Life as a Physicist

My last day in Bombay was great: I got out as a tourist. Mostly shopping, but none-the-less. I really wanted to take a boat trip, but my stomach just didn’t feel up to it.

One thing that made the end of the week so nice is the wind moved in. The picture on the left shows the smog in Bombay at the start of the week (that isn’t a cloud!!). I think Bombay is a bit like LA — when there is no wind everything gets trapped. Mostly pollution. The camera exagerates the effect, but you can tell how bad it was! The picture on the right was taken at the end of the week from TIFR — and now you can see several kilometers. I would love to know what it looks like approaching Bombay from the sea: does it look like one big smog bubble and the city is only visible after you enter it?

The last day was a lot of walking around. We ended up in a market in (what I think is) the Muslim section of the city. It was totally different from the rest of Bombay. Many fewer women on the streets, and the style of dress totally changes. It felt a bit like walking into China Town in NYCity. Without realizing it your world changes. Of course, everything in Bombay is strange to me, so the change wasn’t as apparent as in NY City.

That picture probably wins the cute-award for all of the ones I took while at Bombay. These guys were posing because they wanted to see their image on a digital camera. I got the feeling they knew exactly what it was — but they were fascinated to see its operation up close. BTW, these kids weren’t beggars. The difference between the two (here is one that latched, literally, onto Toby one evening) — well, I couldn’t always tell until I was approached. In America the obviously poor usually look like they have given up: out on the street begging, for example. The poor that haven’t given up, well, you can’t tell - they look middle class in America (despite their struggles). Bombay was different — you could tell the poor from the middle class. But the poor had clearly not given up. They were full of life and looked, to first-order, healthy. Certainly not living a standard that we in America would allow — but healthy and living.

While there I learned that the rural population of India is 700 million (out of 1 billion total). That is twice the size of the US living in rural communities!! I was also told that most people in the city had jobs, however menial, and could feed themselves. Things were worse in rural areas. To an American eye the labor market was very odd. A $15 dinner meal involved a huge number of people serving you. If a friend put a cigarette in their mouth someone was there to light it before their brain had sent signals to their hand to fish in their pocket for a lighter. It would seem there had been a concious choice by the government to employ as many people as possible. Very odd when you compare to America where we are a productivity kick and trying to do as much as possible with as few people as possible. The big difference, of course, is that in India labor is cheap compared to America. I wonder how India will deal with it when that changes…?

All in all the trip was fantastic. I wish I’d had more time to explore — and even be a tourist outside Bombay, as many of my friends did. I can only hope they will post their pictures so I can live vicariously through them… I’ve put up all the pictures on my flickr account. Check them out. The last day are towards the end. There are conference dinner pictures mixed in with walks between the hotel and TIFR. And I have to thank everyone that worked so hard to put that conference together. It was a lot of fun!