The movie theater experience

A friend recommended that I should read The Martian. Last Friday, I was feeling pretty lethargic after hearing about the Umpqua Community College shooting, so I downloaded the book and started reading. (Friday was an Indian holiday, so the office was closed and I could just stay home and read.) I really enjoyed the book and ended up finishing it before going to bed that night.

Then, last night, I went to a mall in town to see the movie. (I also checked out a grocery store in the mall and discovered that they were selling A&W Root Beer--Victory!!!) It's definitely a different experience than seeing a movie in a US theater. First off, there are no previews for movies. There are about ten minutes of commercials before the movie (things like jewelry, cologne, undershirts, leggings and rice). Then, during the movie they dubbed all of the f-bombs (Matt Damon swears quite a bit during the movie). Also, the movie had an intermission. This was not actually built into the reel, they just seemed to pick a moment about halfway through the movie and stop it so that people could buy concessions and so that they could play more ads (even though the movie was in English without subtitles, nearly all of the ads were in Hindi).

The most annoying part, however, was the assigned seating. This made it easy to get good seats by buying tickets early. However, there were people walking in 10 or 20 minutes after the movie started, shining the flashlights on their phones all over the theater to try to find their seats. That was rather distracting. Still, the movie had good picture quality (we watched it in 3D) and definitely good audio (aside from when the dialogue track was cut-off momentarily so that we couldn't hear Matt Damon swearing). And the ticket was about 300 rupees ($4.50), so that's a pretty good deal.

Long day in the field

Yesterday I woke up at 5:30am and left for the office at 5:45. I got to the office by 6:30 and we started our trip to our field office in the city of Anthiyur. It's important to leave Bangalore early so you don't get stuck in city traffic.

We stopped on the road for breakfast and with that 30 minute stop and made it to Anthiyur right at 11am. I got a two-hour nap on the trip. In Anthiyur, I met with managers from each of Essmart's field offices. It was great to meet most of the team, since most of my work outside of Bangalore has been at the Krishnagiri field office.

The view from the office in Krishnagiri (it's up a flight of stairs, so it mostly looks at electrical wires)

The team had a 3 hour meeting, most of which was in Tamil, so I wasn't really sure what was going on. (My Tamil is coming along slowly, but they mix some English into the conversation, so I knew what was being discussed at points.) Still, I thought it was better to remain attentive than to pull out my laptop and work, so I listened and watched who had the most input and who seemed most likely to disagree with various points.

After that, we went out to get lunch before heading back to Bangalore. It was about 2pm. My colleague from Bangalore couldn't start his car, so we pushed it until he was able to throw it into gear, and was able to run it to the restaurant. While we ordered, he called a mechanic, who said that he was on his way. We finished our lunch and waited for the mechanic (I read during that time).

Waiting to sort out car trouble

After three hours, the mechanic showed up, and said that there was a problem with the alternator. Our colleague concluded that he couldn't drive the car, so he helped us get to the city of Erode. From there, we got a bus to the city of Salem. Our bus left Salem at around 8:30 and didn't reach Bangalore until 12:30am. Then we had to get an auto-rickshaw (they insisted that we pay double the meter price at that hour of night) and didn't get home until 1am. Hopefully next time transport will be a little less complicated.

I don't take many selfies

But I was pretty proud of the one that I took today.

That's me doing a headstand. I can do pretty good headstands (I recently stayed on my head for five straight minutes). I had to use the wall to balance myself while I took the picture, but still. I thought that it was pretty cool.