It’s been over two months since I came back from India, and here comes the first blog entry about the trip. There were a few reasons for the delay. First, I brought back a rather overwhealming quantity of photos and decided that to process all of them required engaging some economies of scale, pushing all 9 GB of photos through each step in my phoot-processing pipeline together. That took a month. Then I had some computer problems with upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10, aka Disaster of the Year. But it was also the difficulty of writing about India. India was just so so confusing, like no other place that I have been to before. I was originally hoping that if I just wait a week after my return, it would all settle and start making sense, but that didn’t happen. So, instead of presenting some sort of re-thought analysis of the trip, I am just going back to the notes that I wrote while in India or soon after, just editing them for style.

The first strong impressions in connection to my trip to India preceeded the actual arrival there. About two or three weeks before the trip, once I got back to US from Brazil in the first days of August, I started planning my time in Bangalore. I wanted to spend a little over a week in Bangalore talking to software developers there. (The idea was to get some perspective on what I've been looking at in Brazil and also start thinking about potential future projects.) Since I was going to spend only nine days there, I had no time to waste. So, rather than showing up in Bangalore and trying to line up people there (as I did for my first round of fieldwork in Brazil), I tried my best to line up Bangalore contacts while still in US, and in fact go as far as to schedule individual meetings. I spammed a bunch of friends asking if they knew someone in Bangalore. I also emailed a bunch of people whose blogs, etc. I found on the web. During the first week I was not getting much in terms of positive responses, but then they suddenly started to arrive. By the time I was about to leave for India, I had a list of more people that I could realistically meet.

That tought me something about India: the extent to which my social network is linked to those of Bangalore. This was such a contrast to what had happened in Brazil during my first round: there I spent I first few weeks wrecking my head as to where to find software developers and it took me about two months to meet the first 20 people. In Bangalore I talked to 20 people just in the first week. (Of course, none of this is to downplay the help of all the people who either referred me to their friends or friends of friends or agreed to meet.)

On Aug 22 I flew out of Newark, heading for Delhi. I was flying with Alitalia and had a stop in Milan, where I got a cup of Italian capuccino, which was quite good, and one of those rolls with creme inside, which amusingly they called “pasta.” I just happened to have some euros on me (actually, I just happened to have a small roll with Euros, rubles, yuans and canadian dollars…), so I could even pay in euros and not make an idiot out of myself trying to pay in dollars. Though, my italian conversation didn’t go very far (and people there and also on the plane seemed very serious about speaking Italian and most of the waiters didn’t seem to speak much English), so they called me “mister” at the end (“Here it is, Mister”), which made me wonder if this was meant as synonim for “gringo”. The rest of the flight wasn’t too bad either. Having this break in between was nice, actually and I managed to sleep a bit on both legs of the flight. That was a big mistake, since I then couldn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. When I wasn’t sleeping, I tried to make some use of the “Learn Kannada in a Month” book (by Srinivasa Sastry), which I soon had to put aside, realizing that I was holding quite possibly one of the worst language learning books ever written. (As I later learned, unfortunately, there appears to be no good Kannada books.)

I arrived to Delhi a little after 10 p.m. (When I was looking for my tickets, I discovered that it appears to find a NY-Delhi flight that is both short and arrives during the day.) My first impression of Delhi, right off of the plane: It felt a lot like Kazakhstan (if that means anything to you), but with one really weird quirk – the abundance of ancient-looking cars. They are called “Ambassador” and they look like they were designed in 1950s. Or, rather, they were designed in 1950s but are still made in India. So, imagine that ALL taxis are those Ambassadors. I've heard about India’s ancient cars before, but I didn’t expect to see quite as many of them and I didn’t expect them to look quite as outdated.

Getting a taxi was a mess. There is no line, just some sort of brawnian motion that matches people to taxis. It took me a while to figure out how that game worked, but eventually I gathered enough courage to elbow the competition, much like everyone else was doing, and got into a taxi. I got a voucher for “pre-paid taxi” which is supposed to be a solution for taxi scams, so this did work well. There is just an office, you pay inside the airport, then take a taxi and give the taxi driver a voucher. The voucher says “tipping the driver is prohibited”, I am guessing to make it clear that you don’t owe it to them. (The guy did try to ask for a tip, but I didn’t give it to him.)

I had made a reservation at “Tarra Hotel” for $15, which was near the airport. (I just called a hotel in Delhi from Skype and asked to make a reservation.) The hotel turned out to be the middle of what I would call a “favela,” in Brazil. The hotel itself was also quite a dump. The room didn’t have windows, there were ants on the floor, etc. Luckily, it did have air conditioning, which did work. On top of that, I couldn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m., so I got to enjoy this dumpy room fully.

I slept until 6 or so, then got up and went for a walk around the “favela.” That first taste of India was a bit overwhealming. There was no shortage of cows in the streets – I think you could pretty much see at least two cows regardless of which direction you look. Also lots of dogs, but not quite as many as cows. And kids. As I later learned, India in general is full of kids, like no other country that I've been to before. The cows and the dogs are invariably sick. The kids seemed ok. (Just to clarify: this was in the outskirts of Delhi, near the airport. As I learned later, central Delhi doesn’t look like that.)

I returned back to my “hotel” and gook a taxi to the domestic airport. (The two airports are four kilometers apart and people talk about them as if they were different airports, though officially those are different terminals of the same airport.) I got there early, expecting to stand in a long line, but it turned out to be quite organized. There was had a self-checkin kiosk: you come up to it, type in your name and confirmation number form the e-ticket and they just print you a boarding pass. Nice. The plane and the service was very nice too. Alitalia wasn’t bad, but the waiters all had this smirk on their faces. Here it was all super-attentive, everyone was nicely dressed, etc. They were supposed to serve a “snack”, which turned out to be a good size lunch. (I was flying Jet Air. I bought the tickets through MakeMyTrip.com. I was happy with both.)

In Bangalore I again took a “pre-paid taxi” to my hotel, getting there without any adventures. I already had a hotel reserved here as well (In both casesI again had a hotel reserved (“Toms Hotel”), which was more expensive ($30) but also much better. The window faces a wall of another building one meter away and the shower just showers on the floor, but apart from there don’t seem to be any problem. They even put a roll of toilet paper there for me.

I called one of my contacts whom I was supposed to meet the same day, learned that we would have to reschedule for Monday, then headed out to explore the Indian Silicon Valley.