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.
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