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.

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.

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.

“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.

——-

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.

Another book review…

Games Indians Play is a short but intellectually heavy book in which Raghunathan tries to decipher why Indians are the way they are. In Raghunathan’s words,

“Why are we a nation that is individually so smart and collectively so naive? Why do we mistake talk for action? Why is our self-worth massaged only if we have the ‘authority’ to break rules? Why are we among the world’s most corrupt? Why do we jump red lights? Why do we dump our garbage at the neighbour’s doorstep? . . . Can it be our climate, population density, poverty, colonial past or even genetic encoding?”

Raghunathan uses game theory and behavioral economics to analyze the behavior which has prevented India from being a developed nation 60 years after its independence. I’m pretty new to game theory… the primary scenario Raghunathan uses is Prisoners Dilemma - The classical prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is as follows:

Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act?

Raghunathan also describes iterations of this dilemma, and goes into different strategies for how to deal with it, and explains that ultimately the strategy that wins is Tit for Tat, which maximizes the gains of the individual as well as that of the population. So when you repeat the experiment, continue to cooperate until the other guy defects, then also defect. Selfishness maximizes short term gains, but in the long run co-operation leads to the greatest rewards.

Raghunathan also discusses several things about India that don’t make any sense, and they are the sort of things that many of us outsiders understand immediately… unneccessary paperwork (I had to submit 5 passport photos for my drivers license), the requirement that you fill out a customs form for a domestic flight that has an international connection, even if you’re just on the domestic leg, getting insurance for ticketless travel on the Bombay local trains (there are people who will offer to sell you a monthly pass for less than it costs to buy a pass from the railway - you pay them in advance and you don’t actually get a pass… you just travel with out a ticket and pay the fine if you get caught. They reimburse you after you present them with a receipt of getting caught. The chances of getting caught aren’t very high).

The book itself is very interesting, and I learned a lot about game theory, but I’m not sure I agree with the author on several points. One that he mentions several times is that he feels that Indians are perhaps the most intelligent race in the world… He uses examples like the vegetable seller who keeps track of the amount that everything costs and can compute how much you buy faster than a computer. I’d argue that he can do that because he grew up doing so, and may not be better at something else, and wouldn’t be as fast if he grew up with a calculator. Also, simple math isn’t a good way to measure intelligence. Also, I find this same skill lacking in a lot of Indians. Case in Point: I went to Subhiksha the other day to buy my groceries. I love the place - it’s kind of like my favorite store back home, Aldi. Their stores have a small footprint, but you can get everything you need, and it’s cheaper than you can get it elsewhere. The cashier rings up my order of goods that I’d mentally guessed would be approx 100rupees. Instead the cashier gives me a bill for about 300 rupees. He’d put in the wrong number for the daal that I bought, and ended up charging me for 2.5kg instead of 250grams. I pointed it out to him immediately, but he protested that that is what the number is, so that is what the price must be. I protested that it was impossible for such a small amount of daal to cost so much, and asked him to use some common sense. After a lot of convincing, he relented but said that only one of the registers was equipped to do returns, and that the manager had to do them, so I had to wait about 10 minutes to get my price adjusted. It’s a frustrating experience, and one that I often find in Indian supermarkets. Anyway, my point was that not all Indians are smart and can do math in their head. Don’t think that Indians are more intelligent than other races based off that assumption. Raghunathan makes some other assumptions that I’m not too crazy about, doesn’t cite his experiments very well (most of them seem to be run among his IIM students- you can’t represent an entire race based off of somewhat greedy students at their best business school) I also don’t think Raghunathan is a very good writer, but it is definitely interesting just to learn about game theory and how it can be applied practically, so I’d recommend reading book just for that and the insight into India. One thing that I really enjoyed reading about because I’ve found it to be so true is how Indians as a people mistake talk for action and boast about the glorious past when living in a filthy present!

And - I saw this shirt in a store in Delhi, but was short on cash so couldn’t buy it (wanted to buy it for Shaila, who’s working on a project with camel cart drivers), so I took a picture… It’s so true of India… New Century, Same day. It would’ve been better if they had the camel cart driver talking on his cell-phone, which I’ve seen.

I’ve been on a bit of a book-reading kick… I haven’t read nearly as much this year as I thought I would, but it seems like I’ve been catching up in the past month. The 3 books I read recently are:
For the Lova of India: The Life and Times of Jamshetji Tata, by RM Lala,
Games Indians Play, by V. Raghunathan,
and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins.

I’ve been criticized for my posts being too long so I’ll split this one up into 3, starting with a review of For the Lova of India: The Life and Times of Jamshetji Tata. It’s probably still too long as a review.

For the Love of India is a pretty good account of one of India’s first and most successful Industrialists, Jamshetji Tata. Jamsetji Tata not only built an unparalleled personal wealth but was also one of the builders of modern India. His conviction that India must change from a predominantly agricultural nation into an industrialized one put the country on the road to modernization, a road that encountered many bumps and hurdles during the socialist period of rule, but one that I think is on a better path now. Its simply amazing to me how many amazing things Jamshetji accomplished in his lifetime, and even more so including things that happened after his death but based on his plans.

Jamshetji brought to the country iron, steel and hydroelectric power, but also made fine cotton when everyone else was making coarse yarn and revived the silk industry in the South. In 1877, he set up Empress Mills in Nagpur to make cotton cloth. It was the first major industrial enterprise in the Central Provinces, and the book argues that he did a lot of world-wide innovation, both in technical prowess and in human resource management. As early as 1873, he was toying with the idea of using hydroelectric power for his mill, something that was unheard of even in the West.

The book primarily focuses not on how Jamshetji built his wealth, but rather on 4 projects he undertook “for the love of India,” in his dream to see an industrialized nation of educated people. Looking back from now, his 4 projects were amazingly ambitious for the time… they are The Taj Hotel in Bombay, Steel, Hydroelectric Power, and the Indian Institute of Science.

The Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay, which I’d argue is still the best hotel in Bombay, at a majestic location near the Gateway of India (though the gateway wasn’t there when it was built).
Here’s a picture of all of the kids from the Bombay Marathon in front of the Taj, still magnificent 100+ years after it was built.

The Taj is still owned by the Tata Group, and they now also own 77 other properties around the world. Taj Hotels have been acquiring beautiful old hotels recently, and have 3 properties in the US as well (Boston, NYC, San Fran).

Making Steel in India wasn’t seen as sort of a crazy dream at the time, but Jamshetji hired the right people from America and elsewhere to make his dream a reality. Again, Tata Steel is still in the hands of the Tata’s, chaired by Ratan Tata. Tata Steel is historically known for establishing an 8 hour workday when 12 hours was the norm, introducing leave with pay, and starting a provident fund for employees. It seems to me that the Tata’s mastered the art of being rich and successful, and also doing a lot for their employees and country. The Bizarro above is so indicative of the traditional stance towards wealth accumulation, but you can be wealthy and kind, and the Tatas have proven it.

The author doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the hydroelectric plant, and I can’t add any value there anyway, so I’ll skip over it, but I will mention that when Tata Hydro-Electric Power Supply Company was set up the only other place using hydro-electric power was Niagara Falls.

The most interesting of Jamsetji’s dreams for India was the idea of establishing an institute of higher learning that eventually took shape, after his death, as the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Tata realized that Indias educational system was severely lacking, and he wanted to make a huge impact on it. He felt that the best way to uplift his nation was not to uplift the downtrodden, but rather to create an institution for the very best to prosper and advance the nation. There are debates everyday on both sides of the issue - should x person have spent $100 million by donating it to a business school or should they have cured X African people of malaria. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think its a value judgement and I wouldn’t criticize the person for their philanthropy. Anyway, Jamshetji wanted to create a Research University, of which none existed in India at the time (and very few do today). Personally, I think one of the best things about America, and what has kept it so prosperous is the American educational system. We have the best research universities in the world, which bring the brightest students from around the world to the US, many of them for life. In the US, we teach problem-solving and value creative thinkers probably moreso than anywhere else in the world. This is true to some extent at the secondary level, but much more so at the university level, and even more so at the grad school level. This is still a huge problem in India. Jamshetji foresaw this, and decided that he would endow a large amount of money to the place. In fact almost 1/3rd of his estate went to the University, after giving 1/3rd to each of his sons. He had to fight Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy to India at the time to make his dream a reality, but finally did so (although it didn’t formally launch until after his death)

Still, many say the greatest thing about Jamshetji was his ability to make leaders. He wasn’t personally able to fulfill many of his own goals, but he showed the way to others inspired them to hold on to his dreams after his death. Interesting read if you’re interested in business biographies and have an interest in India.

Looking for a book suggestion… any good book recommendations? I’m planning to read “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits”, by CK Prahalad, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School. It’s a book I really should’ve read a long time ago, given my interest in the subject. I’m also planning to read Maximum City in the near future.

Since I started with a Bizarro, I might as well end with one. I realllly love Bizarro. I think it’s the most clever cartoon out there. Here’s one of my favorites:

I haven’t seen it in syndication here in India, probably because the jokes wouldn’t make sense here. Every month or so I get caught up with my laughs here. I have to admit though, I’m finding the recent ones less and less funny… maybe its a sign that I’m becoming more and more Indian.

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while. Amul is a huge dairy cooperative in India (HUGE!), owned by 2.4 million milk producers in Gujarat. It’s one of the most long-term successful cooperatives world-wide, and is often referenced in the development world as being so. It started in 1946 and spurred India’s so-called “White Revolution,” which has made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. This is an oft-referenced source of pride for Indians (I hear it all the time, especially at public functions). I wondered, if not India, who would be the largest producer of milk products? The only reasonable competition (population-wise) would be from China, but the Chinese don’t use much milk or milk products in their diet. So naturally India would be number one. The US has less than 1/3rd the population of India, but it turns out the US is now only slightly behind India in production, and it actually goes back and forth every year as to who is number one.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant, as I want to talk about marketing. But - here’s my vegan disclaimer (I am a vegan, or have been attempting to be one atleast for the past several years) - MILK AND MILK PRODUCTS ARE BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, FOR YOU, FOR THE ANIMALS, etc. There is some more information about the environment in particular on my Interesting Stuff page, and if you want information on the other stuff leave me a comment or do a google search.

Anyway, Amul is absolutely great at marketing. One of my favorite things to do every week is check the Amul billboard which comes out on Friday. Here’s one from a month ago when I was in Bombay, and Sanjaya was a semifinal in American Idol (No, I don’t watch American Idol or find it entertaining):

Since the 60’s, Amul has been putting out hilarious tongue-in-cheek sketches starring the Amul baby commenting jovially on the latest news or current events. They usually have some pun involving Amul and the loveable Amul baby and her friends. The Amul ads are one of the longest running ads based on the same theme… I’ve read that they are going to be entered into the Guinness book as the longest running ads based on the same theme. I would’ve thought Absolut would win there, but it turns out that campaign only started in 1980.

I don’t follow Indian news as much as I should, but I always know the top story of the week when I see the Amul ads. It’s an amazing timely slice of Indian culture at that time.
Here are some of my favorite recent ones:

This is from when the Bollywood movie Dhoom: 2 came out, which featured a bunch of the leading stars of India (and had the same font):

From when Shakira came to India to perform in Bombay:

When the SENSEX (Bombay Stock Exchange) plummetted last May:

I spent some time in Delhi last week, working with the folks at Drishtee. I had a great time, and met up with a bunch of other folks in the development space, doing very different things from me.
Picture-based overview of my non-work time in Delhi:

Getting driven all around Delhi in Andrew’s scooter. Andrew is the person I’m in contact with most often from a work perspective for Drishtee, and this time I was there over the weekend, so I got to meet up with some of Andrew’s friends, and was surprised to note that me and Andrew’s friends had many other friends in common, so it was one big happy family of people in the development sector. At times we were on the scooter for more than an hour at a time. At other times, we had as many as 4 people on the scooter at the same time (sorry, no pictures of that).
Andrew is brilliant at taking a picture and being in it at the same time:

Playing frisbee. This would seem to be picture worthy, except that if you look closely, we have a mix of several different races and most of the people are white. Also, we’re playing on a neatly manicured lawn with big trees and sidewalk-lamps. It looks a lot like America. It could be Schenley Park, where I occasionally tossed the frisbee during college. But it’s Nehru Park, in the heart of New Delhi, and these are mostly expats doing some sort of development work in India. There are a bunch of them in Delhi, and thanks to Andrew, I got to meet several.

Here is the one big happy family of people (most of whom I’d known for less than 24 hours) in the development sector… we had a great time:

I keep on mentally referring to the past week as a retreat rather than a workshop. It was our 3rd Indicorps workshop of the year, and dramatically different from the past 2. The first one had a Socratic dialogue theme, where we read and discussed a LOT of text to give us a fresh outlook on leadership. The 2nd workshop involved a 4-day long project that we worked on for the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad. Both were jam-packed with lots of work and located in Ahmedabad. This workshops’ theme was “From Micro to Macro.” We did a good deal of sitting down and discussing issues, and one case study, where we analyzed a couple of Government policies (one around mid-day meals for schoolchildren and the other about a sanitation program for slums) and came up with recommendations. The workshop was located in Panchgani, a small hill-station 100kms from Pune. It’s very popular as a weekend retreat from Bombay and Pune, and it’s also very famous for boarding schools (as are most hill-stations in India). Interesting sidenote: Freddie Mercury (the late lead singer of Queen) attended St. Peter’s school in Panchgani, where he learned to play Piano and formed his first band.

The workshop was hosted at a place called Asia Plateau, a conference center at a place called Initiatives of Change, formerly known as Moral Rearmament. It’s run by an intesting group of people. I’m still not exactly sure I understand what they do, but check them out on the web here.
The plateau is supposedly the 2nd tallest in Asia.

I don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll do a quick wrapup of the workshop by pictures rather than words… There are a lot but they are really low-quality (click on them for bigger versions and higher quality).

Among other fun activities, we:

Hiked the plateau

Played really silly games: In this one, the 3 people were supposed to form a tree, but Anand (right) is forming the ear of an elephant instead of tree-branches, so he loses

Climbed trees

Played Ping-Pong-Tennis… a game on a smaller tennis court with big paddles, using a tennis ball. Really awesome.

Picked Strawberries from the farm of a huge jam manufacturer, Mapro. Apparently their season is over, so they didn’t mind us coming and picking/eating hundreds and hundreds of strawberries. (Radhika, Lisa, and Archana)

Me Prem and Shaila decided that we’d share all of our strawberries, so we had a rotation system so we each got to eat 1/3rd of the strawberries.

Jumped on a trampoline:

Sat around in the library and discussed development-related issues:

Enjoyed beautiful scenery

I’m in Bombay now, will be headed to Delhi in the near future.

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.