Old Home Week -- and a Day in Baroda

We got back from Ahmedabad late last Friday night, and first thing Saturday morning, before we were even up, Frank Holmquist and his wife Mary, and Omar Dahi and his wife Cora, arrived on campus on a flight from Syria. Frank and Omar both teach at Hampshire, and Omar is Syrian -- this was his first trip back to Syria in five years, and it was Cora's first time there ever (although she had met his parents and at least some of his siblings in the States). She's from Buenos Aires, and they met while in school at Notre Dame (she's still finishing her Ph.D. there). Anyway, all four of them are very nice, and it was fun to have people to hang out with for a few days with whom conversation was a little less stiff than our conversations with other faculty members have so far tended to be. They all were going to stay on campus (in the facility that's used to house in-service training groups) for several days, then go off in separate directions to visit other places in India, and then arrive back next Mon., 1/19, when Vivek will also be back from the U.S. Vivek had arranged for them to do some kind of workshop with the Ph.D. students at IRMA.

Saturday they slept late (jet lag) and Bob and I went about our normal routine: breakfast, email, time in the office (sometimes it's genuinely hard to tell that we're really in India rather than the U.S!). But we all gathered for lunch at Vivek's house, which was fun (Vivek is gone, but his wife Charu, their daughters Barkha and Annika, and Vivek's father Ashok and his mother are all there). We all had supper together too. It was a bit like old home week (old home day?).

Sunday Ashok had planned an outing for everyone that involved going to an art museum in Baroda (the older name for what's now called Vadodara), then a visit to the palace of the Maharaja Fateh Singh, the former Maharaja of Baroda (Baroda was not part of British India, but was the capital of the princely state of Gaekwad, over which the Maharaja ruled -- there were many such semi-autonomous kingdoms during the colonial period, which somehow got folded into independent India after 1947), and ended with a buffet lunch at an upscale hotel. The art museum, which showcased the undistinguished collection of the Maharaja himself, was mostly dull and dusty, and the palace was almost overwhelmingly enormous (see photo) -- some of the rooms to which the public was allowed entrance (only a small fraction of the entire place) were lovely or impressive, but mostly I was struck by two things: 1) that one person could have such an opulent place built for himself and his family, and the amazing number of poor people's labor that must have generated the wealth for it, and 2) that the descendents of the Maharaja actually still live there, in the rooms that aren't open to the public! In fact, on Sunday afternoon at 2 the public was being kicked out because in the great hall where the Maharaja used to hold audiences with the public, the granddaughter of the current head of the family was going to be having a naming ceremony. We were allowed into the room, which is normally on the public tour, because it was still morning, and so we saw the ornate silver cradle, the draperies, the white upholstered couches strewn with rose petals, that would be the setting for the ceremony later in the day. I found it hard to get my mind around the idea that such things could be happening in 2009 (of course, there is the British monarchy and all, but stilll . . . .)

The buffet lunch was great, since we don't often get to be in upscale surroundings in Anand, and also since there was carrot halwah for dessert, which I had had in Delhi and really liked (it's basically shredded carrots, a lot of sugar, and spices all cooked up together into a pasty consistency). We also took group photos of our party, which I've added up above.