The Peek India MAP trip’s almost at an end: bags are packed, souvenirs purchased, interviews completed and final curries consumed. MAP itself isn’t over, and in fact we’re about to crash headlong into the hella busy presentation-finalizing phase that doesn’t wrap up until April 28. But the India portion of the project is about to close out, so I thought I’d do it up superlative-style and look back on the trip:
Most Relevant Article: “Trying Really Hard To Like India”. I’ve sent this article by my old coworker Seth Stevenson to everyone on an India MAP project, and it’s gotten to the point that we all make references to it when something relevant happens, which is often. It definitely captures the pluses and minuses of being a visitor, and it’s another chance for me to plug Slate. Everybody wins.
Best Mode of Transport: Walking. Rickshaws are fun and all, but it’s much more exciting to dodge buses and trucks when you have zero protection but much greater side-to-side agility. It also helps you walk off all those ghee-induced calories.
Best Word: “Teekay.” This just means “very good”, but you can use it for just about any situation at all — explaining where to stop in a rickshaw, ordering food, or settling on a highly inflated price. Perfect when combined with …
Best Food: Gulab jamun. Indian sweets probably pack more sugar per square centimeter of foodstuff than any other nation’s desserts, and gulab jamun is certainly setting the trend. If you aren’t familiar with it, think of a donut ball dunked in sugar syrup and you’re pretty close to the mark. It is pure saccharine goodness.
Best Men’s Accessory: The Mustache. So much of the world has moved on from the facial hairstyles of the early ’80s, which is why I can only hope this doesn’t come true. What haven will the mustache have left? It will be reduced solely to the once-a-year Rosstache charity event. (I plan to participate next year, and I have some terrific ideas involving a neckbeard.)
Least Favorite Trip Experience: Sweating it out in Mumbai. Mumbai has plenty to do — the Taj Hotel and the Elephanta Caves are amazing, and I hear there’s awesome party action that we were completely unable to find. It’s similar enough to New York City that two of my later-arriving teammates were taken aback by how I had started to go native and navigate the city in just three days. (Had I not been trimming it, the hair above my lip probably would have grown five times faster than normal.) I’m sure lots of people think Bombay / Mumbai is a great place to be.
Sadly I was not one of these people — I can’t say I enjoy the clinging feeling of business wear in 100-degree, 100-percent-humidity weather. Somehow the weather also accelerates the feeling of helpless guilt that comes from witnessing some of the sadder stuff on Earth, and it certainly accelerates the smell that comes from cows and dogs eating long-expired substances. Then there was the four-hour hotel-lobby adventure when Jim didn’t bring his passport. (The first few bars of “Jingle Bells” will haunt me for years.)
So yeah, I’m glad I went to Mumbai and really did enjoy some of it, but I won’t be in a huge hurry to get back.
Trip Highlight: Visiting the family. Having family where you’re going is always a good thing, and that’s even more true when you’re going halfway around the world. From playing deus ex machina in fixing the aforementioned hotel issue to coming in for lunch in Mumbai to completely spoiling our entire group during our trip to Delhi, the visits with Geeta’s family were the best part of the time over here. Much gratitude to everyone — I not only got the best wife by getting married, I got the best in-laws.
That’s about all from this side of the world, so we’ll return to our regularly-scheduled website soon enough. Meantime, namaskar and see yinz later.
So, I finally saw it. The Taj Mahal is a pretty awesome site. I think the Taj and the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem are the two most beautiful buildings I’ve seen, though the Taj is definitely better from a distance and the Dome of the Rock is at its best fairly close-up. Muslims knew how to get their architecture on back in the day, for real.
And some other bullets:
• Delhi has been the nicest city we’ve visited in India. That’s probably confusing to a lot of people, because before I went there I heard it was one of the hottest and worst. Yet the weather was perfect while we were there — not too hot and totally clear — and it was like an Indian version of Washington, D.C. with all the landscaping and traffic circles. That felt nice and familiar, plus the sweets shops have the good North Indian stuff and it’s easy to find fun bars and restaurants. I give Delhi the props.
• Agra, on the other hand, is a bit on the ugly side. Our driver Vinod, who is mad awesome, was complaining about the Uttar Pradesh government siphoning off all the road and cleanup money and pocketing it, and if so, it’s definitely evident. The Taj Mahal is obviously cool and so is the Red Fort, but around that it could use some sprucing up. You could make it totally sweet, too: plenty of the houses are really old and have lots of character. Fix the corruption = Agra 2.0.
• Of anything I did to make MAP a good experience, getting married was by far the best. My in-laws have been fantastic and are the undisputed highlight of the trip. Shoutout to Palu, Sameer, Gita Auntie, V.P. Uncle, Ashok and Vinod for representing!
• Easter Mass in Delhi is pretty much like it is in Pittsburgh, except they add Hindi Casio keyboard synthesizers. So there’s that.
• Easter also means my Lenten thing of just two meat servings per week is done. That meant some fantastic chicken tikka tonight, which I plan to crush until I leave next week. Gotta load up!
Time’s winding down here in India before it’s back to the States. Keep it otherwise ah-cha til next time, and I’m out.
I am back from the Internet desert that was Bombay. (More on the name later.) My hotel didn’t have wireless and the Internet cafe wasn’t always open, thus the lack of updates even via Twitter. But you know I’m not letting you down, so here’s a summation of the city as I saw it over the past five days.
1. Bombay is hot. Clothes-drenchingly, sensory-multiplyingly hot. The city is plenty to deal with just in terms of smells, sights, sounds and general craziness alone, but throw in 98-degree days with 100 percent humidity every day and you got a recipe for some dry cleaning needs with the quickness. Wearing shorts and a T shirt is tough enough, but I got stuck wearing dress clothes for three days while we did interviews. I think my favorite gray pants could probably walk on their own right now.
2. As a white dude, I should probably call it Mumbai. But as someone in India, I would probably be alone in doing that. I have yet to meet a single Indian person here who doesn’t refer to the city by its old British name, and this so confused us that we had a big debate before sending out our interview-request emails as to whether we should mention that we were traveling to “Bombay” or “Mumbai” — if we say “Bombay”, we might sound hip to the game, but we might also sound like old-school imperialist dudes with handlebar mustaches and pith helmets. If we say “Mumbai”, then we sound respectful, but also like we are totally out of the Indian thing. Ultimately we figured we were new to the place, so Mumbai it was.
3. Driving is actually a little saner in Mumbai than in Bangalore. It’s still insanity, but people seem to occasionally notice the lane lines on the road.
4. I finally learned some Hindi. Now I can tell you “cool” (ah-chai), “OK” (teekay) and “get out of my face” (jao jao! — good for aggressive beggars). Hello Boss, OK no problem!
5. Poverty gets depressing after a while. Shocking, I know. What probably surprised me more is that slum dwellings and half-naked children blend unobtrusively into the surroundings pretty quickly, even for a liberal-leaning dude like me. Many of those people have jobs and enough to eat, and the entrepreneurial spirit in India is amazing such that everyone seems to have a niche. But then you see two parents tucking in their kids for a night of sleeping on the sidewalk, and you think, how am I even supposed to process this? I wish I had the answer, but considering all of human history, there probably isn’t one.
6. That said, the active beggars are rarely the sympathetic ones. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. I’m probably biased because a wraith-like beggar woman ambushed me on a dark street the first week I was here, latched onto my pocket for three blocks and refused to let go, and then ultimately pickpocketed me for 100 rupees. In the end it was hella annoying, but nothing worse than a $2 reminder to keep my hand in my pocket.
This time in Bombay (I like to switch off) I was ready: I went out and bought some two-rupee mini-packs of Parle-G biscuits to hand out to panhandlers so they wouldn’t bother me for cash. (These cookie-esque biscuits are also quite tasty, and Rajesh and I ate them for breakfast a few times when in a rush.) This didn’t have quite the expected result: instead of being grateful, most recipients looked at the biscuits like I had handed them a Sudoku puzzle to figure out. On the way to the airport today, a girl came up to the open window, stuck in her hand and started singing “Jingle Bells”, which I found funny because the elevator in our hotel inexplicably played “Jingle Bells” every time the door was opened. I remembered I had a last pack of biscuits and gave it to her, after which she proceeded to say “No Parle-G, only rupee” while smiling the whole time and ignoring my response of “No rupee, no rupee.” Sorry homegirl, it’s Parle-G or nothing.
Even better was when a monkey-owning woman followed Brian around until he gave her a Parle-G pack. She insisted she needed rupees “for the baby’s milk powder”, then huffed at him when he walked off. He turned around later and she was feeding the Parle-Gs to the monkey.
7. Oh yeah, monkeys. They are some smart dudes, but not cute. Elephanta Island (which has bad-ass caves with stone carvings that are 1,600 years old) is infested with monkeys who have learned to steal people’s food and eat it. Brian saw one monkey steal a bottle of Mazza (mango drink) off of a kid, untwist the cap and chug it down. Another monkey tried to steal Jim’s water bottle while we were walking by, then stood in front of us and barked aggressively until this other Indian guy came by and swung a bag at the monkey. We were trying to figure out whether we should kick the monkey or what would be the best way to divert it, but luckily the Indian dude acted first. Now you know why I keep my windows shut at work.
8. End lesson: I think Mumbai would be great fun if you had the ability to buy your way out of the reality of it. As it was, it was a really stimulating and intense place, but after five days I was drained and ready to head back to Bangalore. I ended up at the Taj hotel twice this weekend, the same one that was hit by terrorists in November. It’s fully operational again, which is great to see, and it’s a beautiful hotel. It also represents the reality of Mumbai for maybe .00005% of the population of 16 million, so while it would be amazing to spend all your time there, it would be only partially real. What else is real are haggling cabbies, smelly streets, tasty food, sweaty handkerchiefs and hand-holding families on Chowpatty Beach. But I guess that’s the big reason to visit Mumbai: if nothing else, these dudes keep it extra real.
A unique Indian gesture is the head waggle. It is pretty much done anytime one is saying, “OK, sure, will do”. Naturally we had a contest to see who could do the best one:
The other day I was avoiding a decrepit bus and stepping between four auto-rickshaws when I thought, “Stepping between four auto-rickshaws and avoiding a decrepit bus isn’t an everyday occurrence in the United States. I think there may be some material here. Hey, that dog understands traffic patterns.”
For those who want the quick version, here’s a video that encapsulates things nicely:
Much like the rest of India, Indian driving is centered around filling a vacuum — if there’s even a sliver of space to fill, it will be filled by someone or something. In this instance, the something is a car, truck, auto-rickshaw, bus, bicycle, motorcycle or pedestrian. Lanes be damned — there’s a two-foot-wide space along the side of that cement truck that will fit a motorcycle with four people on it, so into the space that motorcycle goes. This is true whether the vehicular pack is stopped at an intersection or moving down the highway at 30 miles per hour — the crowding is the constant.
There is also the honking. I thought I was used to constant honking from my time in New York, but as with every night, I can hear the horns outside now, and they’re averaging a beep about every .8 seconds. Fortunately we’re about 100 feet off the main road and I rock the earplugs every night, so the din isn’t such a big deal. (Earplugs also work with snoring MAP team members, FYI. Though for the sake of fairness and disclosure, I too should probably gift my teammates a spare pair.)
The horn is actually a pretty useful implement in this part of the world — roll up into that two-foot space, and the horn is a great way to signal to the truck driver, “Hey, I’m here on my bike with my totally sweet standard-issue mustache, please don’t squash me and deprive me of many future years of mustache-growing.”
I’d wish to myself that there were more order in the road system here, but experiencing it is a great way to accede to the crazy paradox of India — it’s pretty close to chaos, and yet everyone ultimately gets where they need to go. Plus, you learn quickly that it’s time to cross when the auto-rickshaws switch off their engines. The ever-dishonest rickshaw driver is our nemesis, but admittedly he does function as an effective crosswalk signal.
This Twitter blogging is way easier than actual blogging, but here are some notes anyway.
Food here is really cheap. Beer, strangely, is not so much. Tonight my teammates and I went out for dinner. Total cost for three people’s dinner and drinks: $11. Beer portion of that: $4 for two beers. It’s a little weird, because it’s definitely possible to find $2 beers in the U.S., but forget about finding a $3.75 dinner.
Monkeys here are not cute. In fact, they are fairly scary. Four of them came around the office today, and we had to lock the door to stop them coming in and stealing our lunch. Those dudes are not cool, I’m sorry.
The array of smells here is fairly surreal. A lot of people have discussed how India smells; it’s true, you can’t really describe it. Definitely a lot of urine and foul-smelling things, but then mixed with a smoky smell and lots of other stuff I can’t figure out. I wouldn’t describe it as pleasant at all, but I’m still getting used to it anyway.
I’ve been here now for 2.5 (sorta) days, so time to catch everyone up on what’s gone down with some phat platitudes:
Flying to India takes a long time. The other three Peek India MAPpers and I counted things up and realized it took us 36 hours to go from door to door — Ann Arbor apartments to our Bangalore guest house. Before I left I had planned to do a diary of my extended time on three flights, but afterwards I’m glad I forgot, because after I got to my Chicago layover and had a nice chance to hang with The Wife for a few hours, this is pretty much the extent of it:
First four hours from O’Hare to Frankfurt: Try and fail to sleep, then briefly succeed.
Next two hours: continue reading Freedom at Midnight.
Final 1.5 hours: Watch Bridge on the River Kwai; get mad when it’s interrupted by landing.
First 5.5 hours of flight to Mumbai after 1.5 hours in Frankfurt: Finish Bridge; watch The Longest Day to continue random WWII movie marathon.
Next 2.5 hours: Try and fail to sleep; land in Mumbai at 5 a.m. local time.
Next 3 hours: Deal with Mumbai airport bureaucracy; get waved through security for no apparent reason while other teammates get scanned; eat samosas with ketchup for breakfast; board flight to Bangalore.
36 hours from start: Get to Bangalore house at noon local time; eat food in jet-lagged daze.
Traffic in India is something else. Nobody really respects lanes here and honking is constant, but somehow everyone seems to get to their destination. Crossing the street though is like playing Frogger with your life. Fun! My secret is finding some Indian person going where I want to go, then letting them play fullback-in-a-sari as I run for a TD to the other side of the street.
Still getting used to eating Indian food three times per day. I haven’t had the traveler’s curse, although I will euphemistically say that my system is a little confused.
The apartment is nice, but I look forward to getting out more. We’re still getting settled and starting our project work, so so far there hasn’t been much touring around. But I’ll have more interesting stuff to say soon, for real.
Though this will say posted at 11:20 p.m., in reality here it’s 9:50 a.m. 10.5 hours from EST — you’re ending your day while I’m starting mine.
While it’s not so dramatic in our modern, travel-friendly age, tomorrow marks my departure for India. On a personal level, it’s going to be strange to be leaving my classmates, my Ann Arbor experience, and most of all, my wife. Regardless, I’m still very excited for a once-in-a-lifetime rare opportunity to travel halfway around the world and live my life in India for a full five weeks.
It’s a crazy opportunistic time we live in, yo. Think back to what your grandparents could do in their day and age and it’s obvious: Take nothing for granted!
Keep reading the blog for updates — I promise to keep you all posted on the next five weeks via patrickstack.com. This blog isn’t as fun as the old one, but it’s still good for something!
So, some background on this: all MBA1s do a MAP as the last quarter of the first year. At the end of December, the list of available projects comes out; about half of these are international, and this year there were projects in India, Ireland, Peru, Brazil, France and several others, as well as a bunch of domestic projects all over the U.S. Our top ten list of preferences was due in early January, and the school formed teams of 4-6 people based on preferences. I was lucky enough to get my number one pick: helping out these guys as they launch their mobile device in India, getting market feedback and other stuff useful to the company.
I’ll be gone from mid-March to mid-April, so I promise as much India blogging as I can find time to do. I gotta keep yinz updated on what it’s like to eat curries for breakfast, yo. Good times and ghee for all.
If you were Musharraf, would you go ahead with January’s elections knowing that everything is in even more turmoil than before, or would you risk the nation getting even more pissed after another suspension of democracy? (Or here, “democracy”, considering that independent media had been banned from election coverage.)
I think he might come out ahead if he allows the elections to continue: if Musharraf can pin this on Islamist sympathizers — not a given since his own sympathy for Bhutto was more forced than genuine, and the attack may instead feed anger toward Musharraf — then he might see more of the country turn towards him as the man most able to restore order, no matter how un-democratic that order might be.
Hey readaz.