Friday 22nd Jan

In the dead of the night I was harshly awakened to the sound of Alvin screaming. “Oh my god, oh my god, what’s wrong?” He just groaned and turned over. A few hours later, it happened again, but he screamed for longer that time. I have no idea what’s wrong with him, he’s on malarone not chloroquine.

We got up obscenely early to go to IIT and finish setting up QoS before the crowds arrived. At precisely 9am, we were absolutely flooded with raucous school children. They were insanely inquisitive about everything, not just the solar cells but also how lenses are fabricated and what the optical stands were and all sorts of bizarre things. In fact, some of the adults were also quite mad, Ben had to fend off one who absolutely insisted he could make a perpetual motion machine out of a vacuum, thus rendering photovoltaic technologies entirely useless. He reminded me a bit of the triangular-black-hole conspiracy theorist at the Royal Society. There were also an extraordinary number of visitors who wanted pictures of me with them.

Disaster struck at 11am, when Ben and Rahul (with remarkable synchronisation) came down with some kind of fever / stomach upset disease. We suspect it may have been caused by the meatball sub that they shared yesterday. They were both in such a bad state that they had to go and lie down for the rest of the day. That left myself, Alvin, and Balarko (a lecturer from Imperial here to promote the college) to man our 3 hands-on demos all day long without being able to take a break. At lunch I discovered an energy drink called Cloud 9, which contains vast quantities of sugar, caffeine, taurine and B vitamins. I feel fairly sure it wouldn’t be legal anywhere else. The only respite we got was at 3 when we shut up shop for an hour to have a meeting with some eminent professors who are setting up a new photovoltaics facility at IIT.

In the evening Alvin and I went to see the inaugural Techfest show, where they had a mountain biking troupe from Britain doing stunts and jumps. The queues to get into the amphitheatre were miles long, but as exhibitors we got special access passes and went straight to the front. Afterwards we got a rickshaw home as the wait for a taxi would have been extremely long, and yet again we narrowly escaped death by Mumbai traffic. Back at the hotel, and Ben and Rahul look absolutely terrible. I sure hope I don’t come down with this as I soon have a 24 hour globe-crossing trip ahead.