Progress in both Indias

"So," asked one of my friends, "what's changed in India since your last visit." The answer is a bit complicated. It depends on which India you are talking about.

This is a village I tend to visit every time I go back to India (it's near where my parents live). What's new in that village in the past two years? A water tank and a children's park (the splash of blue in the photo), both abutting the village's fresh water pond.

The pond remains the source of drinking water for the village, and the rules about what people can do in that pond (no swimming or washing, for example) are still in place. The water remains untreated -- hence the rules of conduct -- and water comes out the pipe for only a quarter hour or so. However, it is progress. The women of the village no longer trek to the pond to collect fresh water. Instead, they wait by their taps early in the morning. The childrens' park is the first park in the village. That splash of blue is the first slide these kids have encountered. That too is progress, but it is bittersweet. Traditional games, the games you can play with nothing but stones and sticks, are the casualty here.

I encounted the other India in Delhi, the national capital. Since the last time I was there (two years ago), Delhi now has a new international airport, a bunch of limited access highways and a greatly expanded metro system. This is the southmost leg of the metro, in Gurgaon, Haryana. The station's still under construction, but the trains are running.

I'm sure Delhi has a few new water tanks and childrens' parks too.

The eight-year-old takes control

On Saturday evening, I was in New York, visiting a cousin who'd recently had a baby.  The wife was in Norman, but was at a wedding (we got the wedding invite after I made my Northeast trip plans).  The kids were at home with the grandparents who are visiting.  With both parents out, S1 had gotten into his head that he needed to take care of his non-English-speaking grandparents and little sister.  He was the man-of-the-house, though where he got this idea, I don't know.  We certainly have never even used that phrase in front of him.

It all started when he called me for help with a computer.  "The laptop that grandpa uses to watch his TV does not start up," he informed me, "it says something about no boot image on the partition. I tried shutting down and restarting it and that didn't help."  I had him look for any storage devices connected to the computer.  There was no DVD in the computer, but he did find a USB drive, so he removed it and reported that the computer was starting up now, but that the resulting desktop looked weird.  "It has a different picture in the background," he commented thoughtfully.

The grandparents watch Tamil TV channels on the internet, and because many India-based websites are virus laden (even the ones that you pay $20/month for), I'd connected a dedicated laptop to the TV and asked them to use that for reading Indian newspapers and watching Indian TV channels.  And to avoid having to reinstall all the software on it every time the machine gets hosed, I'd installed everything on a virtual machine.  That way, every couple of weeks, I'd wipe out the current VM (which by now would have all kinds of viruses and tracking software), copy over a pristine VM and let the whole process go again.

Obviously, the host OS had started up, but the VM hadn't.  So, I had him find the VM manually and start it. He did so, and was very proud to go tell grandpa that he'd fixed the computer (with some assistance from New York-based tech support, of course).

An hour or so later, he called again.  He'd been playing outside when he noticed a funnel-like thing with clouds moving very fast.  "Is a tornado coming to our house?," he asked me, "should we go hide?"   See this picture of the storm by a friend taken at about the time of S1's phone call -- it's a rainfoot/microburst, not a tornado -- but S1 couldn't know that, of course.

Photo (c) James G. Ladue

I had him switch on a local TV station and look at the warning.  "It says thunderstorm warning," he said.  "If it doesn't say tornado watch or warning, you guys can relax," I told him.   By this time, this alert was sitting in my email box, but it was a better learning experience for S1 to have him look at the TV than for me to tell him the answer.  (The blue is my personal alert area; the black the NWS warning area; as you can see we were on the edge of it. ).  It turned to be a heavy rainfall and heavy damage event, concentrated to our east.

At one level, it's funny and rather cute that he would decide that he was man-of-the-house. But another part of me is rather proud -- when I was eight years old, there is no way that I could taken charge of things like that.

The Zen of rain gauges

If rain gauges don't capture rainfall, did it really rain?

Leh, in northern India, lies within a rain shadow region of the Himalayas.  There was a freak cloudburst (rainfall on the order of 100mm/hr) there earlier this month that caused mudslides and hundreds of fatalities, but it was so localized that the weather station in Leh recorded just 13 mm of rainfall!  As far as the records are concerned, there was no cloudburst, just normal rainfall (monthly rainfall in August averages 15 mm).

Gandhi spinning in his grave

August 15 in India is Independence Day. The malls in Delhi, full of Western goods, are now decked out in the colors of the Indian flag. Somewhere, Gandhi and Nehru are spinning in their graves.

Geological time scales

It's easy to forget how old even some of the more recent buildings in India are. The Red Fort in Delhi, for example, was built by one of the last Moghul kings (before they lost their empire to the British). When it was built, water was pumped up from the Yamuna river and used to keep the palaces cool.

Now, though, the Yamua river is more than a mile away. The river has moved that much since the time that the fort was built.

Being pound foolish

Everything I'm seeing in India tells me that Krugman is right when he says:

Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward ... the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn.

Don't eat alone in Indian restaurants

What happens when you walk into a slightly upscale Indian restaurant by yourself?

"You are here aah-looone?", asks the waiter, extending the word "alone" for a full five seconds and saying it loud enough for half the restaurant to turn around and look at you. He then seats you in the middle of the restaurant at a table meant for six. Determined not to be embarrassed, you pull out your e-book reader and start to read. At which point, the old lady at the table over leans over and asks if you are praying.

And that's when you decide you'll never go to an upscale Indian restaurant by yourself.