Jen and I are on our way to Visakhapatnam this weekend to attend the wedding of a coworker of hers. Both of us will arrive by train. I'll take 12 hours during the day tomorrow from Chennai. Jennifer will go overnight with other coworkers from Hyderabad. We'll meet Sunday morning.
After that we'll take a couple of days in the eco-tourism developed land of the Araku Valley. We'll be staying at a hill-station called Jungle Bells.
I haven't written much lately. I've done most of my contributing with pictures. However, I would like to share a bit more.
I was in Mumbai yesterday for a series of meetings at ICICI bank headquarters to get the project on which I'm working (evaluating the incentives of ICICI's Credit Franchises (CF's) through randomized trials) out of the deliberation-stage and into the implementation-stage. In addition, soon I'll be hiring a survey company to go and individually survey several hundred of the CF's across the country as they begin to become more numerous.
I had two circumstances yesterday where I got soaking wet. The first happened as I stepped of the plane in Mumbai. The monsoon season is upon the country, so Mumbai gets hit regularly with heavy rainfall. When I arrived in Mumbai, the rain was pouring. I fly Air Deccan airlines, the cheapest in the country, in order to keep research costs down. Air Deccan is the equivalent of Southwest Airlines in the states. One of Air Deccan's strategies is to not rent airport gate terminals. Instead they bus passengers to and from the terminal and airplane (to be fair, most airlines do this). This means that we passengers have to embark and disembark the plane using those large mobile staircases. While the staircase on which I disembarked yesterday had a canopy, there was a space about two feet wide between the plane and the canopy where the rain was getting through. To my dismay, just as I stepped out of the plane and into this swath of moisture, the crowd in front of me on the staircase stopped moving - the bus at the bottom had departed taking it's first batch of passengers to the terminal. It took me a full 15 to 20 seconds of pushing to get the crowd behind me back onto the plane so that I could get out of the rain. To make matters worse, the wind picked up at just that moment and started to push the rainfall into the plane, forcing me to try and get the crowd behind me to back up even farther while all the while continuing to get soaked to the skin. Eventually I was transported to the terminal. Luckily I had 3 hours before my first meeting. My flight had left Chennai at 5:30 am and had arrived in Mumbai just after 7. I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, so I pulled up a chair there in the baggage claim area and slept myself dry. By the time I was ready to go to ICICI headquarters just after 10, I was dry and the sun was shining outside.
I won't go into as many details for the second case of getting soaked, other than to say that it involved a lot of walking in humid conditions to find a store that could recharge my prepaid mobile phone - a search that was frustratingly fruitless. It did, however, introduce me to another side of the Bandra Kurla Complex where ICICI has their building. If you clicked on the BKC link in the previous sentence, you will have read that it is in many ways the new financial district of Mumbai. But under the shadows and within the midst of these giant money and market-making bastions of capitalism lay pockets of extreme poverty. It was into this maze of slums across the street from ICICI that I ventured to try and recharge my phone. As I mentioned, I was ultimately unsuccessful in finding a store that could perform the recharge for me (I didn't venture too far into the area). Nevertheless, it gave me a first-hand look at an urban shanty town, a environment to which I hadn't personally been exposed for awhile. It isn't that I haven't been close - I've driven over and past them for two months now. I just hadn't been up close yet. It was an incredible (incredible in the sense of hard-to-comprehend) reminder that there are people that live among trash - literally as if they had taken up residence in a garbage dump. And it's right there, just across the street from ICICI, and tucked among the national stock-exchange, the Reserve Bank of India (India's central bank), and several other major financial institutions.
To contribute to the ability of people to be able to afford good housing is part of the reason Jennifer and I are here. It would be nice to be successful.
After that we'll take a couple of days in the eco-tourism developed land of the Araku Valley. We'll be staying at a hill-station called Jungle Bells.
I haven't written much lately. I've done most of my contributing with pictures. However, I would like to share a bit more.
I was in Mumbai yesterday for a series of meetings at ICICI bank headquarters to get the project on which I'm working (evaluating the incentives of ICICI's Credit Franchises (CF's) through randomized trials) out of the deliberation-stage and into the implementation-stage. In addition, soon I'll be hiring a survey company to go and individually survey several hundred of the CF's across the country as they begin to become more numerous.
I had two circumstances yesterday where I got soaking wet. The first happened as I stepped of the plane in Mumbai. The monsoon season is upon the country, so Mumbai gets hit regularly with heavy rainfall. When I arrived in Mumbai, the rain was pouring. I fly Air Deccan airlines, the cheapest in the country, in order to keep research costs down. Air Deccan is the equivalent of Southwest Airlines in the states. One of Air Deccan's strategies is to not rent airport gate terminals. Instead they bus passengers to and from the terminal and airplane (to be fair, most airlines do this). This means that we passengers have to embark and disembark the plane using those large mobile staircases. While the staircase on which I disembarked yesterday had a canopy, there was a space about two feet wide between the plane and the canopy where the rain was getting through. To my dismay, just as I stepped out of the plane and into this swath of moisture, the crowd in front of me on the staircase stopped moving - the bus at the bottom had departed taking it's first batch of passengers to the terminal. It took me a full 15 to 20 seconds of pushing to get the crowd behind me back onto the plane so that I could get out of the rain. To make matters worse, the wind picked up at just that moment and started to push the rainfall into the plane, forcing me to try and get the crowd behind me to back up even farther while all the while continuing to get soaked to the skin. Eventually I was transported to the terminal. Luckily I had 3 hours before my first meeting. My flight had left Chennai at 5:30 am and had arrived in Mumbai just after 7. I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, so I pulled up a chair there in the baggage claim area and slept myself dry. By the time I was ready to go to ICICI headquarters just after 10, I was dry and the sun was shining outside.
I won't go into as many details for the second case of getting soaked, other than to say that it involved a lot of walking in humid conditions to find a store that could recharge my prepaid mobile phone - a search that was frustratingly fruitless. It did, however, introduce me to another side of the Bandra Kurla Complex where ICICI has their building. If you clicked on the BKC link in the previous sentence, you will have read that it is in many ways the new financial district of Mumbai. But under the shadows and within the midst of these giant money and market-making bastions of capitalism lay pockets of extreme poverty. It was into this maze of slums across the street from ICICI that I ventured to try and recharge my phone. As I mentioned, I was ultimately unsuccessful in finding a store that could perform the recharge for me (I didn't venture too far into the area). Nevertheless, it gave me a first-hand look at an urban shanty town, a environment to which I hadn't personally been exposed for awhile. It isn't that I haven't been close - I've driven over and past them for two months now. I just hadn't been up close yet. It was an incredible (incredible in the sense of hard-to-comprehend) reminder that there are people that live among trash - literally as if they had taken up residence in a garbage dump. And it's right there, just across the street from ICICI, and tucked among the national stock-exchange, the Reserve Bank of India (India's central bank), and several other major financial institutions.
To contribute to the ability of people to be able to afford good housing is part of the reason Jennifer and I are here. It would be nice to be successful.
posted by Rock at 10:22 AM
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