Walkabout in South and East Asia

ProdigalMBA

2012-01-27T06:42:00.000-08:00

Hi guys! Rick Sheridan here. I've got a new set of posts up at http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com . They describe a pretty different way of transacting than we're used to, but they may also reduce unemployment a little. I'm trying to get as much feedback as possible on them. Check out the posts starting from "Roll Your Own Currency", but be prepared for some long reads. . .!

Passing on a China Christmas

2011-12-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

(note the site is moving to http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com . . . !)

Well I've participated in a few competitive grant program recently - and actually won one of them. The first was GreenStsrt. It's an incubator right in the middle of San Francisco. Unfortunately I didn't make that one. At that point the pivoting was undeveloped enough that I had to half-a$$ the application, and I'm sure they knew it.

However, separately I also got introduced to the fine folks at HYSTA (Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association). It's a Silicon Valley organization of Chinese American entrepreneurs and investors that counts AliBaba's Jack Ma and Yahoo's Jerry Yang among its participants.

A lot of the folks at HYSTA work as unpaid volunteers - so good for them, their work is appreciated. The program is to send entrepreneurs to mainland China to network with investors and go to all the tech parks. In fact I've visited a lot of these tech parks before, but only one in any kind of official capacity. Basically the park administrators try to convince you to rent space in the parks, which is fine.

I had more time and help to prepare than with Greenstart, so two weeks ago I found myself pitching Really Solid Technology over on University Avenue in Palo Alto to a few VC's acting as gatekeepers. That was really fun because all of the kibbitzing was in Chinese. There were about twenty other entrepreneurs pitching that same evening. Turns out they thought my pitch was one of the best there! I was really stoked about that, especially since I hadn't converted my slide deck into Mandarin. Just goes to show that substance still matters, not just the sheen.

Anyways, HYSTA organized grant-seeking from the city of Guangzhou to its participant who had pitched well - where the grant wasn't guaranteed. A close friend helped me translate my bio into Chinese, submitted it, and lo and behold last night I found out I was awarded a $1200 reimbursement for flying to Guangzhou and visiting the convention there.

So I felt fantastic, but I already knew I probably couldn't go: you see HYSTA would pick up most of the rest of the expenses (food, lodging, domestic travel) throughout the Chinese cities, provided I was able to commit soon enough. And a commitment equaled paying a previously unannounced $100 fee for their volunteer efforts. It took too long (precisely one day too long) for Guangzhou to come through with their reimbursement response. Since I had to count on the Guangzhou subsidy before I could even *consider* going, HYSTA had to pass my opportunity on to the next person. Whatev, they're still nice people and they had already extended the deadline for the better part of a week on my behalf; and i appreciate that.

I felt ok overall. After all I enjoy the chance to connect with investors as much as the next overly-optimistic entrepreneur, but I've got bigger fish to fry in the form of executing on a bootstrapping plan. (NB Bootstrapping = don't need investors).

So good luck to the Chinese-American entrepreneur who got my spot - ya better make the most of it!

(and don't forget, I continue transitioning to the blog to http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com , so have a look, bookmark it or rss it (click the big orange button on the right of the opening page), and let me know what you think!

Harvard curriculum change : HBS now equals "start a business in a developing country"

2011-12-03T14:55:00.000-08:00

I'm a *big* fan of a stalwart like Harvard doing this with their business school curriculum http://www.economist.com/node/21541045

Why? Cuz I, well, did it - and still rockin' and rollin'. Just have to read this blog to see how it all has been playing out. Stay tuned for more, and bookmark The Walkabout Blog's new site at http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com !

Twitter - the "Bank Assassin"

2011-10-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

November 5th is something called "Bank Transfer Day". It's getting especially propagated on the likes of Twitter with hashtags such as #banktransferday.
If I were either among BofA, Citibank, or Chase, (we can simply call them by their industry association name, the American Banker's Association or ABA) I would be shit-scared right now. Not necessarily over the Bank Transfer Day itself, but what it represents: decentralized-yet-coordinated mass bank runs. Today we have an added twist, and to understand it I need to explain to you the meaning of something called "reserve requirements".
Banks earn most of their money from interest paid out by us consumers and business operators on loans we take out, whether for homes, student loans, or for our businesses. There is a limit imposed by federal law to how much money a bank can loan out. If a bank is fortunate enough to maintain, say, a hundred million dollars in the form of 'demand deposits' which is to say, cold hard cash readily available for consumers to take from the ATM at their leisure, then that bank is equipped to issue one billion dollars in interest-earning loans. In issuing those loans, the bank is maintaining something called a 10% "reserve requirement". This means that the demand deposits are 10% of the loan book's size.
Now the reserve requirement is something that the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke has control over. As opposed to the example above, it's not fixed at ten percent exactly, but varies, generally between ten and twenty percent. It's one of a few levers of monetary policy the Fed has to influence the nation's economic activity. (Yes, the Fed wishes those levers were more effective than a rusted car's unhinged steering wheel, but that's another story for another time).
If a bank's reserve amount compared to it's outstanding loans falls below the federally mandated reserve requirement too far for too long, then we're far beyond the mild inconvenience of reduced earnings. Instead, now the FDIC is required by law to send their agents in, discharge the bank's managers, and put the bank into receivership. Particularly their goal is to find a new buyer for the bank. Remember Washington Mutual bank? This happened to them in September 2008, and they were bought by Chase. FDIC did it's job well.
Now for the twist: Like most businesses, banks rely on a certain degree of historical statistics to stay afloat. They know from long experience that on average, the masses don't simultaneously come knocking on their door demanding to withdraw their funds. The exception to this rule is something called a Black Swan event. A Black Swan event is glibly summarized by any unlikely scenario that suddenly becomes unexpectedly inevitable. Where this happened in the form of the Depression and its associated bank runs, the big banks now feel (at least they certainly hope) that the government's Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation formed post-Depression to guarantee people's deposits up to a couple hundred thousand dollars, reduces peoples' tendencies to get panicky and initiate a bank run.
Twitter changes all that. Like a cold steel revolver leveled straight at the ABA's head, Twitter followers via hashtags such as #banktransferday (just search for that keyword, pound and all, on www.twitter.com) can initiate a Black Swan event at the stroke of a key. Historical statistics be damned. How will banks expect themselves to carry on normal business under the current regulatory regime when they can be shot out of the water after a few short weeks of spontaneously-initiated Twitter-based word-of-mouth-building?
So what does the future predict? Well, the #OccupyWallStreet-ers will withdraw their funds from the bank, but the effect will be modest enough that banks will have time to react - including reducing teller availability to stem the rate at which people can close their accounts, as well as initiating periodic traffic 'outages' on their online banking for outgoing transfers. These inconveniences would have the effect of discouraging the non-die-hard Twitter-organized bank runners. However the #Occupiers will have successfully forced the banks to originate fewer new loans, and thus their new revenue generating capability will have been effectively stifled.
On November 5th The ABA will learn this sting of a lesson in social networking, and will know that their member banks came dangerously close to getting raided by the FDIC, getting put into receivership. So I highlighted what ABA would probably initiate among its member banks in the short run, but what will they do in the long run? Well over the next months, expect the ABA to lobby hard on Ben Bernanke's Fed as well as Congress to loosen reserve requirements or otherwise allow them to temporarily swing below the minimum requirement level for longer durations. This can give ABA member banks time to get new infusions of cash from the Fed (or from Warren Buffett ).
And they'll be doing all this quietly because they don't want to provoke another, larger Twitter-juiced bank run . Who's got the upper hand in this struggle? The #Occupiers by far. It may be the only ace they have to keep bank fees and interests rates reflecting the true costs of administering loans and money circulation instead of the ABA member banks' shareholders' inflated sense of expected returns. But boy is it a damn powerful one.

Orissa Market Trials Pt II

2011-08-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

Recap: This is the second of two parts on market trialing of a hand dynamo phone charger called the K-Turn Monster. I'm conducting the trials in a rural part of India's Orissa state near a small town called Parlekhemundi.

Orissa is a beautiful state with serene landscapes - the Eastern Ghat mountains are spaced with rice paddies in between them. Take a look:

The previous post finished with the initiation of a one-week user test, including a town and a village. Electrician vocational students (pictured) from a school I'm staying at introduced us to their home villages. These photos should indicate what some of these villages look like:

During the week while users were trying the product, I completed a tie up with an organization I’m close with here called AID-ITC for them to stock the units and fulfill basic servicing as necessary. So in the box of K-Turn Monsters, users are now getting warranty cards in addition to a promo handout for showing their friends. Here is some background on AID-ITC:

Closely associating itself with Gandhian values, Aid Industrial Training Center (ITC) is part school for 5-8 year old children coming from surrounding villages. It is also in skills building, maintaining significant capacity for training in sewing and pottery. New school rooms are completing construction designed by US-trained civil engineer Dr. Dhanada Mishra. There’s a co-op quality to it as there are irrigated rice paddies on the premises.

It’s here I absolutely must give a special shout-out to Dr. Nrusingha Panda who coordinates AID-ITC – Dr. Panda has been instrumental to coordinating my getting set up here especially with staying at the business school CSRM.

With his guidance and Dr. Dhanada Mishra’s help, I benefited from accessing the campuses’ excellent facilities such as its well-stocked technical and business libraries as well as reaching out to both MBA and vocational students, plus the vocational lab.
Big shout-outs also to Deepak Kumar and Manas Samal. These MBA students of CSRM made for excellent assistants and translators and I was very pleased to have them join up for these efforts. They’re also rockin’ volleyball players to boot, an activity that made staying here especially fun!

Now on to the user tests. With the communities we visited, our goal was to treat each community as a social network within which we would seed opinion leaders and high status individuals. That being the ideal, we of course compromised when encountered by reality on the ground. We did the user tests to gain 1) comprehension of how users would use the product 2) Feedback on price points. Knowing that word of mouth would get around, I designed the study so that we would test high price points first, then steadily graduate to lower price points as circumstances warranted. The communities are a small, 30,000 person town called Kasinagar, and a small village, perhaps 200 persons in the immediate area called Anu Konda.

Kasinagar (above) and Anu Konda (below) communities

In the town it was difficult to seed people who could reference each other (see Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Everett Roger's Diffusion of Innovation), we just stuck with individuals that we somehow managed to connect ourselves to. These were a mobile accessory shopkeeper, a factory worker, the son of the town chairman, and the electrical vocational student who led us there. The village was small enough for this kind of social navigation, but I think we got so caught up with the crowd that presented itself that we neglected to assert seeking out the opinion leaders like the village sarpanch or the highly influential school-teachers. Selected testers including students and paddy farmers.

Town and village dwellers learning about dynamo phone charging

During the testing week we called each of our test users. We reached the Kasinagar town users easily and they reported no problems and simply inquired about the price. Unfortunately we couldn't connect to the Anu Konda village users by phone! Their phones always read as off or out of antenna range, perplexing us. Naturally, we were eager to find out what was going on as the inability to reach them might speak to inferior capability of the K-Turn. At the end of the test week, we visited Kasinagar. We provided our post-survey and offered a higher pricepoint. Per the survey the residents appreciated the phone charging and torch functionality. Everyone found our high pricepoint to expensive, so zero sales unfortunately.

The next day we visited Anu Konda village. Despite our expressed wish to survey people alone to avoid influenced responses, the same crowd as before who had become our testers, quickly gathered. Now, what ensued perplexed me greatly - what I could make out to start with was a lot of elevated chatter in Telugu (secondary local language) which unfortunately none of my team could speak. What I could make out was their continuously repeating the English word "Rate!" "Rate!" which is their word for price. We had translated for us then that everyone thought that we would somehow force them to pay for the price of the unit. We learned that was informed by a difficult experience they had in the past where an outsider came to the town to sell medicines on a weekly installment basis. However the mechanics of that transaction worked out, after some weeks outsider ended up walking off with their money without providing enough product.
So, picturing a torch-and-pitchfork situation for getting the evil beast (me!) out of their village, I refunded their 20 rupee deposit on the spot to help reinforce that there was no way we could force them to pay anything for the products, following which they also returned the units. I went a bit further and stated that we would not sell to them at all at this time, a change from plan. Still came the entreaties "Rate, rate!" Informed by the Kasinagar price feedback, elucidated distribution costing, and discussions with my team, we had come to a moderate end user price point - but this was to be disclosed at the end of the survey only when it came time to offer a sale. So instead I had them disclose this moderate price point right away. Now *as soon* as they heard it, they immediately lost interest in any further discussion or interaction, and simply walked away. Ouch!
I'm not gonna lie - that encounter bummed me out. I think I'll never quite understand, after all the good will we built when we first visited their village, why the villager testers up and walked away, denying the benefit of their valuable feedback. For sure they seemed very skeptical that we wouldn't disclose the price ; No matter how irrational it sounds, in my gut I felt that all they wanted was to spoil what must be our 'nefarious' user test plans. We managed to give that village's vocational student a survey, and learned second-hand from his father that the testers, his neighbors, were trying the product over the next day, and after some ad-hoc phone testing, quickly lost interest. I'm told we also suffered some simple bad luck, an influential non-tester with an axe to grind spread around a lot of negativity over it. Ah well, feedback's feedback, even if it doesn't come in the form we intended - 'price is too expensive, and the product requires to much effort to provide value'.
Back at the school the next day, I informed the Kasinagar vocational student of the lowered price, feeling bad about having had to offer him a higher price earlier for test purposes, and knowing he'd find out about it anyways. Instead of being unhappy or angry, he decided to purchase a unit! So I walked him through the warranty card filling and it was done.

(. . . )

With many pieces in place, I still had to finish setting up the channel before leaving. With product stocked at AID-ITC, numbers hashed out, and servicing in place, I still needed to identify a means of driving sales. AID-ITC was too remote from the main road to be an obvious place to draw people. Time was getting on and I wasn't sure what to do. I went to go think about it over some micro-coffees made outside the school gate where there are some shops for food and daily essentials. I'd become friendly with the instant coffee vendor and he knew what business I was doing. We'll call him Coffee-Wallah.
Well some days earlier I had made an random visit to a nearby village named Upalada close to the CSRM / Centurion Institute of Technology. I was told I'd be reaching them during their Haat, or village market session, and I thought I would try to build some demand demo'ing the K-Turn there. I wandered around making my way to the dais where the Haat should be taking place while carrying a box of K-Turns. I was getting a lot of looks and hearing a lot of abruptly ended conversations as I passed. Picture that you’re in your own town when a spaceships lands and a sandal-clad alien gets out to wander up and down your neighborhood streets and you get the idea.
It turned out the Haat had long since finished that day. Sighing I returned to the main road, for hailing passing buses returning to the school. Unfortunately, the streets were empty of any passing traffic. Meanwhile some locals gathered, asking me, "What's in the box?" I ignored, certainly it was too dark to do a demo, and anyways strange aliens initiating impromptu nighttime street introductions are no way to introduce a brand. But they were insistent, thinking to myself 'alright well they asked for it' and I began my demo. A crowd gathered, and I started showing them their phones getting charged with the K-Turn. Got some low-ball purchase offers and a request for shop-stocking. I passed around flyers containing contact infos in case any of them really wanted to try engaging. A truck finally came, and they arrange with the drivers to take me the 10 kilometers back to the school.
Ordinarily I would have filed the Upalada visit under 'random company ego stroking' and continued with channel-bringup activities, which brings us back to the Coffee Wallah. So once again I was pensively kicking back a few with Coffee-Wallah right outside the school's main gate. As I wallowed in caffeine-infusion, someone else kept trying to get my attention making turning motions with his hands. Finally gaining the presence of mind to realize he was mimicking the K-Turn motion, I asked him where he came from. He replied, 'Upalada', 10 kms away! He was part of the crowd I demo'd to! He trades in gas canisters up and down the road. It dawned on me that Coffee-Wallah's stand is a roadside hub stop for trade traffic up and down the road! So that same day I formulated a proposal for C-W - demo the K-Turn to appropriate passers by, especially traders, and explain to them how they can get their hands on it at nearby-yet-remote AID-ITC. He readily agreed to the terms I described - Now he earns 15 rupees commission for every unit traceable to his recommendation via a 'Coffee-Wallah sent me' declaration from the customer.

Coffee Wallah's demo'ing the K-Turn Monster

So now I have stock placed and a means to drive sales which is precisely what I need to have a complete channel with demand I can monitor over time – Excellent!
Summary: So as pleased as I was with the execution and progress, I would call the user feedback overall as negative, which is to say not justifying moving more volumes of the current product in this particular market unless the channel starts showing demand. Learnings are
1) improved market /targeting based on statistical information of cell antenna placement, call volume at a particular antennae, antenna ontime, and electricity ontime. In practice it would be very difficult to get all of these information even for a single mobile operator, but government-owned BSNL offers some promise as they are required to disclose.
2) product repositioning / refocus brand message.
Its clear that villagers will not suffer manual effort any more than the rest of us would to keep their phones charged when they have intermittent electricity available. That leaves commuters and emergency preparers as the remaining market segment. The branding statement then becomes “The K-Turns provide peace of mind - no matter what calamity has befallen you, you always have the power to keep connected on your cell phone”.
And I'm en route to the US. As I write I’m at rest on a meadow in Delhi’s central Connaught Place. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the remaining market segments include many devel*oped* world consumers, so while I'm monitoring demand from this micro-business I've set up and determining next steps, I’m finding that some related projects are germinating in mind . . .

Fasting in the face of corruption

2011-08-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

This is an interim post as I'm completing the (large) post for the recent India work.
Indians recently have been supercharged by the protest, arrest, and fasting of a famous activist named Anna Hazare. (Anna's a man's name here). He's an older fellow associating himself with Gandhian tradition. He advocates the passage of a far-reaching anti-corruption bill in Parliament. The photo above shows the gateway of the remote rural school I was staying at in Orissa state's far-afield Parlekhemundi. When Anna was arrested, the students at the school spelled out 'No More Corruption' in candles, pictured above. Later they marched en masse around the town.
I first heard of this man in business school during a class in social entrepreneurship describing how back in the 1980's he got a village in Maharashtra state to close its abused alcohol shops, ultimately leading to much greater prosperity in the village. (I found it interesting, I am still as big a fan as the next guy of spirits ;) ) He's since set his sites on eradicating Indian corruption now, which is sort of like living in California and trying to eradicate the sunshine. So his influence and capturing of the Indian spirit is really impressive. Also, the body he demands to pass his bill is the same containing the members he accuses of corruption - people who would risk being detained and punished for corrupt practices after the bill's passage. Talk about an uphill battle. And so the progress of his movement's success is all the more impressive - Parliament agreed in principle to his demands, and after twelve days his fast was to close just this morning. Can you imagine, in the US, someone fasting to protest campaign finance? Then can you imagine that within two weeks, both houses of Congress debating the issue ad nauseam due to his fast? I think our system would let the man starve without so much as paying lip service to his cause inside the Capitol.

Well as I write I'm in Delhi during a two day layover. I overcame a bout of Delhi-belly (don't eat from the roadside nut vendors!) that unfortunately emptied itself all over the center of Connaught Place, and promptly headed to the city's Ramlila Maidan grounds to see Hazare's protest.

Above I'm wearing a hat of the same style that Mr. Hazare wears. These were very popular at his rally, a local gave me one :) . I debated how much direct support I wanted to show - I generally try to steer clear of showing my opinions in the middle of another country's political rally especially when I have limited visibility into the issues. Academics can rightly critique that his rally is motivating the passage of a bill forming a top-level organization above parliament and answerable to no one. I decided that anti-corruption in general was a worthwhile theme to get around, and moreover that marshaling the public energy towards achieving a shared public good is much more needed in the short term than early intellectual dithering resulting in inaction. I see and experience the far reaching effects of corruption every day while in India, including my day's Delhi-belly (think public works, sanitation, promoting food-prep practices). See my later posts from 2008 showing some effects of corruption.

How often does your grandfather care enough about an issue that he'll *sit* and perhaps even *sleep* in the middle of the protest grounds?
I came across just one other foreigner on the grounds; I guess I was a little disappointed in the backpacker set. A note for travelers staying in Delhi: If you're going to stay in a moderately priced guesthouse, I highly recommend staying in Delhi's suburb called Gurgaon. The chaos level is *much* less than the Delhi itself, tends to be much cleaner, and often still with good access to the metro subway. I'll recommend where I stayed with excellent ambience and super friendly staff, the Royal Park Plaza in DLF Phase-1. You can search it on Google.

User Tests in India

2011-08-16T02:07:00.000-07:00

Although this is a personal blog, so much of my time is spent on efforts developing my company that I thought I would post some company updates here. To remind: I push forward my startup in marketing off-grid mobile phone chargers to markets in the developing world. The chargers run on mobile, hand-operated dynamos.

I spent July in Shenzhen, securing exclusivity from my supplier of unique product who I have an excellent relationship with, agreeing on a turnkey model for their order fulfillment to my customers, identifying 2nd and 3rd product offerings, getting the first barebones website up and running at www.rstoem.com (check it out!), and took 30 units of the largest, most heavy-duty product with me to India for trialing with end users and sales. On to India efforts:

I've benefited a lot from introductions to people and organizations in the rural area of Orissa I'm based in, near the small town called Parlakhemundi. I'm happy to be based out of a well equipped, rural school called Jagganath Institute for Technology and Management.

View of campus from the library of JITM.

Importantly, they consist of a business school, technology school, and a vocational school. Two of the MBA students volunteered to help me plan and execute the marketings surveys and user testing. I decided we would present our plan to the vocational students since they come just from the surrounding villages, giving us the introductions we needed into their communities. (Students from the other schools, by contrast, come from all over the entire state of Orissa and then some, making them inappropriate for introductions). That presentation succeeded nicely, and we got four villages meeting the criteria we stated.
Following this, so far individuals from one local village and one small town have been carefully seeded with K-Turn Monsters for 1 week of user testing. Each person gets surveyed about their lifestyle and income, and puts down a twenty Rupee deposit (about 50 cents US) to ensure they ascribe some value to the product during the week of testing. After the week is up they will be surveyed again on if and how they used the product, and finally be given the opportunity to buy it. Excitement during our visits from people who listen to us introduce the product is always high, but I know that this is transient and must be backed up by their experience during the testing period. Right now am deciding which if any other villages will be visited.
Major learnings from this so far are centered around village segmentation. One
village will have lots of electricity on-time while another will not. One village will have high correlation of cell phone signal on-time to electricity on-time while another will not. (That correlation is important, villages with accessible cell phone signal even when there is no electricity, surprisingly common, are more compelling customers) Finally I'm more and more aware of an important BOP-marketing challenge - the greater the need of a village for a given good or service, the less accessible they are likely to be, and the less their ability to pay for products. So efficient targeting is paramount, so villages can be selected efficiently. Also efficient word of mouth building is critical, so that needful villagers can select themselves to seek out the product wherever it is stocked.
On the technical side of things, only last week noted that the units I'm carrying
differ from my sample in important ways. The dynamo diameter was subtly but importantly smaller which reduces its effectiveness on phones. Also, all of the units, including the approved sample, lacked lubrication and had a handle joint that was prone to slipping out. Luckily this school I'm based out of has a vocational branch where I was able to procure grease and adhesive to solve these problems. It just takes some time to make these fixes, about 10 mins per unit, so my little dorm room here looks like a workshop.
As I've been writing this post, have gotten feedback from one of the vocational students that his unit isn't continuously charging the phones he has tried on. If that's correct, it is unfortunate as the units I've provided for user testing that have performed well on my test phones. Phones he has tried on, Nokias, Micromaxes, and China's G5, are particularly prevalent in this environment so his feedback is important. Also as an electrician vocational student his opinion will be particularly referred to in his community. I'm having the student bring his K-Turn tomorrow so I can test it and with any luck, fix it so it works on his phone.
Finally, got feedback from the Jamaica/Haiti mobile operator, unfortunately negative. They
reported that the samples work as advertised, but, quoting: "
- The manual factor was not very appealing
- The life of the charge for the effort was not great
- The price point of the device was high "

So summarizing, progress is strong, but encountering negative market feedback... Anyways I'm particularly enjoying the successful relationship navigating, something this engineer has been historically very bad at . . . this is one point where some INSEAD org-behavior simulations are turning out very helpful. And I'm deeply indebted to Dhanada Mishra, Prof. Haribandhu Panda, Aid India / Aid-ITC organizations, and Orissa's JITM / Centurion Institute of Technology, and of course Patrick Walsh for all of their support through these efforts.

Release your dark side, and then discover immense value in channeling it

2011-06-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

I found the attached image supremely inspiring :) - Which is he more likely to become one day, a finance spreadsheet wizard or a CEO? Enjoy :)

A squeak out through the Great Firewall

2011-06-02T20:09:00.001-07:00

Wow, the internet blocking here in mainland China has become really difficult - Even mobile email status updates don't work anymore. Sorry for seeming out of touch everyone, always here, be back in a week and a half. General update: Shenzhen is changing fast, this fascinating city is whitewashing itself in preparation for summer sports games. For better or for worse, it's definitely starting to mature from its Wild West days.

Video marketing

2011-05-10T20:56:00.001-07:00

So the quality is obvious very low for this, but it's a first pass that describes one marketing approach - i.e. even low-income consumers in the developing world can access product references from the internet.

And yeah, we'll work on the whole RTS <-> RST thing . . . ;)

Sales in Little India Pt. 2

2011-04-18T08:23:00.001-07:00

So last Sunday's purpose was to verify the previous week's sales weren't a fluke. Now, this time the odds were stacked against me for sure: 1) I hadn't managed to get Kumar to commit to assisting with sales in the days prior to last Sunday, and 2) the retailer started talking about charging to rent the space out front, making noises that I was drawing attention away from the other two revenue-generating storefront vendors of phone cards - in short, I had just one hour, from 5pm - 6pm, to do my marketing. So I went in expecting difficulty - can a foreigner sell to skeptical Tamil buyers? Kumar was clearly key to sales last week; I had been out there last week for three hours on my own without securing the attention I needed to even begin explaining how the product works, that is until Kumar came along, having just finished his construction work and joining in with his successful demo'ing and sales efforts.
So I set up shop. After forty five minutes, I had difficulty attracting the attention I needed, just a few demos to a few individuals. The end of my time window was approaching, so I started packing up, unsure of how to interpret things. I happened to be cranking the charger as I stood up to start closing, cause someone noticed and came over. I demo'd and explained to him, and a crowd gathered. By the time I continued demo'ing to others, he decided to buy, and I fulfilled his purchase. So there it was, second week, and demand is demonstrated once again (sigh of relief!). However the crowd had dissipated In the minutes it took for me to fulfill the buyer's purchase; since the demo's drive sales, and I couldn't keep the demo momentum up while fulfilling the buyer's purchase. And yet I was feeling good - in spite of odds stacked against me, I could still sell product, and last week was not a fluke.
Satisfied, I closed up shop then, and continued to plan the way forward: Yes, partners are needed on the marketing and sales side, so I've put out the word on that.

PS Finally, the thing I'm learning about consumer tech product sales is, you don't really ever sell. You explain how the product works, how to use it, and what it can do for them. People make and assert their own buying decision of their own accord. There's no 'selling' moment. They buy or don't buy, and that's it.

Selling in Little India

2011-04-15T05:12:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday represented a successful run of sales in Little India. I have to try to repeat the effort this Sunday to verify the non-fluky-ness of last Sunday, so we'll see what happens. In short, this was a watershed moment for my company, as it showed that there is real market demand (translate that to, people are willing to reach their hands into their pocket, taking out cash to give me, in exchange for my product). Rock on.

Little India video

2011-04-09T01:26:00.000-07:00

A dose of cultural sampling amid the business activities! I'll provide the track name on request.

Gatekeepers

2011-04-07T02:16:00.001-07:00

I operate RST out of a member supported tech office space in Singapore called Hackerspace. You can look it up on www.hackerspace.sg This afternoon there was a knock on the door in the Singapore hackerspace. There was a woman, japanese, speaking carefully enunciated but broken english. I wasn't sure what she wanted, but she appeared to have some sincere
needs. She mentioned the word 'job', yet she had a minimum of the things you would imagine someone
looking for a job would carry, like a CV. Yet as an entrepreneur, I'm conditioned to despise gatekeepers,
especially the box-checking kind, so despite my cautious door-answering instincts, I decided I would try being as
un-gatekeepy as possible. I imagined maybe she was supposed to meet someone in hackerspace, or just to hang out
here or get a tour. But then at one point she said emphatically, with a very serious face, "I'm looking for
a job". So I asked her for her card, told her I would put it up on the bulletin board, and if I or anyone I heard
around was looking for artists, I would mention her card. Well yesterday I had heard a couple folks from
another in-house company talking about artwork, so i queried one of them elliptically asking if they knew any
company looking for an artist. And surprise surprise, their own company was looking for artists right now.
So either the girl was responding to an ad of theirs, or Lady Serendipity was working overtime. The guy I was
querying bolted upright and immediately sought her card that I put on the bulletin board.
Whether or not she's competent for the job at hand, she's got the best chance someone could hope for to be
considered for it. I feel good.

More marketing in Singapore's Little India

2011-04-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

You know, over the past few years I've been keeping this blog, it's been anonymous. Over the same three years, i've learned to come out of my shell. Starting with facebook updates, tweets, then the company fb brandpage and company smartmob group I get consulting from.
And over time, no matter what message I'm trying to get across, I've learned that anonymity serves me little. So for now, I'll just provide some links to my other online identities, and you can sort out from there. So first, I tweet much more frequently than I blog at @walkaboutrick . Then, on facebook you can navigate to my company brand page by searching facebook for 'Really Solid Technology'. Finally, the SmartMob. What's a SmartMob? Well quite simply, I'm going about my entrepreneurial efforts without a business partner. makes it especially tough going, but it is what it is. SmartMob allows me to air out my plans on an upcoming activity or decision, and people i trust can provide their feedback to shape my activities.
That is also searchable on facebook under really Solid Technology. The product I market itself, the K-Turn, is featured on www.rstoem.com . That should pretty well cover my online persona. Now on to business updates:
Last week I had a 1.6 meter tall poster printed, and later, 200 leaflets. They all associated the hand cranked portable cell phone charger I market with an emotion , which is the feeling of helping someone. In essence, the user is taking the charger, called the KTurn, and charging someone else's phone with it who is running out of power. Emotions are very powerful things, and I surmised that the ad's imagery of a boy charging a girl's phone would be very compelling indeed, and that i would be getting calls to my own phones (as listed in the leaflets) so I could tell people which retail storeshelves to buy my product in.
Well we're at about 24 hours after the close of the ad campaign, and no calls yet. Perhaps excessively conditioned instinct by this point tells me not to expect calls. Which leads to another change in strategy.
You see, in handing out the leaflets, I had a Tamil laborer working for me for a few hours. You know, it would be more authentic if people received the ad from one of their own then from some random white guy in the middle of Little India.
Let's call this laborer Kumar. We'll call him that because that's his name and he deserves the credit I'm about to give him.
So where Kumar could have just handed out the leaflets to be people and go on, he would get engaged in conversations with them about the product. He was holding a sample charger I had given him a few days before, (he evidently had been trying it out a lot on his own because he had a lot of feedback for me) and he was demonstrating it during his one on one interactions with randomly approached folks in Little India. He made it clear that he felt he was doing better by me to talk to people instead of just to hand out cards. I decided it was lucky I had structured his compensation both on time and number of leaflets handed out, with emphasis on the time. I hadn't predicted his behavior, but I was sure happy with the result of that and more importantly, Kumar's own initiative.
So Kumar most deliberately forced me to realize that the only real way to 'market' to the Little India denizens is to have little demonstrations in public. The demos have as goal to instruct people, who've probably never seen a dynamo, how they can recharge their phones' batteries using only their own hands.
So over the next week, look for me tweeting about securing a table for demonstrating on, a space to put it up in. and hey, maybe even a microphone, amplifier, and speaker. This INSEAD is not too proud to learn marketing from a construction laborer.
Rick Sheridan

Market Testing in Singapore

2011-02-13T01:24:00.000-08:00

Here I am market testing my company's new product, the KTurn dynamo phone charger! Readers can you guess the setting in which I am testing this?

How to ride a Mongolian Horse

2010-08-16T00:44:00.000-07:00

Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Indonesia

So with the Nepal trek closed and an open summer ahead of me, I took up a very enticing invitation to travel in Tibet. But as long as we’d be in the hinterlands, we thought we might as well visit Inner Mongolia also.
First, I learned that if there was ever a battle for the most representation on tours between mainland Chinese and foreigners, the Chinese won long, long ago. I saw no other foreigners in Inner Mongolia, and on the plateau our foreigner group was outnumbered by Mainland tourists by at least 10-1.
The most famous land feature in Inner Mongolia are the grasslands, on which ride the famed Mongolian horses, whose masters reside in the equally famous roundhouses, eating giant servings of pure lamb meat. The visits to the Mongolian villages are a little touristy, with brief trots on horses, Karaoke lunches, and ongoing negotiations for goods and services. But when you can get away from these small negatives for a moment, and just look out over the expanse of land, and sit and watch the sunset, it’s really relaxing and pleasant. And the lamb was *delicious*, worth every jiao. But back to the horse-back rides: The Mongolian tour directors only let you ride very slowly, but I knew they can ride the horses much faster. How to get them to do that? To answer that question, I took a page from the Cargo Cultists of post-World War II. The Mongolians wear iconic, large brimmed cowboy-style hats, and I was watching some of them hit the horses on the rump to speed them up. (I happened to buy such a hat because I thought it looked cool). Adding a shred of creativity, I took my new hat off, and whapped my horse on the rump with it, and the beast TOOK OFF! I had never been so fast on a horse in my life, and when my initial surprise wore off, the speed was really enjoyable – the horses glide along more smoothly and comfortably at speed than they do in trot. As soon as my horse had gotten this impulse, my Mongolian minder shouted from his increasingly distant point “Drop the hat! Drop the hat!” no doubt hoping desperately that my stilted Chinese possessed the relevant vocabulary. I savored the experience for a few final, memorable seconds before I decided to be an obedient tourist and threw off the cowboy hat. I inferred, correctly that the hat is used in training so that the horses respond to it uniquely.
The grasslands turned out to be lacking in grass in favor of small shrubs. It turned out there were consequences of this which we learned through horseback riding. My horse was tripping every so often on apparently nothing.
“Me: My horse seems so tired . . . “
“Mongolian cowgirl: Didn’t you notice how skinny he is? The rain has been light the last year, the grass for him to eat so little”.
Turns out the horse was indeed scrawny, and I felt bad. I thought that in the US we solved these kinds of shortages with hay cultivation, markets, and transportation, but I’m not a farmer so what do I know . . . By contrast in the opposite corner of the country, the Tibetans definitely have hay figured out to feed their yaks . . .
Following a punctuating bubble bath party back in a Beijing Sanlitun nightspot we proceeded to the Tibetan plateau. If you ever gain the inclination to visit Tibet, please please take the pressure acclimatising train the 48 hour train in and don’t fly. The entire south-western third of China sits on a plateau. So we’re talking about a vast swath of planet Earth raised 4000 meters, or 13000 feet, above sea level. Turns out that the meter-feet conversion is important, because to an ear accustomed to customary units, the number 4000 sounds harmless enough. When the airplane sets down, the airport pharmacy (by the way, the airport has a pharmacy) chiefly sells oxygen bottles. And they are *very* necessary if you come into the country by airplane. Fatigue and headaches settle in quickly, and days later we’re making out way to 5000 Meters (16,500 feet) at Everest Base Camp. More than half of our troupe suffered altitude sickness at this altitude, and while the view of Mt. Everest was valuable, I suspect the sickest among us were unsure their malady-stricken stay at the camp was worth the photos.
We took the train back from Lhasa, and the rolling hills covered in (grassy) grasslands grazed by yaks was delightful. Our train passed through the highest train station in the world, a factoid which the train PA system dutifully recognized. The train sped straight through this notable station without stopping – I decided it was a tribute to the host country’s sense of face that they built this station – because there were no inhabitants, buildings, or crops to justify the station's existence.
Well with these travels completed, there really was only one more logical destination to pursue. Obviously I’m talking about Jakarta. Yes, with two weeks to kill, I had to go somewhere before my itinerary for a class business trek (observing and meeting with exotic tribal chieftains in Silicon Valley) kicked in. My thinking proceeded thusly: I had already visited or traveled through 70% of China’s provinces (which officially means its high time I saw as much of the US . . .). Therefore Jakarta, the rambunctious, unrestrained, burgeoning capital of Indonesia was the last backpacking itch I had to scratch. ( I'm saving Mt. Rushmore for later :) )
From an urban planning perspective, Jakarta is best compared to Los Angeles – a concrete jungle with little planning with respect to zoning and mall developments everywhere, while the megalopolis manages to avoid the street chaos of Mumbai or Delhi. I happened to show up at the opening of Ramadan (as the hedonistic revelers of the world do one big collective face-palm) which pretty much shut down recreational life in the city. That's okay - I always enjoy urban observation (I like to keep my eyes open to in any new city), experience a foreign lifestyle (I managed to observe Jakarta’s hip and beautiful while making friends with expat helicopter pilots in Social House - thanks to GN for the tip!). I skipped over to Bali in pursuit of kite-surfing. As I write I’m in Bali’s beach-chic Seminyak planning my itinerary to Lombok and the Gili islands where I hear the wind and facilities are appropriate for this.

PS, for this posts' photos, I know the bulk of mainstream readers like to see food and cultural stuff, but until the day this blog becomes reader-supported, you get what I like to post, namely . . . Solar-powered GSM phone antennae at 4000 M altitude!

and a solar powered water boiler near Sugatse!! Can there *be* anything cooler??

Since that picture I was in immense pain from a splitting migraine stemming from the reflected sunshine off the cooker. That moment was the last time I smiled that day. :(

Karmic Repair in Nepal

2010-07-11T05:35:00.001-07:00

Holy smokes I’m in Nepal. I had some funny preconceived notions on what I would see here. For example, I thought that Kathmandu would look a lot like Darjeeling (mountain town) on steroids. I write having completed one INSEAD period since my last post.
I’m in this country on a social entrepreneurship trek. You see, before the beginning of the period, we had a choice of the following courses: Building Business in China, Building Business in India, Social Entrepreneurship in Nepal, and Building Business in Brazil. The Brazil trek got canceled for insufficient enrollment, and the remaining BRIC country’s course, Drinking Vodka in Russia, was expunged for unknown reasons. These days the talk is about BRICi, where the little I is for Indonesia. I am aching to visit that little i’s Jakarta, preferably as part of a trek in the autumn P4. Drumming up interest from my fellow INSEAD students is proving tricky, many are looking for the next sandy beach to visit on weekends . . .
One nice thing about elective courses such as these treks is that students are effectively self-selecting into affinity groups. So for example, I meet the guy who has spent his career to date with the Red Cross in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Bain consultant who worked with Technoserve on cashew supply chain optimization, also in Africa.
On this trek, we visited villages where their agricultural output has increased multiple times over allowing them to transition from subsistence farming to market participation with their surpluses. I like the examples of development initiatives where the target’s earning input has increased, as opposed to just making their life a little easier under their current income regime. This usually involves facilitating markets access. In one initiative I was part of, we were enabling lighting in a productized package for low income villagers in India. Perhaps the lighting could increase their productivity, say at night, but it was really about making the customers’ lives easier without necessarily increasing their earning power. On the other hand, it gives villagers who don’t have the income potential to buy the product something to aspire to. Seeking increased utility and status is a powerful force in capitalism – recall ‘the pursuit of happiness’, a notion whose effect on the world isn’t to be underestimated.
But it’s hard to productize the act of facilitating market access. In the case of the above village where they learned how to cross high quality strains of oranges with large size strains, or teaching drip irrigation to maximize targeted water usage without wasting it on weeds, there’s not much you can monetize except for consulting time, which is a subjectively valued product even in the first world.
We also visited a group of social entrepreneurs – they were an inspiring lot with such diverse projects in operation including breweries, training initiatives,distributed biofuel power generation, and housing conversion to traditional architecture styles. We also visited an urban housing project for the homeless, a community drinking water diversion project, and an instance of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in action for Nepali schoolchildren. Now here’s where I’m going to push the INSEAD brand. Whereas a student delegation from your typical, run-of-the-mill social entrepreneurship-oriented business school (ahem, Stanford) would show up on site, see some villages, take some photos, and ruminate on the airplane back home, we INSEAD students said, “Screw that, we’re cutting the original observation schedule short, and make a presentation to all the entrepreneurs we met and show them how to get the entrepreneurial ecosystem right-side-up again.” We created a brand and illustrated a pathway to bring up Nepal’s tourism, agricultural export, and hydropower industries, all under one licenseable brand (kind of like the ‘CE’ label for product safety) designed to inspire commitment in Nepalis and confidence in foreigners on their supermarket store shelves. Remember when you come to Nepal as well as your local organic supermarket storeshelf and see brand “Jaya” posted all over the place, you saw it here
first! Although seeded by our finance guy and our Red Cross worker, cheers to the consultants in our group for pushing the presentation structure along, you’re a tribute to your profession.
After the week-long class was over, we took a flight to the Himalayas and back - $140 for an affirmative response to the question, “Oh you were in Nepal, did you see Mt. Everest?”. Yes, I did, and here are the blurry pictures to prove it.
Alas, the summer is finally here. Many students are in internships with banks and consultancies. Following my unsuccessful “cross the t’s, dot the I’s” banking applications, valiant multi-weekend-in-the-Singapore-library effort at VC internships, and a few artistic stabs at industry, I’m once again mobile and traveling in Asia, my conscience restful in the knowledge that I pulled out all the networking stops at my disposal for an internship in the region.
So on deck we have Delhi starting tomorrow morning where I’ll catch the remainder of the Building Business in India folks, followed by Inner Mongolia in China, and then the holy grail of travel adventures, Tibet. My trusty cell phone camera is taking requests on what to point and shoot it at. Email them or send me a message via comment.

It's all optional

2010-05-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

I wanted very much to be able to say I was in finals and so couldn't post this week, but then all of a sudden, finals just finished this morning, taking away my alibi, and providing you this post.
On Friday I said good-bye to the consternatingly cold weather of Fontainebleau, and a fresh hello to the local liveliness that is Singapore.
Today we will talk about Financial Options, yet we won't talk about how poorly I did on the recent Finance Exam :). I found options fascinating because a) they help you evaluate and negotiate for the kind of stock options package you offer or are offered during the creation of a new company (especially in my Silicon Valley home turf) but more importantly for b) their real life applications outside of finance.
What is an option? Most clearly but least precisely, an option is a contract giving its owner the ability, but not the obligation (thus the "option") to buy a stock at a future time, where the stock's value at the future time is unknown (even though the stock's value is widely known at the time of purchase). If such a contract could be bought and sold, (informal markets can spring up around even the most restrictive of options contracts) you can imagine it would be tough to assign a fair price to it. So we spent a lot of effort learning how to value options contracts. But I suspect that only a few readers of this blog would actually care how such a contract is valued. Suffice to say that the more that an option contract's underlying stock value fluctuates, the more valuable the option.

Instead, I suspect that many readers do care about the value of projects they undertake. Look at going school to learn a new skill with uncertain longterm payoff, or traveling to a new locale to look for otherwise unknowable opportunities, or starting a new business with uncertain outlook. Are these activities worthwhile endeavours? Well it turns out that each of these activities is a form of real option, only mildly distinct from a stock option. Because of the high upside in being able to replicate and scale an otherwise small but value-producing project, and the low downside being the sunk cost of exploring the basecase of the opportunity, then these kinds of explorations in aggregate become very worthwhile.

I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike.

So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . .

Coming up, look for discussion of the Singapore MBA student lifestyle.

Feeling the Timbuk2 Love . . .

2010-04-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

In our Processes and Operations Management class, we study the mathematics that allows some businesses to operate, and causes others to fail (I use the words ‘allow’ and ‘cause’ carefully). Our most recent study was the company Timbuk2. Timbuk2 is the yellow-swirly branded maker of messenger bags founded and headquartered in the City and County of San Francisco. Not all of their bags are made in the city anymore, but a respectable number of them are, and certainly the highest margins are earned there on a per-bag basis.

Timbuk2 is justifiably special to me. I purchased (or rather, my father purchased for me) my first Timbuk2 bag in 1998, priced at $70. It took me through the end of high school and throughout my undergrad years commuting to class on rollerblade. The laptop-messenger pictured is the third bag I’ve owned. It has seen me through all weather conditions in more than ten developing and developed countries. The company continuously fixes design faults and adds appropriate features as the model matures.
(I think it’s notable that the original messenger bag remains offered today for precisely $70, considering all of the things that affect price change over time, including but not limited to manufacturing cost, inflation, consumer demand, and the company’s preference to maintain consumer’s psychological price anchors.)

Earlier after first arriving on campus for the MBA program, no one ever had reason to give my red-and-grey shoulder bag a second look other than that it appeared a bit odd – why not a leather satchel? Now people stop me in the hallway and ask, “Hey, is that a Timbuk2 bag? We just studied that company in our operations class.”

It is definitely a point of pride that we can (or that at least someone can) still make things in San Francisco. The trick is customization. Many companies manufacture uniform, low cost products in China and ship them over a long lead time over water to the US. Apple can contract to manufacture uniform high price, high margin products, and fly them to the US. Dell and other laptop manufacturers can, only after extreme capital equipment expenditures, contract to manufacture customized high price, high margin products to be flown to the US. If you’re a small concern operating locally, you’d better manufacture customized products and capture as much of a consumer’s willingness to pay for the customization as possible. That’s what Timbuk2 does for a significant segment of its products. The rest follows the first China (and Philippines, it turns out) outsourcing model of long lead manufacturing and sea freight.

The company was covered in our operations class for two reasons. First, for the customization (and associated value-add) capability from its website, and second, from a manufacturing process called “bump back” which for its novelty is something I’m still trying to nail down. And as I’m studying for finals, I have to become pretty familiar with this operation.

Entrepreneurship

2010-04-19T15:25:00.001-07:00

It’s rare that I read news that actually has a near term affect on my life and those around me. I think we are bombarded with a lot of noise for the sake of infotainment. When I read a newspaper under a time constraint, I challenge myself on how much I can ignore, instead of seeing how many morsels of happenings I can suck from the headlines. So I derive some kind of mildly schadenfreudian pleasure from (non-catastrophic) news events that actually affect me and people around me.

Case in point. Recently a volcano blew in bankrupted Iceland. (My finance professor relayed a quip from their Brit lenders, “We asked for cash, they sent us ash”). Who knew that volcanic ash clouds could down airliners? Anyways, it has caused transportation chaos throughout Europe. To exacerbate things, the French rail network in the vicinity of Paris went on strike. That left only the Eurostar (Chunnel) line (remember two posts ago?) operating. People around me were definitely affected. A friend missed a UK interview, the CEO of the company that designs Ferraris could not fly in, and half the class missed a long-planned sports trip to Barcelona. But there's no reason why the volcano has to stop erupting anytime soon, so my flight to Singapore in early May is in jeopardy.

On with the week’s post. Entrepreneurship – A five-syllable buzzword if ever there was one. It captures imaginations, it instils fear. For some it represents dreams to be fulfilled, and for others I suppose it ranks with having root canal at the local dentist. I wanted to talk about INSEAD with respect to entrepreneurship. Distinct from departments such as Marketing and Strategy, which I think are all critical for entrepreneurial endeavours, INSEAD offers these courses specifically for Entrepreneurship on the Singapore campus.

Startup Bootcamp
New Business Ventures
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Entrepreneurial Field Studies
Building Business in China
Building Businesses in India
Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Brazil & Emerging Markets
Explorations in Social Entrepreneurship
Business Planning Workshop
Effective Fundraising for Entrepreneurs
Realising Entrepreneurial Potential
Private Equity (read, 'Venture Capital')
Entrepreneurship in Action

It’s actually impossible to take them all due to schedule conflicts. Even given the largest set of courses that don’t conflict with each other, I doubt that even the most entrepreneurially minded students would take them all take of them. After all, there’s other interesting courses like Business to Business Marketing, Strategy for Product and Service Development, and Economics and Management in Developing Countries.

I took the Startup Bootcamp weekend course already. This was a fantastic retreat, comprising fast paced business plan writing, cash flow formulating, and pitching competition. Thirty of us arrived to the offsite Friday evening, had an idea brainstorm, and formed into groups (companies). The next day, we clarified the ideas, fleshed out the business model, rigorously defined how cash is transferred from customers to ourselves, and after running cash flows in Excel, determined the net value of the company. Sunday we prepared our pitches to Venture Capitalists (VCs) - short and sweet, perhaps thirty seconds per person. Of course the preparation took much longer than this. As a model, the instructor brought in the former CEO of NASDAQ Europe. This added in the appropriate level of stress and sweat.

Some people may pursue the ideas coming out of this event, most probably will not. The point is that we all came away with a rigorous early stage execution formula applicable to any endeavour we will set out to accomplish in the future. I am most grateful to our instructors and entrepreneurs in their own right, Paul Keweine-Hite and Peter Sage for their offering their time. Photographed is the practice pitching session.

When I applied to INSEAD the first time, one of my biggest fears was that there wouldn't be other entrepreneurs or support for entrepreneurs on arriving here. After deferring to pursue my business, reapplying, and finally entering, I'm rather pleased with the enterprising aspirations of many of the folks I've met and what's on offer, although the final verdict for the courses won't come until after I've taken them.

"IT Rep!"

2010-04-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

One responsibility I've undertaken at INSEAD is to become IT Rep for my section. It certainly takes up a lot of my scarce, scarce time, so let me illustrate:

Each class intake of 500 students is divided into about 7 sections of around 70-75 students. Fontainebleau campus has 4 such sections. At the beginning of the curriculum, the sections' students elect representatives - Academic reps to interact with the professors, Career reps to interact with Career services and keep students apprised of upcoming recruiting events, Social reps to organize parties, and an IT rep to spearhead mitigating IT and facilities issues the students face. I'll preface the following by repeating the classic IT person's lament, that when systems are working, little credit is given, but when things go wrong, much credit is taken.

Many components come together to give a school its reputation. From the point of view of its students, INSEAD's greatest strength is its faculty, who are truly superior. There are long term faculty, and temporary visiting professors. Both are exceedingly strong. INSEAD's next strength is it's career services. Career services work efficiently and tirelessly to get consultancies, banks, and industry to come onto campus for recruiting. The largest and top-tier consulting firms maintain consultant-caliber staff exclusively for recruitment from *this* school. (What is a consultant? You're forgiven if you're as unfamiliar as I was before the beginning of term, but you'd be better served by your own research into this than my explanation). Then, after school culture, the remaining component that drives a school’s student experience, and by extension it’s reputation, is the quality of its facilities and IT (Information Technology) systems. These include all of the PC’s on campus, the campus local area network, the campus connection to the outside world, PC virus security, e-mail services, and about 20 other items all of which, like parts of an automobile, require regular attention and maintenance.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the school falls far short of the mark – printers fail, the network goes down, email (e.g. from recruiters) stops receiving after filling an unbelievably low 100MB quota, and much, much, more.

One thing I recognized early on starting the MBA program was that the many and disparate IT problems the campus faced were organizational in nature, not technical. For example, follow this train of thought: “Why is email down? Because they haven’t upgraded to a new mail server version. Why not? Because there are IT contractor issues. Why? Because they don’t have enough budget to properly incentivize the contractor or hire a superior one. Why not get quality in-house IT specialists? Because if you inadvertently hire the wrong ones in-house, they are too expensive to fire because of severance pay laws here in France. Why hasn’t someone figured whatever issues, stopgaps, drivers, and incentives exist or are necessary to make the organization robust? Because management, at some level, is not yet up to task.

I actually sought the challenge of figuring out what process distills human and human-created issues into tangible real-world physical effects. Looking from this point of view, you begin to understand that airplanes don’t fly because of differences in air pressure across a wing, they fly because Boeing/Airbus and the airlines will them to fly with no tolerance for failure.

To become a ‘rep’ , one runs for the position in an informal election. So I ran unopposed, for the rep position because I knew there were problems that needed to be solved, and I figured I was as reasonable a choice as the next person to solve them, and do a favor for my class in the process. My campaign platform noted all the problems we face and getting responsiveness from the IT department + facilities. There were three other IT reps, and they made clear early on that they didn’t share the same level of enthusiasm as I did for “getting things done”.

But over time, the class perceived my role as being Mr. Fix-It, instead of the role I intended: someone to take complaint surveys and push for organization change while learning more about how people and organizations work in the process. While I found the undesired fix-it view disheartening, it also pushed me to find the people throughout INSEAD responsible for how things work around here. Now I can solve most major things that go wrong in a technology-enabled classroom with a phone call or polite text message in French, and the relationships I have with the staff give me a peek into what isn’t working on an organizational level. By contrast, I’ve heard that the other reps experience great frustration because they didn’t know where to start when a problem struck and the pressure from the class built to do something about it – one rep even quit because he couldn’t handle the pressure.

It was about halfway through the first 10-week period of school that the senior class’s rep got on board my campaign and we managed to identify exactly who in the IT department it was we were supposed to meet with in order to start getting things done. Org chart? No way; doesn’t exist even if people weren’t too fearful of their jobs to give us one. What about tips from previous years’ reps? Well although these kinds of efforts have been taken up before, there’s very little continuity from intake to intake in the one-year MBA. Along with so many student clubs, like industry and affinity clubs, on campus, everything gets built from scratch every 6-months to a year. This phenomenon which in part represents the efficiency of the INSEAD curriculum, also represents a lack of continuity, deteriorating the effectiveness of the clubs (and the reps) – the contacts they make, and the cultures they create. For efforts expecting only long-term results, you have to pursue them knowing you and those around you won’t get to benefit from them since they’ll graduate in less than a year. Instead you operate on the knowledge that you’re helping the next class, and that has to be enough even though you know the next class will never tangibly realize what you did to make their experience better, or be able to thank you for it. In turn, we know that we are benefiting from earlier classes of students in perhaps intangible ways.

Eventually we managed to get weekly meetings in place that people actually attend. And after all of our haranguing, the IT Department is starting to “get it”. We’re seeing some specific improvements we’ve pushed for, like replacing lots of the printers with new ones, making some Windows7 support software available, and more excessively mundane issues that 1) drive people nuts when they encounter them and 2) don’t need mentioning here for their sheer obscurity. I have another meeting with the Dean of the school coming up. And after newer updates to my section and new surveys I’ve taken from them on their complaints, now I have enough political capital to get org charts and start asking about incentive schemes without feeling like I’m trodding on sensitive territory.

We at INSEAD like to compare ourselves among the top and penultimate tiers of American business schools. These include (not exclusively) Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford, Sloan, and Kellogg, Fuqua, Haas. If we expect to truly hold our own, IT+facilities absolutely have to be improved.

More than any student on this campus I am acutely aware of IT systems near term future. In light of that, to future MBA's intending to spend time on the Fontainebleau campus, I have to make the following recommendations: 1) Bring and rely on your own laptop - for example, an Asus mediabook is ideal – reliable, very portable + good size screen, long battery life. 2) Foot the bill for a Blackberry, it provides a lot of communications robustness independent of INSEAD systems. You'll be on a contract with Orange that you can, with some trouble, get out of if/when you switch campuses.

Having covered IT more than anyone should ever have been interested, look for discussion of Entrepreneurship next post, and Social life in a following one.

This period is tough

2010-03-29T02:25:00.000-07:00

The "elders" of the school, those students who entered 5 months earlier than we did, warned us: The second period (in which we are currently in) is much harder than the first period, completed in early March. They are correct in terms of work quantity - we have almost one new case per course per session to review before the start of class (after which commences some Harvard-style Q+A). But it's not as heavy on completely new, brain twisting concepts. Put-call parity is one notable exception. Instead, the coverage feels much more practicable than last period - especially Strategy, Marketing, and Leading Organizations. I spent pretty much all day yesterday reading the optional reading - because during week this reading is the first thing to get de-prioritized, assuming it ever makes it into the work queue at all.
Ah, "de-prioritize" - that practice I partake in on a daily basis. Reminds me of a little story this week - I was walking with some of my Chinese peers, who were speaking in Mandarin amongst themselves. What you find among Chinese who've spent a lot of time in international circles is that they often use English words intermingled with Chinese speech. Instead of just being a widely used technical English word, it might be an English word that conveys a special idea or emotion. Recent examples I've picked up include "frustrated" and "de-prioritize". I'm interested in language usage, so I asked my Chinese friends why didn't they just use the Chinese word for "de-prioritize" - after all, didn't this word exist in Chinese? Their response: "Of course we have this word in Chinese!". To which I said, "Great! So what is it?" About two minutes of head scratching and nervous contemplating ensued, after which they could not come up with a suitable word to describe de-prioritization. I'm fond of supposing that words and linguistic constructs in modern Chinese should reflect the accumulated collective experience over 4000 of Chinese history. So I retorted, "You mean in 4000 years no Chinese has ever de-prioritized anything? Man, you guys work HARD."
Last point on Chinese - I thank you for praying to your favored Supreme Being, minor deity, or capricious zephyr for my success on the Chinese exam. I've passed INSEAD's exit language requirement, and so it's one more major hurdle off my plate!
I realize I'm remiss on photo-posting. There's been a number of recent photo-heavy events for which I've sworn not to post photos, due to the cross-dressing nature they may or may not depict. Such is culture at INSEAD. Off to an IT meeting, I'm representing the class to improve our ancient IT systems vis-a-vis the school administration. One day that quixotic effort will be worth a blog post in itself.
Also on deck for coverage: Next week I must write about the Entrepreneurial Bootcamp we had. Stay tuned.

London

2010-03-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

I missed last week's post -- a digression for which you have my apology. It was the middle of finals, and although getting into the top percentiles isn't my top priority (and if it was, it would be exceedingly challenging ; there are some smart cookies at this school, and relative to me, far more than the 30 it would take to bar me from the lofty end of the curve) I did study hard. Why study so hard, so much as to shirk blogging responsibility, if not to outcompete the Jones'? Well, because I'm trying really hard to actually learn useful material at this school. I know that once finals are over I won't try so hard to sort out everything I was exposed to. I had to turn exposure into practice. And lets face it - this school is expensive - I want to have knowledge to show for the digits missing from the bank account.
This past week was a student holiday. After a day of catching up on personal admin, I hopped on the Eurostar train with direct service from Paris to London. Most other students went to any among Morocco, skiing in France, or to warmer climes in the country's South. I participated in a business case competition at Imperial College whose campus is set against London's Hyde Park.
The Chunnel is an amazing achievement. And even though the tunnel is treated as a monopoly, and even though this monopoly *still* loses money and has to be bailed out by the two governments that supported it, I'm still thankful it exists. Because a flight plus associated trains would take twice as long and cost at least as much. Curiously, Ryanair, the low cost carrier, doesn't offer a Paris-London route. This seems strange, considering they could outcompete the Chunnel train hands down. I wonder if they managed favorable tax status with the UK/France governments in favor of sidestepping competition for the lucrative government-backed rail route.
People say London is expensive. With respect to taxis, this is absolutely true. It cost twenty pounds to take a typical trip of 2 miles. The dollar is trading at 1.5 to the pound. For food, this poor value is less the case. It also cost twenty pounds on average for the restaurant meals I ate in different part of downtown - and those meals were *excellent*. The key is ethnic food. You're not (easily) going to find a "British restaurant"; they abdicated superiority in food preparation long ago. (all though fish and chips in pubs abound) But Indian, Chinese, Thai, and many other kinds of food abound, and they're done really well. Lastly, a decent seat to watch a Broadway-caliber show costs 35 pounds if purchased shortly before showtime (if seats are still available). I saw "Avenue Q" -- hilarious!!
The business case competition was for the organization called One Laptop Per Child. For some reason I find technology for emerging markets and developing world consumers really enticing. OLPC grew out of an MIT Media Lab project under Nicholas Negroponte whose goal was simply to get a ruggedized, simplified laptop in the hands of every poor rural kid on this globe aged 6-12 years old. It took some finagling, but against odds (not worth explaining here) I managed to get registered for the event and to join one of the other INSEAD teams at Imperial. The challenge was straightforward. The OLPC project has been having difficulty getting traction from developing world governments to subsidize and order the computers. They invited students from Cambridge, London Business School, Oxford's Said school, and INSEAD to compete in proposing a roadmap for creating a sustainable market for OLPC-style laptops into childrens' hands, whether they fall under the OLPC moniker or not.
What I found especially interesting was how the competition played out - Two finalists were announced, from whom one winner was selected. However the tension represented by the two finalists beautifully reflected the internal tensions at work in how I see my career developing: One finalist was, proudly, from INSEAD (alas, not my own team). The teammates represented the best of the INSEAD MBA tradition, made up primarily of former and likely future consultants. They identified an opportunity for corporate sponsorship, and a long term pathway for local component production to lower the devices' cost. The presentation slides were polished silk, and they delivered them well. Now the second team was a group of undergraduates studying at Imperial College -- two electrical engineers, and two scientists. I remember them as being very charming when I introduced myself to them before any finalists were announced (the b-school version of, "I knew them before they were big"). They didn't answer the competition question directly, but instead identified the incumbent OLPC cost as too high, and so proposed and photoshopped up a similar product they estimated would have significantly lower cost - change the LCD to an e-Ink screen, turn the device into a monolithic tablet instead of a foldable laptop. The decreased cost would increase uptake, they theorized. Guess who won? Well today, it was a victory of the engineers over the MBAs. I was simultaneously hurt as an MBA and exceedingly proud based on my engineering background - certainly a conflicted state, especially while I was defending the judges' decision to my fellow MBAs.
My class consists of many former engineers. I frequently study with one of them for final exams. A technical PhD followed by related production work in the telecoms industry, he progressed much, much further into his engineering career than me before starting business school. He remains (for the time being at least) imaginative, and tries to explore different possible approaches to a problem at hand. I can see him struggling with the way case problems are posed at INSEAD, enough that I find it depressing. Depressing because they are the same struggles that I have, but somehow it seems more difficult for him; trying to apply as much cold logic as possible, incapable of accepting the likely but inexact solution (that challenge right there encapsulates perhaps 80% of our struggles with Financial Accounting, by the way). One time for both of our benefit, I had to derive a microeconomics concept in engineering terms. Other students would have found this work unnecessary, taking the concept on faith without needing to generalize it to underlying fundamentals, the better to apply them to any new situation posed. By this point I'm suspecting that the other students' approach is superior, not just for this school, but for life in general. (Somewhere in Boston now, a thousand MIT professors' voices scream out in unison).
So the ongoing conflict is this: Do I leave my engineering mindset behind? Success on the more difficult problems in MIT problem sets and projects usually required out-of-the-box thinking - for example marrying an otherwise unrelated concept learned in a completely different technical discipline to the problem at hand to achieve success. This is what the Imperial engineers did. In business school, we're conditioned (or we condition each other?) to think in a very conventional way. No surprises needed, no a-ha moments. Just take the data at hand, and assemble it appropriately to identify the path forward. This is what the INSEAD consultants did. Summary? If a war rages between engineers and consultants, or the engineering mindset and the consulting mindset, then the engineers won last weekend's battle.
And so today I am back in Fontainebleau for our second of five periods. Courses are Marketing Management, Processes and Operations, Managerial Accounting, Leading Organizations, and . . . one more that doesn't come to mind right now. Let's hope it's titled, "Improving Memory 101". I regret that Macroeconomics isn't being taught until the third period of this year. I would have appreciated having more time to stew on this interesting subject before graduating. It's sort of like the Microeconomics course I took back in undergrad (and again last period) - in that you can observe what they teach playing out around you every time you open a newspaper.
Lastly, please wish me a little bit of luck. I just took my (written) Mandarin exit language exam. Although I'm borderline for passing it, I think I have a good shot at it. If I'm too borderline, I'll have to take an oral exam, in which case please wish the gods of foreign speech synthesis to smile on me that day. I'll know the results in a week or so.

Singapore on the Horizon

2010-03-02T04:01:00.000-08:00

This post will probably apply more to prospective MBAs. "One School, Two Campuses" - part of INSEAD's brand. INSEAD comprises one campus in Fontainebleau, one in Singapore, and depending on how you do the accounting, various modest research centers scattered across the globe, though strangely, nary an office in the USA.
You'd think that a student could freely change campuses to suit his development and career needs subject only to course offering schedule. However in practice, there's scarcity. And where there's scarcity, either a central body has to allocate the scarce resources, or you set up a market. True to b-school form, INSEAD chooses the latter. By contrast, my undergraduate institution used a randomized lottery system to allocate dormitory rooms.
Here's how INSEAD's worked this year - they will probably use something similar in following years. INSEAD has 5 2-month academic periods, just like quarters or semesters, only shorter and much more stressful. 200 "points" are allocated to each student. They can use these points to bid on any combination of course electives and campus exchange. The minimum successfully allocated bid becomes the amount deducted from all bidders' point accounts. Most students I know bid a combination of their maximum allocation of 200 points across two or three periods' worth of exchange. Period 5 during France's winter understandably shows the highest demand.
So as you can see from my bids, I successfully pushed for Singapore during Periods 3, 4, and 5 (We are just finishing P1 now, entering P2), betting all 200 of my points. Because of the minimum-successful-bid deduction, 115 point still remain. Having just received the bid results yesterday, I must now buy a plane ticket and arrange housing - which brings me to the second topic for this week's post: Time.
Time management is a force that unceasingly breathes down everyone's neck. We even learn about something called "time abuse" and "time abusers". A time abuser is clinically defined as "every one of us". The first step to reconciliation with these difficulties is accepting that "you can't do everything". It hurts, many of us try to, taking on new responsibilities as we find we have a modicum of free time. None of us wants to miss out on anything. (The "senior class", called P3's, have gotten so used to this that you can't get them to commit to *anything* - they're completely maxed out, and if free time develops, they wish to cherish it).
Time management is a source of stress. During January and part of February, the biggest time sink outside of school work was French registration, car, and insurance, and being unstructured required the most effort to plan. By contrast, academics are already largely pre-scheduled and structured, so it doesn't stress me out to progress in them. Now, let's look at my to-do list:
1) Pay my speeding ticket (done!)
2) Write this blog post (in progress!)
3) Provide status update to the class in my capacity as IT rep (whew, there goes my school anonymity - but if another student couldn't figure out who's writing this by this point, they shouldn't be at this school . . .)
4) Plan period break trip (way behind on this - many students are going to Morocco, and I'm beginning to think I should have joined them.
5) Buy ticket to Singapore.
6) Set up residence in Singapore.
7) Execute errands associated with my company
8) Continue career development via networking and internship applications.
There are more, especially with respect to my company, I'm just not showing. Notice the lack of academics in the to-do list - unless there's a particular project or paper coming to a head, they won't show up, because I treat it as the default activity to execute during almost all other free time. This is arguably unhealthy, as perhaps the default activity should be heavy socializing (ie. as one has time). I sneak it in during some evenings, but in this I fall far short of my peers. It probably deserves more priority. We were taught a four-quadrant approach to prioritization which the gurus of time-management will recognize immediately - I think it's time to exercise it. Successful implementation of that method is probably even more valuable than all of the courses combined.

INSEAD, Week 7

2010-02-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

Socializing is an integral part of life at INSEAD, although the students I'm sharing the library with this Sunday might debate that. Partaking students call it "networking". I can be on board with that. I've been doing a whole lot of networking recently.
The workload has been lower the past week, perhaps to give us more time to focus on career identification. Sometimes the school, vaunted as it is, resembles an exalted careers placement service on steroids based on the emphasis that is put on job finding in the form of on-campus events, CV reviews, and industry info sessions. Of course the school is excellent, and I'm not just saying that to promote the brand. The professors are tops, the students are engaged and serious, and the alumni network is far reaching. I'm confident that given the diligence I'm supplying, the school will enable me to find, earn, and accept the position that is best suited to my growth as an individual while also satisfying material needs (in spades, hopefully). I thought I'd illustrate the socializing-career connection through the attached images. First image (grainy, above) is a recent party near campus. Remember, this is network-building. Second image (below) came from my tooling on the two alumni network databases to which I have access. It is a listing of number of school alums by work country, filtering for a few randomly-thought-of nations. Yes, some countries still aren't making either list, but I thought this was a reasonable illustration of network breadth. So when you're trying to set up that all-important business deal or emerging market entry into Cambodia, you know who to talk to. Well, this is an anonymous blog after all - if you don't know me, you'll have to exercise the 'Comments' feature. In fact though, just because someone shows up in a database doesn't mean a lot can come from reaching them. In my limited experience with this, connecting with people via an alumni database simply removes one or two layers of unfamiliarity, but you still have to 'prove yourself' to the person to whom you're reaching out. The partying from the first photo? Maybe it serves to strip off a few more layers . . . of unfamiliarity. And to have a really, really good time while we're all trying to learn the nuts and bolts of modern business.

INSEAD Week 6

2010-02-14T17:39:00.000-08:00

It's still very icy and cold here in the Fonty forests. The township I live in is as innocently charming as ever, as you can see by the photo I've included today. This past week was a Culture Week, which means that one of the many ethnicities on campus organizes and hosts a set of themed events. Since this week's was Latin week, everyone from South and Central America participated in organizing events such as a Cuban musical group playing mostly Buena Vista Social Club hits to accompany a Cuban dinner, a Caiperinha night, and a Mariachi band to kick off the week. . .
The Indians are also pretty good about hosting Culture Weeks almost every year. One thing I haven't heard talked about is Anglo-Saxon week. The professors certainly refer to this group frequently enough when talking about financial norms, and it's a common phrase in French parlance to refer to those barbarians across the channel. So I began asking people what they would like to see in an Anglo-Saxon party, but unfortunately whatever springs to their mind just doesn't capture their imagination in the same way that a crowded room full of brightly-colored clothing clad folks dancing meringue with sloshing glasses of Herra Dura in hand does.
Life is *just starting* to settle into a rhythm around here. . . thank God . . . I have a Prices and Markets (Microeconomics) exam in the morning, time for me to get some sleep.

INSEAD Week 5

2010-02-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

The focus of the past week has been for financial services industry presentations. These have taken place in the evenings after classes, with successive sets of representatives from Barclay’s Capital, Nomura, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, and the venerable Goldman Sachs. From the presentations I attended, I noted on average 40 people attending each presentation and networking/drinks event that always follows. However the Goldman Sachs presentation saw some 150 people show up, easily half of the Fontainebleau class. The hiring drive on the part of banks in general is much greater than last year, it seems the directors of the planet’s financial resources are making up for lost time from 2008-9.
Attached photo is the audience during the Goldman presentation. I found the Goldmanites (I have no idea what they call themselves) to uniformly speak in very hushed tones, even when addressing the full amphitheater – as if to implicitly advertise the emphasis they place on discretion with clients’ information. By comparison, Morgan Stanley who presented right afterwards were very lively and animated, showcasing their culture in direct contrast to the Goldmanites. Most of the other bank presentations I saw fell somewhere in between in terms of energy shown during the presentation.
The schedule at INSEAD is becoming increasingly rigorous. Courses alone wouldn’t stress me out, but add them to personal administration with respect to localizing/registering in France, and job searching activities and all of a sudden the 1-year MBA becomes much more challenging in practice than it sounded. The school’s Career Services is truly a machine, and the hiring process particularly with respect to financial firms is extremely regimented. In contrast to the intended order behind this approach, all parties (banks, school, and students) universally agree that the only way to actually *get* an internship with a bank is to network relentlessly with alums and friends who currently work for them. Because otherwise, the banks don’t have any way of differentiating among the hordes of similarly highly qualified CVs they receive.
This weekend saw an American themed party in one of the biggest chateau residences featuring frat-style drinking games and people dressed in football jersies. Americans, like every nationality, are a minority on the campus. Kind of funny to look in on how others perceive your culture. Actually, I felt honored that there were enough salient aspects of American culture that it would be even possible to have an American themed party. Cheers!

INSEAD Week 4

2010-01-31T06:09:00.000-08:00

As I write I am downloading a powerful antivirus program called Kaspersky. I reviewed a lot AV software to get rid of the worm on my computer. This worm kept infecting my memory sticks (I disinfect them easily now), and blocked my access to the websites of AV program vendors as well as Microsoft. This is an old virus from over a year ago - its called conficker or else follows the conficker model. I learned how to disable part of the worm’s functionality so I could access the antivirus website and download their latest software.
And for the hours I spend doing this, I wonder how much of life I’m missing out on considering the weather is finally turning up, and there is a forest complete with deer, boars, and foxes, *in my backyard*.
I got my new car on Tuesday. And I *love* it! If you ever thought it would be empowering to drive your own car across the European highways, well, it absolutely is. However, France is a police state with respect to motor traffic. Identifying whether it’s legal to park in a given space for a given amount of time is unbelievably stressful in a crowded downtown district. And they make use of automated speeding cameras, one of which caught me last night. It was a 90 kmh zone, and my heavy foot late at night in the deserted rode put me at 105 kmh. To put that in perspective, that’s going 65mph in a 56mph zone. That’s ticket worthy. Not looking forward to sorting out how to find my 140euro ticket (going exchange rate: 1.4 dollars to the euro!) since the car owner address on record is still the previous owner’s. My roommate had the same experience in roughly the same location that same evening.
Doesn’t change the fact that I love my car. It is a stick, 1999 Renault Clio, blue, petite, and absolutely responsive. Last night I took my roommate to Paris, and door to door from my forested hamlet to the cabaret smack in the middle of the Champs-Elysees it was 1 hour. Definitely feeling the empowerment after 2 weeks of bumming rides of people.
So speaking of the car, and deer, turns out we have to be very careful driving on the forest roads. Last night as we were returning after a long but disappointing night in the City of Lights, a fully matured buck carrying a beautiful set of antlers bolted across the road about 20 meters ahead of my car, itself going about 100kph. Not a lot of math tells us that I was less than a second away from becoming an accomplished if perhaps personally maimed deer hunter. By the way there’s a lot of awareness on campus for drunk driving. One of the principal ways in which students have been injured in the past is drunk driving in the forest in their tiny cars - they say that in an accident, the deer and boars running around will usually win. Years ago the Dean had to make an unfortunate phone call to the parents of two students because of that.
Between the student body and the administration, everyone puts in a lot of effort to ensure a lot of camaraderie on campus. How to accomplish this? Lots and lots of socializing! That’s part of what you are accepting in an MBA, not just net present value valuations, double entry bookkeeping, and monopsony buyer theory, but the connections you have with your fellow students after you graduate. After a year, if there’s a great esprit de corps (I always felt a lot of this at my undergrad institution), then that can serve everyone in the future. If instead there was a lot of acrimony over the year, then that damages the network going forward. This opens up a discussion on self selecting groups and elitism, to which my response is, “If I know you and I trust you, I’m going to help you when you need it”, no matter whether you’re associated with a brand of any organization or not. And I wish, but don’t expect, others to treat me the same way. And if I don’t know you? Well I can only hope to have a positive influence anyways through the minute macro effects of the career I will choose.

In the meantime, I’m going to speed on European autoroutes:

Also I wanted to finally post the forest video I owed from last week...

INSEAD, Week 3

2010-01-24T17:33:00.000-08:00

Life at INSEAD is starting to settle into the rhythm we can expect for the next few periods. I now have a local bank account, a mobile phone plan, a new Nokia E63 , and very very soon, a car (a 1999 Renault Clio). Looking forward to regional trips, and I’ve already promised some people I’ll help them go clubbing in Paris on weekend nights with it.

Today is Sunday, a day of rest. In France Sunday is a day of rest whether you want it to be or not, and if you’re not careful, Saturday quickly becomes a day of rest as well after a late morning following a night of revelry. Scarce business hours are maintained very strongly. We’re in classes all day every day, so going to school and getting personal administration done are mutually exclusive tasks. Today I cooked three times! I cooked an omelette with fried peppers and onions for breakfast accompanied by tea and rye loaf with brie cheese, a very elegant pasta with white and the rest of the brie for lunch (Provencal spices, salt ad pepper), and steak and rice with more fried onions for dinner. My roommate from China got a few mouthfuls of the steak and didn’t regurgitate, so it passes. A delicious day, and I’m happily full.

INSEAD’s core curriculum for the first period contains these courses; .1 Prices and Markets (another name for the Microeconomics we all know and love), 2. Uncertainty, Data, and Judgement (that’s one course, not three) which captures Probability Statistics, and how not to make an ass of oneself in gambling kinds of situations. 3. Financial Markets and Valuation evidently taught by the runner up for Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil until Mike Myers decided to play the part himself (I’m serious, all our professor needs is a shaved scalp and a white pussycat to stroke and he’s him, accent, attitude and all. If you ever read this, Professor, know that I actually really enjoy your courses and you’re a fantastic instructor. . . ) (phew) Then come the “soft skills” courses, those are Ethics and Leaderships. No, the Leadership classes aren’t all taught on ropes courses, but I wish they were. Ethics is actually really interesting. I like all of the discussions where we’re debating shades of grey – which I usually debate while coming from their dark side.

Speaking of the finance class (because it really is fascinating, Professor) I was noting that the course isn’t teachable without interjecting precepts of good ol’ capitalist thought which, true to form, Professor provides in generous servings. He emphasized above all else the value of "maximizing the size of the pie" (like, as opposed to consideration of that pastry baker's free time), and that maximum economic efficiency was enabled by the combination of price knowledge, private property, and greed. (Greed, you know, like in the academic sense . . . ). That opening class made me imagine what it would have been like for students behind the old iron curtain to take an economics class - I'm sure they got their dose of the party line while they were still absorbing the course syllabus too - must discussion of the prevailing philosophy of economic management precede the rest of a finance course in any society? Does the study of finance exist independent of the values and political philophy containing it, or is it always a colossus with clay feet? Makes me wonder what they're learning right now over at Tsing Hua. "Well, first you hack into foreign companys' servers, harvest whatever intellectual property you couldn't get from earlier joint ventures, and then use that edge to develop the harmonious and yet newly competitive society. Above all keep the nation's currency domestic and undervalued". I'm just kidding, I'm sure our peers over there are learning all of the free market theory we are. But I wonder if they are as surprised as we are when it comes time to apply theories like consumer value and pricing efficiency to the mundane act of buying a cell phone plan and realizing that practically there are only ever two or three cell phone carriers to choose from inside these free markets we're all members of. .

My roommates have each been sick the past two weeks. Last week on Saturday there was a party sponsored by one of the management consultancies (brand name, you’ve heard of them, don’t need mentioning in case their recruiters manage to lurk my blog). For many it went until 4am, and folks didn’t get home until 5. That really screwed up the week that follows for a lot of us – there were a lot of sleepy folks on Monday, and the academic schedule and homework commitments for the first three days were relentlessly unforgiving. Fatigue took its toll on peoples’ immune systems. Wednesday morning saw many people coughing throughout lecture. Amazing that with two sick roommates I’ve remained healthy. Come a short respite Thursday morning , everyone got in what personal and admin activities they could. My teammate got a perm (you look great!), I put a downpayment on my car.

Now let’s see, I need to put up a picture of something. What do I have . . . (browsing through my Flip camera videos) I will try to upload a few videos (and if you watch carefully, I even risk blowing my anonymity – could this be a start of a trend towards full disclosure . . . ? Scary . . . ) The first video is as titled, a snowy entry to campus. The second video is during a trip with Outward Bound (like a ropes course, but very organizational theory oriented). Hmm, Blogger's not letting me put up the second video, (why am I still using this service?) So perhaps I'll add the Outward Bound video to the next post.

Week 2

2010-01-17T19:02:00.001-08:00

A week of registration, paperwork, and early socializing
has passed - between the heavy schedule at school, and the
short french work schedule and workweek, it's really
hard to get anything done outside of class. Remaining
major tasks include getting a car and cell phone plan.
As promised, this post has three images - the first is one
I made showing the relative size of France vs. some states
in the Western US. I think if you put California and Nevada
together, you have a landmass pretty close to the size of
France. For some reason I was curious about that.

Second image - the omelette I made with Indian spices
borrowed from my roommate who hails from their source.
He taught me a recipe for a simple Indian sauce oriented
toward vegetarians. To which I added chicken.

Third image - some of my teammates, among whom by sheer
coincidence, is my second roommate from China. Here's hoping we
don't kill each other by the end of the semester! Pictured are teammates
from Greece and Zimbabwe, and missing is my Lebanese teammate.
Top that for diversity Harvard Business School!

MBA

2010-01-10T04:46:00.001-08:00

(changes: edited for spelling) I arrived in Fontainebleau two days ago. The town is located about
one hour south of Paris by train. I'm set up in a house I arranged
with my classmate Bo while I was in Shanghai. This house is awesome.
It's quite big, and there is ample room for the three housemates (plus
a charming girl guest who's been hanging out here since we moved in).
All this means that I've started my year at INSEAD. I was
fortunate enough to get into this excellent program, and equally
fortunate that they took me back in after I deferred my acceptance for
one year to pursue my entrepreneurial aspirations in Shenzhen and
Shanghai.
INSEAD has two campuse. One is here in France, the other is in
Singapore. Students decide whether they want to spend the whole year
in one place or the other, or split the year between the two. There
are two intakes of students, one every January, and one every august.
The January intakes enjoy the opportunity and challenge to find a
summer internship with an investment bank, consulting firm, or in
industry. Those choices are similar to the career choices students
must make upon graduating, along with one more, which is
entrepreneurship.
I remain keen on entrepreneurship, and that is my main reason for
intending to transfer to Singapore later in the year because it is
known to have stronger entrepreneurship electives. However, under the
burden of a student loan, the odds are stacked against my pursuing
that for several years.
With each post I am posting at least one photo, and due to that I
must formally issue an IOU to the reader who I hope will understand as
I have typed this entire post on the torture device known as the
iPhone, and can not send photo attachments for emailed posts. Expect
the next weekly post to have a second replacement photo plus an
additional one due to interest. My early MBA skills calculate this to
be an interest rate of 5200%.

More on milk . . .

2009-03-24T03:06:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across the source of China's milk quality problems . . .

Good locals, bad locals

2009-03-12T22:00:00.001-07:00

The other night the gas for my stove stopped working. Strange, because my hot water had gas. Also unfortunate, because I arrived home late from a long day of work, and I was eager to prepare myself a carb and protein fortified meal consisting of that classic, pasta and tomato sauce. I asked the security guard downstairs to call a repairperson, who arrived in 5 minutes with an assistant. In the meantime I arranged to dine with a similarly famished neighbor, who would bring an electric stove while I supplied the food and cooking.
The repairpeople disassembled the stove, and pointed out the area of the problem, saying that an important component would need to be replaced, at a cost of 160RMB. Lucky for me, they were prepared to complete the repair on the spot. But I was busy with dinner plans with my neighbor, so I told them I'd call the in the morning. Against my suggestion they closed up the nonfunctional stove.
Repairpeople having departed, I showed my neighbor the problem. There was electricity for the ignition spark, but no gas to light. She suggested changing the batteries in the stove.
"Stoves have batteries?". Sure enough, my stove is powered by two D batteries. I felt for sure it should have been connected into the apartment's electric network. (American readers: Do your gas stoves use batteries? I grew up with an electric stove, so unsure). My neighbor went on to suggest that the repairpeople might cheat me.
The next night, (last night) I purchased two batteries, 7RMB, replacing the old ones that turned out to power both the sparking function and a solenoid valve for the main gas line. The solenoid valve (or its controller) cuts out when the battery voltage falls below a certain level, although the batteries are still sufficient to generate the ignition sparks. Certainly intentionally, this is a safety measure to keep gas from flowing when batteries become so dead that the spark itself stops working and the manual gas valves (the knobs) are left on.
I replaced the batteries, and voila! . . . the stove still wasn't working. I remembered how eager the repairpeople were to put the stove together again the night before. I re-disassembled the stove, to find those crafty repairpeople had sabotaged the connector to the solenoid valve. ("Ah, Shenzhen . . . ") I reset it, and my stove was working fine again. (For you root-cause analysis people out there, to confirm my comprehension of the situation, I put in the old batteries again, and the stove was again non-functional). I wrote my neighbor to thank her profusely for her advice.
Moral: Choose good locals to make friends with, they counter the naughty ones who undoubtedly will find you.

My recollection of life in the north of China is that I would much less likely have this experience. Any northern readers care to comment?

Also, in writing this post, I'm concerned that Chinese grammatical structure is working its way into my written English use. Dissecting contract grammar in my last language session could be to blame. I'm a bit too close to the issue to be able to judge it from a distance, but I invite any appropriately bilingual reader to assess.

Malls and Migrants

2009-02-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

The first image is Guangzhou East Railway station. I visited through here on a day trip from Shenzhen. During Chinese new year GZ's train stations are synonymous with the largest annual human migration on the planet. Migrant workers and students alike collectively do their part to test the limits of ticket servicepersons' patience. I had the dubious honor of joining the masses in the middle of the fray as I had to purchase my return ticket to Shenzhen.

On the other side of the economic spectrum, in the second image we have a dragon dance, familiar to SF Bay Area folks, taking place in a ritzy mall, which felt like much less familiar a setting for such an authentic cultural display. I had been looking in vain for these kinds of New Years' festivities streetside as seen in Chinatown back home. I decided that the mall must be the new 'authentic' for affluent shenzheners. As opposed to the migrants and students, this Shenzhen middle class - businesspeople and office workers - stick around the city during the holiday and frequent these ubiquitous, unavoidable malls.

Blog update initiation

2009-01-28T05:24:00.000-08:00

Welcome once again,
This blog is for keeping in touch with people I'm familiar with, and giving you a view into my activities and experiences mostly in Asia, especially China. Blogger/Google Groups combination make it very tricky to update many users to the blog. Suffice to say I published the below three posts only to find that it didn't update (!) I had to use three email accounts of mine to test out the capabilities under different settings. So here's the skinny: When I post, within about a day you'll get the message that it posted. This is to allow for the (rare) case when I post multiple times in a day, I don't want people getting bothered with multiple emails. Also gives me time to do damage control in case I post inadvertently ;) So, this post is intended to completely exercise the update capability, and below are the "real" posts. With that, do please give them a look!

Welcome to newcomers

2009-01-28T02:15:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the blog if you haven’t seen it before – to avoid people having to check periodically to look for new posts, I’ve set up an update list. That way, if I go off the radar for a month, you know you’re not missing anything until the next update. If you have a friend who wants to subscribe, they can leave a comment with their email address which I won’t publish, and I’ll add them. Unsubscribing is also easy. It's an anonymous blog, and I moderate comments. Lastly, if you've been receiving daily summary emails from Google Groups, that won't happen anymore, and I apologize for any trouble.

To avoid cluttering people’s inboxes with update notices right now, the following three posts are uploaded together:

Post 1: Four Months Ago

Last entry I was on my way to Beijing. I got to see my first Beijing Opera, a real cacophony of tones taken to extreme. Like in western opera, much of the audience won’t understand what’s being sung, and so they have subtitles, which not only are in Chinese characters but their grammar reflects an ancient style of expression, and so I’m triply lost. Luckily I had a local there to explain what was going on. Turns out that a plot that takes three sentences to describe takes two hours to act and sing out.

Beijing continues to be a beautiful place, replete with preserved as well as re-created traditional architecture. I’m going to try and cover the goings on of the past three months in short form in this entry to allow me to quickly segue into current events. Here goes:

Got my phone stolen in October (horror). I felt like I was missing an arm for about a week and a half while I was doing pickpocket negotiations (don’t bother) and phone-fraud damage control, and while finding a quality exact replacement. Scoured Shenzhen on Thanksgiving for a true Turkey. Went to Shanghai in December to check out an up and coming business school there, (which unfortunately for its recent tuition hikes, is more than aware of its up and coming status). Saw my good and newly arrived friend in the French Concession there. Tied up work on the inspiring lighting product, toward putting pieces in place to allow many customers to develop and manufacture different kinds of electronics products using affordable IT development and manufacturing resources in India and China. (boilerplate: This effort isn't taking away American jobs, it’s enabling higher value-add and creativity in existing jobs, as well as creating new jobs higher up the value chain, and generally fostering an environment for opportunities that otherwise would be unable to find an outlet.). Yes, I had not been exclusively backpacking and snapping photos during my travels, extended business and technically-oriented networking began rather spontaneously shortly after I originally set out for across the Pacific one year ago. In fact, yesterday was the one year anniversary that I departed the States for Kuala Lumpur on the way to Bombay. I returned to the States over the Christmas holiday, got my China business visa in hand while there (neither a trivial errand nor cheap), did some other mundane activities related to the business (changing to a more remotely manageable American bank account, for example) and returned to Shenzhen via Hong Kong in early January.

Post 2: The Nokia E51

I want to describe a tool I rely on heavily. After one day when this tool was stolen from my pocket, I was at a great disadvantage and generally in a very sour mood, and so I became keenly aware of its value before locating an identical one. The tool is my mobile phone, specifically the Nokia E51 business phone. I purchased it in Malaysia, my first outbound port of call. It’s most important feature is its quad-band GSM capability, which means the device is useful in Asia, Europe, and the States. It also has 802.11b access, GPRS (slow speed) data, versatile 3G (high speed) data, a (poor) camera , audio recording, music playing, and video recording capability. For being purchased in Malaysia, and thanks to its proximity to Singapore, it came loaded with simplified Chinese character support as well as a Chinese dictionary. How’s that for serendipity? Singaporeans, thankfully for my subsequent instruction, had adopted China’s simplified character system as opposed to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Compared to most phones acquired via subscription plans in the states, I spent more up front and purchased this one outright. Most phones purchased in the states are “locked”, which means they can’t be used with a different telecom carrier than you subscribe with, even if you’re outside the country. I think this practice is sick myself. Freedom to move and operate between countries has been an integral theme to my past year, so the technology to enable the communications side of that was critical, and I paid for it.

The phone’s operating system is Symbian v9.0 S3 . The phone allows me to download and install applications written for this popular OS. Critical applications enabling my mobility are Gmail for mobile, Google Maps with antenna position localization, and the Fring VOIP tool.

Google Maps has enabled me to keep Indian rickshaws from cheating me, and to learn and recommend faster routes to Dong Guan taxi drivers. Fring has allowed me to stay in touch via instant message with my friends on Gmail and Skype from guest houses in Mysore, a hundred miles out of Bangalore, as well as to give the odd friend or family member out of the blue near-free voice calls from trains en route to Guangzhou. YouTube mobile has allowed me to view videos while on Ko Pha-Ngan (because this is what one should be doing on a Thai island). I use the phone to record Chinese speech and photograph Chinese sentences that I’m not familiar with to later review with my teacher. I also refer to the dictionary described earlier frequently.

For all this functionality, I most frequently use the phone for texting. Chinese sent 700 billion texts last year. Can you imagine if an American dime was paid for each one such as in off-plan American mobile phone contracts? Chinese generally pay one jiao, (a Chinese dime), for a message, equivalent to about one and a half American pennies. And their SMS servers have at least the functionality that ours do, and may very well be the same brands . . . it's a lucrative game, that one.

One encouraging Hong Kong expat challenged me to switch from pinyin texting to character texting to increase my character learning rate. That effort, while initially difficult for a few weeks, paid off handsomely in how much I can communicate by text now. Texted Chinese reflects spoken Chinese, and therefore often exercises a different set of characters than used in typical written Chinese. Shortly my instruction will have to switch to those Chinese characters used more frequently in writing.

Post 3: “You who come, are of Shenzhen.”

来了,就是深圳人 – this phrase is translated by this entry’s title, In fact it’s hard to translate this phrase any way other than poetically. I’m told there are deeper as well as more mundane meanings to this sentence, but I most appreciate its surface meaning – it might as well say, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. . . ”. Quoting Liam Casey, a local entrepreneur I admire, from a Shenzhen Daily article – “When people go to the United States, they’re probably chasing the American Dream. But when seeking their fortunes in Shenzhen, they call it a global dream . . . ”.

Shenzhen is a rough and tumble place, presenting the full spectrum of character that diverse individuals have to offer - humanity’s good, bad, and ugly. It's not a very pleasant or fun place, and it's culturally indistinct next to Shanghai or Beijing. People come here to work, to enable their dreams, and (especially those on excursion from Hong Kong) to indulge their vices. If I ever wondered what an old American western town was like, I would look at this city, and simply rewind its technological clock by a hundred and fifty years. Instead of being the Wild West, it’s the Wild South. Here livelihoods are earned, families supported, and industries made, even if periodically at the moral expense of co-opted western intellectual property.

For better or for worse, this place is where I’ve chosen to start my consulting business. Alas, this blog is too anonymous for me to go into much detail on the business (unless I decide to use this medium for marketing . . . hmmm . . . ), suffice to say I now have an office in the fiercely staid central business district, and an apartment on the edge of shady LuoHu.

Shenzhen Food

Cuisine in Shenzhen is difficult for a foreigner used to large portions with little time in which to consume. Burritos, that most efficient form of consumption, don’t exist here. Instead, a lot of rice with some vegetables with little meat is too often the norm. A lot of food is served such that it requires many plates to get enough substance into you.

Not a place for a healthy diet. And so we foreigners here share tips on where to find large portions of protein-filled dishes, and we cook for ourselves. I frequent the likely places, keep a stash of western supplies at home, and take vitamin supplements. My current favorite restaurant is a Pakistani joint that serves as familiarly Indian style food as I could hope for. It’s strong point is that by default it has the features I otherwise have to ask servers in recommending dishes, containing “a lot of meat, no bones, no fat, and no soup.”

When I got home to the Bay Area, I couldn’t wait to consume what I remembered calling “chinese food” again. As far as I’m concerned, “American style” Chinese food is at least as deserving of recognition as any revered member of the eight regional Chinese cuisines.

Consuming Products

Buying anything in Shenzhen is challenging. I’m not talking about linguistic obstacles – that isn’t a problem anymore. It’s all about deficient product quality now. Just about anything I buy will have some defect that becomes apparent only after some use of the product. I’ve been amazed at how well this has held true again and again. The DVD player’s syncing is imperfect, the apartment’s microwave is busted, the pillows (from IKEA!) don’t match the demo models . . . Products just need to be tested, and they need to be tested locally. I saw a promotional video once for the company National Instruments, makers of testing products and software. They depicted a world where testing didn’t exist – all kinds of everyday objects kept breaking and acting funny. This is only a mild exaggeration of what Shenzhen is like for me. There is a very strong filter between the products that get made here for export, and the products that are received in the States. In the states, we no longer necessarily associate Chinese products with low quality like we did ten to twenty years ago. But in China, low quality Chinese products is absolutely still the norm. Just the fact that they exercise the term “export quality” is very telling. There was a local news story recently that with the poor economy in the States, and American importers telling Chinese exporters to withhold shipments, initially resulting in a stockpile of goods in warehouses here, that Chinese consumers were finally getting to buy quality products as exporters decided to sell domestically instead.

Banking

A long time ago, I set it as my goal to open a local HSBC bank account. As of last week, I finally got one. Those folks don’t make it easy. Beyond the usual identifying documents, it required a personal introduction plus my office and apartment lease and no small change of a starting balance. However, it’s worth the trouble. The account represents my ability to exercise funds from any part of the world, to any part of the world, at a few clicks and a small transaction cost. Quite a powerful tool even if it seems outwardly mundane. Try doing that with Washington Mutual. I’m thankfully enabled in setting even that much up by a very helpful person in the States. On one’s own with no logistical assistance from the home country, I’m not sure how one could begin in exploiting global opportunities. It’s a failing of the financial system we operate in, I think. For all that our trade representatives work hard to make world commerce in the image of American free market values, the occasional need to remain enabled administratively by trusted folks at home (valued as they are) feels contrary to the American sense of independent rugged individualism. To illustrate, if the American financial system could collectively speak, it would be saying to me, “Of course you need to be in an American bank branch to manage your account”, or “Of course you need to maintain a local address for tax and financial correspondence”, and even, “You really ought to just business from within your own borders. How could you possible require being based anywhere else?” I suppose that under any kind of financial system, one can still trace one’s success in large part to those who are trusted and close to them, it’s just that operating abroad in the early stages periodically requires pressing such an abstract concept into all-to-tangible practice.

Train, Shenzhen to Beijing

2008-10-01T01:11:00.000-07:00

I'm on a train to Beijing. Their long national day holiday has just begun. Almost all Chinese are on vacation. Like I mentioned in a much earlier post, it's a twenty four hour journey. I enjoy that aspect because it lets me unplug for a little while. And by 'unplug' I mean 'write mobile photo-enabled blog posts'. So as you can see, these trains are reasonably comfortable. The mattresses are soft. There's a restaurant car, but it's considered relatively expensive, so a minority of passengers go there to eat, bringing their own food instead. One photo from the restaurant car shows the ubiquitous green tea containers. I've found these are popular everywhere, and essentially indispensable among folks in the factories.
By the way, I decided I like this form of communication, so if you currently get email notifications of updates, I'll end them soon so email boxes don't get cluttered. If you don't mind a cluttered inbox, let me know and I'll keep you on.

Dong Guan

2008-09-29T01:41:00.000-07:00

This is a bird's eye view of a landscape in Dong Guan just north of Shenzhen. Dong Guan is developing quickly, rapidly resembling it's SEZ neighbor to the south. I'm also experimenting with this kind of on the fly post as a different medium for communicating than the standard blog post.
To recap the last post on milk, I've talked to some more locals, and it seems Chinese around here are reasonably hip to the propensity for corporate greed, but place less blame on government culpability in the problem than Western newspapers. One person understood my tack in questioning, and in turn was convincing me that people have a lot of freedom of speech in general even on political topics, certainly much more than in the past. Looking from their eyes, if the large American milk company Lucerne started giving people food poisoning, I would much sooner blame the company than draw the conclusion that the multi party system had to be overhauled, essentially the analog of some Western newspapers' arguments on the recent scandal. It's easy for me to realize, however, that such a scandal in the US would become easy fodder for political mud slinging in an election based on multiple parties, and would probably result in some positive action to improve food regulation. Personally, I think it would be nice if we had more than two parties to choose between every election cycle. Maybe some problems result from a strictly two party system that, just as with the Chinese, aren't so obvious to us either. Like them, I don't think we'll soon see commentary in our popular press on the topic. I don't know why.

Milk

2008-09-27T23:13:00.001-07:00

Commenting on the latest media frenzy on China isn't my style because it feels like grandstanding. I'm not a Sinophile, so I'm not always paying attention to all the political dimensions at play, usually leaving me at a disadvantage to contribute to the conversation. But this business with the milk powder deserves some thoughts.
You don't have to be an expert in Chinese characters to be able to glean that the internal news coverage is being glossed over. Go to www.xinhua.net, the government's online news site. I've been visiting the past few days. This character, 奶, means "milk". Copy and paste the character into your browser's text search utility, and you'll find that coverage is far removed from the main headlines. Instead, headlines of China's space mission currently in progress reign supreme. In general I've picked up that China's internal news coverage is about instilling pride in the country and its place in the world. It's fun to follow this kind of coverage (usually through imagery for me for obvious reasons, but many Chinese article translations are also accessible), because I feel like I'm observing an important transition for a developing country. But if it happens at the expense of themes like the following excerpt, from an article by a Beijinger Cui Weiping, then it's not fair. This was accessed via the Washington Post, dated Sunday, September 28.

"What could I do after I heard something like this? Where could I go to report the problem? I can't think of any official in this vast country who would patiently listen to me and try to address the problem. Most officials would probably regard me as insane if I went to talk to them. They would glance at me arrogantly from behind their desks. I don't think I could stand the humiliation for even a few minutes. Why should I seek this disgrace?

"There are all kinds of things like this happening in the country. There's nothing I can do about it," I said to myself, trying to appease my conscience.

How pitiful I am. I already know that my effort will be useless even before I take any action. Is there a devil who lives in our hearts and sneers at our actions all the time? His mission is to deprive us of the ability to respond, to smother our enthusiasm, and to paralyze our will to take action. I am caught in the same situation as my imaginary, impassive official. Both of us are controlled by a curse and have lost the ability to take appropriate action . . .

However, my humanity has been hurt. The damage is immeasurable. Trapped in this kind of silence and not able to do anything about it, I feel bad about myself. I almost feel that I've become a pile of [dung], or a slave who only knows work but not how to speak. I chat and joke with people around me, but I am not able to talk about the biggest bewilderment on my mind.

To speak, or not to speak, this is the question. This is a question that is hard for our judgment. But what we've lost is the ability to make basic moral judgment.

-- Cui Weiping

(End quote)

At least one of the following links should allow you to easily access the full article in question.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092603451.html
http://wordpress.com/tag/baby-milk-powder-scandal/

This excerpt reflects themes I've come across before, but mostly in reading about China in Western media. To the extent that Chinese news organizations still cover the tainted milk issue, I've been able to glean from poor automated translations that coverage focuses on blaming one company. There's little discussion of reexamining the regulation process at a higher level. And contrary to the excerpt, local Chinese folks I talk to as part of the everyday don't seem to be itching to get these kinds of thoughts off their chest. They know which milk to avoid, and that's all I hear from them about it. If they wanted to they would have no problem voicing such concerns since face-to-face conversations naturally aren't monitored.

Onward

2008-09-12T02:18:00.000-07:00

With my last post, I signaled the close of this blog. But a lot's happened since then, and so it's time to start writing it up. I'll also reframe the scope of the blog. It's no longer a travel blog, but its focus is on expatriate (expat) life, particularly with regards to China.

About that: Yes, I'm back in China, in Shenzhen. In July, in and around France, I visited Brittany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, and finally, Marseille with my dear mother. After her return home, I used the time in Marseille to determine the next step in my career, intending to do extended volunteer oriented work, where I could preferably apply engineering skills. That last condition narrows down the list *a lot*. However, towards the beginning of travels, I had made some inroads with a particularly appropriate socially oriented technology company. And so I remain in the profit-seeking world.

In looking over the blog history for references to Shenzhen, I realized I didn't write it up much. (By the way, kudos to the post-Olympics government for letting me proof my own blog, unlike before!) This was because I spent less than two days here. It's for the better anyways, as now I have the opportunity to talk a lot more about it. Shenzhen is not a travelling destination, it's a bit of a business hub, but with a very very low concentration of expats compared to, say, it's big brother Hong Kong to the south. Shenzhen is a wealthy place. To look out over the city is to walk through an excessively caffeinated architectural firm's display room. convention centers, government centers, major hotels, together look like a futuristic city from a space opera. The funny thing is, getting in at ground level, if you look hard enough, you can still find typical Chinese style hutongs sprinkled about. I should know, I live in one, and it's quite interesting (not to mention convenient - almost anything I want from rice cookers to barber shops at rock bottom prices). By contrast, the designer highrise apartment complexes that make up much of the residential space of downtown Shenzhen have a much lower local density of retail businesses, and even then only in the marble palaces that comprise your average Chinese shopping mall. It occurred to me one day as I was chowing away on semi-identifiable food in the hutong, that you can't eat marble. Anyways, before you think I'm slumming it Eastern-style all the time, I'm only there when I want a cultural dip. As I write, I'm in a starbucks.

Alas, life is not all bai cai and chicken feet, nor is it ventis and raspberry scones. Guangdong, the province Shenzhen is located in, particularly specialized in electronics manufacturing. With the help of local partners, I source and coordinate manufacturing for a consumer lighting product. The work scratches my itch for development oriented work, as the target customer is a low income consumer without reliable electrical access : e.g. much of India, rural China.

The earlier Chinese language study is starting to pay off - I can get through most of a day's work in the engineering areas without calling our bilingual OEM, who's often busy. You can teach each other technical words on the spot. Maybe one day I'll tell local engineers that the English word for 'resistor' is actually "lollipop". Can't wait to have them source 10,000 lollipops. Well, I like the sound of their term "dian zou" better. I keep up the studies, but only at 4 hours a week instead of 20+ like in Beijing. Character assimilation is slow, especially with such crutches as the fact that all non-elderly Chinese read my pinyin with no problem. Good computer input method editors make it far too easy to look like I know all kinds of characters. Here goes one: 中秋节快乐 means, "happy mid-autumn festival", an important holiday taking place this Sunday, which also gives everyone a day off on Monday. (People work they're behinds off around here, they deserve this holiday and more).

Another aspect of the work, which I probably more adopted than was assigned, is interfacing with venture capitalists. Socially oriented entrepreneurship is all the rage these days. And Asia has no shortage of heaping sums of money flowing around, as evidenced by the aforementioned monuments to modernisation of Gehry pedigree. Especially with close proximity to Hong Kong, networking with potential investors is exciting. And, to folks from the Sili Valley, don't worry, Sand Hill Road is well in our sights too.

To whet your appetites for the next post (god only knows when that will be), I'll write a heavily redacted description of the social aspects of expat life. (hey, an audience of wide scope reads this, you don't think everyone wants the sordid details, do you?)

One last note: When it comes to talking about business, I try to maintain some discretion - this is a startup, and like many startups with viable business plans, we have competitors. To the extent that you may glean details about our operations from my writings, do please be discrete as well. I've come to learn, mostly for the better, it's a very connected world after all. Sounds like the theme song for an up-revved Disneyland boat ride.

Reminder: comments are anonymous

End in sight

2008-07-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

Since my last post, I finished up my time in Thailand in the island of Phuket. I got better at surfing, (finally managing to catch the open face of waves!), and learned a new sport called paddle upright surfing.
The wind during my time there wasn’t sufficient for picking up kite-surfing, instead I was very happy to have progressed to the extent that I did with conventional surfing. Thailand was fun, but I don’t know if it deserves the nostalgic sense of ecstasy people seem to go into when they talk about their experiences there. Maybe I’m not young enough to enjoy it as a complete party animal, and not old enough to enjoy it for the idyllic sense of relaxation available in so many parts of the country. The Indonesian island Bali has both of these in a smaller area, so if you ever consider an exotic getaway, give this one due consideration as well.

Now I’m in France, the last stop on my itinerary. The first week I stayed in an apartment in Montmartre. I was gratified to be able to “cook” and store my own food in the apartment since, with the dollar-euro conversion being what it is these days, eating out daily was becoming an expensive prospect. I’m glad to be joined now by one close family member, and we’re visiting Paris, northeastern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and northwestern France around Strasbourg together.

After getting to practice yapping on so many itinerant French in recent travels, communicating in the language has become easy here. Today I found myself missing the adventure in China of communicating over the course of daily activities, trying to form sentences in poorly-toned Chinese, like in the grocery store: Wo yao na ge dong xi, yong chi chi fan. (lit. I need that thing, used for eating food) spoken while I make a pinching motion. And so I get led to chopsticks, and I learn, kuai zi. And then to make it easier to eat rice, Yao ying guo de kuai zi (I need ‘English chopsticks’) and now I have a fork! As far as languages go, Chinese is definitely my next focus, especially for business. Although I think I’ll be learning characters for the rest of my life . . .

With the end of travels in sight, I find myself spending most of my time moving forward with the next steps of my life and career. Soon, this blog (being a travel blog after all) will by all rights come to an end. Going forward though, I will treat it as a medium to update folks, wherever I am, (even home!), in order to describe new experiences and my reflections. If you don’t already get “push” notifications by email or otherwise of updates to the blog, email me and I’ll add you to the update list. Should you choose to tune out completely (and who could blame, given the frequency of updates!), it’s been very fulfilling to post my experiences and thoughts. Perhaps you’ve been enticed to wonder about the world some more, or just to hit the beach. Either would justify my purpose in posting. The travels have been meaningful to me on approximately twenty thousand different levels, and I hope some of that has rubbed off. If via this medium you’ve been accompanying me, I thank you.

Thailand

2008-06-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

One goal I had with coming to Thailand was to see what all the fuss was about with
people who've come here reporting that it shouldn't be missed. So I'm here, finally
not-missing it, and . . . well it's a very pretty place. White sandy beaches are mildly
developed, providing a happy balance between seclusion and access to services and
activities. Addressing the fuss, I'm afraid I can provide no nutshell response on whether Thailand should or shouldn't be visited except through the anecdotes that follow. I will preface that Thailand's
seemingly magical effect on most visitors seems to have only mildly affected me. Like I told at least one person before I left, I'm a very bad tourist, so I can only enjoy
pure uninterrupted recreation and relaxation for so long, an inconvenient character flaw
in a place like this.

First, I completed my 18-meter depth dive certification in the waters off Ko Tao, which was so much fun! The water was as clear as any postcard picture you've seen of diving in a tropical resort region. The instructor, comfortable with my classmate's and my level of relaxation, took us into some narrow caves, making for a real lesson in buoyancy control

I've spent the past week and a half on Ko Pha-Ngan island off Thailand's east coast. My bungalow is very inexpensive, so I've spent a lot of time using it as a base to explore different parts of the island, finding beaches each with their own traveler culture. And that's the funny thing about much of Thailand that I've seen. The culture of common tourist locations is more driven by travelers than by locals. To hazard a guess, I imagine that in busy times the island's transient foreign population swells to at least match the local population in size. So touring here is like touring the populations of the developed countries, if vastly overrepresented by the British.

Ko Pha-Ngan's culture and economy is centered on the Full Moon event. Some would call this event a festival, others would call it a party, and still others would call it a 10,000 person beach rave complete with trance techno, florescent paint, drinks with dangerously unidentifiable ingredients, and more unabashed hedonists than you can shake
a glowstick at (and who could say if I wasn't one of them?). I could describe it as a one-night Burning Man minus the sense of responsibility to selves and environment. And the average age is about ten years younger than Burning Man's (the British pre-university gap year hordes strike again). If you don't know what Burning Man is, you'll have to do a few minutes of web searching to understand this as a reference point for the Full Moon Party. And if you're not familiar with what Gap Year is, well I think I'll touch on
it next post, or you can search on your own.

What follows is a moderately stream of conscious listing of things I've been up to around here. If you're looking for a post that is well tied together, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I've exited the Thailand mindset. At least I didn't write in pidgin.

-I recently finished reading The Beach by Alex Garland, a book about backpackers finding a secret lagoon community in a nearby island to Ko Pha-Ngan. It follows the popular trouble-in-paradise plot line, except like Lord of the Flies, it's a real downer of a novel, so it's put me in a sour mood.

-I took a Thai cooking class, making coconut soup with chicken, Pad Thai,
green curry chicken, and for dessert, coconut-milk fried bananas. I served the
food to some Thai I live near, and they didn't retch, so I felt good.

-Unfortunately for a still growing tourism industry, the islands are floating liabilities
when it comes to the likelihood of many kinds of injuries. Roads are in deplorable condition, compounded by unfenced ditches by the roadsides, frequent rains, and drunken tourists on two wheels. On the flip side, wound dressing is big business so it’s justifiably pervasively advertised. Sometimes more frequently than I can believe, I see travelers with glass cuts from walking on the beach (even wearing sandals), motorcycle accidents, and rock cuts from vaulting between cliffs (under the influence of some narcotic). Also, in the local hot, moist climate, the threat of infection is always looming. For all this, unlike in India, I'm avoiding motorcycles like the plague here, which by no means absolves me from the odd cut or scrape. I've gone into my med kit at least twice as frequently as in India, though thankfully through much more mundane causes than described above.

-I'm trying to manually remove a virus from my laptop again. I first got rid of it while
I was in China, but it looks like it's been hibernating on my memory cards in the meantime. Here's hoping it's not on my phone's memory itself. Not a very good use of time in the islands, but I'm getting some work done as well on the computer so I need it clean. Otherwise my computer gets too hot, and risks getting damaged.

Now I'm itching to see a different part of Thailand. I'm planning my escape by air to the island of Phuket for more surf lessons, and then back to Bangkok with plenty of margin of time to fly for France.

China recap - and don't forget the subsequent recent post!

2008-06-09T10:14:00.001-07:00

As I was arriving in Hong Kong they were only just running news
stories of protests by parents of students killed in the Sichuan
earthquake. Apparently many of the schools that fell were the only
structures in their respective areas to suffer such catastrophic
damage. Since schools are the kinds of things that get built en masse
via government contract, it immediately pointed to the potential for
corruption in the construction planning process.
It bothered me in the wake of the earthquake that the news coverage
focused only on the heroic efforts of rescuers, and not on critical
questions such as why the building codes weren't up to the task of
withstanding a high magnitude earthquake such as many important
structures in San Francisco are designed to handle. A semi-analogous
US disaster in recent memory was Hurricane Katrina. There was much
more anger as to why the levees didn't hold water through the storm
than similar coverage for the China quake. To get an idea of how the
Chinese media responded to the disaster, consider this: Imagine if for
one night shortly after Hurricane Katrina, a PBS-on-steroids goverment
television network wiped away all other broadcasted programming in
favor of airing the same telethon benefit event identically on all
channels, where the theme of the event was an emphatically displayed
and repeatedly exclaimed, 'I am American!', presented amid
sensational images of the disaster and rescue attempts. This the
evening of the day that every car driver in every US city was required
to simultaneously stop completely while maintaining a constant honk on
their horn for three minutes straight in memory of the disaster. To me
this sounds fanciful, or just plain strange, but it's what took place
in China after the earthquake.
Turns out, as Western papers reported, local Chinese media
establishments were being instructed by the government's media arm not
to air coverage critical of why buildings weren't constructed to
withstand earthquakes. Instead, only themes promoting unity got
through.

In Thailand

2008-06-09T09:20:00.001-07:00

At two am this morning I arrived in Thailand after about a week in
Hong Kong and Shenzhen. A friend from school put me up and helped me
sample expat life in the Asian business hub. Most expats I met must
have been spending every other week in a different East or Southeast
Asian city on work.
One of HK's first tourist stops is a mountain sitting on top of the
city's downtown called the Peak: take San Francisco's Telegraph Hill,
make it three times as tall and wide, and relocate it to the middle of
downtown at Powell and Market streets, and you get the idea of how
closely HK's developed areas have had to squeeze against and around
it's sharp geographic features. Walking around the Peak I could get
the lay of the land. I think Hong Kong's most recognizable features
are its ubiquitous residential towers which for their narrow girth
look unnaturally tall.
I arrived in Thailand early this morning. I'm on a bus now making my
way to one of Thailand's islands. I'm gratified to have made good on
a recent friend's advice to 'get out of Bangkok as soon as possible'.
For a while it seemed like I was going to be stuck in an urban
backpacker district that looks like the first stop in Southeast Asia
for every British gap year student looking for quick and dirty
partying on arrival. For the next week I'm taking a diving course in
Ko Tao, finishing it in plenty of time to reach the storied full moon
festival in Ko Pha Ngan. Everyone I've ever met while traveling has
always had only glowing things to say about Thailand, so I decided to
invest all of my three weeks before France in this country,
particularly around its islands. In the interest of moving around
like a true backpacker, I've left all of my business and metropolitan
clothing behind in a hotel's left luggage area. Everything except . .
. my laptop. One must have principles after all.

Bliss in Beijing

2008-06-01T06:48:00.001-07:00

I am on a train in the Beijing railway station, at the beginning of a
twenty three hour journey from the capital to Shenzhen, Hong Kong's
manufacturing hub. It's my last stop before reaching HK. The train,
by the way, is very plush, considering I booked the lowest class.
Compared to Indian trains' jail-cell sleeper class, I feel like I'm at
the Hilton for how clean and comfortable it is . . . Maybe I'm getting
soft these days.
I'm sad to be leaving Beijing. Like anyone I get addicted to routine
all too easily: get up, eat cereal, hit the starbucks on the way to
the four hour morning class, one hour lunch of gai-fan (deliciously
cheap meat- and vegetable-covered steamed rice) , then one hour of
private tutoring before either returning home to take a much-needed
nap or else linguistically force-feed myself by bargaining the
afternoon away in a knock-off goods market. (jia-de meaning 'fake' is
important vocabulary to know in these situations, although at the end
of the day neither vendor nor customer have any illusion about the
authenticity of the goods. Authenticity matters little here - if
knock-off goods do the job, then they're goods, regardless of what
brand has been slapped on them). Speaking of routine, seeing the same
students and teachers every day for a month definitely caused me to
form attachments, so leaving some of those behind made me feel kind of
down.
Beijing is a great city. It has so much energy running up to the
Olympics. There's a sense of anxiousness about the event and wanting
to present Beijing's image on the right foot that permeates
everywhere. I feel fortunate to have been here during precisely this
time.
On the other hand, I can anticipate sensing the opposite feeling in
people when the Games are through, something like, 'the party's over,
now what do we do?'. Also, between the Games and the sensationally
televised government's response to the quake, locals will be so hiked
up on national pride by August 8th that I'm afraid they'll have
withdrawal symptoms come September!

What does 'mouth mouth mouth mouth mouth' mean?

2008-05-20T10:58:00.001-07:00

Well my historically trusty laptop has given up the ghost for the time
being. I'm posting from my phone, so my posts will be a little more
rough until I can get the computer fixed. Just another week and a half
in Beijing, then time for Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Feeling
particularly cut off from the world outside China these days - somehow
the powers that be decided that a good tribute to the earthquake
victims would be to cut off all foreign television programming for
three days. (to be fair, this was an extremely grave event - the
ever increasing official death toll numbers speak for themselves, and
unfortunately a lot of sad, gruesome, and heartstring tugging
anecdotes have emerged from the event. It's been unpleasant going
about 'business as usual' in the city feeling unable to do anything
about something happening not to far away apart from the odd donation)
So don't be afraid to send a message my way so i feel in touch. By
the way, one benefit to posting via phone is easy access to a chinese
script interface - 我想学衣汉语在北京! Two points to the first person with a
translation. If you only see a bunch of squares, don't sweat it,
your browser doesn't support chinese. Or, maybe i just felt like
writing the character for 'mouth' several times.

Retrospective: Elephant vs. Dragon in a Developing World Free-for-All

2008-05-14T05:05:00.000-07:00

I decided there was enough temporal distance between me and the subcontinent to post a little retrospective in light of what I’m seeing in China. Also it gives me the opportunity to blow the electronic dust off some photos to post. To kick things off, I hereby curse so many newspapers in the media back home for using the phrase “developing countries such as India and China” (I found 40,000 instances of the phrase in the English-language web on Google) . The phrase isn’t inaccurate, but the proximity of the two names in the sentence makes me imagine that the countries are in similar states of development. This is very very far from the reality that I got to sample.

I’ll talk about what I’ve observed about development and my thoughts comparing the two countries - I’ll leave it to others to debate whether and how development should take place in any country. Let me post a caveat before going further – in India I saw large cities, tiny towns, and the more easily reached of non-agrarian villages situated along my journey’s path. In China however, I’ve only seen its two most important metropolises, its favorite domestic vacation destination city, and what suburbia I could make out over the course of a two hour train ride, all in the months preceding the Olympics. Leading up to the Games, the government has made it its utmost priority to look good in front of the world, and, stoked or not with nationalism by the powers that be, the public imagination is completely consumed by this international spectacle. I frequently hear the phrase, “Will it be ready?” referring to the tying up and spit-polishing of construction in Beijing and environs. In other words, I’m seeing China firmly stomp its best foot forward, without sight of the rest of the beast.

To the photos. The first picture showing an oxcart with an om symbol, is probably the clearest one I have to illustrate the chaos and ramshackle feel of an Indian market street in just one shot. It’s from Bombay. Calcutta’s streets were actually much more chaotic with bootstrap commerce and myriad transportation means, but alas, no photos, since it was always so dark while I was in the middle of it. The one shown suffices to give an idea.

The second shot is a street in central Calcutta. The road’s been torn up to be repaved. When it’s finished with paving, it will probably look like those sections that weren’t torn up, and overall won’t be up to a good standard. Old bricks are used for filler. Neighborhood locals, as likely children as adults, do the work.

The third shot is from Kerala, still my favorite state (you think I'm excluding American states, don't you ;) ). Depending on your standards, these people aren’t poor. They are working to enable their livelihood, and they have no need or desire to ask you for money. But they probably can't afford quality goods and services.

The last (and unfortunately blurry) Indian shot is from along the beach in Chennai. Most Tamil girls in the city also wear saris everywhere.

To the

China

shots next.

First: Here go the Shanghai skyscrapers, taken from the Pearl Tower.

Second: This is a Shanghai street bordered by a mix of local Shanghainese, domestic tourists, and some international tourists.

Third: This is an Audi parked outside of Beihai park next to the Beijing's Forbidden City. It’s license plate has four “8”s on it which is why I took the photo. Mandarin for 8 is ‘ba’, rhyming with 'fa', one word for money. Therefore 8 is lucky, making phone numbers, addresses, and yes, license plates with 8 in them desirable and expensive. The souped up Audi probably ran upwards of $60,000 USD. For it’s lucky number 8’s, one local put the license plate cost at $125,000 USD. Unlike my Keralan friend on the canal banks, the owner of this vehicle did not present him/herself to be pictured. He or she could probably afford quality goods and services.

Last: A deliberately preserved Beijing hutong neighborhood. A really typical hutong should come off as a little bit slummy, but some, especially in central Beijing, perpetuate centuries-old historical traditions especially in architecture, and are themselves tourist attractions.

(I wonder if in future decades some of the bigger slums in India will be preserved and become tourist attractions like in Beijing. Dharavi slum in Bombay already hosts off-beat tours (development tourism). Except that the streets there still stink of human waste, and it’s really not intended as a tourist attraction that some people have as their chosen occupation to beat burlap bags containing scraped-off paint chips into a powder so they can be recycled into paint).

I’ll let the photos provide the study in contrasts for the most part. Let me speak to the potential for editorial bias. Far afield of major cities, and especially outside eastern China, I probably could take photos better resembling the first Indian shot suggesting street chaos, the third shot representing otherwise solvent people who lead a simpler lifestyle, and the last Indian shot representing the perpetuation of tradition irrespective of inconveniences incurred. But taking the reverse approach I promise there are no huge skyscrapers in Bombay, Chennai, or Kolkata. Newly-fabled Bangalore has only two real *highrises* in this IT powerhouse’s downtown, and no metro. (I challenge readers to do an image search for skyscraper plus any of these cities and see what comes up).

Referring to the third photo from each country, I freely admit deliberate, gross and profane editorial bias in juxtaposing the two. I really wanted the contrast.

I also promise that most cities in India will not soon have streets as clean or orderly as those of its neighbor’s to the East. Check out the third, fairly mundane China shot. The hordes of people packed on either side of the street, by Bombay standards, should have long since crowded onto the asphalt to make a traffic-pedestrian curry masala. Moreover the cars stay in their lanes, a practice which avoids gridlock and accidents.

This comparison is as much an indictment of government practice as it is of collective will. India teems with universally cursed yet universally tolerated corruption that the public actively participates in to accomplish much of their mundane legal needs (bribes for stamps on important documents, bribes for paying property tax). When streets are torn up to be repaved, it’s a local politician serving a powerfully large albeit poor constituency, who facilitated the construction contract at their behest. The same street could have been similarly torn up less than two years prior. Also, enforcement of quaint concepts such as traffic laws is a joke, certainly nothing that a palm padded with rupee notes couldn't handle.

The norms of daily life in the bigger cities cause anything that’s publicly owned or publicly shared to quickly become either a waste receptacle or a sitting duck for decay. By contrast, the insides of homes and businesses are strikingly well cared for. Therefore, all this isn't to say I didn't enjoy my time there, actually, I loved most of the conscious hours I spent there for the sense of discovery they afforded. And Kerala . . . ah

PS Need to remind especially to new folks to the blog, this is an *anonymous* blog, so please consider comments accordingly.

Now that's a stadium!

2008-05-14T04:57:00.000-07:00

(reposted unmodified)

I've arrived in Beijing and I've begun taking a one month intensive Mandarin language course that I signed up for while in India. It's nice also to be able to settle down for a little while as a change from moving from place to place every two or three days. Some friends in Beijing set up an apartment for me before I arrived. I am for a long time in their debt. Attached you can see pictures of the place. I'm particularly proud of the kitchen, pictured. It's simple, I know, but I've cooked a lot since I arrived, so I've enjoyed just having the facilities for it. The building shown is one of the iconic structures that represent "The New Beijing" . This one is the Olympic stadium shaped like a bird's nest, definitely an architectural wonder. Because of security surrounding the Olympic construction site, it was hard to get a clear shot. I managed to find a hotel near the grounds, the far side of which had a clear shot of the structure.
Mandarin is a very very very difficult language to learn. Gone are the friendly cognates, pronunciation, tonality, and alphabet of more easily accessed languages such as French and Spanish. Learning this is like starting *completely* from scratch. In a (successful) effort to keep ourselves entertained and motivated, I organized a private lesson among my fellow students with my tutor to learn some of the more colorful Mandarin turns-of-phrase, not to mention useful sentences for the more, er, practical situations of daily (and evening-ly) life here. There was a lot of beer involved in the lesson.
Beijing is a huge city, development is everywhere. The capital has its towers and architectural wonders, but compared to Shanghai it has traded off such a large volume of towers for sprawling yet still somehow tasteful apartment blocks.

Shanghai'd

2008-05-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

I spent the week in Shanghai, meeting up with a friend from the States. The sites were grand enough that I decided it was worth putting up a few photos, the first the blog has had! I hope you like them, their selection reflects how I perceive the Shanghai lifestyle and economy. I'm off to Beijing now to begin a language course! I'll be there for a month, having booked a stylish apartment to boot! I publish photos of it next post.

Automated update notifying

2008-04-30T22:28:00.000-07:00

To loyal readers: If you want to get automated update notifications of this blog by email, just send me an email since you know me. If you're missing my email address, then just put up a comment in the blog containing your own email address, and I'll add you to the update list and (in the interest of preserving anonymity) delete the comment.

I bet those mountains look fantastic behind all that fog . . .

2008-04-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago, I arrived in Kolkata. For many travelers, Kolkata is the first port of call on arrival in India, just like Bombay was for me nearly three months ago. Kolkata earns its reputation for rampant overt poverty, but that doesn't distinguish it from other Indian cities. Newly arrived foreigners can't hide the fish-out-of-water expression on their faces. While I find the presence of children on the streets shocking, I've built a wall around my natural reaction to seeing deformed, grotesquely handicapped people on the sidewalks, or kids lathering and washing themselves at the street water-pump, and most disappointingly, mothers carrying babies tugging at my shirt growling out "baba" (friend) for rupees. For the latter, long ago I decided it was wrong to give money in those situations, as I'm as likely to incentivize them to have another baby to increase the shock factor, which they're well aware of. Stories abound in many cities of "begging syndicates" which transport the destitute to a tourist location for the day, then return them to their street after taking the bulk of the day's reap.
For all this, elusive New India is still out there, just primarily in the suburbs, (residences, offices and all) save for cultural islands in the dense urban areas.

Kolkata's been hot, so after some requisite sightseeing, I boarded a train for Darjeeling.
Darjeeling is a foggy mountain town in the same state, West Bengal, as Kolkata. It's a hill station - one of 50-100 high altitude townships throughout India chartered under the British Raj as a cooler refuge for British servicemen from the energy-draining heat of the lowlands. Walking into this town, it's like stepping out of India completely. For starters, the bulk of locals are of Nepali descent (actually Ghurka), with smatterings of Tibetan. Prices are much lower for all manner of food, lodging, and clothing, and yet the residents enjoy a standard of living far above the Indian average I perceive in the cities. Deservedly there are a lot of foreigners soaking in Darjeeling and environs, and more Americans than I've encountered elsewhere in India altogether (this means I met at least three there).

One thoughtful British traveling companion convinced me to visit the nearby mountainous but tiny state of Sikkim with him. Like the Darjeeling area, Sikkim is also completely distinct from the rest of India. It's composed mostly of, well, Sikkimese who have more east asiatic look, but also Nepali, and Bhutanese. Seeing so much greenery around me, I joined a trek here in the foothills of the Himalayas. In two days of hiking, I had justified every piece of warm weather clothing and outdoor equipment I had been lugging around with me all this time, including a sleeping bag, an inflatable mat, two sweaters, a (fantastic) North Face jacket from a good friend back home, a water filter, and . . . socks. (Elsewhere, you just don't need socks when you're gallivanting around such a warm country in sandals). All in all, I spent most of two weeks in the mountains trekking, sightseeing, or just plain hanging out. I didn't leave loaded with tea leaves - I actually don't like pure Darjeeling tea for being either too bitter or too bland. It's better mixed with other flavors and spices which I leave to the good folks at Unilever (Lipton) in Sri Lanka and Twinings and Bigelow in London to accomplish.

One thing I learned about the residents of the mountain areas, they like to go on strike a lot. Often this is couched in a protest for autonomy from India or to create a new Indian state. But my read was that they just like to collectively bring the entire local economy to a halt, going so far as to stage a hundred-plus person sit-in in the middle of the only street traversing town, deranging everyone's travel plans and overall costing a lot of people a lot of money. Depending on how you do the accounting, the strikes have cost me anywhere from $100-200 US for the alternative plans I had to come up with. (In retrospect, I think I understand now why the residents enjoy such a high standard of living amid otherwise low prices . . . ) I encountered strikes in Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Silguri, an important waystation to reach Darjeeling.

My time in India is coming to a close. I'm back in Kolkata, and tonight I'm flying for Shanghai, followed by Beijing a week and a half later. Time is getting on, and I have to go to the airport soon, so I will sign off. To my resident and foreigner friends who I met while traveling in the country who follow the blog, our discussions and shared experiences have made my time here thoroughly meaningful, and I know I will be keeping in touch with you going forward. I will hope always that we can make our paths cross again. test

Tamil Nadu

2008-04-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

Outside India, Kanyakumari is rightly known for its beautiful sunsets. (Within India, Hindus come from all over the country to worship at a famous temple here, and Tamils celebrate the memory of a famed ancient poet immortalized in a colossus-like statue emerging from the water). For its location on India’s southern tip, the town probably should be equally renowned for its sunrises over the water. Of course, being the generally nocturnal person that I am, I couldn't be bothered to catch the sunrise, but the sunset was out of this world. Having made my way around this land's end, I'm now making my way up India's east coast.

North of Kanyakumari, Pondicherry was India’s only formerly French colony. So let’s do some math here: During the Raj, Britain controlled some 1.3 million square miles of India. With Pondicherry, the French managed to squeeze out a little less than 200 subcontinental square miles. I think it’s clear who won that particular game. What was the deciding factor? My theory: Cuisine. Have you ever tried British food? They’ve needed all the spices they could get from the East, and so were keen to get an early advantage in colonization. Meanwhile, the French were only too happy to continue farming their fertile home landscape to achieve their vaunted regional tastes. Like I said, it’s a theory, but I’ve found that much of the French psyche can be traced through their stomach.

Pondicherry is one of just a few cities in India that is laid out like a grid. The French quarter of the city has a very European feel to it, and is quite pretty and inviting. Historically, under French rule the Tamils were not even allowed into this neighborhood! Elements of French culture are only sporadically manifested: For example on the one hand, social welfare offices and other government bureaus proliferate throughout. However, French speakers, whether ethnically Tamil or otherwise, are mildly prevalent even in this quarter. At least the continental food in the trendy, posh restaurants is fantastic and authentic. While I’ve been sticking to vegetarian food for health reasons since leaving Bangalore, I made an exception in Pondicherry when I noticed my drool on the menu listing for coq au vin.

A stone’s throw from Pondicherry is the small utopian venture called Auroville. Auroville’s history dating from its founding in1968 is tied to a famous local ashram that is still very active today. The founders wanted to create a settlement that was independent of any nation’s sovereignty. Today, Auroville is a pioneer in alternative energy technologies including solar water heating, photovoltaic system deployments, water filtration, and wind power for electric and mechanical applications. The specialized cooperatives engaged in manufacturing these systems, which together contribute an important part of Auroville’s small export economy, count both small villages and urban homeowners throughout India as their customers. A busy greybeard engineer I talked to leads one of the cooperatives, drawing from thirty years of experience developing wind and water systems. The original intent of these systems was to sustain the settlement before they became a source of commercial gain for the community. He arrived in town when he was twenty.

Auroville’s technical prowess has a funny way of mixing with the village’s spiritual identity – for example, in water filtration, the final processing step (after a series of conventional steps such as reverse osmosis, UV and ozone treatment) resembles, as best as I could ascertain, a spiritual pep-talk for the water. No complaints here – the water was delicious.

The Auroville excursion also marked my first rental of a geared motorcycle (i.e. not scooter). A new local acquaintance in Kanyakumari showed me how to ride his brand spankin’ new Hero Honda bike (with Yamaha-style paint schemes and all). It’s a lot like driving a manual car – clutch, neutral, gears one through five . . . but no reverse =) . As I was riding back to central Pondicherry from rural Auroville, I wound up in the middle of rush hour Indian traffic (this kind of traffic is truly its own phenomenon). And so with my dilettante motoring skills I had to dodge oxcarts, rickshaws, cargo lorries, family-bearing scooters, and most importantly, buses whose rash drivers must in fact be closet philosophers; having clearly pondered the Hindu sense of fatalism to its extreme, they have absolutely no fear of death. During one close encounter with a few tons of mobile steel, it occurred to me that my trusty laminated medical insurance card, while eminently useful both logistically and financially when unfortunate circumstances befall (a comfort which in turn enables me to rent motorcycles in the first place), doesn't actually repel these hulking vehicles from merging into the modest square meter of road that I occupy.

Further north still on the way to Chennai, I reached Mahabalipuram, a town with temples and carvings in excess of one millennium old. The carving skills remain with the inhabitants today, many of whom make a living selling small statues of gods made of green granite and marble. My favorite: Ganesh, the god with the elephant’s head, kicking back and tapping away on his laptop.

Now I’m in Chennai, formerly Madras. The city is far from tourism-focused, and from a budget-traveling point of view, costly to get around, so after visiting the century-old markets of Georgetown and hitting some of the widest beaches in the world, I’ve decided to hunker down to do errands in preparation for the upcoming leg of the trip (in two weeks!) to Shanghai via Hong Kong. The highlight of my stay here was actually an evening spent with the local family of a friend living in California, particularly the impromptu course in cooking and Hinduism they gave me!

Tomorrow I’m headed to West Bengal starting in Kolkata. Looking forward to lots of fish – shortly after it will be time to justify all of the warm clothes I’ve been carrying around with a visit to Darjeeling!

Tying up Kerala

2008-03-30T01:13:00.000-07:00

Since the backwater trip, I’ve now seen the beach towns of Varkala and Kovalam. Varkala is mostly a backpacker and long-term stay hangout. Kovalam is more of a (small) package tourist resort with mostly older folks from Britain.

Earlier in Cochin, I had taken an Ayurvedic massage – I came out of it feeling quite pummeled. Not knowing whether I had a sufficiently authentic experience, I was naturally left with no choice but to take a second Ayurvedic treatment! This time I took it in Varkala, and the provider came highly recommended. Well, the second massage beat the pants off the first, what with the masseur walking on the back and all. Also, in this case there were often two masseurs working synchronously on either side of me.

In Kovalam, I was gratified to discover actual, intact surf boards! As far as I can tell, these are the only surf boards, rented out by the only surf instructors, in all of India. (With any luck I can prove myself wrong in coastal Madras). The waves in Kovalam are ideal for learning - for example, it's hard not to catch a whitewater wave. As of yesterday I've graduated from long boards to midsize boards. And I even managed to get up on a short board! I'm really working on catching the open face of a wave instead of whitewater now. Among other things, it requires my weight to be centered further back on the board. If I didn't have the itinerary clock ticking, I would stay in Kovalam for a week to continue practicing, since it's cheap living here. ($4 a night plus $3 x 3 meals on average.

Now I’m making my way to Kanyakumari by bus. This town is located at the southernmost tip of the country, where three seas – the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal, meet by convention at one point. Shortly after, the formerly French colony of Pondicherry is begging to be visited.

Maybe if I disable this ship's propulsion, we can maroon ourselves here for a long time . . .

2008-03-24T12:46:00.001-07:00

I'm writing from the Keralan backwaters. The waters are a network of navigable freshwater canals, running up and down the Kerala coast just a few miles inland from the ocean. The guidebook Lonely Planet calls a houseboat trip along the canals “one of the top 10 things to do before you die”. Looking out over the palm trees lining the banks, after having sipped coconut juice (and looking forward to a coconut-coke-rum I’ve dreamt up) I find it hard to disagree.

I’ve rented a two bedroom houseboat on behalf of myself and two British I befriended since arriving in the state. The vessel includes a kitchen with chef, captain, and engineer. For our funds, we’re served excellent local style meals plus tea, coffee, and water as we like throughout the day. It’s been outfit as an eco-friendly boat, boasting twice the fuel efficiency of its competitors, with all on board amenities plus sewage treatment to boot. In other words, guilt-free, pleasant-as-hell travel.

(…)

It is night now – I’ve just come from seeing one of those sights that make me wish I had a $1000 camera. I’m on the upper balcony deck with the Brits sipping our coconut-coke-rum under a near full moon. Mist is climbing over the water, and looking down the canal, the rows of palms that line it seem to point the way forward, towards an unforeseeable but desirable destination.

Earlier in the evening as our boat was docked, we walked along rice-paddy fields. I saw simple but effective irrigation pump stations in action, maintaining the water level for optimal growing conditions. Like many Keralites (Malayali), the locals were very friendly and warm, and after having spent the better part of a week in the state, I’ve learned to respond to their overtures with genuine affection and not distrust. At this time two kids treated me to an impromptu tour of the rice-reaping and threshing operations. Of all things they could ask in return, they wanted pens – simple, functioning, ballpoint pens. It’s not that they don’t have access to cheap pens of decent quality – those are readily available in most markets today. Instead, in recent decades the Malayali government began putting an extraordinary stress on education and literacy, but the young people often lacked quality pens with which to practice their language,
Malayalam. (If you had 56 letters in your alphabet, you’d need to practice them a lot too). With the tourism through the backwaters, the kids along the banks years ago learned to ask for pens of foreign (quality) origin from the travelers, who were only too happy to oblige. In recent years, locals now have relatively easy access to these kinds of amenities. But the cultural valuation of pens stuck, and so the kids continue to ask for them, still perceiving a stronger sense of quality (or maybe just style?) with foreign-made pens. I was only too happy returning to my boat to forage through my luggage for the ballpoints I was never using, continuing a tradition nearly two-decades old.

For their trouble, the Malayali boast a 97% literacy rate, which pretty well smokes the competition in every other Indian state. If I ever felt a sense of despair for peoples’ livelihoods driving past the most wretched slums of Mumbai, then here instead I see unabashed aspiration and sustainability. It’s refreshing for someone who needed to see it.

Tomorrow morning the captain will drop me at a highway that crosses the canals, where I will catch a bus to Varkala beach. More upcoming destinations that are likely before next post are Trivandrum and Kovalam.

First distilled ruminations . . .

2008-03-19T07:49:00.001-07:00

I wanted to post some lingering thoughts I've been able to distill through recent conversations with folks back home.
First, on Bangalore, since I've recently closed up shop there, and catering to the engineers among you - The city's got a lot in common with Silicon Valley, venture capitalists and all. However as an economy they still rely on innovation, direction, and income from places like the valley. The startups I've encountered are engineering services oriented, not making IP from scratch. It's true that I've read that new technology / web app startups of the type that proliferate Silicon Valley exist in some quantity in Bangalore, but the engineers that I meet and articles I read in the everyday reflect the former (services) variety much more, so I have to believe that it's the more important sector. The eagle-eyed among you may imagine there's a selection bias in the locales of the city that I've seen. This is possible, but I think it unlikely.
Then regarding social observations: I find it educational to see what life is really like on the ground, since all I ever really knew about India is through the lens and pen of media (both Western and . . . Bollywood), and through friends who are originally from the subcontinent, but who can only realistically represent a small fraction of the population, speaking either of economic or demographic backgrounds.
I've come to realize is that India is not one country in the sense that the US is one country. It's better compared to Europe for the sense of disunity in place between people from different states of the country. It would be hard to blame anyone for this - If folks in Oregon and Nevada spoke and wrote in a completely unrecognizable language to us in California, we'd have a hard time relating to neighboring states as well. (Except given India's geography, it would be more accurate to use states like New York and Pennsylvania to highlight the contrast of culture vs. distance in comparing the US and India; the density of Indian states resembles more New England than the spread out West Coast.)
As a general travel update, I've visited my first palace! It was in Mysore, and it was . . . big. I'm afraid I don't have much to add on that. Whatever you can imagine when you hear the word "palace", is probably not far off. At least rely on your vivid imaginations until I can post photos.

Back to Backpacking

2008-03-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

I've just concluded my (first) stay in Bangalore. The city's ubiquitous technical industry and cosmopolitan attitude have hit close enough to home that it's not hard to imagine returning in the future. Feeling comfortable with the number of inroads I made into the engineering community, I decided it was time to move further south.
I'm in Mysore now, three hours southwest of Bangalore by bus, which means I covered all of 70 miles. This is about the number of miles between San Francisco and Morgan Hill, a drive which normally takes as many minutes to complete. Distances mean a lot more in India than in the States. Naturally, urban distances are doubly more difficult to traverse. In traffic-clogged Bangalore, even if you have twenty minutes to make it to a meeting just 2 miles away, God help you.
As I write I'm in a budget hotel near Mysore's palace, on the Internet through my phone's crawling data connection. I watch as the mosquitoes in the room stealthily grow fatter at my expense. It's time to invest in a mosquito net, as soon as I can find one. In the meantime, I'm applying liberal amounts of the dwindling supply of bug repellent.
After so much time spent in cities, I'm trying hard to see the more remote palaces and temples. It's a challenge for someone who would much rather visit the local museum of industrial history. I'll scratch a few must-see religious sites off my to-do list before heading to Kerala for a week of surf lessons followed by lazy houseboat rides down the network of backwater 'highways'.

Of Baked Beans

2008-03-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

Bangalore must be the most livable town in India I've seen; certainly the most familiar to a Californian.
Maybe it feels that way because of the foreigners in the area coordinating IT work. But in fact
it's the thousands of young professionals with regal-sounding British/Indian accents running
around making the city hum, who you could otherwise not distinguish by look or by attitude from the yuppie population of any major US city. It's cool to make contact with the engineering and business community here in roundabout ways, getting to know the kinds of projects that people do and what small organizations are capable of. People are naturally busy, but when you catch them in their free time they are eager to get to know a foreign soul with a different kind of story than the typical.
The hard deadline for Bangalore nightspots is 11:00pm vs. Goa's 10pm, but I'm holding out for more secret late night events.
The post title refers to Bangalore's new official name, Bengaluru, which translates to "Baked beans". Old habits die hard, especially given locals' own reinforcement of the deprecated name, hence its appearance throughout the post.

Clandestine Gatherings

2008-03-07T03:46:00.000-08:00

After my last few days in Goa, I decided it deserves a little more credit than I gave it during the previous post - the missing parties after 10:00pm turn out to flourish incognito. As is true with many things in life, you just have to meet the right people. I decided to post a primer on how to find late night parties in Goa.

1. Get out of the touristy areas: Whether you're in Baga or Calangut, however enticing the nightspots are for staying open late, you need to get out of there. The real party's elsewhere, and those partiers *hate* everything having to do with these two developed beach towns . . .
2. At around 8:00pm, hop on your motorscooter, friend in tow, and drive around secluded and dusty Anjuna and Vagator aimlessly (these are areas where the long term foreign population staying from anywhere between 3 month and 30 years reside, often in remote ramshackle guest stays that rent barely in excess of $1 a day): When you hear the music blaring over the hilltops, stop the bike and wander on foot till you find the clearing where the rave is taking place.
3. Meet as many people as you can: Not everybody knows where the post-10pm party is, and this way you're more likely to meet the owner or organizer of the next rave that night. It helps if you've dressed like you're going to Burning Man - it breaks the ice a lot more easily. No, I will not post action shots.

The first outcome of following this primer found my friend and me in an abandoned church converted to a home stay / club venue. I felt fortunate that the guests were only 50% Russian instead of the typical 90%, so I could converse much more easily.
Consequently the last few days (read nights) in Goa were much more entertaining, and it wasn't with just a little fast-onset nostalgia that I boarded the Kingfisher jet to India's mini-Silicon Valley.

Let's see, I'll take a polio with a side of typhoid

2008-03-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

So some of you might be wondering what it takes to prepare for a trip like this. Preparation is an ongoing endeavour, because every few days to a week you're hitting the Lonely Planet to call ahead to book the next budget accomodation (with wi-fi, preferably), along with other minutiae like making photocopies of your passport/visa/driver's license or getting flimsy but important documents laminated. I'll work tidbits about preparation in between future posts, but there's one important one I'll talk about here, which is medical prep.
The first step I took was to go to the local Department of Public Health clinic. They run a non-profit office staffed with travel nurses, and offer a smorgasboard of vaccines for varying prices. A single administration of one vaccine might run anywhere between $30 and $200. Polio's cheap, Rabies is expensive, and the rest fall somewhere in between. They ask you the list of countries you will likely be visiting, and generate a printout describing the risk level of any diseases of concern in each country. Since the printout is in prose and not itemized, you have to sift through and put together your own list. At the same time you consult with a travel nurse. Mine was very good at helping me assess the risk level, such as whether you'll be in a rural or metropolitan area (rural = higher risk for most diseases). That's an important point about assessing risk - you don't *have* to get all the vaccines you're supposed to. You don't even have to get any at all, and many people don't and are fine. But you want to leave home with a sense of security about where you're going, and most people are willing to put down a few benjamins for that achieve that.
So you put together your list of vaccines, and when you refer to the vaccine price menu, you balk and decide to call your (shudder) HMO instead. My HMO wouldn't be able to provide any shots until after a phone consultation, which wouldn't take place for another two weeks. But free's free in the face of a ~$1000 vaccine regimen, so I decided to hold out. To justify the travel nurse's consultation time (which they charge you for anyway if you don't get any shots), I took my first adminstration of HepA/B which is called Twinrix.
Long story short, over the course of the next month and half (three further visits to the HMO) I got in addition to the childhood/high school/college shots,
HepA/B, DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis), Typhoid, Polio (booster), Rabies (3 shots over 1 month) and Japanese Encephalitis (3 shots over 1 month). I also got 300 days worth of doxycycline medication to protect against Malaria. Since this medicine makes me sick, I'm looking to get my hands on some Proguanil before I get to the Keralan backwaters.
Luckily, there is little need for concern over malaria in metropolitan Bangalore, which I'll cover next post . . .

Goa Post-Mortem

2008-03-02T03:32:00.000-08:00

I'm tying up about a week in Goa, staying just a little longer until I depart for my next destination. So far I've seen beautiful empty beaches and bustling tourist-filled beaches. For me the charm in Goa is hearing every shop, restaurant, and bar whether day or night playing trance techno. You don't see this anywhere else in the world that I am familiar with (not much right now, but I am working to change this), although I imagine Spain's Ibiza would be similar. The unfortunate difference between Goa and Ibiza is that Goa is no longer the party center that it once was. This is due less to the fickleness of European, Russian, and Israeli ravers, and more to ordinances passed by the local government banning "amplified music" after 10:00pm, citing the bad influence on local youth. Some popular hangouts get around this with bribes, but the majority of places have had to follow this rule or close, effectively killing nightlife throughout Goa. Maybe the local youth would benefit better from serious education supported by taxes on cover charges/drinks at the otherwise banned parties.
As a result of the government's crackdown, in walking around Baga or Anjuna beach even before the mandated closing time, you see a huge overcapacity of bars and clubs, which is another way of saying that they're mostly empty, and that they were built under conditions of much larger crowds. In the busy season of Christmas and the three weeks following, they get their crowds (even from America, which is shocking from my experience of not meeting a single American here). But in this, the 'shoulder' season between February and May, my understanding is that traffic is far below what it was historically.
I convinced an American buddy from Bombay to fly down for half a week to hang out until we go on to our next respective ports of call. He's been thoughtful enough to show me the nuts and bolts of running a business remotely, something I've been keenly interested in. Speaking of business instruction, specifically, negotiation skill, I got the firmest accolades from a local vendor from whom I was purchasing towels along with my friend. As my friend was stammering to negotiate prices, I took control of the situation, coming in with a laughably low price of 50 rupees a towel ($1.25) against her asking price of 600 rupees ($15). Over the next few iterations of bargaining we each shaved margin from our respective positions, but I wasn't satisfied (even though I would have no problem purchasing a towel for $15). I pulled my friend and walked out the door knowing the magic trick that makes vendors start playing fair. It didn't take long after for her to meet my price. The kicker is that after the transaction was complete, she called me a very bad man, and my friend a very good man for originally considering her original pricing scheme. So I guess I'm a bad man, but it never felt so good. (For those sympathetic to the poor vendor's situation, you may console yourself that she is doing fine for having a storefront on the main drag of the main tourist city of Goa, and that she sells many towels to many foreigners in excess of $15, and further that she wouldn't have made the sale if she wasn't making money on the deal. I dare say she was probably still making 50-100% margin off our transaction).
And finally, my verdict on Goa: Without the trance-fuelled nightlife that made Goa so popular for over a decade, all it has left are its beaches, which exist in better quantity and quality elsewhere in the world. My advice to Americans looking for an exotic locale to relax in for awhile-- lie back in Cancun, sip pina coladas in Puerto Vallarta, or when you've got some more time, go surfing in Bali.
Next stop: Bangalore, center of the "New India"; Recent experiences are telling me to expect supermalls next to slums. We'll see soon if this plays out . . .

Goa - First Reactions

2008-02-26T01:34:00.000-08:00

Unlike most of India, Goa is a former Portuguese colony, which is evident mostly in the architecture in the region's cultural center, Panjim.
Of course, I wouldn't know anything about that, because I'm sticking to the beaches.
During Christmas Goa attracts the young and beautiful from Western Europe and Russia for a weeks' or even months' long R+R. Right now it is the shoulder season, being between the Christmas high season and the monsoon (dead) season, during which the beaches are instead packed with leathery skinned long term retirees. There are just a few backpackers such as myself.
Goa is a state composed of many interior towns and "beach cities". So, Anjuna, Baga, Calangut, Vagator, etc. would be equivalent to LA's Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Long Beach, except with shorter distances between and a minimum of development. Also like LA, each beach town here has its own character. Some towns are more for serenity, peace and quiet, and others are a raver's dream. I'm staying in Baga, which is somewhere in between these two extremes. To get around, I've rented a motor scooter after having earlier rented one in Pune on which to practice. (I rented my first scooter in Bali last year and loved it). I woudn't ride a motorcycle in any major city, but in the small places you can get away with it safely.
This reminds me to mention some important advice to any would-be travelers out there - get an international driver's permit (IDP) before you go! It's quick and easy to pick up at the local AAA, and you never know when it will come in handy along your journey. A lot of piece of mind comes from knowing you're driving legally, so you can focus on driving safely and not looking out for cops. I recommend laminating the IDP, as it's too easy for the thing to get wet and damaged around here (this is first hand experience).
Goa is not an expensive place to live in. The dollar/euro/pound go very far here, and the result of course is in the number and intensity of touts and vendors announcing their services or wares.
I haven't figured out where the downward price pressure comes from around here, except for the vast number of year-round Goa retirees and "lifers" who have to make fixed nest eggs
stretch as far as possible over a long period of time. Otherwise I think all kinds of prices throughout Goa could be justifiably at least double their current value if the consumers were strictly folks on holiday.
Speaking of the touts, it's disheartening to see kids selling items (jewelry, refreshments) on the beach during the day when you know they should be in school. Education is not a universal right/requirement in India. I'm told a rough cost for basic schooling is 40 rupees a month. This is about $1 US. The kids probably make ten times that in profit per day selling wares. It's hard to have to ignore them, but until I learn otherwise I think ignoring is the most appropriate response, just like with everyone else trying to get your attention with the oft repeated words, "Hallo!", "Baba! (friend)", and "'where from?". Regarding the last, as far as price negotiations are concerned, I'm from Russia. Anyways, no one seems to be able to pick out an American accent around here, probably because there aren't any Americans around in the first place. No shortage of British, continental Western European, and yes, Russians.
I'm targeting about one and a half weeks exploring Goa, a place I've wanted to visit since seeing the film "Bourne Supremacy" years ago. Remember the opening chase sequence? Took place here. Irrespective of where it was shot, they certainly got the look and feel of the place down.

Taxi Drivers Are Out to Screw

2008-02-21T01:15:00.001-08:00

Still in Pune, even though I've been strongly tempted by a Bombay buddy's lobbying to meet up with him in Goa. Goa's beaches represent the party capital of India. The day I go there, and it's coming soon I promise, expect infrequent posts. Goa is twelve hours away by bus, only a few hours away by plane. So naturally I would fly, except Pune's airport is closed for these two weeks for runway renovations. So I've got a sleeper bus trip coming up.
Speaking of transportation, I'll talk about taxis. Autorickshaws and taxis are everywhere in Indian cities. There must be millions of them. And each and every one of them will lie to your face about the fare. The more honest among them will try to arrange an excessively expensive fare relative to the government-mandated rate before the journey begins.
[ The power just went out, and everyone left the internet cafe I was in. I thought I lost the post up to this point, but blogger autosaves! I plugged in my phone to my laptop (whose battery is running out of power - are you noticing a theme here along with the last post?) and I'm back to finish things. ]
To pick up from where I left off: I can understand that the fixed rate may not be keeping up with free market pressures, but it sure feels like it's "pick on the foreigner" day everyday here. To illustrate, while in Bombay late at night I was riding from Bandra (chichi nightlife center) to Colaba (tourist center). I asked the driver for the card to translate the meter reading to government-mandated cost. He swore up and down he didn't have it. I said no problem, I'll just calculate it, having memorized the daytime (less expensive) transfer function (mostly linear). I counted out the cash and prepared to go. However, my result was 25% less than the government-mandated "after midnight" rate. All of the sudden the driver manages to produce the fare translation card from the glove compartment that calls out the midnight rate. I told him what a liar he was, smirked to myself, and paid the midnight rate minus a bit to disincentive in the future. He argued, but I couldn't care less and left. I used to hate the post-ride exchanges, but they're getting fun now.

Power out in Pune

2008-02-19T10:47:00.001-08:00

In Pune, and the power's out - or at least a fuse is blown / circuit breaker tripped on my floor of the guesthouse, since everyone else seems to have power. Add to that I have only one bar on my cell phone, so I think I'll have a very pretty cell-phone sized brick to carry around with me tomorrow morning. This also means I have one bar's worth of time to get this post out. Let's see if I can make it.
Pune is an important IT hub for India - all the majors are here, Infosys, Patni, and a dozen other outsourcing firms. Try googling Infosys and Pune, and you'll see some interesting architecture in that company's IT park here.
I mentioned earlier that India was pretty hard on the senses - Thankfully Pune by contrast is quite livable, boasting a much more even distribution of wealth and quality of life than Mumbai. There is a well known ashram (like a temple+school) called Osho Ashram. It caters particularly to foreigners. Its late leader was known as a "sex guru", touting tantric sex as a key to enlightenment. The members all dress in maroon robes by day, and white robes by night. I toured the ashram this morning (no tantric sex), and they have all kinds of courses on different kinds of meditation. The grounds are beautiful and relaxing, and if the whole cult aspect of things didn't bug me, it might be cool to learn/participate in some Tai Chi.
I think I'll hold out for another cult, or as a few people close to me suggested, start my own! ;)

The next Shah Rukh Khan?

2008-02-16T07:27:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday I took my shot at stardom by being in a Bollywood movie. I was an extra! The scene was a colorful Indian wedding, and the star was crashing it to get the groom she loves. There were a lot of foreigners there from all over the world. It was excessively sunny and there was a lot of downtime, which allowed me to get to know all of the other foreign and local extras!

Local casting crews like to get fair skinned extras from the touristy area of Bombay for movies where the location requires it. I made 500 rupees - over three times the average daily income of a mumbaiker of 135 Rs (of course, there are a lot of questions you could ask about how this number was generated). This remuneration paid for my (decent) dinner that night, which should tell you something about the aforementioned average income. Don't tell the Indian government that I violated the terms of my non-work visa.

Bombay

2008-02-15T04:42:00.001-08:00

Greetings all. Have finally managed to set aside some hours in a Bombay internet cafe for setting up the blog. While it's true that one of the first things I did when I arrived in India was to get set up with a local phone plan and Internet connection via the mobile phone, the connection is slow, similar to modems, and makes blog provider research, registration, etc. a rather painful process. I'll try and backdate posts to cover past experiences in more detail.

Few things to get started - this is an anonymous unsearchable blog, so if you have the URL you probably know me or someone closely familiar with me. Even so, I'm paranoid and not ready to open my identity up to the whole online world. So, if you want to post comments, you should feel welcome, and I will request that you not address me by name. I would even suggest that your own handle (name) for your comments be anonymous as well, but that's up to you. If you lapse, it's ok, but I'll have to remove the comment, so don't be offended. Also, I'll state that final editorial control over whether comments are kept or removed rests with yours truly. There's always email . . .Lastly, you should feel free to pass the URL to familiar interested folks. (Don't worry, the content will be commensurate!)

Mumbai and Bombay are the same thing, and locals use the words interchangeably. I've picked up this bad habit. I've been in Mumbai for a week and a half, after having spent a week in Malaysia. In a few days I'm headed to Pune, which is a three hour train trip away. Of travel interest I've seen the Gateway to India (see photo) and Elephanta Island, which contains 1500 year old carvings of Shiva. Elephanta is to mumbaikers (people from Mumbai) like Alcatraz is to San Franciscans -- locals have never been there. Also saw the Federal Reserve Bank of India's coin museum, which chronicles the history of money in India.

Meeting lots of backpackers and locals on the ground. Everyone has their own itinerary, so it's challenging to be in the same place as another for more than a few days. Been staying in a simple hostel. Cold showers and shared toilets are the norm. I'm keeping a running tally of the number of times I get sick from food ("Delhi Belly"), and the count is up to 1 for now. I'm taking the malaria antibiotics religiously now in the hope of getting a protective effect from the food borne illnesses. Doxycycline is so strong that I have to be careful when/how I take it, or I'll get sick from the medicine instead of the illness. They should sell pepto-bismol here. If any of you decide to up and fly out to meet me, go ahead and bring a few bottles or ten.

OK, I have to get ready to go - It is Friday night after all, and Bombay has a pretty serious night scene, which is one thing I'll miss about the city when I leave for other parts. This has been a fairly superficial post, but you have to start somewhere, right? I hope that future posts will have more depth and introspection. In the absence of said depth, I'll post a link to a funny past Slate article that has summed things up pretty well so far. It doesn't speak for me, but I do share some reactions with the author.

http://www.slate.com/id/2107063/entry/2107071/

For those among you of subcontinental origin, don't be offended that it's taking time for the place to grow on me. There is plenty to see still!

I'm not sure yet how often you ought to be able to expect updates, I'm still figuring out the rhythm of doing this. Maybe we'll even get a few images up too ;)

Hope that all are well!