Arts Festival and Football Matches: Feb 4-Feb 9

Every Saturday in the mess they serve a delicious breakfast of a spicy grits-like porridge with coconut chutney and a sweet pineapple-flavored yellow dish that has a similar texture to the grits. I have written about this meal before, but it is more exciting now that I have figured out that it is served every Saturday morning. Looking forward to breakfast tomorrow…

Another note on the mess food: for lunch and dinner, there are almost always slices of onion, lemon, and two of the following four items (listed in order of most to least common) out on a central table: cucumber, tomato, beets, radishes, and carrots. Usually on the weekend, but sometimes during the week, there is instead of the sliced vegetables a “salad” of cucumber bits and boiled peanuts. My intuition tells me that they serve this when they have a lot of extra peanuts and cucumber piled up from the previous few days’ meals. On the average day when there are vegetable slices available, I have taken to loading up my plate with whatever the vegetables and using them like chapatti—dipping them in my dal or gravy. I have not seen anyone else in the mess eat the vegetables like this, but I am going to keep doing so because it makes them much more enjoyable to eat. Imagine how many more people would eat vegetables in the US if they tasted like dal!

Last Saturday (Feb 4) I went out in to Hiranandani, the nearby neighborhood, with Shahnawaz to run some errands and get lunch. Highlights include three different types of dates from the supermarket and my drinking my weekly coconut that I buy every time I walk past the vendor near campus. Upon our return to campus, we waited on one of the campus buses for about 10 minutes before its driver finally decided to depart the gate and drive toward the hostels. There are of course no digital timing boards telling when the bus would leave the gate. When Shahnawaz asked the driver, after we and many others had been sitting on the hot bus for many minutes, when he would leave, he barely turned his head and did not respond. He started the bus 30 seconds later and we were off. None of the Indian students on the bus thought much of it. This piece of Indian culture still puzzles me—apparently in this situation it was “acceptable” for the driver to simply not answer a question that was asked of him. It would be a different story if he had said “in a few minutes” or something vague like that; this was frustrating to me, but none of the other Indian students appeared bothered by it. I guess I will have to try and get used to this as well.

In the afternoon I participated in the Institute Blitz Tournament at IIT. It was really fun to play a few games of competitive chess. I got 3.5 points out of 7, and all but two of the games were close. The most striking similarity to the chess tournaments of my youth was an obsession with gathering around the pairings as they were announced. Instead of a bunch of 4-foot kids gathering around a piece of paper as it was tacked to the wall, in this tournament it was a bunch of college students (including me) huddling around a guy sitting on top of a desk holding his computer as he read off the pairings that a simple chess program spit out based on the results of the previous round. This is a broad generalization, but I will make it anyway: chess people are the same the world over and it is fun to be a part of that group.

On Sunday morning I went to a farmer’s market that is on campus every week, though this is the first time I had heard of it. I bought a few ripe figs and a few guava. The figs were really good, but they do not compare to the figs on my grandpa’s tree in Long beach—those are many steps above these and I do not think they will ever be surpassed.

In the afternoon, I went downtown with a few other international exchange students to the Kala Ghoda arts festival. There were lots of booths with social organizations and self-help groups from villages selling artwork and crafts. We saw a few short English-language plays in a venue near the main street; the plays were entertaining and it was nice to get a break from the heat and sit down for a little while. It was standing room only, so we sat on the floor on the side of the audience during the performance. After the plays we walked around the neighborhood of Kala Ghoda where there were many sculptures in the parks. My favorite title for a sculpture was “Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb.” Bonus point to anyone who knows where this line is from (hint: one of my all-time favorite albums). Before returning to campus, we had dinner at “The Taste of Kerala” restaurant downtown. The restaurant had a restroom only in their auxiliary building a couple blocks away from where we were eating; there was one employee whose job seemed to consist only of guiding people to and from the restroom in the other building. The food was really good, especially the spicy chicken dish we had, and we returned to campus on the not-too-crowded local train.

I woke up at 5:00am to watch the Super Bowl on Monday morning. I was not rooting for the Pats, but it was quite an incredible comeback to watch. I am a little relieved to not be in Boston at this time, because I think every sentence uttered in the next couple weeks will ether the work “Brady,” “GOAT,” “Belichick,” or “Trump.” Here, when I mention American football, most people say something to the effect of “that is like rugby, right?” It puts the importance of the NFL in a bit of perspective when no one even knows how to play the game. Soccer is really the world’s game—everyone plays it and everyone loves it. Maybe this game can be part of bringing the world together in the modern age, though under a different authority that FIFA, considering their suspected corruption (watch for this to come up in the news as 2018 and 2022 approach).

Our next football match was on Monday night against Hostel 3, one of the undergrad hostels. One player on my team said to be careful of the strikers because “these guys are young like you.” The rest of my hostel team are Masters or PhD students, so they are a few years older than me. I almost had a header goal on a corner kick—I put it one foot over the crossbar from about the 6-yard line. It was thrilling to actually get a chance to head the ball near the goal, and I am hungry for the next time I have this chance. We drew the game 0-0, meaning we would need at least a draw in our final group stage match to advance to the quarter finals.

On Tuesday night I went to see a couple plays put on by the drama club. The first was written by Sumit, a friend in the CTARA program—it was fun to watch but unfortunately I missed a lot of the plot because it was in Hindi. The second play of the night was in English and was great. I liked these two plays more than the plays I saw at the Kala Ghoda arts festival a few days before. An email about the plays said they would start at “7pm sharp;” Shilpa said they would start at 7:30. The plays started around 7:45 in the evening.

On Wednesday my hostel had our next football match, a 2-1 victory over Hostel 6. I was close to another header goal, on a free kick outside the box—the ball was half a step ahead of me and I could not quite get there. We ate dinner in the night canteen as a group. I had chicken biryani and pineapple juice. Juice is not cheap here (comparatively), but it is always made fresh and is delicious.

On Thursday I had lunch and dinner with Timo, a friend from Switzerland. He is traveling to Pune this weekend for a music festival. I looked up the festival to see who was playing and one of the openers is Macklemore. What a small world—what is the chance that a rapper from Seattle plays a festival in the same state I am in in India? I will be sure to ask him how the performance was next week.