No Riot Today

From Miscellaneous...

Since I can't upload pictures until I figure out what I did with my USB connector cable, here's an interesting story. So in April 2006... well, no, in 2000, well...

Okay, start at the beginning. People in India are big on movie stars. And not in the Mel Gibson/Paris Hilton sense - at least when compared to the United States, movie stars are heroes and champions and role models. Assuming I'm not the most intense West Wing fan you know, think about what that person thinks of Martin Sheen, and then keep going in that direction for a good long distance and I think you're getting there.

Anyway, Dr. Rajkumar was one of these people, and that Wikipedia entry gives a lot of background on the rest of this story. He was a Kannada movie star - Kannada being the state langauge of Karnataka, of which Bangalore/Bengaluru/that place I'm at is the capital. By some descriptions Rajkumar was the Kannada movie industry, which is different from Bollywood, which is Hindi, or the lesser-known but quite large Tamil movie industry...

I digress. Rajkumar was a star, hero, and a champion of the Kannada language in general. He was kidnapped in 2000, and Wikipedia says the event "threw the Karnataka government into crisis" and boy do I believe it. Either Kentaro or Prasad said that there were riots at this point because the government was not doing enough to get them back. So that's 2000.

Like a number of movie stars, he had a house in Bangalore in the pleasant-yet-accessible neighborhood Sadashivanagar near Sankey Tank, which is to say right behind the office of Microsoft Research, India. And so when he died in April 2006, that is where his body was taken. Most of the employees at that time went home, but the few that stayed got some awesome pictures of the riots, which resulted in most of the (very strong, two layer) windows of our building getting destroyed.

This leads us to last night, right after we had boarded the train back from Hubli to return to Bangalore on the overnight train. We got a flurry of text messages from Sriram and Prasad telling us not to go to work tomorrow until we'd checked our Microsoft email at our apartments. Apparently money for a memorial to Rajkumar was not being released, and so the same people that planned the aforementioned charming memorial service were planning to march from a movie studio through Sadashivanagar to the Chief Minister's house, which is about two blocks north of where I live. Microsoft was pretty well prepared for this occasion - the insurance companies made them buy a number of bright blue Battle of Seattle-esque riot curtains to protect the building from rocks, but even so we all went home until we found out at about 10:30 that the Chief Minister had skipped town (I believe the official line is "previous arrangements in Delhi"), taking most of the wind out the sails of the protesters - someone said something about them trying to convert the march to a hunger strike, but I don't know if that got anywhere.

And that's the story of how there was no riot at Microsoft today.

Badami, Etc.

Gave the first of two talks today on some CMU-related things (Twelf), it was well received by the MSRI crowd and I was happy about that.

Got profiled by Microsoft Research's PR team, and while that's really awesome I really hope they change the picture (I gave them a great picture of me in front of the Queen's Palace in Hampi that Jason took, but they made it a ridiculous-looking windswept sunglass-wearing headshot).

Going to Badami this weekend with five other people, and while I'm kind of exhausted after the talk and want to just lie down for a long time, it should be a fun and exciting trip!

[Update: They did fix my picture. And I'm back from Badami, and can't find my darn USB cord so that I can upload the pictures from the trip. So that will have to wait 'till at least tomorrow I'm afraid!]

I wonder what they'd call the Indian magical academy?

So I'm a Harry Potter fan, but I wouldn't consider myself a particularly rabid fan by any means. However, when I mentioned around the office that I'd reserved a book at Blossom Books, that they would be released at 5 AM, and that I was thinking about showing up for the release, I quickly developed a reputation as THE office Harry Potter fan which was as amusing as it was undeserved. Even if I didn't get there at 5 AM I felt like I needed to show up pretty early or I'd be letting my reputation down!

From Miscellaneous...

Most of the 50 or so people at line when I showed up at 5:50 AM seemed as surprised as I was that there were 50 other people there - it was not a festival atmosphere, there was only one under-15-year-old I spotted in the line, and there was not a removable-scar-tattoo to be seen anywhere. That said, it was a happy atmosphere of quiet excitement, with the exception of the one guy who decided to spend the 20 minutes where they were out of books arguing furiously with the shop owners in order to jump the rest of us in line when more books came. (And I was told there were no lines in India! This was, admittedly, by far the most organized line I've seen in 6 weeks.) Another surprise was that I was the only non-Indian person in line (race not nationality; I overheard a few obviously British accents.) I think most of the foreigners were attracted to the other big bookstore in town, I think it's called Legacy or Legend or some other L-word.

In any case, a number of other pictures (with captions and timestamps) are in the Misc. India album that you can get to by clicking on the picture above. After I finished the book on Saturday, Tracy read it from Sunday to Monday, and now Shipla has it, and Prasad has indicated he'll probably read my copy when he gets back from Tibet - I'm thinking I may have everyone who has read my copy write their name on the inside cover.

Fourth of July

I posted my Hampi pictures on July 4, which was basically non-crazy moment before the POPL deadline last Tuesday. However, we did do some fourth-of-july celebrating at Opus, which I've mentioned before. I've got one of the earlier on pictures in Picasa, but most of my pictures from the evening weren't very good.

From Miscellaneous...

There was karaoke, as it was a Wednesday night, and a large group of people (including me) did an awful, awful rendition of Surfin' U.S.A. Someone sang Take Me Home, Country Roads and I both sang my heart out from the audience (there was a lot of singing-along going on) and surprised myself by feeling a little homesick (that's a song we sang at Camp Glisson, where I worked for two summers during college. I don't know if non-facebook people can see these, but here is a picture from Surfin' U.S.A. that pretty well captures the painful awkward :).

Next Chance I Get

It's been an intense few weeks since the Fourth, as we were trying to get a paper on our project submitted to a pretty big conference, POPL. We got the paper submitted, it's nifty, and we won't know if it gets accepted until long after I'm out of India (the end of September, basically).

It's exactly halfway through my 12 week internship this weekend, and since it hasn't all been work for the past two weeks, I'll try to mention some of the interesting bits of July in the next few posts.

[Update: 12 week not 12 month]

More Hampi

Hampi

I just posted and commented on (and, for the most part, mapped) 108 of the 140 or so pictures I took in Hampi - and that's with my camera batteries dying twice during the weekend! Enjoy, I'll put an overview of the trip here --> <-- next chance I get.

Hampi!

I left work a little bit early (okay, 6, but I got in after 10!) today because I was tired, and I realize to my enormous dismay that I've forgotten my USB connector at the office so I can't upload pictures; so much of this trip I want to narrate in pictures, so I'm going to hold off on writing until I can do it properly.

In the meantime, Nels has put up some pictures, I especially like this one from the Queen's Bath. The girl in the picture is Natalie - Natalie, Sonnett, and Nick are three astrophysicists who were invited by Christian, a Microsoftie from Denmark, to come to Hampi, but when Christian got sick and didn't tell us about them they appeared as somewhat of a surprise on the train ride. Nevertheless, a awesome (some might say cloak-and-dagger-ly) time was had by all.

Some bookkeeping: since I've started collecting lots of links of places and people, and because in general none of my own photo albums include pictures that include me (because I took them!) I've put up a bunch of links over to the right that should fill out a lot of background that I'd never find the time to explain thoroughly on my own...