Friday evening is the best time of the week. By then, all the activ­i­ties of the day are wrapped up and put away until the following Monday.

Saturday seems much less of a working day in the US than it does in India. I consider this to be a rather good thing, because it gives me a lot of free time to relax, and get ready for the next week. One day, in my opinion, is too little to recharge.

Also, two days in a row is often long enough to take a short trip somewhere, either as a holiday or a visit to a friend’s place. But you need a car for that.

For graduate students, it is of partic­ular impor­tance that they attend as many seminars and lectures by external speakers, PhD students and faculty from other univer­si­ties as possible.

One obvious advan­tage is that it broadens your horizons to different kinds of problems. Sometimes, you don’t under­stand the details, but you do realize that some such problem exists. This also means that you get the oppor­tu­nity to show off in front of everyone else: you can always contribute to a lively discus­sion on DNA sequences or solid-state devices by pointing out some hidden issues, and then everyone will be impressed.

The most impor­tant, yet oft ignored, reason for attending such confer­ences is that snacks are gener­ally served — pizzas, Pepsi, cookies or something like that. There is nothing as disap­pointing as missing free pizza.

By the time Saturday arrived, I had a pile of laundry to be done. So late at night, I took the whole thing to the basement where there are a couple of washing machines and dryers, and dumped the clothes into the washing machine. Half-an-hour later, the washing was done and I trans­fered my clothes into the dryer, put in some coins, and satis­fied with its enthu­si­astic response, I went back to my apartment.

The next morning, I woke up early, the laundry still fresh on my mind, and wandered into the basement groggily and opened the dryer to find my clothes still wet.

What the hell was that?

I knew I had inserted the right amount; I knew it had started its work. Had it stopped sometime in the middle?

I had no idea what had gone wrong, and I had no quarters to exper­i­ment further. My wet clothes spent the Sunday sitting in a corner of my apartment.

By Sunday night, my spirits had risen somewhat, and with a fresh supply of quarters, I went down to the basement again and gave it another go. It had to be the same dryer, because the other one was in use. I put my clothes in and fed it a dollar. Soon I had the satis­fac­tion of seeing it humming and whirring. I went back home and returned forty-five minutes later to see that the machine was still going strong. Ah! My clothes would soon be dry.

Yeah, sure.

The next morning, I woke up early again, went to the basement again, and found my clothes. Wet.

Now, what in the name of the sixty-four gods was the damn machine doing all those ninety-nine minutes? My clothes weren’t damp, they were wet, as if you had rinsed it and squeezed the water out. And no, I’m pretty damn sure this machine was the dryer. I saw the letters Commer­cial Dryer written on it clearly enough.

What a moronic dryer! I would use some stronger terms here if the dryer could actually under­stand them. Dryer, if you’re reading this, know that there are people who would love to wield a baseball bat on your person. This is not just about the dollars you ate; it’s about your lack of princi­ples and that anti-social streak in your behavior that even jail-time could not cure.

Still, I’m an optimist. I dumped my clothes into a different dryer and it’s going at them now. Just to be sure, I’ve taken out some of the heavier stuff and put it on the sofa to dry.

At least the warm sunlight can be relied upon, if and when it makes an appearance.

I’ve noticed that a lot of Chinese/Korean (cannot distin­guish between the two, sorry) couples constantly hold each other’s hands when they walk around on the street or sit in the bus. I wonder if it is some sort of tradi­tion amongst them.…

On my way back from the tennis-courts, I saw a deer with two younger ones playing around in the grass. The fawns had white spots on their bodies that presum­ably served to camou­flage them. Unfor­tu­nately, I couldn’t take a picture of them with my cell-phone camera, because I didn’t have it with me then.

And speaking of cell-phones, I got mine replaced with another piece of the same model because there was something wrong with the sound quality in my previous one.

Everyone in the US is expected to have a phone. If you sign up for a newsletter, they will ask you to give them a phone-number. When you tell them you don’t have one, they will be stunned, shocked and upset. They will look at you in utter disbe­lief, and wring their hands in despair, faced with the terrible act of leaving that field blank.

You feel guilty that you have been the cause of this awful situa­tion. You try to calm them down. You stammer an excuse. You will be getting a phone in a day or so.

They heave a sigh of relief. Gradu­ally, every­thing returns to normal; they ask you to update them with this infor­ma­tion as soon as possible.

You are normal after all.

In India, traffic moves along the left lane, but in the US it is the other way around. For newcomers, this is a constant source of confu­sion, because they have a diffi­cult time figuring out which way to look before crossing the street. Obviously the best way to deal with this problem is to err on the side of caution and look both ways.

Cars in the US are built differ­ently. The gears are simpli­fied — see automatic trans­mis­sion — which means that there is no need to change gears as the car speeds up or slows down. This also affects the way people drive their cars. For instance, when a red light turns green, a car in India would start moving gradu­ally, the gear would be changed and then the vehicle would speed up. In contrast, a person driving a car in the US would simply press down on the accel­er­ator and it would be off as quickly as possible. It is as if there were a perfectly functioning system of speeding vehicles that the driver wanted to join in the smallest possible time so as to become a part of the mainstream.

One of the strange things for an Indian going to New York is the way vehicles stop and give way to pedes­trians. Where there are zebra-crossings, cars slow down to let people pass. At the same time, it is almost assumed that pedes­trians will not attempt to cross the street at any other place. I think this phenom­enon is tied up to the technology involved — cars can afford to stop frequently because they speed up very easily afterward.

Anyone who has been in the habit of following the progress of this blog would undoubt­edly be familiar with the dynamism with which changes occur in these parts. The usual process goes thus: there is little activity for a few days, and then all of a sudden a different blog takes the place of the previous one, the new replaces the old.

The current change is simply a reflec­tion of a change of circum­stances. I am in a new place, and would like to make occasional comments on the people I encounter, the experi­ences I go through and in general, life in a different place. This could be an anthropologist’s gold-mine, or it could be trash. Take your pick.

The place: Ithaca, New York, USA