Monsoon Miracles
Today was an excellent day.  The most runny of poos that have tormenting me for the past few days finally relented, i'm sure because I got my hands on some sweet drugs, namely Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic.  This miracle antibiotic has, I think, saved my life at least once and maybe twice while i've been here in India.  Since I’ve already amply described my near-toilet experiences with India’s unique strains of explosive diarrhea in previous entries, and plan on writing  a book to be named “The Story of My Experiments with Diarrhea”, I’ll just say that I have gone from near-deathly to definitely alive within the past few days. 
 
Work has been excellent—in my long-standing battle with every computer in our office, I think its fair to say that I have soundly thumped the machines.  Score: Aziz, 1, Machines, 0.  A couple of mornings ago I arrived at the office, a little dehydrated from the squishy-runny (listen, diarrhea is a major part of the Indian experience and I’m not going to side-step it), only to find that N.’s computer on which I had completed my research paper the night before was not starting.  Not starting, as in just like a broken lawnmower, it was a purely hardware-related problem.  It’s amazing that computers can function in this environment, given the heat, dust and humidity, but they really do break down at the most inopportune moments.  But I was not to be defeated.  Summoning Herculean quantities of problem solving ability, I unplugged and powered-down the CPU, unplugged all the devices except the monitor, banged on the computer case precisely 3 times, no less and no more, threatened violence and rebooted—and it worked.  I started laughing, and I laughed long and hard at the stupid machine.  Then I deftly guided the computer into connecting to the network, and transferred all my files to 8 other computers that are now acting as my backups.  And unless the dumb machines learn to collude in destroying my data, I think we can assume that my paper will still be there tomorrow.
 
I finished the new AKI “SCALE project” website on T.’s computer, and perhaps the word had spread over the network that a new, bad boy was in town, because I got no trouble with T.’s machine.
 
I had a meeting with the CEO where I was, as they say, ‘on’, and was able to show the true power of my 30 pages of pure statistical goodness; everything from the average villager’s income-elasticity of demand for electricity to the percentage of village households which produce a dairy product using a buffalo.  And the CEO, whom I saw tear apart two esteemed researchers over the past week during their presentations, nodded and agreed at my every word, and suggested he might use my paper as quantitative evidence when he presents his next proposal for funding from the European Commission.
 
I left the office at 10:30 pm, and while standing in the pouring rain outside the office waiting for an autorickshaw, an ambulance pulled up with its lights flashing.  I figured that the driver must be feeling sorry for me, being a poor foreigner, and was asking me where I wanted to go.  So when he asked me something, I said, “Ha, Releep Rode” (yes, Relief road) hoping that he was going that way.  He rolled the window back up with a puzzled expression.  I figured he wasn’t going that way, maybe.  But then someone else ran up to the window, and the driver rolled it down again, and then I realised from the instructions that were given that the driver was actually trying to get directions to the hospital.  Looking back on it, the driver choosing to ask me for directions was pretty unlucky for him—imagine you’re in a city where only one in 10,000 people is foreign, and you urgently need directions to get to the hospital, and you pull up beside someone and ask, “where is the hospital?”, and they reply, “yes, kingston please”.  Hence the puzzled expression, I guess.
 
My autorickshaw plowed me home through deep puddles and torrential rain, and there was, for once, no haggling over the fare.

- posted by aziz @ 5:42 p.m.