[Heads-up: this post contains a brief mention of mental health problems, a tongue-in-cheek drug reference, and a choice assortment of mid-level swear words. Not to mention a couple of truly awful math puns. (You have been warned.)]

Here’s the introduction i was planning to use in this post, the last time i worked on it (back in late January):

Heya! It’s been a while. I’ve already drifted from my goal of biweekly posting by a factor of four, and i blame that entirely on the fact that the past two months have been insanely eventful, especially when compared with the earlier stages of my time here. (More on that later.) In tandem with that, the organising idea of this post has already undergone two major evolutions since i started working on it back at the beginning of December. Time will tell whether i can get it published before it sheds its skin yet again.

Needless to say, i had no idea when writing this just how painfully on-the-nose the phrase “the past two months have been insanely eventful” would end up being, once i finally got around to publishing it in mid-April 2020. It’s admittedly a little weird, going back to proofread a post i hadn’t touched in months, in which i yammer on about living in India, learning Tamil, making friends, and so on, without even the tiniest oblique mention of “COVID-19” or “coronavirus” or “pandemic” or “lockdown”. I debated whether i should table this post, or scrap it altogether, in favour of writing something more “timely” about what life has been like since the pandemic got properly up and running… but at the end of the day, the bizarrely asynchronous timing amused me, and i figure that just about everybody is reading and hearing more than their fill of COVID-19 stories this month. Which clearly didn’t stop me from writing this paragraph, but hey, nobody’s perfect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, without further ado: an update on my life in India, as of several months in the past.

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When i first started writing this post, i intended it to be a collection of vignettes from my time in India so far, each one capturing a way in which my time here has been difficult. This is proooobably due to the fact that that initial writing phase coincided with my longest depressive streak since i moved here — work was dragging, homesickness was resurging, and most significantly, i was starting to feel the full weight of how alone i was here in Chennai.

Thankfully¹, none of these undesirable experiences caught me off guard; in fact, i had anticipated this emotional slump well before i boarded the plane from London. I decided to move to India knowing full well that it would be one of the most challenging experiences of my life. It’d constitute the intersection of two massive transitions — from student life to the workforce, and from the Western world to the Indian subcontinent — and each would bring with it a whole host of new challenges. The latter meant the usual shock of different climate, customs, food, and cultural attitudes. The former meant that, unlike my last relocation to a new country, i would have no immediate social infrastructure to support me through that transition. Rather than being bombarded with one opportunity after another to meet peers who shared my interests, i was now entering a phase of life in which, without a hefty helping of proactivity, i could very well meet nobody besides my immediate coworkers.² And while either of these transitions in isolation would’ve constituted a smooth continuation of my growth progression from high school in Colorado to undergrad in Chicago to postgrad in the UK, their interaction effect was bound to set this joint transition a cut above the rest in terms of difficulty.

Perhaps perversely, though, this difficulty was part of what convinced me to accept HeyMath’s offer to work for them in Chennai. During my time in the UK, it became increasingly clear to me that i habitually placed a higher value on avoiding pain/discomfort than i did on most other things — though i deeply valued going on adventures, being close with people, and a whole host of other contributors to the richness of life, the knowledge that pursuing those carried a risk of pain or discomfort was often enough to hold me back within the walls of my comfort zone. I knew that i needed a shock to my system to jolt me out of that mentality, lest the weight of it continue to keep me captive to fear, and i likely wasn’t going to find such a jolt while continuing to exist in familiar contexts (whether said context be university life or English-speaking Western countries).³

Hence, India.

And it has not disappointed in that regard. From the different cultural norms to the challenge of meeting people, from the language barrier to the unfamiliar food selection, the process of getting settled here has sat several rungs above my previous life transitions on the ol’ Ladder Of Difficulty⁴. As i mentioned above, this entire post was originally dedicated to describing those challenges, as a means of giving an honest view into some of the less-glamorous aspects of my most recent move abroad. Thankfully, i scrapped that idea once (a) those challenges became more manageable with time, and (b) i realised that a post like that would just be such a bummer to read, y’know?⁵

There’s been a lot to adjust to, but at this stage i feel like i’ve largely broken through the discomfort and into feeling like i belong here.⁶ Several aspects of that transition deserve (and will receive) their own dedicated posts, but for the time being, here’s a bird’s eye view of how my experience of Chennai has evolved over the past few months the course of December 2019 and January 2020.⁷

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General life

As the illustrious Captain Obvious once said, “the way people live in India is different from they way they live in the US.” It’s a major adjustment for anyone, relocating to a country with unfamiliar norms and customs, and one of the biggest factors facilitating that adjustment for me has been the intentionality with which i’ve approached assimilation. Rather than clinging to all of my old ways of doing things and trying to lead an American existence in a country halfway ’round the world, i try to allow every new place i live in to shape the evolution of my habits and of me as a person.⁸ After all, i would hate to reach age 34 and look back to see that i’m the same person i was at age 24, just as much as i would hate to currently be the same person i was at age 14.⁹ And i certainly don’t think that every aspect of my being will be changed by my living here — my American optimism and love of Thanksgiving ain’t going anywhere, y’all. But even when some amount of differentiation is inevitable, the process of getting integrated is singularly important to me.

In practical terms, this has meant letting go of a lot of road-related fear i had previously been harbouring. Growing up in a system of well-defined traffic lanes, authoritative traffic lights, and regular crosswalks gives one a tendency to lean heavily on that system for their sense of safety and security. Even when there are no other vehicles around, disobeying that system (whether the transgression entails jaywalking or driving through a red light) feels highly risky.

In India, disobeying that system is a necessity if you ever want to get anywhere (without pissing off everyone you encounter along the way). And as someone who often does want to get somewhere, i had to unlearn a lot of old safety habits which were now irrelevant, and replace them with habits that would actually serve me in India. I used to conceive of jaywalking as a matter of waiting for a gap in the traffic, preferably one large enough that the laws of physics would all-but-guarantee that a car and i couldn’t cross paths during my illicit little mosey. Here in India, such a gap may well as be Godot himself for all the good that awaiting it does; here in India, successfully crossing the road instead requires a large amount of fearless, unwavering confidence, and an even larger amount of trust in the attention being paid by oncoming motorists.

My first instinct was to compare Indian road crossing to a game of Frogger, but that would’ve been as lazy and unoriginal as it is untrue and unfair. The onus isn’t on the pedestrian to bob and weave through the unyielding trajectories of cars and two-wheelers; in fact, that’s probably one of the most surefire ways to guarantee that you do get hit. Instead, the pedestrian’s job is to take as predictable a trajectory across the road as possible, to which the drivers respond by nudging their own courses slightly left or slightly right in order not to intersect that trajectory. Minimising acceleration is the key: as long as you’re not abruptly changing your speed or direction, drivers can anticipate where you’ll be when they get close and can adjust accordingly. It’s a skill of mine that, after being engaged for the first time a few months back bloody ages ago, has been refined twice a day, five days a week, for months on end, every time i’ve crossed the large and interwoven intersection that separates my apartment from my office.

Another risk i thought i’d never take: riding a motorcycle. In working out its risk-versus-reward, i had always placed it squarely in the Really Not Worth It category of activities.¹⁰ But again, whereas i could easily go about my life in the US or UK without ever setting butt on a two-wheeled death trap, my aversion to riding motorcycles constituted a fairly large handicap here in India. I’ve never been one to say no to a friend offering me a lift, and though my skittishness about bikes did drive me to break that streak during my first week in India, it wasn’t long before i downed a hearty helping of Welp-I’m-Gonna-Die-Someday-Anyway-🤷 and started hopping on the backs of bikes with reckless abandon.¹¹

Of course, learning how to navigate the roads here has hardly been the only adaptation i’ve made to daily life in India. I’ve also had to recalibrate my entire sense of money since moving here, to an even greater extent than i needed to upon relocating to the UK. When i first moved there (the UK), i adopted the rough rule of thumb that i could tack on an extra third of the listed price to get its approximate equivalent in dollars (so something that cost £3 would be about $4, for instance). Here in India, though, my operating rule of thumb has to be “divide by 70”, so things that are close to multiples of 7 in rupees aren’t too bad to estimate (e.g. ₹500 is pretty damn close to $7), but as the numbers get larger and the easy multiples of 7 get farther away, the estimates become shakier. This phenomenon manifested distressingly clearly during my first grocery shopping trip after arrival, where i saw a bottle of olive oil for ₹1600 and had a vague hand-waving thought of “there are a lot of rupees in a dollar, so that’s not too bad” as i added it to my basket. It wasn’t until i got home that i realised i had just spent over $20 on a bottle of olive oil.

Even after i got a hold on the book-smarts task of mental currency conversion, the street-smarts skill of knowing how much things should cost proved to be a different beast altogether. Back in the US, i wouldn’t be surprised to pay $10 for a 20-minute Uber ride. Here in India, though, ₹700 for such a trip would be tantamount to highway robbery — the longest Uber trip i’ve taken here was nearly an hour long, and it cost a whopping sum of ₹320 (about $4.50). A 15-20 minute ride might set me back a couple bucks, if that. While these prices are pretty standard for India, i myself can really only avail of them when using apps like Uber; if i try to get a ride by hailing autos¹² on the street, the prices they tell me are invariably double or higher compared to the listed going price, for reasons that are still an utter mystery to me…

The motivating assumption here, of course, is that white people in India (1) have more money than the average Indian person, and (2) have no goddamn clue what constitutes a fair price. But through talking with Indian friends and relying mainly on fixed-price transportation apps, i’ve pretty solidly mitigated the latter. And while the former may be true for me from a savings-account perspective, my salary (aka my only source of spending money) sits right at the average for a fresh-out-of-university job in India. I make a bit under $40 per day¹³, which is more than enough to cover my needs and wants out here, but it does mean that i’m not raking in the American-sized dough that these folks often assume i am.

All of this is a lot to try and convey to an auto driver as he’s driving past and shouting a price at me, of course, and it would be an absolute godsend if i could somehow immediately demonstrate to him that i’m not just another loaded, clueless tourist…

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Tamil

Say, that reminds me!

Alongside my experiential education in road safety and finance management, i’ve been picking up bits and pieces of written and spoken Tamil (the primary language used in this part of India). Under the watchful tutelage of the Tamil script Wikipedia page and the book i mentioned in my last post, i slowly learned to recognise and generate the 247 (!!!) characters that form the building blocks of written Tamil.¹⁴ Though i will hardly (if ever) need to write in Tamil, you never know when the ability to read local signs, buses, and posters might come in handy, and the abundance of these even on my daily commute gives me plenty of opportunities for practice. And in the context of spoken Tamil (which is my real focus in studying the language), knowing how a word is written in Tamil script gives me a much better sense of its pronunciation than its English transliteration does, since there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the common sounds in the two languages.

Also — and if i’m being honest, this was my main motivation in learning the script — it’s just a lot of fun.

One day, i let slip to the coworker who sits next to me that i’d learned the script over the preceding couple of months. It ended up setting off a chain of astonished did-you-hears, and by the time afternoon tea had arrived, i was surrounded by six or seven coworkers excitedly asking me to write their names in Tamil or guess the spelling of random words.

Since that day, there’s been an unmistakable shift in the dynamic between me and the coworkers who sit in my immediate vicinity. They still regularly speak in Tamil amongst themselves, but i no longer feel like i’m sitting wholly on the sidelines; instead, i feel like i’ve suddenly been let onto the field, and even though it’s relatively certain that i’m going to be pummelled into oblivion, my teammates are making a solid effort to teach me as we go.

Sometimes Raghav will ask me a question in rapid Tamil, then (in response to the deer-in-the-headlights expression on my face) break it down word-by-word until i can both repeat the question back to him and answer it satisfactorily. Sometimes Gita will stand up to meet my gaze over the desk divider and ask if i know the name of a particular animal in Tamil.¹⁵ Sometimes i’ll hear a word pop up frequently in a particular conversation and ask them about it, or wonder aloud how to say a particular word or phrase in Tamil. And on every such occasion, the people around me have happily answered (and sometimes heatedly debated) my questions — we started out writing things down on a piece of scratch paper, but before long it became clear we’d have to move our tutorial notes to a dedicated notebook.

I’ve reached a point where i can now pick out occasional words in Tamil conversations, in addition to giving simple answers to certain questions; the ever-important “ama” (yes), “ille” (no), and “theriyadhu” (i don’t know) have proven remarkably useful in both regards. I would love to share more of what i’ve learned, both in terms of verbal communication and the intricacies of the Tamil script, but once again, this broad-focus post isn’t quite the right place for a linguistic deep-dive.¹⁶ So although i know you must be simply dying to learn all about the many quirks of an abugida writing system and the syntactical structure of one of the world’s most prominent Dravidian languages, i’m afraid you’ll just have to wait for my dedicated language post two or three entries down the road.

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Travelling

For the first two months of my time here, i didn’t once leave the Chennai city limits; the farthest i travelled from my apartment in that time was that aforementioned one-hour Uber ride to the south part of city.¹⁷ Given how much i love travel and exploration, i’m not sure why i didn’t feel the pull to push further out into other regions of this country and this part of the world. I think it probably came from a need for a basic level of security — a sense of having a home base close by — that i hadn’t yet reached with respect to Chennai. In any case, that stationary inertia was broken in dramatic fashion last month four months ago (damn!), when two of my best friends took (separate) trips out to this part of the world and reached out to coordinate rendezvous¹⁸ with me. In the week leading up to Christmas, my Durham friend Ellen travelled with her family to Pondicherry (a former French colony about four hours south of Chennai) to meet up with her sister and brother-in-law at the tail end of their travel-packed honeymoon, and i got to spend a full day down there sightseeing with the group and catching up with her. A mere week and a half later, i flew from Chennai to Sri Lanka to meet up with my Northwestern friend Sophia, who was rounding out a month-long work holiday that, up to that point, had mainly consisted of exploring Myanmar.¹⁹

There’s seriously so much i want to share about those trips, so instead of letting that sharing totally engulf this more broadly-focused post²⁰, i’ll tell you all about them in a dedicated entry 😁

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Friends

Last but probably most, the hardest aspect of the transition had been its social dimension. I arrived without any clear sense of where and how to meet people outside my office, and unlike Bangalore or Mumbai, Chennai isn’t particularly renowned as a buzzing social hub of India. It even has a reputation for being one of the country’s more conservative urban centres.

But as i’ve already learned in Evanston, Durham, and Cambridge — none of which is a particularly happening town by most standards — the extent to which general social life proliferates a place doesn’t really matter, when it comes to my actual experiences of the place. What matters is finding like-minded people with whom i can create a social environment within the place where i live, irrespective of what that place is like as a whole.

And over the course of the past couple months my time here²¹, i’ve met some of those people.

When Nimmi and i were discussing my upcoming move over the summer, she mentioned that she had a few connections to other westerners living in Chennai whom she could introduce me to. About three weeks after i arrived, she made good on that promise by introducing me to Jodie Sovak, an administrator at the American International School in Chennai (AISC).²² After chatting for a bit at the office and exchanging WhatsApp numbers, she mentioned that she and her family were going to see a play that weekend, and she told me i’d be more than welcome to join them. Not only did they treat me to a stellar performance of The Mousetrap, they also invited me to join them for a pre-show all-you-can-eat lunch at the incredibly luxe Leela Palace hotel 😍

Thankfully, my ravenous rampage through the Leela spread wasn’t enough to scare them off completely, and shortly thereafter they invited me to spend Thanksgiving with them at their house in south Chennai. Despite the fact that i haven’t spent Thanksgiving with my family since 2012, i’ve never felt a lack of family atmosphere on that quintessentially American holiday — no matter where i’ve been in the world when November’s fourth Thursday rolled around, i’ve always found people to take me in for a Thanksgiving home-away-from-home, and it’s consistently one of the things i’m most grateful for on the holiday 🥰

Getting to know my adoptive American family has been seriously lovely, but i still felt a need for people my age whom i could relate to as peers/friends. Though the adult world lacked the robust social environment of a university, i figured there had to be some people who still congregated around shared interests, and i started my search for those people within days of arriving in India. While browsing the ‘Social’ category of an app called Meetup, i found a group called ‘Chennai Partying Meetup’, which sounded so comically up-my-alley that i was almost suspicious.

Figuring that it couldn’t hurt to at least check it out, i joined the group and subscribed to updates, and it wasn’t too long before the first notification came through: December 7th, Besant Nagar, event titled ‘Beers by the Beach’. It was in my Google calendar faster than you can say, “gee, doesn’t that seem a little, i dunno, desperate?” Though undeterred by those peskily judgemental inner voices, i admittedly did set my expectations for the event pretty low — a no-commitment app group with 1500 members doesn’t exactly scream “there’s even a moderate amount of social pressure for people to turn up for events” — and when i arrived about an hour into the event to see that only three other guys had shown up so far, i further prepared myself for a dud of an evening.

The guy sitting closest to me introduced himself as Vaishnav (“but you can call me V, since you probably won’t remember that”²³), an itinerant doctor who had grown up in India but spent the last 7-8 years living in Dubai, and the two guys on his right introduced themselves as Akash and Manoj, both local teetotallers who nevertheless enjoyed the social atmosphere of the events organised by Chennai Partying Meetup. We were later joined by Vivek, a Chennai Partying Meetup veteran, and the five of us ended up being the entire crew for the evening.

I gotta say: sometimes, life subverts your expectations in the most fantastic ways.

We ended up talking, joking, and laughing at the bar until it closed, and rather than call it a night, we took an assortment of autos and motorbikes to our next target: the ground-floor bar of the Taj Coromandel hotel. Vaishnav and i arrived first and went through a few beers while awaiting the others’ arrival, but when they got there, the three of them were barred by the bouncers because one of them was wearing sandals instead of shoes (a big no-no in the variably-legalistic Chennai bar scene). Vaishnav tried to work his silver-tongued magic with the bouncers to get the rest of our crew inside, but it was to no avail, and we decided to cut our losses and take our business elsewhere.

Based on the speed with which the bar staff chased after us, we probably should have paid our tab before taking our business elsewhere 😬

The five of us made a WhatsApp group that night, and for the next few months, we made social plans almost every weekend. From the restobar with an obnoxiously overenthusiastic DJ…

…to the half-empty bar where we were nevertheless seated in the far corner for being a group of stags²⁴…

…to the fancy-ass hotel where one of the guys leveraged his connections with the staff to get us into an upscale open-bar party…

…we had a pretty great thing going, and a lot of memorable nights²⁵ to attest to it.

Out of the five of us, Vaishnav and i were the two who most hit it off from the first night onward, and he was the one who usually got the ball rolling on our various weekend plans. As the weeks went by, the guys in the group got busier with travel and work and such, and our original crew of five dwindled down to four, then three, and by mid-January it was just Vaishnav and me. Without our usual connection to get us into the parties at ITC, we even had to stoop so low as to party instead at the Hilton’s rooftop Q Bar 😪

But even such proletarian pleasures as these were not to last. Less than a week after our two-man Q Bar takeover, Vaishnav announced that he had received a UK visa and, within the week, would be leaving Chennai to go work as an NHS doctor in Gloucester.²⁶ I met him for lunch on the day of his departure, and then bade farewell to the guy who had become one of my best friends in my new city.

Though i had lost my main partner-in-crime for weekend debauchery, all hope was not lost for my Chennai social life. Around the time of my initiation into Chennai Partying Meetup, i poked around in search of comedy opportunities in the city, and lo and behold, there was an improv open jam set to take place on the first Friday of December.²⁷

If hanging out with Vaishnav and the Meetup crew took me back to how i spent my weekend nights at uni, meeting the folks at that improv jam took me back to how i spent all the rest of my free time as a student. Though i’m a world away from all the places where i learned and performed improv, i realised at that jam that comedians are all cut from pretty similar cloth, regardless of where they come from: they’re funny, of course, but also equal measures self-deprecating and confident, close-knit and welcoming.

In short, i had found my people. And my timing couldn’t have been more perfect: that same month, Half-Boiled Improv (one of, if not the only improv troupe in the city) started putting on improv workshops every Saturday, and even though they’re more than half an hour away by car, i’ve still managed to attend nearly every single one. Not only have i gotten to know a lot of the regulars at the workshops and performers at the comedy shows i’ve attended, but the folks in the community have also gotten to know me, to the point that people i’ve never met before will occasionally come up to me and already know my name. As for what could be causing me to leave such an impression and stand out so much from the crowd, i can only assume it’s my razor-sharp wit and dashing good looks.

In all seriousness though, getting involved in comedy as an obvious foreigner has been such a fun experience. I get to make jokes about white people that really wouldn’t have landed in England, for one. On multiple occasions, i’ve driven an audience wild by knowing even the tiniest amount of Tamil. My friends have even reserved a front-row seat for me at their shows so they can get a bit of visible audience diversity, which is an act of altruism i’m always willing to perform. I do obviously plan to establish myself as an actual funny person here at some point (rather than just being the token white guy in every workshop or show audience), but for now i’m perfectly happy to ride this wave as far as it will take me.

Both offstage and on-, the comedians i’ve met here in Chennai have been a riot to hang out with and a delight to become friends with. Not only have they invited me (a foreigner!) out for drinks with them, they’ve even complimented my sense of humour and encouraged me to start performing my own material, which is about the biggest ego-boost someone could get from paid comedians, i think. They’ve formed the backbone of my social life here in Chennai, and i’m seriously grateful to have them.

And remarkably, these different threads of meeting people out in the city are not the only ones comprising the tapestry of my Chennai social network: i’ve even grown to become Real Friends with some of my coworkers! My first experience of a Chennai bar was with two of my colleagues, one of whom had a fair amount of experience with the scene, and the other of whom requested that his/her involvement in the night’s activities remain undisclosed.

With this in mind, the natural choice of venue was a bar called Off The Record.

And of course, what else would you expect from a discretion-themed bar than to meet a Tamil film star named Narain?

I haven’t gone out a second time with Angela and Mystery Friend, but i have formed a semi-regular board games crew with a current coworker and an ex-HeyMath-employee.

We’ve gotten together nearly every month at The Board Room, a board games café in the Mylapore area east of where i live, to spend the better part of a weekend day playing games, eating food, and generally giving each other good-natured hell.

From the games themselves, to meandering conversations with the employees, to the impressively tasty food²⁸, our Board Room days have quickly become a fun monthly tradition and a staple of my Chennai experience.

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Conclusion

Needless to say²⁹, meeting and befriending people here has completely changed the character of my experience as a whole, as has studying the local language, learning how to get around, getting accustomed to paying in rupees, and planning the occasional getaway from this year’s ville de l’année.³⁰ I no longer feel like i’m far away from my “real life” on some temporary excursion to a distant country. Instead, i feel like i’m settling in to my new home. And there’s still so, so much this place has left to teach me.³¹

Until next time ✌🏼💞

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Image sources

The Good Place: https://dev.to/catcarbn/pobodys-nerfect-462l/comments

Jaywalkers: https://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-30854320071206

Pretentious armchair man: https://www.learning-mind.com/pretentious-people-seem-smarter/

Contemplative white guy: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pensive-young-man-sitting-on-floor-671471989

Segway: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-way-to-make-a-person-riding-a-Segway-not-look-like-a-total-dork

Grease scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6soXf476aV0

American football tackle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-1MQ0Cnbhs&t=6s

Grumpy baby: Photo by Ryan Franco on Unsplash

Inbetweeners GIF: https://giphy.com/gifs/thumbs-up-friend-simon-4VdAe6apKga4w

Sausage: Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Hilton Q Bar: https://www.zomato.com/chennai/q-bar-hilton-chennai-guindy

Flaming surfer: https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/7-absurd-stunts-jamie-obrien-ever-pulled-off/

Wacky skeleton: Photo by Bart Heird on Unsplash

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.

• 

• 

• 

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.

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. 😊

Until next time! ✌🏼💞

[Heads-up: contains a couple instances of profanity, as well as some (potentially related) toilet discussion. There’s also an undeniably low-hanging-fruit joke about Indian bureaucracy, in case you’re in the comedy business and need to avoid having your razor-sharp wit dulled by my shameless low-effort fruit-picking.]

[Note for future posts: i’ll try my best to use heads-ups at the top of each future post, so that you can avoid things like profanity or toilet talk or any number of questionable things i might choose to publicly post on the internet. I think this is a pretty ideal system for allowing myself to write freely in these posts, while still giving those who might take offence a chance to opt out (and receive India updates via some other means). I was originally going to borrow the established terminology of content warnings (CWs) for these, but since i will inevitably want to make jokes in mine and CWs are meant to be treated seriously, i decided it’d be poor form to start being wantonly offensive via my attempted tool for avoiding offence.]

[Okay, i promised you last time that this blog would be more about India than about spilling my overthought brain vomit onto the internet’s throw rug. And that’s a promise i intend to keep.]

Now, onto the good stuff.

*ahem*

I arrived in India around 8pm on Friday, 18 October, 2019. After clearing immigration and collecting my bags, i headed outside to meet up with the colleague who’d arranged a ride for me.

Many of the things i immediately noticed after leaving the airport were things i knew to expect. The heat. The humidity. The crowds of people. The lingering looks from a lot of them, the eager offers of a taxi ride from the drivers among them. These all marked a clear difference between my new home and the one i’d just left behind, but none was so intense as to constitute “culture shock” in my mind. I knew what my true sources of culture shock were going to be, thanks to earlier conversations with Nimmi¹ and with friends who’ve either visited or lived in India. And within five minutes of stepping out into the Chennai air, i was facing down the gauntlet’s first test of my mettle: Indian driving.

Now, the universe contains a whole host of dichotomies, where each half is neither good nor bad and both are equally necessary: order and chaos, science and art, stability and freedom, et cetera. As i clutched my backpack in the backseat of the car, watching vehicle after vehicle come within inches of making contact with our own, i quickly realised that US/UK driving and Indian driving form another such dichotomy. The lane markers here seem to function as quiet suggestions rather than rigid instructions, and drivers don’t so much “cautiously merge over” as they do “regularly apply their knowledge of the exact width of their vehicle”. For those of us who are used to adhering to strict rules on the road, it seems like a system for generating as many car collisions as possible, but despite how nervous i got watching all the cars, rickshaws, and motorbikes in a seemingly constant state of near-collision, i didn’t see a single impact on the entire drive home from the airport. It feels like watching an intricately choreographed dance or crowd scene, where the audience perceives randomness and chaos but the participants each know their part and, once in motion, can seamlessly² get to where they’re going without bumping into anybody. It’s quite mesmerising, once you stop imagining that every person on a motorcycle has a life expectancy of just under two minutes (and once your ears get acclimated to the unending symphony of personality-packed car horns, come to think of it).

And because i know you’re just clamouring for it, here’s a short snippet of what my first car ride in India was like. (Spoiler: no one died. Not even a little.)

We arrived to my flat in about half an hour, and my colleague exchanged a few words with the guys working at the complex before heading out. And after being whisked into the reception office to fill out a form (because of course my first responsibility in India was filling out a form), i took my first step into my home for the next year.

A couple of my coworkers were kind enough to stock my flat with a few essentials before i arrived, so that i wouldn’t need to worry about what to eat while i was simultaneously starting my first full-time job and starting to assimilate into a completely new country. I checked the kitchen area and, based on the food they bought, it seems they deemed the following to constitute the quintessential weekend diet of a 24-year-old American fresh out of grad school:

• 1 loaf of white bread
• 1 stick of butter
• 2 cartons of milk
• 1 carton of orange juice
• 4 apples
• 1 350g jar of Nutella

God bless ’em.

Now, coming into this move, i had been expecting the drive over to be my sole encounter with culture shock on my first night in India. In the process of touring my new digs, however, i suddenly found myself face-to-face with the completely unheralded Gauntlet Round 2: the bum gun, also known as the bidet spray, the health faucet, the shattaf, or (my personal favourite) the ass-blaster/ungabunga-blaster. I shit you not, look it up on Wikipedia³.

The keen-eyed Westerners among you will notice that this here toilet setup lacks a place to hang toilet paper, and that, in its place, there is a hose-like mechanism akin to what some kitchens have for washing dirty dishes. Putting two and two together⁴, you come to the same realisation that i did: your butt⁵, dear reader, is the dirty dishes. The people at HeyMath! who sorted my apartment for me were kind enough to include two (2) rolls of our precious waste-wiping paper in the apartment, which i will be using as a sort of “training wheels” while i get used to the spray-off method. And to be honest, i’m pretty excited about it! After all, in what other context could we get something gross on our body and feel satisfactorily clean after merely wiping it off with some dry paper? And besides, dry paper is slow and annoying and probably not all that good for the plumbing.

Well, no more, i say! From this point forward, Dan Kinch shall be a man who cleans himself with water, like a gentleman.

And before i go any further down this increasingly worrisome rabbit-hole, i should probably wrap this post up — it’s already been three weeks since the events of this post actually took place, and if i spend any more time adding to it / editing it / doing anything besides publishing it, this’ll all start to get just a bit too silly. And if there’s one thing i detest more than any other ill on God’s green Earth, it’s surfeits of silliness⁶.

Till next time ✌