A Georgia Peach in the Big Apple
There are no laundry machines or dryers here, so I’ve been washing all my clothes by hand! To dry them, I hung up a line on the balcony of my room and leave them there to dry. I’ve never had to wash all my clothes by hand before – I used to think it was a pain to do laundry at college, where I have washers and dryers. I will no longer ever complain about laundry day again.
Professor Gurumoorthy (we call him Guru or BGM for short) is the professor at CPDM who is advising our project. He is this really boisterous, talkative, and friendly guy who studied in the US and then came back to India to become a professor. All the students here love him and they say that he’s “god” because he’s so nice to the students. We’re really excited to be working with him!
Guru seems pretty well connected here and has arranged for us in the first few weeks to visit hospitals to observe what technologies and medical devices they are using. The plan is to observe a high-end hospital, middle tier hospital, and then a government or rural hospital to get a comparison of the various levels of healthcare in India.
For the first week, we will be visiting Fortis Hospital, a very expensive hospital that has branches all over the world. From our visits, it seemed pretty much on par with hospitals in America and has the latest technologies, was very clean, and very well run.
On the first day, we got to see the inside of an ambulance!
We observed in the ICU and emergency room on the first two days. The emergency room did not feel like there was emergency at all. Most of the patients came in with pretty minor conditions and the majority of the beds were empty. The ICU had slightly more going on. We saw doctors do a couple procedures on the patients there and most of them were on ventilators and in pretty sever conditions.
On the third day we got to follow around a neurosurgeon named Dr. Rajkumar Deshpande around. He was really cool and we got to wear scrubs and stand in the operating rooms to observe surgeries. When he wasn’t performing a procedure, Dr. Rajkumar sat down with us and chatted for a while. He was also a really boisterous guy with a big personality.
He told us about how he originally wanted to be an engineer, and when he took his college exams, he was accepted by both engineering and medical programs, the two most respected and difficult professions in India. At the time, he had no interest in medicine and had his mind set on being an engineer. But then he talked to his uncle who convinced him that he should be a doctor because he could save lives and make a difference in India. For the first few years of med school, he was really bored and didn’t do that well, and then he went to a presentation by a neurosurgeon and fell in love with neurology. He’s a pretty smart guy and took the very competitive exam for neurosurgeons and was one of the two people out of thousands accepted to the neurology program.
He then went on to study and practice medicine in the US, but because he was the son of the family, he had to move back to India to take care of his parents, because they couldn’t adjust to life in America.
The next day, I went down to the maternal and child health ward and got to watch a woman give birth by c-section. It was probably the most terrifying thing ever. The mom was awake the entire time and had anesthesia so she couldn’t feel anything from her chest down. The doctor just cut a slit along the lower side of her belly, took a clamp and pulled the baby out by the head. I never knew giving birth was so messy and gross looking.
The doctor then stitched the lady back up and on the way removed her ovaries because I think the lady was not planning on having any more kids. She already had a son who she gave birth to via c-section so that’s why her daughter had to also be done by c-section.
the food here has been amazing! here’s a brief re-cap of what I’ve been eating so far
Prakruthi is a cafeteria close to the CPDM building where we eat every day. The weather is really beautiful so everyone eats outdoors even though there is a small indoor seating area, but there are lots of tables and it’s shaded by lots of trees so it’s a lovely place to sit and eat.
There is one central place where you pay for food and then the person at the register hands you a slip of paper with what you paid for and you go to either the food station, tea/coffee station, or the snacks/drinks section, hand the person the slip of paper and they give you your food.
This is roti curry, pretty much what I eat almost every day. The bread is called roti and the two little bowls are different types of curry. Every day there are different types of curry that contain a variety of things such as chickpeas, carrots, potatoes, leafy vegetables, green beans, and always, onion and tomatoes.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling really hungry/ambitious, I would get the “South Indian Mini Meal” which is really not a mini meal at all but more like a feast! It comes with rice, nan, a couple different kinds of curry and yogurt, which I add sugar to and eat. It’s delicious!
This is my favorite dessert, gulab jamun. Basically it’s just a little donut soaked in lots and lots of syrup. It’s soooo good!
For breakfast, I usually have idly, which is a steamed rice patty covered with samba, a spicy tomato-y sauce flavored with onions and other spices.
When I’m not feeling too hungry for breakfast or when I want fruit, there is a juice bar right by our dorm. They have all kinds of juices, smoothies and lassis and they blend it right in front of you and you drink it from glasses and then return the glasses after you’re done.
Indian people eat dinner really really late – on average around 8:30 or 9. This is because they always have tea in the afternoon around 4. Sometimes we’ll go with the Indian students to have tea, coffee, or some juice in the afternoon. Usually they also have a snack with their tea:
This is pani puri – a crispy hollow thing that they poke a hole in and inside you add onions, a bean sauce, a sour-tasting water, and chutney.
And of course, samosa!
I arrived bright and early in Bangalore this morning after 28 long hours of travelling (with two layovers in Frankfurt and Bombay). Walking out of the baggage claim, I was very excited to see two of my teammates waiting in the lobby of the airport at the cafe we had agreed to meet at ahead of time. Our fourth teammate will be arriving in an hour.
The team from Harvard arrived from all over the world this morning. Stella flew from Greece and had just finished her second year studying Computer Science at Harvard. Richard flew from Lebanon and just finished his second year studying Electrical Engineering. Matt, my co-director for Ghungroo this year, is from New York and just finished his third year in Mechanical Engineering. Our last teammate Will is a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School and is arriving in two weeks after classes at the med school get out.
After the four of us arrived, we found a cab to take us to the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) where we will meet up with the four Indian students from IISC we will be working with.
We obviously had a lot of luggage and it didn’t all fit in the car, so the cab driver just put our suitcases on top of the car! Didn’t strap it in or buckle it down or anything – literally just put them on top of the car and drove! I suppose the rack on top has a lot of friction to keep the bags from falling, because lo and behold, when we arrived at IISC, the bags hadn’t budged!
We met up with our four Indian team members from IISC, Vijayendra (a mechanical engineer), Heloise (an architect), Simran (a computer scientist) and Parveen (an aerospace engineer). They were all now first-year graduate students in IISC’s Center for Product Design and Manufacturing (CPDM) studying design.
They were so nice and helped us get settled in. We also for the first time got our taste of Indian bureaucracy. We walked back and forth from the International Office, to the Hostel Office (where we got our dorm keys) to the bank, to our dorm, to the department so many times to get the right paperwork, the right receipts, signatures, passport photos, photocopies of visas. But finally, almost three hours later, we got everything settled.
After things were sorted out, they took us out to lunch at a little restaurant on campus. Here’s the entire team at lunch:
(from left) me, Parveen, Richard, Vijayendra, Heloise, Stella, Matt and Simran
On our way over, the cab driver had told us that the IISC campus was beautiful – but we were not expecting it to be THIS nice! Every inch of campus is shaded and the roads are all lined by beautiful trees on both sides. We thought the university was built in the middle of a rainforest, but the students told us the trees were planted after the university was built. They also have a policy that doesn’t allow any trees to be cut down on campus.
The weather was also so amazing! I was very comfortable in jeans and a shirt and most people here wear long sleeves and long pants (mainly to cover all their skin from bugs because there are quite a number of little insects and mosquitos). Apparently the weather is this nice all year round in Bangalore because they happen to be surrounded by some rain forests and are in a fairly tropical area, close to the ocean. I could really get used to this!
The dorms (they call them hostels here) are set up apartment style, and each student gets their own room. This is the girl’s hostel. It was just built this year I think, so it’s very new.
The weather is so nice all year round here that there’s no need for air conditioning or heaters. The hallways of the dorm are all outdoors and creates a really nice breezeway in the mornings and evenings when I step outside my room. The rooms surround a courtyard where there’s a huge tree over 6 stories high. Here’s the view outside my room on the third floor:
My dorm is now all set up and cleaned. It’s quite a cozy little room with great sunlight!
The weather, the campus, and the people are all really great. So excited to be spending the next 10 weeks living and working here!
