At the invitation of the Minister of Education of Vietnam, I went to Hanoi for a week to talk at a workshop of  Chancelors and Vice Chancellors of Vietnameese Colleges and Universities.

Of the 200 people at the conference (including six Vietnamese and four foreign speakers),  I was really the only one that was a working researcher, and I bring a different perspective.   I also don’t have a “canned” presentation.  I described the California three tier University system and compared it (and students) to the higher education system in India.   I was useful to me to organize my thoughts.  The advantages of each are clearer to me now.

Talking with the administrators about education in Vietnam was exhilarating, but I am not going to go into that now.   Instead I am going to post some pictures from walks around back streets (when others thought I was listening to all the other speakers).  Hanoi is fascinating. My strongest memory was a dinner the Rector of Higher Education took me to in a restaurant overlooking a lake in the old French Quarter of Hanoi. I and two Vietnamese and two Japanese administrators talked and joked and ate while a woman hauntingly sang to the counterpoint of a one-string instrument whose pitch was changed by pressuring a vertical stick (literally a stick) that tensioned the string.   Towards the end of the evening they played a version that I will swear was “The Red River Valley”  (David Pederson joked that this could be a song from the cold war days when the Red River Valley would be the Mekong Delta and not a river in Texas),

One last thing and then you come to the pictures.   I have been out of town for six weeks (The seminar in Pondicherry and the workshop in Hanoi), and that is why I haven’t put up new postings.  I am leaving in a few days for a ten days back in Tamil Nadu.

Ramanujam (the Indian Mathematician) was born in Tamil Nadu. He is a legend in India (and I think the sole reason people think India has a great history of mathematicians). 

For those who don’t know who he is, Ramanujam is the the most romantic figure in the history of science. He was  clerking  in a India and developing a line of mathematics research on his own.   He sent some  results to G.H. Hardy at Oxford.   Hardy and Littlewood were mathematic’s most respected collaborators of the time.   To give a perspective,  I get several papers a year from people who claim breakthrough results –if only someone will listen to them –so they say.  The papers I get are equivalent to someone saying they have invented a perpetual motion machine.   Anyway Hardy saw something in Ramanujam’s writings, but these were written  in idiosyncratic notation and  unconventional language and style.   He brought the papers to Littlewood, and the two spent days  deciphering the writing.   The work, in fact, was genius (I don’t use that word lightly).   They brought Ramanujam to Oxford where the three made brilliant discoveries.    But Ramanujam died within a year (or two-I don’t remember) of tuberculosis in the cold of London.  (Tamil Nadu is in the tropical south of India).

Everyone in mathematics (and probably everyone in science) knows the story. Consequently the State University of Tamil Nadu (Anna University)  and IIT Madras both have commemorative lecture series on that day,  22 December.   Both have invited me to be their speaker.  They are located near each other in Chennai on the other side of the subcontinent from Mangalore.  They have gotten together and arranged a shuttle scheme for me to talk at one in the morning and at the other in the afternoon.  I then fly south to give an invited lecture at an Indian Math Society regional meeting.   My question is this.  They all offered to pay my air fare,  Can I give all three of them copies of the invoice, then charge the Fulbright administration,  and my grant and also take it off my taxes?    This is just like Max Bialystock (played by Zero Mostel), soliciting 700% of the necessary funds to produce the sure-thing failure of a play, “Spring Time For Hitler”,  in “The Producers”—only I don’t have to get rejected attempting to seduce, and then swindle, ugly women.

Week 11 (Government Hospital)

 I couldn’t decide the severity of the injuries of the people laying on the eight gurneys scattered about the reception area of the JIPMER federal government hospital outside Pondicherry. Another 40-60 people (patients, family and friends) waited between the glass entrance doors, the intake clerks occupying the openings in the back left and the hallways at the far back leading off– somewhere. Three women sat together cross legged on the floor. A mother and daughter shared a bag of chips with a man on a gurney who was holding an IV bag in one hand. Waiting people filled most of the rows of airport waiting room looking seating. The bare metal surfaces of the gurneys had the concave appearance of weathered and taughtly stretched leather. I was told that some of the occupants had serious injuries. I couldn’t tell. Most lay motionless—perhaps sleeping. They wore the clothes they arrived with. Everyone was waiting.

The doctor said his father was a mathematics professor at a college in Pondicherry. I asked, “Do you like your father?” He laughed, but kept working, “Who doesn’t like their father?”

The driver woke me at the Institute in Bangalore that morning with a 5:30 call. He was ready to begin the drive to Pondicherry. He was supposed to come at 8:00, but the 350 km drive with a stop at the three hilltop Gingee Fort could take all day, and an early start would be good. I would buy the breakfasts and lunches on the road, and we could be across the subcontinent by dark. I objected to the tourist hotel he picked for breakfast and we drove on to an open-front, dirt-floor “family restaurant”. While we ate chapatti and idyli, passengers from two busses washed their hands at the row of faucets above the metal troths in the back before they filled the stackable plastic chairs lining long tables.

The driver, in his 50s, drove from Pondicherry the day before. This morning, he frequently stopped to ask which of the unmarked roads lead to the national highway back to the East Coast. I tried to show him on the Google maps on my Blackberry or to show him my compass when he turned west or north on the roads that we needed to take east or south. But he preferred to shout up to the open windows of a truck or to a passing helmeted (but unbuckled) motorcycle driver who had his daughter cradled between his arms while his wife in a cream and blue Sawalli sat sidesaddle behind him. An answer would be given and we would separate without the American expected courtesies of gratitude. Twice he missed his turn and drove in reverse back to the turn to correct his navigation error. He would touch his chest when we passed a temple, then momentarily touch his finger tips together in a prayer position while inaudibly, repeating something. He answered his frequently ringing mobile phone– as everyone in India does—and in the U.S. for that matter. We stopped along the road side several times. Once or twice he relieved himself. I don’t know why we stopped the other times.

I am not used to the no-room-for-error driving: the one car length tailgating behind a truck, the center line straddling default driving lane, the sharing of a lanes with another vehicles, or passing in opposite directions so closely that one would be nuts to hang an arm out a window. With right hand steering, my passenger’s seat is the left front seat—the position from which we habitually monitor the road. Fewer than a 100km from Pondicherry, but before the Gingee Fort, a motorcycle approached us as we drove side-by-side with a car we were causally passing. We had been in the oncoming traffic lane for a half minute. When we crossed the one second to impact barrier (Note: vehicles travelling 45+ mph close a gap of 40 yards in a second) and my driver hadn’t reacted, the motorcycle swerved sharply, corrected to upright for an instant; and then, as its rear wheel lost traction in a fishtail skid, dropped to the pavement and dragged a rooster tail of sparks to us.

I was woozy and achy, I had hit my head, probably on the dashboard, but I was OK. I opened the door to see how standing up would feel. There was a crowd 20 meters behind the car surrounding the motorcycle wreckage. I couldn’t figure out how they got there already. My driver was there too. I don’t know how he got there either. I stood up in the 100 degree heat, held the car to steady myself, and waited for my head to feel a bit more normal before finding out what happened or seeking shade.

We had been in the right side passing lane. I don’t know how the car came to rest sideways in the dirt across two lanes to the left side. My hand came back bloody from holding my forehead. The men around me urged me to sit back down. The patterns of blood on my pants and shirt looked like the splattering of thrown cups of coffee. But I was OK.

A bystander drove me a few kilometers on the back of his motorcycle to a rural government medical center. He wore a white shirt, and I didn’t want to hold on to him while I was still dripping. A young woman medical officer ran the center. She served several such centers, but they only did first aid and emergency work. Luckily that was what I needed. She and the staff gently and thoroughly cleaned and bandaged my head. “It is deep”, she said. I would need stitches within four hours.

 The driver came by to check on me. A new car was coming. He would come back in 15 minutes, and we would go to a hospital in Pondicherry. I asked them to call Professor Indumathi who was awaiting my arrival. An hour passed. The medical center staff shared their lunches with me. My head continued to bleed through the bandages (as head wounds do) making the injuries look more severe than they felt.

A thin women in her late 80s put her hands together and moved her head side to side as she stood looking at me and speaking in Tamil. As the doctor dabbed the blood flowing towards my eye, she quietly and matter-of-factly interpreted, “the woman is worried for you”. The older woman took my hand in hers and held it. It was comforting, but I was receiving more attention than I deserved. I took a good hit, but I would be fine in a few days.

Another hour passed. The doctor’s father walked me to the police station a half kilometer away. My driver was now wearing a bandage on his lip. No one remembered an injury. He was engaged in an animated discussion. No one asked me what happened, and Indumathi told me later that there would be no investigation. In India a four wheeler crashing with a two wheeler is at fault: no law suit, no investigation, and no lengthy delay. But she said, “Both will end up paying.”

The new car and driver had arrived, but we waited for someone from the company to come. I walked around the crashed car for the first time. It was totaled. My side, the front left was the crash area. The fender was folded down to the wheel, the axel broken, and the hood was crumpled to the windshield. The windshield shattered in a concentric circle pattern as if a cinderblock had dropped on the glass—only the impact was outward from the inside the car. If I had gloves, I could have grabbed the upper-left corner where the windshield had separated from the car body, and pulled the shattered glass free of the car frame as if I were ripping insect screening from a window frame.

It was well more than four hours when the intake person—who turned out to be a doctor—asked rhetorically, “Who doesn’t like his father?” The good news he said is that “The wound is very deep and still bleeding: so we are still in time”. Very few people here have health insurance. The government hospitals are free and their quality has a good reputation, but they are far overcrowded. They have decent equipment; but doctors’ salaries, half that of the private hospitals. There are stories of patients and families living on the streets in front of government hospitals waiting to be seen while private hospital workers induce them to come to the private ones. The stories continue to tell of patients who accept the offers only to have botched treatments. A young surgery resident I met at the guest house told me that at his hospital they start the day deciding which incoming patients get beds and which lie on the floor.

 I am fine. In fact, I realized some benefits from the crash. I get to buy new sunglasses. People who invited me are trying to make it up to me (although they have no responsibility what so ever for the crash), and then there is this other incident. Half way into the drive to the Government hospital, the replacement driver stopped at a market with a few tables to get some water. I stayed outside since my shirt and pants were stained with dried blood. I sat on the ground with my back against a wall; took off the ball cap I wore to hide the bandages; emptied my pockets into the cap; closed my eyes, and tilted my head back to face the comforting warmth of the 95 degree heat from the sun. I was startled awake by a passing shadow, I put my hand up to block the sun and squinted to see a silhouetted women drop a coin in my ball cap. “Oh lady, Thanks”, I laughed, “I’m fine. We just stopped for water. We had a car accident, and I’m on my way to the hospital in Pondicherry to check things out. I’m an American.” She stopped for a moment, walked back and dropped another coin in the hat. She turned to her husband and in a British accent told him, “Poor thing. He tried to say something in English, but his accent is so bad; I could only make out something about money to the hospital, and then he mistook for an American. That part was embarrassing.” I looked in the hat for a moment: then looked up and said, “Hey lady, what the fuck is this? This is only five rupees. I almost lost my eye here. What am I supposed to do with five rupees?”

Everything is recovering quickly and as predicted. Moreover, I have had a tour of the medical system. I have been to five medical facilities (both private and government), and have been seen by nine doctors including a neurologist, eye specialist, and plastic surgeon. I have had a CT scan; nine stitches in the shape of three widely spaced fork prongs (from the center of my eyebrow around the eye socket to below my eye level), and I have had special eye exams. My doctors have been attentive, easy to engage, concerned and confidence invoking. So far the bills, including medicines, are less than a few hundred dollars. Like the American medical delivery system, this one is far from perfect, but it has strengths. I am particularly grateful to Professor Indumathi who arranged the appointments, schedules, and transportation. Who checked on doctors, and hospitals and purchased medicines and who stayed with me to be a second listener to doctor’s instructions. I had no stress from logistics. I do not underestimate the recuperative and emotional value of that benefit.

Other than that, the drive from Bangalore to Tamil Nadu was beautiful and uneventful.

Mangalore was carved out of a tropical jungle on the coast of the Arabian Sea in the state of Karnataka in the southwest of India. It is backed by the Western Ghats a mountain range with one of the world’s magnificient biodiversity environments. Armed soldiers on the road in the passages through the Ghats manually move the metal road barriers after peering in our cars looking for smuggled monkeys, snakes, birds and maybe other items that make headlines. Mangalore is a port from the early trading days, when the monsoons cut the sailing times from Europe, around Africa, to India. They export coffee, cashews, and grow rice–lots of rice. They tell me that the Mangalore region is also getting a reputation as an educated community with a few high tech companies, the University and over a hundred colleges. Mangalore is between the beaches of Goa and the National Parks in Karala. It is not on the way to anything.

Professor Bhatta wrote that two research scholars (Shiju George and H.S. Ramananda) would recognize me at the airport because, on the internet, they had watched a TV show I did on “Calculus and the Art of Bicycle Racing”. But I was the only westerner on a full 737 from Mumbai to Mangalore, and I was about as difficult to identify as a zebra in a band of horses.

Shiju and Ramananda cajoled my two large bags into the trunk of the rented Ambassador—which looks like the elegant scion of a 1955 round-fendered Mercedes 220 and a 1955 Nash Rambler– but older. One bag, a wheeled hard-case measuring 26×26×10 inches-–exactly the airplane legal baggage 62 inch sum– holds a 60 cm titanium bicycle that I have ridden in over a 200 races. The smaller bag—a wheeled duffel—has books, papers, clothes, and with, I hope, enough miscellanea for a six month stay as a Fulbright Scholar with the Mathematics Department of Mangalore University.

Two years ago I was invited to the Centenary Meeting of the Indian Mathematical Society. For two months, I traveled, mainly in the north, at the invitations of conferences and Universities in India. When I left, I thought that if I were to come back, I would need three things: an opportunity to work on my mathematics, a primary base location with a room in which I felt comfortable, and my bicycle.

The 30 kilometer drive from the airport takes us over broken sections of good pavement, over cobbled roads, dirt sections and around construction crews. We also pass coconut and banana trees, and lush moist ferns, and hanging plants and banyan trees. We skirted puddles from the morning rains, all the while beeped our horn. I don’t see any bikes– not bikes carrying petroleum tanks, or caged chickens, or a family of three, or rickshaws or any of the millions (literally) of bicycles I saw in Delhi.

The monsoon rains usually last into September. I have heard stories of three feet of rain in 24 hours. The floods regularly disable cities. But on the coast the monsoon also cools the air below 100º. The monsoon came late again this year. Since July, the rainfall has been near average but the total is low: some areas, such as near Mumbai, are 40% below average; and the country might be down 25%, a decrease that usually precedes drought. (Added during the first week of October: After a dry August the rains came back in September, but it was too late. Most of the crops died in the field. The rains turned heavy in Karnataka, but still none fell in the north of India. The first days of October brought torrential rains in the north of the state with a death toll now over 200. There are pictures of people in chest deep water and others in trees. There are bridges torn away and towns isolated. There is no high ground in the northern plains of the state for people to escape or for the military helicopters to retrieve stranded people),

My room is minimal, but livable. It is over 300 sq feet. It has hot water; a ceiling fans (to disorient the mosquitoes), a western toilet; a metal cabinet stabilized by propping one leg on folded newspaper and with “Liquor not permitted” written on the door; and an entrance door with three bolts inside and a padlocking bolt outside; a half dozen barred windows screened with a mosquito netting that Velcros to the wall; and a pair of just-passably-narrow metal and glass French doors that open over lush tropical vegetation. There are lightbulbs in two of the four fixtures, there is a locking metal compartment in the cabinet, but it is locked and no one knows where the key is. There is a lounge with a TV and with sofas that provide a choice of setting high in the center part over the sprung coils or low on the sides where the springs are sprung. I go there most mornings and evenings to read “The Hindu” do a Sudoku and watch an English language broadcast from Japan. When desperate, I have watched Cricket.

Students haven’t arrived yet and during my first three days, I meet the other faculty members, ensconce in an office, and gradually widen the spiral of recognizable places. I still haven’t seen a westerner, an adult on a bicycle, anyone running, an adult man in shorts or in a tee-shirt or with a baseball cap; or for that matter, an elephant, a tiger or a cobra.

(All photos are local.  Most were taken on bike rides.)

Immersion of a Goddess Effigy (Week Eight)

We drove the 110 miles down from Kuvempu University, high in the Western Ghats, to arrive back at the Mangalore University Guest House in a little under eight hours.   After a lunch, a short jog and a nap, I took my backpack and, as the afternoon cooled down, I walked (as I often do), to the cluster of stalls and fruit stands a kilometer north of the campus.  They know me there now—actually most people on the way do—and I always buy about the same thing: a kg of Mysore bananas, maybe some minosas (an orange like fruit) maybe grapes, maybe pomegranates. There isn’t that much choice for me.   I can walk to at least a half dozen stalls and they are almost identical.  I don’t understand how this market economy works.   Besides the fruit, there are dozens of varieties of what appear to be either fried and salty items (occupying the place of potato chips for the U.S.) or sweets.

I watched a man squatted on the ground in front of the stalls who was selling fish spread across a green plastic tarp in front of him. Between shooing flies he sells the six inch fish in small black plastic bags.  The river (The Netravati) is about five miles north of here, and I wonder if he is one of the fishermen, and how he got here, and when the fish were caught.

I walk back on a red dirt path alongside the road and stop for a few minutes to watch the boys playing Cricket in the empty field.  They pile stones behind the batsman for a wicket.  Usually they call to me and ask me to play.  This time they only wave.

At the end of the field a dozen college age men are handing out literature.  They are dressed in white and orange.  The flyer is written in Kannada script, and they begin to explain when a man (also in white and orange) on a Vespa pulls up to us,  and says to me. “Get on”.  We drive down the plateau towards the rice paddies until we pull into a small Hindu temple.   He explains that this evening is the last day of a festival for a deity of knowledge and new beginnings that is celebrated by the people of this temple.  A life-size mud effigy of the goddess is in the back of the temple and as the evening turns to night the figure will be transported in a procession from the temple to a pool where the effigy will be lowered into the water, dissolved and returned to mud.  They give me a bag of food items that the priest has blessed and I am invited to take part in the procession—in fact, implored to take part.

Some dancers are wearing costumes that make them into nine foot tall figures.  A man and a woman each wear a wire and paper figure of a horse that, when they dance, appears to be two people riding horses.   My favorite is a woman in a more traditional Indian dance dress who wears a seven foot high headpiece. She could be fifty (she could be 30). Her face has  hard edged angular features (I’ll include some pictures). After ceremonies, the goddess effigy is loaded onto a float on a truck and the procession follows the wild spinning and sharp energetic movements of the dancers while a half dozen drummers bang away and what I am sure is a rhythm.   There are a hundred of us at the start from ten year old children to –well to old people like me.  The mood is festive and lively and everyone chatters above the din.  People crowd around me to make sure I am OK.  The man who brought me comes back regularly to check that I am doing OK.  He tells me several times that I can get in the float vehicle.   It is a kilometer or two down a steep jungle path to the pool and I need to consider my age.   I assure him that I am OK, but that I will take his offer if I get tired.  The path is steep and descends into the jungle night with the way lit by small candle like flames on banana leaves placed along the side of the path.   At a few points there are tables of food.  Those around me are pleased that I take– and like –the offerings. There is constantly a crowd around me,  and the daughter of the man with Vespa tells me that everyone likes me and is pleased that I am in the procession.  One of the drummers gives me his drum and I join the group until I expect they realize that I don’t get the beat.

We arrive at the water’s edge before midnight.   Out into a pool in the rice paddies, they have built a wood platform with an open center into which they will lower the goddess.   The pool is 20 meters across and –they say –ten meters deep.  Some of the local rice farmers are squatting along the two accessible edges of the pool, and the Vespa guardian goes to ask them if they can make room for me to see the immersion.    He talks to them for awhile in Tulu (although Kannada is the official language of Karnataka, only the better educated (and maybe higher caste?) people in the Mangalore region speak it as their first language).  He comes back to me and says. “Have you been here before?”   “Oh yes,” I say, “but not at night.  I barely recognize where I am”.     “These rice farmers,” he says, “They all say that they are your friends, that you run and ride a bicycle down these paths, and that they all know you.”   “Oh I only know them well enough to say ‘very fine, thank you’ when they call out ‘how are you?’ as I go by.”    The farmers squeeze together and make room for me.  They all squat.  I really can’t do that and one of the farmers finds a place and way for me to sit on the levee around the rice paddy.

The immersion ceremony is prefaced with floating flames on leaves out into the pool.  The night and the water are calm.  The flames are lit and with gentle sweeps of a hand the leaves are floated out into the pool. It takes a half dozen men to lower the goddess in the water,  and bubbles rise from the pool for the half hour before we hike back up the trails in the dark.

Dan

Daniel Wulbert, Fulbright Scholar, Mathematics,  Mangalore University,   Karnataka, India