A Land of Contradictions

I'm sitting in the Indian equivalent of Starbucks (called the Coffee Bean) and making use of their free wifi, along with a charming window overlooking the street. Today was apparently the first day of the "actual" monsoon... prior days had just been warm-up runs. I awoke this morning to the sound of rustling palm fronds and a heavy deluge. Walking to the balcony, I looked down to see a quite a scene. There was a taxi (like Cairo, the taxis here are circa 1960, but do have functional meters, provided you can multiply by 13 in your head... yay Rapid Math Tricks!) sliding down the hill because the river of water prevented it from gaining traction. Three Indian men were trying to push it to the side of the road, but straining against the knee deep water, they didn't make much progress. Instead, it slid down to the bottom of the hill, where traffic proceeded to slowly go around it until a larger car pushed it out of the way (whether intentionally or not remains to be determined). The whole site was quite surreal as I stood sipping my tea and eating a biscuit in the comfort of my 5th floor balcony.

Today has been very much an extension of the scene this morning... moments of ridiculous chaos countered by extravagant comfort. My first meeting was with Actis, the global emerging market private equity firm. After taking an hour to go about 3/4 of a mile in the taxi, I arrived at their offices. They were located in a brand new glass office tower, but next door was a shanty village complete with blue tarps and discarded tires. It struck me that here I was in an office of a firm that controlled billions of dollars in capital, but right next door were people whose daily income is equivalent to what I just paid for an espresso. My second interview, with the Managing Director of BCG (Boston Consulting Group) India, struck a chord with this feeling. Dr. Sinha (a Woody Woo alum... go Princeton!) talked about the failure of the government to provide many of the most basic social services to huge swaths of the population. It was a great conversation that tempered my enthusiasm for India with a sharp dose of reality. The outsourcing and software industry get so much attention (from myself included) but they employ less than 1% of the Indian labor force. Even accounting for the spillover jobs that are created (in landscaping, security, transportation, dining services, etc.) there are still over 250 million people in agriculture. 40% of this labor force is illiterate and most are under the age of 25. He did share some bits of optimism, saying that the globalization, if truly embraced, could help solve the demographic crisis facing Japan, Western Europe, and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. But continually talking about winners and losers obscures the fact that unless something is done, huge portions of India will remain in destitute poverty, and much of the developed world will grow increasingly reliant on an ever-shrinking labor and tax base.

I walked out of his office, which overlooked the squalls rolling off the Arabian Sea, with many mixed emotions. There seems to be so much potential in the world, but it seems to be matched by increasing problems. Smart people all over the world are thinking about these things, and I'm comforted by that, but I worry that politicians and economists cannot understand each other. The politician says the economist only thinks of what should be happening, and ignores that people make decisions based on their own perspective, with whatever limited information they have available. Economists think that politicians are unable to make the long-term investment that is vital to development because they are too concerned with winning reelection. I'll be a fence-sitter and say the truth is in the middle. The world works in strange ways, India certainly is showing me that, but that does not mean that we should dismiss a good idea because it is inconvenient in the short-term. Big changes are happening around us, now I believe it is up to us to figure out how we make sure that we don't leave a few billion people behind as we charge ahead into the 21st century.

OK, enough deep musings. Now to find a cab home. I'll leave you with a quote from an Emerson essay that my Syrian couchsurfing host gave me (Housni, if you're reading this, hope all is well).

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide..."

I think that sums up a lot of my thinking atm...

Day 25/82 (it feels like a lot longer right now)
Distance from NY JFK: 7798.93 miles
Current mood: pensive (obviously)
Current music: some Kenny G-esque jazz...
Only here moment: Having to pay an extra 100 rupees to my cabbie to turn on the A/C. While only 2USD, it seemed ridiculous since he stood to benefit from it also.

Monsooning Mumbai

Greetings from the hot and humid subcontinent. I arrived yesterday afternoon, and yes, could smell Mumbai from the second the airplane doors opened. It was quite a startling scene to see shanty towns built up to the barbed-wire fence around the airoprt. I've learned Mumbai is very much like that though, extreme poverty with some middle class havens and a few islands of the megarich. As in Cairo, the tech companies like the one I visited today, are all located well outside the city because office space is cheaper. The Infotech park I visited was quite a sight to behold with 8 towers, all on top of rail complex, so workers could easily get to and from the office. Someone asked if I was going to take the train back to the city, and I considered it briefly before he said "let me show you first." So... trains in Mumbai don't have doors. According to my kind host (a 23 yr old software developer), that is a luxury the government only splurged on in the capital, New Delhi. There was a twinkle in his eyes as he spoke with wonderment of a metro with doors. Oh the luxuries we take for granted.

Besides a great meeting with V2, a software outsourcing firm, I've been wandering around the area I'm staying, called Peddar Rd. It's one of the posh areas of town, just a few blocks down from the tower which will soon be the world's most expensive private residence http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mukesh_Ambanis_home_worlds_costliest/articleshow/3002586.cms

My hosts are the lovely Dr. and Mrs. Misra, who are the parents of one of my mother's neighbors. They have been so generous and have made the transition to India so much easier than if I had been staying in a hotel/hostel by myself. I'm probably eating more healthy food now than I have at any point in the past month.

Tomorrow I have two meetings and then the weekend to explore Mumbai. If the monsoon hasn't cancelled the boats to Elephant Island, I'm planning to go out there and see the famous caves. Other than that, I'm at the whim of my Lonely Planet guide that Nellie so kindly gave me.

Pictures to come this weekend.

Day 25/82
Distance from New York JFK: 7807 miles
Current mood: content, but drowsy, potentially from the Malarone?
Current music: the not-so-soft, but unbelievably wonderful, drone of my A/C
Only here moment: Passing thousands of billboards and posters advertising two things. First, mutual funds. Everywhere you look, they are advertising mutual funds with slogans of like "get your piece of Indian's infrastructure boom". The minimum investment requirement is quite low, so it certainly gives the middle class a chance to invest in their country's growth. Let's hope they do better than AIG. And the second, advertisements for English lessons. They are EVERYWHERE. And for software training. If you don't think there are hundreds of thousands of people gunning for "your" job, then you are terribly mistaken. They still have a long way to go, but it's going to be an incredible shift to watch.

Last thing, a sign for an English language academy called SpeakEasy that read "Learn English, improve your personality". I thought of a few people who could certainly use their services.