My new ID card

The employee ID card I got when I started working here 1.3 years ago lasted only as long as the employment visa in my passport, which lasted until March 2023. My visa was extended and then yesterday I received a new employee ID card. Note that the two photos of me look different (Fig. 1a,b). It’s beyond that one photo is elongated and the other is compressed. The first one (Fig. 1a) was taken the day after I arrived in India. My colleague, Sumanta, graciously guided me around various administrative offices that day. But first he took me to a small photo shop just off campus and instructed me to get a pack of 24 replicate ID size photos, which cost just over a dollar. I did as he said, wondering how it could ever be that I would use that many photos. Sumanta was right, of course. The first one was used for my ID. Over the next hours and days and months I dutifully handed over photos to bureaucrats and stapled photos to forms, until one day I ran out. I had the photo taken for my new ID a few weeks ago at another small photo shop, where I again got a pack of 24 replicates for about a dollar.

An obvious difference between the photos is the length of my hair. Photo 1a shows the hairs as they were just growing from the new cells that naively came to life after chemo killed their predecessors. Later, after the photo, the hairs lengthened, and curled first a lot and then less. So now my hair looks about like it did in the time before chemotherapy.

I can’t tell if the second difference between the photos is even visible to you. What I see in the first photo is a person caught on “film” while moving through the Covid pandemic and cancer treatment, to a mysterious new job in a mysterious land, too far from her beloved children. In the second photo (1b) the pandemic, the cancer treatment, and the mysteries of the new job and culture are all still in the mix, but she no longer has the deer-in-the-headlights look about her. In its place is a small but useful amount of new knowledge and understanding. She is still way too far from her children. 

Now it is March 2023. The main thing that has happened here since I last reported, in August 2022, is that my role as an associate professor at the Centre for ecological sciences at IISc has filed in, a lot. I have been teaching, going to meetings, writing grants and papers, traveling within India to do field work (Fig. 2) and other work things (Fig. 3a,b), and my lab is populated with students and postdocs (fig 4) who are energetic and learning and doing research (Fig. 5). Last weekend the lab group went on a social field-trip to the local zoo and butterfly park (Fig. 6). The way that so much unknown has resolved, so far, into this, seems like magic. 

On the home front, Andy and I still don’t feel entirely comfortable living here. It is hard being away from family (Fig. 7 a, b), our local social life is still mostly superficial, I still miss being able to be out hiking and biking alone, and Andy hasn’t figured out just how he fits in at IISc work-wise, and he has only found a handful of sewing machines to repair (Fig. 8). We are getting to know Bangalore a little better (Fig. 9 a, b), but we have not yet taken advantage of the interesting places we can travel to as tourists in this huge diverse country. And, in the last week hungry monkeys ransacked our apartment, twice (Fig. 10). We aren’t miserable but I guess it takes a while to feel at home someplace, and no matter how diligently we work at that, we are still too far away from some important people (Fig. 11).