Second Week: Aug 1, 2008

It's been like a week since I wrote, I guess. So far all the B-Tech (BS) students have arrived here. They're very friendly, so far and most of them speak very good english. Generally it seems you have to introduce yourself to someone once at the Mess (cafeteria) or somewhere, and then they say hi whenever you see them. It's a bit confusing, because I keep losing track of who I have met before and who I haven't. Their names are also very difficult to remember but Abishek and Arvinder seem to be very popular. The situation is peculiar in that IIT is set up so that all the girls are on one side of the campus and all the guys are on the other. Since the food in the mess is offered in our Hostels and we can't eat at other hostels, generally people are separated by approximately 1.5 to 3 kilometers from anyone who is not of the same gender.

The foreign students and I went to a bar in Yusuf Sarai (I believe that is the name of a small region of Delhi near IIT. The bar was actually more of a restaurant which served alcoholic drinks and played music so loud that it was almost impossible to talk. Apparently most of the "bars" here are similar. It is more of an imitation of what a bar is thought to be like in the US for the more upper class Indians or so. The drinks seemed to be reasonably priced, around 140 rupees for mixed drinks and 200 rupees for bears. 200 Rupees is 5 dollars. In any case, prolly due to some of the same cultural ideas that lead to the whole separating of the guys' and girls' hostels, there were virtually no women in the entire bar. I think I may have seen 2. Three others may have passed through, but I don't think they stayed. This did not stop the guys who were there from dancing after it became sufficiently late. One guy randomly started dancing and then slowly people started joining him. Almost everyone at our table, including me, eventually got up and joined in. Throughout the whole "Dance Party", if you will, neither of the girls danced along. Allegedly at the very end one of them started but I did not see her. It was very bizarre, but fun.

I still have not succumbed to disease, although my roomape is suffering from something. So far everything has been going well, although I've started to drink the drinking water here, and I've been brushing my teeth with less potable water since I arrived.

The whole hostel seems obsessed with sports, and they keep recruiting people for there hostel teams. All the hostels (I presume by all they mean the male hostels.) compete to get a ranking in a lot of sports. Swimming, water polo, football (soccer), badminton, squash, basketball, and, of course, cricket are on the agenda. They compete on the "cultural" level too. So like music, dance, etc. They are especially interested in recruiting foreigners because our size and often athletic ability makes us pretty useful I think. So I will try to play with them and see how it goes. The freshers (freshmen) are forced to do running and other exercises by the upper classmen for the first week, because generally they spend 2 years preparing almost exclusively for the entrance exam to IIT. So usually they aren't particularly active before they arrive. The goal is to make sure that they stay physically fit as well. It seems to be working, since everyone here seems to be athletic. There are not many fat people as far as I can tell. Most if the foreign students are more or less ripped too. I'm not sure why.

The bureaucracy here is incredible. I had to register for staying here for more than 180 days. This involved standing around in various lines from 9:30 till 3. A friend of mine who was ahead of me in line initially wasn't done until 4:20. It was a pretty terrible experience. In the end, all it boiled down to was getting some stamps on some papers and getting the stamps signed. They also scribbled some stuff on my passport saying that I had registered or something. I think there was a stamp for that too. Some friends of mine didn't have the correct papers so they forged them right outside the office. It sort makes you think how pointless the whole paperwork is, if all it takes is a stamp and some scribbles to makes something official. And yet, despite the utter lack of sense they make people wait for around 6 hours to get registered. It's unclear to me what happens with all the papers, I get the impression it all goes into some 1984ish memory hole, or onto the trash heap immediately outside. It all seems like a waste of life, since I get the impression all the paperwork is more of an imitation of the Western systems than something meaningful. They wanted me to fill out a paper in triplicate with a picture of me on each page. In the end they stapled all three papers together and dumped them on a pile on the desk of someone "incharge" as the sign above his desk read.

The only good thing about the whole experience was that I did meet some interesting people there; one from Bangladesh, one from Sri Lanka, and one from the Czech Republic.

Classes have also started. It's too early to tell whether they will be good or not. My math classes are pretty good, but my physics classes are brutally early (8:00). That combined with the heat and the somewhat boring nature of the lectures makes it very difficult for me to stay awake. I've been doing my best to stay conscious though, because I've been told the profs won't have any understanding or show much mercy if they perceive such a lack of caring. So needless to say, it's been pretty rough. In my lower dimensional physics class their are some scribbles where I almost fell asleep while trying to write something at the same time. I was sitting in the first row, so I hope the Prof. didn't notice. The students here seem to be very good. Generally they seem to be computationally much faster than I am and surprisingly enough people ask questions in class. It will be interesting to see how they go about the homework. (I talked with one 3rd year Bachelor degree student in Electrical Engineering, and he told me had 4 hours of free time in a day.) Apparently taking 8 classes is the norm. That is 6 lectures and 2 labs. I will take at most 5 and am shooting for 4.

Anyway that's all for now, I am going to Amritsar for the weekend so I need to get ready.