Last week we went to Madras. I had a couple of speaking invitations, and we also wanted to do some sight seeing at Mahabilipuram, a small town south of Madras with some interesting old temples. Madras is the fourth largest city in India, located on the south east coast. We were slightly worried about the weather, since the wet season for Madras is October and November. However, since the climate in madras is hot and unpleasant all year round, there wasn't the option of postponing the visit to a better time of year. I made the travel arrangements myself. We decided to take the train one way and return by air. Purchasing airline tickets turned out to be easy, but getting rail tickets looked like it was going to be difficult. I arrived at the railway reservation office, and there were thirteen windows, each with lines of at least thirty people. I filled out my reservation form and was prepared to spend the afternoon waiting in line, when I noticed the fourteenth line which was very short. There was a window reserved for "freedom fighters, old age pensioners, handicapped people and foreign tourists". I felt guilty about taking advantage of my foreign status (but not guilty enough to wait in the long line).

We had a frantic rush to make it to the train which turned out to be an hour late arriving in Bangalore, so we had plenty of time. When we arrived at the station a porter immediately took our two suitcases and balanced them on his head and raced off to the platform. The remarkable thing about the build of the porters is that they were generally very small men with exceptionally well developed neck muscles. (Basically, the body of a jockey, with the neck muscles of a Husky lineman). We were the only Westerners present out of the one thousand people that were waiting for the train. The train ride was uneventful although we arrived an hour late. We had been given instructions to meet someone holding a "MathScience" sign infront of the Higginbothoms book stall. We found him with little difficulty inspite of the tremendous number of people in the station. The central open area of the station was for overnight accomodation, so it meant having to find a path between all the sleeping people. The driver clearly was not happy about us being late, and drove exceptionally agressively. He would swear at the people he almost ran over, and pulled manoeuvres that were obnoxious even by Indian standards. We only missed becoming the inside of a bus sandwich by the good grace of a pair of bus drivers. I had a rough idea where we were going, so I wasn't surprised when we went along Marina drive which bordered the beach. However, when the main road turned inland, we continued on Marina drive. This seemed strange, since the road was separating a slum from the beach, and we had to drive very slowly, weaving a path between sleeping goats, dogs, and people. I guessed this was a short cut. Suddenly, the driver stopped, got out of the car, and mumbled something about coming back soon and disappeared. Slowly a crowd formed around the jeep, wondering what these three white people were doing in the back of a jeep, in the middle of the slum, which is precisely what we were wondering. The crowd was quite pleasant, and people kept asking me for the time, and wanted to know where we were going. Eventually, the driver reappeared with a woman that he introduced as his wife, and drove on towards the guest house at a more reasonable pace. The guest house was quite comfortable, although the rooms were absolutely overrun with ants. The mosquito population was large, and thanks to us, well fed.

My first professional visit was to the Mathematical Sciences Institute. This is an organization that is funded by the bureau of atomic energy but is left alone to think great thoughts in Mathematical Science. There is a small group in very theoretical computer science that I was visiting. The group has grown substantially since I visited in 1990 and the institute's computer resources have increased from one PC to a half a dozen PC's and a few sun workstations. The institute has a couple of buildings separated by a court yard which contains open thatched huts with blackboards that are apparently very popular during the hot season. Behind the institute is a film studio which just put up several 10 metre tall giraffe statues which fit in perfectly with the tropical landscape if one doesn't think that carefully. Several of the members of the institute are very involved in grass roots literacy and science education work. People at the institute also seem to work very hard, often staying until late at night (which is different than the general academic work habits here). My talk was fairly well recieved, even though only one person in the audience worked in an area that was even remotely connected to what I was working on.

I did not like Madras as a city. The one thing that it really brought home to me was that living in Bangalore is very easy compared to some other areas of India. The first thing we noticed about Madras was how bad it smelt from the vast quantities of stagnant sewage in rivers and canals. Second was the tremendous number of farm animals wandering on the streets. The streets were filthy with animal and human waste. Madras is a city that continues to grow, and inspite of increased wealth at the top end, the average standard of living continues to drop. The biggest problem for Madras is the lack of water. The state spends a fortune moving water from place to place in trucks. Madras has only a small water supply which is dependant upon an unpredictable monsoon. There are proposals to build a canal to send the waters of the Ganges to S. India, but this is on par with Hickle's plan to send Alaska water to California.

The last day of our visit to Math Science coincided with the start of the Dasara festival. There seem to be festivals almost all the time, and we have very little understanding of their meaning. The festivals are very widely observed. The outward signs of Dasara were that people splashed little blobs of yellow and red paint on windows and other objects, mellons were smashed on the street (often with a little burning oil), and banana leaves were tied to doors and cars. I talked to someone afterwards and found out the Dasara is the time when you give thanks to the objects by which you make your livelihood, so that is why you put a blob of paint on your terminal or break open a mellon in front of your auto rickshaw. [American festivals, such as halloween must seem equally strange to Indians].

Our next stop was a visit to a private engineering contact, Sri Venkateswara Engineering College outside of Madras. I heard about the place indirectly through email contacts, and they were interested in having me visit to hear about the undergraduate research projects they did. Professor Venkateswaran and two students stopped by the guest house to make the arrangements for the visit, and showed up with a very large bouquet of flowers for us (which is not exactly the type of thing you need when you are trying to travel light). They wanted to take us to visit Kanchipuram, one of the seven holy Hindu cities. SVCE was about 30 miles outside of Madras on the way to Kanchipuram, so the plan was to first visit Kanchipuram, and then visit the SVCE. We were planning to visit Mahabilipuram afterwards. Travel and hotel arrangements turned out to be very difficult to make, partly because of the difficulty with the Indian phone network, and partly because phone numbers had changed since the guidebook I had was published (in many places digits have been added to increase the number of phone numbers, just yesterday Bangalore went from 6 digit to 7 digit numbers). When we left Madras we had finally made hotel arrangements, but did not have travel arrangements, we were thinking we would try to find a taxi from Madras to Mahabilipuram. However, when we told the folks from SVCE our lack of plans, they offered to drop us off Mahabilipuram, a decision I'm sure that they regretted. We drove out of Madras past the college and on to Kanchipuram. The landmark close to the college is the place where Rajiv Gandhi was blown up a few years ago. It is visible from the main road, and is now a stop for tour busses. (We didn't stop.) The engineering college is very new. However, after they built the college, they realized they didn't have a water supply so plans to make it a residential college are on hold while they develop a water supply. This means that everyone commutes for over an hour from Madras by bus.

We spent the morning visiting Kanchipuram, and in the afternoon I spent a few hours at SVCE listening to student presentations, while Nancy sat in a faculty office trying to get Casey to nap. [Nancy thought it was really unfair that I didn't even have to give a talk to receive this hospitality!] Professor Venkateswaran has for the last five years been having his undergraduate students design a parallel super computer. Although the machine will never be built, this is providing an excellent set of integrated undergraduate projects. I listened to over one dozen undergraduates describing their projects. The work was absolutely first class, and involved working with ideas from current western research papers (a certain Professor Snyder's work was very prominent.) They were doing this with very limited resources (two PC's for the project), and the students had to take a full course in addition to the project.

At the top of the Indian undergraduate education system are the IITs (Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Bombay and Madras). Admission to the IITs is through a very competative exam, and a large percentage of IIT graduates are exported. Below the IITs are the regional engineering colleges and the private engineering colleges. There is currently substantial controversy relating to the private colleges, although I have only a vague grasp on the issues. The two private colleges I have visited were very impressive in terms of students, and the one in Mysore was well equipped. Apparently, some other private colleges are run more as money making enterprises and do not provide a strong education. Many of the colleges in Karnataka have not admitted any students this year because of a fight with the state government over which students will be admitted. Many of the colleges have religous affiliations, both SVCE and SJCE have a Hindu affiliation, with Swamis presiding over the schools. I am under the impression that there are all sorts of reservation (affirmative action) and religious issues associated with the colleges that I do not understand.

I am going to send off this note, and write up something on our visits to Kanchipuram and Mahabilipuram later, since it is already almost two weeks since we returned.