the clouds returned and the world disappeared again. i went back to watching a subtitled russian sitcom about a former gangster who becomes a gym teacher.

the clouds broke again as both the sitcom and connecticut were ending. we flew out almost to montauk, and then turned hard right and flew straight down the spine of long island. i picked out brookhaven national lab and the islip airport. the plane went straight down long island, slowing and descending, like the entire island was a 100-mile long runway. we were angled slightly south, so by the end of the flight i could look down and see the barrier islands on the south shore, look across the entire height of long island, across the long island sound, all the way to connecticut. it was beautiful.
i love flying. i know everyone loves to complain about air travel, but it's worth it for the views alone. did i ever tell you about my incredible flight from san jose to denver last year? absolutely magical.
speaking of the views: every time i fly, i have to re-derive the formula for how far you can see across the earth at a given height. for my reference, i'll re-derive it again. (scribble scribble scribble on some paper.) drawings aside: as a straight-line through the atmosphere, you can see sqrt(r^2 + (r+h)^2), where r is the earth's radius and h is your elevation/height above the surface. basic trig. but that's not really what we want---we care about distance along the surface of the earth. for that, the formula works out to be r * arccos(r/(r+h)). so with r=3959 miles and h=7 miles (= 37,000 feet), we can see about 235 miles. if you could see all 360 degrees around you---if you were a fighter pilot in a swivel chair, say---you'd be able to gaze upon pi * r^2 = 173,000 square miles. which is more than TWO minnesotas. it's more than a MONTANA, even. (of course, neither minnesota nor montana are shaped like circles, so you wouldn't actually be able to see all of them.) (it's slightly more than a california, too, but california can't alliterate with minnesota.)
finally we landed at JFK.
i took the subway into manhattan. from canal st i walked to k.'s apartment at 90th and lexington. i had reached 34th street before i realized what was so different: it was quiet. admittedly, this was mid-day during a holiday week, but even so, compared to india, manhattan was SILENT.
this morning i walked from 90th and lex down to the port authority, and took the bus up to ithaca. the bus ride is always pretty---the catskills, the delaware river, barns and silos and other pastoral northeastern images---but what struck me, during the entire ride, was how CLEAR it was. it was a nice day, but a fairly ordinary day, with a low-elevation sun and maybe 50% cloud cover. but compared to india, it was just so CLEAR! my cataracts were gone! my corneas had been polished back to transparency! like going from mt palomar to the hubble space telescope.