A few low-resolution photos from Rock's Palm pilot - a canny device that doesn't look like a camera and thus draws less attention

Riding the public bus from Pune to Ahmednagar in rural Maharashtra

Some fellow passengers enjoying the view from the bus. Note that nothing in the bus is in English. The native language of Maharashtra is Marati, closely related to Hindi, but different enough that native Hindi spakers struggle in the rural areas to be understood.

The rain clouds gather at a gas station somewhere between Pune and Mumbai. Gas (called petrol here) is drop-for-drop more expensive in India than in the US by about 50%. The sign in the distance has an HP on the top which stands for Hindustan Petroleum. Most other petrol stations carry similar names that employ some native form of the word 'India.' Petrol companies are all state-owned here in India, so gas prices are even greater political-fodder here than in the US. The central government recently increased gas prices about 10% across the board in order to better match international prices. In a somewhat empty gesture they asked the state governments to reduce their petrol taxes in order to minimize the effects of the price increase on the common man. To my knowledge, no state lowered their taxes.

My second week in India I visited the Delhi area and stayed at the Gold Regency Hotel (http://www.goldregency.com) the Parharganj area of the city, not too far from the city center Connought Place. As a research associate, IFMR pays for my travel and asks me to keep the costs down. That means I generally stay in 3-star or less hotels and that I pay anywhere from 600 rupees (about $14) to 3,500 rupees (about $85) depending on the location and my ability to find a good place quickly.

The road on which the Gold Regency finds itself is called Main Bazaar, and for good reason. Small storefronts line both sides and their goods and their salespeople spill out onto the street most of the day and late into the evening. Most taxis refuse to drive on Main Bazaar during the day because it gets so crowded. My first night I arrived in Delhi by plane about 7:30 PM. I was put on the on the first floor (which in India is the floor just on top of ground level). The hotel has a restaurant on the ground level with live entertainment until 1 A.M. My room was right above the restaurant and right next to the street. I didn’t get nearly as much sleep that night as I was hoping.

When it turned out that I needed to stay in a Delhi hotel for the rest of the week, I decided to give Gold Regency another chance, but I asked to be put on the second floor. It seemed that the hotel was so pleased that I came back at all that not only did they put me on the second floor but they also put me in a larger and nicer room. The best part of the room from my perspective was that it had immediate access to the hotel’s balcony overlooking Main Bazaar. The balcony wasn’t necessarily intended to be used by the hotel’s guests – it had two large billboards attached to it in various configurations and clothes lines hanging between metal and cement pillars – but it provided me with a pleasant vantage point from which to people-watch on the street below and in surrounding buildings. An "India & Me" moment came that evening as I was watching a young man across the street on top of his own apartment building trying to get a small paper kite to fly (there was a light wind blowing). As I watched him tease his kite into the sky, I saw three or four other people also watching the young man’s efforts. The young man, aware of his audience, was trying to put on a good show. As he succeeded in getting his kite higher and higher, five or six other small dots in the Delhi evening sky came to my attention. It became obvious that this was not the only young man or woman who had purchased a small paper kite that afternoon in the Paharganj area. The next half an hour was a moment of connection for me, an experience of feeling that I was sharing – as an equal – space and time with others who previously had been foreign to me. I enjoy that sensation.

Another moment that involves the top floor of a hotel. This one happened two weeks later when I made my third trip to Mumbai (Bombay’s new name). My second trip to Mumbai (three weeks ago) was rather sudden, and the hotel that IFMR usually uses for research associates was completely booked (not a rare occurrence in Mumbai - it is often difficult to secure a hotel room in the city). Thus that afternoon I surfed the internet quickly and reserved a room at a somewhat random hotel that seemed reasonably near the domestic airport and that had a room available and was relatively cheap. Upon arriving in Mumbai, I was, as always, approached by the large number of touts gathered outside the terminal’s exit. I usually don’t pay them any mind, however this evening I was a little more open to their suggestions - the hotel to which I was headed was just as much a random variable having been selected sight-unseen and without any specific recommendation. When a particularly convincing tout promised me that #1- his hotel was better than the one I had selected, #2- he would secure the exact same price I was going to pay at the other place, #3- that it was in the same area as my selected hotel, and #4 (the reason that pushed me over the top)- the hotel came with free transportation to and from the airport, I decided to give it a try. I wasn’t disappointed.

I was taken to the Hotel Four Seasons (not the US version, but a 3-star Mumbai copy) (http://www.iloveindia.com/hotelsinindia/mumbai-hotels/hotel-four-seasons-mumbai.html). The hotel was reasonably clean and I ended up receiving very good service for the price. Thus when I returned to Mumbai the next week and IFMR’s normal hotel wasn’t available, I went straight for the Hotel Four Seasons (it had become a known quantity). Similarly to my Delhi experience, the hotel staff was so pleased that I had returned to them that they put me in a very nice room on the top floor of the hotel (in this particular building this is the ninth floor, or tenth story).

As soon as I saw this new room they put me in, I was hooked. It is a corner room overlooking the city of Mumbai out the south window and overlooking the Arabian Sea out the western window. The hotel is in the Juhu area of Mumbai, right on Juhu Beach. In general I appreciate good views, and this room, #9052, has a particularly good view.

Jennifer was coming to Mumbai that weekend, and I immediately went down to the registration desk and reserved the same room for those three nights (Jennifer, I believe, has already written about the weekend’s activities). That first night I was able to work from my computer while watching the sun set over the ocean and Mumbai’s lights come on and planes take off and land from the city’s airports. It was, again, a connecting moment, not necessarily with any particular person or people, but with a city that I had heard about as legend for years and was beginning to get to know.

Other moments that I don’t have time to write more about right now include
- Speaking with a Sikh on a plane about his outward and inward expressions of faith (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhism)
- Visiting the birthplace of Sai Baba, a Hindu Saint that lived in the late 19th and earl 20th century, in Shirdi, Maharashtra, after a field visit and being crowded into a small room with his jade statue where devotees were giving flowers and food to the gods and the priests were returning the gifts to the givers after allowing the gods to take their portion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirdi_Sai_Baba)
- Visiting a Hindu temple in the rural town of Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, where Shiva is worshipped as fire and as water, and having a guided tour of the temple grounds with a group of ICICI bank employees and Professor Antoinette Schoar, through the virtually empty temple where in each room a prayer was said and we had the chance to dab a little paint on our foreheads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiruvannamalai)
- Realizing in Pune that I was in a city that felt the size of Provo (a town near where I grew up in Utah with about 80,000 people in it) but which contained more people than the entire state of Utah (Pune has over 4 million people - Utah is approaching 3 million people) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pune)
- Taking a public bus between Pune and Ahmednagar to keep costs down and enjoying being part of the public means of travel.

Photos of some of these events are coming...

On June 20th last year, Rock took me whale watching on the Atlantic Ocean near Boston, and I never would have guessed that on June 20th this year I would be spending my birthday in India. Cheers to neat birthdays.

I am back in Hyderabad and Rock had to stay in Mumbai for a few more days, so we couldn't celebrate together today, but we celebrated over the weekend. Unbeknownst to me, Rock emailed my work yesterday and told them today is my birthday, so today when I went to work everyone wished me a Happy Birthday, and they later did a surprise cake. I had no idea how everyone knew.

June 18, 2006

The weekend in Mumbai has been wonderful. I have felt more connected to people than I have since arriving here, in terms of feeling like we are making friends and connecting with people outside of formal work, research and church related vicinities. This is a huge blessing. As a newcomer, it has been a challenge to feel connected to any one community when I only spend portions of my week in each. It is hard not to feel like a transient visitor everywhere, with no roots anywhere, which can be isolating.

Since we won't be in the same city on my birthday this week, Rock and I celebrated this weekend. We did a bit of site-seeing Saturday, including going to one of Mumbai's museums, where we learned much about India, its history, and Hinduism.

In the evening, one of Rock's colleagues from the ICICI invited us to go out to dinner with his wife, child, and wife's sister. They were very gracious and it was a very pleasant experience. We walked along the beach on the Arabian Sea at about 8 or 9 PM. It was full of people and families with young children. In Mumbai, whole families stay up late. We probably didn't eat dinner until about 10 PM, which is also typical in Mumbai. The restaurant we went to was also full of families and was as busy as a popular U.S. restaurant would be on a Friday night at 6 or 7 PM. We really enjoyed eating with this family because they suggested several delicious dishes to us and helped us know what things go together and how to eat them. Usually we just blindly choose something we hope we'll like and guess at what it goes with. Three of my favorites were Pav Bhaji (a type of buttered bread with this amazing sauce), Masala Dosa (a big role of paper rice that was eaten with a special type of potato dish), and Onion Uttapa (sort of like an Indian tostada, with Indian spices and no meat or cheese).

Rock's colleague's family presented us with a gift, a beautiful figurine of one of the more popular Hindu gods, Gamesh. Gamesh (we had just learned in the museum earlier that day) has an elephant's head and is the Hindu god of new beginnings and the remover of obstacles. I thought that was a fitting metaphor.

Today, we were planning on attending church at the local Mormon congregation from 11 AM to 12:30 PM (the time posted on the Internet) until we found out at about 10:45 that it is actually not in Mumbai, but in New Mumbai, which would have taken us about 1.5 hours to reach. Given that the services only lasted an hour and a half, we quickly realized that we would be lucky to make it just as everyone else was leaving, so we had our own private church meeting for the first time since we have been to India. (Chennai has two Mormon congregations. I'll write more about that another time.)

Another of Rock's ICICI colleagues invited us to a family birthday celebration this afternoon. It was quite interesting. When we arrived, Rock was invited to sit in the living room with all of the men, and I was ushered to one of the bedrooms where the women were watching a guy entertain the kids with music and dancing. Rock says that the men didn't talk a whole lot. The women didn't talk a whole lot either, but that was because they were watching the kids and helping them with the games. It was great fun to watch the kids have a good time. It was a lovely gathering. The food was delicious, and I really had a great time just watching everyone enjoy one another's company and being a part of that in a small way. Watching all of the children play together also brought to my mind several fond memories of various holiday and birthday celebrations growing up. I really appreciate that my parents put effort into making such occasions memorable. They definitely succeeded.

June 16, 2006

How is it already mid-June? It is hard to believe that tomorrow (Saturday) marks one month from the day we arrived in India. We are already one-seventh through our journey.

I had expected that coming to India would force us to slow down our pace of life, and I was rather looking forward to that. As it turns out, we are both working with very fast-paced organizations and projects, so we are working very hard and are as busy as we have ever been.

I have a hypothesis that anyone who can effectively run an organization across all of India is likely to successfully transition to running a global organization. There is such a diversity across India's states in terms of culture, languages, customs, etc. To even run a business across a couple of states requires being able to effectively both determine the strategy for catering to customers and manage the logistics of working with employees who speak very different languages with different alphabets, have very different cultures and customs, etc. Doing business in India's large cities requires the ability to move relatively quickly, yet any aspects of a business requiring interaction with rural areas require the patience to conduct business in an underdeveloped infrastructure. India feels, in some ways, like a microcosm of the world.

Today (Friday) I am headed to Mumbai, where I will meet Rock (who is already there for data collection). I am excited to be exposed to another major Indian city.

I would like to visit the rural areas at some point too. I feel rather sheltered from the poverty in the cities. If you are not living in poverty, you can very easily live your life quite sheltered from the extent of its existence. I see some of it, but I also see wealth. Occasionally when I run across a beggar or see people living in more extreme poverty, I feel detached, and that disturbs me. It is a weird feeling. I am trying to figure out ways to connect more with the less educated population. It is hard because of the language barrier. Rock and I are hoping to find some service opportunities in Chennai where we can spend a couple of hours on weekends getting to know people. Right now I am providing pro-bono service, but I feel far removed from the end beneficiaries (rural poor women).

A few more pictures...

ICICI Bank Headquarters in Mumbai

An ICICI Bank Franchisee in Kolor, Karnataka


An auto-rickshaw posing as a Ford

A train station just outside of Bangalore

Fields of Green on a rural highway; I may be proven wrong on this eventually, but I believe that the short green plants in the field are mullberry leaves which they feed to silkworms (silk is a major cash-commodity in the Karnatak area) and the taller trees in the distance are eucalyptus trees whose leaves they press to get eucalyptus oil.

A few pictures of what we're experiencing:

A typical lunch at the IFMR Canteen

Rock at Karnataka's state capital in Bangalore

Jen in our hostel room feeling pretty wearing her new kurta.

A little bit about rural India:

I've spent the past two weeks travelling throughout the country. My access to internet has been sketchy, hence the dearth of entries on my part.

Last week I visited Delhi to visit credit-franchises around the area. For the un-initiated, credit-franchises (or CF's) are small-business owners in rural areas of India who have contracted with ICICI Bank (http://www.icicibank.com) to provide the bank's products to the rural population. It is an effort by the bank to extend its 'footprint' further into the rural areas without incurring the high costs of establishing a brick-and-morter branch. Indeed, the strategy is fraught with potential privacy and reputational issues. Hence the bank's willingness to let a bunch of academics try and figure out the strategy and its implications.

I first visited the Jaipur area in the state of Rajasthan, south-west of Delhi. Rajasthan, appropriately named, is the land of the Raj's and is the classic India most foreigners have flash across their minds when the country is mentioned. Camels are everywhere. Great palaces built by the old Raj's leap out of an otherwise drab landscape. Many of the palaces have been converted into hotels and resorts for tourists. Of the two CF's I visited in the area, one was a grain-merchant (essentially a commodity middle-man between farmers and factories) and the other was a marble/stone retailer. Both were chosen for their connections to the local farmers and their consequent knowledge of the farmer's credit-worthiness. Both were in their mid-twenties.

I next visited the Meerut area in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). UP is the most densely populated state in the country. It's distinguishing feature in my mind was the kilometers and kilometers of lush, green sugarcane. Another ubiquitous feature of the area are the stacks of dried dung piled 12 feet high and covered with hay to survive the coming monsoon season. The dung will be used as heating-fuel in the winter months when the temperature drops close to freezing for several weeks.

The next day I visited CFs in the Karnal district of the state of Haryana. The farmers in Haryana are comparatively wealthy relative to other state's farmers as the fertile land is particularly productive there. ICICI is anticipating a great deal of business here as they will be the first private bank in the area and the first bank to aggresively cater to the farmers' needs.

Lamentably I forgot to bring our camera with me so I have no pictures yet to show. However, I am taking two days tomorrow to visit CFs in the state of Karnataka (rhymes with Battlestar Galactica) and I will have my camera at the ready.

21st Century Slavery

Newspaper Clip: “Missing girls should be registered as trafficked” (The Times of Hyderabad, Monday June 5, 2006)

“New Delhi: Concerned over several trafficking cases not being reported, the ministry of women and child welfare (WCD) has asked all the states to register 'missing' girls as trafficked. The issue was discussed in the central advisory committee meeting held last week and instructions were given to state police and administrations.

“With India topping the list of most number of HIV / Aids [sic] infected people, it [is]not a surprise that [the] flesh trade has been thriving in this country.

“But for those who read and hear about the rampant trade at Delhi's G B Road, Kolkata's Sonagachi and Mumbai's Kamathipura, this will come as a shocker: just 46 cases of women were reported to have been trafficked in 2003. This number increased by 93.5% to 89 in 2004 with Jharkhand reporting 36 cases and Bihar 35, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

“According to WCD ministry officials, young girls are being kidnapped or coerced and taken from Nepal and Bangladesh and states like Andhra Pradsh and Tamil Nadu to northern states like Delhi, Punhab and Haryana. A report commissioned by the National Commission for Women in March 2006 on human rights violations of commercial sex works (CSW) concluded that 29.5% (the maximum number) of the survivors and victims of trafficking came from Andhra, followed by Karnakata (15%), West Bengal (12.5%) and TN (12.3%).

“ 'The number of girls being trafficked is growing at an alarming rate and the average age is dropping as well. The clients now prefer girls as young as 10-12 years,' an official said. This is, however, not reflected in the national figures as either police officials are not sensitised to this problem or prefer to cover up cases. By registering the cases as trafficking, ministry officials hope to succeed in better enforcement. 'Right now there is no inter-state coordination. After the state police conducts a raid and registers and FIR, the victims have to come for hearings for which they neither have the interest nor the money,' the official added.”

Increasingly younger women and girls being sold, duped, and stolen into sex slavery is not a problem that is unique to India.

Comments from anyone

Hi all,

Unfortunately for the past two weeks we've had our blog settings set such that you had to be a registered user to make a comment. I hope that it hasn't deterred too many people from contributing. I have now turned that function off so that anyone can post a comment.

Best,
Rock

6/3/2006
10: 45 PM

Office Life in Hyderabad

Because I spend so much of my time in the office, I thought I would share some interesting aspects of office life in an Indian office in Hyderabad.

Water Cooler: There are no disposable cups. All of the cups are glass or ceramic. The office employs women whose job it is to: 1) offer everyone coffee or tea in the morning, 2) offer everyone coffee or tea later in the day, 3) offer everyone coffee or tea or water during meetings, 4) keep the place clean overall, and 5) wash all of the dishes (the glasses, cups, and office dishes and silverware people use to eat lunch—including dishes people bring from home to carry their food to work. As an aside, I don't see much plastic or Tupperware here—everything is tin or glass). Theoretically, you never have to leave your desk. I am a bit independent, so it has been hard for me to get used to having someone set up my lunch for me every time I want to eat. I rebel and get my own water – it's the only mental break I get during the day and I am not about to give it up.

“Office Boy”: This individual's job is to go do errands for anyone who needs him to, including ordering lunch for anyone who wants to order and picking it up if necessary. He also is the only person (that I can tell) who has keys to the office. (Maybe the CEO does too.) He opens the office in the morning and has to wait until everyone is gone in the evening to lock up.

Workweek: The Indian workweek is from Monday to Saturday, usually from about 9:30 AM until 6 or 7 PM for the average worker. Many people stay even later. (While I sometimes do some work-related stuff on Saturdays, I am not bound to this work schedule. I have that luxury since I am doing pro-bono work.)

Recruitment Practices: In India, it is legal and common to specify desired gender and age as part of the required qualifications for a job. Rock recently noticed an advertisement for stewardesses for a new Indian airline. Among the specified qualifications: female, young, unmarried. I have seen several job advertisements requiring applicants to be 35 or under. I only have a few more good years left to contribute by that standard!

Infrastructure: The building I work in at Hyderabad is an old building. The walls could use some paint, the floor is old, the bathroom toilet leaks unless you turn the water off, the power goes out from time to time, and the internet connection occasionally dies. Only the two conference rooms and the CEO's office have air conditioning. Everyone else gets ceiling fans. I have really re-gained an appreciation for the extent to which infrastructure can enable or block the efficient running of a business. Overall, though, it is not too bad—not much worse than what I have seen elsewhere. I hear that the working conditions in the more blatantly for-profit organizations are better. I believe it—there is a lot of construction in both Hyderabad and Chennai with a lot of beautiful new buildings going up.

Lastly, I read an interesting newspaper article the other day that spoke of the nouveau-middle class “call center yuppies.”