Pat

I’m not sure if I’d prepared this as an answer to a potential interview question but if I were asked if there was one part of my life which I’d’ve chosen to live differently, I’d probably pick my four years at IIT Madras. In many respects, it represents some kind of a void in my life. Nothing much of note happened during that. It was during that time that I learnt to put NED. There wasn’t much value added to my life in those four years, either in terms of actual value or even in terms of bullet points. There was not much “growth” in those years.

I did nothing of note in terms of academics (I ended up as class median) and apart from a bit of quizing not much in the lit scene either. I didn’t go out on too many trips, nor did I go out too much. You might be surprised to know that I’ve never in my life watched a movie at a movie hall in Chennai! I went to Besant Nagar beach thrice during my four year stay, and to the Marina Beach once. I played only a peripheral role in organizing Saarang and Shaastra, and that too only in the latter half of my stay there.

On several occasions I’ve asked myself what kept me going through those four years that I consider to be my “dark days”, and the only reasonable answer that I get is “pat”. Pat. Sri Gurunath Patisserie. The coffee shop of IIT. The life and blood of my life at IIT. Perhaps the only thing I really missed about IIT when I moved to IIMB. The venue for much discussion, and fun, and bitchery, and long nights. Open air. Bad chairs. Broken tables. Non-existtent umbrellas. Breeze. Cheap and horrible nescafe. 5 Rupis lemonade. Etecetera.

When bitching about my life at IIT, I usually lay most of the blame on the fact that I was put in a mostly PG hostel. However, one advantage of being in Marnad was that it was right opposite Patisserie, and so it took little effort to go park there. I suppose it was no coincidence that the most prolific Pat-ers (Bhaand, Shamnath and I) were all Narmadites.

It was really simple. All that one had to do when bored was to walk across and go buy yourself a cup of Nescafe for 5 rupis. And park. If you found an interesting gumbal, you would park with them. If not you would park alone, and an interesting enough gumbal would build up around you as time went by. People kept coming and people kept going but the conversation would go on for a while. And some time in the middle, Satcho would materialize and molest Mani, the dog that had been much fattened on the Patisserie leftovers.

It was at the Patisserie that the editors of The Fourth Estate would meet the correspondents and collect ideas for bitchy stories. It was at the Patisserie that plots were hatched to bring down The Fourth Estate and start the rival (shortlived) Total Perspective Vortex. It was at the Patisserie that campus couples announced themselves (though after a while action in this regard moved to “spot” near the girls’ hostel). It was at Patisserie that cheap treats were given and cheap bets were settled.

It was at the Patisserie that I first started making Pertinent Observations, and telling them to people around me. When I didn’t have access to Patisserie any more, I started this blog.

Earlier, when people told me about the crazy things they’d done in their undergrad and all the fun they had, I’d feel bad. I’d feel bad that I’d missed out on something. Now I just ask myself if I’d’ve traded my sessions at the Patisserie for the “fun” things that they’d done. And the answer, usually, is no.

Flower Sellers

If you have ever been to Church Street in Bangalore, you would have come across this girl. It is extremely hard to miss her, and it is likely that she has pestered you at least once in your life. She was little the first time I saw her, but I happened to come across her recently, and she seems to have grown up now.

She is a fair girl, with a pleasant face. Her hair is usually tied up in two plaits, and whenever I have seen her, she is wearing this woollen pullover over her salwar. Her job is to sell flowers, red roses to be precise. And the first time I happened to see her was four summers ago, when I was walking down Church Street with a girl to whom I hoped to give red roses. And as her profession warrants, she was trying to sell us a red rose.

The worst insult you can give to a street vendor is to turn them into a beggar. Hawking on the streets is respectable business, it is a signal that you are willing to work for your living and don’t want to be shown pity. It is another matter that most street vendors don’t really get this and literally beg you to buy their product. Nevertheless, they do get extremely offended if you were to treat them like you would treat a beggar. That fundamental difference is there.

My companion on that day hadn’t wanted the flowers, not even if I were to gift them to her as a token of love. The flower seller, however, wouldn’t go away. Maybe she had figured that marketing to couples was an extremely profitable strategy, and didn’t want to let go of this opportunity. My companion had proceeded to pull out twenty rupees and give them to the vendor, asking her to keep it and not give her any flowers. Incensed at being treated like a beggar, the poor flower seller had run away. I don’t know if something snapped in me at that moment, but we broke up under inexplicable circumstances a couple of hours later.

Cut the scene forward by three years, three months and three days, and change the venue of the scene to Gandhi Bazaar in South Bangalore. It was a different vendor this time, and she was selling jasmine on strings. It was dark, and her face was dark, so I don’t really think I’ll recognize her if I see her another time. It was late in the evening so her stock of jasmine was almost over, and she was trying to get rid of whatever was left.

I was meeting this girl (not the vendor) for the first time that day, and her reaction was swift. “I’ll buy some for my mum”, she declared and quickly cleared the vendor’s stock. My mind quickly went back to that day on Church Street three years, three months and three days earlier.

Louis, I thought, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Swarovski Earrings

On Friday evening I tweeted:

Louis philippe best white shirt – rs X1
Swarovski crystal earrings – rs X2
Dinner at taj west end – rs X3
Proposal accepted – priceless

Now I must confess that there was a lie. Which I tried to mask by using variables for the various values. Of course, at the time of tweeting this, I didn’t know the value of X3; though I figured it out an hour later. The value of X1 is well known. The lie was in the X2 bit. The thing is I don’t know. Because the Swarovski crystal earrings weren’t bought; they were won.

Back in 2000 when I entered IIT Madras, I started doing extremely bad in quizzes there. It took me a long while to get adjusted to the format there (long questions, all-night quizzes… ) and a lot of stuff that got asked there was about stuff that I didn’t care much about so I didn’t really bother doing well. There’s this old joke that every IITM quiz should start and end with a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) question with two more LOTR questions in the middle, and all this is only in one half of the quiz.

In my first year there, there was also the additional problem of finding good people to quiz with. You invariably ended up going with someone either from your hostel or your class who might have attended their school trials for the Bournvita Quiz Contest, or sometimes quizzers you know from Bangalore. Still, the lack of a settled team meant that there was a cap on how well one could do. All through first year, I didn’t qualify in a single quiz, neither in Madras nor when I came home to Bangalore.

Second year was marginally different. There was still no settled team but the format wasn’t strange any more. And quizzes had started to get a little more general and less esoteric. I had started to qualify, or just miss qualification, in some quizzes. And around this time, while struggling with VLSI circuits and being accused by the Prof of being potential WTC Bombers (this was a few days after 9/11) I heard God and Ranga talk about some Dakshinachitra where they had qualified for the finals.

So Dakshinachitra is this heritage center on East Coast Road and they had been conducting an India Quiz. It was a strange format – three rounds of prelims with two teams (of two people) qualifying from each round. God and Ranga had gone for the first round of prelims and had sailed through. They had told me the competition hadn’t been too tough and so the following week Droopy and I headed out, taking some random local bus to the place.

We too made it peacefully to the finals and then found that it had turned out to be an all-IIT finals. However, they refused to shift the venue of the finals to the IIT campus and so all of us had to brave the Saturday afternoonMadras sun and head out again to the place. Thankfully this time they’d organized a bus from somewhere close to IIT.

I don’t remember too much of the finals apart from the fact that there was a buzzer round with extremely high stakes, in which Droopy and I did rather well. I remember one question in the buzzer round being cancelled because an audience member shouted out the answer. I remember there was this fraud-max specialist round where we were quizzed on a topic we’d picked beforehand. Thankfully the stakes there weren’t too high. It wasn’t a great quiz by general quizzing standards but what mattered was we won, marginally ahead of God and Ranga in a close finish.

The next morning Droopy and I appeard in the supplement pages of the New Indian Express, holding this huge winner’s certificate with Air India’s name on it (they took back that certificate as soon as the photo was taken). We were promised one return ticket each by Air India to any destination in some really limited list, but somehow they frauded on it and we could never fly. God and Ranga got a holiday each in some resort, and I don’t think they took that, too.

There were a lot of random things as prizes. There were some random old music CDs. Maybe some movie CDs too. I remember God and Ranga getting saris (god (not God, maybe God also) knows what they did with it). Droopy and I got coupons from VLCC. I put NED to encash them. Droopy went and was given a free haircut. And then there were these earrings.

Not knowing what to do with them, I just gave them to my mother. She, however, refused to wear them saying that since I’d won them, it was only appropriate that they go to my wife. So she put them away in the locker in my Jayanagar house and told me to take them out only when I had decided who I wanted to marry. And I, then a geeky 18-year old IITian, had decided to use these earrings while proposing marriage.

So early in the evening on Friday I went to the Jayanagar house and took the earrings out of the locker. What followed can be seen in the tweet. Oh, and now you might want to start following this blog.

PS: apologies for the extra-long post, but given the nature of the subject I suppose you can’t blame me for getting carried away

Rajkumar Hirani Copycat

Ok this post has nothing to do wtih Five Point Someone or its related controversies. Yeah, the story is inspired by 5PS more than the claimed 3% but I’ll let Chetan Bhagat and his army of followers fight out that battle. Copying from others is honourable, at least you are taking inspiration from someone. What is just not done is copying from oneself. It simply shows lack of creativity and laziness to come up with new ideas.

Maybe when Rajkumar Hirani made 3 Idiots, he assumed that the public would have forgotten Munnabhai MBBS. He assumed that Munnabhai MBBS would be so out of circulation that it would have gone out of people’s minds, eclipsed by the more successful sequel Lage Raho. What he didn’t bargain for was that Munnabhai MBBS was on the menu on the New York JFK  to Dubai Emirates Airlines flight, and that people like me would watch it within 3 weeks of watching 3 idiots.

The similarities are uncanny. Both colleges are “Imperial”, have Boman Irani playing the “big prof” (diro here, dean there), and acting similarly in both. Both have a nerdy Tam who comes 2nd in class, 2nd to the hero. Yeah, Chatur is caricatured in 3I while Swami is given a more positive role in Munnabhai. Both are about the system, about how the larger-than-life hero fights the system and makes the big prof realize that the way he has been running the institution is wrong. The hero’s love interest is the big prof’s daughter. And so on..  Just that Munnabhai and Rancho use different methods to achieve their goals, that’s all.

I suppose most of you would have watched 3Idiots recently. I urge you to pick up a DVD or a torrent of Munnabhai MBBS and watch it, again. And keep an eye out for the similarities. You will be convinced that Rajkumar Hirani is guilty of copying, from his own stuff. It is indeed sad to see a good director such has him stooping to Anu Malik* depths.

While on the topic of 3Idiots, my esteemed colleague Baada wanted me to do a stud-fighter post on the movie. I suppose all of you who have seen the movie will easily figure out why the framework fits. I don’t think it needs any more explanation from the resident stud-fighter expert, that is me. Also, if you recall, I had taken a vow that I won’t do any more stud-fighter blogging. Though I must mention that my book on the topic is going nowhere.

* Listen to the prelude music of Ae Mere Humsafar from Baazigar, and then to the title song of Ishq. Next, listen to the interlude music of Kitaben Bahut Si, again from Baazigar, and then to the title song from Fiza. The self-copy is obvious. And I must mention that I had used this concept in a quiz question, twice. Yeah, I’ve also been guilty of “petering” my own questions.

Loos in India

Ok so this took a real long time coming. It might have been up to five years since I first thought of this post, but so far have never gotten down to writing it. The normal disgust warnings apply. So if you are either eating or have just eaten or feel remotely like throwing up, I request you to read no further. In this post, I want to talk about the culture of shitting (yeah I’ll use the shit word. Direct and disgusting it is) in India and effects of that on current culture and morality.

Before you read further, I would urge you to read about the Aryan Code of Toilets (1500 BC). Thanks to Amit Varma for the pointer. Quoting:

  • Before going for defecation it was prescribed that the sacred thread should be rolled to a smaller size and be put on the right ear.
  • The head was to be covered with a cloth. In the absence of cloth, the sacred thread was to be brought over the head and was to be hung on the left ear.
  • Then while observing silence and facing north in the day and south in the night one could defecate.
  • So one of my questions is now answered of course. I hope you read the article, it explains a lot more. So from this article it is clear that according to the great Indian tradition, shitting is a ritual no less. And though this document doesn’t mention it, it is generally understood that you shit once, early in the morning after you wake up. Shitting more often or at irregular times is a sign of illness or indiscipline.

    My hypothesis is that it is because of this “custom” or “cultural aspect” that we don’t have good public loos in India. Since shitting at irregular times is looked down upon, it wasn’t considered a good idea to encourage this “indisciplined” practice by providing good public loos. Ok it may not have been on purpose but since shitting at non-regular times (not early in the morning) wasn’t a done thing no one really talked about it and the results (abysmal public toilet infrastructure) are here to stay. It is only in modern offices where indisciplined foreignerrs visit regularly that you have good public loos!

    Then, in India, there was a major lag between urbanization and development of public sewerage system because of which loos had to be placed away from the rest of the house. Soon  this became a practice, and this further discouraged people from “going” at irregular times. And the delay in arrival of water closets and public sewerage kept the class of people called “night soil collectors” in business much longer than it needed to and this prolonged the incidence of untouchability (this is supposed to have been beautifully captured in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Untouchable).

    The other impact of shitting being a ritual is that it is not a done thing to go to the loo in other people’s houses. Some people plain get offended if you ask them if you can use their loo, and consequently it is a bit embarrassing for guests here to enquire if they can use the loo. Thankfully there have been no Tycho Brahes in India (wasn’t he the guy that died of a bladder burst because he thought it would be impolite to the queen if he excused himself? ), or if there have been they haven’t been reported thus!

    An unrelated (to the rest of the post) thought – steel and quality cement and elevators are all fine, but don’t you think one of the most important pre-requisites for the building of skyscrapers was the water closet? Just think about it.

  • Before going for defecation it was prescribed that the sacred thread should be rolled to a smaller size and be put on the right ear.
  • The head was to be covered with a cloth. In the absence of cloth, the sacred thread was to be brought over the head and was to be hung on the left ear.
  • Then while observing silence and facing north in the day and south in the night one could defecate.
  • Coffee in America

    I could have finished this post in one word  – “horrible”. But for the sake of blogging and detailed description, let me sacrifice brevity, like I usually do. I’m writing this after having drunk a cup of absolutely atrocious self-made coffee. Yes, it is proper traditional filter coffee made using Coffee Day Ultra Rich powder, but somewhere I seem to have messed it up. And the quality of this coffee, the first time I’ve made the brew after returning from America, reflects the general quality of coffee they make in America!

    I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had good coffee. One was at a friend’s place in New Jersey, where I had traditional South Indian filter coffee out of a steel tumbler. Another was the Turkish coffee at The Hummus Place in Greenwich Village which I’ve talked about in my previous post. That is it! Maybe the odd capuccino somewhere but I can’t remember anything else specific.

    The funny thing about America is the size of the coffee lOTas. The average coffee cup in my office was some 400 ml, and each time I would put it under the machine and ask for capuccino it would get filled up! It was extremely disorienting for someone like me who is used to several small doses of coffee during the day. There was another dispenser which dispensed decoction but that was horrible, too. But later on I started drinking from that since I could then control the volume of each dose!

    I think I have mentioned this in some other post but another problem in America is they give you hot black coffee and COLD milk. Again extremely disorienting for someone who is used to coffee made with boiling milk. I’m told that the typical American puts such little milk in his coffee that the temperature of milk doesn’t matter. Just that I found it hard to digest (not literally).

    Then there was this coffee maker in my apartment. I had to google to figure out how it worked and then realized that an essential part of making it work was to buy filter paper (the first time I’d come across this thing since high school chemistry lab). Since I didn’t have enthu to buy the said paper, I just made do with the two complimentary sheets that had been kindly provided in my apartment. Needless to say the coffee came out to be horrible and I didn’t use the machine again.

    One of my regrets of my America trip is that I didn’t order coffee post my several Italian meals. Maybe the Italian restaurants would have made coffee much better than what was available in the rest of the country. And one of the amusing things i remember from the trip is the length of the queues at the Starbucks outlets! That made me realize that people actually go to Starbucks for coffee unlike us here who use Cafe Coffee Day as a convenient hangout location!

    Yesterday I did my bit to make up for all the horrible coffee that I’d endured during my America trip. Had two awesome cups of filter coffee at a friend’s place, and then three doses of “sugarless strong” at three diffferent darshini-level places. Unfortunately this morning’s mess-up (now I realize I put 2 spoons of powder into the filter instead of the usual 4) has taken me back to square one, of American quality coffee.

    New York – Food Diary

    Ok back to inputs now. I suppose this is much more palatable than outputs. One of the things that I did successfully on this trip to New York was to sample various kinds of cuisines. There were some repetitions, and there was this one particular restaurant I ended up giong to thrice, but overall I had an extremely good culinary experience. I’m writing this in the past tense as I’m on the way out of New York as I write this. I’m at the Emirates Lounge at JFK Airport (more about this in another post).

    On most weekdays, breakfast and lunch were at office. There wasn’t much variety in lunch (our cafeteria wasn’t very diverse) so I ended up eating salad on most days. Breakfast I experimented and had a variety of things. Dinner, however, I ate out on all days, and though I couldn’t keep up completetly with my initial aim of a different cuisine each day, I did quite well. One of the reasons for not achieving my “target” was that Battery place, where I was living, wasn’t very well served by restaurants and on several days I put NED to take the train.

    There were only 2 days when I didn’t have salad for lunch at the office cafeteria. Two fridays back (8th of Jan) I had some thai vegetables with rice. It was extremely heavy and I had trouble finishing. Oh and one of my regrets of this tour is that I didn’t have a good Thai meal anywhere. Green curry with rice types. Then, today I had mexican rice for lunch at the cafeteria. Rice with beans, roasted sweet corn and lettuce. Was pretty good stuff. Liked it.

    Breakfast I tried a variety of stuff. I had “home-style fries” (basically south indian alu fry), scrambled eggs, omlette (really liked the omlettes in my office; had it several times), fruit salad (usually a supplement to other stuff; avocado, kharbuja, strawberries, grapes and pineapple), cream of wheat, oatmeal, etc. I realized how you need to add stuff such as raisins, honey, etc. in order to make oatmeal porridge more palatable, and if you add these stuffs it can be made really tasty while yet being healthy.

    Dinner diary:

    • 3rd, 10th Jan: Chipotle mexican grill. Excellent stuff. Had been ages since I’d had Mexican stuff and it was extremely tasty. Highly recommended
    • 4th, 18th, 21st Jan: Alfanoose, Maiden Street, off Broadway. Mediterranean place. Excellent veg platter. One main dish (hummus/baba ganoush/falafel/.. ) with rice or salad, one side dish (chickpeas, tabouli, etc.) and a pita bread. Very filling and very tasty. I also had falafel sandwich as a supplement a couple of times. Excellent again.
    • 5th Jan: Wendy’s Fresh Mex. Right next to my office on Vesey Street. Supposedly authentic Mexican. Maaaajor letdown.
    • 6th Jan: Maoz Vegetarian, near Times square: Hummus-falafel sandwich with unlimited salad helpings. Brilliant. And cheap.
    • 7th Jan: Taj Tribeca, Murray Street. North Indian. Surprisingly excellent. Broke my no-Indian-food policy since some friends wanted to eat there. And it was extremely good.
    • 8th, 15th Jan: Adreinne’s Pizzabar, Stone Street. Bloody brilliant pizza. The Margherita I had on the 15th is the best I’ve EVER had. crunchy thin crust, just the right amount of cheese, etc. Can’t praise it more!
    • 9th Jan: Uncle Nick’s, Hell’s Kitchen. Greek. Had just a starter since it was so heavy. Essentially capsicum bajji with cheese. Decent.
    • 11th Jan: Hangawi, 32nd and 5th. Where else but in New York will you find a Korean Vegetarian place? Insanely brilliant salad and awesome soup. Main course (stonepot rice) wasn’t as good as the starter but ranked high on an absolute scale!
    • 12th Jan: Meskerem, Macdougal Street, Greenwich Village. Ethiopian. Cold dosa with 3 dals, 4 sabjis and one dal-level thing with wine. Pretty good stuff. But bad ambience. Too crowded.
    • 13th Jan: The Hummus Place, opposite Meskerem. Buggers didn’t accept AmEx cards so had to pay in cash. Fawa beans soup, roasted eggplant for starter, some hummus and chickpeas thing for main course nad Turkish coffee. the coffee was absolutely brilliant. Out of the world. Heavily laden with spices and extremely strong.
    • 14th Jan: Capri Caffe, Church Street. Authentic cuisine from the island of Capri. Again main crib is they didn’t take AmEx. Pretty good salad and excellent soup (green peas).
    • 16th Jan: Harrington’s. 31st and 7th. It’s a pub. Had some fried cheese and capsicum for starter. Panini for main course. How good can you expect the food to be in a bar?
    • 17th Jan: Some mexican place in Hell’s Kitchen. Decent but not brilliant. Expensive (ok friend’s wife’s relative paid for it, so I didn’t even expense it! ). No value for money. But excellent dessert (friend’s wife’s relative described it as a liquid Tiramisu – coffee, tequila and whipped cream). And this friend’s wife’s relative (US-settled) was surprised that you get Tiramisu in India!!
    • 19th Jan: The Village Trattoria, Greenwich Village. Lentil soup, bruschetta, some pasta with pesto sauce. Again brilliant. Excellent stuff. And not too expensive.
    • 20th Jan: Ancora Ristorante Italiano: Somewhere near Broad Street. Don’t konw exact address. It’s a high-class looking underground Italian place. Again pretty good. Ok I’ll reclassify that to brilliant.
    • 22nd Jan: Ok this was more of an evening snack preparing for the impending flight. Greek Salad at Cosi’s opposite my office. Excellent.

    Ok I suppose I haven’t mentioned the times I ate breakfast or lunch out but it isn’t that significant so I’ll leave it out.

    Compensating Teachers

    This is yet another of those things which I’ve been thinking about and have been intending to write about for a long time but have never gotten down to it. Pinky wrote this excellent post on the topic today and that has got me thinking. To quote her,

    A bad teacher makes a bad student. A teacher who looks at teaching as just another job is doing no good to anyone. She neither grows in her life nor contributes to the positive growth of a kid.There have been a few teachers in my life who i have tremendous respect for, not because they taught me effectively enough to pass in their subjects but because they taught me to listen, think and speak!

    I don’t have any solutions yet but I thought I should just put some bullet points here, just to try and give a structure to the problem. Let me know your thoughts

    • If we consider a person’s salary as Society’s recognition of his/her worth, school teachers are not recognized enough
    • Abysmal salaries drive away a large number of potential school teachers away from the profession
    • Love for teaching is important, but if teaching pays as abysmally as it currently does, the opportunity cost of doing what you love is way too high for some people, and so they end up in other professions
    • We have a market failure in teaching – how do we run a school profitably while paying teachers competently while on the other hand keeping fees reasonable, and not resorting to any subsidies?
    • India suffers from what I call the “official’s wife bug”. In the 60s and 70s, the teaching profession got flooded by women who weren’t really looking to make much money, but more to just pass some time and use their bachelor’s degrees rather than being housewives. This has fostered a culture of low schoolteachers’ salaries in India. People who weren’t looking to make money out of teaching crowded out those who found the opportunity cost of the low salaries in teaching too high.
    • McKinsey interview level arithmetic: assume a school having classes 1 to 12, 4 sections per class, 40 students per section. 8 periods a day 5 days a week gives a total of 12 * 4 * 8 * 5 = 1920 periods per week. Assuming each teacher can take 5 classes a day (or 25 a week) we will need 77 (round it off to 80) teachers. Number of students is 12 * 4 * 40  = 1920, so essentially 25 students have to pay for one teacher’s salary, and this is apart from expenses towards school building, maintenance, overheads, etc. McKinsey level handwaving. 10 students have to pay for one teacher’s salary. Doesn’t sound feasible
    • Primary and secondary education is simply way too important to be left in the hands of unmotivated disinterested people, but that seems like the situation we are in (I dont’ mean to say all teachers are unmotivated or disinterested; just that the situation doesn’t incentivize talented motivated people to enter the profession).
    • Universities attract talent by allowing faculty to make money by other means such as consulting and organizing for-profit courses. Will something like that work for schools? And no, I’m not talking about private tuitinos as the other source of income. Is there something else?
    • Government intervention is not a solution. In a place like India it will only end up messing up things further and draining more money from the system.
    • In the pre-IT era, teaching salaries were more competitive (with respect to competing jobs) than they are now, so they could attract better talent
    • I wonder if it is only in India that such a large proportion of school teachers are women. This is just a general pertinent observation, and has nothing to do with the rest of the post
    • The officer’s wife model was good when it started off – some motivated people came into the system because fo that. Just that the system is not sustainable and we’re facing the problems of that now and because a lot of school managements fail to take into account that the model isn’t sustainable

    Any thoughts on this? Any possible solutions? Of course it’s not possible to implement any macro-level solution. All I’m looking at is a school-level solution. How do you plan to run one school (of size I mentioned in my bullets) sustainably while ensuring teachers are paid adequately enough to not scare away interested people?

    Loos in America

    Ok I’ve spent quite a few (>1) blog posts after coming here on input so let me write one on output. In fact for a long time I’ve intended to write a post on loos in India but have never got the time. Hopefully I’ll sit down to write it some day. Today, you’ll have to make do with American shyte.

    The last time I found facilities in a loo for washing the arse (or thoLyin the thika) was at the Dubai airport on my way here where there was a health faucet. As has been well documented Islamic cultures place a lot of emphasis of keeping the arse clean and hence the ubiquity of this contraption in all Islamic countries (and of late in India also). As has also been well documented, western cultures prefer to keep the loos clean and hence use paper to wipe the arse after the process.

    In my serviced apartment I’ve been doing one of the usual Indian things – I’ve kept a drinking glass in the bathroom and use it as a mug. Yeah its volume is quite low but that’s the best I can manage. Thankfully the taps aren’t too far away so I can manage. My biggest fear, however, is that I’ll drop this glass in the bathroom and might injure my feet. Office, however, offers no such luxuries so I’ve to make do with paper. When in Amreeka, do your ass like the Amreekans do.

    My apartment and my office have two contrasting flushing systems, both of which seem superior to the system we have in India (the flush in my apartment in Bangalore is especially inefficient, especially when I download large volumes). At home, water starts swirling around in the WC as soon as I pull the trigger, slowly and steadily. Soon the pace picks up and the water level starts going down, pulling the crap along with it. And in a few seconds the pot is clean, and new water comes in so the level of water in the pot is restored. Actually I’ve noticed that the normal level of water in the pot in my apartment is much higher than it normally is in western loos. I think it’s similar to a football defence playing with a high offside line!

    Office is a new building so has even more sophisticated loo. First of all the flush is automated – as soon as you get up and start buttoning up your pants the thing goes, though there’s a  button which you can push in case the automatic thing fails. This is the first time ever that I’ve seen automatic flush in a pottystation. I’d earlier seen it only in urinals.

    So the flush operates with a vacuum mechanism, much like the flushes on flights. So some pump gets into operation and sucks in all the shit and the paper and everything else in one smooth motion. And then there is a water jet to clean up any remnants, and that gets sucked in too. Finally, there is some fresh water ready to take shit.

    The best thing I’ve found about my office loo, however, is the seat paper. So in this special compartment in the potty station you get paper that’s shaped in the plan of the commode (plan as in top view; I hope you can picturize). So when you go in, you pull out one such paper and put it on to the seat, and then take your seat and do your business. And once business is done, send this paper also packing into the WC!

    Excellent idea, I think, because the biggest crib that people have about commodes is that they have to rest bare arse on the same space that hosted some other bare arse and this may not be healthy. Providing this facility allows you to take insurance about that, and you need not put your ass-to-risk*. I hope this starts getting implemented soon enough in India also, especially in public facilities.

    Some links:

    1. Vikram Doctor’s excellent take on toilets
    2. One earlier time when I had blogged about toilets at work
    3. An earlier post of mine, on washing your arse in the Thames
    4. A post on loos and sacred threads. One of those one-liner posts I stopped posting after I started tweeting. This post would become significant later in my life in a most unusual manner

    More on food in New York

    Just a collection of pertinent observations:

    • It’s amazing how so many restaurants which might get classified as “fine dining” in Bangalore are run out of such small places in New York. Of course, in Manhattan real estate is at a premium but the amazing thing is how these restaurants maintain their class despite putting tables within a foot of each other.
    • Tipping here is serious business. For the first time in my life I’ve left a minimum of a 15% tip wherever I’ve gone. And despite paying the tip by card, I follow the standard Indian policy of rounding off so that the total amount is a round number.
    • I’ve had mediterranean food thrice in three different places and each has tasted much different from the other. Hummus and pita bread has been the common factor in each.
    • Went to an Indian restaurant once during these two weeks (when I was catching up with some IIM friends) and it was surprisingly good. Especially since my benchmark was the Bangladeshi places in London, I suppose
    • As I had mentioned in an earlier post, large cosmopolitan urban agglomerations such as New York lead to extremely niche restaurants. What are the odds of finding a “high class vegetarian” Korean restaurant (called Hangawi; brilliant food and even more brilliant ambience) or a Caprese (serving food supposedly native to the island of Capri) restaurant?
    • I’ve taken a fetish for soup – had soup thrice this week. Veg dumpling soup at Hangawi, fawa beans and green peas soup at the Capri Caffe and a mixed vegetable soup at The Hummus Place. All extremely thick and excellent. I should try soups at more places.
    • I had the much-recommended ethiopian food the other day. The main item is some dosa-type thing. It’s a bit sour and is served cold, though. Extremely large and similar to home-made plain dosa. I had a veg platter for the main course. Got four dals (two of which tasted like the pappu you get in Andhra meals and one had wine) and four sabzis. Not ideal with dosas but was good only.
    • The Greenwich Village area seems to have a good congregation of high quality (but cheap looking) restaurants.
    • The way they make the omlette in my office cafeteria is interesting. First they just put the vegetables onto the tawa and then they take pre-beaten egg/egg white and pour it on top of the vegetable using a bowl. And they spray something on the tawa so that it doesn’t stick. And they actually toss the omlette in the air to flip it around on the tawa!
    • When we were kids we would hear that American kids can’t do arithmetic and use a calculator even to add two single digit numbers. Restaurants have taken advantage of this. For example, on today’s dinner bill, at the bottom it said something like “for 20% tip leave $4.64” or something. So basically since most people don’t have patience to do the arithmetic for 15%, they just take this number given to them and put it. Profit for the waiters!
    • I hope to eat many other kinds of tasty food in my one remaining week here.