Two Days in Delhi

I have been wanting to write this even since I got back to MIT from India in the end of July. But somehow I never got the time. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving - an American festival (or "holiday" if you so prefer) and we have a long weekend. I cannot resist the temptation of making a comment that American festivals are few and far between. In India, you have a festival almost every two weeks ! So you get used to getting days off.

I started from home early. Caught the morning Shatabdi (the name of an express train) to New Delhi. This train, which is the fastest in India, takes about 3 hours to cover the 250 km distance. It was raining. It wasn't a strong rain - and you would probably not be surprised that even minor glitches like this can cause major delays in India. A ~30 year old guy was sitting next to me in the train. I don't know why but he asked me where I was going. New Delhi - IIT. Next obvious question, "Do you study there ?" "No, I used to." "What happened ?" "I left IIT. I was in Computer Science, I did not like it, so I switched to Physics." I did not want to add MIT into the game. "It seems like you don't study - just like me. You'll always stay behind." Weird. Well, that is the stereotypical answer you can expect if you are not doing some sort of engineering - even if that happens to be from a one room college in the middle of a sugar-cane farm in Punjab.

Anyways, I have gotten used to such people and don't care anymore. I arrived at the New Delhi railway station at noon, two hours behind schedule. Next obvious adventure - getting an auto. I was in no mood to bargain, so I went straight to the pre-paid auto-rickshaw/taxi booth run by the Delhi Police. I was in queue - thankfully not too far behind the ticket-window. Now, you must understand that queues in India do not look like a line - they look more like a huddle - near the window. Suddenly, a gigantic blob of skin came up and pushed its way upto the front of the queue. It was the hardcore-fat-desi-ready-to-fight aunty trying to make use of her feminine-ness to barge herself all the way to the front. I double-checked: there was no special line for women. When the lady in front of me finished, this skin-blob tried to get her hand inside the ticket-window and push money in before me. I told her to move away. She did not. I took her hand and shoved it away. She started pushing me. I pushed her out of the line. She started bad mouthing me, "You are the son of a very decent family." Whatever. The person behind me said, "Don't worry Aunty. You can go after him, before me." Stupid idiot. Anyways, I did not stop to see whether the person behind me actually kept his word.

The auto-rickshaw ride to IIT was relatively pain-free except hold-ups in the Green Park market due to intensive construction work of the Delhi Metro - frantic bids to get the city in shape before the 2010 Commonwealth games - which, to me, seem to be heading towards a disaster. I arrived at IIT, stopped the auto right in front of the side entrance to the main building and went straight to the wind-tunnel.

The wind-tunnel, or wind-t for short is a favorite hangout place for IITD students between lectures and during lunch time. It is a passage-way essentially, with a roof being the first floor of the main building - and due to the buildings and God knows what, there is a steady current of air inside there, hence the name.

I met up with random people there - most of my Computer Science class-fellows. Rahul, Anshul, Bharath, Navneet, Shantanu, Varun, almost everyone. Then I went with Kashish and Shantanu for a lunch at Rainbows - a restaurant in the market opposite the IITD main gate.

We came back and I went to visit some professors. Went to VK Tripathi first, then Kurur, and the Ajit Kumar. Can't remember anything special about the conversations I had with them, but the warmth with which everybody greeted me was so touching. They are professors in a prestigious institute - could I imagine an MIT professor doing that. Probably not. Well, part of it also has to do with general culture in the two places, but that topic is for another day. The essence of the experience was that one can form these deep bonds with people - with friends, with faculty - that you feel at home. There was still the sense of belonging, a deep attachment, a feeling that spoke out loud - "We care, We remember".

Ajit Kumar took me for tea downstairs to the coffee shop beneath the library building. (The Nescafe outlets - the one besides "Holistic" (also a food shop), and the one near Vindhyanchal hostel no longer existed due to an expired contract.) As we were going towards the coffee shop from the main building, I ran into Priyanka - who had to return me my plug converter - which she had used over the summer while she was at MIT and forgot to return it before she left. She had been looking for me all day, but I had no cellphone - so she could not contact me.

There were CS professors having coffee at the coffee shop too. There was S. Arun-Kumar and Subhashis Bannerjee - had a brief chat. They asked me to stop by the department. Then I went to Barista with Priyanka - talked about random things - MIT, her upcoming exchange semester in Vancouver, et. al. Then there was the usual squabble over money - who pays? We split it evenly at the end.

Then I went over to Bharati building - which houses the Computer Science department. Chatted with Suban for a while. SSen dropped by and chatted. Kolin Paul, SAK and Naveen Garg were also seen in the corridor. We talked about the IITD CS curriculum, how it differed from MIT and what changes should be made in the IIT system.

Then I went over to Satpura - to Kashish's room. Later went to Jwala - to order pizza with my hostel mates. We ordered Domino's - Mazzy (my room mate when I was there) gobbling up his three loaves of garlic bread with cheese dip. After the pizza came the time for drinks - went over to the new student canteen which came up after KLS stopped operating after my first year. I remember being miserable for food in my second year because of that missing canteen.

Then we went back to Satpura and listened to some music - classical of course, when the legends are together.

Ankur came in the morning and we went to Connaught Place. We had a couple of beverages at the restaurant called Legend of Connaught. Then we went over to the New Book Depot in CP on the Inner Circle, where I bought Mankiw's economics textbooks. I wanted to visit Twinkle - my cousin who is in 12th grade taking tuition for Medical school entrance exams in Delhi. I wanted to take the Metro to her place. I made multiple calls but her host family was away - having locked her in the house (this is by no means a bad thing ). Somehow the scheduling did not work.

Came back to IIT, went to Barista with Ankur. Made multiple calls to AT - he was away somewhere and was coming back to IIT. Finally he said we could meet - Ankur left. Then I went and chatted with AT at his office. In the middle, I had to leave to bug the IITD Director for my scholarships issue - 13000 rupees from NCERT to me, lying in the coffers of IITD due to their stupid, mindless, horrible rules. Went back to AT's office - Kashish was there. There was also a random guy in his office who had apparently failed a lot of classes and was struggling to keep up. AT was giving advice in his usual but unique and mildly humorous way.

Then the three of us sat under the library building, drinking tea and chatting about random things. He dropped us in his car at Jwalamukhi hostel. I went to meet Bharati Puri - her husband was also at home. It was nice to see her. Then Varun, Kashish and I went to Priya (a multiplex with a cinema and food outlets) to have food. When we came back I went to Vindy to see Ashish. I slept in his room for a while. Then went back to Satpura - packed my stuff, and sat in Shantanu's room for a while. I was walking back to Vindy with my stuff when Papa called to day that they were there at IITD. So I called Ashish and went straight to Jwala - where Ravneet had booked us the visitor room for the four odd hours we had. Everybody was in the Jwala visitor room for a while - talking. Then people left. I slept for a while. Woke up in the morning. Bathed. Departed for the airport. ~24 hours later I was in JFK.

It was funny how hectic those two two days were. Yet so enjoyable. Meeting everyone - getting to know that people care for you. They want to spend time with you - taking out time from their schedules. Here in the US, everyone is on his own. People run about, doing their tasks to inordinate perfection, but what is lacking is that spirit of being connected - to one another, to folks, to teachers, to friends. Why did I always have people around me those two days ? Were they not in the middle of a semester and had crazy amount of work ?

I struggle to find the right mix of India and the US, the east and the west. This is a gigantic question, and extremely important. Hope I can find a way to preserve those qualities that I inculcated back home while I live here at MIT.