Surveying, and I'm not talking about the ACSM

I am going to start surveying soon*. The past few months have been mostly in-office data work, so the prospect of being in the field** is exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. Exciting because it means buzzing down dirt roads in the chill of the early morning on the back of a bike, searching the rustic scenery for idle surveyors. Nerve-wracking because it means I will be managing ten times more people than I am now and mistakes are costly - whereas I can always tweak and re-run a .do file if I mess up a regression specification the first time, I can't  re-run a $30,000 three-month survey if I forget to tell my surveyors that they HAVE to stick to the pre-selected randomized list of respondents or face eternal damnation. Exhausting because it's exciting and nerve-wracking and all-consuming. I'm going to miss my boys -  Vincent Chase, Jonathan Ames, Dexter, and the rest of the crew - while I'm away. Oh yeah, and Virginia, I'll miss her too.

This assignment will be a throw-back to last year when I went away to do surveying in UP.  The main differences are: my fiancée (1) will be in the same time-zone as me (2); we will include women (3) and urban residents (4) in our sample; the survey instrument is different (5), though we are trying to answer very similar questions (-); and I can discuss, in Hindi, the merits of the movie I saw last weekend with my friends Pratap and Sangeeta from the Teach Yourself Hindi book (6), though I'd be as useless as a dead fish if my PA actually threw me into a village with a survey and said "Go" (-).

One place we are considering for the survey is Ghazipur district. It's about 80 km northeast of Varanasi, 180 km west of Patna, and it's not the Ghazipur you get when you type "Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, India" into Google Maps (my Ghazipur is located at 25°35'N 83°34'E). The district is split by the mighty Ganga, with 3/4 of the district north of the river and 1/4 south of the river. The district headquarters is a town called Ghazipur with a population of 105,000, or 1,05,000 as it's written in Hindi (read "1 lakh 5 thousand"). Incidentally, this is exactly the same size as the population of Cambridge, which will be my next semi-permanent residence after this year in India. Ghazipur is a major source of opium production in India and is also the site of Lord Cornwallis' tomb (coincidence?). That's right, Mr. Defeated-at-Yorktown himself is buried in this quiet (unlikely) riverine (likely)  town. I wonder what a young, arrogant Cornwallis would have thought if he was told that, in 250 years,  a citizen of a fully-independent America would be visiting his gravesite in a fully-independent India.

Of course, all of these plans are contingent on the French not hijacking this survey for their own evil purposes. As George Washington said to the Marquis de Lafayette on the eve of the Battle of Brandywine: "No Monsieur, this is my war."

Of course, the Americans lost that battle, and I think the exchange between GW and M de L during the retreat to Chester went something like:

"Are you ever coming back?"

"You kidding? I am Queens Boulevard."***

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* This is  a Patna soon, which means too soon to be prepared for but way after my nicely color-coded Excel timeline has me slated to leave for UP.

** This is an awesome new blog, but read with caution lest it make you jump out of your seat and run a 100 mile ultra-marathon in the Colorado Rockies before you can say "Daniel Kahneman".

*** I started watching this show a few weeks ago, and it made me realize something about myself: I want to be E and I want Colin to be my Vincent Chase.