Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day! I had wanted to post sooner, but we’ve been having intermittent blackouts all day. As much as we like our house, its wiring leaves a lot to be desired. This has already resulted in one disaster. I still think it’s fortunate I wasn’t home and it didn’t happen in the middle of the night; I might have lost a lot more than a few thousand dollars in personal effects destroyed by the flames or carted away by the firemen. The house has two main lines, each connected to a different city grid. This results in the absurd situation where if one of the grids goes out, any outlet connected to that grid doesn’t work. So while my TV may still have power, the computer only a few feet away, but plugged into a different outlet, will not. We have a generator that is supposed to act as backup, but it doesn’t kick in all the time. Anyway, we had a nice Christmas. Friends and colleagues gathered at the manor of aforadventure.com for a party last night. I seem to have caught a cold, so I’m trying to take it easy. I slept for at least 10 hours today so far. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. I’ll try to make it in for work if I can. I came up a bit short on the loot end this year, but I did get one really cool present from Spicygirl: Corkscrew and stopper setI’d been wanting one of these babies ever since I saw a similar one owned by a colleague who left Chennai in November. He’s going to Paris next, so he should get a lot of use out of it. It works beautifully. Now if I could only get decent wine in India… Are you wondering what I got Spicygirl? I had planned to buy her a nice jewelry set at her favorite artisan here, Nalini Designs. But Nalini is off visiting the US until January, and she took most of her pieces with her. So I just gave her some money instead.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/26/2005 11:00:00 PM| |

 
Santa’s cutest elf…Spicygirl flew in for the holidays! She’ll be here for the next week. That’s the best present I could get. It’s been over 3 months since we were last together, and after this we may have to wait until next summer, when I arrive at my next post in Taipei. We try not to dwell on it, but do our best to live in the present moment fully. Tonight was a good start! The relevant scenes: Christmas Eve FeastThere it is: my first home-cooked meal in Madras in over six months. 全家福or is it 川酒福? Get it? I came up with that pun all by myself, and I’m pretty proud of it. That bottle you see there is Sichuan’s most famous liquor, called Wuliangye 五粮液. Literally, “Five Grain Liquid”, it’s made of sorghum, rice, glutinous rice, wheat and corn. Its slight spicy after bite makes it the perfect compliment to Sichuan food. Guizhou province’s Maotai is probably China’s best known spirit, or baijiu 白酒, but it shouldn’t be. It can’t hold a shot glass to Wuliangye. PR knocks one backBeware: This stuff takes no prisoners. It’s best enjoyed sipped and savored, not shotgunned. Use it to cleanse the palate between courses. Unfortunately, the finer appreciation of baijiu in China is rapidly becoming a vanished art form. Its subtleties are for the most part lost now, and if you see it at all anymore, it is usually a group of beet-faced yahoos in a run-down restaurant downing shot after shot of a rot-gut label until they get violently ill and pass out. Spicygirl brought me back two bottles as birthday gift from my in-laws. She also brought along this: Isn’t it lovely? Now I can enjoy real tea again. I’ve just never been able to get used to the Indian way of drinking tea, dumping heaps of sugar and milk. After living in places like Taiwan and Japan that have elevated the preparation and enjoyment of tea to such a high art form, it seems almost profane. Like adding sugar to popcorn or soy sauce to steamed rice.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/25/2005 01:45:00 AM| |

 
I’m On a Road to Nowhere… Well, it started off as a great night. An Indian colleague invited me to a performance by the renowned dancer Anita Ratnam. Her program, named Arya-Tara, consisted of segments from two of her full-length choreographic works, “Arya-the Divine Feminine” and “Seven Graces”. The second piece centers around the Tibetan goddess Tara. Anita combined these two movements into a thematic journey of her personal and artistic search for the Mother Goddess. I’m pretty much an illiterate when it comes to the fine arts, but I enjoyed her performance very much. It was just an hour long, so I had plenty of stamina left. The music was fantastic: a mix of Carnatic and Tibetan. I guess the best word to describe it would be “transporting”. The only part that didn’t make sense was the inclusion of Western opera, but that only lasted a few minutes. Thankfully. In any case, I need to make an effort to see as many presentations as possible before I leave Chennai. The quality of traditional Indian musical and dance performances in this city is really quite high. This brings me to my actual topic: the Chennai auto-rickshaw driver. Auto-rickshaws infest the streets of Chennai, and are the primary culprits for the horrendous traffic plaguing the city. And the Madras government recently approved licenses for an additional five thousand of the things. For those of you who don’t know what an auto-rickshaw is, here you go: These are where lawn mower engines go when they die. They are noisy, the two-stroke engines belch out lethal, toxic fumes and the drivers are certifiably insane. But they are a necessary evil. For all the harrumphing you hear about how ‘great’ public transport is in Chennai, if it were not for these little environmental terrors, the city would come to a grinding halt. (Actually, thanks their swarming numbers, the city has come to a standstill anyway). But many people depend on auto-rickshaws to get around. The auto-rickshaw driver is the equivalent of the cabbie in many other countries. Chennai does have traditional taxis, so I’m told, but they are nowhere to be found. Where these guys differ from their counterparts in other countries (and maybe the rest of India) is their knowledge of the city in which they ply their trade: It is atrocious. I’ve never seen anything like it. I doubt they can even find their way home, which is probably why I see so many of them congregated in the wine shops I pass by on my way to work. This fellow is a case in point: The performance I attended tonight was in the Mylapore district of Chennai. It’s not terribly far from where I live, maybe 20 minutes or so south. I hailed this guy after the show, and to make it easy for him, I wanted him to take me to the Park Sheraton. It’s one of the three or four five-star hotels in Chennai. And just so you don’t go thinking there was a language barrier, my Indian colleague told him in Tamil where I wanted to go and how to get there. He did the South Indian oscillating head glide that means “Yes, I understand” and off we went. I knew something was wrong when we crossed a bridge over the Adyar River. (In fact, I knew something was wrong when I smelled the Adyar even before we got to the bridge). The problem was, this was the bridge headed towards the airport, which is situated about 10 kilometers south of the city. My frantic shouting clued him that something was wrong, and he stopped to ask directions. We headed back into the city, whereupon in no time at all he lost his way again. To make a long story short, after yet another stop for help, he was able to get to a part of town I recognized, and I guided him to the hotel from that point. What should have been a 15 minute ride ended up taking close to an hour. All for a 40 rupee fare. On the bright side, I think I’ve discovered the origin of “IST”, or Indian Standard Time. The joke goes that Indians run on “IST”, because they are notoriously late—up to an hour is not unusual. My theory is that it has nothing to do with something inherent in the Indian psyche, like many people believe. Nope, the auto-rickshaw driver got lost.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/23/2005 02:05:00 AM| |

 
'Tis the Season The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) drive just ended. This is the US Government’s charity clearinghouse where federal employees can choose to contribute to charities of their choice. We can either donate through a lump-sum cash payment, or by a painless monthly deduction from our salaries. I guess they always do the drive in December, because in the US the Christmas season is the traditional time of giving. One of my colleagues acts as the post coordinator, and she did a good job of getting us to [voluntarily!] sign up. She came in Friday with a Tupperware filled with home-made chocolate chip cookies that she passed out to anyone who completed a pledge form. I admit, initially I took a look at this with the aim of getting one of those cookies. Chocolate chip cookies have always been my Achilles heel. I thought I’d pledge to one or two boring mainstream charities, get my cookie, and that would be that. Little did I know that there are literally hundreds of groups from which to choose. Once I saw the list, the cookies became the last thing on my mind. Really, she needn’t have bothered. This was too good to pass up. I had no idea the list contains groups of every conceivable ilk, and I guess neither had several other colleagues, because it quickly developed into a contest to see who could find, and pledge to, the most bizarre charity. I thought H-Bomb found the winner at first, a group called “Boxer Rescue and Adoption, Inc.” I was all set to concede defeat until I found out, much to my dismay, that it’s not a charity for washed-up prizefighters. No, they mean the dogs. How disappointing. Religious organizations make up a large number of the groups on the list. I guess that’s not so surprising, but the only ones I found are either Christian or Jewish, and what’s more, many of them seem somewhat radical. I was hoping to see other faiths represented, but I couldn’t find any Buddhist, Hindu, Jain or Muslim charities, even though these have more and more adherents in the US. However, I was glad to find numerous charities devoted to assisting the developing world. One of these sounded quite odd: “Solar Cookers International." Turns out they provide solar stoves to families in arid parts of Africa, enabling them to prepare meals without the women and children having to cut down trees for firewood. The stoves they give these people kind of look like the one I had to make for science class back in junior high. I was able to cook an egg on it, and a hot dog. A bit eccentric, I thought, but pretty cool. I’m in. Another one I signed up for is the "Space Frontier Foundation." These guys are pushing for the permanent settlement of outer space. I guess they’ve given up on us ever being able to solve our problems here on Earth and would rather start over somewhere else. I’m more than happy to help them out: the sooner they get on their way, the more room there will be for the rest of us. For whatever reason, it’s always the animal lovers’ groups where you find the really wacky. In fact, that’s where we got our finalists. One of these is my entry, and yes, I am donating to them for all of 2006. I won’t give the game away, but here they are: "Bat Conservation International" and "Ferret Haven By-the-Sea". Register your vote for the wackiest in the comments. Better yet, search through the charity list, and let me know if I’ve missed any. There’s always next year…
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/18/2005 11:30:00 PM| |

 
For the benefit of my readers who are Tamil Nadu natives, the place we visited was the Mudumalai National Park. For anyone who hasn’t yet been, I would definitely recommend it. I didn’t think Tamil Nadu had any green anywhere, so this area was a very pleasant surprise. We pulled out of Chennai on the 2100 train to Coimbatore: The perfect accompaniment to an overnight ride on an India train: warm Kingfisher Our first stop was in Coimbatore where the college roommate of our Indian friend picked us up at around 0545. They both studied at Purdue in the US. A lot of Indians here seem to apply there for undergrad. We went to his home for breakfast. His parents were the personification of graciousness and warmth, and were the perfect example of why Indians are so justifiably renowned for their hospitality. We passed through again on our way back to Chennai and they prepared one of the finest dinners I’ve had yet in India. I still feel really guilty that we were running late and had to literally eat and run. Their home has a beautiful garden where I spotted this stunning clay relief carving of Ganesh: Ganesh carving…can anyone explain the other figures? We departed Coimbatore at about 0900. On the way out of town, I spotted this guy hitching a ride: We passed through the hill station of Ooty, and if anyone is familiar with a nightclub there called Aliens, please leave a comment. We heard from an Irish guy later that it is dismal, but that it was better than the other club in town, Midnight Cowboy. I liked what I saw of Ooty though; it has a rough, beat feel to it, and reminded me a lot of similar hill towns I’ve visited in China, a town with an edge. The road from Ooty to Mudumalai passes through several tea plantations and villages. There are great views into the Coimbatore plains: We stayed at the Jungle Retreat in Bokkapuram. As soon as I walked in, I thought it had a very Lonely Planet feel to it. Sure enough, I looked it up after I returned to Chennai, and there it is on page 663 (South India edition). It’s a very friendly place, and the tariff includes all meals. They will also arrange a number of activities in the area. Here are some photos of the place: My cabin: unfortunately not a treehouse, but quite nice. View from cabin Lounge, Restaurant and Bar: you’ll probably spend a lot of time here Vinay, Tarun, H-Bomb and I went on a night safari. This cost Rps. 850 and included driver, open-air jeep and ‘guide’. At first, I thought it was a rip-off, because all they did was drive around a few fields where we saw some deer and rabbits. But then they went down this other road where we spotted a herd of wild elephants. The driver stopped the jeep literally yards away from the dominant cow, who responded with angry growls. So our idiot ‘guide’ began to antagonize the animal by making loud vocal noises, which just angered the beast even more. It came really close to charging us. I was a bit upset at the prospect because I was in the back nearest the irate animal, and elephants are quite fast runners at short distances. We finally made the driver take off, and the guide said he wasn’t teasing it, but merely making a bull mating call. OK, number one, this clown was no Jim Fowler/Marlon Perkins, so I had little faith in what he was saying or in his knowledge about animal behavior. Number two, even if he was right, there’s no way in hell I want a two-ton cow elephant thinking I have any amorous intentions towards it. Either way, I’m in for a world of hurt. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was pretty scary. Later though, after we dropped off our guide, our driver went down another road where we witnessed a truly extraordinary sight: a solitary bull with a set of magnificent tusks grazing in a field under a moonlit sky. That ranks as one of the most special moments I’ve experienced here in India. This time, we just pulled to the side and quietly watched him until he got nervous and backed away into the night. Sorry to say I didn’t get a photo, but Vinay did, which I’ll post when he emails it to me. Almost an anti-climax after that, but the area is also monkey country. On the drive back to Coimbatore, before passing through Ooty, we spotted a troop of them, which were the only ones I saw all weekend, a shame, because I enjoy watching these guys:
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/13/2005 09:00:00 PM| |

 
Off tonight for a hill station retreat somewhere deep in the unclaimed wilds of Tamil Nadu with the H-Bomb and some Indian pals. I hear we'll even reside in treehouses. Should be a blast. I'll try to have something early next week...gotta pack now.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/08/2005 08:00:00 PM| |

 
Battle of the Super Strongs At the stroke of midnight on December 4, 2005 four intrepid heroes sacrificed livers, good taste, and most probably several years of their lives in order to rank six Indian super strong beers, so you wouldn’t have to. Their glorious story appears below. By way of introduction, the Indian super strong beer scene is not for the timid or faint of heart. Most expats in India never venture into the Dark Zone. They stick to safe and banal libations like Kingfisher [the non-super strong version], Sandpiper or Golden Eagle. These beers themselves are no great shakes, but will not likely cause any lasting harm once the glycerin headaches wear off. It’s when you hazard into the world of fortified beer that it becomes a game for keeps. These fortified beers, called ‘super strongs’ in India, are the equivalent of malt liquors in the US. Like US malt liquors, they average over 7% alcohol, and just as much ‘exacting care’ goes into their manufacture, with the additional bonus of glycerin, formaldehyde or whatever that chemical is they put in beer here. The Indians play the name game far better than US brewers, however, who could learn a thing or two from their Indian counterparts when it comes to product designations, with labels like Bullet, Knockout, Vorion 6000, Marco Polo and Zingaro gracing the local wineshop shelves. It seems each Indian state has its own legendary array of super strongs, and it was a recent trip by friend and colleague H-Bomb to Orissa that gave me the idea of organizing a super strong tasting after he called me from some podunk town there extolling the virtues of the local brew. Just for an idea of the incredible variety on offer, consider the picture below: Haywards 5000, Max 7000, He Man 9000, Hit 12000, Godfather, Hunter, Black Knight, and Kingfisher Superstrong For whatever reason, many of these beers contain a numerical designation in the name. The higher, the better? Not in my experience. As I mentioned, our tasting consisted of six super strongs. Unfortunately, due to logistical concerns, H-Bomb was only able to bring back three super strongs from his trip. The other three I obtained locally. Sadly, Vorion 6000 was not among them. The wineshop I went to refused to sell singles of it, and I wasn’t about to buy an entire case. We had six volunteers for the event, but only four completed their mission. That just shows you our dedication to science in the face of extreme hardship. I created scorecards and we came up with five categories by which to judge the beers: bouquet, color, taste, aftertaste, drinkability (meaning, would we consider finishing a whole bottle). We should’ve included one more as it turned out: gag/retch reflex. Scoring consisted of a 1-5 scale, with 5 being highest/best. The highest overall score a beer could obtain was 25 points. This was a blind taste test; no one knew which beer was which. That is, except me. I had really wanted to participate blind myself, and hoped another guy would serve as the referee, but he had to leave before we started the experiment. So here is the line-up of beers we rated, in the order I served them: Haywards 5000, Max 7000, Hunter, Godfather, Kingfisher, Black Knight Here are some action shots of the event: H-Bomb, probably wondering why he let me talk him into this Some Guy From Tulsa™ wishing we had included the gag factor Survivors and Heroes: Vinay, H-Bomb, PR, Some Guy From Tulsa™, with signed scorecards Although we had two Indian participants, Vinay was the only one to go the distance. I thought it important for statistical reliability purposes to have a local person’s data included in the study. After all, the manufacturers brew these beers with the Indian consumer in mind. It turns out his results were practically the same as the expats. So which beer was the winner? Actually ‘winner’ is too strong a term. There were no winners here. But the ‘least offensive’ turned out to be a tie between Haywards 5000 and Kingfisher Super Strong. Those two also happen to be the most widely-known super strongs in India, and it’s interesting that we rated them the highest. But in a contest like this, everyone wants to know the loser. In this case, it was a clear-cut unanimous decision. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I bring you: Godfather Super Strong High Powered Beer by Devans Modern Breweries Limited in Jammu (J&K): this is quite possibly the worst beer I have ever tasted in my life And now this man has something he would like to say: "Devans Brewery, Devans Brewery. What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?" It's a night I will not soon forget. H-Bomb and I had spent the previous weekend in Kuala Lumpur, so it became a test of wills to choke that stuff down. I had to repeat the following mantra to myself: "mind over matter...mind over matter". KL, with its readily available draught Tetleys, Guinness, and many other fine beers, really spoils a guy. The scary thing is that for almost two years we've been drinking these super strongs and thinking little of it. Sure, we knew they were bad, but we had no idea just how vile they were. Let this be a lesson to anyone out there coming to India: once you're here, whatever you do, don't leave until your time is up. Keep hitting the Haywards or Kingfisher, and don't question it; you really don't want to know.
UPDATE: Here's how the actual scoring broke down. After I tallied all the votes, I assigned a points system to each beer based on how each judge rated the beer. The 'least offensive' beer of each judge received 5 points all the way down to the one judged 'most offensive', which received 0 points. If a judge rated beers equally, I awarded full points to each. This scoring method has the advantage of providing a proportional weighting based on how each beer placed among each judge. As is clearly evident, Godfather fared extremely poorly, while the difference between Haywards and Kingfisher was marginal, and both placed far ahead of the field. One surprise: the third-place finish of Black Knight, which had a miserable reputation among all judges, although our bias was somewhat validated by its relatively low rating compared to the top two. Its final result in the tasting also provides a useful reference as to just how excruciatingly bad the other beers were. It is my hope that readers and future travelers/residents to India find this project handy should their imported stocks run dry.

Super Strong Taste Test

Beer	5	4	3	2	1	0	Total
Haywards 5000	XX	XX	--	--	--	--	18
Max 7000	--	--	--	XX	X	X	5
Hunter	--	--	XX	X	--	X	8
Godfather	--	--	--	--	X	XXX	1
Kingfisher	XXX	X	--	--	--	--	19
Black Knight	--	--	XXX	--	X	--	10

If you're reading this, Happy 40th Jody!!!
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/05/2005 01:50:00 AM| |

 
Cyclone Bazz Comes to Town Wow, Madras is in the midst of a real monsoon! Nothing like last year, where we received hardly any rain. We’ve already had two major city floods this year. The Indian media was on top of things for once, and we started receiving cyclone warnings earlier in the week. (I still find it very odd that the website of the largest English newspaper here, The Hindu, does not have a weather link). It started raining yesterday morning and didn’t quit until the wee hours of today. The flooding isn’t nearly as bad as that storm we had back in early October, but it still caused major traffic problems. Then again, nothing much more than an empty cardboard box in the street is needed to start a traffic snarl in Chennai. We had another Student Saturday® today so I headed off to the consulate at around 7:30 this morning. This time I did not forget to bring my camera. I took all of these while driving: Let’s see, the British established Madras in 1640. The city has been around now for 365 years. The monsoon is an annual event, and am I to understand that in all that time no one put together the logical sequence: Monsoon=Every Year=Heavy Rain=Flooding=City Drainage System? The British are to blame most of all. They controlled Madras for over 300 years and never initiated the proper public works projects that would prevent the city from flooding. Well, all I can say is I issued visas to at least three guys today so they could pursue graduate civil engineering degrees in the United States. I hope at least one of them comes back and designs a drainage network…Madras, I did my part. Still having trouble with my Internet connection, but the guys came out today and replaced the cable: “Cable is problem, sir.” It’s working fine now. (Famous last words). Here’s an example of the Tata Indicom fleet of service vehicles: Meanwhile, we in Madras get a taste of Harbin every day. From The Hindu:

...In the test results released to the media on Friday, the group said the air sample had carcinogens such as benzene, 1,3-butadiene and chloromethane at levels between 200 and 34,782 times higher than levels considered safe by the US EPA. Continuous exposure to the chemicals could lead to severe problems related to central nervous system and respiratory system. Benzene, which can cause childhood leukaemia, was more than 2000 times higher than levels deemed safe. The environmentalists pointed out that Benzene was in news recently for polluting Harbin River [sic] in China...

There's a reason why I cancelled my subscription to that newspaper...
- posted by Prince Roy @ 12/03/2005 03:00:00 PM| |