First Days in Mumbai: Jan 5-Jan 6

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Jan. 7, 2017

My first two days in India have been packed, full of learning about student life and meeting people I will be working with this semester. There are so many different things that I have come across in my first couple days here that I could write for hours, but I will choose a few aspects of what I have seen and write about those.

First the food; I will be eating almost all of my meals in the mess this year. I live in Hostel 13, and the mess that I eat in is also common to Hostels 12 and 14. Each hostel has 3-4 wings and each wing has 7 or so floors with 20-30 rooms on each floor, so the mess probably serves around 2000 people, though I am not sure if all the rooms are occupied. This is the biggest mess on campus. The mess is underground and can either be entered through the basement of one wing of my hostel or through a central entrance in a courtyard between the three hostels. When I enter the mess I take my card from my room cubby and put it in a bin corresponding to the B wing of the hostel in which I live. This system allows the university to count how many people from each hostel eat each meal. I then grab a spoon and tray and proceed in to the food.

The mess serves breakfast, lunch, tiffin (or afternoon snack) and dinner. Dinner starts at around 7:30 and is served until 9:30—this is later than I am used to eating, but I will adapt. The mess serves vegetarian food and you can opt to pay extra for drinks, non-veg (meaning meat, usually chicken), or eggs. A general lunch or dinner meal consists of chapatti (flat bread), white rice, spiced rice, yellow dal (lentils), and two other dishes such as aloo gobi or soya in an Indian sauce. I do not know the names of everything that I have eaten, but most of it tastes familiar. There are also sliced onions, cucumber, beets, and carrots set out for some of the meals. I am not especially fond of beets and try to avoid them in the US, but I am going to make a point to try and eat them more often while I am in India. For breakfast there is some food set out on the table where the trays are stacked. On this table they serve boiled eggs, bananas, a paneer dish, hot chocolate milk, and generally some sort of boiled/raw bean or legume. There is some sort of rule as to how many bananas and/or eggs you can take (I think it is 2 total), but I have not quite figured out all the nuances of these rules. In self-serve buffet trays there is then a grain of some sort, either uttapam (rice pancake), a spiced grits-like dish, or paratha (pancake filled with spiced potatoes, onions, etc.). Today at breakfast there was a tub of something that looked like a type of bean, but upon tasting them I deduced that they were in fact boiled peanuts.

For my project work this semester, I will be focusing on two main projects: turmeric processing and a solar roaster. An agricultural university in central India has come up with a faster, cheaper way to process turmeric that results in a better quality product than the traditional method of boiling the turmeric and drying it in the sun for more that 2 weeks. They need help designing a downsized plant so that it can be used by a small group of farmers. The current size of the plant is much too large and expensive for a small group of farmers to invest in. I am visiting an existing plant next week with Professor Vishal Sardeshpande (my mentor for the semester) and another student. The second project I will be working on is a solar roaster for spices. The roaster will be useful for villages as well as for a small spice processing factory. If time permits I will also be working on a low-cost, energy-efficient method for cooling chicken coops in the hot summer months. I will provide more details on both of these projects as the semester progresses.

All of the students I have met here so far have been very friendly and welcoming. All have helped me get settled in my room and have offered to help me find anything I might need for my stay. Thanks to the help of multiple students, I already have an Indian SIM card for my phone that has free 4G data until March 31! The phone company Jio, recently started by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, is the first to bring 4G coverage to India, and three free months of 1GB data per day (unlimited for all intensive purposes) is the introductory offer. That said, if you are trying to reach me by texting my US number I will not be checking it consistently for the next few months, so email me instead. Two students, Akshay (Prof. Sardeshpande connected us before I reached India) and Shahnawaz, have been especially helpful in orienting me and making me feel welcome here. Akshay has invited me to his house in Mumbai later in the semester for a home-cooked meal—I am looking forward to it!


As I finish writing this post, there are 30-40 hawks circling above the building next to me. I wonder what they see…

My room in Hostel 13

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