Charminarmccjan8: On our way out of Hyderabad, we caught the minaret beauty of one
of the city’s principal landmarks, the Charminar, built by Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah
in 1591 to commemorate the founding of Hyderabad. [Kayser]

Horsecoimbatoreelliottjan08: An exhausted but still prancing Pancha Kalyane makes
it to the baggage claim in Coimbatore after the plane is diverted back to Hyderabad
and passengers and horse are forced to take a second flight. [Heffner]

Horserideelliottjan8: Elliot Heffner takes Pancha Kalyane out for an early morning ride
before leaving ISCRISAT.

Waterjan08kayser: Getting fresh water is a labor intensive part of most everyone’s day
in India. [Kayser]

Jan. 8, 2008
Ag Systems
Hyderabad/Coimbatore, India

The majority of our time today was spent visiting the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad and flying to Coimbatore and checking into the hotel there. The museum, named after the apparently very wealthy and famous Salar Jung family, contained a wide variety of exhibits. There was pottery that was thousands of years old, portraits of the Salar Jung family, many sculptures of Buddha, bodhisattvas, and Hindu gods like Vishnu, Krishna, Kothapaly and Ganesha, weapons and armor, firearms, cutlery, clothing, furniture, toys, and for some reason, statues of the Seven Dwarfs (but no Snow White). The room filled with ivory sculptures was particularly impressive, with incredibly detailed boats with tiny men aboard braving calamitous ocean waves displayed alongside Hindu gods.  

The atmosphere of the museum visit was not unlike that of an elementary school field trip, due to the masses of children walking around. We first saw them outside of the museum, when a bus full of laughing children pulled into the parking lot and we heard a pile of voices shouting “hello!” at us. Inside, they kept together by holding onto each other’s waists like a long human train, touching nearly every possible statue they could, directly underneath the “DO NOT TOUCH” signs. Around noon, around 500 to 600 people gathered in a large room in the center of the museum. The roughly 150 or so children sat at the front, while the hundreds of others sat in chairs behind them, and leaned over balconies above. They were there to watch the Musical Clock, which turned out to be a glorified cuckoo clock. Inside the view window at the top of the clock, a blacksmith hammered, every second. A bell was at the center, and at 3 minutes to the hour, another man with a hammer emerged from the left side of the clock. The children gasped and got really excited, and the room became even fuller. At 12 o’clock, the miniature man with hammer stepped closer to the bell, and struck it 12 times, with many in the people in the room counting along, louder and louder. And then it was over. It seemed like a lot of build-up for what proved to be somewhat anticlimactic, but it was still good fun.

After lunch, we headed for the airport for what was supposed to be a short flight to Coimbatore. After a very short security check and check-in, we received our boarding passes, waited about an hour, and boarded the plane. When we had been in the air about twenty minutes, an announcement was made that the plane’s transponder was malfunctioning, and before long we were back on the ground in Coimbatore, walking around to the front of the airport, going through security again, checking in again, receiving new boarding passes that were identical to the previous ones, and boarding another plane to Coimbatore. It was déjà vu all over again. The second flight proceeded without any problems, and in a few hours we were in Coimbatore.

Through it all was a horse named Pancha Kalyane, purchased for the bargain price of 200 rupees (about 5 dollars), and roughly the size of a Saint Bernard. We take a strange pleasure in watching this horse travel around India, on conveyor belts, planes, and buses.
Zach Scott, master’s degree student in Environmental Policy

Animal Sciences
Date – 8 Jan
Student –Kawin Punyoun
Places visited – Indian Immunologicals
Indian Immunologicals was established in 1983. This plant have WHO-GMP and ISO 9002 certification, which helps to deliver safe and efficient, biological and pharmaceutical products. They have a team, dedicated themselves to achieve the stated objective by maintaining quality at every stage and by complying with all current regulatory requirement.
They commit themselves to total quality by meeting the consumer requirement through Total Quality Management. I saw the vaccine production process right from raw material storage unit, production unit, packing unit. They store the vaccines in thermo controlled rooms. Three types of adjuvant are used to produce the vaccine which includes aluminum phosphate and aluminum hydroxide. They have animal testing facilities for lab animals like mice, hamster, rabbit and large animals like cattle. They conduct serological challenge tests to analyze the efficiency of the developed vaccine.
Production unit comprises testing facility for water and raw materials. Media room has facilities for bulk media preparation, filtration, tissue culture lab, washing and cleaning area.
In comparison with Thailand, cost of the several vaccines is cheaper. For example, FMD vaccine costs 10 Rs in India where as it is 30-40 Baths in Thailand.
After that we had lunch in a park and moved to airport to catch Chennai Flight.