An Exercise in Irrelevance

Food last night filled a whole but was otherwise disappointing.

This morning, I awoke to a cacophony; constant chanting from a nearby Hindu temple competing at sun break with the Muezzins’ call to prayer, as well as the ever present horn blowing and engine noise.

We are on the rooftop in a ramshackle building under a large crag with a fort on top. The crag is peppered with basking monkeys and topped by circling birds. The air is cool, clear and sweet smelling. I expect all of this will change.

Today started with a hairy car journey to the Ranakpur Jain temple. I know very little about the Jain religion except for extreme veggie tendencies. One thing is clear, though — they make very impressive temples. It was a place of singing and joy. As with as the religious and tourists, there were a bunch of school children from Bali — they were expect at posing, 10 of them could form up in an instant and they delighted in having their picture taken.

Bali turned out to be a village 30km away as we found out on the journey; it was bumpy, unpleasant and, erm, thrilling. The horn beeping was constant until night fell, then we drove with dipped lights until the a car or lorry approached in the opposite direction, when full beams were used. Indicators were constantly deployed, also, but I have no ideal with what meaning. We saw two crashes. One was between two lorries, side-on, and the other a lorry that had been rear-ended by a tuk-tuk. There’s no way that everyone walked away from these. A sorry sight.

No real idea about Jodphur until we got out — the last leg of the journey was by tuk-tuk as the guest house in inaccessible by car because of the narrow streets. It’s a dramatic place and seems to be clean. Food is to come.

A day late, but got here eventually. It’s much warmer than Delhi. The hotel is good enough and a blessed relief after last nights mouse pit.

Udaipur is a city on the lake; Octopussy was filmed here, but you can’t blame the setting for the rubbish movie; it’s striking and beautiful here with two buildings in the lake itself — a hotel and a temple.

We see a native dance show — the Goan dance was rather camp, with one guy in a dress riding on the back of another, while a third pranced around stage. The others were graceful rather than athletic, with the dancers in magnificent colours. Afterwards, we found a slightly dodgy rooftop restaurant; the place was a bit of a dump, but the food was excellent.

Sadly, we have less than 24 hours here.

Got fogged off and missed our connection. Now stuck in Delhi. The airport was chaos. It took us over 2 hours before we got a new ticket, and then a hotel transfer. The hotel is, well, a genuine cultural experience. Hot water — at least if you turn the boiler on first. The room not too clean with a strange smell. And no heating, which is unfortunate in the middle of winter.

Food was good though — we all went veggie — everyone else to be on the safe side. Took me a while to convince them that the chick peas would make up for the lack of protein. I didn’t point out the mouse running free by then, as it wouldn’t have helped. Explains the strange smell.

I’m hoping that my DEET is effective against insects other than mosquitos.

The flight from Dhaka is belayed due to the weather; while the ever-present smog has saved my a fortune in suntan cream, now it’s not nearly so good.

We managed to avoid the madness of airport security by means of the VIP lounge; the name of our gracious host proved less effective on the way out than on the way in, but they seemed to accept the magic incantation of an EU passport. Inside the airport secure zone, it’s calm and relaxed; I don’t discount the possibility that this due to the absence of planes. Wandering around a photo of the Pink Palace from yesterday blares out at me, lurid in it’s impossibly pink false colour. It makes me want to see it, even though I know that the reality is more muted.

It’s been a strange experience. This is a country of extremes and contradictions, which sums up how I feel about it. I got to see Old Dhaka and the river; but was this out of a genuine desire to see how others’ life is lived or is it an unpleasant voyeurism for those less well off; I feel compassion for the beggars, with an abiding wish that they would just go away.

Today, we went to the bazaar in old Dhaka. After a long drag across town for an hour in polluted air, we got to Sadarghat ferry terminal where we took a dubious ride across the river; again, we were the focus of attention at the river. It’s clear that they don’t get too much crazy westerners down there.

The boat trip which is a narrow, flat bottomed boat, skulled by one of the three people who appeared to make their living from it. The river, again, was polluted with an oily surface and lots of nasty things floating in it; surprisingly, it even had some plants floating on the surface; it was slow-running and smooth.

Many of the boats shuttle sand up and down the river; these amazing vehicles float unloaded about 3m out of the water, proudly displaying their load lines high above our heads; when loaded they almost disappear, the water from their bow wave splashing over their deck. Travelling through the boat yards, it’s all done by hand; they are building massive ships here, riveting them and shaping their with sledgehammer, painting them with brushes.

We finish to with quick trip to Ahsan Manjil, the Pink Palace. Not that great, although I get my photo taken many times, while hanging around in the grounds.

Bangladesh has been an amazing and depressing experience in equal measures. There is, perhaps, surprisingly little between this society and my own; modern technology is here, but it didn’t develop alongside the organisation that we have in the UK. Everybody might moan about the system at times, but in the UK, it’s not so bad.

Not much to say about yesterday; it was new year, so we had a party and food. All good, but not particularly notable.

Today, we had a tour of Old Dhaka. The chaos of Gulshan is nothing compared to there; in Old Dhaka, the rickshaws and tuk-tuks far outnumber the cars — cheaper are far more suited toward the smaller and narrow streets.

We saw the local university and Lalbagh Fort — the grounds are impressive although the building is, perhaps, less so. The museum is mostly 18th century — the manuscripts and paintings being most impressive. Throughout, we were as much a centre of attention as the other artefacts on show.

Later, back at the hotel, ready for a nap, clearing the results of pollution and the car drive from my head.

The Ontogenesis knowledgeblog meeting has now finished; it’s been a fascinating experience and one that I’ve enjoyed very much.

I was hoping for two things out of the meeting; the first was to get some content. There has been a pressing need introductory material on ontologies for a long time now. We were never going to address this completely in a two day meeting even with the significant number of people that we had in the room. But, we managed to write quite a number of articles between us — I rather let the side-down with only one small article, but I have the excuse that I was busy answering questions. Most of these have not achieved the required number of reviews yet, although I’ve just done the second reviews for Mikel’s, so once that’s posted, we should be there for at least one article. I think that people enjoyed the process enough that some more articles will appear over time, although, inevitably, once the immediacy of being in the same room will mean that this process will not happen as rapidly.

The second question was to get a clear understanding of whether the idea of knowledgeblogging has legs; it seems reasonable in theory, but does it work in practice. There were some issues — the server crashing twice out of memory was not ideal, although quickly resolved. Quite a number of people who hadn’t blogged before found the wordpress interface, particularly the editor, fairly nasty; it’s not really designed for large posts. The review process also was a little clunky and there were many questions and ideas about this. However, for my money, the 80/20 rules comes in; we got 80 percent there with a more-or-less modified wordpress. Well, maybe, 70/30.

The rest is going to require more thinking about.

I’m on my way down to Manchester for the Ontogenesis meeting while I was sad enough to blog about on Christmas Day. I’m looking forward to this meeting a lot; the idea has been in gestation for five or six months since Bio-Ontologies last year. In summary, we are getting a number of people together to write articles for a book, but instead of going through the tedious and difficult process of getting it published we are going to use a blog.

I finished fiddling with wordpress yesterday and, hopefully, all is ready (fingers crossed that our server doesn’t get hacked as happened to this blog a few days ago). I’m hoping that we manage to get a number of articles written during the meeting; in practice, getting people in one room is the best way of getting these things done. However, this is not a closed process; I’d welcome articles from anyone, as well as those not at the meeting. Being blog based, the system is inherently distributed. So, if you have an ontology-related topic that you have a burning desire to write about, please contact me and I’ll let you know whether if anyone else is doing it. Alternatively, there is a list of topics that we hope to make a start in covering. The articles will be peer-reviewed and available for the world to see, fully-credited to your name.

I can’t guarantee that it’s going to be included in the REF, but I am working on it.

I started today with a late breakfast — I went for a combination Bangladeshi-English breakfast with both curry and hash-browns. Tomorrow, I’ll drop the rice, and have the fresh bread that they are make on the spot.

Later, we went out for shoes and currency. Roads here are scary; there are no real pavements, lanes are an expression of broad intentions — 2 lanes mean no more than 4 vehicles abreast. Despite this, it feels less dangerous than Brazil; everyone wanted to get on, but fewer people wanted to be a forumla one driver. As elsewhere, the begging is bad, with a gauntlet surrounding the hotel. Again, it didn’t feel aggressive, just unpleasant. On the way to the bank, we pass a small food market, with waste food rotting in a skip, picked over by feral sheep.

Back in the hotel, read the newspaper. The English is beautiful, with a slightly archaic feel and an overly formal style. The content of the paper was also interesting, with a in-depth analysis of the electricity supply in different parts of the country.