Archive for March, 2007
I probably should’ve addressed this a long time ago… I started this blog mainly for friends to get an update on my personal life, but I get a ton of emails about Kiva.org and India, mostly people asking when we’ll be live so they can loan to entrepreneurs in India. So maybe Kiva and Indicorps are a part of my personal life and I should include more about them here…
Part of my work involves getting Kiva.org set up in India. Due to a number of circumstances, most involving the Reserve Bank of India’s rules about who can borrow from foreign sources, this process has taken far longer than my wildest imaginations when I came here. Every time I think there is a solution, another problem presents itself, and another bureaucratic hurdle makes itself known. Still though, there is hope, and this time, I’m serious… We’re close to a solution and hope to be live with Indian businesses shortly.
Bill Clinton talked about Kiva.org yesterday in his address to the CTIA (the wireless association)…
“In India, Clinton said, small-time entrepreneurs are making good on micro-loans made through sites such as Kiva.org and are rising above the poverty line by purchasing cell phones and then leasing them out to their neighbors. “
Source
It’s a wonderful honor for WJC to be talking about us (he previously honored Kiva.org at his Clinton Global Initiative last year), but what he said about Kiva in India isn’t exactly true just yet. We hope to be there really soon, and hope that you’ll join in by making loans when we are live here… I think there is a really exciting future in store for Kiva in India. If you want to know more, or have any way to help, let me know.
In the meantime, make a loan to an entrepreneur in another country - they need your help:
By the way, there’s a post below this one that I just wrote today (yeah, 2 posts in one day - crazy considering my slackitude on the posting lately)
My life is my message
~MK Gandhi
(Picture from the Gandhi Ashram, pre-cleanup)
So after the trip in the North, I came back to Ahmedabad for the Indicorps workshop. This is a time for all of the fellows get back together, to reconnect and learn from others experiences. It was really really great to see all of the other fellows. The theme for the workshop was “Challenges to Excellence.” What keeps us from being great at what we do? The workshop was held at the Sabarmati Gandhi Ashram, which is where Gandhi lived from 1919 to 1930. At this workshop, we broke off into teams and worked on projects for the Ashram. My team’s(Me, Ashish(blog) and Shaila(blog)) project was to create a virtual tour for the Gandhi Ashram (or a template for one) that could later be incorporated into the website. Here’s what we came up with in a few days: http://www.sheelm.com/gandhi
I know it takes forever to load the 360’s on the website… they were optimized for display on my laptop rather than the web, so they are a little bigger than they should be.
At first, we were all pretty daunted by the tasks in front of us… I didn’t think we’d be able to accomplish much in 3 days. In the end, I think we got a decent amount done and if we had 1 more day, it would’ve been a lot better. The other groups tasks were
- to create and take a survey of visitors asking questions that would help the Ashram plan for future visitors, and to create a guestbook for visitors to write their thoughts
- to create a map (that will be displayed at the Ashram) and brochure of the Ashram to be given out to visitors and could be taken home as a keepsake
here’s what they came up with in a couple of days (the current version looks even better!)
- to fix a lot of panels that have quotes by Gandhi, pictures, etc. that were made in the late 60’s and haven’t been properly cared for, and to clean up others (hence Sheela in the “my life is my message” quote above)
- to come up with a project to do in the library. The group ended up creating new panels and signage and also translating Gandhi’s letters that were displayed in the library (of 35,000 in their collection, all on which he wrote the back sides of used paper)… I guess it was actually more transcribing… from Gandhi’s poor handwriting english into typewritten legible English… I thought this was much needed, as I can’t understand his writing at all
- our project - create a virtual tour of the place.
http://www.sheelm.com/gandhi
Every group came up with something stellar at the end of 3 days, and I think the Gandhi Ashram really appreciated it. In next years group of fellows, there is going to be one person whos job it is to re-energize the Gandhi Ashram. Here is the full description:
http://apply.indicorps.org/ProjectInformation.php?prjId=66It seems like a pretty cool project.
Here are some other shots of the ashram:
Gandhi picture - I really like the way the picture looks when lit up
3 monkeys (Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil)… these 3 monkeys were always on Gandhi’s desk.
Entrance area:
Hridaykunj: Gandhi’s actual home… It’s REALLY basic…
here’s Gandhiji’s office inside of Hridaykunj
Gandhi statue - really peaceful place, right by the river
We tried to get everyone (22 people) in the Indicorps jeep at once… we did it but then the driver balked at driving with such a ridiculously stuffed vehicle. We totally could’ve been fine… anyway, here’s a picture of the folks in the rear getting out… I like it in Sepia:
That act reminded me a bit of an old picture of a competition in the 60’s to get as many people stuffed into a VW bug as possible… I found it online - they got 31 in the veedub…
In the US we have to have competitions for these sort of things, but in India it’s sort of just a part of life, as the bus in Jodhpur shows…
I’m sure that someone has packed in atleast 40 in an Ambassador or Maruti Van
I’ve been in Ahmedabad since the workshop, and nothing terribly exciting has gone on… just the daily grind, in the office.
My friend Manasee (btw, how I met Manasee is an interesting story… My first week in A’bad, with no non-Indicorps friends, I went to Sewa bank for a meeting and I heard someone speaking American English, so I just went up to her and said something like “hello, are you American?, figuring that it couldnt hurt, seeing as how I didn’t have any friends in the city. It worked!)
anyway Manasee let me borrow a few of her DVD’s, which I’ve been watching every couple of days… My favorite of the ones I’ve seen so far is Water (IMDB link). Great Oscar-nominated Deepa Mehta movie about widows in India. The cinematography was absolutely brilliant… the acting was great, but Lisa Ray’s Hindi sucked (though I think she was otherwise perfect for the part). the film was actually shot both in English and Hindi - they shot every scene twice, once in each language (I saw the Hindi version). Interestingly, this film was being shot in India in 2000, but the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Fundamentalist organizations, affiliated with BJP political party in India) wouldn’t allow her to shoot it because they claimed that the script “smacks of a conspiracy by the votaries of western culture to tarnish the image of widowhood in India.” Anyway, the film was shot a few years later in Sri Lanka, and all of their hard work to get this film made was worth it in my mind - the film is stunningly beautiful…
It’s starting to get unbearably hot in Ahmedabad. Highs this week from 104 to 107 Farenheit!(40 to 42 Celcius, I’m still not used to this scale). I don’t really have any good way to deal with it - no A/C in my apartment or in the office. Any suggestions, besides drinking copious amounts of water (which I do)?
My next course of action is to get a really short haircut and shave my almost 3 week old beard… which you can see a little bit below.
This is my flat… not too impressive, but it serves its purpose. It would be nicer if there was a wireless signal somewhere so I could communicate with people in the US at normal hours. Actually the crappy thing is that there IS a wireless signal, just at 1 bar and I haven’t gotten anything useful out of it, but I have spent many fruitless hours walking around with my laptop trying to find the source of the signal.
Every time I wear a kurta and I’m unshaven, my cousins tell me that I finally look the part of an NGO-walla… reading In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati. Next on the reading list is Games Indians Play by N. Raghunathan. I haven’t read nearly as much as I had planned to read this year.
Til next time…
I’m going to see Namesake today and will go to a speech by India Finance Minister P. Chidambaram (speaking at IIM-A’s convocation tomorrow… interestingly, the last speech I went to at IIM was Director Bakul Dholakia criticizing PC for a horrible budget… I wonder what he’ll say to him in person)
Prem, you owe me one for no public humiliation about the moustache.
Arrogance and self awareness seldom go hand in hand
~M in Casino Royale, which I loved, incidentally
Babysteps…
I’m so far behind in blogging that I’m going to break this up into 2 posts, one about 2 weeks ago and one about this past week, which I’ll post in a couple of days.
March 4th was Holi (click for wikipedia article)…
The day before, we’d bought some holi powder from some street vendors:
I figured that the best celebrations would be in the old-city side of Ahmedabad, so we trekked out there looking for masti to be had. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any, so we had to make our own. We ended up chancing upon a group that was attacking random people with color, so we joined in their fun for a bit. It was fun, but I have to admit that it was nowhere near as fun as the Holi played at Carnegie Mellon Holi, a tradition that we started when I was on campus. I think it has more to do with being in a space where everyone is playing holi and you know a lot more people and can do whatever you want (pick people up and dunk them in a huge barrel full of water, etc)… It’s hard to play with strangers.
Anyway, Me, Shaila, and Bidisha had a good time:
I love this shot for some reason:
Even the puppy got in on a little holi action:
Right after holi, I went on another trip, this time in the north, to Delhi, Dehradun, Lucknow & Kanpur, visiting MFI’s, telling them about Kiva.
In Delhi, I spent all of my time in Noida (a suburb), working in the offces of Drishtee, an organization I’ve blogged about before. They put Internet Kiosks in rural areas, allowing the villagers to get access to a ton of services they didn’t have before. It’s going to be great to partner up with them.
It was pretty lovely all in all… The North of India is still freezing cold (high 40’s Farenheit, but there is no heating, so that’s pretty cold), whereas it’s been 100 farenheit here in Ahmedabad (and I have no aircon).
Dehradun is a hill-station area that is the capital of the newly formed Uttarakhand state. It’s a pretty beautiful place but I didn’t really get to explore any of it. At the recommendation of the MFI I was visiting and some other people who heard about it from Lonely Planet, I decided to check out the Forest Research Institute. It’s this 1200 acre property that does forest research in India… I don’t understand what they do at all. I went to a museum that I thought would explain it, and even got a guide, but it was a very typical developing world museum, with weird stuff and no explanations. The entrance had 2 sample villages that looked like grade school projects - one had a village without trees and the villagers were all working hard and they had terrible housing. The other village had trees and all of a sudden the village was very developed and had perfectly made homes. The guide explained that life is much better when you have trees. OK… a little overly simplistic maybe? He also kept on telling about how trees are good because you can cut them down and use them for paper and firewood… a little odd to me. I was also a little spooked by the number of dead animals in the place - they probably have a taxidermist on hand full-time.
The main building is an impressive greco-roman work of architecture - it looks like a college - in fact, it would feel right at home on Harvard’s campus. When it was built 80 years ago - it cost 40lacs rupees (Lac is 100,000, current exchange rate is 45, no idea what it was then)… Now it costs over 50lacs ($111,000) a year just to maintain the place:
I read somewhere last week that repetition makes for great pictures, and I promised myself I’d try it out:
I saw interesting signs all over the campus - among them - “Pedh Lagaye, Garibi Hataye,” loosely translated into, “Plant Trees, Remove Poverty.” A little simplistic for me. Another one:
If they said Trees are Life, I’d be fine with that. I can even go along with the 1st and 3rd lines. But how does water mean bread? Seems like there are some logic/English issues at play here.
The rest of the trip wasn’t all that eventful - saw a great MFI called NEED in Lucknow, and a few others. I think things are going well from a project standpoint - it’ll be great to have Indian businesses up on Kiva.
Anyway, I’m back in Ahmedabad for a bit, after a crazy last month that included 15 trips on the Indian Railways!
Info about last week coming up in the next post - it was great!
Leadership is not a possession, it’s an action
~Tagline for Evadaithe Naakenti, a Telugu Movie
(Seen on billboards in the South)
Trip report:
My trip in the south was spent mostly visiting Microfinance Institutions… It was good from a work standpoint, I got to meet with a lot of the people and see work at several MFI’s that I’ve been wanting to visit.
I also had a lot of fun and saw a lot of India… My favorite thing about the trip (other than seeing people) was the food! I love South Indian food, and I figured that it would be best in the south… My trip totally validated that. I would usually eat a couple of dosas (12rs or $.26 each) a day, and usually an Andhra Meal (25rs or $.55)for lunch… Andhra meals are a couple of vegetables, sambar, rasam and rice, all you can eat.
Here’s a picture of one from Chennai - a little different than the ones in Hyderabad. The further south I went, the more likely that the meal would be served on a banana leaf.
I started my journey in Hyderabad, meeting with a few big MFI’s and visiting a smaller one. 3 other Indicorps fellows live in Hyderabad - Prem (My room and masti-partner from orientation), Sarita, and Priya, but Priya wasn’t in town. I ended up being able to spend a good amount of time with the other fellows when I was there, because my schedule wasn’t as packed as I thought it would be (had a couple of meetings cancelled).
We did some touristy stuff and had an overall really good time. I went on an unexpectedly romantic dinner with Prem on Valentines day (we didn’t expect the candlelight and roses at the restaurant). We went to Charminar, which is this gate in Hyderabad that you can go up in though it was closed - huge tourist attraction, and saw our other fellow Sheela who was in town for an NGO visit.
One NGO totally ditched me on a field visit, so armed with some extra time, Prem Sarita and I decided to go to Golconda, which is a fort right outside of Hyderbad. It was a wonderful couple of hours - quality time with my fellow fellows, great weather, and I love old forts (actually I love anything old and high up on a city). Prem wrote it up on his blog too.
Here are some pictures:
Me and Prembhai:
Me, Sarita, Prem, Golconda
After leaving Hyderabad (very sadly), I headed to Nellore, to spend the day with an NGO called IMM. IMM does development work for women in the district, mainly AIDS and Microfinance work. I had told them that I’d like to see some of their work and maybe meet some of the women in their SHG’s (Self Help Groups)… It ended up being that they had set up meetings with the leaders of all of their SHG groups, and the whole day spent travelling around the district, and I only got to spend like 10 minutes with each group. Each group was ridiculously thankful to me for spending time with them, and wanted pictures with me and some even gave me flowers! I think they were just happy to know that I was from the US and was in India spending time with them. I felt really weird about this. I also met with some HIV positive patients and handed out some medicine and daily supplies to them.
The scenery in the district was pretty cool - I got to see a lot of stuff I hadn’t seen before. Along the way, there were a lot of huts that look like this:
I took a look inside a couple of them - they were very very basic, and didnt seem like they would be able to withstand much. Some of them were huts that the farmers use when in the field, others were nomadic tribes that build small huts and move around - I met with some that grow watermelons during this season, sell them, and then move on to other business.
After Nellore, I went to Chennai for a couple of days… One of the NGO’s I visited was called DPG - the Development Promotion Group.
I visited a slum area of Chennai near the river where they work. They have similar issues to Ahmedabad in that they release water when the dam is in danger of breaking, and low-lying areas flood. DPG did some work (with government assistance) several years ago to get some government assistance to build housing in the slum. The best thing I saw that DPG did - one of the best SHG (Self Help Group) projects I’ve ever seen is this provision store that the SHG built with DPG’s assistance in the slum area as a cooperative. The slum area had a grocery store, but it was overpriced and didn’t have good quality produce and other stuff. DPG coordinated 5 of their SHG groups (total of 96 people, 4 female and 1 male group) and brought them together to discuss what could be done. They decided that they’d start their own provision store and buy from it. 5 different SHG groups each put in 10,000 rupees for a total of 50k in startup costs. DPG provided a moped and phone for them for free, but they pay for everything else. There is a guy that goes out and gets vegetables every morning on the moped. The store brings in 4-5000 rupees a day and they make a profit of 10% on that. They easily cover their costs and have made a total of about 3.25 lacs from their 50k investment 2 years ago, and they also have cheaper and better food and have provided a job in the village (the lady who works at the store makes 3,000 rupees a month). I really like this model of helping the people do something for themselves, and from what I heard about other projects DPG seems to be really good at it.
Here’s a streetshot of the slum:
The store:
After Chennai, I headed to Bangalore to visit a few other MFI’s. By this point I was starting to miss Ahmedabad! All of these cities in the south are nice, but much larger to get around… I took so many rickshaws everywhere because sometimes busses wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go. In Ahmedabad, I can take Popat (I’ve named my bike Popat) most places I want to go to. In Bangalore I had the problem that the rickshaws would refuse to take me where I wanted to go, so a couple of times it took me half an hour just to find a rickshaw that would go where I wanted and not charge me a crazy extra rate. Anyway, not much to report from the Bangalore trip - I spent most of my time there in meetings… I did see this really cool rickshaw though:
I couldn’t find the driver so I don’t know full details - but there are solar cells all over the thing. I’d find it hard to believe that it runs entirely on solar power… my guess is that you plug it into the wall at night and the solar power just helps to recharge. Very cool nonetheless… I wonder if it makes fiscal sense to unleash these all over the country… It’d be an awesome thing from a pollution standpoint, as I think rickshaws are a pretty big contributor to pollution in cities in India.
Happy belated Holi… will post pictures when I get them from Bidisha.
By the way, I’m on a trip in the north right now. I’ve been in Delhi and now I’m in Dehradun, which is incredibly cold (by incredibly cold I mean 50s in Farenheit, so it’s not nearly as cold as it is for many of my friends in the US)… Next stop is Lucknow then back to A’bad for workshop.
