The News & TeleGraff

The Absurdities of My Current Life

Yesterday I slept late and got up around 8 a.m. and went to bed around 11:30, meaning that I was awake for about 15 1/2 hours over the course of the day. It was, admittedly, a short day for me. Normally I try to be awake by around 6 or 6:30 so that I can get writing.

Anyway, yesterday I attended the monthly luncheon of hotel PR directors here in DC at the Four Seasons, where I enjoyed a delicious four-course lunch, complete with rose champagne, a wagyu rib-eye, celery soup, and a frisee salad. Since we lingered over the conversation for a while, the lunch took about three hours start-to-finish.

Last night, then, I went out to dinner with the publicist for the new restaurant Il Mulino New York that's opening here later this month. It's a very famous New York Italian haunt, where, supposedly, it's nearly impossible to score a table. K and my old friend Justin came along to round out our table for four at the mock service dinner before it opens officially, and we arrived at about 6:30 p.m. The dinner was delicious, just course after course of very rich, very yummy Italian food—from a mushroom ravioli to a spicy bruschetta to a langostino risotto to a very tender veal saltimbocca, and on through a poached pear, Grand Marnier-soaked orange, cheesecake, and an endless supply of Chianti. Dinner lasted until just before 11.

Looking back, here's the absurdity: All told yesterday I spent 7.5 hours—roughly an entire work-day and nearly 50 percent of my waking hours—engaged in meals. It's probably a good thing, looking back, that I skipped breakfast yesterday.

Return to India?

So sitting in the Mumbai airport yesterday morning, I was thinking about how incredible the trip to India had been. It's clear that there's really amazing stuff happening over there right now. As one of the people I interviewed said, "This is the sweet spot of the world right now."

There's so much happening there and it's going to be so critical to the coming decades in the world that I'm sure that I'm going to be back to India—the only question is how soon? Will it be six months? One year? Five years?

What will India look like the next time I see it? How much will it have lept forward?

I can't wait to find out.

Mumbai and the Marriott

I'm going to have a few more posts over the next couple of days about India as I get a chance to write them up. There's just so much to say.

Our last three days in India were packed full. By the time I got on the plane Friday morning in Mumbai, I think I'd slept something like nine hours in the previous three days. I was asleep before take-off and ended up sleeping most of both flights, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Tuesday was our day at Satyam. The drive to the campus was a good example of the dichotomous India: We passed row after row of shacks on the way there, shanty towns filled with cows and camels, and very primitive communities. Then, once inside the gate, it was an oasis: a golf course, helipad, and even a zoo, complete with roosters, peacocks (including a rare white peacock), deer, emus, and love birds. Flags from each of the 53 countries where Satyam does work line the main drive. We spent most of the day listening to panel discussions in the center of the campus, and I stumbled across two great ex-pats from the Washington area who were the first westerners to take top positions in India with Satyam. During the lunch break, several of us sat out by the campus swimming pool in the sun—the granite benches were much too hot to sit upon, so we all sat on our notebooks.

Tuesday night we had a very nice dinner poolside back at the Hotel Kakatiya Sheraton where we were staying with a bunch of the Satyam executives. Afterwards Kara and I headed out into the city for a random and totally unsafe autorickshaw ride. Alan on our trip had done it the night before and it really sounded like fun. Our driver was completely baffled by our request—the idea that anyone would just go out and drive around was really confusing. He took us out for a while—zipping through the darkened streets, up onto the highways, down onto the surface streets through the neighborhoods—and then we went asked to go back to the hotel he ended up pulling over and asking someone to interpret. The man on the street kept saying, "But your driver says he picked you up at the Sheraton. Now you want to go back there?" Eventually we worked it out and we made it back in one piece.

Early Wednesday morning found us at a Verizon call center in Hyderabad, one of 13 Verizon has around the world. This one operates from 7 a.m. to 12 midnight EST, and so was just winding down as we showed up at about 7:30 a.m. The place was filled with amusing peppy posters, encouraging people to be friendly and learn about cultural events in the U.S. Evidently the staff is encouraged to read CNN.com each day so they know what's going on in the U.S. that day. The call center is run by Nipuna, the BPO (business process outsourcing) wing of Satyam. Across the street from the IT park was the office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), that was literally bordered by shanties.

Then we were off to the Reuters Overseas Development Centre, which does a lot of IT infrastructure and some of the strategic planning for Reuters. The company has been one of the leaders in offshoring strategic and back-end functions and has a major center in Bangalore.

Wednesday night was a mess: The plane we were supposed to take to Mumbai blew a tire upon landing in Hyderabad so it was delayed and then canceled. We scrambled around, running the length of the airport to get our bags and rebook our flights. When the discount airline, Spicejet, with the next flight didn't accept AmEx, we started handing over credit cards to try to book the flight. I'm, in retrospect, happy to say that my Mastercard won't let me charge several thousand dollars in plane tickets in the middle of the night in the middle of India. We finally arrived in Mumbai at our hotel around 1:30 a.m., and I nearly had a break down over not being able to get my internet working. By the time I fell asleep, it'd been another 22-hour day.

Thursday morning we awoke in daylight. I was so confused and disoriented since this was the first morning of the trip that I'd awaken after sunrise. This was the scene out my hotel window. After a drive through Mumbai in a bright yellow school bus of sorts, we spent the day at the NASSCOM convention, which is the major trade association for IT/outsourcing companies in India. The convention was held in the Grand Hyatt, and when lunch came around Kara and I excitedly had a pizza lunch in the hotel's Italian restaurant. I like Indian food as much as anyone, but my stomach wasn't used to eating it three meals a day.

For our last night in India we headed to the J.W. Marriott hotel in Mumbai, which everyone we talked to singled out as one of (if not "the") night hotspot for Bollywood stars, over-the-top weddings, and nightlife. It was, indeed, one of the most impressive hotels I've seen anywhere in the world, and since it borders the ocean, there's a beach just beyond the amazing swimming pool. We had an incredible dinner at the courtyard buffet—probably the best meal of the trip—and it vastly improved my grumpy and exhausted mood.

Then it was back to the airport, one final glimpse of the Mumbai streets and the endless chaos and noise, one final run through the bureaucratic rigamole that is any process in India, and then back aboard Air France for the 9,000-mile journey home.

> Here's my full third set of photos.

Mumbai Traffic

So I still feel like I haven't been able to really "capture" just how crazy India was, but I figured that a little video might help. I shot these two videos out of the window of our bus while we were driving around Mumbai Thursday morning. It certainly doesn't capture the traffic, since I only shot while we were moving, not sitting still in the endless, complicated, and loud gridlock that gripped us for much of our movements.

It does, I think, give some sense of the landscape we were driving through—the mix of new things, old things, slums, humanity, and businesses, as well as the overall run-down-ness of nearly everything.

Also apologies for the bounciness, but neither the quality of Mumbai's roads nor the poor suspension on our bus were conducive to production-level video.

Here are the videos:

Transformative Change

So we took today to go out into the more rural areas around Hyderabad to look at the work going on in the villages. India has hundreds of thousands of villages and most are very primitive places. In a typical "small" village of 6,000 people, less than half of the houses have any sort of toilets or outhouses, the dirt roads are nearly impassable, and health clinics are generally 15 to 20 kilometers away. Unemployment runs very high and most families subsist on less than a dollar a day, the country's official poverty line.

We visited the village of Kandlakoyya, population 1,300, about an hour outside the city, to see the development efforts of the foundation started by Satyam's founder. At the education center, we were greeted by a row of kids who presented each of us with the rose. The richest man in the village, R.S. Raju, who made his fortune growing table grapes for the British grocery chain Tesco, showed us around with the foundation's head. The Byrraju Foundation "adopts" villages, then provides literacy training, plumbing, and things like water plants, education centers, clinics, a teacher and a nurse. In three cases, it's even opened a call center in villages to bring jobs and investment.

The education center was just incredible—each of the classes from the town's open air school come to it for a few hours each day to do play games, do arts and crafts, reading and writing exercises, and to play on the donated kid-proof computers. Since there's no reliable power, the computers are all run off batteries. The kids were so cute and it was obvious that this program was really giving them one of their first opportunities in life. The village itself was very primitive. Here's a photo of the fields nearby and here's one of the "store." I just can't get over how, once you get outside the high tech centers, so much of life in India is hardly different than it could have been 500 years ago.

Afterwards we toured the one-room health center and the water plant which is, for the first time, providing the village with safe drinking water. Each family comes daily to get a 12.5 liter jug. The water plant cost only $10,000 to set up and has been breaking even from its first month—even though a month's supply of water for a family costs just about a dollar.

I could write a ton on this visit but it really underscored for me the great opportunities here for transformative change. A $10,000 donation to a nonprofit in the U.S. would go almost nowhere—even if you gave it directly to one family it wouldn't make a transformative difference in a family. Here, though, pretty modest investments in this village will radically change the lives of everyone in the village. These kids have a future they never had before. Heck, the whole village has a future it never had before.

In the afternoon, we visited the Emergency Management Research Institute, another part of Satyam's founder's efforts. India has no 911 system or even a government-run ambulance service. If you were injured or needed medical attention you were pretty much on your own to get to the hospital unless you tracked down the number of a nearby hospital and got them to send out one their own ambulances, most of which have no life support systems. Beginning with the state around Hyderabad, EMRI is rolling out a unified emergency number (108) and setting up its own free ambulance system. So far they have 72 ambulances. Right now they're getting about 10,000 calls and in 18 months of operation have saved 6,500 lives—about one in ten medical calls they receive. They're also handling dispatching for police and fire, which have no central dispatching either.

Again, it's a transformative change: One number where anyone to call and get the help they need and, because the ambulances are pretty state-of-the-art, far more help than they ever could have before. The plan is to cover all of the state by May and all of India by 2010. The cost? 10 rupees per person per year or roughly a dollar annually per person—or, to put it another way, for less than what the U.S. is spending in 48 hours in Iraq, India could have a real emergency management system and save a conservative estimate of one million lives a year.

It's sad that the Indian government isn't up to providing these services like water, health clinics, and ambulances itself, but it's so great to see entrepreneurs stepping in to solve their nation's own problems.

Growing up, I've seen all those commercials about how for just a few pennies a day you can save some child in Africa or similarly impoverished countries, but it was just amazing to see that in full color today—and the village we visited is far better off than most since it's close enough to Hyderabad and linked by good enough roads that we could get there.

I was really moved by today. Technology is giving these Indians amazing opportunities for the future—and they've had so few for so long.

Hyderabad Bazaars

Sunday was our only real day of sight-seeing on this trip--we met as a group early in the morning and set out to see the city. Hyderabad is India's fifth largest city with some seven million people--meaning it's about the size of L.A. and Chicago combined.

We started the day at the Birla Mandir, a temple to Lord Venkateshwara that overlooks most of the city. We had to take our shoes off to explore the sprawling marble edifice, but there were many people scurrying about brushing off the steps and hand-washing the surfaces so it appeared pretty clean.

Then we went to visit the Buddha statue in the middle of Tank Bund, the lake that connects Hyderabad with its twin city.

In the heart of the Muslim old city, we climbed the 500-year-old Charminar, shopped for a brief while in the bazaars at the base of it (I bought salad tongs for about 80 cents after some tough bargaining), and saw Mecca Masjid, the second-largest mosque in India, which can hold 10,000 people at a time and dates to the early 1600s. Everywhere we went we attracted quite the crowd--there aren't that many western tourists wandering around here, although our hotel is packed with western businesspeople.

We had a great tour guide, Kumar, for the day, who got repeatedly annoyed by the stragglers in the group and our poor bargaining skills. He finally stepped in when I was bargaining over some trinkets in a bazaar and somehow secured a lower price than I had even started negotiating for.

We saw a lot of kids out today, mostly pretty poor and mostly selling things. Speaking of selling things, one of the biggest snacks here on the street are fresh coconuts, where the sellar hacks the top off and sticks in a straw.

Our second-to-last stop was the Qutub Shahi Tombs, which are the only place in the world where an entire dynasty is buried in one place. About 400 years old, the tombs are in terrible shape now, although structurally they are amazing, giant buildings rising from the countryside.

We finished the day at Golconda Fort, an ancient 12th century bastion that protected the early empire here. After trekking the 1.5 km (and 340 steps) up to the top, we walked down the backside of the fort into the old palace where they're now doing a light and sound show in the evening. India's tourism infrastructure is as dilapidated as everything else—most buildings are run-down, dangerously unsafe, and defaced with all sorts of graffiti—so it's good to see them making the effort to bring some revenue into Golconda.

Anyway, sort of a brief write-up, but the days are long here.

Indian Travels, Part I

I'm just wrapping up my second day in India and have tons of thoughts to put to paper (or, as the case may be, bytes).

We spent much of the day just driving around Chennai—the city's sites are mostly its streets and the amazingly long Marina Beach, the second longest white sand beach in the world and where the 2004 tsunami infamously rolled ashore in India. We visited our host's impressive round church and stopped by to see the relics of Thomas the Apostle who, legend has it, was killed in Chennai long about 78 A.D. Mostly we just drove, with the windows down, let the city's humanity roll over us. The ubiquitous yellow autorickshaws and motorcycles zipped among us honking endlessly in what first seemed like chaos but gradually emerged as a highly refined system of rules of the road (Rule #1: The larger the vehicle, the more right of way it has). Suicidal pedestrians wandered across the streets as if its second nature; cow-drawn carts plied the roads alongside overcrowded city buses; and there were tons and tons of people. There's lots of activity on (and in) the streets, not the least of which are the endless merchants selling fruit,

This being my first trip to Asia, it was entirely mind-blowing. I had begun the morning with a walk around our pristine hotel, but turned around overwhelmed after only a few blocks. It was just sensory overload. The streets of India are exactly the way they're pictured in the Amazing Race or whatever other show you've been watching, but without the noise and the smells video and pictures capture such a tiny tiny part of the experience.

I just can't get over the incongruity of India: It's so high tech and low tech at the same time. There's amazing prosperity and opportunity just blocks away from squalor, beggars, and thatched hut communities. Tonight in Hyderabad, after braving crazy, loud traffic and swarms of people at the confusing airports, five minutes after checking into our Sheraton, I'm in my spacious room where Kenny G is playing on the TV and my wireless internet connection is letting me do an audio chat with K back home. Downstairs, we sat in the hotel's cigar and scotch bar listening to two Eastern European lounge singers perform cover songs. We could have been just about anywhere in the U.S.

Earlier today, just a few blocks from the gleaming glass high tech parks rising above the scrub jungle, we watched weary women load bricks onto their head to carry them into a decidely low-tech construction site. One minute you're on the cutting edge of the 21st century; the next, you could be in the fifteenth century.

Anyway, more later. Here's a selection of today's photos—looking back at them at the end of the day I'm disappointed at how little of the experience I captured, but it's not possible to do just with photos.