NRI-Now Residing in India

Indicorps Fellowship - January ‘08

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Back to Amreeka, and an advertisement for Singapore Airlines!

The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.
~Bill Gates… So true, planes bring people together - I feel closest to and know the most about the places that I’ve visited, without planes it would be much tougher to visit these places.

In the space age, man will be able to go around the world in two hours - one hour for flying and one hour to get to the airport.
~Neil McElroy(we’re much closer than this reality than I anticipated)
The ride home from the airport took FOREVER - though I had this view of Pittsburgh coming out of the tunnel that I’d been looking forward to the whole year - coming through the fort pitt tunnel really is incredible:
)

Lots to write about - apologies for not writing for the past month. It’s been busy - I was travelling in the north (Uttar Pradesh and Nepal). I didn’t have a lot of internet access, and when I did for a time and wrote a post, it disappeared when the power went and I lost everything I’d saved. I also left my old laptop in India (sold it and bought a new one here - the Dell XPS 1330 for the geeks - it’s supposed to be pretty awesome - it better be for what I’m spending on it, but it’ll take a month to make it and deliver it to me ).

Anyway I have a lot to write about (trips, closeout at Indicorps, etc), but right now I have all my pictures on various other media sources and I hate posting from not my own computer (certain things- software and keystrokes I’m just not used to on other computers)… so it’ll be a while.

My flights home were AWESOME.
I haven’t flown in the year since I flew to India, which is somewhat crazy considering that I had racked up 550,000 miles on US Airways in the previous 4 years. I flew Singapore Airlines (Star Alliance partner of US, flown on an award ticket), in executive economy from Singapore to Los Angeles. I realize that I took the long way around the world to get to Pittsburgh - but I did it for 3 reasons… 1- I wanted to stop over in Singapore (on the way over), and 2- I wanted to stop over in LA (on the way back, ended up cancelling it but still meeting up with friend for dinner), and 3- non-stop flight from Ahmedabad to Singapore. The 16 hour flight from Singapore to LA was pure bliss. It was in an A340-500, which is a pretty big long-range craft, in which other airlines usually seat at least 300. Singapore had theirs configured to seat only 181 in 2 classes, so it was supremely comfortable. I’ve had the fortune of flying in business and first class on many other airlines, but I think I would take exec economy in Singapore over them (note that I’m small and don’t care for the really wide seats - actually I hate them)… I was seated in the last row of the aircraft, so I was really worried that my seat wouldn’t recline at all or something on the 16 hour flight and it would be terrible. To my delight the seat reclined fully and was awesome… the service, entertainment and food was all awesome as well. I watched Spiderman 3 and Shrek the Third on the trip (there were some 150 on demand movies available), and slept for the rest of the journey.
This is economy!

(I didn’t take the picture - it’s from Singapore’s PR website… I wanted to take the picture, but I was too shy to pull out my camera on the plane)

Then my flight from LA to Pittsburgh was on US Airways and it was pretty bad as per usual. One thing I will have to get used to is not having airline status… I used to automatically get bumped up to first class and treated really well, but after a year of no flying, I don’t get any perks

A couple of things since getting back -
1) It feels like I never left, I just jumped back into my old life. I haven’t even started driving on the left side of the road or anything crazy like I have done in the past. My friends comment that it seems like I was only gone for a couple of weeks (I don’t know if that is good or bad)
2) Right now me and my brother are obsessed with watching some of the DVD’s I bought in India (I bought a TON of them), especially the Abhishek and Amitabh Bachchan ones:

3) First 3 meals: Paco’s Cantina (Mexican) with Shawn in LA, Tofu Lasagna at home, then spring dosas and tamarind rice at Udipi Cafe in Pittsburgh (I know its weird to have Indian so soon after coming, but they are catering my bro’s grad party and we had a tasting… also I think that their dosa is better than any I had in India).

ok, I’ll write more soon… still have to write a year-end wrapup for Indicorps too.

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Monsoon & Mangoes

“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
~Richard Feynman, adventurous nobel prize winning physicist and prankster (nobel was for physics, unfortunately)… seems like he was an awesome guy all around.

I haven’t posted any real news for over a month, and for no good reason (not much has happenned, but that never stopped me before…). I’ve been meaning to post this for the past week or so, but just finally got around to it, and some of the thanks goes to my friend Shaila, who’s post inspired this one.

It’s (finally) monsoon season in Gujarat. The monsoon is a rainy season, caused by some crazy pressure system that you can read about here, that lasts for a couple months during which it rains almost every day here (sometimes for almost the whole day). One thing that is sort of great here compared to home is that it almost never rains except during monsoon season (someone correct me if I’m wrong), so it would be easier to plan picnics and the like if I was doing that (really missing American summers, especially dining al fresco). On the flipside, the summer here was unbearably hot - temps generally in the 100’s for the past couple of months, so it was really too hot to do much of anything outside. Last week, we finally got our first (heavy) rains of the year, and it was awesome, but it seriously screws everything up because it is raining most of the time. It’s kind of funny, it feels cold now, but the reality is that the highs are still in the 90’s every day (it’s just much cooler than before, no sun and 10-15 degree lower temps in one week). I don’t have an AC anywhere I roam except for my family’s place in Ahmedabad, which I go to every couple of weeks. During the summer, I had a lot of trouble sleeping at night, often opting for the roof of our apartment building because it was a bit colder there. However, that is only good for about 5.5 hours a night… its too noisy at the beginning of the night, and the sun starts rising at about 6.

Here’s what Shaila had to say about the rains:

The weather in Ahmedabad had gradually been getting more and more humid for the past month. Generally the heat here is arid & dry but this past month was different. It would rain and sprinkle a bit here and there, but no proper, drenching, floodworthy monsoon rains like there should be. Two weeks back the humidity hit a peak and it was totally unbearable - the kind of humidity that makes you sweat even in the middle of your cold shower. Then in an instant, God answered the prayer of 5 million people and it poured. Children shed their clothes and ran out into the streets to dance. Old people raised their hands to the sky and thanked the heavens. Rickshaw drives got out of their autos and stood in the rain with their faces upwards. Every time the thunder clapped, people whooped and hollered like we were at a cricket match.

And I did what I had been dying to do since the summer started. I left my phone, wallet and everything else at home and got on my cycle. The rain was coming down in buckets and I wanted to be in it. Sometimes straight. Sometimes slanted. Sometimes horizontal. The wind blew cyclists over, the streets flooded, scooters got stuck and trees fell in the wind. But Ahmedabad, and Shaila, were all celebration and smiles for the first rains of the season.

I cycled around the old city for a couple of hours and watched kids play in flooded streets. Then I picked up Sheel and we rode around together for a bit in the old city and took some pictures. It was incredibly fantastic. The idea of warm torrential rains is completely foreign to most people in the west, but it is an amazing feeling to be in this weather and there is something extra special about the first rains of the season.

Riding our bikes throughout the city was pretty awesome. Here’s a picture of me and Shaila (I put my camera in a clear plastic bag, which is why it looks hazy):

We are actually much more soaked than it looks. As Shaila says, it is exactly as if we had jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed.

The rains feel really good in contrast with the ridiculous heat and humidity that we had during the past month, but they also help you realize how shoddy the infrastructure is in this city (and most other Indian cities). The roads fill up with water because the sewer infrastructure is really bad, and in a lot of rain the sewers back up and pour out dirty stuff rather than drain it away. The slum areas are typically low-lying and the first to get flooded… a waterfront location is a bad thing here. There are often casualties, but moreso there is a lot of disease and garbage floating around… and there are kids swimming in it:

The kids were definitely having a blast.

Mango Mania!

On the dietary side of things, I’ve been eating mangos every day for the past couple of months. I usually get the totapuri mangoes for 20rs/kilo, which works out to about 5 rupees (12.5 cents) each. My relatives buy crates of 10kilos each (50 mangos) every 3 days. (they also have 12 members in their family). They are absolutely delicious and much cheaper than what we get in the US. For a while, I was also having Mango rus (juice) everyday, but I got sick of that after a while. The sad news is that the beginning of monsoon season spells the end of mango season, so I just have one more week or so to enjoy the mangoes! Here’s an relevant and interesting article from the NYT last year: Mango Mania in India

Double Savari
Last bit - direct copy from Shaila:

Sheel and I ride around “double savari” (double passenger) quite often. It’s common in India - I once saw 4 people on a cycle! Sheel is much better at balancing the cycle with two people on it than I am so he usually rides the cycle (I tried a couple of times and we just ended up falling over). He and I will go double savari if we are going out to lunch, for a snack or some tea when I don’t bring my cycle into the NGO office. It’s a ton of fun!

And… the year is coming to a close… but I have so much yet to do, so it doesn’t really seem like it’s almost over yet.

And regarding my laptop… I’m back up and running, but for some reason both of my batteries don’t work anymore, and Dell won’t do anything about it because they are over a year old… so I just have my laptop plugged in all the time.

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The Worst News Ever

Each misfortune you encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrow’s good luck.
~Anonymous

Hope so!

My laptop died. My Dell D400’s hard drive started making clicking noises and now won’t start up. After several hours on the phone with Dell GOLD technical support (for which my former company paid a bunch of extra money for), I am told that I will be getting a hard drive in the mail, but all of my data is lost. Truly sad. I don’t have a very recent backup, so I lost several documents I was working on, and even a blog post! Also dear are my pictures, most of which I still have but my edits are probably gone.

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Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.”

“Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.”
both from Ron Paul, who is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2008.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was a great, light read. It is described as an insider’s account of exploitation or neo-colonialization of Third World countries by a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government. It was on the New York Times bestseller lists for over a year.

According to his book, Perkins’ function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with huge debts they could not hope to pay, these countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralised politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an EHM as follows:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

Definitely interesting. I don’t have time to write a new review, so I’ll copy what I wrote to a friend who I’ve been dueling with over the benefits of market capitalism (my friend Sushil, who is pretty radical, actually recommended this book to me, and here’s what I wrote back to him) .

It was entertaining in a spy-thrillerish way, though I think Perkins sacrificed some truths for entertainment value, and the book is worse off for it. The basic thesis appeals to me quite a bit - the corporatocracy is bad. Corporatocracy as Perkins describes it is the teaming of the feds and select private sector firms to advance political hegemony and economic rent. Corporatocracy is terrible. However, extrapolating this to “globalization and capitalism is bad” is QUITE a stretch.

In fact what is bad is the creation of wealth that depends on coercion in the hands of the government. THAT IS NOT MARKET CAPITALISM! Halliburton and Bechtel, among others are funded indirectly by the US govt and our dollars to force people off their lands in South America. That is obviously terrible, and isn’t how market capitalism works, so this book doesn’t provide a cogent argument against libertarianism at all. Halliburton and Bechtel are violating our rights as taxpayers by funding the politically connected firms. The South American Govt’s are violating the rights of the people and cultures displaced when they remove them from their indigenous land.

He uses the real examples of Halliburton, Chas T. Main (engineering companies acting in hand with the US government to cheat 3rd world countries - though I think he exaggerates this and makes some leaps in logic), and then pretends that Wal-Mart and McDonalds going into the 3rd world are doing the same things. They aren’t toppling economies and they aren’t with I don’t find fault with Nike opening a factory in Malaysia, allowing workers who live in the area to voluntarily sell their labor for wages that would exceed their next-best opportunity for work. Noone dies, no cultures are killed off, and (hopefully) no subsides are given by the governments, so taxpayers aren’t footing the bill. Again, I don’t know the answers here… I’m open to discussing this and open to being swayed one way or another by someone. Shoot me an email or drop a comment if you have anything interesting to add.

Oh, in this vein, here’s an article against microfinance that I find to be pretty interesting. It echoes some thoughts I’ve had for a while.
Microfinance misses the mark
However, I still think there is a huge need for microfinance, and also that the industry has a long way to go. I think where the author is right is that Microfinance isn’t a silver bullet for poverty and that we need to support industry. However, there are many non-economic benefits of microfinance that can’t be overlooked. Additionally, one thing that I think the article is good about addressing is that microfinance is more than microcredit - finance includes the ability to borrow, but also much more than that, particularly savings and insurance. A lot of the problems are around governmental regulation, for example in India Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFC’s) can’t accept savings, yet that is what most of the MFI’s in India are registered as or moving towards. Anyway, no time to write more, but its certainly an interesting discussion to have.

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Here are some Billboards from Bombay that I meant to post a long time ago but forgot… More than 10 years after deregulation, there are “Airline wars” going on in India, which are mostly good for the consumer. The Indian aviation market is pretty hot, and a bunch of low-cost carriers have come in the marketplace in the past few years. Here’s a great example of advertising one-upmanship:

First, Jet airways puts up a billboard saying “We’ve changed”. Kingfisher responded within 36 hours by putting up another billboard on top of it, saying, “We made them change”. A few days later, GoAir put one up on top, saying, “We’ve not changed. We’re still the smartest way to fly.” Pretty clever advertising.

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