Mumbai/Bangalore
Our company trips have been extremely educational, and one thing that’s really fascinating to me is the business dress that women wear. Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve seen Indian women wearing saris in offices, hospitals, and restaurants. I’m impressed by the number of women we’ve heard from so far. We heard mixed reviews on the role of women coming in, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what we’ve seen so far.
Tonight (our first night in Bangalore) Beth, Kevin, and I went out and had a great time. We took a taxi down to the shopping area, and the driver thought he was taking us for a round trip. He dropped us off, and then we would find him standing and waiting for us when we would come out of a store. He was a really nice guy, but he was unbelievably annoying.
We tried to find and internet cafe so Beth could check her email, but we didn’t have any luck. We went into a computer shop to ask if they knew where one was, and they just let us use their computer for fifteen minutes. The woman there was very nice—she told us to come back any time.
From there we went to a pub named Geoffrey’s, which is at a hotel near the airport. A guy we found outside the shops told us about it (he said they had “really good music”) and arranged us an autorickshaw—30 rupees for about a 30-minute ride. The three of us squeezed in the back, and Beth found it really funny how much trouble I had fitting.
The autorickshaw is like a cross between a taxi cab, a go cart, a motorcycle, and a roller coaster (which itself would be a cross between the Runaway Mine Train and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride). It’s fascinating riding in these things because a) they’re a hell of a lot of fun and b) they give you the best possible perspective on Indian traffic. Those things wedge themselves in the smallest possible places, weave in and out of traffic, and maintain some sort of control while seeming like the most reckless rides you could possibly be on.
Our first rickshaw driver was a 10-year veteran who was eager to let us know that he was able to read. He owned his vehicle, and he was very friendly and willing to talk to us. Kevin, probably the most intellectually curious person I’ve ever known, did a good job of getting him to open up.
Geoffrey’s was not exactly what we were looking for, but it was all right. It was inside a hotel, it had very few people, and they called me out for wearing shorts. And the really good music consisted of Aerosmith’s greatest hits. Still, I had a great time. Beth and Kevin are two people I haven’t gotten to spend nearly enough time with, and we had a few beers (Kingfishers, the dominant beer of India) and talked for a while. We have a lot more in common than I would have thought—we talked a little about getting a PhD an about what brought us to business school.
I bet if you added up all the people who think they’re the opposite of everyone else in business school, you’d have more than half of the MBA program. From people who voted to Kerry to people who don’t really care about money to people who shudder at the thought of consulting or investment banking, there are a lot of people who seem to believe that there is a dominant logic in business school that everyone but them subscribes to. I’ve talked to a number of people who believe they’re all alone in that sort of thing. Really, though, there seem to be a lot of kindred spirits who are unaware of each other, probably because of the kind of business school interactions we tend to have or just plain time constraints. Which is why it was good for me to talk with two “academics” who share similar views on a lot of things.
When we tried to get a ride back into town, the first rickshaw driver we saw offered us a rate of 150 rupees, citing some sort of shortcuts and one-way roads that he claimed we would have taken (but apparently didn’t notice) on the way over. So we balked at that and found a rate of 50, thanks to Kevin’s superior negotiating skills and the fact that he decided to use the situation to do his out-of-class negotiations assignment.
Back in central Bangalore we had dinner at a small, out-of-the-way vegetarian restaurant. We all ate until we were full (there was actually food left on the table) and we ended up paying about $6 for it, altogether.
After dinner we continued on our quest for Bangalore’s best pubs. Geoffrey’s had been an unfortunate sidetrack as it wasn’t very authentic, and we were determined to do better. Beth’s guidebook mentioned an acid rock pub, which got me all excited, but Beth and Kevin had their eye on another (certainly inferior) one. We found theirs, and though it contained not a hint of acid rock, it turned out to be a blast. This place was on one of the side streets of the main drag, and it was definitely a far cry from Geoffrey’s. This one had a bunch of working-class men being loud and singing along with whatever came over the speaker. We were fortunate to walk in at the beginning of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”. The whole bar sang along, boisterously, as the three tourists were just about cracking up. They did a few more songs to our amusement before we left (unfortunately “Uptown Girl” didn’t make an appearance).
The ride back cost us 60 rupees, even though it was less than half the distance of our other two rickshaw rides. Which is okay. Apparently you have to pay a little bit extra when you’re in the care of the Evel Knievel of autorickshaws.
I had heard from classmates that rickshaw rides can seem a little out of control, but nothing could have prepared me for what we went through that night. The first move our driver executed was to zip around a car that was waiting to turn. Our driver wasn’t into waiting, so instead of sitting patiently behind the car he pulled around it, putting us in the path of oncoming cars that he couldn’t possibly have seen from where he had been sitting. That’s one thing I love about Indian drivers. They just go. If there’s no visibility where you are, just pull out to where you have a better view of things, even if it’s on to the wrong side of the road, and just assume that whoever’s about to hit you will pull out of your way. The two scariest moments of our ride both involved red lights. One light we approached at full speed, and we could see all of the cars ahead of us were stopped. The three of us all kind of looked at each other, wondering when we were going to stop. But we just plowed through at full speed, driving to the left of all the stopped cars and not meeting with any harm. Probably the most dangerous maneuver was turning right (which is like turning left in the US) while weaving through cars from another side that were making protected turns.
I finally talked to Professor Konana about cricket today. When we got to the Mumbai airport, he was anxious to catch up on the match, so I went with him to find a TV. I asked him about the guy in the previous day who was working on a century (100 runs in an innings), and he talked about how selfish the guy was. One of India’s stars got close to 100 runs, and to get the century (which he ended up failing to achieve) he just protected the wickets and hit pitches very lightly rather than chancing an out. (In cricket, you don’t have to run if you don’t choose to. So hitting the ball lightly is like fouling pitches off.) Konana was upset because the batsman’s pursuit of the personal milestone put his team in jeopardy of running out of time and getting a draw rather than a win (which is what ended up happening). Having this conversation with Professor Konana was enlightening for two reasons: 1) it was good to know that he had also seen this particular at bat as boring (of course, I think every at bat in cricket is boring, but this one at bat was just unbearable, and it was good to get confirmation from an Indian) and 2) it brought up something I had never thought of: the stall to avoid a loss. In America, teams stall to ensure a win. The Four Corners in basketball and running the ball in football are two tactics that are common to condense the game so that a trailing team has fewer opportunities to score. In cricket, the trailing team tries to stall because any test match that fails to complete two innings in five days ends in a draw. That’s a fascinating distinction, and it’s hard for a Westerner to understand the unique dynamics that would bring out in cricket.
After trying to be Indian with Konana, I went back to being American with the two Chrises. We talked about all the ways that cricket sucks: you score on every play, ground balls make it to the boundary easily, the ball isn’t pitched that fast, bouncing off the ground would make the ball easier to hit, being down a hundred runs is nothing, you don’t have to run if you hit it, the runners always look like they’re running half speed, and so on. I still think the sweater vests are the biggest thing working against cricket. And what’s up with those samurai leg coverings?
The food of the day was the mushroom fried rice I had for dinner. That, and some naan, had me completely full for just a couple bucks.
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