Procrastiblog

So, there’s a lot of man-on-man hand-holding in this town. Coming at this from a non-homophobic angle: what’s the necessity for it? What does it signify? I’ve always interpreted boy-girl hand-holding and arm-wrapping as a sublimated expression of sexual longing… And, of course, so must the rest of the Western world, since we all agree that heterosexual men should not hold hands, and should only hug at sporting events.

I’m pretty sure I have seen boy-girl hand-holding here as well. How is this hand-holding different from same-sex hand-holding? Or is it all the same, Platonic affection, and my dirty Western mind is leading me astray?

Just uploaded a new photo set.

WARNING: The theme of this blog for the next 3 months will be slowly evaporating ignorance masquerading as insight.

So, obviously, I have arrived. I’ve spent the last week trying to get my bearings, and I’m still only just getting started. Rather than write a novel about everything that has happened since I arrived, I will list just a few of the experiences of cultural difference that have perplexed me.

• In Mumbai, I waited an unbelievably long time in a partially air-conditioned corridor to take the shuttle bus* from the international terminal to the domestic terminal. So long (almost an hour) that I began to wonder if we weren’t subjects in some kind of psychological experiment.
• It takes two men to drive a cab to the airport: one to drive the car, and one to talk on his cell phone while the other guy drives the car.
• I have a houseboy who brings me food, washes my dishes and my clothes, and cleans the apartment. He speaks about five words of English, which are: breakfast, lunch, dinner, outside, and tomorrow.
• For some reason, all of my furniture, the refrigerator, and the washing machine disappeared. I asked the houseboy where they went, and he said, “Outside.” I asked him when they would come back, and he said, “Tomorrow.” This was on Wednesday. They have not reappeared.

* Note to my Indian readers: in the U.S., we prefer to take the monorail between airport terminals, as the monorail is the Transportation of the Future (cf. Epcot). We reserve buses for the poor, the infirm, and the insane, or use them to get to rental car agencies, hotels, Atlantic City, or Hooters. In any case, they run every 15 minutes.

I’ve uploaded my first Bangalore photo set to Flickr.

Here’s the first image in my new Flickr account. It’s the pile of drugs I just bought at Target so that my skin, sinuses, and gastro-intestinal tract will not fall off, rupture or explode while I’m in India. I’ll try to upload interesting pics regularly while I’m away.

I’m going to be spending the next few months at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore, and I’ll try to use that as an excuse to un-mothball the blog and keep people up-to-date on my cross-cultural hijinks. I’m not sure if I’m at liberty to divulge what I’ll be working on, but you might be able to figure it out yourself if you look at the projects on the Rigorous Software Engineering group page and then look at the projects I’ve worked on on my home page. Hint: it’s not Petri Nets. (Or is it? Proof of equivalence to follow.)