It’s now been over a month since i started working at HeyMath1, and holy smokes has the time scampered on by!2 For those of you who have less than one minute available to digest this post, here’s the gist of it: everyone is super friendly, the workplace environment is very casual, most of my coworkers speak Tamil, my culinary exposure increases with every passing day, the project i’ve been working on this past month is rather outside my job description, and also i don’t really have a set job description.
Ah rats, i really should have put a spoiler alert in front of that. Sorry, everyone else.
Much like the boat you’re now in (with respect to this blog post), i also knew roughly what to expect before i dove into my new job. Back when Nimmi was still working to convince me to move to India instead of immediately starting a PhD, one of her main selling points was the workplace culture and the nature of the work at HeyMath!3 She told me that, while the people at HeyMath all work hard at what they do, the overall environment is a very casual one. There are no set times for when people should show up and when they should leave. There is no dress code. There also isn’t much of a hierarchy; everyone is on more or less the same level of status, and anyone can and will make a request of anyone else if they have a need within the other person’s area of expertise. And the office has a pretty social environment — rather than stay planted at their desk all day, employees will congregate at breaks to socialise, joke around, and share food.4
Much to my delight, i found every one of those advertised points to be true upon arriving 😄 But of course, i’ve also learned many of the caveats and nuances to those elements over the course of the past month.
There is no set start- and end-time, but most people tend to show up between 10 and 11AM and leave between 6 and 7PM. In essence, it’s an 8-hour work day with flexible start- and end-times that cater to a later sleep schedule. And as someone who actively avoided taking undergrad classes with a start time of 9AM or earlier, this has been an absolute godsend. There isn’t any system keeping track of when we each arrive and depart the office each day, but i usually aim for the exact middle of those ranges, arriving around 10:30 and leaving around 6:30. There have been a couple days where i’ve stayed longer than eight hours, on account of a big deadline on the horizon, but i’ve yet to stay less than that — even though no one’s said that we’re supposed to stay for eight hours, working a shorter day without good reason would just make me feel like a lazy mooch (especially after all the trouble this company went through to bring me here). That said, it’s nice to know that, if i did have a good reason to seriously deviate from my normal working schedule, i wouldn’t have to worry about being reprimanded for my delinquency.
There is no dress code, but most of the men there wear button-down shirts with either slacks or jeans. And since assimilation is a big priority of mine whenever i enter a new environment (especially when said environment is a team of people), i upgraded my wardrobe to follow suit.5
To be honest, though, i haven’t been completely prudent in my decision to only wear “work clothes” to work. Part of my Day One welcome to HeyMath consisted of me receiving a collection of company swag, including a branded backpack and a Pythagorean Theorem t-shirt. So naturally, i had to wear the latter to work at least once.
My favourite part of the standard workplace attire is the footwear: lots of people wear sandals to work, and many of those people take their sandals off when they’re in the office. Which means that, for the first time i can remember, i’m no longer a lone weirdo for working barefoot in a public place!6 Gone are the days of feeling like a brave trailblazer for enduring the library, the exam room, and the Cambridge streets alike sans pedal protection7 — in Chennai, i’m just like everybody else.8
Amazingly, it seems Nimmi left a couple of her cards off the table during her campaign to convince me to come work at HeyMath. In addition to the casual atmosphere regarding timing and attire, there’s a well-established schedule of every employee regularly getting free goodies to eat and drink. There’s a man who comes in twice a day every day — once around 11:45, and once around 4:45 — to bring each employee a hot drink. He has a specific mug for each person (many of which have been entrusted to him by said person), and he knows every person’s order by heart. He’s truly the unsung hero of the office, providing the caffeinated fuel that gets converted into practice problems and animations and code.
The sustenance gods also deliver a bucket of snacks from the heavens to the office every Monday and Wednesday, leading to a clockwork ritual of (1) people rushing to claim a bag of their favourite goodies from the bucket, (2) people eating the first few morsels from that bag and savouring the sweet, sweet taste of victory, and (3) people milling around and sharing the contents of that bag with as many people as will accept them.
Needless to say, my own Little Heart just about melted 🥰
Between the scheduling flexibility, the casual atmosphere, and the free food and drinks, it seemed like i couldn’t build a more ideal work environment if i tried.
And then i saw the ping pong table.
On my very first day in the office, Siva9 asked me if i was into “TT.” I had no idea what he meant by the acronym, so i assumed it was an Indian activity i hadn’t been introduced to yet. He then showed me to the mezzanine level of the office, where the perimeter is dotted with dining tables and the walls are decorated with student artwork. And there in the centre of it all, like a shining altar in the temple’s heart of hearts, lies…10
And unlike literally every single Bowflex that’s ever been sold, this bad boy isn’t just for show. On the contrary, the HeyMath ping pong table gets 2-3 hours of use every single workday, split between the ephemeral lunch-break period and the equally ephemeral end-of-the-work-day period. Overall, the roster of frequent players is over a dozen names long11, and the TT game of everyone on said roster is pretty solidly on point. Some of the guys (myself included) go for tactical play, trying to make the ball difficult to return via strategic placement and killer spin. Others pursue these same aims by smashing the ball as hard as they can. To each his own, i guess! 🤷 Regardless of who’s up to play, every match is choc-full of intense play, amazing shots, and endless streams of Tamil banter. My high school self never could’ve predicted that his four years of weekly LHS Ping Pong Club would one day help his 24-year-old self integrate into an Indian workplace, but here we are.
My mad ping pong skills haven’t smoothed out all the wrinkles in my Indian integration, unfortunately. Because nearly all of my coworkers speak Tamil as their first language and English as their second, Tamil is almost always their go-to language when talking to each other, which means i can’t currently participate in the majority of group conversations at the office. And that’s a serious bummer, given that the office constitutes almost the entirety of my in-person social contact. It’s given me a much greater appreciation for my German friends at Cambridge, who would speak German in conversations amongst themselves and then immediately switch to English when i joined the circle. I took that social convention for granted last year, and there have been countless inaccessible conversations this past month that have caused me to sorely miss it.
Broaching this topic admittedly dredges up some pretty grim reflections about how lonely i’ve been for much of my time in Chennai, but because i’m delineating these early posts by topic (and this is a post about my workplace, not about the difficulties i’ve experienced since moving here), i’ll save those uplifting details for a later post.12
For this post, i’ll instead focus on the fact that i haven’t just been moping around all day about my linguistic exclusion. On the contrary: since i first arrived in Chennai, i’ve tried a couple different methods for getting a foothold on understanding Tamil. My first attempt was with a book my coworker Ladong13 lent to me, titled “Spoken Tamil: Learn Tamil Through English”.
Within a week of starting the book, however, i started noticing inconsistencies in what it was telling me, and a few tactical googles confirmed that these were full-on errors. Which, trust me, says a lot more about the fastidiousness of that book’s editor than it does about the linguistic brilliance of this post’s author.
Resolving not to waste any more time studying potentially incorrect Tamil, i asked Nimmi if she had any ideas of other resources i could use to learn the language. She told me that Peru (our resident animator extraordinaire, and frequent TT personality) taught basic Tamil to one of the earlier Cambridge boys to come through HeyMath, and when she brought up the possibility of reprising his role as an in-house language tutor, he said he’d be happy to. According to Peru, written Tamil is very different from spoken Tamil (which reminds me of a similar fact about French, i think), so rather than have me practice reading and writing in the Tamil script, he sent me recordings of himself pronouncing common Tamil words and told me to reply with recordings of myself saying those words. He’s been super encouraging with regards to my pronunciation, as have several of my other coworkers. One of them even went so far as to call me a natural “Tamil-tongue”, which is both super generous and crazy absurd, but not so much so that i didn’t let it go to my head. 😇
Unfortunately for me, Peru’s currently in the midst of a massive project that’s due in mid-January, so he hasn’t had a lot of time for linguistic back-and-forths. To keep up with my practice, i’ve taken to memorising the pronunciations of written Tamil characters and learning additional words/phrases from this video, at a rate of a few per day. I’m not expecting to be conversational anytime soon, but given (1) how single-minded i get when learning languages, (2) how hooked i get on the thrill of understanding snippets of conversations and portions of written signs, and (3) how thoroughly the existence of my social life here depends on my understanding of Tamil, i’m decently confident that this is a project i can stick with.
Speaking of non-sequiturs, boy has the office been a great environment for trying new foods!
According to Wikipedia, “Tamil Nadu [the state of which Chennai is the captial] is famous for its deep belief that serving food to others is a service to humanity”, and that claim has certainly been borne out by my interactions with coworkers this past month. The precedent was set during the first hour of my first day at HeyMath: Siva asked me if i’d eaten breakfast before coming in to the office, and i told him that no, i’d slept through my alarm and not had time.14 He said something in Tamil to one of the other employees, and then told me, “we’ll have something here for you in fifteen minutes or so, don’t worry.” And what they had for me was a positively scrumptious egg dosa, smothered in sambar and served on a banana leaf.
(Especially when what’s on the inside is tasty tasty egg 😋)
Thus began my still-ongoing love affair with South Indian cuisine. Spicy, hearty, and packed to the absolute gills with flavour, it’s one of the few cuisines i could eat every day and not get tired of. Which is mighty fortuitous, because between the South Indian-heavy restaurant selection and all the food my coworkers have shared from their packed lunches, i pretty much have eaten it every day since i got here.
Which i really can’t complain about, especially with the remarkable variety i’ve been introduced to by my coworkers. Every lunchtime works sort of like a massive potluck, with each person opening up a container of vegetables or finger food or sambar variety and passing it around to everyone who wants some. It feels like one big family affair, and (as someone who would trade bits of food during every meal if left unchecked) i’m delighted at the chance to have eight different dishes represented on my lunch plate every weekday.
As if that weren’t enough to sate my appetite for both delicious food and wholesome communal eating, the culture of food-sharing extends beyond the lunch hour and into working hours as well. Every time anyone brings any sort of foodstuff to snack on, there’s invariably someone flagging me down to come over and try it (which, again, not complaining in the least). From murukku to plantain chips to several dozen other snacks whose names haven’t yet stuck in my memory, i’ve never let my so-called “work responsibilities” get in the way of the valuable cultural experience of Impromptu Snack Time.
During one conversation with my coworker Venu, he asked if i had tried pongal yet, and i replied that i hadn’t. A couple days later, he came over to my desk, handed me a metal container, and said, “try this.” I opened it up, and it was filled to the top with homemade pongal that he had brought just for me. He topped it off with mango sambar (again homemade), and what had been a fairly stressful day for me up till then suddenly melted into a moment of contented happiness, touched that he had thought of me and reminded of why i joined the HeyMath family in the first place 🥰
Of course, the main reason i joined HeyMath was their exciting work in improving the quality and accessibility of math(s) education, so i was excited to get past the compulsory orientation period and start getting my hands dirty.15 I was immediately snatched up by a small team working to complete a large external project, which i can’t get into the nitty-gritty specifics of for NDA reasons16, but in essence: i and a few others were tasked with creating practice problems for Indian high school students, to help gauge and improve their abilities in solving real-world problems with the math(s) they’d learned in school. It was definitely challenging at times, trying to strike the right balance of making a problem interesting (i.e. not so easy as to be trivial) while still keeping it doable.17 And there were undeniably days where i felt like my internal well of mathematical context ideas was completely dried up. But in the end, i managed to create 66 different problems during the month i was on the project team, and we’ve collectively received very positive feedback from coworkers and teachers alike, so i feel i have a lot to be pleased about 😊 And as i finish addressing my teammates’ constructive feedback on those problems this week, i’ll be transitioning into an entirely new role! Yet another thing i love about working here: my particular work will vary so much month-to-month that the job has very low odds of ever getting stale 💪🏼
And it does keep me on my toes: on my second day of working here, we had a student arrive from Bangalore to do a brief internship at the company, and Nimmi thought it would be great if he worked as my intern. Which, incredibly, ended up being pretty smooth sailing from start to finish. I embraced the comical absurdity of my having an intern (with basically the same amount of experience at HeyMath as i had), talked with a couple coworkers about past internship projects, talked with the student about his academic and vocational interests, and we collectively brewed up a plan for what he could create during his two-day internship.18 He wrote a script for a video explaining the economic concept of marginal revenue/cost and came up with some visuals to accompany it. We took the script down to the recording studio, where he, uh, recorded the script, and meanwhile Peru got to work creating graphics based on the ideas he’d sketched. And less than 48 hours later, his internship culminated in this neat little video about maximising profits in simple economic models.
And in terms of this early overview, that’s about it! There’s still plenty more to share about my life at the office — for example, the Diwali celebrations we had a week after i arrived, or the three weddings i’ve been invited to since arriving, or the exhaustive catalogue of all the new foods i’ve tried since moving here — but since i’ve already slated those for specific subsequent posts, y’all will just have to sit tight and patient for another few weeks. 😇 Until then, here’s a shot of the view from my desk — if you happen to look at it between 10:30 and 18:30 IST on a weekday, the odds are good that you and i will be sharing a pretty similar perspective. 😊
(if i actually wore shoes, that is! ha ha ha!)
Until next time! ✌🏼💞
Stranger in a New Land 
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