Mysore

We spent the weekend in Mysore. The official reason for the trip was for me to give a couple of lectures at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, although we were also interested in seeing a number of the tourist sites around Mysore. Mysore is about 80 miles from Bangalore, so the trip was a relatively easy two and a half hour train ride. [This was the fast, non-stop train, the Tippu Express]. We booked seats in the only AC car on the train which meant that we were travelling in the "business section". This car was comparable to Amtrak or a European train car. The remainder of the train was second class reserved, which provided benches with slightly less sitting area. It would have been okay for us to travel in the second class section and would have made for a more interesting trip. The only worry I would have had is that the exterior doors were generally open, so it would not have been safe for Casey to run around. Second class unreserved is reputed to be impossibly crowded.

When we arrived, we fought our way through the porters to the front of the station, hoping to meet the representatives of the college. I had made arrangements over the phone with them, and had left a message giving our arrival time. However, my luck with the telephone has been sufficiently poor that I was somewhat worried. We did not know what the arrangements were for our accomodation. Nancy and Casey sat down with the bags and I went off to find a phone, but was only able to leave another message. All this time both Nancy and I were under a barrage of people offering us Hotel rooms, sightseeing tours or rides in their Taxi/Auto/Horse Cart. I was really wishing that I knew the Kannada equivalent of "get lost" (or some other more explicit phrase). One particularly annoying auto driver was following me, showing me the phone, telling me the office would be closed, wanting to take us sight seeing, get us a hotel room and so on. I must have said "not interested" to him at least fifty times in five minutes. Finally, a jeep from the college showed up and took us out of the clutches of the railway stations touts. They took us to the guest house, and then I spent an hour at the department while Casey got a ride around campus on a motor scooter. We went out for dinner with two of the professors and had a south Indian "thali" dinner. This is served on a big metal plate with little metal dishes of curries and such. We had previously been completely perplexed as to how to eat such a meal, so it was convenient to watch people who knew what they were doing. (The meal is eaten by first using bread to scoop out the curries, and then pouring the remainder of the curries over rice which is eaten with one's fingers. The one faux pas that we had made in the past was to eat bread and rice at the same time (and to do something as crude as to scoop up rice with a chapati!).) Thali meals are generally "all-you-can-eat", with the bowls refilled immediately after they are emptied.

Mysore Zoo

The next morning we planned to go to the Mysore zoo. Although we had heard good things about the zoo, we were skeptical since the other zoos we had seen in India did not have the animals in particularly good facilities. However, the Mysore zoo was great! The animals generally had very spacious quarters and looked like they were well cared for. There was a large variety of animals, including Rhinos, giraffes, hippos, gorillas, and even a few animals that were native to India. The zoo also had a collection of birds, with a big cage full of pigeons with monkeys playing around outside the cage. The zoo was just slightly run down. The animals were not as well separated from the people as at a US zoo such as Woodland park. Animals such as camels would lean over the fence meet the patrons. There were a number of signs aimed at making sure the zoo goers behaved themselves. One I particularly liked was infront of the gorilla cage: "Do not throw rocks at the gorillas, they will return the objects with greater velocity, causing injury". Of course, for many of the zoos visitors, Casey was the most interesting and exotic creature, and he starred in many photos. Most of the photo ops went just fine (with Casey pouting), the only one that got out of hand was when he got cornered by a busload of school girls. [Western tourists are a very small minority of tourists in India - the bulk of tourism is done by Indians, travelling in bus tours. The bus tours seem to try to fit in many different sites, so they will have whirlwind visits. One popular destination on South India tours is Tirupathi temple, where one stands in line for many hours to get the special blessing, and then gets one's head shaved. Tours with many bald men, women, and children have just been to Tirupathi. We are planning to leave that destination off of our list.] After the zoo we set up the car rental for the next day and had lunch at cheap restaurant (under 25 cents a person qualifies as cheap.) When we were looking for an auto back the guy who had been an absolute pest at the train station showed up, and quoted us a reasonable sounding fare back to the University. He told me that he could have given me a much better deal on the car rental if we had asked him first. When we got to the guest house, he said he was confused about the campus we were going to and wanted more money (although we had agreed on something that was greater than the meter, which he had left on). He basically admitted that he was a crook (but an honest crook).

I spent the afternoon at the college. I knew very little about the place when I arranged the visit. It is a mostly public engineering college, that ranks below the IITs and the Regional Engineering College. I was impressed by the quality of the facilities, and later by the students. They wanted me to give a couple of lectures, consecutively. I had one set of transparencies that I hadn't looked at since Delhi, so I decided to give the semi-prepared talk first, and then to make something up about parallel computation for the second lecture. I was sufficiently desparate that I resorted to the gambit of wearing a tie, which seems to be a reasonable substitute for having something worthwhile to say. When I entered the room, everyone stood up and then I got a round of applause before I started to speak. The audience was about 150 people at the start of the talk. The first talk on N-body simulation went well with plenty of head shaking (which sometimes is a gesture of understanding) and only a few bizarre questions, such as "what does this have to do with fractals". After the talk, I was promised a break between lectures, but a large number of students came up to the podium and asked very good questions. The second talk also went very well, in spite of the lack of preparation, and again only drew a few bizarre questions, such as: "what does this have to do with the brain". I spent about twenty or thirty minutes after the talk with the students who came up to the podium, and was absolutely impressed with them. One student had written up a two page project proposal based upon my first talk, and wanted to know if it was a reasonable idea. This really was one of the best audiences I have spoken to - they even laughed at my jokes.

Somnathpur Temple

We had Saturday free, so we decided to go to Somnathpur temple. This is a 13th century temple, located about 25 miles from Mysore. We arranged to have a car take us there, so the trip started with a very pleasant drive through the lush country side. The temple is just outside of a small village and does not have the trappings of a major tourist site. We took off our shoes, paid our three cents, and went inside. The temple is a fairly low building covered with elaborate carving. Casey loved the place. The base of the temple was encircled by small elephants, each maybe two and a half feet high, so Casey proceeded to sit on every one. He then started running around the raised platform supporting the temple, and ran constantly for the next hour and a half. The carving on the temple was absolutely spectacular, although I did not have a chance to look at it carefully. The temple grounds were very quiet, except when bus tours would arrive, and then fifty people would show up, take a quick walk round, and leave. One tour of about seventy school girls from Madras showed up, and they all immediately took to Casey. Several of them started stalking Casey to take his picture, and he started running against the crowd to get away and ended up getting very frightened. I rescued Casey, and he went off to climb on another area of the temple. The girls then regrouped around him, and one had the bright idea of giving him candy, which worked perfectly, since he sat down to eat it, and they got their pictures. At that point all of the girls got candies out of their handbags and gave them to him, so he ended up with this big handful of breathmints, cough drops, and throat lozenges. The tour finally left, and Casey ran around the temple another twentyfive times and we headed back to Mysore. We had lunch at a not too great restaurant in a nice hotel. The only anecdote worth reporting is that Casey was quite bored, so I took him out to the lobby. He immediately saw a group of young men outside with motorcycles and insisted on going outside to see the "motorcycle-guys". We went outside and he ran up to these Indian James Deans, and he was immediately taken for several rides around the parking lot on their motorcycles.

On Sunday the we were to take the train back to Bangalore. This began with the typical auto rickshaw hassle with the driver demanding additional fare after we arrived at the station. Since another customer was already in his auto when we were arguing about money, he couldn't claim he was going to return empty. I had hoped that the other customer would translate the reason why the driver needed more money, but he just confirmed that the driver expected more. However, he then told me that the train had been cancelled because of a derailment. To verify this I went to several ticket windows and was then refered to the reservation office at the other end of the building. They would not say that the train was cancelled, just that its leaving time was indefinite. After visiting several more windows, filling out a form, and standing in line for an hour, we had the refund for our tickets. [The reservation process is computerized, and much to my surprise they had a backup power supply, so when the power went off they were able to continue working.] At one point it looked like we could get a ride in a Taxi back to Bangalore, but that fell through, so we had to take a bus back home. There was a private bus waiting which took us to the bus station, and then transfered us to another private bus. (For this service, we were again hit up for baksheesh.) The bus company employed about a dozen men to stand outside the bus and shout Bangalore-Bangalore-Bangalore, and also seemed to employ another half-dozen men to sit up in the cab. We waited for the bus to fill up and had a steady stream of fruit sellers and peanut sellers coming up to the bus window. When the bus left town it went on a tour of the rice paddies around town on dirt roads instead of going directly to the highway - I have absolutely no explanation for this, but it was a pleasant drive. When we got out to the highway, a man who was standing in the aisle started talking very loudly. At first he sounded like a conductor who was listing the twenty intermediate stops. Next an associate of his got out suitcase and gave him a piece of fabric which he started showing around, and then he started taking bids - the bus provided a fabric auction! Utterly bizzare. This went on for about forty five minutes - unsuccessful bidders got small gifts which encouraged them to bid on future pieces. The bus stopped at a small town, and the auction gang left, presumably to conduct an auction on a bus back to Mysore. A handful of rupees passed from the auctioneer to the bus conductor. The bus picked up additional passengers and eventually stopped so that the men could get out and pee on the side of the road. Casey took advantage of stop to go up to the front of the bus and visit the sheep that was on its way to Bangalore. A little further down the road, the driver was able to find a large group of passengers to pick up, so that the aisle was completely packed with people. The drive was delayed slightly when we had to stop for a motorcade for the "great leader of Karnataka" who was out trying to rally support of the faithful. We had passed a forty foot tall billboard earlier, featuring him looking out and waving at the highway. From everything that I can gather, state politics in India is really at the bottom of the barrel. We eventually arrived home, very dirty, and partially deaf. Although busses appear very reckless, riding inside the bus does not convey this feeling, because there is no view of the road ahead. However, I am sure that this is just a false sense of security.