Lemony Snicket's and the Fighting Irish

Last week was mostly spent at a conference at the University of Notre Dame. This University is in a place called South Bend in Indiana and the best way to reach it is to fly to Chicago and drive 2 hours from there on three or four different freeways. 

My first stumble was with United Airlines. They were 45 mintues late. Apparently they were waiting for the incoming aircraft. No sorry. No apologies. 5 minutes before boarding time, they pushed it out 45 minutes.

My plan was to drive from O'Hare airport to my sister who lives 20 minutes from the airport, get some rest and start driving first thing in the morning. The flight which is supposed to land at 10:15 in the night, lands at 10:50 and the pilot announces "There seems to be a traffic jam at the gate with three planes stuck in our area. So this will be a few minutes". After doing three rounds around terminal C, he finally gets us in. It is 11:10! Traffic jam in an airport?! Experiencing this for the first time after so many years of flying. 

Raced out of the gate to find the Budget Car rental, only to realize the one has to catch a Budget bus that takes you offsite and then you get your car. The Budget bus guy circled the airport twice to fill up the bus before deciding to exit and there is a jam at the airport! It takes him 20 minutes just to get to the office outside the airport somewhere.

Then the fun begins. I am 15th in line and there are a whole bunch of simply frustrated people standing in line in this middle of nowhere place. The guy in front of me says he has already been in line for 35 mintues. Apparently the new cars that were being returned were not automatically showing up on the computer. So after doing paperwork, the guys at the counter were manually going out to the lot, assigning a car to the contract and sending the customer on their way, a process that took 10-12 mintues per customer. 

There was no sorry, no apologies from the counter folks. "If you want a car you can wait for however long it takes. Your other option is to call corporate and get a refund." is what this guy told a very frustrated lady with two small toddlers.

I watched helplessly, as a few other angry folks in the line moved over to Avis, which was the only other counter in that area. To their credit, they were in and out in 15 minutes.  Before you know it, the Avis line was full and by now I had already waited an hour!

My sister has almost given up on seeing me that night and she texts me to say "just call us when you get to the parking lot". Finally got a car assigned to me at 12:55 AM after a sudden improvement in the counter speed for the last four customers in front of me. Made it to my sisters place at 1:20 in the night. We chatted for a few minutes and my sister said "I will get up in the morning and make you some breakfast!". I almost teared up. It was already 1:45 in the morning. 

So set the alarm for 5:30 and my sister is already up making me idli's for the on road breakfast (and lunch) and she has packed me some stuff for dinner and the next days breakfast given my allergy history. In short enough to cover me till the return trip through her house to O'hare!

Gladly took all the food and started driving over to Indiana. Then came sequel to Lemony..

Google maps put the time at 1 hour 55 minutes and gave me nice directions. So given that, and the fact that it was raining like crazy to the point that using the windshield viper at max was still useless, drove at a steady pace. Just 10 minutes before I got to the exit for Notre Dame, got a rude shock! The time jumped an hour from Central to Eastern time! Almost cried. Why would any state have some counties on different time zones?! Why?!

Unlike flight timings where they tell you the arrival time with the local time in mind, Google Maps is not smart enough to tell you that when you arrive at your destination you will lose an extra hour.  Luckily there was enough time for me to go do the formalities there. 

There was a short break from all this angst when spending time on the campus. What a beautiful campus! Apparently, it was the day they showed all the new kids a tour of the football stadium. Thousands of kids all wearing green "Fighting Irish" T-shirts crossed the roads as the few conference goers waited patiently to find their parking lots.

Checked in later that evening into the Inn at Saint Mary's. Given that this place is in the middle of nowhere, this hotel was awesome! The best room I have had a chance to stay in to date on any business trip. For 100 bucks (with a discount for being part of the conference) I got a room with a Jacuzzi! 

When it was time to come back stopped by my sister's place again. My Chai buddy who still lives in Fermi Lab after all these years showed up and we caught up. It is amazing how you can catch up on 3 years in 30 minutes with friends.

When it was time to leave, United did it again. Boarded early morning in Chicago and they pushed the time of the flight by 40 mintues, shortly after boarding. The announcement was brief :

"There is fog in San Francisco and that is causing delays in air traffic control. So the flight is delayed, ONLY by 40 minutes. We might make up some time in the air. Thank you". 

No apologies. No sorry. Nothing. The old lady next to me said "ONLY by 40 minutes. See, they know we all cooped up here like rats and we got nowhere else to go! That it why she takes that tone".

We discussed in bullet points, how:

- SFO being two hours behind will almost always have a pre dawn fog

- by the time our flight gets to SFO 4 hours later, the fog should be gone

- what a pathetic excuse etc. etc. 

Somehow the talking moves to how often I travel and we get to "how is traveling in India"!

I told her about an India trip two years ago, when our flight got cancelled and we were offered seats on a competitor airlines flight to the same destination at no charge. She went "What?!" and I said "Yes. There is competition now in India and customer service is getting better because they know if they do that, the folks will remember what they did and come back!" and now we have gone from "We are extremely sorry that the flight is delayed by 10 minutes" just a decade ago to "It is ONLY 40 minutes delay".  

We both agreed that we live in interesting times. 

Finally made it back home to kids who rushed into my arms. Lemony Sicket's was over!

Both United and Budget car rental want feedback on my user experience as of yesterday. It should be fun giving them radio button answers on a scale of 1 to 10, not that I think it will make a difference!

Life is an adventure. Get to go to new places, meet a lot of new people, experience different things that improve  understanding of the surroundings and open my eyes to the world and if I am lucky enough to keep traveling, see changes and patterns. 

This was one interesting trip!

Knowledge is power ?

Has been a busy week, with more work, a conference in San Francisco and the usual happenings at home. I have been attending this conference almost every year for the last 13 years! This conference is usually a week long event. I get to attend it for two or three days every year. Ever since I started working, even those two days are marred by frequent phone calls and beeps on my pager. In spite of the interruptions, I feel so alive at this conference. I get to listen to the latest and greatest breakthroughs in my field of research, meet people who have similar interests, and get to overload my brain with all the information.

The hour long drive to and from San Francisco also helps clear my head and give me time to process the information. Yesterday I met an old friend and the conversation steered towards education. On the way back from the conference, my thought process was wandering around

education
why I did not become a professor
India
Brahmins
Importance to Knowledge
Aaavani Avittam
BHU
Mandal commission
reservations
affirmative action
research
white LED's
Nakamura
% success in Research projects
funding
policy
role of policy in education

and after going through a full circle I just realized I was just tired and the little hamster insdie my head needed some sleep!

But a couple of thoughts were stuck there for some time.

What Aavani Avittam ceremony is supposed to do for me and fails, this conference does! All Brahmin boys, renew their commitment to the learning process once every year at this ceremony. I do that ceremony mechanically because I am not well versed in Sanskrit or study Vedas and Upanishads for a living. I do love learning though! This week has been an extended Aavani Avittam for me! I get to meet the high priests of materials engineering, chat and debate with fellow researchers and realize the value of what I do for a living!

A second train of thought was that somehow in the back of my mind, I do always feel that the caste systems successful survival and stubborness to be eradicated in India has to do with how it makes people believe that they are special. More specifically Brahmins are proud of their commitment to learning or their belief of "knowledge is power". I am not discriminatory by nature and I am definitely not elitist or snobish because I am a brahmin. However, I have made statements in the past of how proud I am to believe that "knowledge is power" and that is somehow a very Brahmin thing to believe! I also realized that every caste tries to one up the others by making their speciality a secret. If brahmins believed that Knowledge is power, the right thing to do would have been to spread knowledge and empower everyone. Yet we know only a handful of people like Sankara, Ramanuja went along those lines. The vast majority decided to keep education to themselves and their clan and made the rest of the population dependent on them to even read and write! I could say similar things about all other castes except the poorest and lowest castes who by default got the shaft from everyone else.

I also keep thinking about how researchers are confronting politicians in faith vs science debates today, similar to the power struggle dynamics between Brahmins and the Kshatriyas.

It would have been great if everyone knew how to read and write, everyone was well versed in martial arts or had self defense skills, everyone knew how to trade and do business and of course everyone knew how to wash their own clothes, clean their own toilets or cut their own hair!! or at the least have a mutual respect for every other profession and professional!!

The hamster is on overdrive and needs to rest! Enough rambling....

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