The USS Quad Damage

Today was spent mostly visiting relatives and wishing them well. We spent a bunch of time trying to be quick about visiting people, but eventually being coaxed first into coming inside, then into sitting, then tea and conversation, next thing the whole day is gone.

One of the big topics of the day was corruption. Good or bad? Discuss. (I ended up not really understanding whether corruption was a solvable problem or not).

A bunch of time was spent talking about my relatives. A lot of them are pretty awesome. Some of them are just plain witty, or nice, or really smart. My cousin’s wife is a statistician (either getting or has a PhD) who has done work on ballistics, reliability, and cryptanalysis. If I heard this correctly she’s built a FSM to create keys.

I will be talking more to her later.

To be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention most of the day. The night would go off with a bang. It really sounded like it could’ve been a war. During the height of people lighting firecrackers, you didn’t have a time where you didn’t hear a pop or a squeal or a boom. Various bright lights going off and neighbours all giggling and laughing as things went very right, or wrong.

Newer and larger rockets have their own casing, so they look like big cylinders with a fuse. Smaller rockets are kinda dangerous. Sometimes they don’t go off, and sometimes when they do they change trajectory to point across rather than up. One of my rather naughty nephews lit a rocket and threw it on the ground, laughing greefully. What followed was a slow-motion “oh shit” and I moved him out of the way and his dad threw the rocket across the street. It flew down the road at a bunch of kids lighting other firecrackers freaked the fuck out.

Much apologies later, the fun resumed.

The left-over cylinders from the big rockets were used to demonstrate the power of some of the bungers. You didn’t really need to demonstrate the power. Even when blowing them up from across the street, not only were they hilariously loud, but you could actually feel the shockwaves. They blew out the candles we lit around our home.

Anyway, we thought a demonstration would be useful, so we put a cylinder around the bunger and set it off. We never saw that cylinder again, so we tried again with a bigger cylinder. It flew in the air about 10m, then fell back down again.

Apparently there were even bigger bungers which have since been made illegal.

I had a good night’s sleep. High on the agenda was getting more Toilet Paper. Water is a scarce resource, and is only delivered until 10am in the morning. I think it resumes again in the evening. Between those two hours, you’re on your own. We have a water tank which keeps some water. Having said that, at no time during the day, even when water is directly delivered, is there any real pressure to the water itself. It feels very much like it’s using osmosis to move through the piping.

India is full of small businesses directly competing against one another. If you’re looking for a shoe shop, you’ll generally find a number of shoe shops next to each other. Brands, too, are generally “unknown”, even though they’ve gained recognition in their own right. Competing against all of these are the global players. It feels nice. A lot of businesses set up shop right outside a legitimate strip of commercial areas, for example, people selling things in the car park of the commercial strip. Whether you buy things from the car park or from inside one of the shops, it appears there’s a fair bit of hand calculation going on.

It took me a while to figure this out. As the guy’s adding things up, I’m wondering why he’s not just using a calculator, or just a cash register. Eventually it clicks, and the lack of a receipt confirms it. I wonder if all businesses are off the books like this or if there’s some way of tracking this stuff.

Chandigarh itself is a nice area. However, a lot of the work seems strangely half done. For instance, there are kerbs, but for some reason there’s a bunch of dirt and concrete mounted on the kerbs. You’d think that if there was a guy in charge of doing the kerbs, he wouldn’t just leave his crap lying around after he was done. Apparently corruption is the universal answer for that sort of thing around here.

One of the things I’m trying to learn to do is speaking hindi. Being around a bunch of people constantly speaking the language helps a lot, as does the fact that apparently my accent is untenable. It’s still hard going though. Strangely, it seems like I can understand more Hindi and Punjabi than my brother, but can’t speak as much of it.

One of the things we did was visit the factory which my relos own. They make bolts there, and even though that sounds simple it encompasses most of what we learnt in Engineering Science in High school. There’s various forming, threading, and other machines, a bunch of lathes and such for tool design, even a furnace for heat treatment. There’s also things for plating and case hardening.

Today, on the eve of Diwali, apparently all engineers celebrate this dude who was Rawan’s (the bad guy who gets killed on Dushera) Engineer. This guy was supposed to have designed and / or built his city. I like the idea that engineers respect this guy even though he was fighting for “the wrong team”. I hope that science and engineering can maintain this sort of respect and care for each other even if they’re on opposite sides of the war.

Eventually, we went shopping for the things we would need for Diwali. I remember markets having a lot more haggling. Maybe I used to go shopping with my more cheap-skatey relatives. The important thing for me here was the firecrackers. We bought a bunch of stuff totalling nearly $200. That’s a lot for a country where food is, on average, around $1 a head in a restaurant. We ended up with over 20Kg of explosives, ranging from things that spin around, things which go boom, things which go bigger boom, rockets, and things which spray fire into the night. Oh, and Sparklers.

I’m excited about tomorrow. For some reason I was worried that if I arrived too late, all the fireworks would’ve been bought out. Silly fear. Guys who sell explosives are awesome, and they never run out.

Looking at my nephews and the way they act (completely loco), as well as my relatives’ description of how me and my brother were as children, I’m starting to wonder if I’m adopted. The stories are all “yeah, and we were all this insane… except you Sunny, you just studied a lot”. Excellent.