An International Conference

Jason was from China, Professor Matt from UK, Allison from Trinidad, Allison’s husband Tim from Ireland (he was wearing a Chile t-shirt though), a postgrad student from Iran, Azmir from Malaysia, me representing India, and one Aussie, a neighbour of Allison I suppose. We all were there invited by Allison mostly aimed at introducing me to the small Geomatics group at the university. It is the custom here to call everyone directly by their first names, and Allison reminded that to me since I was calling her Ma’am. I had a problem with that as I am used to calling profs by their names only if I did not respect them much (Sutapa for instance). There were also a few children around the house, two of them were Allison’s kids. They did not especially enjoy being in the meet as much as their domesticated cat which went from chair to chair and rubbed itself cosily against everyone’s trousers, very playful indeed.

We talked about a lot of things over a self-served lunch. A topic would come up and it would go round with each one sharing his/her experiences or viewpoints. The topics ranged from Sudoku to scuba diving. At points, there were awkward silences, though. Strangely no one other than the host and Matt drank wine.

Now I suppose I should talk about the population here. A large percentage, at least 30 if not more would be Mongoloids, and in the university it would be about 50. (This pissed off Pulkit pretty badly) There were people from all the South East Asian countries. There would be about 3-5 % Indians, mostly Punjabis. The total population of Australia is 30 million. It’s mostly localized in the cities and the village culture is pretty poor. The mixed population probably helps Australia to be a better place for foreigners to live, as in racism here is much less compared to that in America and Europe.