Surfaces

A lot has happened since my last post.
We finally have some conception of what we are doing, which is nice. We thought coming in to this that we would be just doing interviews and passing off the results to someone else, then going home. Not so. Ideally, we will be designing an entire student loan financial instrument. One of the people we are working for told us (after a couple of beers, to be fair) that if all goes well they might be able to give out tens of thousands of whatever we propose in the next couple years. A little frightening.

Getting to work is interesting. Our hotel is in Nungambakkam, one of the nicer-ish parts of town, but none of the cabbies have ever even heard of our hotel. So we are more or less trying to navigate the streets of Chennai for them, and I hold that the risk of being stranded in a random part of Chennai is an excellent motivator and really improves the memory. The six of us only barely fit into a real cab and it takes far too long for one to arrive (I dont get how this can be, they are everywhere. My only theory is that the guy at the front desk calls some relative of his to get him business, even if the guy is half way across the city) so we have started taking auto-rickshaws. These rides are terrifying, and exhilarating, and at the same time probably the most indian experience I have had so far. The drivers dart around cars and motorcycles, cut people off, only barely miss hitting pedestrians who dont even seem to register the suicidal contraptions. I have literally had to tuck my knee back into the tiny, three person passenger seat to avoid having it removed by the amputative mass of a passing bus.  Last night, coming back from dinner, we decided that we could fit five of us on one rickshaw--i was in front with the driver, trying not to fall out/get in the way of the operation of heavy machinery.  There were four people in the back, one of them sitting on the others lap.  We payed too much, but are getting better at negotiating, and im sure by the time we leave we'll only be paying twice what they would charge a local.

Chennai itself is interesting.  The sky is thankfully overcast most days, trying and failing to slow down the emotions of the city.  There are people everywhere.  A few doors down from our hotel is a shoddily constructed simple house that a family lives in.  At night, when we drive by, the fluorescent lights inside paint the glassless windows as images of these people's lives visible from the street.  Blue walls and hard floors.  An elderly man asleep on the floor, only his leather tough feet visible from the outside world.  The entire family gathered around the distorted image on the tiny TV set placed in front of the otherwise bear walls, huddling to capture that small image in their sight.  I wish I could capture it in pictures, but I doubt that I will.
All around the city chickens wander free, their unsettlingly long legs picking through the rubbish on the street.  One of the expats in the office talked at dinner about how the chickens here were all free range, and I just laughed.  I guess I cant contend with this categorization; the chickens are indeed free to live off of rotting scraps on the street, breath in the fumes of the auto-rickshaws, and live their lives in terror of being run over by an overly ambitious cabbie trying to pass some slower moving car.
The array of people is impressive.  They range from the young men dressed for european clubs and cafes, to business people in cheap but starched collared shirts, to women "of a certain age and build" wrapped conservatively in bright saris with their midriffs hanging out for the world to see, to men wearing nothing but a kilt-like strip of cloth around their wastes and between their legs.  It is a sea of humanity completely unlike anything in the states.  Sensory overflow, too much data, all the time.