Travels, 8

There are two roads from Chennai to Puducherry. We had come on the inland road since it was easier to reach from the airport, but we drove north on the coast road which gave quicker access to the IIT Madras campus.

For the first half of the journey, the road was under construction or reconstruction; the journey consisted almost entirely of detours, and indeed it was sometimes difficult to know whether we were on a one-way or two-way road.

We passed a number of lagoons, mostly bordered with mangrove forests. These are also used as a source of salt; we saw evaporation ponds, and heaps of salt covered with bright blue tarpaulins. It may be that some of these will turn into marinas, which would be a pity since mangrove forests are important for many reasons (including reducing the damaging effects of storm surges, and nurturing the creatures at the bottom of the food chain to maintain fish stocks).

Asir wanted to give us a treat. He stopped at a roadside coconut seller and enquired. The seller pointed sadly at a pile of ruined fruit. So we had coconut instead, drinking the coconut water through a straw and eating the soft flesh with a natural spoon made from the coconut itself. Delicious and refreshing, and it brought back memories of Jaap Seidel. At the Bose Memorial Conference in the Indian Statistical Institute in 1988, they took us to the botanic garden to see the huge banyan. Under its shade was a coconut seller. Jaap insisted in paying for everyone in the party to have a coconut.

But Asir was not easily put off, and at the next coconut seller he struck lucky and we were able to have ice apple (nongu in Tamil), the fruit of the palmyra palm tree. This grows only in south India, Sri Lanka, and a few other places), and the fruit looks from outside a bit like a small coconut, but when peeled reveals the semi-liquid fruit encased in several membranes. If coconut was delicions, this was beyond my powers of description.

By about halfway, the roadworks were over, and the journey proceeded more smoothly, until just before Chennai, when we were pulled over by the traffic police. Not for any misdemeanour, fortunately; just to check documents.

Into the built-up area of Chennai, and a fairly short drive brought us to the campus of IIT Madras.

This campus is amazing; more like a forest than a University campus. Deer and monkeys in substantial numbers roam the grounds. But this was our undoing. The campus has a 20km/h speed limit to protect the animals. There were notices near the entrance but none around the grounds, as far as I could see. So Asir was pulled over again for speeding. Arun Kumar, our next host, came to help sort it out; and after fifteen or twenty minutes, Asir was let off with a caution rather than a substantial fine.

The campus also has snakes (small thin harmless watersnakes) and, we are told, jackals (and indeed during our first night we heard a sound which may well have been jackals).

We went to the Taramani Guest House, where we had been given a room on the second floor. But when we got into the lift with the luggage, the machine went on strike, and declared itself out of service and could not be fixed. Fortunately, room 2 on the ground floor had just been cleaned after the previous guests, so we were given that instead.

Then, after a brief lunch stop, to the mathematics department for the talks. There was a nice big lecture room with plenty of blackboard space. The slides hadn’t been loaded onto anything, so I simply ran them (for both of our talks) from my laptop, which still had plenty of charge left after nearly three hours. We were giving the same talks as in Pondicherry the previous day, so were up to speed with what we were talking about. I was pleased that Arvind (from IMSc) was there; we will be talking in his place on Monday, and also he and I are two authors of a paper currently under revision. The talk went well and elicited lots of questions. Unlike at Pondicherry, we had more or less the same audience for both talks (with a welcome cup of tea between).

After the talks, we were (understandably) quite tired; Arvind drove us back to the guest house, where we rested for a while and then went for dinner to the guest house dining room. Among other things, they have the very tasty small bananas that we ate also in the hotel in Kochi; we smuggled a couple of them out for a pre-breakfast. (Rosemary is not as good with spicy food as I am, and so her choices for breakfast are a bit limited, though they do provide cornflakes with hot milk and also white bread toast with butter and jam.)

The next day Arvind had invited us to lunch, a meal which was a wonderful experience. This was the Annalakshmi, a vegetarian restaurant on several floors (we went to the first floor), with carved wood, pictures, and other elaborate decorations, including flowers floating in a small fountain. The extraordinary meal was not too highly spiced (I don’t know for sure whether this was their normal custom or specially arranged for us), and the food consisted of many many small dishes which simply kept coming, all delicious. After we had eaten ourselves to a standstill, they brought some things (including a rather bitter drink) to aid digestion, but that was not the end: puddings came, Ras Malai and ice cream among them. There was mango juice to drink. Great stuff, one of the high points of the trip. Finally it really was over, and we were driven back to our guest house (it being by then not the time for serious sightseeing).

In the evening, we went for a fairly short walk with Arun. We talked about twin reduction; this inspired me later in the evening to think, and come up with a perhaps hopeful new approach to twin reduction, a characterisation of the fully reduced graph (in terms of the partition in which two vertices belong to the same part if they get identified at some point in the reduction). This gives a nice graph-theoretic strucuture theorem, with consequences for the automorphism group of any graph: it has a normal subgroup built from direct products of simple groups, the quotient being the automorphism group of the fully reduced graph.

The next day, however, we were not idle. First we went to the Government Museum and Art Gallery. This was in a number of different buildings, and it was a hot day; Rosemary got a bit heat-stressed walking between them. We began in a building that had a huge numbers of bronze statues, mostly of gods but some of mere mortals, including Buddha and Mahavira. The most common was Natarajah, the Lord of the Dance, whom I think is a version of Siva. Artists had rung many changes on the standard formula for depicting each god.

One unexpected discovery outdoors was a row of cannon (some with elaborate decoration); on the other side of the road was a cannonball tree (whose hanging fruit look as if they are ready to be fired from the cannon).

There are two art gallery buildings on the site. One has traditional art of national importance. Many of these were miniatures from the Mughal period, but there were also many pictures by Ravi Varma, the Kerala artist who was probably the first Indian to paint in Western style; we had met him in the Kerala Museum. His women always look pensive or sad. The other museum was mostly closed for reconstruction but did have a selection of modern Indian art.

The museum complex had a pleasant restaurant where we took lunch. While we ate, we could watch three men picking mangoes from a tree just outside the window. One of them held a long pole with something on the end to dislodge the mangoes, while the other two held a cloth to catch them. Sometimes they missed, and the mango would hit the tarmac with a thud. The left these ones (presumably they were seriously bruised and would rot rather than ripen), but after a woman came and took one, the men came back and picked up all the rest.

Part way through, Arun had to go and catch a train; his wife was defending her thesis in a university in the south of Tamil Nadu and of course he wanted to be there.

After the museums, accompanied by Arun’s student Ganesh, we took a taxi to the Lighthouse, which towers above an enormous beach, putting the West Sands in St Andrews in the shade. We went up nine floors in the lift and still had quite a bit of a climb to reach the viewpoint, which gave stunning views over the beach and neighbouring parts of the city.

That done, it was back to the guest house for dinner. Arun and Ganesh came for a chat about twin reduction and we formulated some questions which could be addressed.

Monday brought our talks at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences. We changed our plans to go in the morning to give time for some discussion. Arvind’s colleague Amri (Amritanshu Prasad) came to the discussion; he is a representation theorist, and works on “global subgroups”, subgroups of a group such that the character induced from the trivial character of the subgroup contains all irreducibles of the group; naturally he prefers them to be maximal with this property (though this doesn’t mean they are maximal subgroups of the group).

The talk (given by both of us) went well, and there were many questions, until we got on to the actual definition of the generalized wreath product, and our main theorems about it. (This is highly technical stuff, and even now I feel a bit unconfident when asked to explain it.)

Then back to the guesthouse. Arun had told us that his colleague Nishad Kothari wanted to meet us, so he showed up for dinner and we had a very good conversation.

Our plane was at 5:30 the next day, so a taxi would come and pick us up at 1:30, and Ganesh would show up to make sure we got off OK (the taxi driver had been carefully briefed about where to take us). So we decided that there was no point going to bed and risking missing the taxi.