Travels with Tavish

Note: I am will not have internet access from April 23 – May 5 as I am going to Kolhapur for a Vipassana meditation course. I am a couple weeks behind on my blog but will update it when I return to Mumbai. Now back to the regularly scheduled post... I woke up early in the morning on Friday, March 31 to travel to Pune. I traveled with Anameka, a fellow CTARA student at IIT Bombay who also had some project work in Pune. As usual, we took the local train to Thane, the nearest station where the Mumbai Pune Intercity Superfast Express stops. The female voice that announces stops and trains over the intercom is common to all stations—the accent and word choice is enjoyable. In the name of this train, the emphasis on “Superfast” is great. My favorite is when the voice says “Please mind the gap between the footboard and the platform while alighting from the train.” I think I have only ever heard the word “alighting” said by those who speak UK English. Listening to these announcements s...

The day after the PAF was spent sleeping in and recovering from the many late nights. Unfortunately, it would take me many days to re-align my internal calendar with the rising and setting of the sun, as I had been awake most of the dark hours and asleep for much of the day during the days before the PAF. Nevertheless, my projects march on. On Friday and Saturday, I visited Pune. My journey began early Friday morning via the Intercity Superfast Express. My ticket in the non-AC section cost 110 Rupees for the 3-hour journey. I ate one wada pav (fried potato “burger” served with chutney on a roll) in Mumbai and bought another two out the window of the train at a station halfway to Pune. I listened to This American Life as I watched the landscape—desert, litter, hills, people—drift by out the window. The train was pleasant until around 9:00am, with one hour of my trip left, the hot Indian sun began streaming in through the window. It was a relief to reach Pune, where Professor S...

On 3/15, Cathy O’Dowd, the first woman to climb Mount Everest from both sides, came to campus as a guest speaker. She talked mostly about her first ascent of Everest in the mid-1990’s when she was part of the first South African team to ever climb the mountain. The main theme of her talk was the importance of a strong team and strategies for dealing with uncooperative team members or difficult situations that might arise during a project. One of the key steps that her climbing team from South Africa took was to include the porters in all their key decisions and treat them as equal members of the team; everyone carried loads and the porters were asked to share their inputs when there were difficult decisions to make. The porters get paid for how high they climb; to save money, many teams leave the porters at camp 4, the final camp before the summit, or sometimes even lower on the mountain. O’Dowd’s team assured their porters that they could climb to the summit, even if all of the Sout...