Blogs, Power and Holidays

I should put in a plug for my daughter's blog. She is a PhD student in
Anthropology and is currently in Nicaragua (for nearly a year) doing
research for her dissertation. She is keeping a blog at
http://carolynffisher.blogspot.com . It's really great, and I'm not in
the slightest prejudiced.

Anyway we both keep noticing the occasional similarities in our
experiences in "developing" countries, although India is, by
conventional measure, more "developed" I think.

For example, power: We are both living in cities (although she make
trips out to El Campo (the countryside...not an implication of a
vacation, but rather small rural villages). We both see the power
disappearing frequently. The difference ends there because my apartment
has standby power, as does my work. What happens at the apartment is
that the lights go out, the internet dies if you happen to be doing that
and suddenly there is this roaring all around. The standby generators
have kicked on. After maybe 10 seconds for the generators to stabilize,
the power comes back on. At work, it is an uninterruptible power supply
of some sort. The lights blinked once, but the computers kept running
fine. But back to the apartment: This roaring goes on for a time.
Sometimes it is 5 minutes. Sometimes it is an hour or so. It seems
that when the municiple power comes back on there is some sort of loud
chime. It seems to be coming from my kitchen, but I guess it could be
right outside the window. Sometimes, but not always, the generator
shuts down a few seconds later. I hypothesize that when the power comes
back on they somehow get some idea whether it is on "for good" or if it
is likely to be off again soon. If the later, they keep the generator
running.

It's pretty odd when the power goes out while you're walking the street
at night. The street lights don't have any backup, so you have to be
careful where you walk. Being able to see is a very good thing when
walking due to the many obstacles all the way from stray dogs (M.M.Kaye
calls them "pariah dogs" in The Far Pavilions, a fabulous book to read
while you are in India, BTW, despite it being set in Victorian times and
the British Raj) to uneven paving to speed bumps to cars.

Funny story about power: Some of my Indian friends were in the US at work when there was a momentary power failure. Realize that this happens only a few times a year, but I think that there was a thunderstorm or something. All the computers in the lab went down, as did the A/C and a bunch of other stuff. It was a Friday afternoon so I told them they might as well go start their weekend trip early. Things were not going to be back until evening (the A/C has to be restarted, machines rebooted, etc etc, and the physical plant folks are doing this all over the building.) I found out later that they were totally amazed that such a thing could happen. They loose municipal power much more often than we do, so they have a backup. That means that they almost never actually loose power in the lab. The fact that we did not have a backup seemed pretty primitive to them!

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This is the beginning of Deepavali or Diwali (usually transliterated the
former way, although the pronunciation is more like the latter). This
is the biggest holiday of the year for Hindus. It is also celebrated by
Jains, Telugu, and Sikhs. It is also called "The Festival of Lights".
Oddly, it seems that one of the most stunning decorative displays in
Orchard Street in Singapore, but there are surely a lot of lights. (And
no, they did not go up in July. It was just yesterday!) The festival
is 5 days long, but Saturday is the biggest day (I think day #3). We
have today (Friday) off from work. Then Tuesday is Eid, the end of
the Muslim Holy Month of Ramadan. That day is also off. You can
imagine that most people take Monday as a vacation day so that they have
a nice long weekend to go spend time with their families.

Nov 1 is also a holiday. That is the founding of the state of
Karnataka (in 1957 I think...they re-arranged the state boundaries
then). And I may have mentioned that on that day, the city of Bangalore
will be officially renamed to Bengaluru (I think they are still debating
the official transliteration; there might be a double-o in place of the
first u). It's an exciting time to be here!