Dear Daniel, IOU one Saturday. Love, India

Mumbai

The longest travel day of my life ended with our class arriving at the Intercontinental Hotel at 2:00 a.m. local time on Sunday. We left Austin at 2:50 p.m. on Friday, flew two hours to Cincinnati, flew eight hours to Paris, and flew nine hours to Mumbai. On the way to Paris, I got to see Finding Neverland and The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. Finding Neverland was great—I was left wanting it to last twice as long as it did, and the Peter character is one of the most endearing characters I’ve ever seen. Spongebob was unbelievably funny. It leaves you in a very vulnerable position to be sitting in front of twenty of your MBA classmates and let them watch you laugh out loud repeatedly at a children’s cartoon, but it was well worth it.

I brought three books for the trip: Baseball and Philosophy, Naked by David Sedaris, and a biography of Mother Teresa. I had planned to read the Mother Teresa book on the plane but I didn’t get around to it, which means that my only India-centric preparation I did on the plane was listening to the White Album—the whole thing. Even “Revolution 9” all the way through, which I think was a first. I hope that gives me everything I need to know about India.

Flying into Mumbai is a lot like flying into Mexico City—the poverty and filth are inescapable, but at the same time, the city has a lot of nice places, like this hotel. The most poignant moment of the night for me was when we were walking out of the airport and Amanda rolled her suitcase over the corner of some blankets. Professor Konana pointed out that she should be careful because there are people under those blankets.

So now I’m sitting in my hotel room watching a cricket match. How long do I have to watch this thing before I can say authoritatively that this game is stupid? Some guy made a routine catch on a pop up, and the crowd just went nuts. And the batsman doesn’t appear to be very good, given that he gets to hit with a canoe oar. I’m telling you, Tony Gwynn would wipe up in this game, whatever the hell it is. Anyway, that’s my goal for the trip—to divine as much as I can about cricket just by watching it.