Thursday, December 6, 2007

HRI


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On the evening of the 8th of October I arrived at HRI, a bit tired after the train journey. As you can see from the map it fairly central in India, in Uttar Pradesh, in the so called Hindi-belt or cow-belt. Many of the students and faculty here are Bengali and UP is regarded as a bit backward. The town of Allahabad had all the noise, dirt and stray animals, but the Campus itself, not far from the Ganges on the outskirts of town has a nice green, relatively peaceful site with plenty of armed guards on hand.

When I arrved I got the key to my flat. I was expecting a one room studenty affair, but I have a two bedroom flat with a kitchen. Since I'm carrying only one rucksack of posessions it looks very bare. Include are pictures of the main bedroom and front room. The flat has a population of lizards, and pigeons who live ontop of a primative metal airconditioner on my windowsill (it acts as a drum/amplifier when they get rowdy around dawn each morning). I thought I'd escape the terror of the pigeons after they hassled me in my early Cambridge rooms, but they seem to be in every bloody country in the world. Is nowhere safe? There was also lots of building and decorating ahead of an external review a few weeks back. The banging has only now subsided. Again builders seemed to follow me everywhere at the end of last year (reroofing our flat, outside my offices in Cambride and London). Anyway enough moaning. The next day I also was given an office, a whole one to myself this time, which is quite lucky as post-docs here (like most places) have to share. I have the office of a recently departed faculty member.

Meals are taken in the mess, a Canteen like place where you present your metal tray and get rice, daal, 2 mysterious veggie boiled mush things and chapatis. If you're lucky sometimes there are parathas, desserts or salady stuff. It's not bad really, everything (including breakfast) is spiced but not very hot. Things are on a weekly repetition, which changes every month depending who's in charge. However this month they've hardly changed it so it's getting very repetitive.

There's also a "pantry" where you can get tea (chai). It recently moved to shiny new premises with a crazy voucher system whereby you have to by tokens beforehand and then exchange them for tea. Genius. They were letting me just pay with money, but a warning email went round about this and I have to buy a big book of tokens now (not from the pantry itself, no, from reception or some mysterious office, which often run out of tokens so you can't get any tea!).

Well I seem to be ranting a bit in this post but all in all life on the Campus is fine, it's much cleaner and safer than outside but pretty isolated. I don't think I'd like to stay much longer than I am.

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