Passage from India

I share my lab with two Chinese guys and six Indians. They're all very nice and patient with my persistant questions that do little other than to prove I am incapable of correctly pronouncing Ganapathysubramanian, Pundar, and the Chinese word for "goodbye" and that I stubbornly refuse to believe that no Indians ride to their weddings on elephants any more. Sometimes, I learn about strange holidays that, say, celebrate reading by encouraging everyone to abstain for the day. This would never work in the US. Of course, India's president is a nuclear scientist. Culturally, they may be a bit nerdier than we are. I now know that Southern Indians have long last names because they like to incorporate the names of Hindu gods. Now, there are approximately one billion Hindu gods. This is seemingly because the same gods keep dying and being reincarnated as different gods. The population of India is also around one billion. So they could have one god each, but they share. Hindu religion classes must be complicated.

All the Indian guys attended the same undergraduate university, IIT. They all seem to agree that the hardest part of their education was working to get accepted there. They are all quite brilliant, but sometimes it's hard to keep up with them, especially when they get excited and start speaking too quickly for me to understand their accents, or, if they really feel passionate about the topic at hand, in Tanglish (Tamil + English).

So Sethu just sent me this article. The author has exaggerated a bit, but the basic themes are more or less correct. Enjoy!