Here are a few more random notes - several topics could be embellished, and I will try to give a summary of Casey's daycare experiences in a later note. We are visiting Mysore this weekend which will be our first train trip.

Helmet Law The city government has imposed a helmet law on motorcycle and scooter drivers (all passengers are exempt, so the wife and children can go without). The compliance with the law has been higher than I had expected, and the police are enforcing it. I saw a young kid today at the center of a large crowd being held by several policeman, he had a scooter but no helmet, and from the look on his face he was due for more than just a 50 rupee fine. One solution that motorcycle riders have taken to the helmet law is to buy the flimsiest possible helmets - one style that is common can't be any stronger than a plastic yogurt container and couldn't protect the rider from anything other than bird droppings.

Building Urchins There are several little children that hang around the computer science department. A little boy just came into my office and wanted the pens that I had thrown out. Since I had just been to the market, I gave him a banana, and then gave his sister one when he came back with her. These are very cute little kids that speak no english (with exception of the phrase 'pen please'). Several weeks ago they came into a seminar room and spent 20 minutes listening to a not very comprehensible talk. Their lack of English was not the major obsticle to understanding. I did have the vision that this talk would prompt one of them to become a mathematician with discoveries that would shake the world in the twenty-first century, but maybe not. Why do these kids hang around a computer science department? Maybe stealing computer time like the young Bill Gates? The answer is that at the other end of the building is a construction project where some new offices are being added. Construction is a family job, with men shaping stones, and women carrying bricks and the kids that are too young to work just hanging around the construction site. I would guess that the boy will be chipping away at rocks in a year and his sister will be carrying bricks in a couple of years. The construction crews live on site in very primitive facilities. The subject of child labor does receive attention in India, but it is a very difficult problem that can't successfully be addressed without dealing with a whole host of other problems. [Several days later: the children continue to hang around - yesterday they spent some time practicing typing (and seeing how many keys could be held down simultaneously). One of my colleagues told me that they are enrolled in school, so it is just afternoons and weekends when they hang out with the CS nerds. ]

We are often in a position where we have no idea of what is going on. One example occurred the other night when we were leaving the market and it was starting to rain. We wanted to get an auto home, but none was available. A woman that had a street stall selling plaster Ganeshes motioned for us to get under her tarp out of the rain. She wanted to know where we wanted to go, so we said we wanted an auto to the Tata Institute. This set her into motion, she sent a couple men running up the street, and sent a boy in another direction. It was raining hard, so they had pulled there shirts up over their heads for protection. At one point she darted off and came back. We guessed that this was all to get us an auto, but had know idea as to why - was this out of the goodness of her heart? Were we supposed to give her money? Eventually, the boy showed up in an auto that he had flagged down from somewhere. So we got in, and had to decide whether or not we were to give her anything, since it would be embarrassing to do the wrong thing. Fortunately, at this point she told us that she had a vegetable stand in the market, so now we just buy onions from her occasionally.

Kumar Another person who is very helpful is one of the people that works at the faculty guest house. His motives are more obvious - he plans to take a small cut on any financial deal, and is hoping that we will sell him our used belongings when we leave. This is all completely reasonable. I first met him when I stayed in the faculty guest house two and a half years ago. He not only remembered who I was from that visit, but also remembered that I was a "vegetarian". [This came about because on my third night at the guest house, they served the first meal with meat - huge slabs of grilled liver. Not wanting to seem squeamish or a picky eater, I just self-righteously claimed to be a vegetarian. This got me out of some other equally unappetizing meat dishes later on. However, I certainly don't advocate being a vegetarian in India - some restaurants have had absolutely wonderful meat based meals.] Kumar has wanted to sell us various things, and to arrange for household help. He did set up newspaper delivery for us. Today he came by, and has arranged to take our used newspapers. [His story was that his kids wanted to cut the papers, although given that the paper is drier than the WSJ, this is hard to believe. He obviously sells the used papers to a recycler.]

Campus Wildlife The campus has a very rich collection of wildlife - my two favorites are the giant bats and the giant millipides. A large flock of bats flies around campus every evening. The millipides are about six to eight inches long and wander around in a very innocuous manner. There are also a large number of toads which facinate Casey and lots of very small frogs. This morning a monkey was climbing on our windows and roof. We have been warned to watch out for Cobras and scorpions, although we haven't encountered any. I have received enough warnings about cobras that I am starting to believe them. There are also plenty of gecko lizards which live on the walls. We have a squirrel which lives in our rafters and I had been trying to blame it for eating the fruit we had left out in the kitchen. Unfortunately, last night I verified that it was a large rat that was visiting our kitchen regularly. THere wasn't much I could do except try to chase it out the kitchen door. It instead chose to run up the electrical wiring and disappeared into the roof, presumably ending up in our neighbors apartment. The campus also has a large number stray dogs (which wait at garbage cans for food to be discarded.) [The rat continues to out smart us - it is quite happy to eat through the plastic containers we are storing crackers and fruit in]. There are two very large vultures which live at the top of the tower of the administration building. Insects are also very well represented, with ants, mosquitos, and cockroaches out in force. Some of the species of ants create large mounds. I noticed that people would decorate the mounds with flowers and incense, so I asked one of my friends about it. He said that ant mounds were often inhabited by snakes, and it was the snakes that were being worshipped. He is building a house, and has a large ant mound in the front. A local women comes by each day and adorns it. He decided to ask around about it and was told that the previous owner had the snake smoked out of the ant mound and soon after had his luck turn bad and went bankrupt. My friend is planning to have a small shrine erected over the ant mound.