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This online checkin British Airways uses is brilliant - as we're preparing to shut the doors of this 777 the Gate Agent barges back into the aircraft to see if I am really on board. I am, and as I sit here watching Jarhead glorify the United States Marine Corps I remember the Marine friend of mine who spent a large part of Desert Storm putting bits of Iraqi soldier in American body bags, in an effort to facilitate their burial in accordance with Islam, and who won't now let his son join the military.
Chennai feels like other Asian places I have been through, the air thick with moisture, plenty of labour around, each job seems to be done by three or four people, except here some of them carry AK-47s, something you do not see in most other countries. One always wonders whether they're loaded, these types of guns aren't the most discerning in a crowd. Before you think I am beginning my India discovery by criticizing a country I don't really know - those guns are not a bad thing, many Asian governments do not trust their own military and police, which is why you see few armed soldiers and even fewer armed policemen in large Asian cities.
Tidel Park is a huge purpose built compound in the burgeoning technology sector of Chennai, at the same time a technology park and a business incubator. The Indians have taken the incubator concept to its next level - while I had been mightily impressed at the American laboratories I have worked at, by available services like gyms and dry cleaning pickup, Tidel Park has everything from shopping, financial and business services, tennis courts, swimming pools, to lunch for 15 Rupees (that's a quarter, folks - by comparison, a two course room service dinner at the Comfort Inn costs $5) and a full service medical center. Advanced skills development is provided too, and I found on the first floor (second floor for Americans) a huge room with hundreds (not kidding) of job applicants, some nervously on the phone because they didn't have all the required paperwork, others filling out application forms and going on to interviews. Security is incredibly tight - they wouldn't even let my cab enter the compound until I had identified myself as a visiting manager. And there is a discipline you couldn't begin to think about in the US - when five employees enter a facility, all five will individually swipe their access cards, while my escorts would swipe me through first, then themselves, separately. Interesting also that nobody finds it even slightly unusual I would make it all the way out here - teams fly back and forth to the United States all the time, and I tell you that is a grueling trip.
My jet lag isn't too serious - it is compounded by two factors: stopping at London's Heathrow Airport and calling some friends there, which involved having to figure out what the local time was, and connecting back with colleagues in the US. I know how to avoid jet lag by forcing my mind to synchronize with the local time quickly - mostly, what you want to avoid is going to bed the first day, even if you do arrive in the middle of the night. Also setting one's watch to the destination time as soon as you board the airplane is very beneficial. But constantly having to remember what time it is back home does scramble the brain, and that gets worse if back home is on a different day, as well.
It does not really matter where you stay - there is no foreigner friendly public transport in cities, so you use cabs. That varies from motorized rickshaws that are fitted with a taximeter, to public taxis, more like our limousine service. A non airconditioned car has a flat rate of $3, anywhere in the city, an airconditioned car will set you back $12 (good for arriving at your business meeting without those nasty shadows under your armpits). Don't tell them I told you, but it is the same car, the cheaper rate it has the airconditioning not turned on, although you can certainly ask the driver to do that - tip him a buck and he won't squeal on you (you pay the hotel travel desk for your taxi rides). Getting from A to B can easily take an hour or more, so plan for travel time - the city is huge and traffic congested, but moving - in Jakarta I once sat in a traffic jam for three hours. Once at your destination you can have your car wait for you, or you can time your visit and call the hotel to be picked up. Hailing a local cab runs you the risk of not being understood, or the driver not knowing where to go. One thing I have not seen here is the "car call", a transportation desk that will assist you in getting a cab, as it is done in Indonesia. Chennai is, I guess, less geared to tourism than is Jakarta, but in Indonesia there used to also be a flavour of not wanting tourists running loose all over the city - here, they don't care.
The sights and sounds of Chennai are overwhelming - along with waterways so polluted they can't sustain any form of life. The city appears to be removing the shantytowns from the riverbanks - they must be part of the reason for the pollution. Ram, the driver the hotel assigned to me, took me on a tour of temples and churches this afternoon, and tomorrow we will go to Kanchipuram, a town 70 km north of Chennai, where there are more temples, old and new. I am not a religious nut, but there are temples all over this enormous country, some well over 1,000 years old, and I do listen to advice. The Government Museum on Pantheon Road I visited this morning has some 1,100 years' worth of religious artifacts.
At the same time there are visible attempts at getting the problems under control. Evironmental control measures abound - motorized rickshaws, or "autoricks" do use two stroke engines, but they have to get pollution certification, while most if not all public transportation runs low sulfur diesel engines - like many of the cars, home grown in the Tata factories, Chennai is the Detroit of India. Gasoline costs about that same it does in Europe - about a dollar U.S. per litre, $3.50 per gallon - a heck of a lot of money for your average Indian. That will certainly curb the use of automobiles, and public transportation is available in abundance.
The population is very welcoming and friendly, and service is unlike any I have ever seen. From the housekeeper who maintains my floor via front desk staff to the bellhop, no effort is too great. Coming back from a shopping escapade I carried in the just bought travel case full of goodies for the home front, but was stopped by the bellhop, who insisted on carrying it for me: "That is my job, Sir". The food is out of this world, even the buffet variety dinner the restaurant serves for some 220 Rupees, five bucks, has four courses and some 15 different main course dishes, all you can eat. So I am not coming home 15 lbs lighter, like I normally do when traveling. I've been stuffing my face with this gorgeous Indian food every chance I get. And it does taste different from what is available in the US - for one thing, a mildly spicy dish is equivalent to about a five alarm chili, and most dishes are not mild... No wonder the Kingfisher beers come in 750 cc bottles.
Somehow I find the discrepancy between the 21st century and the impoverished peasant here even more extreme than in Indonesia - quite literally, ox carts and Javascript side-by-side. While the countries are taking full advantage of what the modern world has to offer, all it takes is a drive outside the big city to see what almost amounts to a medieval way of life - except the villages get their water from tanker trucks, there are wireless payphones, some hutches even have satellite dishes. We tend to forget, in the West, that in the tropics heating is unnecessary, and dinner grows on trees. Actually, even water grows on trees - coconut sellers are everywhere. My driver got me one, the other day, when I said I was thirsty - after I drank the contents he took it back to the cart, where it was split in half and the meat cut out so I could eat that. The shell is used in construction and for making household objects - nothing goes to waste, it is Mother Nature's can of soda and recycling, all in one. I do not subscribe to the nonsensical notion that India is progressing too fast - I believe the outsourcing industry has revenues of some $ 8 billion this year - money that will make its way into the lower echelons of society, even if that may take a generation. As is the case in Indonesia, even the improvements in infrastructure to support the technology regions provide jobs and income to many, the cleanup of Chennai's shanty towns goes on 24 hours a day. It is going on right outside my hotel - if you look at the picture in my March 15 entry, below, the close side of the riverbank is being cleaned up, the other shore shows the shanties. They're bringing landfill down there all night.
Kanchipuram, where I visited today, is indeed a town full of temples, over a thousand, I am told. My driver took me to a few, one being built new today, with replicated artwork. Another has a core dating back to the fifth century, and all of these temples are in active use today, except for the oldest, which is an official antiquity, it is fenced in and watched over by personnel from the Indian Department of Antiquities. That temple contains ancient painted illustrations and there are remnants of colouration on some of the statues. For the paint to have lasted 1,400 years in this heat and humidity is truly amazing. Weddings are performed in many temples, Hindus from all over India come to worship, and there is tourism, of course. The temples are a money machine, as well, touts will walk you all over the complex as an unofficial tour guide, then ask for your contribution and they'll tell you in no uncertain terms if you're not contributing enough. In one temple a priest is dispensing blessings to all comers at speed, $10 a pop, and they have waived the "no shoes" rule in the complex so as not to inconvenience the tourists. You can even enter the inner sanctum, something that isn't allowed in most temples if you are not a Hindu. But for the $10 he blessed my driver, as well. And there is a fee for photography and video - in the Government Museum (every city has one) I had to buy a permit for photography. Prices for Indians and foreigners are different, in many places, of course, and listed as such.
Having your driver blessed is no luxury - the highway is under construction, some bits are dual carriageway, some are not, and it is not uncommon to switch from one side to the other and find three vehicles (including two trucks) barreling down straight at you - nobody brakes, either, you all kind of swerve around each other. It is also not uncommon to find two ox carts or a bus(!) coming down your side of the road in the wrong direction, straight atcha, on their way to the next intersection to get to their side of the road - no overpasses here. No surprise, then, that on the 3 hour drive I saw two accidents that had just happened - a car barreled into a turning truck, and in the other a motorcyclist had met up with another truck, head on, the truck facing the wrong way... I remember my colleague Raj at the lab in New York not coming back from India after a visit home, and being told he'd had a head on collision with a truck. We laughed about his impetuous driving, but now I understand that his driving probably had little to do with it. But there are emergency stations with well equipped and staffed ambulances all along the highway, and I drove past at least three very large teaching hospitals. Medical tourism is, after all, now a source of income - procedures are performed by Western educated doctors with the latest equipment, in fully staffed clinics, at probably a third of the price you'd pay back home. A new concept, I suppose, the "liposuction holiday".
Anyway, the restaurant clearly was catering to tourists - security guards inside and a police officer outside. There appears to be little crime, leaving my backpack and cameras on the table while we went to the washroom was quite OK, I think it is more the beggars and sellers they're keeping out. So we sat down in the open space and I was given a menu, and as my driver didn't get one I asked him if he was eating. Turned out he only ate "Indian food", and he said what I was going to eat was "fried rice". It all looked Indian to me, but clearly not to him. So when I asked him where we'd get that Indian food he said that that was upstairs. We headed up there and it turned out that here was where most of the the locals ate - you get a bowl of rice, food and condiments are served continually, on a large palm leaf you wash down with drinking water before they start serving. You pay up front, fixed rate, 38 Rupees per person, that is less than a dollar, and you're served what is served today. We ended up with a crowd of wait staff around our table (I tend to want to eat with my driver on these trips) who clearly couldn't remember the last time a Westerner had come upstairs to eat indigenous food. I did insist on munching on dried peppers (thank God colleague Raj, the one who had the accident, had trained me in eating raw dried pepper), but I must admit to a coughing fit when I tried one particular sauce. "Water, water" Ram said, all concerned I would choke on the spices. Like I said, delicous, what's the point in coming to India and then eating Westernized food? You do eat with your hands, no knives or forks here. I remember Jacquie taking me to an Indian restaurant in Singapore that served the same food, the same way, but in S'pore of course you get eating implements.
One more day, and a trip to (probably) the resort town of Mamallapuram, where there are ancient rock carvings along with superb seafood, or so I am told. Then Thursday I am heading for Bangalore and yet more high tech environment. Spent much of today troubleshooting something gone wrong in the States, and doing some shopping in the afternoon. I did withstand the temptation to buy gold - very high quality here, at 750 Rupees a gram, but I just can't face the hassle in U.S. Customs coming back, not my thing. I had taken a look at going to Hyderabad, but the cheapest hotel I could find there was $225 a night, and a week of that is well outside of my vacation budget. Some other time, perhaps. Instead, I'll take the day train to Bangalore, and will get to see some India from the Indian Railways perspective. I will leave you with a picture of a medical building I noticed this afternoon, while I watch England doing unmentionables to India on the third day of the (cricket) test match in Mumbai. Quite a feat in that heat - 38 centigrade. And on the other channel two Kenyan women are running a bunch of white ladies right off the track at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia. If I close my eyes for a moment I am back living in London...
Some 45 km south of Chennai is the village of Mamallapuram, at once a temple town (but which town here is not) and a beach resort. The coast road south to Pondicherry turns into a toll road just outside of Chennai, and so it only takes an hour or so to get to Mamallapuram once you leave the city proper. It is an interesting place in that it is full of rock art, temples hewn out of the granite rock outcrops and boulders that litter the landscape, some dating back to the 7th century A.D. - note the temple in the ocean facing side of the rock in the picture. Interesting stuff - get the Lonely Planet guide to South India and you'll learn all about it. Most of the sites are Indian Heritage Sites, and so they are well tended and the usual bands of hustlers and "guides" are not allowed in. There is no need for them as there are informational panels everywhere, though they will try and annoyingly get your attention just outside the manned gates. Avoiding a young woman beggar with a child on her arm, my driver commented "not even her own, they rent those babies".
The drive down is at once interesting and eery. Interesting, because there are artist's communities and backpacker hostels all along the toll road, eery, because the usual disheveled and messy peasant villages are lacking. Here, you see, is where the tsunami wiped all coastal fishing villages completely off the map - not well publicized because the Indian government performed its own cleanup, away from the Phuket limelight. Driver Ram simply shrugged his shoulders when I asked him how many people were lost here - "We don't know". These were peasant villages that were very likely completely wiped out, nobody left to tell the tale, and many of these folks would not have had a birth certificate, and were not registered anywhere. So while the coastline has been cleaned up, there are some ruined stone buildings left, and some impossibly tidy new villages have been built with aid of European Union countries and charitable organizations like the Chennai Rotary Club. There are only a few, the original population largely having been drowned.
By comparison with Chennai, Bangalore immediately conveys the big city flavour, complete with a cabbie who musta learned the trade in Manhattan, blasting through traffic at breakneck speed, you are supposed to feel important when they do that. From Bangalore City Junction you pass through Bangalore's film district, block after block of studios and production companies, long trains of support vehicles parked everywhere, a male couple walking hand in hand. India, after all, has the largest film industry in the world.
Indian Railways conveyed me to Bangalore in the promised six hours, on a comfortable train in an airconditioned car with reclining seats, a continuous supply of coffee and Indian food brought to your seat, the train left on time and got to Bangalore at 2 in the afternoon. The railways appear reliable and comfortable. Indian Railways has its own police, and security includes armed officers that ride and actively patrol the trains. Curious to see a mix of AK-47s (India has in the past bought a lot of armament from the then Soviet Union), and locally manufactured copies of WWII designed British Sten and Bren guns. Handguns are worn the way British officers used to wear them in days long gone by, in a closed leather holster high on the hip. In the stations, men as well as women constables patrol the platforms, and each station has a "Railways Protective Service" office. The conductor doesn't just come to punch your ticket, he actually has a list of seat numbers and corresponding passenger names and ages, and he checks you off as he punches your ticket. Across the aisle from me an Indian couple with a small child, traditional dress, except the wife is wearing hiking boots instead of sandals. Very nice folks - from Ohio, of course....
The first day of a stay in a city is usually taken up with some necessary shopping, getting one's bearings, doing laundry, negotiating with the travel desk (I'll get to that in a minute) and, uh, general chores. One of the problems the Westerner faces all over Asia is that it isn't considered polite to say "no", and so in each culture you have to figure out which yes means "maybe not". Something especially disconcerting here in India is that most of the people I interact with often shake their heads to and fro as they're speaking, and I have to date no clue what that means. It is body language, clearly, probably has a negative meaning, but the exact portent escapes me.
This driver also has a hard time understanding me, so it took quite a while for him to find Foodworld when I insisted on going to a supermarket. Similarly, when I wanted to go to a mall he took me to one of those tourist trap "trade centers" where you can buy overpriced saris, sculptures and carpets. The driver gets compensated for taking you there, and though I like to spread the wealth, I flatly refused today, he was not very pleased. "You're the boss" he said, but knows as much as I do that one is dependent on good communication with one's driver. By the time I got back another manager had the travel desk, and he was much more amenable - I'd been looking for a portable multi-standard DVD player, and after my driver took me to a couple of places that don't sell them, the manager finally walked me across the street, through an alleyway, and into a five storey shopping center with little booths, where the locals shop. The same Sony player I had seen in an upscale mall in Chennai for $133 was quoted here as costing $62. "Yes", the manager commented "if I come with you and haggle it'll probably cost $40". QED.
So I found a nightlight-cum-insect repellent that costs $1.50, you can buy refills for it, and it doesn't smell the place up like mosquito coils do, which can also do a good job of setting the place on fire if you're not careful. It will be part of my tropics kit, I bought half a dozen refills (each lasts up to 45 days, and they're resealable). Stuff like that is best to get immediately after arrival, it is cheaper here, and it runs on 220 VAC, which most countries use. Any supermarket stocks these things, and other supplies you're likely to need, like shampoo, deodorant, and Listerine, are also on the shelves, your familiar brands at about a third of what you would pay Stateside, a quarter when considered in Euros. One thing you really have to watch is whether bottled water is fresh. In this Comfort Inn in Bangalore a bottle of water was thoughtfully provided with coffee and tea, but when I checked the seal was broken. That usually means the staff has swiped the new bottles to sell them, and given you a refilled used bottle. This, as you can imagine, is not a safe thing, as cholera and typhoid are water borne. So watch out for this, in Chennai everything was very shipshape, but here in Bangalore, the ripoff game is in full swing, with you as the intended victim.
My sister comments (thanks for visiting, Sis!) in my guestbook that when she visited India, trains stopped long enough that you could go to the bathroom during a stopover. Now I have of course taken the sum total of one train here, and that was an Express to boot, but it does look like that has changed. Several stops we made were actually less than a minute(!) long, and the train left on the dot and arrived on the dot. And that is only possible if the other trains run on time too, or the works would get gummed up. And the trains actually have bathrooms, clearly marked "Western" and "Indian", but I have not been courageous enough to try one.
I want to do some testing with my DVD writer at home, which is supposedly capable of burning PAL standard DVDs (PAL is the European/Asian TV system, NTSC the American one - PAL is roughly based on a synchonization at 50 cycles per second, which yields 25 frames per second, where NTSC is based on the 60 cps mains frequency, and thus yields 30 fps - the tradeoff being that the European standard has a higher resolution at fewer frames). As I do not possess a PAL player I have no way of testing this, and so I bought a portable player that allegedly handles both. A man's gotta have his toys, you know. With that I went into a big music store and bought a DVD and two VCDs (a popular CD video format out here that never made it to the West) and then wondered how I am supposed to tell if these American and British movies are official or knockoffs. They have authenticity certificates and holographic stickers on the box, but I have no way of figuring out whether those are real or not. It is an interesting question as somebody recently got nabbed at Seattle Tacoma by U.S. customs with a bunch of these, and fined quite a bit for illegally importing stolen copyrighted works. The ones I bought state on the box they are "For Sale Only In India", and have an export prohibition "by way of trade". So I should be good, we'll see. I have had to buy a new suitcase to put the local goodies in, mostly gifts, this is turning out to be quite a shopping excercise.
Right now we're trying to figure out if the Aerospace Museum is or isn't open - they seem to think that area of the airport is now off limits, but their website says they're open. India has a mixed track record in the aerospace industry - it has its own launch vehicles and has put some communications and scientific satellites in orbit, but has contracted some of the larger satellite manufacture and launch out to European and Russian entities. For President Bush to make an attempt at improving commercial ties between the United States and India is not a bad idea. This is a large country with significant resources, and I can see from my hotel TV service their focus is more on Europe and their own neighbourhood. Several channels carry BBC World programming, although there is a local CNN variety available, and much of the rest of the broadcasting is provided by companies owned by Rupert Murdoch - though nominally a U.S. citizen (the U.S. government obliged Mr. Murdoch to apply for U.S. citizenship when one of his companies wanted to buy an American broadcaster - you cannot own a broadcast or telecommunications company if you're an alien) he pretty much has all of the Asian market sewn up with his satellite services, he is even making inroads into China. Australians, after all, are considered Asian, in these parts, and as such have a rather unique position in terms of market access. The picture to the right I took at the Tippu Sultan palace, here in town. A ruler of Bangalore, he finished the palace in 1791, only to die in 1799 at the hands of the British, who he had so pissed off by defeating them in battle twice that they eventually came with an army that made mincemeat of his, and of him. Tippu Sultan should have known better - the British always kept coming back until they got what they wanted, and had superior troops and battlefield techniques.
Taking a stroll through Bangalore's Lalbagh, an 18th century botanical garden right on the edge of old Bangalore, I sat down on a park bench for a moment, and found a young man on the same bench reciting English phrases he was trying to pronounce. I turned and told him to speak more slowly, one problem Indians have is that they speak English at the same clip they speak Tamil and other indigenous languages, fast, and without silence breaks between words. He gave me the paper he had been rehearsing from, and it turned out this was his English language introduction for a college interview he would attend tomorrow, Monday, detailing his schooling and work experience. Earlier this morning I had watched an Indian produced BBC documentary about English language call centers, the main theme being how hard it is for local call center agents to work across cultures with nothing but a voice and training to go by, they have after all never visited the UK and the USA.
And therein lies the problem. I find that each time I have a problem with my bank account, the call center agents in Bangalore are only able to find a resolution by getting in touch with their Buffalo, NY, counterparts, and that is hardly the idea behind having agents in India (this has got worse now that the bank won't even let me call the branch direct any more). A rather extreme but real example is that when I couldn't get the hotel in Chennai I had booked with to understand I wanted to be picked up by a hotel car from the airport, which involved their monitoring my flight in case of delay, I called Expedia, since I had booked the hotel through their service. Well, long story short, I ended up in a call center in the Philippines, which now began calling the hotel in Chennai for me. I gave up after twenty minutes on hold, having more important things to do, no offense, but my pidgin English is at least as good as that of a Filippino call center agent. Eventually I called my colleague Anand in Chennai from Heathrow Airport, and he took care of it for me, my flight was two hours late but the driver was there.
I don't mean to be negative about what is going on here, the Indian kettle is definitely on the boil and I won't presume to be able to predict the future. It is clear from what I see here, and earlier in Singapore, that the Indians and the Chinese have placed great emphasis on developing an educated workforce, and the Chinese have begun to not only buy American technology companies but even moving headquarters to the United States - viz. Lenovo, IBM's personal computer business that is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate. I will be curious to see if they will continue to build the technical wizardry into the Thinkpad that IBM used to (but T.J. Watson stuff may not be what the market needs, I just love it). So far, IBM's labrats are still assisting Lenovo in supporting the Thinkpad (although much of the support for earlier Thinkpads is nominally provided by Lenovo now). I know this because I just bought a reconditioned IBM Thinkpad, and find that the telephone support is provided by IBM in Canada and the USA, but the online engineering support redirects from ibm.com to lenovo.com. And the patents I see mentioned are still all registered to IBM, but then much of IBM's knowledgeware is subject to US Government GSA contracts and probably cannot be sold.
Curious to see wooden scaffolding used, lashed with rope, here in India - I know bamboo grows locally, and I would have expected to see that used more universally, as its tensile strength is higher than that of steel. I also note imported technologies all around me, often as part of joint ventures, but imported nevertheless. Many autorickshaws run on LPG (that is Liquid Petroleum Gas, the stuff you see flamed off at refineries), but the technology is Italian, and I see that some of those autoricks are manufactured by Italian scooter and vehicle manufacturer Piaggio. And I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of Tata cars I see driving around are Japanese or Korean designs, built under license. I have to say the Tata I am driving around in is comfortable and fitted will all modern electronics and amenities one expects. It has a small (1400 cc) diesel engine that is incredibly frugal - after a 100 km trip I could hardly notice the gauge coming down. A litre of the stuff cost around 34 Rupees, 75 cents US, one thing that is abundantly clear is that India has an energy problem.
Not having oil of its own it needs to import its fuel, Shell announced today it would double the capacity of its majority owned LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) terminal in the Northeast of the country. That is gas that is used for residential as well as commercial purposes, and for power generation. Power failures are common, although I have not experienced any that were longer than ten minutes or so (hotels all have emergency generators that kick in within 60 seconds or so). But how much of a problem it is was clear outside the local mall I went to the other day - there were some 20 small emergency generators sitting around, all prewired to various parts of the building, basically to help shoppers and staff to evacuate in case of a prolonged power failure. All of that, of course, is a consequence of impoverished peasants moving to the city to try and scrape some kind of income together. Indonesia tried to curb that by using a permit scheme, infamously tried previously by South Africa during the Apartheid era, but when your peasants don't have birth certificates or real home addresses there isn't much you can do to stop this trend. Not until large scale rural investment projects are implemented will you enable the peasant to escape poverty.
But I see few products that have "Made in India" printed on them - you can count them out on the fingers of one hand: China, Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam - well, OK, two hands. So perhaps India ought to think about whether the call center and software development craze will last. Returning NRI's - the term for Indians that emigrated overseas - are increasingly finding they can't afford to live in Bangalore. They look for homes and apartments built to Western standards with Western amenities, the stuff they were used to in the US and the UK, and find that they can't afford those on high end Indian salaries, typically 14 lakh rupees or so, a lot of money in this country. Lakh stands for 100,000 - the next "number up" is the crore - written as 100,00,000. Takes getting used to, but I think I am getting there... The shantytown pictured here, underneath an overpass, had lots of autoricks parked next to it, so I assume these are some of those rural migrants that are trying to make a living as cabdrivers here. Not so different from the many Pakistanis and Punjabis driving cabs in New York and Washington, really, many of those live in substandard accomodation. I noticed that there are water tanks in those shantytowns, the government making some effort to provide daily necessities. It is the absence of sewers that I think is a real health hazard.
I really don't worry about these things too much when I am headed somewhere, I once sweated it out in Indonesia when my driver barreled down the highway at 160 kph in a Toyota Corolla, but I am on vacation, for chrissakes, and if we get there tomorrow that is dandy too! Ah, yes, make it three hours of that. Each way.
Now if you had read my March 25 entry you'd know about Tippu Sultan, one of the local rulers, whose palace in Bangalore I visited. Here in Mysore, the man had a couple of palaces, one of which was situated inside an enormous fortification hundreds of acres in size. Tippu Sultan had the audacity to attack the British, helped by a couple of regional warlord brethren, and when he won he was silly or stupid enough to do it again. This all takes places in the late 1700's, the British are in the middle of conquering their colonies - like the Dutch, they have set up a corporation, the East India Company, complete with stockholders and institutional investors, which does the trading and management. Soldiers are provided by the English King, and sometimes by other governments as well. Long story short, by the time Tippu Sultan has given the British a bloody nose twice, they put together a large army consisting of British and French troops (strictly speaking competitors, but if Tippu had had his druthers he'd have driven them all back where they came from, the sea), as well as native batallions provided by a Brit-friendly Maharajah who thinks this is a splendid opportunity to get rid of a competitor, and then they not only barge right into Tippu's rather substantial fortifications, but clobber his army as well. They rather ungentlemanly disable Tippu's horse during the battle, proceed to shoot him in the head, and to drive the point home the Duke of Wellington orders Tippu's main palace destroyed, and himself moves into the Garden Palace, which still stands today, and has been turned into a museum celebrating Tippu's life and exploits.
The Maharajah, whose palace is some 30 kilometers up the road, remains friendly with the Brits, judging by the presence of two large portraits of the English King and Queen in his portrait gallery of family and friends, not to mention some rather expensive gifts courtesy of said Royals. Game, set and match, I suppose. The reason these conquests were largely successful, by the way, was that the settlers and soldiers more often than not became bondholders in the Company, and in many cases after a decade or so of duty were given land in the new dominions. These folks where thus quite motivated to help the Company succeed, and had absolutely no qualms about clobbering some Sultans along the way. Kind of a 401K forerunner, I suppose - the better we do our job and outwit the competition the more our pensions are worth.
Just another street in just another city in India, as the evening rush begins and the office workers begin to go home. The stores and the repair shops and the jewelers and all those other merchants stay open well into the evening, so there is another rush that starts around ten in the evening and doesn't finish until midnight. Packed in rickshaws and packed in buses, they go home to spend the evening with their families - the family bond is still strong in India, and the average adult has two children and several parents to take care of.
Duh. Here you are, at the invitation of the Indian government, and rather than try and arrive at an informed opinion, you simply assume you have the answer. Sometimes I wonder why somewhat dense people are elected into government - aren't Members of Parliament supposed to understand these issues, and have better insight than the average Joe or Mary? India has a very strong government, but it is a multiparty democracy. In a multiparty democracy, as most of Europe is, including The Netherlands, consensus can only be arrived at by negotiating - further complicated by having a couple dozen languages to contend with. Negotiating, especially in a huge and very populous country like India, takes time, and once, after due consideration, decisions have been taken and ratified, they need to be cascaded down to the grass roots level. Down through a vast bureaucracy, down to the level of the State governments, then down further, all the way to the region, the city, the district, the village and the individual, with lots of further democratic decision making along the way. Remember that to some extent the Indian system of governance is modeled on Anglo-Saxon, i.e. devolved, principles. The Dutch have as yet little experience of what that means, The Netherlands is not a federated state, and it will be a long time before the European Union has a true Europe wide government.
I visited the Hindustan Aerospace Industries museum today, based here in Bangalore, just outside of the airport, and basically saw that confirmed again - the majority of aircraft on display built locally, under license from American manufacturers with engines built locally under license from British manufacturers, and only some small agricultural and private aircraft homegrown. Curiously, I have seen a more advanced Indian designed jetfighter in a museum in Munich, Germany, than are on display here. I have to admit it made much more sense for the Indian Airforce to buy Soviet Mig 21 aircraft, and manufacture them under license, it is a jetfighter that suits Indian conditions very well, but at the same time this does not seem to have led to the local aircraft industry doing anything with the acquired knowledge, although the Army helicopter pictured here is a completely local design, using some of the latest technologies. Recent aircraft were suspiciously absent from the HAL museum, it may well be more advanced developments are kept under wraps due to the ever threatening conflict with Pakistan. There too, India is on the move, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeing off the new cross border bus himself, on live television, a couple of days ago, accompanied by a conciliatory speech.
On a completely different note, if you're looking for somewhere to have lunch or dinner in Bangalore I would make Angeeti your first stop. It is a rooftop restaurant, open air (but covered), and features a very local atmosphere and an out of this world lunchtime buffet, both veg (for Hindus) and non-veg. Indians do incredible things with veggies, you never want for meat or fish, I love combining the two. For 125 Rupees, $2.80, all you can eat, and a small crowd of bakers and cooks prepare fresh Tandoori bread (roti) and fresh fried dishes right in front of you. It is not a tourist trap - thankfully I got there early-ish, 1pm, by the time I left there was quite a queue, as you can see (Indians start late - at 7am, when where I work and play the rush hour would be in full swing, there is virtually no traffic on the roads here). A queue of Indians, I would like to emphasize, this is the real thing. Delish. #1, Museum Road, corner of Church St. You could shop on M.G. (Mahatma Ghandi) Road, a mile or so of any kind of shop you could ever want, and when you're ready for lunch Church Street is right behind it, and runs parallel.
Coming back to my hotel two motorcycle cops were cleaning up the square, carting away illegally parked motor bikes on the local equivalent of a tow truck. The guy in vertical stripes is the undercover cop who had called in the cavalry.
Last day in B'lore, and the travel desk insists on dragging me out to a safari park some 25 kilometers out of town. The highway is closed for repairs, of course, so I end up bumping along behind a bus for an hour on unpaved and semipaved roads narrow enough that buses cannot pass each other. But the route runs through native villages as well as the new upscale NRI settlements. NRI, that is Non Resident Indian, the Indian nouveau riche that went and got U.S. citizenship and made lots of $$s and now finds they can make as much or more in their own country, so they are busily building Indian style McMansions in Bangalore suburbs, gated communities and all. Some travel back and forth, others become RNRI, or Returned Non Resident Indian. NRIs and RNRIs have become a category all by themselves - their expertise as well as their dollars make them sought after for all sorts of reasons - major banks are setting up special accounts accessible in multiple currencies for them, and they attract their very own interest rates here - check out Citibank's offering. They have been discovered in the United States, too - Dish Network provides international cricket matches via PPV, and advertises them both in the US and in India. The entire India v. England series that began a couple of weeks ago with the Mumbai Test Match (which England won) can be watched for $195, and Dish Network has an exclusive on the England tour.
What is special about the zoo pictures I took is that these animals aren't in the zoo. That is, they are in the confines of the zoo, but not in an enclosure or cage. Curious, that - there are caged monkeys on exhibit, and then the ordinary monkeys jump around all over their cages when they are not begging food from the tourists. Lots of folks in the zoo today, it is the Hindu New Year and the streets of Bangalore are devoid of traffic, and most of the shops closed. And then I suddenly find myself eye-to-eye with a rather large elephant - now you have to understand I have been close to pachyderms before, in the zoo, in the circus, but these three (two females and a calf) are not in any cage or enclosure, and one is standing there right in front of my face. These things are huge - and they somehow seem bigger if they're untethered - that chain is not connected to anything. Honest. This monster could just accidentally step forward and turn me into a small puddle! "Hey, why worry, those kids get up close", I can hear you say, but you see, those are the mahout's kids, this animal knows them, but she doesn't know me from Ranjiv!
What is very conspicuous is the water management. Much of India has no water mains, even in the city I see areas that have water tanks. The government distributes safe potable water in tanker trucks, and those drive around filling up big black water tanks you see everywhere. They are on houses in rural areas, on street corners in small villages and even in shanties. The women pictured here came from the shanties I shot above, and are waiting for a ride to the nearest tank, from where they will bring clean water back with them (look on the house behind them and you will see one of those tanks). They make this trip every day, of course, but the important thing is that there is a significant effort being made to elevate their health and standard of living in this manner. There is also a huge drive going on to encourage couples to have no more than one child - the standard of health care in India has advanced to the point that the need for many children, so as to increase their statistical change of survival, is no longer there. Contraception is freely available, and abortion as well as sterilization are cheap - probably free in the charitable hospitals I see quite a few of. "One for Two" or "Two for One" is painted on the load gate of many a truck, and the rear of many autoricks.
When I first went to work in Indonesia, in the early nineties, building one of Indonesia's three cellular networks, secretaries and other staff came to work on the bus, and only had access to a telephone if there was one in their parental home. Two or three secretaries would prepare papers for another secretary to key in, and only that secretary had a computer and a phone.
It is truly astonishing how much the folks in Chennai make you feel at home and welcome. Hotel staff greeted me like an old friend, everyone, including the busboy, wanted to know how I had liked Bangalore, and I am talking about 8 or 9 staffers and restaurant staff coming up to me and asking me about my vacation and my travels. Folks in Bangalore are friendly too, but this is exceptional. And, having eaten in all kinds of restaurants for three weeks, I now know for sure that the restaurant here in the hotel is exceptional too. I am not given to superlatives that much, but this place is really special, even if only because the rooms are state of the art and large enough to throw a party in, there is even a small refrigerator in the suitcase stand. Driver Ram was, all smiles, waiting for me at the magazine stand as arranged. Add to that that it'll cost you no more than Motel 6, with the service level of a five star hotel in Boston, you should honestly consider coming here for a vacation. British Airways has competitive fares, there is tons of ancient Indian culture to absorb, and if you're really looking for sand and sea, that is just up the road from here, a mountainous region is just inland, and there are many terrific hiking opportunities. Security is abundant - there is plenty of police, hotels, restaurants and shopping malls augment this with private security, some of which is armed. English is widely spoken, for the upper crust it is the primary language, street signs, television and newspapers all are available in English. British and American movies and television series are broadcast in English, separate channels have dubbed versions for the native population, DVDs and VCDs have an English and five different Indian language sound tracks. Your ATM card will work in the hundreds of ATMs around town, while almost every shop takes credit cards. Mind one thing though: it is now summer here, and the past couple of days temperatures have come up to around 96 - in the shade. It is 85 now, 9:30pm, and that is as low as it is going to get.
I am sitting here with Monk going on on the box - much to my delight this television set has video in- and outputs on the back, and that gave me a chance to test the portable DVD player I bought in Bangalore. In so doing, I discovered that the television set (a local Philips model) actually supports both the European PAL and the American NTSC standards - one of the reasons I bought a DVD player here is that they are multi-standard, both in terms of being able to play all DVD standards and regions, but also being able to output to PAL as well as NTSC. This is how I discovered there is such a thing as PAL60, which I assume is a standard developed for countries with 60Hz mains power, as opposed to the 50Hz original PAL is designed to handle. Asia is a hotchpotch of standards, I saw a CDMA deskphone (that's right, a desk telephone with an antenna rather than a phonewire connecting to a local CDMA cellular network - look Ma, no hands!) in Bangalore, manufactured locally by Tata, while South Korea and Japan use systems and power based on the American NTSC and 60 cycle 117 volt mains standards. Autoswitching TV technology has been around for a long time, it makes sense to just build one multistandard system for Asia, in those volumes the effect on prices would be negligible. The stuff you don't find out when you're playing around...
Chennai is clearly more international than Bangalore, though Bangalore is supposedly India's international IT hub. The cable system has satellite stations from Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Malysia, England and the United States. As I am surfing channels the Indian news channels report live from the NASDAQ studio on Broadway, as the U.S. market is just opening when I write this. One special report provides detailed information on all Indian stocks trading on Wall Street. One feels connected to the world in this place. It is indeed possible to travel around and get places in English, although it is at times hard to understand people. Curiously enough, that isn't due to their lack of English, but the average Indian speaks English at about twice the clip we're used to, doesn't pause between words, and doesn't use verbal punctuation, the quality of speech where ends of sentences or comma-emphasized utterances are indicated by rising and falling pitch. I should imagine it isn't a problem when you're here for a longer period of time, but I am for now having a hard time with it, although people will happily repeat and rephrase when necessary. Another problem is that when dealing with clerks and drivers it is sometimes hard to figure out if they did not understand you, or if they simply don't want to tell you you're wrong. This isn't new to me, Indonesians do the same thing, I remember once driving four times around the block in Jakarta when the hotel driver (my regular driver had the day off) wouldn't take me into a native neighbourhood. Drivers are told where they can't take a "whiteface", but in this case I had a really hard time persuading this driver that my office was in the kampong, and that I really knew where I was going. And as it was impolite for him to tell me why we couldn't go in there, he simply kept driving around.
I am still puzzled why India uses wood so much - bamboo grows well here, though it probably is not indigenous. But bamboo grows fast, and as I mentioned, it has higher tensile strength than steel, it is an ideal construction material. It is used all over China, I have seen it in general use in Indonesia, but no sign of it here, other than for decorative use in parks, as you see it here. Perhaps it is a cultural thing, much like most houses in the United States are built on a wood frame, even though wood is no longer either cheap or abundantly available. Telephone poles in India are made from concrete, so are railway sleepers.
I have, of course, plenty more pictures of India, perhaps I will do a picture page, some of them are too good not to share. I try to keep my website manageable in terms of page layout, and reasonably fast loading for those on slow Internet connections. Web designers all too often do not realize that some 70% of all Internet users in North America are on dialup speeds, it is amazing to me how many e-commerce companies do not require their webdesigners to test webpages at low speed. After all, if you're trying to sell stuff, or provide online services, what makes you think those millions of users are prepared to wait for ten minutes or more so they can buy from you, or use your online whatchamacallit? If you are selling really fancy webcapabilities, or sell web design, sure, but otherwise using Flash, or server push technologies (which makes webpages uncacheable), is to me overkill, and completely unnecessary - even if you just want web surfers to read your stuff, why should you make that hard? Apart from anything else, many Internet users in third world countries are on slow links, and today's world really has no borders, as we have seen in this India log. Letting your site go into secure mode from the login page, and staying there, unnecessarily, is another one of those techniques that should be grounds for divorce. And forcing your customers to go to your website to read a statement, instead of making your data downloadable directly from Quicken and other financial management software is another one of those mortal sins. "We do this for security reasons" says Bank of America. Bull. You do this so you can put marketing material in front of your customer.
The picture above I took from the passenger seat of my hotel car on the coast road from Chennai to Pondicherry, a former French enclave that comes across like a Mediterranean village - another example of the somewhat disconcerting drivestyle of the average Indian driver on a highway without central divider - and this one was comparatively well behaved. The pictures below I took on that same trip, they kind of speak for themselves, and I was pleased to take a side road and find this development right behind the coast line. They are everywhere - this coastline was truly demolished for hundreds of miles, and the reason there are some many new resorts and hostels and restaurants along this stretch of road is that just about everything was demolished tens of miles inland. But the area is coming back, although it is very clearly slow going. You can see hundreds of acres of barren land, all over this area, barren and without vegetation, which was killed by the salt water that was deposited inland. All of these areas have to be reclaimed and desalinated before they can be used to live on or for agriculture. Some have been turned into salt pans, to produce upmarket sea salt.
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport now has an entirely new wing with terminals, and is even more of a shopping mall than before. I am not overstating - this is not a terminal with some Duty Free stores, you can shop for almost anything at the airport, from clothes and fine foods to cut diamonds, electronics, cellphones, Rembrandt replicas, tulip bulbs and Delftware porcelain. I had been meaning to buy a couple of two way radios with NOAA weather alerts for a long time, NOAA being the American national weather alert system, and there is a pair of U.S. standard Cobras for 31 Euros in the electronics store at Schiphol. Those I had only found in the US for $80 and up - ideal when hunting, they let you keep in touch with a hunting buddy while alerting you to any severe weather about to hit your area. London has some pretty good shopping too, but I now doubt there is any way Heathrow can catch up to Schiphol. Especially since Schiphol has created a large mall in the landside arrivals area as well, an airport mall concept that achieved something nobody ever expected to take off: a family shopping outing area, accessible via the railways from all major conurbations in the middle and western Netherlands. Families go there at the weekend for shopping and the food court, it is a railway hub from where you can catch local, regional and international trains, and it is probably the safest mall in the Netherlands as it isn't patrolled by private security but by submachine gun toting Marechaussees, the paramilitary border guards that take care of airport security here. Abundant parking, local buses and always available taxis, combined with close proximity to Amsterdam (it took under 20 minutes to get to the airport from my sister's apartment, at 7am) make it a hopping place. I'd put it a notch above Singapore's Changi Airport, if it weren't for the open air rooftop smoking zone there, which features a Zen meditation garden, full bar and a swimming pool.
With my bags of old Dutch cheese and herring - deep frozen matjes herring is sold at Schiphol in special "cold" trays, and the delicatessen now has insulated thermos bags available for both frozen and chilled purchases - I head for the 45 minute British Airways flight to London, a good old full British breakfast at Garfunkels, where I have enough time to read my mail and hit Dixons to get batteries for the Cobra radios I just bought at Schiphol. Then it is time to board my flight to JFK, where the U.S. Customs agent asks me about the animal products I state on the form I am carrying. When she finds out I have Dutch cheese and herring on me, I can see her think "you're one of those expats" and she waves me through, which makes me happy because apart from all of my India and Amsterdam shopping I was naughty and bought a really expensive solar powered watch in the airplane from India, she doesn't notice the tan underneath the wristband, phew..... The only discord of the day happens: a delayed gentleman traveler heading back to San Francisco in the American Airlines terminal, who after three Maker's Marks and three pints of Guinness decides to declare his undying friendship for me, getting both loud and annoyingly physical in the process. After a bite to eat I decide to go hang out at my departure gate, where I can read in peace, and make some calls.