Life in Chennai #14: Beating the Heat Part 2 - Adapting

Friends and family have all been asking me how I am doing with the heat, with the summer and the answer, very truthfully and surprisingly, is, “I’m doing fine with it”. I’m glad it’s summer, happy it is here and enjoying the days, not pining for cooler climes or a change of season. And that surprises me as much as anyone.

I’ve got a few close friends here and talking this past weekend, we all noticed the same thing: somewhere along the way, we’ve actually gotten used to the heat. Oh, the days it hits 44 degrees C are not days you feel particularly motivated to go for a jog or run errands around town all afternoon, but they’re not days we wish we were dead either. We’ve found tricks and tactics (like in my last post) to deal, but it goes beyond that. We’re actually physically and mentally adapting to the new range.

It is weird to notice that and funny too. This past weekend was cooler than it’s been, lovely and pleasant, nice at night. We were happy and giddy over the comfort and freedom and spent lots of time outside…it was 38 degrees. We’ve completely adjusted our range of what is normal, what is nice, what is hot and what is cool. I first really noticed we had adapted when I caught myself using “only” to describe anything under 40 degrees and not meaning it in jest. Similarly, you stop noticing being sweaty and sticky. You stop describing it as “gross” and, really, just stop describing it at all. You get along with it psychologically so that you do not feeling trapped inside or unable to live life.

I seem to be physically adapting also. The first week back from Nepal was definitely like getting smacked by a truck and I definitely felt my body struggling with the heat and worried about the months of summer left. Sweaty and damp, I didn’t sleep well those first few nights. But that seems to have gone away and I feel fine now, normal. I’m actually sweating less and being bothered less than when I first arrived in India despite it now being much hotter. I’ve even kept my beard and find it OK, maybe because the short hair aids evaporation? Beats me, but it isn’t any more itchy, annoying or damp than the rest of me. I am feeling OK without a/c at home and even no longer feel the need to turn on the fans all the time (although I am thankful we have a/c at work as without any airflow and catching the mid-day sun, the office is truly unbearable without some form of cooling). I am really jazzed about this, all the more because I wasn’t sure how I would do. I do well in the cold – my body generates a lot of heat – but was never as good with wilting heat, so this is a new trick for me.

A year ago, I would have described 38 degrees as killer hot and dreaded a day out in it and today I find it pleasantly cool and a nice respite. I now have a high of 44 degrees in my spread of acceptable temperatures I know I can handle. How cool is that? It is really amazing what you can get used to and how you can redefine your range of comfort.

Travelling #10: Homecoming to Chennai

I’m home. And sweating.

It is 38 degrees and 95% humidity. I think with the population of 7 million sweating, we must be pushing it up to 100. I shouldn’t whine though. Actually, outside, with a breeze, it isn’t too bad in the shade if you’re stationary. But I’m at work and the power is out, so no a/c, no fans and no breeze, where I’m sweating just thinking (with an obvious solution therefore presented). Ah India, welcoming me home! A week ago I was standing above 6000m with a bitingly dry wind at -15 and now here I am at sea level, 95% humidity and pushing 40 degrees. Quite the change.

I realise that I have slowly lost some of my adaptations and resistances while away. I am finding it will be a few days before that slight fraying of nerves at the constant chaos and bump of bodies goes away. But I smile at the remembered charms I always liked. I missed the bumblebee-coloured rickshaws and I missed my masala dosa. I missed good Indian chai as the touristy places in Thamel in Kathmandu were hit and miss with it (I blame the indiscriminating tourists). I missed my housemates and our lovely maid, who was apparently quite upset Monday morning when she discovered I hadn’t arrived on Sunday as planned and worried I was lost (so nice!). I missed the wallahs everywhere and I missed the lushness of Chennai – say what you will about its grime and dirtiness, it is at least a very green city with palm trees and flowering plants everywhere. I sit eagerly staring out of the auto on the way to work soaking it all back in.

So it is back to India for another 6 months and back to re-start my project. It has been nice to be off travelling and trekking and meeting people (and I promise to get more stories up on that soon), but it is also exciting to be getting back to work and back to doing what I’ve set my career as doing. I’m excited to restart the learning curve 2.0 and to start Tamil lessons (supposed to have been arranged while I was away, fingers crossed). After 6 months, who knows – my visa lets me stay here until mid-October when I may be doing this all again... We’ll see.

Life in Chennai #8: Inconveniences and Outages

The power has gone out again, throwing us into darkness in the office. The UPS backup, a necessity and normal appliance for businesses and any homes that can afford one, has just run out so computers are out.

When the UPS is drained it makes a terribly annoying high-pitch whine, obstinately to warn you to shut down your computers properly before it dies, but it seems more a headache-causing inconvenience than a useful function (I suspect they are designed to carry sound through Western-style IT closets rather than out in the open in the corner of our room). It does make one scurry though.

Being on a laptop, I’ve got a couple hours of buffer to keep working, unlike my colleagues who are more or less shut down now. Of course, I’m not the lone soldier enough to feel compelled to be the only one working so I’ll take the chance to write this instead!

Power outages are a fact of life here. Usually the power goes out a few times a week from a few minutes to an hour. Sometimes also the lights flicker or dim from more limited brown-outs or when we lose a phase (electric power is 3-phase and technically lights and some electronics can run on just 1. This sort of power splitting is quite common in villages since in a work-around-way it triples the supply of a given unit of power). Varying throughout the city, they happen at home too at random hours. It is funny that I’ve gotten so used to the constant staccato of the overhead fan that the sudden silence of an outage instantly wakes me. The water gets cut about as frequently, compensated in every office and household bathroom by at-the-ready filled (and brightly coloured) plastic vessels to bath and flush the toilets with. It reminds me of the recommendations of all the pamphlets and community trainings they push in Vancouver on earthquake emergency preparedness (that very few get around to following) and reminds me how societies will adapt to inconsistency and reliability of service and simply carry on around it. I even recall a particularly dramatic performance at a play in Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario where the theatre suddenly went pitch black during a thunderstorm and the actors continued on in the darkness without missing a beat and demonstrating what people here know well: the show must go on. But equally it reminds me just how less robust and more fragile our modern society is: our modern businesses and offices, with computers, electronic files, emails and faxes, cannot operate without absolute, constant power; water maybe, but not power. We lose the ability to roll with the disruption. Like the power and the water, the Internet goes out regularly (and isn’t great even when it is on) and when it does, our office is nearly as crippled. We’ve built this wonderful global system, but it is a fragile one.

At least the trains always run on time…
(Ha, just kidding, where do you think this is, Japan?)

The power outages usually don’t last longer than an hour thankfully, but a couple weeks ago, the power was out at the office the whole day and I got a taste for what it was like working prior to modern infrastructure. It is stuffy, sticky, sapping heat: no air conditioning and worse, no fan to compensate. You start to really understand the reason and value of siesta (actually, I’ve always been a firm backer of the idea, and who wouldn’t, just can’t seem to convince employers to go for it!). In fact it is probably worse than historically because the buildings today are not designed with cooling or airflow considerations at all. The power companies inoffensively call the outage “load shedding” since their problem is that too much demand load is threatening their systems. So from their operational perspective, they solve their problem by shedding load, which happens to be us...They kept saying another couple hours, then stopped answering the phone. Twiddling our thumbs and shooting the shit grew tedious and eventually even my laptop battery depleted. We went home early.

Today thankfully there is a nice breeze passing through the opened French doors (one of the many little differences in Indian architecture), although paperweights have had to be frantically added to any pile of documents on our desks as you snatched your recent meeting notes or report from its escape for freedom. We order an extra afternoon tea from the chai wallah and I catch up on my writing (been caught up in evenings in a book, will share that later). It’s a quarter to 5. If it goes another hour, there is no point staying. I’d rather be writing or reading or talking with my colleagues around a nice open-air café. There is a lovely one nearby. I think I’ll suggest it...

...5:30. Drat, the power just came back on, just as we were thinking we could make a break for it. Oh well, back to work! ;-) These ups and downs are just the way of life and commerce here. You adapt.

Sidebar #2: Random Thoughts and Tidbits

I've got a few good and more meaty entries in progress, but in the mean time here is another smattering of odds and ends to keep ya' entertained; things that cross my busy mind, things I see in the autos, and the little things that just make me shake my head in wonder.

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Since the autos appear to be running on sewing machine engines, why don’t they install actual sewing machines? Doing double duty while they ferry passengers around, they could make extra money producing fine textiles and they have built-in transportation of the completed goods to collection points. Perfect!

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The elderly groundskeeper of our compound at work plays golf in the courtyard. It’s not that big a yard, but he chips the balls around the square and grass, bouncing them off walls. He’s not that good to be honest. Last month he broke a window. When I see him playing I have to make sure he sees me (and stops chipping) before I exit the door. My boss hates it; he keeps threatening to report it to the police. I just think it is funny and harmless. He mostly now plays when he sees my boss is out of the office. We don’t tell on him.

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I really like population names that end in “I”. Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi. They have a nice ring to them. No particularly reason, I just like them. I’ve also always been partial to Canuck over Canadian though maybe that’s because it alliterates better with “Crazy”...

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It is funny the little biases you hold on to. We’re stopped at an intersection on my morning commute. In the traffic column beside me I see a man riding a scooter and another with a bandana over his nose and mouth. Regular sights, nothing remarkable, but despite their obvious practical usefulness, to me I can’t help still thinking:
Man on a scooter = dorky
Man with bandana = bandit
Man with a bandana on a scooter = really needs to be tied down and forced to watch 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' for a few lessons...

Sorry to all the dorky bandits out there. It is nothing personal. I know it is my own bias. Please don’t run me over with your scooter next time I try to cross the street...

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A few months ago the latest Bollywood fluff ‘Dhoom 2’ was dominating every media space in advance of its release. The theme song was playing in all the dance clubs and 15 times hourly on all the commercials. The pure commercials (those that were just for the movie rather than for products like Coke and Speed petrol) showed a guy doing cool stunts flying down the highways on rollerblades. It made me miss rollerblading with memories of gliding down smooth, fresh blacktop on blades (sans impressive stunts involving 18-wheelers), tape walkman blaring (this was well pre-ipod days). I wish I had rollerblades here for the entirely literary hook that the experience of trying to blade down Chennai’s packed and potholed streets would make for a really, really funny story...

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I’ve come to really like SMS. Messaging friends often gets me through the long, boring auto rides home when I’ve got time to kill and it’s too dark to write or read or sightsee. Motorola predictive text sucks ass though.

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One should not text and walk however (I realise this is obvious to just about everyone). I am careful about traffic, but I nearly ran into a low-hanging tree branch the other day while tapping a quick reply. Oops...

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There are quite a few water trucks plying the streets here, partial compensation for the city water system sucking and being completely inadequate. They meander awkwardly down the streets, blocking them like linebackers. All of them, without exception, leak profusely. Now maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem to be a good characteristic for water transport trucks to have. But it is so quintessential India. Thar’s a hole in me bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza…

Food #2: A day in the life...

So as I write this, I am eating dinner. Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to work at the table, but I’m not at the table. Of course you’re not supposed to eat in your room either. But my hosts have retired to watch TV in their room with their meals, so house rules and I can do what I want. :-)

I thought you might be interested in what a typical day of meals is here:

In the morning, after showering and dressing, I sit down at the table. The cook has already set out breakfast. Today we are having Iddli, which is basically steamed rice flour cakes served with sambar (a dhal-type lentil stew if you recall) and a coconut chutney.

With my breakfast is traditional Indian tea, which is black tea, often with some spices, half milk, half-water and plenty of sugar. I rather like it, preferring it over English tea style any day. Coffee is made the same way, which again, I rather like better than the bitter dark Starbucks style.

Lunch today I order masala dosa, which is basically dosa (recall, a thin crispy rice-crepe) with stuff inside it (the masala), in this case a saffron potato filling. It comes, as all South Indian dishes do, with a variety of condiments, including sambar, a spicy red paste, a white paste and a green paste. The white paste is a different variation of the coconut chutney I had for breakfast. The red I don’t know the name of & the green I can’t identify. They’re all good. My colleague is taking a call on his cell and I forget to ask what they are by the time he gets off.

That has been one of my early little challenges. I had to explain to my housemates that I was asking what everything was not because my eating of the yellow mixed stuff or the red mixed stuff was dependent on the answer, but because I really wanted to know what things were called. I’ve learned it is simpler to wait until I had eaten half before asking...

During the day, the office has a few half-cups of tea or sometimes coffee and usually a snack mid-morning or mid-afternoon of nuts, snack mix, sweets or samosas. The samosas remind me of summer Ultimate where we used to buy them from a local lady between games Monday nights. These are probably better, but those were gold at the time. ;-)

Dinner tonight is rice with a dish of some pickled mini okra-shaped green vegetable. It probably is a type of okra. It’s tasty, regardless, kind of tangy, a bit spicy. For the rice there is this lip-tingling hot oil concoction and some curd, a watery yoghurt. Wryly I note that even the curd has chillies in it. The South Indians love their spice and use it liberally in everything, even apparently in the yoghurt traditionally meant as an offset...

To the meal I’ve added two pieces of KFC chicken strips Sonya picked up for me on her way home. I feel like it is cheating, but they were left for me and you know guilty pleasures… As I munch on the greasy finger I try to think of the last time I had KFC. I remember why I don’t tend to eat it. It just isn’t good. I hope the chain doesn’t get as big here as they did in China.

I put the leftovers in the fridge and the dishes in the sink and start to think about the tasty things we’ll have tomorrow...

Life in Chennai #3: The Office

Sorry for all the posts crammed in today. I've been writing them all week, but haven't had the chance to post them until today...

Being a little cooler means we can leave the air conditioner off longer each day. Mornings we usually have the doors & window wide to catch the breeze. I like that. Our office is small, one main room, an adjoining office, a bathroom and a lunch room/balcony. Quite simple. There are 5 of us in the main office, my boss and his secretary in the adjoining one. We have tea (done Indian style, made with milk and lots of sugar) in the morning and again in the afternoon, delivered in a thermos from a tea stand just down the street. Being a small, focused office, there is a strong communal spirit and my other colleagues often want to know the details of this meeting or that on our project. There is a strong sense that we’re all working together, which of course is great. Problems and issues, personal or professional are dealt with as a group and successes and occasions get wide discussion. I’m only partly integrated into this all of course, still being an outsider and have cultural differences. But I’m gaining ground.
:-)

The main language in the office is English, which of course makes it easy on me. Actually, it makes it easy on everyone because English is the only shared language between them as well as with me. Of the 4 others in my part of the office, two pairs cannot speak each other’s languages. Two speak Tamil, the local tongue, but not Hindi and the other two are from the NE, speaking Bengalese and Hindi, but not Tamil. It is quite interesting to see this dynamic as others beyond me request a pair to switch back to English so we can get in on the conversation. So meetings are always in English, ourselves or with clients and partners, writing is always in English (although India has its own particular way and style of business writing) and phone calls seem to be entirely in English. So it helps to be useful for work, but alternatively, it is harder for me to pick up any Tamil as many of the people I interact with and hear regularly (including my housemates) don’t speak it regularly or at all. So having my Indian colleague explain his similar trouble with auto-rickshaws, restaurants and local service because he too doesn’t speak the language is one of those “obvious once you know it” understandings of the diversity of India.

And that is where I work.