Archive for November, 2006
In India it is popular to use Rangoli to make beautiful designs near the entrance of a house to welcome guests… Rangoli is colored sand or rice powder… sometimes people do it year-round, sometimes just during the festive season. In many traditional households the lady of the house starts her daily chores by drawing the rangoli (which is usually symmetrical) outside of the house.
Last week when we went back to ESI where we had training, I saw this rangoli set-up… It says Peace, Satya (Truth), Prem (Love), Ekta (Unity), Abhay (Fearlessness)
The streets here, even smaller side streets, are absolutely full of activity. I took a few pictures from my grandfather’s sister’s place where I come on occasion… Here (in this household), during the day the women usually don’t leave the house, not because they are tied down or anything but because they get everything they need right outside their door… The older women in the house don’t drive, so when they leave to visit their friends, etc, they take rickshaws. It’s a very interesting family - there are 12 people living in 2 adjacent 2-bedroom apartments… it’s really hectic - there is a wide range of ages and on top of the large family size they always have visitors dropping in… I could write an entire post on the family, maybe some other time… anyway,
At about 9am, right outside of the apartment building come a bunch of carts, selling all different kinds of vegetables. It’s a mini-vegetable/fruit market. They yell what all they have to offer loud enough that you can hear and take a look from your balcony before heading down. There are plenty of fruits and vegetables to choose from. From my understanding, these guys buy it in wholesale from the big market (Subzi Mandi) which is a little far away every morning at like 4am, and then mark up about 30% to get their cut for bringing it to your doorstep. The Subzi Mandi buys the veggies either from a middleman who buys it from the farmers or from the farmers themselves, who often rent trucks and travel huge distances to bring their goods to the market, and then are forced to empty their lot at whatever price the Mandi gives them that day… so there are a few steps between the producer and the consumer in this model, and each middleman takes a portion of the profits. There are new models coming to India though - Reliance (huge Indian company in many industries) has recently opened a few supermarkets in Hyderabad, and from my understanding they source vegetables straight from farmers, giving farmers a better price, and yet charging consumers less. They also plan to start selling to the push-cart vendors at lower costs than those at the Mandi, realizing that that model will continue to thrive as the primary means of receiving goods in India for time to come. The market is growing by something like 8% per year, and Reliance only wants to capture 2% of the total market by it’s superstores, so I don’t think its a huge harm to the small-scale guys. Part of the reason they can offer more to the farmer and sell for less is that there is a LOT of wastage that can be eliminated with refrigeration and other techniques employed in travel. I don’t know enough about the subject to speak on it with a lot of authority, but this sounds great… people talk about how big business suppresses the poor farmer, but I see this as one way that big business can help. The National Commodities Exchange is setting up electronic tickers announcing spot and future prices in local languages at Mandis and Bus Stands in some states (source and a great read). The RBI problem mentioned in the article is a frustrating one… Banks can’t lend against warehouse receipts, meaning that a farmer who needs money now (like most farmers do) must sell his crop now at whatever price the Mandi is giving him even if he knows the prices will be higher later.
Market on the street at 9am:
One cart, 20 different kinds of vegetables:
another cart
Throughout the day, people sell all kinds of stuff on that same small side-street… Including brooms, pots and pans, even vaccuum cleaners! Here’s another cart that has kids games, locks, bangles, cell-phone covers, bags, sandals, hairbands, soap, etc. It’s amazing how much they can pack into a small portable area!
Another amazing thing is how easily the kids on the street can entertain themselves. Often a stick and ball or stick and old tire can entertain people for hours on end. I saw this kid pulling another kid (presumably his brother) in a huge piece of styrofoam that was probably used for a computer or some other large appliance. The remarkable part is that I saw these kids on my way to a speech(below), and they were still at it 2 hours later when I decided to take the picture. Admittedly, the kid doing the pulling doesn’t look like he’s having a very good time.
I went to a speech by the Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, C. Rangarajan, at IIM Ahmedabad which is a place I wrote about earlier. I really liked the guy and what he had to say about the country, its needs, and future direction… I think India is in fairly good hands from an economic standpoint. His target audience was International business school leaders (he was the keynote speaker for a conference being held at IIM-A, I just came as a guest of my friend Nimit). He covered a lot of economic & educational ground in a short time… a few nuggets that I remember -
Failures in the Indian education system… A few good state-supported universities and a lot of bad other universities doesn’t do any good because the people who get into the top universities are highly intelligent to begin with, and often leave the country because there aren’t enough opportunities in India itself. There aren’t enough opportunities for cutting-edge research, partly because there are so few research universities like we have in the US. That to me is one of the best things about the US. A lot of cutting edge work is done in the US simply because we have some of the best research universities, and smart people from around the world come there to study and teach.
Another unfortunate consequence of the huge disparity between good and bad universities is that I think the students that are less than great that have the ability to rise up through education. Unfortunately that kind of education is hard to come by in India, whereas in the US I think the quality of our state-level institutions is pretty good and not all that far off from what is offerred in some of the elite private universities.
Rangarajan also suggested that maybe an entrance exam isn’t the best way to judge talent for entrance to universities… In the US universities use a combination of test score, high school grades, essays, recommendations, and sometimes a personal interview to decide who they admit. In India its often strictly based on the results of an exam, which gets you a lot of students of the same type who are really good at taking tests. It seems to discard the thought that diversity inside and outside the classroom is one of the best ways to learn about the world.
Rangarajan talked a bit about economics and the growth in GDP of nations, and what that is based on. Growth in GDP is based on a combination of more inputs (resources, labor) as well as higher efficiency… Rangarajan was pretty good at breaking it down simply - India is doing well because of foreign resources/money, but also because of efficiency. Here’s an article comparing India and China in this regard (pro India)… Anyway, I find that India still has a long ways to go on the efficiency front, compared to most other countries I’ve been to, especially China. Because of the availability of cheap labor in India, often times the easy “solution” to a problem is to hire another employee rather than putting into place a system that fixes the problem. It sucks!
When people ask me if I think I could live in India forever, the one thing that holds me back is inefficiency. I get really fed up with waiting in line when there are simple solutions if people would be willing to work just a little bit harder or come up with proper systems… More ranting on Indian Efficiency (InEfficiency for short)… There are too many damn people where you don’t need them and not enough people where you do… 4 bank tellers serving 200 people in the bank (huge lines, especially in gov’t banks), 2 people can conduct driving permit exams when 600 people show up to take them every day (huge lines), but there’s a guy in your tiny-ass elevator pushing the button for whatever floor you tell him to. Mind you, the guy probably won’t help you with your bags - his job is only to push the button. Security guards won’t watch your bags, the guy who washes your dishes won’t wash the floor, etc. It’s pretty frustrating. I went to Big Bazaar in Nagpur and there were 5 employees at the checkout line. 5! 
All of the guys in orange shirts and the guys with the strings on the shirts are Big Bazaar employees…
I’m not sure what they were doing, but the checkout line was really really tiny, so they were just making the place reallllllly tight. We bought some groceries and then realized that we had to buy more, so we asked one of the 10 security guards to watch our stuff for 2 minutes. He wouldn’t… his job was only to watch the one door. There was another security guard also watching that same door. At buffet-style dinners, there will be plenty of people serving food but not enough stations. Either increase the number of stations or let us serve ourselves on both sides of the line! People often combat efficient solutions with the problem that it will take away jobs… I don’t really buy the argument - it’s similar to one that was used in the Industrial revolution, and I think everything worked out OK. I don’t have a solution for the huge unemployment problem in this country, but I don’t think that hiring additional people to get in the way of work is a good solution.
Back to the street… After the festival season, people start flying kites around here, and I believe it culminates during a huge kite festival that is called Makar Sakranti in some places, and I think it’s called Uttarayan here… anyway it happens on January 14th, and Ahmedabad is reputed to be the best place for it. Street-sellers are emptying their inventory of firecrackers (that they sold for Diwali, the festival of lights) and more and more are starting to sell spindles and kites. You start to see spindle-makers on the streets… Here’s a colorful bunch of spindles waiting to be strung.
These guys are manually laying out the string, chalking it pink, and then roll it on to the spindles… the whole thing is a completely manual process, done on the street.
Sewing - on the street!
This guy brings a table and sewing machine on the street everyday and people come to him to fix stuff… There is no set prices, it’s all by negotiation. I doubt he pays any rent and I would guess that the police could probably come shut him down (or ask for a bribe) anytime.
The trash collection system is this a guy on a tricycle (employed by the muncipality)
… he comes around to each house everyday and collects the trash that you give him. He then takes it to a bigger dumpster and trucks come there every week to pick up the trash. In the meantime, rag-pickers come and sort recyclables to take with them, in the process sifting through a lot of dirty trash, occasionally broken glass and needles,etc. Here’s a picture of the rag-picking process, though this is a picture I took on the street in Delhi, not at a dumpster.
Hope this helped give some insight into what happens right outside of my door everyday (& sorry for the inefficiency rant, I’m often guilty of that)…
I’m getting back in the swing of things in Ahmedabad. I recently started using a bicycle to get everywhere and I absolutely love it & the freedom it brings… I have a bike with a basket on the front - pretty sure it’s a girls bike, but I don’t care, it’s awesome (and it isn’t very unusual for guys to ride ladies bikes here - you see it all the time). Almost everywhere I’ve been to in the past week has been accessible via bike - I’ve only taken a rickshaw once.
Last week I spent some time volunteering at Seva Cafe… Seva Cafe is a restaurant on a terrace on one of the main shopping districts in Ahmedabad - CG road. They have a fixed menu of options that rotates every day, with a mix of foreign and Indian dishes every day. They serve only 50 people, and are only open for dinner. The catch is that at the end of your meal you are brought a bill and an envelope. The “bill” has a list of what you ordered, there are no prices. You are free to put whatever you want in the envelope. Noone will say anything if you don’t put anything in it. They serve 50 people per day, and only collect on average 2000-2500 rupees per day (about $50)… They have a small staff of paid people, which is made up of kids who grew up being helped my Manav Sadhna. Manav Sadhna is an NGO that runs Seva Cafe… it does a lot of great work with a slum in Ahmedabad that I mentioned early on in this blog, as well as other projects around the country. Manav Sadhna is fortunate in that they are based inside of the Gandhi Ashram, and they get a ton of international volunteers. Seva Cafe has been operating in the red since they started (everything is transparent)… but Jayesh Bhai says that “In the worst case, we have fed people with our hearts”
It was a lot of fun to work there… When I was working there, the menu had a mix of mexican and indian food that was fun to serve (and yummy to eat!)… It’s great to see these kids who are so dedicated to the cause. I think they learn a lot from the experience, and the thought is that if if even one person who visits the cafe gets really moved to carry that forward into the world the cafe is a success… If you want to read more positive stuff about the place, check out Nipun’s blog at http://nipun.charityfocus.org/blog/ar/pilgrimpost/000944.html
A few pictures:
sign explaining seva cafe
Chopping:
Exterior portion of Seva Cafe:
As I mentioned in the last post, I also got to see the movie DON. I don’t think it’s a huge success of a film… a lot of people I talked to didn’t like the movie (its a remake of an old film, and a lot of people loved the old one and don’t like the remake)… I really liked it though - I thought the songs were re-shot tastefully, and with a mix of old and new sounds, and that overall the movie was shot extremely well. Manasee and I had gotten to “Fun Republic” early, and went to the “Special store for NRI’s.” Needless to say it was absolutely hilarious, and there was nothing in there that any NRI (Non-Resident Indian - they love the acronyms here) would be caught dead wearing on a regular basis. There were, however, several items that an NRI like myself would love to wear for hilarities sake… Shirts that have crazy slogans too wild for this blog are all the rage, as are faked US company shirts, some of which may have logos from more than one company (like my brothers belt that is both Calvin Klein and Gucci at the same time - just spin the belt over!)…
Anyway, so as we were trying to decide which “NRI” shirt to buy before heading to see the movie Don, Manasee spotted a shirt with DON embroidered on the front and back. Naturally we couldn’t pass up this opportunity, and so it was that I wore a Don shirt (150 rs - $3.30) to the Don movie. It was pretty hilarious because people would look at me and point, thinking I didn’t notice…
Here’s a picture - it doesn’t quite do the situation justice because from the picture it looks like I just put a Don sticker on - anyway it was a lot of fun, though I sort of got a little self-concious with it towards the end, kind of like when I had the moustache last month.
A few days back, it was one of our friends (Archana’s) birthday, and there was a huge party at the place where she’s staying. There was a LOT of leftover food, so she brought it to the office the next day and we had it for lunch. There was still quite a bit leftover after lunch, so we thought we’d go out and give it to some homeless people on the street. Cutting the long story short, the kids were happy to get the food, but they had no plates or bowls to eat on… so they would go around through the trash and find a dirty newspaper or sign or bag and tell us to put the food on it… and their hands were pretty gross too, but there was nothing we could really do about it due to a time-crunch. This is how a lot of disease is spread in the country… a little gross, but they probably also take a dump outside and use their hands to wash-up, and probably never use soap at all. Sanitation is one of the biggest problems facing India’s poor - here’s an article on toilets from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/10/world/10toilet.html?_r=2&ref=health&oref=slogin&oref=slogin It’s very true… I often see people drinking water from the same streams that they or other people shit in, it’s pretty damn gross! Even animals by nature won’t shit in areas that they drink from, they know that it’ll get them sick… drinking your own pee is totally OK (in terms of your stomache, psychologically probably have some problems), eating your own shit causes major problems.
Lakshmi giving the kids food:
Immediately after I took this picture, I regretted it a bit, because all of the kids got up to look at my camera and then insisted that I take a lot of pictures of them individually… I knew it would happen - I’m not sure it’s a bad thing though, showing the kids a camera & taking their picture… It makes them feel important, like someone is spending the time & effort to take my picture! I just felt bad because they all got up and left their food for a couple of minutes, and plus I had to go to dinner with my college buddy…
My college suitemate Kunal was in town to open up a new nursery school… he now runs schools across the country and has gone through a pretty big round of financing and is now opening them up at a fast clip. The school is called Children’s Nook, in Ahmedabad… It is inside of an old mansion… the school is really amazing by Indian standards, fully air conditioned, full of color, and well designed. Fees are 8-10,000rs ($200) per 3 months, which is a TON of money for nursery school in India. Tina Ambani, an old movie star and current wife of one of the Indian bigshots Anil Ambani flew in for the opening. It was funny to see all of the reporters flock to her and ask her questions because she had a lot less to do with the opening than did my buddy Kunal or his mom Pinky. It was really cool to see my buddy run a press conference with 20 reporters though… there were TV stations & newspapers covering the event.
So - star power is huge in India (& everywhere)… I’m sure that a ton of people only came to the opening to see Tina Ambani. The newspapers all were interviewing her rather than Kunal and his mom, the people that actually opened the school…
The day before, some of us from Indicorps had gone back to our orientation space in Sughad Village, where the rotary club was hosting an event for some 75 Future Leaders of India… They wanted to get an NRI’s perspective on leadership & India. It was nice to see kids who want to get invoved and help India move forward, but I didn’t see the drive in them to make it happen… There was some famous Indian cricket player also there giving some absolutely horrible motivational speech (I came from nowhere and became a famous cricketer because I am awesome!), and it seemed like people gravitated towards him more… one of the girls said something like, “This guy has inspired me so much that I just want to be with him always…”
VOT?
(that’s how some people ’round here say what, and it’s hilarious to me - you have to imagine the thick Indian accent)
I’m back in Ahmedabad for the next few weeks atleast… after 5 weeks of a lot of travels, I miss the adventure of the past month already… It does feel a little good though because I have a lot of work to do. One thing is a little hard for me to get used to though - here, everyone wakes up kind of early - I usually get up at 7am or so, but noone goes to the office until 10:30! I’m used to getting up and leaving for the office within 30 minutes, so I’m not used to all of this extra time. I don’t know what to do with my mornings now… I suppose I should start working out or running, and maybe doing some yoga, but I don’t think I can keep that up for more than a week or so.
After Dharamsala (last post), I went to Delhi. I met up with an organization called Drishtee, which is a platform for rural networking that provides IT-enabled services to rural populations. They have a franchising model where they sell the computer and services to the franchisee who provides services to the village (for a profit). They provide e-governance, education, health, insurance, agriculture, and a couple of other services, some via the internet, some not. I think it’s a great model… to provide some context to how this works - here’s a short story to illustrate the need…
Villager needs to file an application for a new electricity meter. The electricity board is in a city 17 kilometers away. The villager takes a bus or shared rickshaw in the morning for 17 kilometers (short distance, but it probably takes over an hour - 15rs)… He takes another rickshaw from the bus stand to the electricity board office (another 15rs)… He gets there at noon, but the office is closed from Noon - 2 (lunch break). He waits in a long line of people. At 2:30, the clerks decide to come back from their lunch break… He finally gets to the front of the line at 3:15pm, happy that he’ll finally get a new electricity meter, after taking just a day away from the farm. In line, the clerk hands him some paperwork and tells him that he needs an affadavit with passport photo proving his residence. He takes another rickshaw to the district court to get his affadavit made to prove his residence (another 10rs)… He gets his passport picture taken right there for 30rs, spends 100rs (and an hour in line) on the affadavit (worthless time-wasting remnant from colonial British Raj)… By that time the electricity board office is closed. He goes back in a rickshaw to a bus stand then a bus home (total 25rs)… Comes back the next day to the electricity board (30rs ride) and submits his paperwork. I haven’t even brought up a lot of inconveniences that could happen along the way - like chances are that the affadavit place is on a chai break for an hour, etc etc.
With Drishtee in place, he goes to the kiosk in his own village, pays maybe 15 rupees, gets all of the paperwork, knows what he has to get (affadavit), and gets a passport photo and all forms from the kiosk immediately. He is probably able to save 100rs, but more importantly he saves one day of time that he can use to work in the field!
So - I really like the Drishtee model… It’s a for profit entity that has recently started making a profit, and the kiosk operators are making profits too. I’d really like to get Kiva funding new kiosk operators before the end of the year. The real magic though, is when we allow those kiosk operators to give out loans via Kiva. They have so many advantages over a typical MFI operation… They are already living in the villages, so they have a good idea who is credit worthy already… they generally have english skills because they are running a computer… from a technology standpoint, they have a computer, digital camera, and internet connection. I really want to make this happen… I think it’ll be awesome and another way for Kiva technology to revolutionize MicroFinance.
I went out to visit 7 kiosk operators… It was a long journey that started at 6am… The place I was going to was about 6 hours away by bus. I spent most of the day on the back of a motorcycle with a view something like this.: 
Here’s what a kiosk looks like from the outside:
From the inside: 
Honestly, riding on the back of a motorcycle for over 100kms was not nearly as fun as I thought it would be… in fact I was hurting after a while… However, the view and wind in your face is awesome- This was a very common sight… I think its cotton harvesting season, and they transport the cotton by camels: 
Another very common sight: 
They are piles of “Goober,” which means cow/buffalo/ox shit. They use the goober to as coals to run their stoves… it’s a very efficient fuel source, and actually doesn’t smell when dry.
After the long day on the back of a motorcycle, I was getting ready for a long busride back to Delhi… I had a bus-ticket screwup (I bought a bus ticket for the next bus out of a town, but the bus that I bought a ticket for was late a few hours and in the meantime another bus had come for which my ticket wasn’t valid, but I got on the bus anyway and got thrown off 10 minutes later). Anyway, the bus screwup was somewhat fortunate because I got to visit my cousin who stayed about an hour away from where I was stuck for the night.
My cousin studies at BITS (Birla Institute of Science and Technology), a really good university. Admission to the university is based solely on the results of a computer-based exam called the BITSAT (BITS Admission Test) that is administered around the country. Gaurav’s incoming class has 720 guys and 80 girls! And I thought CMU’s 60-40 ratio was bad!
I then realized that I was very close to this village where a bunch of my other friends stay called Bagar… I didn’t have any of their numbers, but I decided to visit the place (it was a 14rs busride away - $0.31) and just walk around the village until I found my friends. It ended up taking about 20 minutes to find them - I just walked around asking for the foreign guy with 4 foreign girls. We hung out for the day… the highlight might have been climbing to the top of this huge rock in their village that they had never climbed before. It was a really beautiful view of the village and surrounding area…
Here’s a picture of Me Ashish and Radhika 
We play this game called 1,2,3 action that we learned in the slums of Ahmedabad (kids LOVE this game)…. you have to say 1,2,3 and and then everyone makes an action at the same time. It sounds really stupid, but it’s awesome… here’s the results: 
I eventually made my way back to Delhi for the Microfinance India Conference. It was a very formal conference at the Hotel Ashok in Delhi… it was a bit too corporate large-scale development for me, but it was really good from a networking standpoint. To get to the hotel from my hotel (which was the Gandhi Peace Foundation - a pretty cool place), I took a Bicycle rickshaw to the train station (10rs - $0.22) , the sparkling Delhi Metro to Central Secretariat (8rs - $0.17), and then either a rickshaw to the hotel (30rs - $0.66), or a bus (5rs - $0.11)… The busrides are always interesting because they are so DAMN full, and when you think it’s full the guy collecting money yells out to the stand telling people that it’s totally empty… here’s a pic of the so-called ”empty” bus. 
So like I said, I’m back in Ahmedabad. Went to see the movie “Don” yesterday, starring Shah Rukh Khan and filmed in Malaysia… The movie got a lot of bad reviews, but I liked it overall… There was some hilarity associated with my outfit for the movie, but I’ll wait until I have pictures to show.
