Headed Home

Mumbai/Paris/New York/Cincinnati/Austin

I don’t know how they expect me to fly halfway across the world without a little TV monitor right in front of me. I actually did watch two movies on the plane, even though I had to watch them on the awkwardly placed common screens.

The Indian movie was bad. Really bad. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to recount it in clichéd “boy meets girl” format:

Boy sees girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy finds out where girl lives. Boy goes to girl’s apartment. Boy professes love for girl. Girl does not reciprocate. Boy goes home dejected. Boy attempts suicide. Girl finds out that boy has attempted suicide over her. Girl decides to give boy a chance. Girl falls in love with boy. Boy and girl spend gobs of time together. Girl attempts suicide (scarf on the ceiling fan style—nice touch). Boy finds girl attempting suicide. Girl reveals that she is in debt. Boy robs bank for girl. Boy finds out girl is actually married to someone else and that she and her husband have schemed to get him to rob a bank for them. Boy plots revenge. Boy fights with girl’s husband. Girl dies.

My favorite part of the film was that not only were there two attempted suicides, which seems like a lot, the second of them was just a trick, the woman’s way of letting her fake boyfriend think she’s really desperate.

The other movie was Sideways, a movie that several of us were excited to see. But I think that everyone who watched it ended up somewhat disappointed. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best movie to watch in the middle of the afternoon on an airplane, but I still think that film critics must be chronically depressed human beings. If you create a movie where people just kind of trudge around through the molasses of their own introspective miserableness, you’ve got a cult hit and a critical masterpiece on your hands.

Our stopover was once again in Paris. You know, you hear a lot about people who go to Europe, and they come back hating the French. Well, I went to India, and I came back hating the French. And it wasn’t just me. We saw a lot of tourists in India (we were often mistaken for British or Australians), but the French tourists just seemed a little more annoying than the others. There was a big group of them at the hotel in Jaipur who seemed obnoxious, and ever since then it seemed that the people who were most likely to be irritating in some way were the French people.

In India you could get a Coke for 15 rupees, or about 30 cents. In the Charles de Gaulle Airport you can buy a Coke for about three Euros, which is about four dollars.

Many of us had pretty much the same experience flying into JFK. We were greatly anticipating being back on terra firma in the United States and not having to worry about the dirtiness, the smell, the way people treated you, the animals all over the place, and the way just about everything was substandard. As soon as we got into New York, the elevator didn’t work, some of the people were rude, and there were pigeons at the gate. Still, they were our animals and broken stuff and rude people.

Next stop: Cincinnati. We were greatly looking forward to Cincinnati because we had a four-hour layover and could have hamburgers and get our first glimpse of the NCAA Tournament. The burgers were good, and the tournament was better. I got to see the end of the Michigan St.-Kentucky game, which turned out to be a classic. It was a good game, but really it was good to be watching any kind of ballgame again in the United States. That’s when I really felt like I was back home.

It became obvious pretty quickly that not too many of the scheduled flights were making it out on time. Our flight was supposed to leave at a few minutes to nine, but we were pushed back gradually, and we didn’t actually leave until almost midnight. During our long wait, every one of us slept at one point or another. I taught Texas Hold ‘Em to Shinji and Lili.

When we finally got back to Austin, the entire airport was closed except for us. Shinji and I caught a cab back to Oak Park, and I spent about as much on that cab as I had on all of my rickshaw rides in India. And the cab ride didn't even raise my heart rate.

“You Call Him Dr. Jones, Doll!”

Udaipur/Mumbai

We flew out early this morning for Mumbai, where it all started. We got a hotel room on Juhu Beach and pretty much stayed there all day. I tried to watch the cricket match, but somehow we got stuck watching The Gangs of New York. I went down to the business center to watch the match and to send out an email of my journal entry from Sunday.

Today was when Holi really gets going. Out in the streets there were people just covered in powder, and in the airport on the way over here we saw people embracing as a way of spreading powder onto one another.

A bunch of us ate dinner together at the Chinese place in the hotel. It was great because it had a giant lazy Susan in the middle of the table, just like in Indiana Jones. I did my best Short Round impersonation.

The food of the day was the Thai fried rice I had for dinner. They had Thai chicken fried rice and they had veggie Pad Thai, but they didn’t have chicken Pad Thai. So Justin and I both asked for chicken Pad Thai. They brought it to Justin, but to white boy they brought just the chicken fried rice. Racists. Oh yeah, and Beth had them put jalapenos on our chicken and pineapple pizza at lunch, and that was pretty good, too.

A Good Friday

Udaipur

Today was a day of lasts. The last “real” day of vacation. The last palace. The last real Indian meal. The last butterscotch ice cream. The last cricket conversation with a native. And the last time I let somebody stick colored powder on the back of my head.

Today marked the start of Holi, which, as I understand it, is an ancient Hindu holiday whose purpose is to throw colored powder on Daniel Lauve. As we were walking through the streets of Udaipur we saw elephants walking through the streets and people putting colors on other people’s foreheads. I didn’t want any stuff being thrown on me, so I tried to avoid the guy who was sticking people. Apparently he was going to get me whether I wanted color on me or not, because he was still trying to put his fingers on my forehead even after I refused. I tried ducking underneath his hands, and he ended up getting me on the back of my head. Now there’s three fingerprints on the back of my head—it looks like the guy thought my head was a bowling ball. And I’ve got pink on my shorts and shirt because the powder is really fine and falls all over the place.

The city palace was nice. It could have used some better organization of the human beings going through the place, though. First off, our tour guide almost got us into a fight. He was already assigned to a group of Germans and then he picked us up, offering us some kind of group rate if he could take both of us around. The Germans got really upset at him and started yelling at him before storming off in a huff. A couple of them made faces at us, but they were really pissed at the guide. If I could talk to them, I’d tell them that he wasn’t worth making a fuss over. He kept getting crossways with other tour groups, which really was more a function of the fact that the path people took through the palace had people constantly running into each other.

For tonight’s sunset we went out to an old palace that has a great view of the city and the mountains that surrounded us on all sides. The view was amazing, and it was a great place just to sit around and hang out for a couple hours. Waiting for the sunset for a couple hours sounds kind of boring, but the two times we’ve been able to do that (here and the Taj Mahal) we’ve had some good conversation and a nice respite from the streets. And it doesn’t hurt to be surrounded by some of the greatest scenery in the whole world.

Dinner was another family style Indian meal out on the lake. We ate at a restaurant that had little alcoves that offered us a great view of the fireworks that were being shot off to celebrate Holi. I had my last butterscotch ice cream, which is something I’m going to miss. Jason joined us this time, and we had a great little meal eating without chairs at this short table.

The food of the day was the mixed vegetable dish we had for dinner. I wasn’t eating meat, so I made do with the veggie items, which was just fine. I also helped myself to a bunch of naan. Naan is pretty addictive in and of itself, but on the Rajasthan leg of the trip I’ve discovered cheese naan and butter naan, which I could eat a ton of.

License to Cow

Jodhpur/Udaipur

We were all wondering what to expect when we got to Udaipur. The last stop on our Rajasthan tour, it is usually characterized by the sun setting over a beautiful lake, but we had heard that the lake, the centerpiece of the town, had dried up. A couple disappointing monsoon seasons had left the lake extremely shallow, and we were told to temper our expectations.

The drive into Udaipur was filled with its share of bumpy roads as usual, but the last kilometer or so of the drive was completely unexpected. Our hotel was right along the “lake” and in the middle of a giant cluster of buildings, and we took a road that was barely wide enough to fit a single car. So when another car came the opposite direction, we were barely able to squeeze through.

The lake ended up being almost completely dry, but that’s okay. It was fun to see what’s happening with the dry expanse that used to be underwater. There were children playing cricket, people digging, and, of course, cows. That was remarkable to me—this area is potentially the most valuable property in town (the hotel that is supposed to be surrounded by water has 1500 rupee dinners and I’m sure the rooms are similarly expensive), but instead it’s just a well-placed commons. I know the town wants the lake back so that Udaipur can regain its picturesque quality, but I’m not going to be praying for rain. I kind of like the idea of children playing cricket on Udaipur’s dried-up tourist utopia.

Our first Udaipur sunset was spent on the city’s rooftops. Udaipur has all these great buildings that are a three or four stories tall and have restaurants or bars on their rooftops. Many of them show Octopussy every night at 7:00 p.m., since part of the James Bond film was filmed here. We had drinks on one rooftop and then had dinner and watched the sunset from another. We had a nice family-style meal that was a good survey of Indian food (it’s sad how little Indian food I’ve eaten in the last couple days). During the meal one of the elephants that was roaming down in the lake area let out an incredibly loud noise that made everyone take notice. On the way out I saw a sitar player and asked him if he knew “Boris the Spider” (for old time’s sake).

The food of the day could have been anything from our dinner tonight. I thought the chilli (that’s how they spell it) butter chicken was especially good.

Sports and Music, India Style

Jodhpur

On our way up to Mehrangarh Fort, somebody commented on how Jodhpur, the blue city, isn’t really all that blue at all. We found out otherwise once we got up to the fort—apparently all the houses have blue paint on only the sides facing the fort, so while you won’t see too much blue throughout the town you’ll see nothing but blue when you’re looking down on the city.

On our way out for the afternoon, I got out the cricket bat and ball and walked out on the lawn with Lili to play a little. As soon as our drivers saw what we were up to, they wanted in, too. We were in an area surrounded by hotel windows, so I told them to go easy, but apparently they weren’t listening. As soon as one got the ball in his hands, he was firing it as the batsman from about twenty feet away, usually sending it through the shrubs and out into the parking lot. I got a chance to throw at one of our drivers, and I got him to swing and miss. Unfortunately, he lost his grip on the bat and flung it all the way to a wall, where some of the bottom of it chipped off. I’m kind of pissed, but I guess it serves as proof that I’ve played cricket with a real, honest-to-goodness Indian.

Jodhpur is the Florida of India—it’s where autorickshaws go to retire. Everywhere else the rickshaws are small, cheap, and spry, but in Jodhpur they’re big, ornate, and slow. They really are sort of like Cadillacs compared to the other rickshaws we’ve seen. You don’t get the feeling that they’re going anywhere with a purpose; they’re just sort of running out their final kilometers in style.

We had dinner at the Taj Hotel. Justin, who must be trying to drop a crore in Jodhpur, was once again spending money like it was going out of style. He must have spent about a thousand on his prawns. But the best part of the dinner, even better than Justin’s prawns, was the sitar player who sat and played right next to us.

As soon as I saw a guy climbing onto the platform next to us with a sitar (he had a partner who played the tabla), I was giddy. I immediately asked him if he knew the Beatles. He said yes, and I requested “Within You Without You”. He said he didn’t know that one. I asked if he knew “Norwegian Wood” (the Beatles’ first sitar song), and he said he could play that one. Well, he could sort of play that one. All he did was play the first line over and over, with his own stylistic interludes to transition in between. I would have liked to have heard the whole thing, but what he played was really great.

After getting one request played, I started getting a little bolder. I requested “Boris the Spider,” which elicited a confused look, not only from the sitar player but from the people at my table, and later on I requested “Moon River” and “Mack the Knife”. He didn’t come close to knowing any of those. Justin requested John Denver and “Purple Rain,” and not only did he get shot down by the sitar man, but he also got his requesting privileges revoked by the rest of the table.

What the guy was able to play was half disappointing and half enjoyable. Sick of trying to guess what he could play, I asked him what he knew besides the Beatles, and he said he liked the Eagles. So he played “Hotel California,” which was again mega-truncated. He made what I think was an attempt at playing the Spanish guitar intro and then went right into the chorus, which he played over and over. The only other Western standard was Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” which I’m sorry to say he say he knew all the way through. So apparently there’s an inverse relationship between how good a song is and how much he knows of it. Except for songs that are actually from India. The indigenous songs he played were fantastic, I thought. He was able to play them with a greater richness than the Western songs (which makes sense—they were probably written for the sitar) and the songs themselves were very good. I don’t know that Indian music qualifies as “catchy,” but these songs definitely had pleasing melodies and were great just to be exposed to.

Professor Konana said that it would be easy getting around India because the people here speak English. Yeah, they speak English (most of the ones we interact with, anyway), but they don’t know English. I had the following conversation with a waiter recently:

“Do you have Fanta?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll have a Fanta...”

“We don’t have Fanta.”

Several people have had similar experiences. I’m not sure “yes” means what they think it does. They will often say things to acknowledge that they’re listening to you, and these things aren’t intended to be an answer to your question.

The food of the day was my main course at the Taj Hotel. After a disappointing French onion soup, they brought me something that might as well have been served for breakfast at Pete’s Place in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I forget what Indian description they gave it, but it was essentially hash browns (real hash browns) covered in cream gravy, mushrooms, and carrot slivers.

Happy Ever After in the Marketplace...

Pushkar/Jodhpur

Today we drove to Jodhpur, and the first place we went was a store with all kinds of trinkets, furniture, and fabrics. The kid who was showing us fabrics was classic. He just had the salesman gene—he’s one of the few people who is somewhat over the top but you’re entertained rather than annoyed because he’s just so good at it. He would bring out miles of fabrics and tell us to pick which ones we wanted to look closer at. “If you don’t like it, say, ‘Bye-bye’.” He said that all of these designers, including Versace and a bunch of others, were going to be featuring these fabrics at huge multiples of what they were selling for at his store. Justin broke the bank buying four duvet covers.

Later, we went into the center of town to look at the market. Bartley, Beth, and I went into a shop that sold spices. The owner had several pictures on display that he claimed were of Garry Marshall, but the person in the pictures looked nothing like Garry Marshall. He also said Richard Gere had been in his shop, and he mentioned selling stuff to many of the same American designers that the guy at the fabrics place mentioned. I bought a few spices for family members, though I had basically no idea what I was buying.

We found our way to this great outdoor vegetable market, and as we were on our way there a cow sneezed on Beth and me. How tacky. Somebody’s got to rein in the cow problem in that country—you treat them like deities for long enough and pretty soon they start believing it.

Also at this market I met two of the most interesting (read: insane) people I’ve met so far. The first one was a guy who came up and walked right next to me. He asked me where I was from and what I was going to after Jodhpur. I told him, and he said, “Okay, we are friends. Make me a deal. If you see me again in Udaipur or Mumbai, you pay me ten dollars. Okay?” I said, “What will you pay me if I don’t see you?” He said, “No, this will be great if we see each other again and you pay me ten dollars.” We went back and forth about this for a while. At one point, I tried talking him down from ten dollars, as if we were in an actual negotiation, which entertained me for a little while. The thing is I can’t distinguish him from most anyone else here, and if somebody in Udaipur does come up acting like my friend and asking for $10, I probably won’t know the difference. I imagine that’s the scam he’s running. When I related that story somebody else said the same thing had happened to him.

The second guy also walked alongside me. He asked me where I was from, and he said, “Do you like Jodhpur?” Now, this is something I’ve gotten used to from India, the feedback solicitation capital of the world. We’ve naturally received comment cards from hotels and airlines, but we’ve also gotten them at an unusually large number of restaurants and other places. Jenny was handed got a page-long feedback form on a gas station bathroom. And whatever town we’re in, people want to know how that town is doing. We’ve gotten used to singing the praises of the town we’re in, so I did the same when the guy asked me if I liked Jodhpur. Except that wasn’t what he had asked me. He clarified: “No, do you like George Bush? He’s your president.”

Okay, I know that Americans are often criticized for not being knowledgeable on world affairs, and I am proud to say that I now contribute to perpetuating that stereotype. But it isn’t all deserved. I swear it sounded like “Jodhpur” through his thick accent.

In response to his question, I said, “I guess he’s all right,” which is probably a strange take on the most polarizing president in history. Then the guy asked me why people would dislike him. I said probably because he invades other countries. He said that he has a friend in New York who has a theory about the red states and the blue states—that the people in the “countryside” like Bush better because they have less education—and asked what I thought about that. I responded that the real reason that people voted differently is that they just have different priorities. I don’t think he liked my answer, but it’s the truth.

There are two kinds of toilets in India, the EWC and the IWC, and you better know the difference. EWC is the European water closet, and it is what you and I might call a toilet bowl. IWC is very little more than a hole in the floor. Most of the upscale places have EWCs, and some of the less nice places we’ve been have IWCs, but some of the places have both. Which means that, when given a choice between a toilet or a hole in the ground, some people will actually choose the hole in the ground.

Today’s food of the day was the Coke float I had at On the Rocks. It was like a little piece of America—if only the waitress who brought it out had been on roller skates. And I extended my fried rice streak to four days.

Vegan for a Day

Jaipur/Pushkar

Our second stop on our Spring Break is Pushkar, a small town that has banned meat, eggs, and alcohol and does not allow cars downtown. A bumpy rural road (we drove for over an hour of the trip without seeing anything in a familiar alphabet) took us to maybe the nicest hotel we’ve stayed at so far. Our hotel in Pushkar is not nearly as new as some of the other places we’ve been (it has padlocks on the doors—a far cry from key cards), but it’s very cozy. Each room has a nice little balcony, and they have a great pool area. As soon as we arrived, we were regretting getting to stay only one night.

My newfound love of cricket is being embraced by everyone in India, save for the people who have to carry my luggage. Most everywhere I go, people are happy to talk with me about the ongoing test match, and they usually find it entertaining that a Westerner (especially an American) would take such an interest in Indian cricket. But when my cricket curiosity manifested itself in a bat that is quite heavy, that created an externality that (through the additional weight in my suitcase) landed square on the backs of India’s hotel employees. My suitcase was already pushing 30 kilos without the bat, but now it’s getting ridiculous to lug around. I really do feel badly for the bellmen at these hotels, but they insist on taking your luggage so they can earn tips. Today was especially bad. Employees are apparently not allowed to use the elevator at our hotel in Pushkar, so the poor man had to walk up three flights of stairs with the thing on his head.

Our activity for the afternoon was a camel safari that we were greatly anticipating. We rode two to a camel, getting on the camel as it was kneeling and hanging on as it rose to its feet. Jenny asked our guide whether our camel was going to be good. He said, “If he is bad, I will kill him.”

As we were walking out to the desert, I asked our guide the question Rob asked Kiran: How expensive is a camel compared to a horse? He said that a camel costs about 20,000 rupees, while a horse will probably cost a lakh (100,000 rupees). The only other notable thing on our trip out to the desert was seeing numerous signs for the Pink Floyd Cafe & Hotel, which gives you a pretty good idea of the foreign clientele Pushkar often sees.

The desert was cool. It was a bunch of sand with a big lake in the middle.

After our camel ride we went out to a hotel downtown, where we watched the sunset and the goings on of some of the people arrayed along the cascading steps in front of us. Watching some of the other people who were there to witness the sunset left just one question in my mind: “When does Widespread Panic go on?” Pushkar’s laid-back attitude is exemplified in its foreign tourists, most of whom are European and Australian hippies. Functional hippies, with proclivities for music and juggling-type activities.

Then we went to dinner. What do you eat in India when you can’t have meat or eggs? Enchiladas and hash browns, of course. The hash browns were about the eighth different way I’ve seen them prepared in this country—these were cubes of potato with onions and peppers, and it was about three times more food than I expected.

The food of the day, however, was the butterscotch ice cream I had at lunch. I don’t know what to say about it except that it’s the best ice cream I’ve had in a long time.

Come and Show Me the Magic of Your Bollywood Song...

Jaipur

Today I went to a palace…again. And I got to ride an elephant…again.

The Amber Palace in Jaipur led off one of the most amazing days of my life. I woke up with my usual thirst for NCAA scores and learned that one of my nickel teams, Bucknell, defeated the mighty Kansas Jayhawks. More importantly, my beloved Aggies made it through the second round of the NIT Tournament.

We left for the fort/palace at 7:30, and once we got there we immediately hopped on elephants and headed up a very steep climb to the entrance. I’ll never get tired of riding on elephants—this one was as great as the last. I got to see Justin and a vendor conduct a transaction by throwing puppets and money back and forth at each other, and I got a picture taken sitting on the elephant’s head. The palace was amazing. You could see the city, the garden, the lake, and the mountains from it, and it had an intricate system of stairs and corridors connecting all the 12 queens’ living quarters.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the best part of the palace, the monkeys. In one particular part, about seven or eight of them were right above our heads, and later they walked right past us. In fact, my only reprimand of the trip came today, when Beth had to call me over to listen to our guide rather than watch the monkeys.

The way out of the palace was as hectic as usual, and included in the chaos was a guy who takes pictures of people on elephants. On the way up, we were hassled by a photographer who kept wanting us to look over at him. He would take a picture and then say, “50 rupees. You no like, you no buy.” They have them developed while you’re in the palace, and when everyone comes out they’re frantically flipping through photos and finding the people to sell them to. It really is an interesting business model. Anyway, my guy didn’t find me, and I didn’t care to find him, so I just left.

Kevin, Beth, Holly, and I ended up eating lunch at McDonald’s. I had a Vegetarian McCurry Pan, which is a mix of broccoli and mushrooms in some kind of salty sauce sitting in a rectangular crust that’s open on top. It looked disgusting, but it was actually not that bad. It’s amazing to think that I haven’t had a meal at McDonald’s in at least seven years and here I was in India eating at one. We even took pictures next to Ronald.

From there we went to the Jaipur observatory, which is a collection of interesting astronomical structures that were arrayed throughout a few acres. A king in the late 1700s was very interested in astronomy, so he sought out the best practices in other countries and used them to build his own observatories, the biggest of which was in Jaipur. Its structures were fascinating—most of them contained giant curves with stairs, prompting Kevin to remark that it felt like being in a Salvador Dali painting.

After the observatory I walked the others to the City Palace before heading to my movie. At one point Beth said, “You know, on this street there’s cars, motorcycles, autorickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, cows, and camels, and it doesn’t even phase me.” Which is right—there are so many things we see on a regular basis that will be flat impossible to convey to anyone back in the States. The traffic, the swastikas, the begging, the honking, the smells, the feeling of being the only white people in a sea of Indians—none of these come through in pictures or verbal descriptions.

When we were about a hundred feet from the City Palace I was stopped by a vendor, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that he showed me a picture of me on the elephant from earlier in the day. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I bought the picture, but I was more interested in how he got it. He couldn’t tell me (didn’t know English) but apparently all the unsold photographs get sent to the City Palace (the #2 tourist attraction in Jaipur, about an hour away) so that more people can be picked out. I still have no idea how they make money at it, but I find it fascinating.

Raj Mandir is considered the best movie theater in India, but India isn’t exactly known for its theaters. It has only one screen and seats around 1200 people, and tickets cost between 18 and 75 rupees. Getting my 50 rupee ticket involved standing in line among a bunch of Indian teenagers who have no concept of personal space. It was really uncomfortable, especially considering I had no idea when the ticket window was going to open.

I entered the theater lobby at 2:45 for a 3:00 show (the intermission was at 4:30 and the movie was set to let out at 6:05), and it really was an all right theater. The carpet was coming up in places, but there were a lot of nice seating areas in the lobby as well as chandeliers and other ornate decoration. The popcorn was about three times cheaper than in America, but in America the concession guy doesn’t normally stick his hand in the popcorn and pull out handfuls to eat.

I met some interesting people at the theater. The first kid I talked to was in the tenth class, and he was there with his little brother and sister. He was interested in where I had been in India and why I was here. His siblings seemed to see me as some sort of strange curiosity, and they smiled sheepishly while keeping their distance. The second guy I talked to was about 30 and was there with his wife. We weren’t able to talk as long because of language problems.

A 3:00 movie doesn’t actually start at 3:00 in India. I thought the large number of people in the lobby was a function of not being able to eat in the theater, but they actually keep the theater doors locked until right before the movie starts. The doors finally opened at about 3:10, and even though there’s assigned seating people streamed in immediately as if there was a fire in the lobby.

Despite being the best movie theater in India, Raj Mandir relies on handwritten seat assignments, which left me unable to determine whether I was in seat D32 or O32. I ended up sitting in O32 because I thought it was in the 50 rupee Emerald section. As I was standing in the aisle to let other people by me, someone hopped into my seat, which was next to his friends’ seats. The man I had talked to in the lobby saw what was going on, and he motioned me to take back the seat. I did, but then an argument ensued over whose seat it actually was. The man came over, looked at my ticket, and told me I should be in D32. He walked me over to D32, except he did it “Indian style,” which is holding hands. My natural reaction was to pull my hand away, which in retrospect probably offended him. Oh well.

When I got to D32, I quickly noticed that I was the only person in that row or any of the four rows behind it, while the rest of the theater was full. An usher came up yelling a bunch of stuff in Hindi and motioning for me to get out, so I went back to where I had been and found a seat in O31. Which is good, because O31 is an aisle seat, and those seats would have been much too small for me to sit in without the extra legroom.

The movie, Bewafaa, was about 90% in Hindi, with the 10% in English being token words and phrases that didn’t contribute to my understanding of the plot. It was about a woman who lives in Canada but has to go back to New Delhi when her sister dies giving birth to twin girls. There was a lot of music, including a 10-minute musical montage right when the woman gets back to India. The actual look of the film was pretty high quality, but there were a lot of things that just wouldn’t pass in the States. The acting was terrible. The sister who was supposed to be pregnant with twins wasn’t showing even right before she had her babies. They wanted to have a shot of the Taj Mahal in the movie, so they just had the characters go there for no reason (to an area where they wouldn’t actually have had access to). Mostly, though, you just didn’t really care about the characters. The woman is supposedly facing all these struggles in living in India and raising these children, but they don’t let you in on any of that. They just kind of show her looking sad while a song is playing. The other thing that was annoying was all the stuff yelled by the audience throughout the movie, especially during a pretty risqué bath scene (knees and bare back were shown), in which a bunch of people were yelling and whistling. The woman in the film might have turned out all right in the end, but I wouldn’t know because I left at intermission to attend Mass.

I found a Catholic church in Jaipur that had a 5:00 Sunday Mass, and it was supposed to be a 10-minute walk from the theater. The only problem is that I still have yet to see a street sign in India, and all the people I talked to about where Ashok street was either didn’t know where it was or couldn’t understand what I was asking about. After 30 minutes I found someone who said he knew where the Catholic church was, and he put me on a bicycle rickshaw at a rate of 9 rupees. We headed in a direction I didn’t think I was supposed to go, but after about 10 minutes we ended up stopping at a church. It took me a while to find the gate, and it looked like nobody had been there in a long time. Right after I got inside the gate I saw some kind of employee who told me that the only service was at 10:00 a.m. The doors to the church were locked, so I just found a bench to sit down at and put my head down and prayed.

After a while a man came out, and I could tell that he was probably a priest. He told me that he was the pastor at St. Andrews and asked me a bunch of questions about where I was from and about my travels. When I told him that I was going to be in the air on Easter Sunday, he said, “You need to come inside.”

On the way in he told me about the church’s founding by Scottish missionaries and about the 1000-1200 people who currently attend mass there. “I wish you could’ve been here this morning,” he told me. He allowed me to sit inside for a while, and after a few minutes he walked out with me, I thanked him, and he said that it was his pleasure to open up the church to anyone who wants to come in.

Honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had opened up the church. Just finding it was the thing. Maybe that’s something everyone who wants to call himself a religious or spiritual person should be made to work for. A lot of us routinely go to church on Sunday without thinking about what it’s worth to us—we never have to think about what would happen if it were taken away. But in the past couple weeks there’s been something building up in me, a real need. I learned what it’s like to have to make it to church. Approaching countless different foreigners in a not so great part of town is no fun, but I felt like I had to do it. Even when I knew I would have been showing up at least a half an hour late, I kept trying. I know that when I make it back to Austin I’ll probably view attending Mass as somewhat of a chore, but it was nice at least once to feel that real sense of desperation.

As soon as I left the gate and walked back onto the streets, I sensed a change. My walk through the shops and back toward the hotel was a little more peaceful than usual. Some of the shops were closing, so there weren’t as many people shouting “Hello!” and trying to get you to come in their shops. I didn’t even have any beggar kids following me for several blocks. I smiled at more people, and they reacted better to me. I remember one guy in particular who was trying to pull his rickshaw into the street when a cow walked into his path. We made eye contact and both kind of laughed.

The only person I really talked with was a kid of about thirteen years who asked me why tourists won’t talk with Indian people. I told him about the numerous peddlers and beggars and about how it’s impossible to get anywhere if you stop and talk to all the people who want your attention. He said that not all Indian people are like that and to prove it he offered to take me to a place nearby and have some coffee and just talk. I said I would prefer just to talk in the street, and after fighting me on it a while he agreed just to stay there. He asked about my trip and about my perceptions of Indians. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grows up, and he said he wanted to be a tour guide. Then he told me about his family’s shop, gave me their card, and told me to come by in the morning. What’s sad is that I was expecting the sales pitch the whole time and wasn’t at all surprised when it came. Most people in India are very nice and laid back and not at all intrusive. The problem is that you have to be in the right place to have a conversation with them. Most of the time, though, you’re walking down a city street where all kinds of people can just come up and talk to you. People with something to sell will ask you where you’re from before trying to get you in their stores. Little children will put their fingers to their mouths and say “Please” or “Rupees” and will usually tug on your clothes or walk within a couple inches of you. Begging women will try to get in your way. All of them open with the very friendly but very well-rehearsed “HAL-low!” greeting.

Before going back to the hotel I decided to watch a children’s cricket game I had seen earlier in the day. On the way there I was discovered by some small children who wanted some money. At this point I was far enough away from the market to attract big crowds of beggars, so I pulled out a 5 rupee coin and gave it to them. I had only the one coin, so I told them to share (like that was going to work) and eventually lost them by the time I got to the cricket fields.

The cricket field was just a rocky dirt lot with two games going on simultaneously. I watched the game the smaller children (about middle school age) were playing, but after a couple minutes one of the kids spotted me and came over. He asked my name, and then he said, “Hello, [Hindi word].” I tried to ask him about the game, but he was too interested in messing with me. Before too long a half dozen of his friends had come by, and they were all saying Hindi phrases and laughing as I tried in vain to find out about their cricket game. Eventually I left and the went another direction, but I wasn’t alone for long. The children I had give the rupee coin to noticed I was coming their way, and they again asked me for money, but this time they were more clingy and demonstrative. And I couldn’t shake them, because they knew I had money and was willing to give it away. It wasn’t until an older sibling or neighbor came by that I was finally past them. I caught a rickshaw back to the hotel after that.

Today’s food of the day was the milkshake I had at McDonald’s. It tasted just like home, as did the fries. (My real food of the day was the fried rice I had for dinner, but I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. I’ve had more fried rice this trip than I thought one human could consume.)

“Mornin’ Sam.” “Mornin’ Ralph.”

Delhi/Jaipur

We started on our own today, just Bartley, Beth, Jenny, Justin, Lili, Holly, and I. Holly’s with us for only a couple days until she heads back. The seven of us headed out in two Qualises (I rode with Beth and Bartley) to Jaipur. We’ll go through Jaipur, Pushkar, Jodhpur, and Udaipur before heading back to Mumbai.

On our way out we stopped nearby some snake charmers. Jenny said, “See, I got you your snake charmer.” The funniest thing about the snake charmers was watching them go “off duty”. They have, at least to a Westerner, a lot of mysticism surrounding them, and when they approach you there is some kind of other worldliness that attaches. But when we were pulling away, they just kind of shut down. They sat down, had a smoke, and just chatted. It was like the cartoon with Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog where the whistle blows and they get out their lunch pails and eat lunch together, letting go of their public personae.

As soon as we got to Jaipur we headed to the main shopping area of the city, which consists of a giant grid of streets behind these big gates. Jaipur is called the pink city, and everything is painted this color that sort of resembles pink. We entered through one of the gates and started walking straight back. After a while it started feeling like we were walking in circles. The shops seemed to be repeating the same pattern: a convenience store followed by an upscale clothing store followed by a car battery store followed by a pharmacy followed by a children’s clothing store followed by a bicycle store, and then we would start all over with a convenience store. It was really weird to see all these stores that looked exactly the same. (I learned later that certain areas have different types of stores. If you walk down another street you might see jewelry stores and women’s clothing stores over and over again.) Each store is less than half as wide as a store you might see in a mall, and about half as deep. For the most part, nobody seemed to be going into many of these stores. It seemed like given the amount of business most of these stores got, you could probably sustain only about a quarter the number of stores they have there.

There are a lot of things that continue to puzzle me about how to it’s possible to make money in India. I’ve seen a lot of people selling trinkets and getting very little business, and yet these vendors and stores are all over the place, all selling essentially the same things and all having a very hard time doing it. Another thing is the distribution of consumer goods. We’ve seen cola drinks and liters of water that sell in restaurants for 15 rupees, which is a third of what they would be in the United States, and along the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere you’ll see a bag of potato chips selling for really little as well. I don’t yet understand how any company can distribute to all these remote places and sell for so much less than in the States.

Tonight we went to a nice restaurant in Jaipur, near the shopping area. We rode on bicycle rickshaws, which we hadn’t seen in any other city. The price was supposed to be 20 rupees for a ride of a couple kilometers. We got in the rickshaws two at a time, and the drivers took us around on the strength of their own legs, which were pretty thin. I kept cheering our driver on as he drove past the other rickshaws (no small accomplishment since I was easily the heaviest person in any rickshaw) and as pedaled he looked like he was killing himself. When we got to our destination, I gave him a significant tip—I think I gave him 50 rupees total.

Did I give him a good tip? I tipped him less than a dollar for a significant amount of work. Still, it was easily more money than he was used to seeing. There seem to be two ways you can deal with the difference in the intrinsic value of money here. You can tip more, reasoning that it’s worth more to them than it is to you, so in a sense you’re creating value. Or you can tip less, figuring that any little amount you give them will be more than they usually get. I think we all vacillate between two extremes from time to time, but it’s really easy to forget about what money is worth here. I know that I’ve looked at a menu and thought that a 150 rupee bowl of fried rice is exorbitant, but it’s three bucks. Some people here think that tipping 20% on an autorickshaw ride is being generous, even though it’s 25 cents. Maybe it is generous, I don’t know.

On the way out of the restaurant we had probably our worst encounter of the trip. These children came up to us and were asking for money in the most obstructive way. They followed us around for several minutes, and they were hanging all over us. They were equal parts cute and annoying, which was entirely frustrating. We tried to talk to them, and at times they were all right, but most of the time they would just pester us. They would have been really fun if they weren’t aiming everything at us. I still don’t know what their intentions were. It seems like they wanted to get some money out of us, but when we kept refusing, I think they were content to entertain each other by getting in our way and driving us insane.

The food of the day was the fried rice I had for dinner.

Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey...

Agra/Delhi

The first thing I did after getting up was go and search for an internet place to check on scores. I was told that internet places outside the hotel would be opening at 7:00, but when I went to look everything was closed. A gentleman told me he could take me to a place, but we walked a couple hundred meters to a place that ended up being closed. What’s worse, the entire path was along this seriously smelly sewage line that I had to endure all the way up and back. I was about to go back to the hotel when I saw a guy sitting in front of a closed internet shop (actually more of a 10-foot-wide self storage space than a shop) that he agreed to open up for me and charge 20 rupees an hour. I got my scores, and I got to follow the last 10 minutes of the Texas-Nevada game.

This morning we visited the Agra Fort, which is across town from the Taj Mahal. This was a fort that was constructed many centuries ago and has a lot of amazing things going for it, but I think what we were all most impressed with were its resident monkeys. As soon as we got inside the gate we saw a bunch of monkeys that were perched up on the walls and were sliding down the cables on the walls.

Later on, a small group of us got to have a much closer encounter with the monkeys. Professor Konana noticed Jack taking a bunch of pictures of the monkeys, and he said that you could make a Dr. Seuss book out of that. For the rest of the day he was tormenting Jack with his little verse:

Jack snapped a monkey

Jack chased a monkey

Jack likes the monkey

Jack made new friends

On the way back Kevin started talking with Professor Konana about Konana’s cover story that had just appeared in the India news magazine Frontline. They went back and forth about the role of democracy in India’s development (or lack thereof). It’s been fascinating being on this trip with Professor Konana because of the perspective he brings. He displays this really inspiring passion when he talks about the things he loves about India, and if he wants to relate to you something he thinks is exciting about India you’d better pull up a chair and enjoy taking it all in. At the same time, his disappointments with his homeland are pretty obvious, and he isn’t afraid to let you know about them. When he was talking with Kevin and me, he saw a hillside with trash scattered across it, and he went off about why do people have to make such a mess of things. When I saw him at the museum in Mumbai, he said that it was a shame that the museum didn’t really tell a story and a museum somewhere else would have done a much better job. When I asked him about why they’re constantly interrupting cricket matches for commercials, he said that that would never happen in the United States.

I think his is a very honest approach to something you care deeply about. If you accept that it’s impossible to behave dispassionately toward something you’re extremely close to, then there seem to be two possible outlooks. One is to portray everything as being great whether or not it actually is. We’ve seen a lot of that since we’ve been here—people want to tell you the good stuff and either ignore the bad or portray it as good. You also see it all the time with American politics. Democrats in the late 1990’s who were defending President Clinton and Republicans who are now trying to defend Tom DeLay seem to have this problem admitting to anything the least bit wrong with the person they’re defending, which leads to cynicism and polarization.

The other approach is to call attention to both the things you find praiseworthy and the things you find lacking. If you’re a little more honest, it’s tougher to get drug down into these indefensible positions that are viewed with such skepticism (“Everything is perfect with India”; “So-and-so is just being targeted by the opposition”), but if you’re not careful you may find yourself too ambivalent toward this thing you’re supposed to love. Like with me and the Aggies. I love A&M to death, but the things that I find wrong with it run the risk of invalidating, in my mind, the things that make it so great. So a little bit of perspective is in order with either outlook, which itself can be extremely difficult.

Anyway, the perspective people here take on India has been very eye opening. We have heard people being blindly positive about things that obviously are not perfect (the kinds of things that Professor Konana is trying to call attention to), but I think that positive attitude comes from a collective pride in their institutions. In America we’re so used to people openly complaining about things, especially right now when everybody’s mad at either 51% or 49% of the electorate. Much of it is constructive, but it seems that a lot of it comes from an unwillingness to take ownership in what we hold in common. It’s said that you get the government that you deserve, but most people choose to interpret that as “I’m stuck with the government that everyone else deserves.” In America we’ve always got people writing off whatever Congress is up to, and since the presidential election we’ve had the blue states essentially saying that the red states are not part of “their” America (or vice versa). Those are extreme examples, but they follow from a somewhat universal attitude. India has the opposite problem of being rosy without exception, but at least they take ownership, which I think is where the extreme optimism comes from. Meanwhile, we Americans tend to be able to speak universally negatively because certain things, especially the goings on in Washington, are not anything we want to be close enough to to be invested in. It’s just a theory, and of course it’s a huge generalization, but it is strange how differently people here talk about certain things.

When we got back to Delhi, Kevin, Zach, Beth, and I went to a place called Rodeo, which articulates the Indian concept of what a Texan restaurant should be. There were saddles at the bar, and the waiters wore cowboy attire. We had a pitcher of margaritas, which actually turned out to be very good.

I was wearing my cricket jersey, which seemed to make the people at Rodeo pretty happy. I watched some of the test match there and shared some of my revelations about cricket. At one point I said that the fielders don’t really do anything in cricket, and Zach said, “Well, they do more than they do in baseball.” I just about lost it. I made the contention, which I believe is right, that even if you concede that nothing happens in baseball (which is preposterous) you can’t really say that anything more happens in cricket. It’s just a different kind of nothing. Which leads to all kinds of problems when a follower of one sport tries to watch the other.

As I first tried to watch cricket, I was primarily put off by two things: the ease of scoring and the fact that an out is celebrated like a grand slam. Presumably, a cricket fan watching baseball for the first time would get peeved at how commonplace outs are and how people celebrate after scoring a single run. Whereas we see the pitcher in a defensive manner, the batter in cricket is in a lot of ways more of a defensive player. He must preserve his at bat and protect the wickets from the attacks of the bowler. The cricket bowler, on the other hand, may view his job just as a baseball batter would: “Chances are I’m going to be unsuccessful with this bowl (in this at bat), but if I can get an out (score a run) some small percentage of the time then I will have helped my team immensely.” When you switch the payoffs like that from offense to defense, it’s very hard to understand the other sport. That may be the key leap of faith you need to make with cricket. Just accept that scoring runs is easy, which is of course easier said than done. I talk a good game, but I still struggle some when actually watching cricket.

After the Rodeo we went shopping. I bought a book on the history of the alphabet, and then we went to a sports shop that contained the holy grail of India souvenirs.

Since I got my cricket jersey I have wanted to buy some for a couple other people, and I was in luck. This place had them for only 250 rupees. Then Kevin bought a hat that was too small for 50 rupees. And then I saw it. As I was scanning the shelves behind the counter I spotted the object of my unrealized desires and the reason that I had brought a suitcase that could fit a baby giraffe. I looked at the shop owner and asked, “Hey, how much are those cricket bats?” He said they ran from 800 to 2000 rupees, so I got the cheapest one I could for 790. Then I got a ball for 150, and I was in business. I didn’t ever really think about what I was going to get for myself, and now I’m glad, because this cricket bat is better than anything I could have thought of. And it just barely fits in my suitcase—another centimeter and I’d have to mail it home.

Tonight was our final dinner. I got to talk to Richa’s parents and aunt, which was great. After the dinner, I ended up in the lobby of the hotel at about 1:00 in the morning, talking with Shinji and Lili. Lili and I just kind of interviewed Shinji, who was voted the “mystery man” earlier in the night. I got him to divulge the entire contents of his luggage, and he reflected on his own approach to this trip. He said he was selfish for going out on his own so much, which Lili and I told him was ridiculous. He couldn’t be less concerned about making sure the rest of us are paying attention to his priorities, as the rest of us generally are. On his third week he’s volunteering for a few days at the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, which shows just how selfish he is.

The food of the day was the mushroom biscuit appetizers at the party.

Maybe Later

Delhi/Agra

I will always remember this day because it marks my encounter with the greatest accomplishment in human history, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Oh yeah, and the Taj Mahal wasn’t bad neither.

Since we couldn’t all get to computers and fill out online brackets and I didn’t feel like messing with paper ones, I thought it would be a good idea to scrap the traditional tourney pool and just have a silent auction (thanks to Holly for the idea) where you bid on teams and then win money based on their progress throughout the tournament. It was a lot of fun passing around the bid sheets on the bus and seeing who was bidding on what. Chris Shiflett and Jack Brock went back and forth on Louisville, Beth made a late run at Duke, and Kevin was nice enough to put a quarter on Penn. Every team was bought (I had to take up all the 16 seeds at a nickel apiece), and the most expensive team was Illinois at $6 (thanks to Jack).

I really like the auction format. A lot of people, myself included, have proposed novel ways of scoring a tourney pools that are supposed to reward picking upsets. The problem is that you can pick the three most unexpected Sweet 16 teams, but if you don’t know who’s playing in the Final Four you’re still getting your ten bucks eaten up. That’s me in the pool—I’ll have a nice idea about an 11 or 12 seed that earns me what exactly, a point? So I lose by 29 points instead of 30. The auction, on the other hand, allows you to profit from good little ideas. You can just buy up a team that you think is undervalued, and you can profit from as small an investment as you want. Next year I’ll figure out a way to sell overvalued teams short, and the system will be perfect.

Agra has a whole bunch of nothing apart from the Taj Mahal, which is kind of like saying Niagra Falls isn’t so great except for all that water. It’s amazing the lengths they go to to protect the Taj. Every Friday it’s closed so that they can clean it, and they clean every inch of it, including the very top. Automobiles are not allowed within a certain radius of the Taj Mahal, and factories are not allowed within a much larger radius.

On the bus on the way in Desiree was whistling “Within You Without You,” which cracked me up.

When we arrived on the premises we were greeted by probably the biggest group of vendors we’ve ever seen anywhere. Getting off the bus near a tourist attraction is always an adventure, so it makes sense that the mother of all tourist attractions would have the mother of all sales hordes. This group I really enjoyed, though, because they had mastered the art of the Maybe Later.

When you invariably said no to these people carrying all kinds of trinkets, they would come back with, “Maybe later?” and if you said, “Okay, maybe later” they would say, “I remember you.” It sounds like maybe a reasonable conversation to have, but when all hundred salesmen are trained to say exactly the same thing, it ends up sounding hilarious.

The price of a ticket to the Taj Mahal is 750 rupees for foreigners and 20 rupees for Indians. The first thing we saw when we got inside the gates was a giant, dark red building, and you could see the Taj Mahal peeking over its walls. As you are walking through the red building you can see the Taj in the distance, and it really does look amazing. The thing I didn’t get in the pictures I’ve seen was just how pristine it looks—it has darker buildings all around it, and it’s very bright. We took a group picture in front of it, but we didn’t get the McCombs banner because they wouldn’t let us bring it in.

We had to either go in barefoot or wear foot coverings to go inside, and most of us opted for the foot coverings. They were just pieces of cloth that tied over your shoes, and they allowed you to slide on the marble of the Taj Mahal. The inside of the Taj Mahal was very ornate, but it was not quite as pristine as the outside, and Kiran was put off by the smell. There was a replica of the actual tomb of Shah Jihan’s wife, which we were able to see, but we weren’t able to go down to where the actual tomb was because a woman had suffocated to death recently. Most of us decided to stay until sunset, so we burned some time by visiting the mosque next door and hanging out on the grass. Our guides saw some French tourists and started making fun of them, saying, “Ooh la la,” which cracked me up.

I sat for the sunset in front of the Taj, which was not an ideal place, but it was still pretty darn good. We took turns guessing the nationalities of tourists who walked by. At one point Kevin ripped Americans for being the only tourists that wear shorts at a Muslim holy place, but it turns out that his determination that they were Americans was based on the fact that they were wearing shorts. Apparently he’s as good at circular logic as regular logic.

I didn’t think watching the Taj Mahal change colors during the sunset was magnificent as much as it was just really peaceful. We got to sit and just admire it, and it provided great scenery for relaxing and people watching. It was really great, though.

One of the funniest things about being at the Taj Mahal was seeing the little children being dragged around by their parents. Kevin and I have memories of Niagra Falls and Graceland, respectively, as the things that are in your town that you have to go to when guests come in. It’s funny to think that for some little Indian kid that place is the Taj Mahal. We did our impressions of the children: “Why do we have to go to the Taj Mahal again?”

The food of the day was chicken tikka pizza, once again from Pizza Hut, where we had dinner. There was probably something at our lunch buffet that was better, but all I can remember right now was the fried chicken, which was very pink on the inside.

Frijoles Refritos? Publicidad Falsa.

Delhi

Today was the last day of company presentations. At NTPC we received a tie and a book of fables. They weren’t exactly the greatest gifts but I guess they’re better than I’ve received from any other power company.

For dinner I went with a bunch of people to a place called Buzz. It was in a mall, where Rob and I both got India cricket jerseys. I got what was called a size Asian XXL, which I now know is slightly smaller than an American XL.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of “real” sports or what, but I’m starting to like cricket. It’s kind of cool learning a new sport, once you get over all the American sports baggage that colors your opinion. Cricket seems to be a good one to learn because there’s a lot new to it. Rather than one pitcher facing a lot of batters like in baseball, one batter usually stands up there and faces a number of different pitchers. The base running dynamic is also really interesting—both men run back and forth together, so communication is supremely important. If one guy runs and the other doesn’t, it’s an automatic out. The length of the game is still a struggle because it’s hard to know where you are. Okay, you’re 323 for 5 in the first innings on the second day and it’s 2:00 in the afternoon. Is that good or bad? I can’t imagine being that involved where you can’t separate yourself from a TV on the first day of a five-day match, but when I sit down and watch I’m usually unwilling to pry myself away for a little while. There’s a lot about cricket I still don’t get, but I figure the jersey will give me instant credibility.

They say India is a land of contradictions, and that was certainly true tonight. Buzz is a bar, but it’s located in a mall. Buzz apparently doesn’t know what refried beans are, but they make the best chimichangas in history.

As I was looking over the menu I saw something very curious. There was an appetizer featuring nachos with cheese, lettuce, and jalapenos, and it was called “frijoles refritos”. The menu was very diverse and included Indian, Chinese, and Mexican foods. Julia had some pork chops that she claimed were excellent, and Rob spent the rest of the night proclaiming the Good News about his chimichanga. At one point he called Amanda, and he got the chef on the phone, who mentioned the chimichanga. I had a bite of the chimichanga in question, and Rob was right to tell as many people as possible about it.

We stayed around at Buzz for a while and enjoyed its slightly stale music selection. Those of us who had eaten at Buzz were joined by a few people who had eaten at TGI Friday’s. Some people partook of the hookah, which I’m now kind of wishing I had done. How many people can say they’ve taken a hit off a hookah in India, and in a shopping mall no less?

The food of the day is the hoisin chicken I had at Buzz. I haven’t done as good a job of promoting it as some people have with their dishes, but the hoisin chicken takes a back seat to nobody.

Creme Tangerine...

Bangalore/Delhi

After visiting IBM India, Professor Konana, Holly, and I sat with a reporter from the Economic Times to talk with him about our trip. We talked about a number of things—what we saw over the weekend, the companies we’ve visited so far, our general thoughts about India—but it was clear there were a few things he was most interested in. He first got some background on the school and the Global Plus program, and we told him how long we’re here and where else Plus trips go. As soon as he found out that a Plus trip went to China, his interest was piqued. He asked us why we picked India over China, and I talked about some of the people I had talked to from last year’s trip and the experience they had. He also asked us if we would consider working in India. We both said that we might like to come back and work for a little while. Then he asked us some more questions about what has surprised us about India and what we’ll take back with us. Before too long, though, he was back to asking us about China and jobs. He asked why we like India more than China and why we want to work in India. I could see what the article was obviously going to be about. As we were leaving I told Holly that the entire content of the article was going to be how we loved India and hated China and how we were looking for jobs only in India (even though that was about 10% of what we actually talked about). [p.s. I’ve had a chance to look at the actual article since getting back. The headline is “McCombs Grads Choose India Over China As Their Destination For Overseas Study Tour,” and they said that we thought working in India after graduation was an “interesting possibility” (which is pretty faithful to what we said). And they spelled my name incorrectly, which is all right, because the one quote they attributed to me (Mr. Laure) could not have been more wrong.

The article said, “Mr Laure said that the visit to a few software and BPO firms in India has made him realise that it is not just low end work that happens in the country.” I remember saying two things that might be relevant to this statement. I said that there was quite a debate going on in the United States about outsourcing and that people who are against outsourcing were essentially wanting to portray the jobs that are coming over to India as degrading call center jobs that are being performed in subpar working conditions. I said that anybody who knows anything about business knows that not to be the case, but it’s probably more comforting for Americans to think that we’re losing jobs just because India simply an extremely low bidder and nothing else. I told him that what we found upon visiting the call center was that people do their jobs very well and work in very nice conditions. The other thing I said was that in the States when you think India business you think, “Call center, call center, call center” and “IT, IT, IT,” and it was very nice to see places like Hindustan Lever and Biocon to get an idea of the breadth of business capability that India is building.]

After the interview, I went out to see the parliament building with Kevin and Holly. We saw the parliament building and then we walked around for a little while, half lost, until we got to this store we were looking for. I bought four packages of about ten little sandwich cookies each (two orange (the orange cookies have been a favorite of mine at company presentations) and two butterscotch) and two Fantas all for about eighty rupees. Then, at the counter, they threw in four packages of crackers because of some promotion they were running. So I got all that food for two bucks. Then I went parading it around to everybody as if I had accomplished something.

The Bangalore airport has a ton of mosquitoes. They’re everywhere, including inside the planes. On the airplane I had another one of those seats that wouldn’t stay unreclined, so I kept having to consciously try not to lean back onto Sam. The only redeeming thing about the trip to Delhi was getting spotted by some of the Perot Systems people, who were in town for the company’s first board meeting ever held in Bangalore and were able to pick me out because of my hat. They were really nice—we took some pictures and talked a little while. One of them is on the McCombs Advisory Board.

The food of the day goes to rice. We had a meal at IBM that was, well, not perfect. Seeing that the other options on the food line were less than desirable, I asked the person serving me for “plenty” of rice. So that’s what I got. I had a huge pile of this rice dish sitting in the middle of my plate that a couple people asked about. It was pretty good, but I still didn’t finish it.

Honey, Disconnect the Phone...

Bangalore

Bangalore, in Austin at least, is very closely associated with the Dell call center, and today we got to see what they do. The day started out at Wipro, which I thought has been one of our best presentations, and we had some free time in the afternoon. I made it to Pizza Hut and to an internet cafe to send a mass email and print out my brackets, and I went to a music store.

The big promotion at the music store was Mark Knopfler, which cracked me up. A couple days ago I saw a story about the frontman for Dire Straits playing a concert in Bangalore, and some of the kids who were interviewed said things like, “Mark Knopfler is a god.” (Keep in mind that the Hindu religion has hundreds of millions of gods, so maybe it’s not that big a deal.)

Dell was fascinating, if for no other reason than to see American office culture lifted out and plopped right in the middle of India. I loved the little signs they had posted all over the place. At Wipro, they had one that said, “Attitudes are contagious. Who’s catching yours?” Dell had all of these pick-me-ups that were about selling services. They said things like, “Playing a sitar? Hard. Selling support services? Easy!”

Cricket is getting better. If batting is so easy, as I thought it was, then why is there so much variance in how well batters do at it? Some guys get upwards of 100 runs, and others can’t even get ten. The average is about thirty, I think. I’ve looked at the high scoring as something that makes batting easy, but actually it can create a challenge as well—the price of being retired is extremely high. For an elite player, if you swing and miss just once, you’re costing your team about a hundred runs.

The food of the day goes to the chicken and pineapple pizza I had at Pizza Hut.

Who Put the “Shrava” in the “Shravanabelagola”?

Mysore/Shravanabelagola/Halebid/Belur/Bangalore

People in India like their temples. And the bottoms of their feet are made of fiberglass.

We started our day by traveling out to Shravanabelagola, which houses a 1000-year-old Jain temple. Before we got there, we visited a small sugar cane village along the road. Children came up to the window, and I had heard that they like pens, so I took a few of the spare ones out of my backpack and dropped them down. After that it was like a feeding frenzy—a whole bunch of kids came to my window until I had given away almost all of my pens. They would do a writing gesture as a way of asking for a pen. I’ve got this great picture of a girl who’s holding one of the pens I gave out in one hand while she’s signaling for a pen in the other. As we were walking around the village we got to take pictures of and with more children. It was a great visit because it was so far away from the city, where everybody wants something from you. Here, these kids had very little concept of money (pens were apparently their currency), and they seemed more genuinely excited just to have us around. Which meant that we could enjoy them a lot more rather than saying no (or “nahi”) all the time. I wonder what’s the farthest distance these children have traveled from that village.

When we got to the temple, we had to deposit our shoes and go up only in our socks. About a third of the way up the incredibly long stairs, I decided I should acculturate myself and go barefoot. It was a pretty hot day, but all the Indian people I saw (even small children) were barefoot. I found that it really wasn’t that bad, but there were a few problem spots where I would have to find some shade to keep from being really uncomfortable.

The temple itself was impressive, to say the least. There was a giant monolithic statue at the top that was about 60 feet high, and there were ancient carvings all over the place.

Yesterday I made a reference or two to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but I stepped it up today. Beth and I made a few references to the movie, but Zach was stuck in the Last Crusade. We need to straighten him out.

Today right before lunch Will Reale bought what he calls a “cocolin,” a two-stringed violin made from a coconut, for 60 rupees. The amazing thing was that I left the bus and went straight to the restaurant, and he came up a couple minutes later and was already playing the thing really well.

Later on Sam bought a drum and Matt Norris bought a flute, and they started playing songs from the back of the bus. At one point I heard different sides of the bus yelling, “India!” and “China!” I later found out that the song was called “India-China Cage Match” and posed the very valid question, “Who would win a cage match between India and China?”

The other two temples we visited were pretty similar and had a lot of the same amazingly intricate sculptures lining the walls. During the first one, the tour guide was going slightly overboard touting all of the historical accomplishments of the people who built the temples. He pointed out what could be construed as a curly wig and claimed that this was where the British probably got the idea for the way their judges dress, and he made a couple other claims as well. At one point I said, “Next they’re going to say that they invented the space shuttle.” Sure enough, at one point there was a carving of people with these roundish domes on their heads, and he said, “It looks just like the helmets that astronauts wear.”

If there’s one question that keeps popping up over and over, it’s “Is Shinji okay?” Our most independent companion has managed to be the subject of more than one water cooler conversation, though it’s not really all his fault. Here’s a chronology:

Day 1: Shinji shows up at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport with two small carry-ons, each of which was smaller than my backpack. People started talking about him, wondering how he could fit all his clothes, plus the laptop he brought, in such a small space. I said that surely he had checked all of his bags and we just didn’t see them, but I was wrong. He’s got everything in a space I probably couldn’t fit two days’ worth of clothes. Day 2: Shinji walks into a glass door. I think I was the first one who saw him after he walked straight into a door at the hotel, causing a big lump above his right eyebrow. Since then, everyone has asked him how he’s doing and telling him that it’s starting to look a lot better. Day 3: Shinji knocks over a railing at the Citizen Hotel. This one was just unbelievably unfortunate. There was an old wood railing between our patio and the beach, and Shinji happened to put a little too much weight on the wrong spot, causing a whole section of it to fall off. Day 5: On our plane ride to Bangalore, Shinji got a hold of something really hot. I heard something going on across the aisle, and the first thing I saw was Shinji going through all these gyrations to get rid of whatever was causing the burning in his mouth. The second thing I saw was Sam sitting next to him doing his darndest to keep from cracking up. Shinji would fill his mouth with water and move his head back vigorously, and he made some pretty uncomfortable faces. I should admit that I let out a giggle or two once I saw all the commotion Shinji was making. Day 9 (today): Shinji was pretty sick. Now, a lot of us have gotten sick sometime over the course of the trip, but Shinji was turning green.

The food of the day is the little caramel/chocolate candies I got at a little shop in Hasan. They weren’t very good, but they were two for a rupee. Second prize goes to Thumbs Up cola, which also wasn’t very good.

I Meant What I Said and I Said What I Meant...

Mysore

Today we visited the palace in Mysore and got the red carpet treatment. We got to go into a few places the general public wasn’t allowed, including a room with crazy weaponry and an adjoining room with stuffed tigers and stools made from elephants’ feet.

When we got outside we got to ride a real live elephant, which was pretty awesome. Six of us fit on it, and we walked around the palace grounds for five or ten minutes. The elephant started kind of going after some Indian people, and they laughed as they scattered out of his path. The funny thing is that we were receiving as much attention as the elephant—people were staring and waving at us. At the time I made the comment, “Look at those things on top of the elephant!”

The same sort of thing happened on the palace grounds. Julia related the story of people coming up and asking her to take a picture. She said that she would be happy to take a picture of them, and they would say that they wanted to take a picture with her.

I used the bathroom near the elephant rides, but when I left there was a woman asking for money. I tried to ignore her as I walked past—this palace has had numerous people trying to sell us stuff or solicit charity, which is always a rough situation. When I got back to the group, someone else was talking about how he was going to use the bathroom but he didn’t because it cost a rupee. I was floored—I cheated this woman out of her rupee because I thought she was a beggar.

Probably the highlight of the day, though, came as a complete surprise. At one point we got off the bus, and there were a bunch of kids across the street. Somebody got out his camera and started snapping pictures, and the kids just went nuts. Soon I got my camera out. The kids would stand in front of you for a picture and then get really excited when you’d show them their image on the screen. At one point, they were so eager to get in the picture that they started pushing each other, and I had to tell them to play nice or I wouldn’t take the picture. All of a sudden, the same boys who had been pushing each other had their arms around one another and were smiling like angels. Kids are funny like that. I took about ten pictures while we were there, and those are by far my favorite pictures I’ve taken so far.

Dinner was at this nice hotel that we were supposed to have stayed at but something got screwed up along the way. When we got there, The Shades, a band of three Indian guys, were playing a Backstreet Boys song. They played a bunch of cheesy music while we ate and talked. One highlight of the night was watching Shinji sleeping on a chair until Jason came and woke him up. Jason tapped Shinji on the shoulder, and Shinji picked his head up, looked around, sprang to his feet, and then walked away with Jason. It looked like a silent movie comedy team. The other highlight was talking with a big group that included Professor Konana. He talked about Desiree always having the same smile on her face, and he mentioned that Infosys has such a strong culture that its people call themselves “Infoceons” (like Americans or Texans). Then he said that maybe if someday Bartley has his own company there will be people who call themselves “Bartleyons”. The name stuck instantly.

The food of the day was actually not at the dinner buffet but at lunch. It was some kind of appetizer that was served on toothpicks (How do you tell the difference between appetizers and entrees in India? toothpick=appetizer; spoon=entree) and was fried vegetables in a nice spicy sauce. It was really good—one of several things on this trip that I’ve helped myself to after everyone else has finished eating.