stupid brian adams
Just a quick note today.  I spent the day in our sweltering office puzzling over my regressions which have turned out to be absolute nonsense.  I decided to leave the office to drink real coffee and work on my laptop at Barrista, the starbucks-imitation coffee chain here.  They played brian adams.  Then i got some dinner at the "copper chimney" restaurant, which is a franchise.  they also played brian adams.  Now, im in a small, local internet cafe, and bloody hell, brian adams is blaring.  What is is with the world and bryan adams?  Thinking back to my travels in various countries, I can remember hearing brian adams in all of them.  Is this what globalization is all about?  I cant think of any music that annoys me quite so much as brian adams, except maybe celine dion.  Canada needs to export more tragically hip and guess who and less brian adams and celine dion.  that is all.

- posted by aziz @ 3:34 p.m.

 
The real subject of my research:"pastimes in rural India"
So i've neglected my blog recently, and the fact that nobody I know has mentioned this has been noted. At least a good number of people I've never met are reading, or so my site stats tell me.
There’s no way I could possibly recap the last month of non blogging, but some random anecdotes come to mind.

Shortly after my last spell of squishy diarrhea, as they call it, I received a call from Keshubhai Patel. This was our conversation:

Aziz: Hello?
KP: This is keshubhai patel. How is your diarrhea?
Aziz: Um, good.
KP: ok, call me if you have diarrhea again. Here my number…

After I hung up the phone I realised this friendly and forward fellow is a friend of a friend of my moms, and was requested by one of these characters to call me to check on my health. I can’t quite describe how weird this phone call was. Let me just say that I was in the middle of rural Gujarat, standing on my front porch, looking at some cows having some squirty diarrhea of their own just beyond our campus fencing. I love the extra random element that is introduced into an already random conversation when you have that conversation on a cell phone in an interesting place. If more people called me I would certainly hang out in crazy places hoping to be able to answer the phone and tell the person where I was, like, "Hi, you wouldn’t believe where I am. I am sitting in a tree in the lower Himalayas." Note to friends: if you call me sometime between Aug 2-10, this is, hopefully, where I might be.

Getting back to the Keshubhai patel telephone call, I found out a few minutes later that KP is also the name of the former chief minister of Gujarat, and I’m told that there is only one Keshubhai Patel. So it is possible that the ex chief minister of Gujarat had called to inquire about the specific current condition of my gastro-intestinal region. Like my friend D, I guess I have friends in high places who like to talk about low things. For anyone living in Ontario, this is like Bob Rae calling you up and asking about your diarrhea troubles. Touching, isnt it?

Sayla turned out to be more of an Ashram for me, really, as I didn’t have much work to do while I was waiting for my students to do my work for me (surveys). You know, you really can get people to do everything for you in India, even research! If we didn’t have the proper statistical package installed at the office for me to do my regressions, I would have checked if I could have hired a statistician to do it for me by hand. I bet its possible. Like they say, "Anything is possible in India!". Actually, nobody says that.

Today I saw some monkeys, which is actually pretty rare in Ahmedabad. They were scurrying across the road, and in this Indian setting, it made me realise that we’re not so different, humans and monkeys. Their posture and movements are so human, they cuddle just like moms and kids, and love to stare the hell out of everything, just like indians! I bet they were running over to the monkey banana-wallah for an afternoon snack, or maybe the monkey chai-wallah. Ok, that’s a bit ridiculous, monkeys don’t drink chai!

Speaking of chai, the best tea I have ever tasted is served by the chai stand outside our office. Its is simply amazing. A real treat.

Back to sayla: like I said, there wasn’t much to do, but I entertained myself. I played Gilli Danda with the kids who live on the campus, which, I know my mom will correct, is played as follows:

Equipment: one big stick, one very small stick.

Player one uses the big stick to knock the small stick off the ground, and then swats it in mid air toward player 2. Player two has to try to catch the stick. If he does, the "batter" is out. If he doesn’t, the batter (player 1) goes over to where the stick landed, and has three chances to knock it further, and at each chance player 2 can block or catch the small stick.
 
When all three bats are finished, player one estimates the distance (in large sticks) between the "home" (where he started) and where the stick ends up. If the small stick is batted into the bushes at any point, then the batter has to extract the small stick, place it above his ear, walk over the center of the pitch, and drop it by tilting his head. Sometimes, if it is wedged above his hear, he must dislodge it by hopping up and down—if my observations were correct, this is best done hopping on one foot.

The game is hilarious and ridiculous, and I part suspect that the kids made it up for kicks to impress me (just like I suspect quebecers made up poutine to slowly kill the english by heart attack). But I have heard of it before, and this game does just seem plausible in India. But again, I will have to verify the authenticity of the kids’ version when I get home by telling mom and dad, who I think must have played this game growing up in africa (although dad claims that his dad had the smallest cricket set in africa crafted for him and his friends, which would negate the need for a silly game like Gilli-Danda).

Aside from the kids, I saw some interesting wildlife. A snake made its home in the corner of my kitchen, but apparently it was only "slowly poisonous". Did this mean that it was only slightly poisonous, or very poisonous but would kill me slowly, which I guess would be worse than very poisonous? Ah, the ambiguity of Indian english. Well, the snake didn’t bite me, but did have to be talked to VERY harshly before he would leave.
 
Two days later we discovered the campus Cobra, a regular on the Sayla circuit, sleeping a few feet from my door. A guard was dispatched to guard the cobra by shining his flashlight on it, and making sure it did not move. The poor guard sat there for hours. I never found out who won the battle of patience between the guard and the cobra, but I reckon there is a good parable somewhere in there about the virtue of patience and quick poison, and it could be called, "the guard and the cobra."

Just before I left Sayla I saw an alligator. He was huge, and was frolicking in the now-dry river bed just down the road from the campus. I instantly remembered the advice in a book I was given called "How to hold a crocodile"—not because I had plans to hold this alligator (which I assume should be held just like a croc), but because the book said that if you want to run from a croc, run at crazy angles, constantly changing direction, because croc/gators take a long time to turn. I always run like this, so it would have been easy to outrun this alligator, but the need never arose—he disappeared into the bushes. I made a note not to be the batter should we start a game of Gilli Danda in the area (remember, the batter has to go into the bushes if the little stick goes in there).

I also discovered dung beetles, which are amazing little animals. So hard working, and built like tanks. Much respect for the dung beetle—he shows us that, in india, creatures from all walks of like, from politicians to beetles, have to deal with dung from time to time, no matter its consistency (chief ministers seem to specialize in the runny, while dung beetles deal, I think, in much more firm dung).

I am now safely back in ahmedabad, entering data and frantically trying to finish my work in time for my departure at the end of this month.


- posted by aziz @ 10:04 a.m.