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Indicorps Fellowship - January ‘08

September 20th, 2007 by Sheel

Back to Amreeka, and an advertisement for Singapore Airlines!

August 4th, 2007 by Sheel

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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The Worst News Ever

June 20th, 2007 by Sheel

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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Movies, Photos, Bombay, and Banks

April 29th, 2007 by Sheel

“The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a litte luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.”
~Opening line in the movie Match Point, which is a very good movie.

I’ve seen a few movies recently, which is really odd considering how few I’ve seen in general. In the past couple weeks, I’ve seen Provoked and Parzania, both of which are true stories, which are typically the movies I like the most. I also recently saw Blood Diamond, which was also really good… So 3 activist-ish movies in the past couple of weeks.

Provoked is the true story of a Punjabi woman named Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Aishwarya Rai) who leaves India to marry a London-based guy (Naveen Andrews), and ends up being badly abused by her husband. She ends up lighting him on fire and in prison for murdering. It’s a pretty touching story, and Aish actually acts quite well (for the first time, I might add). She acts well enough that you geniunely feel sorry for this woman, despite the fact that she murdered her husband. My favorite actor in the movie is her cell-mate, and eventual closest friend “Ronnie” though… The tagline of the movie is “In prison she found freedom,” and it makes a lot of sense when you watch it. Basically, the harsh realities of the world inside the prison with criminals start to harden Kiranjit to fend for herself, and she makes a bunch of new friends.

The sad thing is, noone is watching this movie in India. I saw it with 2 aunts in Bombay, and we were the only ones in the theater, and there were tons of people watching other screens. I guess it’s still hard to make films that make you think and get a broad audience… I think the most successful (and one of my favorite movies ever) is Rang De Basanti.

Parzania is a movie by an American Director, Bakul Dholakia. It’s about a family that gets caught in the riots that occurred in Gujarat in 2002, and loses their son. I saw a pirated version of the film… The actual film hasn’t been shown anywhere in Gujarat, because a terrible organization called the Bajrang Dal has threatened the cinema halls with violence. These are the same guys that are trying to ban Valentines day, inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, and even trying to disallow Muslims from owning land in Gujarat, by attacking traders who sell to Muslims and by attacking Muslim homes and forcing the sale of the house or flat. Their methods of accomplishing things are often very violent, yet they have a lot of support in the state.

Because the copy of Parzania was a poorly pirated version, I think it’s hard to be totally fair. The version I saw was full of terrible edits, a lot of gratuitous swearing, and uneccessary sub-plot lines, but I’ve heard that the final version doesn’t have these issues. I didn’t think the acting was that great, despite Nasserudin Shah being one of my favorite actors (Watch Iqbal!). They way they show the violence that occurs is pretty good, but I’ve seen documentaries that were far more powerful. I wish I’d seen a legitimate copy of the film. Still, it’s a good primer to the violence that occurred in Gujarat, although it only depicts Hindus killing Muslims, and its important to note that the reverse happenned as well.

Blood Diamond was great… I assume you know what it’s about… Blood diamonds are diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance the conflicts. Watch this movie. Also, read this article - it’s really really good and full of information that you should know before buying a diamond. It’s all hype. It’s from the Feb. 1982 Atlantic Monthly, but it’s a really really good read. From my Interesting Stuff I Read page, Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

Indicorps intern Kajal (link to her photopage) has been teaching me some photography skills of late, so I’ve spent some time practicing. Nothing great so far, but learning how to use ISO and exposure , how to frame a picture, and how to do some edits in photoshop (all of this stuff I sorta knew, but never used on my tiny digital camera). The biggest learning so far is about low light situations… I ever photographed them properly before, now I’m learning that flash is bad, and I like that because I hate that everyone knows that you’ve taken a picture.

Here are some pictures of a night where a bunch of us went to eat some Gola. Gola is an Indian Ice slushie type thing, very popular in the summer months. It’s shaved ice with some syrup on top. I actually don’t really like it. You can typically get them for about 5 rupees (12 cents)… The place we went to was almost 30 rupees though! This place puts actual fruit into the mix, and does a TON of business with this differentiation. Anand said he heard they do 15,000 rupees ($350) worth of business a night, which is a ton for a roadside business. It’s amazing to me that so many people were willing to pay so much extra for a slight difference. They have tons and tons of flavors:

So I was in Ahmedabad for 6 weeks after the last Indicorps workshop… It’s probably the longest I’ve stayed in the same city since college. After college, I worked for a couple of consulting firms and was travelling pretty constantly for work, and also for personal trips, so 6 weeks is a long time for me. It’s crazy to think that I’ve been travelling so much for so long.

I finally left last week. I went to Bombay for a couple of meetings. I have mixed feelings about Bombay - it’s too big and everything takes too long and is too expensive and dirty, and people don’t have time for you, but it’s nice because I know a lot of people and there’s always something new to do. It’s exactly the same as New York in that regard. The first night there I met up and stayed with my old music teacher from Pittsburgh. The guy that I took voice and harmonium (keyboard) lessons from a decade ago is now the CIO of Reliance Communications ($20 billion mobile and infocomm giant). Pretty cool how random connections and a person’s network can be.

Everytime I think we have a solution for getting Kiva.org started in India, there is a setback. My current worry is about this story that the RBI has had too much inflow of External Commercial Borrowing for this year. As you can tell from the article, it doesn’t seem like a very well thought out process (as is the case with many regulations in India)… we’re going through an approval process with the RBI, and I really hope that this doesn’t affect the approval (we’re only talking about $500k out of the $22billion!). Pray for us!

I’m off to Baroda, then heading to Pune, then to Panchgani, which is where we have our Indicorps workshop this time. I’m really looking forward to this little retreat. Here’s the site of our workshop http://www.in.iofc.org/ap.

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Smokeless Chulha

April 15th, 2007 by Sheel

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”
~Harry S. Truman

Chulha means stove. Many people in India still cook on a wooden fire, although this is both expensive (wood isn’t cheap in an urban setting) and the smoke is harmful to health. The idea of a smokeless chulha is to not let all of the smoke come out and get in your face while cooking. It’s not actually smokeless - the smoke goes up a pipe and (sometimes) through the roof.
Here are more details from the ESI website: http://www.esi.org.in/technology_smokeless.htm
They could also build gas stoves, but the startup costs are quite high (needs a cylinder, new stove, etc. As a part of her project with the camel cart community, Shaila has been trying to get people in the community to build smokeless chulhas. Last Friday was the big day - the first family decided to build a stove. I went to the community with the thought that I’d help in building the stove, but it turned a neighborhood mason, Devaji

decided to stay home to learn how to build the smokeless chulha, and that there was no way for me to add any value to the building aspect (I have no real skills anyway), so I decided to stay away from the actual building of it.

Instead, I spent time talking to family members of Hastimal-bhai, the person who’s home we were building in. It’s quite interesting actually… Hastimal Bhai is an economics professor at a local college. His family is from Rajasthan, but they moved to Ahmedabad several years back to make a better income in Ahmedabad. His father was a hawker of goods (don’t remember what specifically), and raised 9 kids. Hastimalbhai is the oldest of the 9, and is probably in his upper 20s or lower 30s. He lives in a very different environment than his fellow economics professors, partially because he also provides for his brothers and sisters families - his is the only income in a family of 15. This is his neighborhood:

Not exactly the image in your mind when you think of an econ professor. Mine drove a Yellow Ferrari.

It’s amazing how learned Hastimal-bhai is given his background growing up poor though. In India, it’s generally easy to tell what “class” someone is by their English (or lack thereof)… Hastimalbhai speaks perfect English and is very learned (I enjoyed talking econ with him)… He’s pursuing a PhD at the moment - his thesis is regarding urbanizations environmental consequences.

One of the duties I took on while watching the chulha being built was playing with Hastimalbhais 6-month old baby niece, Tanvi. Tanvi actually became really attached to me and would cry any time I tried to pass her off to someone else. Here are a few cute shots of me and Tanvi (click to maximize).
They were taken by Kajal - click for more of her photos. By the way, most of the pictures in this post are thanks to Kajal.

Her hand is smaller than my thumb… I love it.

The chulha-building was the perfect example of market-driven development. Shaila took the women of this particular area to the Gandhi Ashram, where the staff at ESI explained to them the benefits of smokeless chulhas: faster cooking, less wood used, better for health (here is her blog post on it). Hastimal bhai decided that he’d be the guinea-pig and ponied up 300rs ($7) for the materials (dirt, cement, bricks and a cement pipe) to build the stove. Jayantibhai came from ESI to help build the first stove. The neighborhood mason Devaji came to learn how to build the stove, which he now knows how to build and can replicate, charging 100rs for his time and building expertise. Hastimal Bhai lives on a corner so everyone walking by was naturally curious about what was going on, and a LOT of people stopped to find out what was being built. This was a great time to fill them all in on advantages of a smokeless chulha. The new chulha will pay for itself several times over in less than a year, because they’ll be using less wood, and their homes will be less smoky, so they’ll save on medical expenses as well. Most all of the spectators were sold on the concept, and if they live up to their word, the mason will be quite busy building smokeless chulhas. People do things when they are incentivized to do them, and I think people will be building chulhas because they know the advantages… a much better reason than having an NGO build it for them for free.

Here are some pictures of the process:

Mixing the cement