I now know why people like to be self employed. But I get ahead of myself.
Something from the end of our Thanjavur visit which I didn’t give the attention it deserves. Elephant. We saw it at the big temple in Thanjavur, where it was there to give blessings to/extort donations from tourists and pilgrims alike. For 50Rs (marginally more than a dollar) you could ride it. So of course, being the good little American tourists that we are, we did.
I have seen a number of elephant-riding operations at zoos etc, and this one was a little different. At the zoo version, you go from a raised platform that gets you up to elephant-height, then step over to some form of saddle on the elephant’s back. I think that what I did was more akin to rock climbing. Albeit with a rock covered in pliant and tough flesh. It was unbelievable, scaling its shoulders and using its raised leg as a foothold. And I sat on top, separated from the elephant by nothing more than the thin fabric of my pants. I could feel the bones move beneath leathery skin as the huge gentle animal shifted beneath me. Its hairs were course beneath my fingers.
We returned to Chennai, and that weekend we decided to go to Bangalore. This was not a good idea in terms of sleep. We took the train back on Wednesday night, getting somewhere in the realm of 4 hours of broken sleep before having to get off the train at 5 in the morning, take a taxi to our hotel, then go to work. Tried to recover Thursday night, then boarded a bus Friday night. Im not very good at sleeping on busses. Not very good at all. I think I got around 3 hours of sleep. We toured around Bangalore—not all that much to see, a palace and another Indian city—then went out. Bangalore has a much better bar scene than Chennai, and their officials have generously extended operating hours to 11:30, a big jump from the 11:00 last call that we have grown accustomed to. Pretty crazy, I know. Slept that night, more touristy stuff in the morning, then back to the bus station and another night of maybe 3 hours sleep, optimistically. So in review, of 5 consecutive nights 3 of them were spent on a moving vehicle.
Getting on that last bus to Chennai was interesting. We had split up, and me and Robert, without a functional phone between us, were trying to find our way to the bus. We got to the station fine, only to realize how absolutely huge it was. And all the signs were in Hindi. And not very many people spoke English. And those who did speak English tended to be just about as confused as we were. We got ourselves pointed in what we hoped was the right direction, then started wading off, using a building as our target. It was like a maze of honking, shifting walls. We had to pass through a huge parking lot of busses, all of which were trying to maneuver around the others, get to their platforms, just sit there. A ball of string would have been no help in finding your way out of this labyrinth—it would have been soon snapped by the weight of a passing bus. By a pure stroke of luck the girls saw us and yelled, and we found our bus together.
The last week has been boring. We have been finishing up our final report, which has taken us somewhere in the realm of 6 days to do even though if any one of us had just gone and done it it probably would have taken somewhere in the realm of 3. Some inordinate amount of time has been spent making all of the formatting work together, and this has made me wonder something about work in general. How much time, at an average office, is spent actually producing something, as compared to the time spent talking about what people should be producing, fixing it when they misunderstood their project, and trying to fucking understand the ineffable mysteries of Microsoft Word auto-format.
We also gave our final presentation, and discovered that Indian office culture is not very familiar with the idea of constructive feedback. Once we finally did corner a number of people, we got very solidly confirmed what we have been suspecting all along—that our project was very confusing. Most of the people we talked to were disappointed in what we had done, but none of them for the same reasons. ‘You needed more quantitative data.’ We were told it was a qualitative study. ‘Really? Oh.’ ‘It made too many recommendations , that’s for the design team to do,’ and then ‘we wanted you to spend more time thinking about your recommendations.’ Etc. Apparently not only were we unsure about the point of our project, but they were too. On the bright side the person we thought was our ‘point person’ at the IFMR was happy with it. Questions still remain as to whether he was actually the point person.
I think that the conclusion that we reached, and what I believe, is that we did the best we could with what we had. If they thought that we were going in the wrong direction, there were plenty of intermediate products which showed what direction we were moving towards, and they never gave us feedback during the process. And if they wanted us to be more quantitative, we needed more resources. We simply did not have the translators, the data, or the skill-set to accurately assess risk profiles etc on education loans.
So a little bit of bitterness there.
Moving on to my next project. There are three more weeks left of my internship. I will be spending them living in a cult.
OK, not quite a cult. They only have to give up all their worldly possessions to join, follow the teachings of the Mother who has “left her earthly shell,” and use words like ‘universal,’ ‘tranquility,’ ‘harmony,’ and ‘spiritual’ a lot. So judge for yourself. They are doing a lot of very interesting green technology stuff, and we are looking to see if we can find ways to take that technology/their ideas and apply it in different situations. Like ones where people don’t shave their head and spend much of their time meditating. Some of the ideas are fascinating—the kitchen is completely solar, they clean dishes by letting fish eat the food off and then baking off the bacteria in the sun, and they are trying to improve mud construction technology.
Im really looking forward to it. Partly because of all the interesting technology stuff, partly because I think that the people living there are going to be really interesting, partly because I think it will be much easier to exercise (running in Chennai is difficult. Especially if you are working during the day, and don’t want to wake up in the early morning) and then partly for another reason.
We think that we are going to be renting scooters. This is very exciting, I have been wanting to ride a scooter or motorcycle since I got here, partly because relying on rickshaws for transport is frustrating (I really don’t want to bargain right now, just take me to work PLEASE) and partly because I’m a thrill-seeking teenage boy.
Im not exactly sure what the internet situation is going to be, so if you don’t hear from me for a while that’s probably why. Or I’ve shaved my head, started wearing orange robes, started meditating on the meaning of life and the teachings of the mother, and started drinking copious amounts of Kool-Aid. Either way.
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