Yatra

Himatsingka Seide, Limited

Our next corporate visit brought us to Himatsingka Seide Limited, a silk textile manufacturer about 50 miles outside Bangalore.  Himatsingka makes high quality silk fabrics for interior designers in India and export to Western Europe, the US and other countries.  The company, which is traded on the Bombay and National Stock Exchanges, did 165.20 Rupees Crore last year, or approximately US$37.5M.*  New initiatives include the opening of a ready-made bed linen factory and expansion of the Indian-based Atmosphere branded stores, which carry luxury Himatsingka fabrics for made-to-order home furnishings.   

Founder and CEO Dinesh Himatsingka graciously greeted us at his company entrance and gave us an overview of the factory floor and the silk industry.  Himatsingka receives all its raw silk from China, which is the largest producer of this raw material in the world with about 80% market share.  The Chinese government controls the price of silk and, like so many commodities, keeps it artificially low to promote export.  This makes sourcing for Himatsingka somewhat easy and somewhat difficult -- the price is constant for years and then randomly spikes.  Therefore he has to keep reserves. 

*In the Indian numbering system, a Crore is equivalent to 10M.  Similarly, a Lakh is equivalent to 100K.  This can create quite a bit of confusion for outsiders as not only is the terminology different, but so are the comma separators.  So that 30M (3 Crore) would be written 3,00,00,000.   Also, I used 44 Rps/USD for the exchange rate.

For more on silk from Wikipedia: 

The best-known type of silk is obtained from cocoons made by the larvae of the silkworm Bombyx mori reared in captivity (sericulture).

"Wild silks" are produced by caterpillars other than the mulberry silkworm (Bombyx mori). The term "wild" implies that they are not capable of being domesticated and artificially cultivated like Bombyx mori. Aside from differences in colours and textures, they all differ in one major respect from the domesticated varieties: the cocoons that are gathered in the wild have usually already been damaged by the emerging moth before the cocoons are gathered, and thus the single thread that makes up the cocoon has been torn into shorter lengths. Commercially reared silkworm pupae are killed before the adult moths emerge by dipping them in boiling water or piercing them with a needle (!), thus allowing the whole cocoon to be unravelled as one continuous thread. This allows a much stronger cloth to be woven from the silk.

Chinese peasants perform the needle-in-cocoon silk extraction on a mass scale -- the industry produces billions of pounds a year.  The silk Himatsingka receives from China is of the 'wild' category.  The company's core competency or expertise is in strengthening, dyeing and designing the raw material into high quality textiles.

After the industry overview, we got a factory tour, my first.  Himatsingka is an "industrial boutique" in the sense that they make high quality in small quantity with a design studio in-house as well as the heavy machinery to process the raw material.

My personal favorite part of the tour was the design studio.  It reminded me of the light-filled painting studios at the top of the arts school where I went to summer camp.  They have about 5 designers who draw inspiration from Western design magazines, trips to fabric shows around the world and residencies from a RISDY (Rhode Island School of Design) professor and other prominent design professionals.  They also just started experimenting with a new laser technology that micro-cuts designs. 

We had an non-linear walk through the production line which I'll reassemble as a linear tour so it makes more sense.  First the silk is received in bulky brown bags from China as wispy but relatively rough white tuffs, almost like unbleached cotton balls or my grandmother's hair. 

Next it enters the Spinning division, where it is spun and cleaned many, many times with a variety of progressively fine-tuned machinery.   The process is carefully monitored with custom-designed process control systems while state-of-the-art machinery is made in Germany, Italy and India.

The resulting product is a cone of silk yarn which can be sold to other weavers (we saw a batch headed for Europe) or transfered to the Weaving division, where it is further twisted and then dyed with chemicals.  Himatsingka used to use natural dyes, but synthetic chemicals cause less breakage, require much less time to take and are actually better for the environment and worker conditions.

In the Weaving rooms, yarns of various colored and silk/wool/cotton mix are pulled one thread a time into a weaving machine.  These weaving machines are the coolest.  Hundreds of taught individual fabric strings, stretched from loaders up 20' near the factory ceiling, are guided into a sliding bar that stitches beautiful geometric, floral and fleur di lis patterns right under your eyes.

Machinery throughout the Weaving division are very loud, particularly in this last stiching stage where a metal-on-metal thhwwitttch scrapes every other second.  Most of the workers wear earplugs as they stand in the din for 8 hour shifts, ensuring the machinery's progress is continually on track.

After they are woven, the textiles are rolled and loaded into an industrial cleaner reminiscent of the heavy machinery featured in that Chaplin-eqsue episode of Bugs Bunny wherein Bugs visits a factory.  The fabric is unrolled, pulled upside down, crosswise and right-side up in a horizontal maze of gears and wheels.  It gets progressively shinier, until it reaches the maze end, and is rolled up again by a worker, who then separates and quickly reattaches the interminable length of fabric.

Himatsingka turns out textiles 24 hours a day, producing enough thread to circle the Earth 35 times every day!  The factory runs on electricity purchased from the government controlled utility, but also houses a conventional power generator which can run in case of outages or if electricity costs rise to high.  The facility also produces large amounts of water waste, but cleans and reuses the water entirely to save money and preserve natural resources.  They employ several hundred workers and, like many Indian companies, "sponsor" several nearby villages, often where workers reside, by building schools, providing health service and undertaking other civil projects.

Post-trip addendum (for my Anthropology of Corporations class):

While we're on the subject of silk production, I have to relate one more experience from Varanasi, when I went to visit a string of small-scale silk textile weavers with my hotel guide.  Actually, the owner of the hotel also employed the weavers and they definately tried to give me the shake-down on buying some stunning scarves and shawls.  Varanasi silk is deservedly famous, though his stuff, especially after I saw it produced, raised some quality concerns.  That said, the production process was very interesting.  Actually it was exactly like the mechanical weavers we saw at Himatsingka, but instead of a guy in a hard hat watching the metal looms, it was guy without shoes using his feet and hands to power a wooden thing that spit out patterns not according to a computer program design but a punch card clapper.  They had one of these wooden contraptions at Himatsingka, but it was relegated to the upstairs museum!  Anyway, my hotel owner apparently had an extensive network of these looms working for him because we ducked in and out of dozens of weavers.  Interesting, there wasn't much in the way of family relations in these house factories, but at Himatsingka, the design studio leader was sister-in-law of the CEO, whose son was leading the investment in a new bed linen facility.  Later, at a silk merchant's shop in Pushkar, I confirmed that my hotel owner was something of an outsider as a Muslim in Varanasi and made matters worse by calling his "Shree Kreepa," after an Indian god.

Here's a (sad & long) BBC News video with some footage of the Varanais weavers, who apparently in a lot of economic trouble with China moving in on their market. 

Bangalore, Inc.

I made it to the swish hotel where my Johnson group were staying that evening.  One of the great opportunities of the Cornell MBA program is to take an international business exposure trip every break.  We go everywhere - China, Brazil, Eastern Europe and now India - to meet with high powered execs and learning about the economic developments of the country and region. 

Graciously greeted by Mel Goldman, the professor from Cornell who ran the India trip and Karin Ash from the career office, I met up with Peter B., my roommate for the next couple nights.  The next couple of days were a whirlwind of meetings and briefings and I'll try to capture some of the highlights here. 

On our first day we met with the COO and Co-founder of Mind Tree Consulting, a mid-sized IT consultancy that emphasizes the value of human capital and community above all.  Subroto Bagchi explained to us the imperative of incorporating a sense of community involvement in Indian business.  Mindtree connects to the community  through family newsletters, impoverished village adoption and volunteer days.  They take special interest in sponsoring a home for kids with cerebral palsy, who painted some of the walls at their offices in cheery scenes.

Subroto has just written a book about Indian entrepreneurs, whom, he argued, are in great position to take advantage of the growing economy over the next 25 years.  I asked Mr. Bagchi what he though lay in store for his company over the next 25 years, in the international expansion and sustainability sense, and he envisioned demand for most of Mindtree's services continuing to come from the US, with an unknown stake from new Indian initiatives that aim to take on the Base of the Pyramid. 

At one point, I got the sense that MindTree is involved with designing a system which companies like Chris' microfinance company SKS will use to manage their business.  Subroto confirmed that many of the large banks in India like ICICI and UTI are actively moving into the microloan space as they sense economic opportunity, not just to do good.  It will be interesting to look back to see how technology facilitates the extension of financial services to the 60% of the Indian population in poverty.

After the meeting, Karin Ash and I really appreciated how deeply Subroto and all the MindTree managers connected to the community.  We'd get this sense many times over the next week of meeting with business -especially at the SP Jain Management Institute in Bombay and the Tata Chemicals Company in remote Gujarat- that  Indian managers considered their business inextricably linked with community and worked to improve both together.

After MindTree, a few of us went to an AOL Call Center and had the chance to listen in on a live customer complaint call from America.  Indian economists often ponder why China seems to outpace India when the latter has so many distinct advantages like a huge English-speaking population.  I'll try my best to answer that question in the next couple of posts, but I think it's interesting that in Call Centers, Bangalore has the clear lead through this unique competitive advantage.

The next day, we visited Explocity, a publisher of those guides that middle-of-the-mainstream tourists pick up at the airport and their hotel lobbies.  Today, this about one of the only "old media" strategies that makes any money.  As you can tell from flipping through the magazine, they're not just advertising driven, they're advertising devoted.  Maybe that's why Rupert Murdoch bought them out a few years ago.

Interestingly, these guys have the skills (small business and advertiser relationship management and revenue generation) which every ad-supported tech-media start-up in Silicon Valley starves for.  Google approached them about unlocking the "local" markets in the big Indian cities.  The idea is that the "long tail" of small mom & pop businesses collectively spends as much or potentially more than the big corporate advertisers.  But they felt the AdWords partnership would be too competitive and are embarking independently on a mobile platform strategy.  That's a seemingly smart move in India where broadband is intermittent and unreliable (as I know only too well from writing this blog!!) and mobile connectivity is leap-frogging into so many segments of this enormous, loquacious population.  But, as the current bidding war here for cell phone carrier Hutch hints at, the fate of individual content providers is far from sealed.

After Explocity, we headed over to Gangagen, a really innovative company that is looking to reintroduce bacteriophages into the mainstream market for "prevention and treatment of bacterial infections." 

Bacteriophages are apparently non-living organisms that "co-evolve" with bacteria in a perpetual cycle of adaptation and destruction.  They kill bacteria as it evolves, unlike conventional treatments like Penicillin, which can't keep up with bacteria evolution.  Phages explain why, at the Krumbha Mela, the largest holy event in the world, when millions of Hindus descend on the Ganges to bathe in its holy waters, the confluence of all those germs from all over India doesn't sicken pilgrims.  The volume of this naturally occurring virus-slayer grows exponentially to neutralize the threat.  Apparently phages were once a very popular treatment but lost favor in Western medicine with the advent of Penicillin.

Currently Gangagen does a big business in the Canadian cattle market, assuaging government and industry fears of another mad cow outbreak, by adding the phages to cattle feed, which is non-intrusive to the animals and business process.  It's kind of ironic - a Hindu company using naturally-occurring medicine from the holy Ganges to keep holy cows healthy for slaughter and consumption.  But the potential for improving human-virus treatments is hugely promising, not least because the naturally occurring phages are much cheaper and more effective than current treatments.

Our guide through all this science was Gangagen co-founder Dr. Janakiraman Ramachandran, a important player in the development of Bangalore's pharmaceutical industry, and a real entrepreneur who "gets it."  Hearing his story of starting the company, of how had had to borrow bridge financing from his sons-in-law, I was really struck by how effectively he is combining business and medicine for social purpose.

But I think Dr. Ramachandran is a rarity in Bangalore, if not the world of startups.  My overall impression of Bangalore is a lot like Silicon Valley, where, incidentally, I interned for a Gujurati Internet entrepreneur last summer.  (Samir- one day we'll have to write a book on the crazy Searchforce adventure!!) 

It's a place built on dreams but mired in highway traffic. The gold lining in this smoggy miasma is the wonder of technology, but that magic isn't realized without a monomanical devotion to work.  Meanwhile Bangalore's heart attacks, asthma and diabetes cases have sky-rocketed over the past years.

Don't get me wrong, I think these startup cities are amazing places, built on imagination, where wonders can escape and real needs are solved, but there's no mistaking it's often an unhealthy mental and spiritual environment, especially when social purposes aren't emphasized. 

Super Deluxe Luxury Bus

My early morning trip on the 'Super Deluxe Luxury Volvo Bus' was an education in the relativity of language and international market strategies.  Volvo provided what may have been the most significant threat to the continuity of my neck and spine since they were prenatally joined.  I guess 'Super Deluxe' meant that I would laid down horizontal immediately next to a stranger only on one side, our unfamiliar sides touching for 14 hours to Bangalore, rather than sandwiched between two strangers and suffering twice the humiliation!

Seeing this new definition of luxury, I protested and was given a "single" -- a makeshift board wedged between the rear wheel well and bus ceiling, with about 10" of vertical space and what looked like a hand-punched hole in the ventilation system for oxygen.  I took it.  An hour later, we stopped at a roadside cafeteria and I realized I had been jostled over every bump and pothole in these miserable Indian roads while passed out.  "Volvo -- for life."  The slogan rings with a new meaning to me. 

Thankfully there was a regular seat up front and I suffered the remaining 12 hours of potholes, random chai stops and twice punctured tires a faint step closer to my definition of luxury. 

Just one question: why do Indian seats recline too far?  I've seen this on the most plush airlines all the way down to that evil Volvo bus -- the seat back falling ALL the way back, until it's basically under the chin of the next passenger.  But instead of creating the classic domino effect, the next guy taps angrily on the offending shoulder of the recliner, as if to blame them for taking advantage of some design flaw, and insists they return the seat all the way upright!  I guess it's a continuation of the perpetual negotiation for space that takes place in the big overpopulated cities, as if the space wars can't even rest in transit.

Dancing the night away

The day after Christmas, we rolled down to Old Goa to check out the Cathedrals and Archbishop's quarters.  Deluxe.  With the thick Corinthian columns and floor-to-ceiling gilt alter, it felt more like Europe than India.  The Portuguese ran Goa for more than 400 years and built a ring of giant churches in Old Goa, their seat of power, in the Tuscan-Gothic style, with taxes from the lucrative trade in spice, cotton and indigo.  A colony in India was hugely profitable.  For a time in the 17th Cent. pepper corns were worth their weight in gold back in Europe. 

The Old Goa churches are the biggest in Asia, with the centerpiece, the Se Cathedral, reputedly larger than any in Portugal.  It took 90 years to build.  Walking from one gargantuan to another, it's as if the Franciscans, Jesuits and Roman Catholics of Old Goa were building to outdo each other.   At its height, the city was as populous as London or Paris, but then in the 19th Cent. disease wiped the population and the state capital moved down the Mandovi River to Panjim.

To catch a breather after the cab rides and scooter break-down on the trip to Old Goa, I headed back to Brahmani Yoga for an afternoon meditation class and stuck around for some traditional Hindi singing, known as Bhanjans.  What a great time.  We had a band with drums, guitar and tambourine, and together chanted traditional devotionals in Hindi:

Shiva: Kashi Vishvanatha Gange

(Interpretation by Krishna Das: BREATH OF THE HEART)

Hara Hara Mahadeva Shambo / Kashi Vishwanatha Gange

Kashi Viswanatha Gange / Kashi Amarnatha Gange

Hara Hara Mahadeva Shambo / Kashi Vishwanatha Gange

Hara Hara Hara Hara / Mahadeva Shambo

Bom Bom Mahadeva Shambo / Kashi Vishvanatha Gange

On Wednesday was the famous Anjuna Flea Market, with amazing crafts from all over India, from Tibetan full cord knit sweaters to Keralan spices, all at rock bottom prices.  The colorful Rajathasni mirror and block-work blankets were a personal favorite.  Next time I'm bringing a bigger backpack!

I met up with Bobby & Alex P. at the Jam Connection for chocolate pancake breakfast. Yumm... the place is run by an old German lady who bakes the bread fresh every morning.  We chilled in hammocks in the leafy garden and watched her hippy grandkids play in the tree fort and tire swing.  Also, I met a really great married couple, an American guy from North Adams, MA and Japanese girl, who volunteered at the local dog shelter.  On my second trip to India, I definitely want to do some volunteering.

To celebrate New Year's, Alex P. and I got henna tattoos on the beach.  I looked pretty bad in a swirly sun with a Hindi Om over my shoulder and arm.  Hmmm.... makes you wonder how a real one would look. Ok, not going to happen, but fun for a week.

On New Year's Eve day, I ran in to Elissa, Karim and Bryan totally by accident.  At first, Karim didn't recognize me!  It was hilarious running into to them in of all places, Anjuna.  Karim said, "I bet we've had very different experiences of India."  Wise words.  They invited me to a party at some nice club, but I declined.  At $80 to get in, it was more than I spent all week! 

For New Year's, I decided to keep it low key.  Actually, a lot of people were going to just chill since the Isreali security services had issued a terrorist warning for Goa.  After dinner and a few drinks at Nine Bar, I headed over to the local church for the midnight mass in Kokani, the native Goan language.  What a surreal experience.  There were folk-art quality Santa decorations and rickety overhead fans accompanied by a trio of haunting but out-of-tune violins and Kokani singing in a wavering soprano.  At midnight, a barrage of fireworks went off right outside the church doors and the priest, draped in white vestments, lifted a gold chalice above his head with both hands.

After the mass, I headed down to the beach to catch some more fireworks on the moonlit surf.  I was going to call it a night when I saw a massive bonfire and bumping party at Lilliput.  The Radio Shack mixer was turning out a crowd with funky house and everybody was dancing care-free.  I ended up staying up all night and caught my bus at 8 in the morning!

Ashtanga Wisdom

"We call it introductory because we're introducing you to your muscles." -Yogi in Pushkar

Somewhere between the yoga studio and the end of my scooter ride through the rice patty fields, it strikes me that I lead a very stressful life back in business school. 

Yoga is about healing, the body and the soul.  This truth is imparted to me by the Brits and Euros who teach the Ashantaga school of yoga from Mysore.  Stretching, sweating, breathing.  It's a search for spiritual, mental and physical balance through release of the negative energy that's stored up in our body and mind over successively hectic days. 

Of course this all sounds like new age hippy mumbo jumbo... until you try it.  Words aren't really sufficient.  To understand the language of yoga, you need to move and breath, then sit completely still.

Then it strikes me personally, ahead of this major looming job search, that some career pursuits are going to cause more harm than good to me and the people I know and love.  Oy!  What a bad time for another epiphany!!  But it's pretty clear, some work is bound to create strife for and some alternatives to resolve it. 

I'm not saying it's possible to classify whole occupations. Labeling work in a sustainable enterprise or a handicraft workshop or a monastic cell as "good" or "healing" would be just as much an oversimplification as calling work in an investment bank or a high-tech startup or an economic policy think tank as "bad" or "harmful." 

But in order for work to lead to health and happiness, I think it must be based on motivations that are genuinely positive, that arise from a desire to contribute to the social stock rather than one's brokerage account.  To sustain that contribution, one needs a work-life balance too.

Why sign up for a hellish job thinking it will enable you to make a greater impact later on?  It seems, to me anyway, like an unnecessary dose of chemotherapy -- a painful treatment with no guarantee to heal.

Long live rock

Goa's a bit like a rock sample cross-section you might study in geology.  It exists on several levels at once, some strata fully covering earlier deposits, other shafts zig-zagging through subsequent generations to the surface. 

In this stratigraphic analogy, the law of social superposition applies to each generation of Goan, from the pre-Portuguese Hindus to the seasonal immigrants who maybe just answer to Karma. 

Like the rest of the sub-continent, Goa seem like a stable place only from a safe distance, but get up close and you can see it's teetering on the brink of total mayhem. India has its own Tectonic Plate.  The whole country seems to tremble from the lack of an underpinning legal system.

Then the Portuguese laid down alter of Christianity.  Sandwiched between the shaky subcontinental bedrock and a top-layer of New Age tourism, Goan Christianity is comparatively quiet, private cultural strata.  In Hyderabad, the Muslim's brought a slab from holy Mecca to wedge in the Majjid Mosque's outer wall, which market men scramble past 5 times a day under the wafting Iftar.  At Pushkar Lake, Hindu families and neighbors amble up the mountain path to Sivitra Temple together, inviting every tourist and rickshaw-wallah along the way.  In Goa, the 30% Christian population dress up on Christmas to worship respectfully behind whitewashed church walls. 

The surface layer is an amalgam of beach sand, little shells deposited in the surf and the forgotten flip-flop and lost trinket from tourists from all over the world.  People come here for many reasons.  Some stay at the Marriott and sip waiter-served Mango Lassis from private beach chairs.  Some sleep all day on the beach and twirl flaming swords at night.  There's a lot of Isrealis fresh from the military with chillums to Trance music.  I saw a few Russian couples tattoo'd to the cranium just lounging in front of cabanas and heaps of fried prawns.  The pasty Brits are never too far from a Kingfisher or Cobra.  The loud Americans are racing to the craggy hill where the parasails take off.  The Indian tourists, mostly packs of single men, roam the beaches to gawk at and pester the topless foreign women.  And so on... it's kind of like the world's sandbox. 

But Goa's most interesting present-day feature are the hippies, gray-haired Anglos in batik skirts and open-collar white linen who poke up through the sands like quartz outcrops.  Ten years after the Portuguese left, the hippies laid down a thin but valuable igneous layer.  They've been coming here every winter since, zig-zagging through the later 'seedimentary' deposits like attenuated veins of shiny but flaky quartz.

They rent and decorate an old high-ceiling Portuguese villa for a few months and maybe set up a leafy breakfast nook where they can bake fresh bread and pay the meager rent.  They run the best spots in Anjuna, missed by even my trusty Rough Guide, and still cling to an underlying Goa, whether real or imagined, despite being surrounded by the vulgarization of their ideals in the luxury hotels and, worst of all, the locals who try to take endless advantage of foreigners, while their welcome presence indicates how rare and cool Goa might once have been.

Holidaymakers

Paradise is palm trees, sun and a scooter.  On the evening of my 2nd day, Misha accompanies me on the scooter up to my high school friend Becca at Mandrem Beach Resort, an sand & shore inlet that could've been the set for a Leonardo DiCaprio film.  B's come in from Mumbai, the big city, and she's been living in the convent on the cheap, and following 90% of the rules... Mischief beckons.

After dinner we dare to cross the rickety bamboo bridge over the tidal flats that night.  Becca's managed to befriend every stray dog in sight and we gently coax them across the make-shift bridge, glowing lightbulbs dangling over a fast moving current... of 3 to 4" deep.   The stars are out in force and the sand is cold underfoot, but ultra-soft.  Becca's named each dog "Molly!  Oscar!!" and they're responding! We come back to the tidal crossing and the tide's come in.  Pants are rolled knee-high.

On the scooter ride down to Anjuna and less sublime room rates, we pass over the Siloquiem Bridge and can see a river cut through the verdant Goan inland.  Also we pass through small villages with old white-washed Portuguese churches and Christmas & New Year's decorations.  There's  ubiquitous 5-point stars pointing down, hung upside down, as Bobby tells me later, originally as a colonial protest and then by convention. The Goan place names on the road signs - Anjuna, Arambol, Chapora - are soaked in sun and Latin flavor.

Back in Anjuna, Beck's and I watch the sunset at the beach shack Lillipot while sipping Cobras, Hindustan's best brew, on bamboo lounge chairs.  Lillipot is pumping smooth French house via live DJ at all hours of the day and night and the sun goes down in a blaze of pink and yellow.  I spot one of the Nepalese waiters - they come down for months-long high season and sleep in the restaurant.  He's gently opening the plastic wrap on a new mixer from Radio Shack.  "New Year's," he says.

Later that night we met with Bobby and her friend Alex P... there is another! Also this Israeli guy Shai who struck me as total sketch that night but after we became mates and he showed me around the Goa underground and had the most amazing streak of backgammon luck I've ever seen.  (Shai - you know those dice were loaded!)  That night Beck's and I went as low as you can go in Goa and splurged on a 100 rupee room (about 2 bucks) right on the beach.  Misery is a 100 rupees of hospitality in Goa.  At some point you just need to laugh and dream of Mr. Clean.

In the middle of the night, there was bang and loud scratch over the tin roof.  Becca and I shot bolt upright. She maintains it was a monkey and squirrel fighting, but I'm sure it was a thousand rats.  Ahhhh, paradise.

The next day was Christmas Eve Day we brought Bobby and Alex up to Mandrem for some rest and relaxation.  Becca in her infinite holiday wisdom had brought a Nerf-like football and we put together a real American Christmas Eve day pick-up two-hand touch game on the beach in India. 

We coaxed in a trio of vacationing Portuguese (one in his tightie-whities which drove B. crazy) and established some basic rules such as downs, kick-offs and off-sides.  Also, I'll never forget Manoosh, or "Charlie" as we dubbed him and to which he responded with enthusiasm, our Indian Troy Brown, diving for the end zone passes with his super lanky brown body in speedo and oversized fake Oakleys.  Totally uncatchable, his role in every play was to cause confusion, which he excelled at.  (Becca- we totally would have won if all our players understood English.) 

Christmas Day I had to say goodbye to Becca who had to be back in Mumbai for school the next day.  She's studying a special Indian school of Occupation Therapy which she'll bring back to disadvantaged kids with disabilities in Ithaca. Bobby, Alex and I celebrated the day with a lobster dinner at Lillipot, which they caught for us on special order the night before. Cooked, it was a light orangey-red... pretty good, but couldn't hold a claw to a Cape Cod classic.

That night we danced the night away under the stars and fireworks at the world famous Nine Bar, which hangs over Vagator beach.  Wow, what a sound system.  And the moon shimmered on to the ocean horizon like a silver road.

Touching Down in Goa Town

Before meeting Michael in the airport terminal, I knew 2 things about him immediately.  The first was that he was young and worked in IT.  As we were traveling from Hyderabad to Goa, this wasn't so difficult to surmise.  The second was that he was little crazy.  The Hawaiin shirt and sway to his walk were solid tip-offs.  "You are going to Goa?"  he said to me in his thick Russian accent.  I told him I was and we chatted.  He was from a city near Moscow with an air strip and often went parachuting, for fun.  The cross-country twin prop pulled up to the terminal gate and he said,  "Perhaps we will parachute from this airplane."

Michael, or traditionally "Misha" as Becca dub him, was on a 3 day holiday before returning to Moscow via Frankfurt over Dec. 25.  Although, I learned over dinner the next night, this was not such a big deal as he celebrated the Orthodox Christmas in early January.  We shared an empty row on the ultra-cheap Deccan airlines, where you pay 20 rupees for your peanuts and the guy by the exit row jokes around with the female attendant about opening the emergency exit on the tarmac. 

We touched down over the endless miles of palm fringed beaches and green sea and split a cab with  a salty Isreali woman who been coming to Goa every winter for 8 years.  I'd booked a place at the Orange House in Anjuna, in the center of Goa, where hippies converged in the late 60s and have been partying ever since.  The Orange House lived up to its name with a fresh coat and white trim, and the room had a spectacular balcony that looked out on "downtown" Anjuna - which consisted soley to of a Church (Goa has been Christian since Portuguese Colonial times) and 2 grocery stores Oxford & Orchard.  The former being a nice upmarket option where, over the course of the week, I picked up fresh chocolate croissants, imported goat cheese and fresh focaccia pizza. 

Without further ado, Misha rented a scooter and we were bumbling down unpaved roads toward Anjuna beach, with the steady thump of techno music growing louder as we approached.  On our way, we passed through the bamboo skeleton of the Wednesday Flea Market, with empty stalls illuminated in the moonlight for a few kilometers, before the road emptied into the parking lot of the deserted Chaikoffsky's Cafe.  Misha was ecstatic.  He'd already found a Russian spot and was ready to wait all night for his countrymen to show up, but I convinced him to follow me to Curlie's - an Isreali hangout a few meters down the rocky, unlit beach (ouch!).

So we came up on this mad rave scene about 2 hours after touching down in Goa.  The hippie legends appeared to be true, if mutated in this electronic form.  There were a few hundred people dancing and laid out on straw mats on the beach, watching the moonlit waves, and collapsed in bambo chairs in a dusty, smoky haze.  Actually, the scene was a little gross - I hate to rehash the stereotype but everybody looked liked they needed a shower. But I met a few interesting people, including Bobby, this British girl with dyed dark red hair and Edward, a Swedish guy with a puff-up haircut. 

The place was predominantly Isrealis, but they were anti-social.  It's the right of passage to come to India after serving in the Isreali military and they come mostly hell-bent on partying hard with themselves.  Actually, they've caused quite a big problem with disrespect to the locals and even the Knesset has debated on how to improve Isreal's image in India.  Later I did meet one really likeable Isreali though, Misha, and we played a few intense games of backgammon later that week.

My first night, I called it in early.  Misha and I had had a few Kingfisher beers (worse than Bud, it's all that's available in most bars) and set out for a late night snack.  We winded up at Tin Tin in Tibet, having the most amazing grilled tiger prawns with lime.  They were giants, about 8 inches, and only $1.50!

Hyderabad On the Go

From Delhi I connected via flight on the ultra-posh Jet Airways to Hyderabad.  The contrast between the Jet plane and the overnight train were striking.  Akin to 1st class on an American carrier, the economy section on brand-spanking new Jet plane featured deep leather seats, full news/movie/music personal station and doting attendants that brought around warm towels and a delicious salty lime juice.  The attendant was shocked when I passed on the dinner, like a personal insult to a 5-star chef back at the terminal.

Arriving in Hyderabad, my friend Chris picked me up at the airport and instantly wow'd me with his Hindi while haggling with the ricksaw drivers- apparently there was some kind of strike that day over the meters the local government is forcing the ricksaw drivers to install.  We settled on a price and dove into the intense Hyderabad traffic.  The city has experienced an automotive explosion and the road system was bulging at the intersections with rickshaws, buses, bikes and a plethora of new cars. 

Chris explains that the city is developing at a breakneck pace, fueled by the info and biotech sectors, and the government infrastructure projects are struggling to keep up.  A few years ago the only cars on the road were the British-inspired Ambassadors but today foreign auto makers like Honda and Ford have established positions in the market through government-approved joint ventures with Indian companies.  Chris points above our heads to a raised highway that just stops mid-air, an unfinished road to nowhere that ominously resembles Boston's Central Artery in its final days of deconstruction.  "That wasn't there," he says, "before I went home a few weeks ago." 

Chris has been living in Hyderabad for nearly 2 years working at SKS (http://www.sksindia.com/) an emerging Microfinance institution in India.  The organization's mission is to provide financial services like small loans to Indian women, so far in mostly rural areas, to enable them and their families with the liquidity and fundamental capital to engage in basic income-generating activities like farming and fishing. 

From their website-

Launched in 1998, SKS Microfinance is one of the fastest growing microfinance organizations in the world, having provided over $ 109 million (Rs 484 crores) and has maintained loans outstanding of $39 million (174 crores) in loans to nearly 379, 874 women clients in poor regions of India... This In the last year alone, SKS Microfinance has achieved nearly 161 % growth, with 98% on-time repayment rate.

Vikram Akula, SKS founder and CEO, is a former McKinsey consultant while the company's CFO is a recent Wharton grad.  Chris is applying to pursue a joint-degree MBA and MPA.  It's worth mentioning that Cornell and Johnson have large Sustainable Development programs, with incredible resources for developing innovations, like microfinance, to reach the 4 billion people, or Base of the Pyramid (http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/sge/bopinitiative.html), who live outside or between the boundaries of the developed world's economy.

Chris was a great host and his apartment, with hot water showers and marble floors, was a welcome break from the dingy hotels on the road.  Our first night out we hit this Chinese restaurant by his place.  It was underground, with no windows and dim red candle lighting, bamboo chairs and tables, and bow-tied waiters.  In short, the kind of place that would fit nicely in a James Bond flick, with Odd Job lurking behind a bamboo screen.  But, the place served beers, rare in Hindu & Muslim-dominated Hyderabad, and we had a great time catching up over Kingfisher's and sampling the Hyderabadi cuisine, which is renown for its spicy hot. Actually, I was a bit disoriented by one dish and popped a green chili into my mouth, thinking it was a cool green been.  Seconds later Chris was exclaiming, "You ate that!", my face started to tingle like every nerve was firing awake from a 27-year slumber, my glasses were off and I was balling like a school girl with a skinned knee.  Look out for the green chili.  Even the waitstaff was impressed.

The next day right before Sunset and the evening Iftar, we visited the Charminar district which is the Muslim old city in Hyderabad.   Charminar is a gigantic gate with 4 towering minarets and huge arches under which cart-sellers, children hawkers and ricksaw traffic swirl around a rotary.  As we exit the rickshaw a boy holds up a handful of fake pearls, although Hyderabad is famous for the real stuff.

In the 12th and 13th C., various Muslim rulers based at the Golconda Fort nearby Hyderabad, ran powerful and wealthy dynasties that controlled the jewel and gem trade of the world.

The imposing Majid Mosque stands next door to Charminar.  After taking off our shoes by the compound entrance, Chris and I circled the Mosque exterior past a cricket game, where he pointed out a stone that had brought from Mecca with the help of a local guy.  The interior was whitewashed, with threadbare carpets lining the Mosque floor and a roof of domes.  The place looked somewhat utilitarian, but as we sat in the nearby mausoleum and listened to the Iftar while men young and old ran up to the Mosque, I got a sense of how it was still very much a living part of the city, 300 years after consecration.

What's life like when you take time out to pray 5 times a day?  It seems like that daily structure must add a necessary peace to hectic life in the old city. 

After the sun goes down, Chris shows me around the streets.  First we turn onto a row of wedding supplies merchants, whose walls are stocked with literally millions of glittering gold bangles, shining down the street like uninterrupted gold railings.    

Chris buys two sweet wraps from a stall (non-nicotine, they're rolled in green leaves and sucked on like lollipops) but given my out-of-body green chili experience last night and a lingering sickness from the overnight trains, I've got to pass.  Most of the Indians are impressed that he can speak Hindi, but Chris insists he only knows a few words.  Back at the Mausoleum, he told me about the complexity of language-politics, with kids learning 3 or 4 languages at home and in school.  For instance, in Tamil Nadu, people refuse to speak Hindi even though it's the national language and may know it, because it conflicts with their regional identity. 

After the sweet wrap stall, we stroll under a bunch of tiny red banners hanging over an intersection, with the Communist Sickle & Hammer hanging oddly in earnest.  I think the only other time I've actually seen this displayed is in a college dorm room. Chris comments that the Communist party must have a rally in this neighborhood recently. A few days ago I read an article how Indian PM Singh was surprised at how political factions (read: BJP) still had traction over their support for Saddam Hussein while at the same time India was taking an increasingly prominent role in the international community (read: to the West).  Then we stroll past a Swastika in the 2nd story relief of an stone building and I learn that Hitler actually reversed the symbol, so as a cross-arms bent at right-angles.

We hop in a ricksaw and head home and then to Chris' friend's birthday party a chilled-out roof-top restaurant.   Chris knows a bunch of twenty-something Indians and they're remarkably similar to the Silicon Valley-ites I hung out with last summer.  One girl works for Google and is complaining about the superabundance of free food which is making her fat - this was the cause celebe last summer.  But her job is not tech-driven; she reads the ad copy from Sponsored Links/Adwords to filter out inappropriate language, competitive bashing and illegal trademark use.  Another guy works for Accenture developing for the .net site for a Microsoft JV.  A couple of people are applying for MBAs in the US, but they plan to return with the degree.  I get the sense that the India's surging growth is very real.

The 3 Cabinmates

From Sarnath I took the Vinishawatha Express back to Delhi, an overnight journey of 12 hours.  Luckily I had some interesting cabinmates to pass the time.  Jacques was Frenchman from outside Grenoble who had moved to Himalayan India to become a Buddhist monk. 

Jacques had just come from Sarnath to see the Dalai Lama.  He had some great stories about Dharamsala  where the teenagers join the monasteries in hopes of moving to the US or Europe.  Apparently there's a real drug problem with the next wave of Tibetan and Nepalese monks, and they're more concerned with learning English than Buddhism.  "But what will they teach when they move the to the US?" asks Jacques rhetorically in his think French accent.  "English?" 

To deal with problem, the monasteries are just accepting more monks - communities are expected to double from the hundreds into the thousands this year.  "If there are 3 or 4 very good monks in a monastery of 3 or 400, then it is very good."  Yikes -- talk about quality control.  Also, a lot of the inductees are from the West like Jacques.  So Westerners and the Tibetan/Nepalese are using the religion to switch places, hmm....

My other cabinmate was Mareka, a thirty-something lady from Finland who was disenchanted with her life as a corporate marketer and traveling the world.  She's going to Holland after travels to visit a friend, a florist, she met on the road.  I laid down a good plug for the Cass School and the profession, odds are now like 20 to 1 she restarts work arranging Leather Leaf and Baby's Breath bouquets.  Also, and this was so eery, she had been in Ithaca last year and is cousins with the lady who runs Pangaea, a restaurant in town I've been trying to get to.  Now I've traveled to India for the perfect excuse.

My last cabinmate, and probably the most interesting to me anyway, was an Indian girl, unfortunately I didn't catch her name, who was pursuing an MBA in India.  She was a first year and it was great to hear about the industries and fields she had to choose from.  There's some overlap with the US, but she decided not to pursue a degree in the US because it was too expensive.  Interestingly, her family was top of mind in the job search.  She wants to move near Delhi so her mother can come stay with her before she gets married. 

When Mareka asked about the (now outlawed) Caste system's impact on current marriage arrangements, our Indian cabinmate believed it was still very prevalent.  Parents call the shots, even if it's not an arranged deal, literally a deal given the dowry and wedding expenses. Yahoo! personals appeal to women in search of husbands, not dates.  "What if you want to marry someone else?  Or get a job on your own?"  Mareka asked.  "Why disobey?  She cared for me, she brought me up."