Travels with Tavish

On Saturday (3/11), Shilpa and I went downtown to visit a temple and eat some street food. We went to an ISKCON (International Society of Krishna Consciousness) temple. Upon entering the temple courtyard, I had a strange feeling, like I had been to this place before. There was a restaurant next door whose décor looked familiar, but I could not quite place it. Shilpa told me some stories from the Hindu tradition as we looked at the dioramas that lined the border of the courtyard. The temple was on the second floor—in India, this means two floors above the ground floor—and as soon as we stepped inside I figured out why this place felt so familiar. When I came to India in 2014 with Northeastern, we visited this temple on our first day in Mumbai. We had landed at 2:00am, slept for a few hours, then shuffled onto the bus for a city tour. At this point, I had no sense of direction in the city, and when we had visited this temple before I thought it was located in the north area of the city

On Thursday night (3/9), I met my friend Kuntal from the H13 football team as I was walking out of the mess after eating dinner. He asked me if I was playing in the IFL (Institute Football League), and I responded, “Yes, I signed up last week!” This league is one where teams are mixed undergrad and grad students. There are four teams, each with a certain number of points, and there is an “auction” where the managers bid their points against one another to get the players they want on their team. When I had signed up for the league one week prior, the online payment website did not take international cards, so I had called the organizer and told him I would pay the Rs. 400 in cash. I had not yet organized this payment and had thought that its timing was not important, as have been the timing of most payments in India. Back to Kuntal (the manager of one team in the IFL): he told me that the auction was that night, beginning in 30 minutes. If I did not talk to the organizer and get him