Procrastiblog

For the benefit of future foreign MSRI employees and other Americans in possession of a Citibank Suvidha account:

1) It is possible to transfer your Rupees to a US bank, see below.
2) I have not been able to use my Citibank India ATM card in the US, but I haven’t actually tried very hard. It is not a PIN issue, as I can check my balance—it just won’t let me take out cash.

To transfer your money to the US, you need to:

a) Have your passport, visa, and pay slips that have been signed and sealed by the company. In my case, I brought every single pay slip and they were stamped and signed by HR.

a) Go to the Citibank Suvidha office in the Prestige Meridien building on MG Road. This is not the regular Citibank branch office out front, but a special office which is reached by walking around the building to the left, up a staircase, and past a Cafe Coffee Day. You will be asked to sign in. You need to talk to, IIRC, Shamila at the second desk on the left.

b) Fill out a form requesting “Remission for the Maintenence of Family”. Do not ask to close your account. This will cause a controversy. For the amount you will write something like “X Rupees in USD” to signify the conversion of your Rupee balance to US dollars. I believe there is a fee of Rs 1200 for the transfer.

c) Be careful when you sign the forms. The most commonly heard phrase in the Suvidha office is “signature mismatch”. (Do you actually know how to sign your own name? You’ll get to find out!)

D) Et voila. Your money will appear in your US bank account within a week.

[UPDATE 9/9/2006] ATM card works in U.S. Citibank ATMs. Has not worked as yet in non-Citibank ATMs.

On August 21, 2006, the company purchased me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label* which I promptly turned over to Jonathan, who had gifted me the stolen whiskey. By some twisted Indian logic, this event was precipitated by my mentor’s threat to buy me a bottle of whiskey himself by the end of the day if the company wouldn’t. Thus endeth the Story of the Whiskey.

* Let’s ignore the difference between Tennessee and Scotland and call it even.

So, yes, I am back in NY. I arrived back last Sunday. It is surprisingly not-weird to be here. It feels just like… being home.

I dropped off the face of the blogging Earth two weeks ago because (a) I had an enormous amount of work to do before I left Bangalore, (b) I’ve been just totally disoriented since I got back, and (c) NYU handed me a new laptop on Monday and I’ve spent all of my computer fiddling time since then trying to get wireless and “suspend to RAM” (i.e., sleep) working under Linux* (not responding to email, catching up on blogs, or getting any real work done).

I’ve actually got a bunch of things stacked up that I need to blog about, including: an end to the Saga of the Whiskey, the final lessons of India, the irritating trip home amid the Liquid Explosives Scare of ’06, the Ballad of the Lost Bag, and “closeted gay friends: what’s the deal?” Stay tuned.

* Anybody? Tips? The PC’s a Dell Inspiron 6400, the wireless card’s a Broadcom 1390, which I finally got working with a custom-compiled ndiswrapper**. Suspend to RAM seems hopeless.***

** NDIS!! Oh, how I loathe you!

*** As a result of my summer employment, I am feeling marginally more inclined to fuck it and just run Windows XP. The thing is, I spent an inordinate amount of my summer trying to get Cygwin and MSVC to play nice together and I long for a nice, reasonable command shell and a compiler to go with it.

There’s this project on Flickr to have lots of people submit photos they took at exactly 2:42pm GMT, 19 August 2006. At the appointed hour (as ajudged by my insanely accurate timepiece), Carolyn and I were stuck in traffic coming back from Koramangala. I’m not sure what the exact rules are wrt sub-minute accuracy and what-not, but I now have three candidate pictures for submission. Let’s take a vote!

The auto driver next to us (not our auto driver!), who thought we were two completely insane tourists:

Carloyn, centered and washed out by the flash, with a hint of another auto driver giving us the skunk eye:

Carolyn, off-kilter and trying to simultaneously take a picture of me:

Vote in comments.

Vijay invited us to visit his Dad’s business, which is AFAIK to train pilots, build specialty aircraft, and sell aviation novelties.
I didn’t even realize it was Vijay’s family business until we were already there and he said, “Do you want anything? Just take it.”

After a while I got bored and decided to just annoy Deb.

Later, we went to Cunningham Rd and had a disappointing meal.

What a day!

Sitting in front of the Taj Mahal (which, for my American readers, was built by the Muslim Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his wife, incorporates verses of the Qu’ran into its design, and has an on-site mosque), I remember asking Hilleary what Osama bin Laden would think of it. The pinnacle of Muslim civilization’s accomplishments or an impious despot’s folly?

She said she had no idea and that predicting Osama bin Laden’s thought patterns is not an activity that interests her.

I think this helps answer my question. (Although, it is not clear how legitimate this threat is or how well it ties in with the Islamo-whatsist world-view.)

Gilbird just handed me a bill of Rs 120 for 2 bottles of beer. So they weren’t intended as repayment for the Jack Daniel’s.

I spoke with Lepakshi on the phone and asked why I had received the beer. He said I received it because I had asked for it. But I hadn’t. Gilbird says he was pulled away from his other work to go on an emergency beer run on my behalf.

This is all very strange, no? But I like beer. I even told Gilbird I am willing to pay for it (it’s a fair price and I am glad to drink it), but he refused to take the money. He wants to get to the bottom of this. Good luck, man! I give up!

[UPDATE 9/4/2006] I paid for the beer before I left (at least I tried to). And Gilbird quit.