Archive for December, 2006
Thought for the week:
“…the only way you can remove poverty is by creating more and more wealth legally and ethically…”
Narayan Murthy
A great read about the Murthy family, particularly Sudha is at: http://nipun.charityfocus.org/inspire/infosys.html
Bombay-I refuse to call it Mumbai - I’m all for reverting to original Indian spellings and all, but only when it actually was the original name… Bombay is a Portuguese/English amalgamation for “Good Bay.” (Bom Bahia in Portuguese became Bombay when the Brits took power) I don’t know a whole lot of the history here, but I think the Shiv Sena party, which ruled in Maharashtra when the name changed to Mumbai (10 odd years ago?) came up with some myth about how the British had distorted Mumbadevis name to Bombay, and they claimed that the Mumbadevi temple was 6 centuries old, when in fact historical proof suggests it is just a couple hundred years old, built in British ‘Bombay.’
Anyway, sorry for the diversion - what I wanted to say is - Bombay is insane! My work, friends, and family are all in various social/economic strata of the city, so I got to see a combination of different parts of the city that I don’t think a lot of people do - appalling poverty mixed with obscene decadence. Certainly makes me realize how fortunate I’ve been in life.
I travelled mostly by train, yet I have friends in the city that have never been on the local trains (they are too hi-fi for that), and I had work in slums and some of the big new shiny buildings of the city. The trip was mostly full of meetings - all day, every day, all around bombay. The Bombay local train system is the densest urban transportation system in the world. I travelled to probably 6 different stations for work and then another 2 for a place to sleep (all on the western side)… I’d love to show you a picture of what it’s like inside a rush-hour train, but it’s impossible to take out a camera when you are packed into a train like a sardine with no room to move any part of your body. Suketu Mehta has a good description of the trains in his book “Maximum City,” (I’ve never read it but I’ve met Suketu and heard him speak and was able to find the quote online)- “…if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own. A lover’s embrace was never so close.”
Wikipedia says that during peak hours there are on average 16 standing passengers per square meter of floor space… that means that if you wanted to have a “Bombay Local Train”-themed party in your 1,000sqft apartment, you’d need 1,500 guests to give it the true Bombay feel. Oh yeah, and bad smells all over the place. Going back to where I was staying at night was usually after rush hours and the train was a nice peaceful end of the day ritual for me. I stayed in various places around Bombay - sometimes in South Bombay so I didn’t take the trains home, but mostly I stayed in Andheri or Borivali. I literally travelled with my suitcase with me all the time because I didn’t know where I’d end up at night… I think the fare to Andheri is 7 rupees ($.15) and to Borivali it’s 9 rupees ($.20)… from Churchgate to Borival is about 30 kilometers I think, and on a fast train it takes about 45 minutes.
Empty train at night:
crowded (I didn’t take this pic, I found it), and actually trains during rush hour are far more crowded than this
I really wanted to sit on top of the trains but never had the guts, and actually I was sick during this trip to Bombay too so I didn’t want to get sicker… also I was a little worried about becoming one of the 3,500 annual fatalities in the Bombay local train system.
Rush to get out of the station
Inside the train (non-rush hour)
Another frustrating moment at the train station - I had to cancel a ticket I had booked to Ahmedabad (the waiting list number was really high)… The cancellation and reservation lines are the same at Bandra, and it took me over an hour to cancel the ticket. There were 4 operational lines, 2 lines on lunch break, and 2 lines “for future use.” What are they waiting for - lines wrapping around the city?
It’s amazing how much the poverty in Bombay hits you in the face… it’s estimated that 9 million of it’s 18 million residents live in the slums. there’s poverty all over India, but it’s just more in your face everywhere in Bombay. Here’s a picture from the Bandra station - right in front of you there is a huge slum, but there are glistening new buildings in the background.
Gateway of India… I’ve probably been to Bombay atleast 15 times in my life but this is the first time I remember actually going to the Gateway of India and not just seeing it from across the street or in a car. It was realllly crowded. I’ll be back next month with the marathon runners from Waifad - we’re actually staying at a hotel right around the corner from the Gateway - I don’t think it’s anything of historical importance… it’s by the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel which is awesome - probably one of the grandest hotels I’ve ever been to (didn’t go on this trip)
I was also pretty blown away by some of the architecture in Bombay - again its weird that I’ve been there so many times but not noticed the style of buildings as much as I did this time - probably because this time I spent a lot more time in the South Bombay business district than I have before. Bombay also made me feel pretty poor - everything has gotten so much more expensive than it used to be! I guess I’m not ready to retire to India right now, or I can but I’ll have to live in a village somewhere.
From an accomplishment standpoint, this trip was good - got a lot hammerred out… I don’t want to jinx anything, but let’s just say that I had some great meetings with a lot of people in Bombay.
Funny picture of the week:
I actually took this picture in Ahmedabad and found it hilarious - I thought someone was ripping off the separate and unrelated financial institutions of JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley at the same time, but it turns out that it’s a legitimate business partnership with morgan stanley… www.jmmorganstanley.com
Pretty excited for my next trip to Bombay - Jan 20th-22nd… I’ll be with 13 guys and girls from Waifad village that are running the marathon (I’ve talked about them earlier, find it if you’re interested). It’ll be awesome. We’re planning to take them to see the movie “Guru” - loosely based on Dhirubhai Ambani - a guy from the village who makes it big. (He’s the founder of Reliance Industries, a Fortune global 500 company)… then the marathon is on the 21st, and taking them to Essel World (Bombay’s Disney Land, but much much smaller) on the 22nd.
Short post, not much time… I’ve been in Bombay for the past several days, and it’s been good and bad. I planned all of my meetings perfectly in terms of scheduling the right amount of time for meetings and how long it would take me to get to the next meeting, but didn’t account for the amount of physical wear it would take on me, and I was pretty sick for a couple of days. I’m mostly fine now though.
That was the bad - the good is that I think it’s been really productive (the next couple of days will tell me whether it actually has been productive or just wishful thinking). I’ve been meeting mostly with pretty senior-level folks at different institutions (primarily financial ones), and everyone has been willing to help and is very interested in what Kiva.org wants to do in India. Most of my meetings haven’t been very grass-rootsy (they’ve mostly been in fancy conference rooms), it’s very different from most of my other experiences in India so far.
Just wanted to let you friends know that I’m doing fine… people looking for pictures will have to wait a few days.
Thought for the week:
From a sign at the Sabarmati Gandhi Ashram, Ahmedabad
Not a whole lot of note this week… Several visits to the Reserve Bank of India’s Ahmedabad Branch, A visit to an MFI (Microfinance Institution) in Rajkot and a few visits to MFI’s in A’bad.
I guess something that may be interesting is knowing how microfinance institutions give out loans. Many Microfinance Institutions only give loans to women, for several reasons, most importantly that it is a tool of empowerment and that women are more likely to repay and not spend the money on alcohol or other vices. The one I visited in Rajkot (AMBA) gives 1st time loans of 1000 rupees ($22.2) to help women run businesses, like selling fruits/vegetables or sewing or making religious idols or incense or papad. After successful repayment of the first loan, the women are eligible for 2nd loans of 2,000 and 3rd of 3,000 rupees. They do not require any formal collateral, but they use character references and other members as guarantors. The woman first has to prove that she can save by saving 5 rupees (11 cents) every day for a month, which gets added to her savings account. They have to continue to put aside 5 rupees every day during the term of the 250 day loan, so the total amount is 1,250.
A representative of the NGO goes around to each persons house to collect 35 rupees every week. Of the 250 rupees extra that they pay back, 25 goes to support activities in her local area, 50 rupees is savings that go back to the member, 75 rupees is used to cover the maintenance field workers services, and 100 rupees (10%) is interest. All of these numbers are doubled and tripled for the 2,000 and 3,000 rupee loans. It is amazing to me that the field worker has to go to someones house every week and only gets 75 rupees for the whole year… sounds like not a lot of money for a lot of work, but it turns out that a field worker services 50 clients, including some with 2,000 and 3,000 rupee loans, and the field worker earns between 4,000 and 6,000 rupees ($89 - $133) a month, which is pretty good!
Note that this is one model of microfinance, I’d call it a modified Grameen-style model. Grameen Bank is recognized as the pioneer of microfinance in the world, and the founder of the bank, Mohammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his efforts to alleviate poverty via microfinance. Why is it a modified Grameen Style? AMBA gives very small loans, for a short term, and they repeat the loans. They streamline operations and standardize the lending process while they have a decentralized loan approval process… these are all Grameen qualities. Grameen however has a stricter regiment and requires meetings and their group lending model has groups of 5 not 3 members. As I’ve come to realize after visiting MFI’s here, there are tons of other lending models, the most popular in India being the Self-Help Group model, which I’ll explain some other time if anyone is interested to learn. I don’t believe that one delivery model is any better than another as a whole (certain models work better for certain situations)… Microfinance Institutions succeed or fail in their implementation of the model.
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It’s definately wedding & NRI (Non-resident Indian) season in India… I don’t really know if I’ll be able to describe it well, but every morning I wake up to a wedding band playing wedding songs for a Baraath (wedding procession)
I haven’t taken pictures of any of the bands that wake me up in the morning… here’s one I found from Jodhpur:
I don’t think there is any open space in Ahmedabad not taken up by weddings… I read somewhere that there are thousands of weddings every night during this season in Ahmedabad… Its simply ridiculous to me how many weddings there are and how ubiquitous it is… I heard that gold prices rise significantly this time of year and its mostly attributed to Indian Wedding Season… I’m not exactly sure why weddings are generally from November to Feb, but I think it has to do with Good Weather, Good Astrology, and the ability for NRI relatives to come to India during holiday vacation time. People spend a TON of money on these events, and often borrow from whoever they can to make sure that their son or daughter’s wedding is as grand as can be. Though I said son or daughter, it’s usually the daughter’s family that pays for the wedding, atleast in traditional north Indian families… This is a hidden component to female infanticide that occurs all over India, specifically in the North… For every 100 guys in Gujarat there are something like 85 girls, AND ITS GETTING WORSE, NOT BETTER. A lot of families can’t afford the burden of an Indian wedding plus dowry payments to the grooms family… But infanticide isn’t only in poor families, there are middle and upper class families practicing it as well… I’m no expert on the subject, though - here’s an article from the CSM about a district in TN.
Back to weddings… GE Money introduced an “Auspicious” Personal loan exclusively for weddings. They say weddings are an $11 billion industry in India, and growing every year.
Its common for college students to dress well and go out and crash weddings for the free great buffet food… I could definately see myself doing that a few years ago… the weddings are so big that noone will notice! I think an Indian-ized version of the movie Wedding Crashers would go over really well - I’m sure copy-crazy Bollywood already has a script ready.
A lot of stores have signs stating that their store is where all of the NRI’s shop. It’s a little funny to me and seems like its a bit of the post-colonial inferiority complex again. Hey, if NRI’s shop there it must be a good place, they must have the latest fashions… Here’s a picture from my way to the office this morning… there are TONS of these places:
Next stop: Bombay. I’ll be there next week meeting people from some MFI’s, people from the reserve bank, and other people that will hopefully help get Kiva.org running in India.
This topic definately needs a post… but Divya has already written one, so I’ll just direct you there…
I sort always knew that I didn’t need much to be happy, but this year has brought a new perspective on it, and I’m finding that not only do I not need a lot of stuff, I don’t even want a lot of stuff (the exception being electronic gadgets, which I cant get enough of)… I get upset when I have to go to some function at an expensive restaurant because I don’t enjoy that food or lifestyle… I’ve always been that way to some extent though.
Anyway, here is Divya’s post:
http://divyaramkumar.blogspot.com/2006/12/simple-living.html
Enjoy.
Last week, I went back to Waifad (previous post on Waifad), a village in the Vidarbha region… The Vidarbha region is primarily a cotton-growing region and farmers there aren’t able to sustain themselves and many of them are committing suicide. A village called Dorli which is only about 2kms from Waifad has put the entire village up for sale. I went to Waifad a couple of months ago when I was just trying to get a sense for rural life and the role that credit plays in it, and I got along really well with some of the kids at Waifad… They would try to wake me up at ungodly hours (like 5:30a) to go visit a lake or go hang out in their farms.
When I left Waifad (1st time) I kept on thinking that I might want to do something more for that community, but I couldn’t figure out anything that would have a real impact. After going to Bagar, Rajasthan and seeing my friends there train for the Bombay marathon, I thought we could get the kids from Waifad to run the marathon and make it something that the kids could look forward to and train on a daily basis. Anyway thanks to Savitri’s hard work the kids have been training every day and are doing really well… we’ve got a lot of sponsors and people from the press into it and I think the marathon will be really awesome for the kids (and for me)… They are going to run the half-marathon. It’s on Jan 21st in Bombay.
This time, I wasn’t the only visitor in Waifad, or the most foreign one. Hugo and Renee (2 big white dudes), who I met at the conference in Dharamsala, had ridden down from the north in their Enfield Motorcycles (thousands of kilometers on bike!). They are travelling the country working on some technology and development projects on their own, which is pretty cool. The plan is to make Waifad Wi-Fi’d! Waifad is 17kms from this small city called Wardha, where they can get broadband access, which is lacking in Waifad. In between the 2 places there is a village called Amli, near which there is a temple on a hill… the plan is to send a wireless signal to the temple and then send it over to one of the bigger houses in Waifad which is right by the center. It’ll be really exciting when it happens - Hugo is planning to go back near the end of this year and get it up and running… the kids are already excited about the potential of having internet access and creating their own webpages/blogs.
I always like to get shaves in villages, mostly because its cheaper… I feel uncomfortable paying more than a certain amount for a shave or a haircut, and prices aren’t always posted, so you just sort of find a place that looks cheap. In the village I know that it’s always going to be a good deal. I paid 10 rupees ($0.22) for a shave and massage at a pretty basic place (like they all are in villages)… one chair, a mirror and a bench. Here’s a picture of the “saloon” where I got my shave.
Here’s a picture that was supposed to be of me and the kids who are running the marathon… I guess they aren’t really kids since they are all atleast 18. Anyway, when we started taking the picture other people came in and we didn’t really stop them.
I’ll see them in Bombay in January and I’m stoked!
So then I went to Nagpur, to celebrate my grandparents 50th anniversary. I knew it was going to be a big event, but I didn’t realize how big it would actually be. I had family that came from all over the country and world! There were 3 different events in a 2-day period. The first night was the reenactment of the marriage ceremony at the house, with resaying all of the vows and the saath phera and all. The next morning was a religious ceremony at the house, and then in the evening was the reception at a local private club. For me the best thing about it was seeing all of these relatives & friends from all over the place, many of them who I hadn’t seen in many years. Its a testament to my grandparents that they’ve been able to keep relationships with friends from so many years ago and make new friends that don’t mind travelling 24 hours in a train to come to their anniversary. Even people you wouldn’t expect to see, like tenants of a building my grandparents own in Jodhpur, came all the way just for the anniversary.
Me and Rishi with Mehndi (henna) on our hands - it’s really detailed, but it only takes like 3 minutes for the henna artist to do this, which she did while talking on her cellphone at the same time:
Nagpur is famous for its oranges, so when on a trip to the train station to pick up some guests we stopped by an orange market to buy oranges for people staying at the house… There are 3 family houses that people were mostly staying at all located nearby, and they were all packed to the brim… I think there were over 100 guests from out of town mostly staying at these 3 places… We bought a couple hundred large oranges for 2.5 rupees each (5.5cents). They were delicious… The orange market just has thousands of oranges and guys waiting to pack them for you.
Unfortunately I got stuck driving to the airport to pick up my cousin whos flight came an hour and a half late and I missed some of the re-wedding. There was a lot involved in it, it was a complete reenactment of a wedding ceremony in the Rajasthani style… I don’t know that many particulars, but there are all sorts of ceremonial activities and games with the new couple etc. It starts out with a baarath, which is when the groom travels to the girls place, dancing all the while… we just danced down the street and to the house and then when we got to the house as well… we had awesome music, and people were actually dancing!
Here’s me and my Grandfather (nana) dancing: 
The Phere (circling the fire): 
Nana Feeding Nani:
Putting on the Mala:
It was a really tiring day, and then I woke up at 6 the next morning to pick another relative up at the airport. We came back to the house… we came back to a religious ceremony (Jaap) at home: Here’s the mens side:
That evening was the ceremony, but there were a lot of headaches to get there… We all (100 family people) moved from the house to rooms at the club and had meals there… I had to prepare something for the party… we had a dance teacher who showed me and Rishi steps to a dance (forget the song name), but we hadn’t really practiced it much… We spent some time practicing that and then came up with a new dance on our own, with Savitri… My grandparents love the song “Mahi Ve,” so we choreographed a dance to it, and it actually turned out really good. My grandfather had a bunch of pictures scanned and we had a slideshow running from a projector on the side that people could see… here’s one of the pictures, of my grandparents, parents, and me in DC over 24 years ago. My dad is hilarious with the beard
Right before we were about to start the program, there was a 5-minute terrential downpour, totally out of season. This ruined a lot off stuff, including the 5-stepped massive cake and temporarily the sound system & projector, as well as making all of the seats and dancefloor wet! It totally sucked, but after about 20 minutes of recovery efforts we were back on track, and everything went pretty well. I don’t have any pictures of the actual program - waiting for the professionals on that end. Here are some pictures from after the program:
My dad with my super cute cousin nephew Gollu at the reception:
Me dancing with Sunil Bhaiya
All of the grandkids (I’m the oldest by 6 years):
3 generations of family!
All in all it was realllllly great, and I was really sad about leaving and not spending enough time there with everyone, but then I got to look forward to our Indicorps workshop back in A’bad… I hadn’t seen most of my fellow fellows in 2.5 months, and it was really really great to catch up and see the great work that everyone is doing around India, and also to realize that I’m not the only one facing stumbling blocks in my project. It was held at the Kasturba Trust, which is actually a Pre-Teachers College. It was definately more rustic than our orientation place, ESI, but naturally beautiful, and we all slept in the same huge room on mattresses on the floor, so it had a slumber-party feel to it which was really great.
We did a lot of text-based dialogue, reading and analyzing articles and stories about and by authors and leaders like Lee Kwan Yew (leader of Singapore for 40+ years), Jean Monnet (former planning director, France), Machiavelli, Thucydides, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Ursula Leguin, and business leader Jack Stack. It was a ton of reading for a few days, but I got through most of it. We’d talk about each article in detail together, sometimes reenacting parts of it and discussing/arguing what each person got out of the article. It was pretty fun and a great learning experience for an unpadh (literally means unread, but in India it means illiterate/idiot) like me (Unlike many fellows I hadn’t read any of the articles or anything before).
We also had a lot of fun… Here’s another 1,2,3, action game (I posted one of these before… it’s a game where you say 1,2,3, action, and everyone has to do an action. Kids absolutely love playing it, and so do we). 
My parents & bro came down for a couple of hours and they got to meet all of the fellows which was nice. Apparently my mom reads everyone’s blogs and knew a lot more about some fellows than I did!
When you ask people in India to stand for a picture, especially old-school people or village people, the pictures always are so serious, with arms at the side, a great distance between males and females, and serious faces. We tried to recreate that in some of our pictures - here’s a pretty good one:
The last day we went to this school called Riverside… www.schoolriverside.com
It was Amazing! It was a beautifully designed school (KG-6th grade) with an awesome curriculum and really smart kids! We started by introducing ourselves, and they introduced themselves as well… we got such brilliant questions and responses to a game that we played asking how much people are in favor of a particular statement. We interacted mostly with the 6th graders, and we each got partnered up with a kid to start a longer relationship with to do a project with. I got partnered up with Namrata, a really smart girl who has 4 email addresses that she checks everyday. It’s just so shocking because these kids were so different than the kids you normally come across anywhere, particularly in India. Their English was impeccable, and they talked about role models like MLK and Mandela, and they are only in 6th grade! They were also very creative - they showed us a dance & paintings they had done.
The last activity we did was really fun - we had a campfire on a cliff overlooking the banks of the dried up Sabarmati (I believe)… Really beautiful:
Setting up the campfire:
We did an activity where we had to write a few words describing positives in each person on a piece of paper that was passed around every couple of minutes… It was a great excercise, and the piece of paper that each person has is a nice thing to look at when feeling unmotivated for whatever reason… My favorite thing that someone wrote was Indicorps staff member and my occasional roommate Dev, who wrote that I reminded him of Vijay Mallya, Chairman of the UB group who “lives life Kingsize.” For those of you not well versed in Indian business, he’s very similar to Richard Branson, who runs the Virgin group in the UK… great business sense and also a great sense of adventure in both of them. After that excercise we wrote something we want to get rid of in our life on a piece of paper and then threw it in the fire as a wonderful close to a wonderful but short few days spent with close friends.
