Crossing the street

One thing I haven't blogged about yet is crossing the street in India. As one co-worker says, "if you need a little excitement in your life, all you've gotta do is cross the street." And she's right. See this video - it's not exaggerated, I honestly do this every day. No worries, cars don't go that fast here, so if I really got run over I'd get a few bruises and maybe a broken bone. I never cross in front of buses though - they take no prisoners!

Thanksgiving far from home

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday - not just because I get to see family, but because of the food. Everyone knows I love food, that I love the way it brings people together and that one of the things that makes me the happiest is making food that other people enjoy. This year, I couldn't help but be a little sad that I wouldn't be having a traditional Thanksgiving meal. However, I would have Thanksgiving off - one of the advantages for working for U.S.-located bosses is having U.S. holidays off. I was going on my first real vacation in India with five friends to Kerala, a state west of Tamil Nadu.

Going to Kerala was like stepping into a different country. It's run by the communist (Marxist) party and has the highest literacy rate in India. In fact, we passed a village that was the first in India to receive 100% literacy among its citizenship. The state is also really clean and very laid-back. Our first stop was Alleppey, the gateway to the saltwater canals, or "backwaters." The thing to do there was rent a houseboat and float lazily along for one day and night, so for $25 a head we spent an incredibly relaxing Thanksgiving day doing just about nothing on the boat - and it was wonderful. On our journey, we would pass schools and churches, and local folk getting around the way they were used to: by canoe. We floated blissfully on by, drinking beers, eating lobster grilled in chili and lemon for Thanksgiving dinner, and playing Scrabble. Our transportation out was fun, too: to get to our next destination, we took a public boat. It was essentially a bus that stopped at a boatstop every kilometer or so to pick people up and let people off.

For the second part of our trip, we did something completely different. We took a 4WD into the western Ghats, or hills, where the intensely green tea bushes are grown and the best wildlife park in South India, Periyar, exists. We were absolutely determined to see a tiger. One of many catchphrases of the weekend was "inshallah," which is an Arabic phrase used in Turkish and Hindi that basically means if God wills it so....usually said so you don't jinx the event from actually happening! We ended up seeing many leeches (we wore leech socks which were supposed to prevent them from crawling into our shoes and latching onto our feet and legs, but those persistent things still got through somehow) and a couple wild elephants! Elephants are pretty much my favorite animals, so this was a big deal. How did we find them? Well, in the middle of the road, we would see huge, steaming piles of..... fresh elephant poop. It was actually a pretty easy way to find them, because, well, if you've ever seen elephant poop, you know you can't really mistake it for anything else. Anyway, elephants seem like such docile creatures when you think abstractly about them, but in real life they are quite intimidating. We would creep slowly towards them and then run back because they started moving towards us. Later on, Ayesha and I got up close and personal with a real elephant because we couldn't resist riding one. Though I later decided I felt morally wrong about this activity, it was something both of us had always wanted to do. Something about actually getting up on top made me incredibly sad for this huge poor animal that was forced to spend it's life walking around in circles with people on its back.

What was really incredible about the weekend was that we got to squeeze every single thing 6 individuals wanted to do into four days - from a kathakali (native Keralan dance) show, to eating shrimp curry, to ayurvedic massage, to elephant rides, to spice and tea plantation tours, to canoeing on a serene lake, we did it all. Save the tigers...unfortunately God did not will it so! Apparently it is extremely rare to actually see one of the 50 tigers that reside in the park.

Three Cups of Tea

If you've talked to me in the last month, no doubt I've raved to you about this book, but I thought the blog would be a really good place to publicize it. I don't think it's very popular in the States (my dad claims that Border's doesn't carry it), but I've seen it a lot here. If you've read Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the doctor Paul Farmer, you will see that it's very similar to that book except Greg Mortenson, the hero, is such a regular guy and not such a saint!

Greg Mortenson climbed K2 (the second tallest mountain in the world) and didn't make it to the top, and he got lost on the way down in a village called Korphe in northeast Pakistan. Korphe's "school" was a group of children sitting in a clearing, under no roof, with no teacher, drawing with sticks in the mud. Greg promised to build them a school, and he did.

The great thing is, Greg wasn't rich. Greg lived out of the back of his truck while he was raising money to build his school. He wrote 580 letters to every famous person he could think of, and the only response he got was from Tom Brokaw, with a check for $100. The book is beautifully written and outlines Greg's progression from then to now, when he heads up the Central Asia Institute and will continue building many schools across Pakistan and Afghanistan. His determination and patience are things that I actually do often think of when I'm in the field encountering ridiculous problems. And he is an inspiration to anyone looking for an effective way to fight terrorism that doesn't include guns and endless military occupations. Buy this book today!

(I know I sound like an ad but I'm not selling anything. I just want everyone to read the book!)

Diwali

Diwali, the festival of light, is a Hindu holiday that occurs on (I think) the first new moon in November. There are many stories in Hindu history that are said to be celebrated by this festival – the one I’ve heard the most is the homecoming of the god Rama after he was exiled for 14 years for killing the demon Ravana. The “lights” of Diwali (fire, firecrackers, Christmas-like lights on houses, candles) are supposed to represent the triumph of good over evil, and the inner light that symbolizes the force which is larger than our physical beings (does it sound like I learned that from Wikipedia? Because I did).

I was really excited to get a chance to celebrate Diwali this year. My roommate, Santhi, took me to her extended family’s house in a village not far from Chennai for a traditional Indian experience. Many of you may recall the episode of The Office, called “Diwali,” when Michael invites the office to Kelly’s family’s Diwali celebration and thinks it’s a costume party. So, there was no Diwali party exactly like that this time, but it was still an occasion to dress up. As must happen in India though, we started off the trip with a bit of a mishap: we hit two hours of (easily foreseeable but not avoidable) holiday traffic on the way out of Chennai, and got a flat tire on the way to Tindivanam, so we didn’t arrive there until 12:30 am and went to bed even later. Santhi’s cousin joked that they would be waking us up at 5 am to light firecrackers. He wasn’t joking. We were, in fact, woken up at 5:30 am, when it was still dark out, and given new clothes (a traditional Diwali gift), which we went to go and get blessed at another relative’s house. Then it was time for firecrackers! Unfortunately, by this time the sun had already risen so it wasn’t much of a light show but more of a sound spectacular. Santhi lit the first firecracker, which was actually a string of hundreds of little firecrackers, and almost lost a limb in the process! Needless to say, after that experience we entertained ourselves with sparklers that were quiet and could be held at a comfortable distance from our bodies.

It was really great to get a chance to visit a temple with a Hindu family. Usually, most of the more famous temples in India are off-limits to non-Hindus, so it was special to get to go inside one (actually, I got to go to two). I was surprised that there was no service, but rather you go into a small room and are blessed by the priest with flowers, incense, and oils. The whole visit takes about ten minutes! At the second temple we went to, there were very many gods, and Santhi’s cousins prayed very quickly to each one. One was a god who was in meditation, and you have to clap and say your name so he knows you’re there! I find Hinduism and the mythological history of the gods really interesting, and I feel like if I just read up on it more I would understand the Indian psyche better. It’s interesting because I feel like India developed on this whole other cultural and philosophical plane that’s so different than what we (in the boring western world) know almost instinctively, and I think that may be the reason why so many things seem to not make sense here!

Santhi and I rested (because of our short night’s sleep) for most of the day – well, as much as we could with the firecrackers outside! We arose for the nighttime festivities (more fireworks, temple, and visiting relatives) and dressed in our saris, which was a highlight for me. I’d never worn one before, and the previous weekend I had purchased my first, a piece of clothing I have never been so excited about! I’m not sure why I love saris so much, but I just feel like they automatically bring such beauty and regality to their wearer, no matter what. And no doubt, while wearing a sari, I felt as beautiful as I ever have.

The highlight of Diwali weekend was returning to Chennai the following night and watching the fireworks light up the city from the rooftop of a hotel. It was like the fourth of July, except an endless show, and in 360 degrees. Though spectacular up close, I have to say that I much prefer to watch the fireworks from afar, with a cold beer in hand.

In need of ET

This article from the New York Times last week perfectly sums up the reason why I say "huh?" when people say that India is developing so quickly. It's not hard to believe that the development is only really seen in certain places (like, say Bangalore where all the IT parks are being built, and south Delhi), but this article provides an alternative reason for why: you can't "develop" a country if you don't have infrastructure.

This also brought me to wonder, what should I consider "development?" Why am I fighting for development if, when I visit these villages, I marvel at the simplicity of how they live and sort of wish I could stay with them in their quiet paradise for a week? Part of it is that I can't really presume to know the issues they face. So maybe I would consider "development" to be increasing reliability - reliability in employment, but also reliability on the things (like electricity and water) that one needs to be a productive individual.

But agriculture is not a reliable employment. Rain doesn't come, too much rain comes, seeds are inferior, cows die so fertilizer is unavailable. So why, then, am I doing work that concentrates only on making a farmer more productive in agriculture? One of my co-workers brought this up last week - when asking farmers in the field what they would do with with a 40,000 rupee loan (about $1000), they say "open a shop." They don't say "buy more land so I can farm more crops." So, instead of making more productive farmers, how about making more productive people who are able to move out of farming? After all, agriculture is a very small portion of most "developed" economies. Thoughts?

Survivor: Survey Edition

My credit scoring project is at a point now where we've decided on a likely location, and we want to go to that location to get a sense of what the farmer financial situation is like (i.e., how much they spend on their crops, when they plant and harvest, what kind of loans are available to them, etc). So, to get some hard fact statistics (and I say that with all sarcasm intended, because you know by the title of this post that everything that can go wrong here will), I went out in the field to conduct a "mini-survey," or formalized questionnaire, designed to ask farmers these types of questions.

So, if someone gave you the instructions, "conduct a mini-survey," what would you do? I had to figure this out: Write survey. Revise survey. Format survey into perfect tables. Translate survey into Kannada (the language they speak in the state of Karnataka) and merge it with the English version. Print out a lot of copies of the survey. Go to Bangalore. Find and train a survey team. Find and train a translator. Decide where to go. Rent a van. Look over the surveyors shoulders every second and make sure they are filling out that survey correctly or else you are wasting an entire week and over $1,000 on meaningless data. Guard the surveys with your life and bring them back to Chennai intact and ready to be entered into neat little Excel columns.

First challenge: translation of survey. Who knew that my translator's computer would get attacked by a virus and she would be unable to send me the translation the next day? Also, who knew that this strange occurrence would happen the day before a Hindu religious holiday when there was a pooja (blessing) on her computer and she wasn't allowed to use it? I survived this only because she was extremely helpful and offered to print out the copies of the survey for me herself and give them to me when I arrived in Bangalore Monday morning. Unfortunately, she was so stressed that she messed up the translation in a pretty bad way. Lesson #1: Translate well in advance. Translate back into English. Retranslate. Make sure you have a really really good translation. THEN print out 150 copies.

Second challenge: surveyors. I should have been warned by the fact that it only took me two hours to go over the entire survey with them and that no one had any real questions. They messed it up the first day. I told them what they did wrong. I retrained, they continued to mess up. I told them how I wanted them to ask the questions, they asked them how they wanted to. They started to hate me, I threatened to fire one of them. They united against me, I united against them with my translator and tried to divide and conquer. None of these things really worked spectacularly, but Lesson #2 was: Hire your own surveyors who are at your mercy and yours only, and do not rely on a survey company that hires low quality people at the last minute.

Third challenge: accommodation. The day before I leave for Gulbarga, an overnight bus ride away, the hotel I'm staying at says my reservation is not confirmed (of course...a reservation that someone else was mistakenly relied on to make for me!). I call said person. He calls hotel. They say they are full. He tells me they are full. Hotel calls him, they say they actually have a reservation for me, but they can't confirm it unless they know what I'm doing there. An employment visa? Not sufficient. A letter from my company? Not sufficient either. A letter from the manager of the Gulbarga branch of ICICI bank, who I had never in my life met nor who had any clue who I was? Somehow, that was necessary and sufficient to book me a room in this hotel in the middle of nowhere, India. Lesson #3: Always carry every form of documentation about your origins, purpose, and identity with you while traveling. It will come in handy, and probably won't be enough. Also, Lesson #4: Don't apply logic to anything that doesn't make sense. You will fail.

Fourth challenge: sickness. I finally get on the bus to Gulbarga, an overnight sleeper bus in which I'm on a lurching top bunk, cuddled up next to my huge backpack and lying on top of my laptop and precious hard copies of my survey, when I start to feel ill. I start wondering if I can keep the nausea at bay for the next 13 hours. I start panicking. Will I do it out of the window? In front of the driver? Into my Nalgene? Luckily, we got off at a rest stop. I asked my translator what to do, he smiled and said he would buy me a fresh lime soda and a banana, and voila! my stomach was normal again. Lesson #5: Don't panic. Someone kind may take care of you. Also, India is literally like a rollercoaster, dipping you down until you feel like you're going to crash headfirst into the pavement, then miraculously lifting you up unharmed!

I finished the survey. It wasn't the most quality thing I've ever done, but I survived. I almost, but didn't, kick anyone off the island. I formed an alliance with my translator. I spent long nights with the surveys, carefully going over their inaccuracies and trying to fix them. I carried around 150 hard copies of the survey like precious gems for over a week, on and off buses and trains and autorickshaws. I fought for those surveys and I won! Please applaud now.

Update: photos

There's now a link in the sidebar to my Flickr account, which anyone should be able to view my photos on by creating a free username/password for.

I'm kind of embarrassed that it's been so long since I've updated the blog. I really do want to make it a more common thing though. Updates are coming, I promise...I'm just trying to construct something from my myriad journal entries that will entertain all of my friends, old colleagues, neighbors, and friends' parents at the same time!

I wear flip-flops to work

What's a typical day like? It varies greatly. I could either be having a somewhat normal day working in my office, or out in the field having a completely abnormal experience.

I live with two co-workers, Santhi and Joe, in a two-bedroom apartment. We eat almost every meal together. We travel together. Two of us even sit within the same cubicle at work (incidentally, it's the same two of us who share a bed). We are instant best friends, because we don't have a choice. But fortunately, we all like each other a lot (unless they hate me and haven't told me yet).

Anyway, my typical office day usually starts with a phone call (my parents or Matt) and the arrival of our maid, Valli. Valli speaks broken English and refers to Santhi as her sister (I can't be her sister because I'm white, not brown). I have a soft spot for Valli because for some reason she reminds me of one of my aunts -- strange, I know, but they both clean a lot and have the same sort of facial expression.

Anyway, after getting ready for work I walk a block to the office. That's right, I live a block away from work. In this sense, it's almost like being on a college campus. Lots of people are asking what I usually wear -- usually, it's a kurta (an Indian tunic) with really amazing pants that are lightweight and flowy and made out of cotton...they are probably the coolest way to deal with the heat in Chennai. I always accessorize with flip-flops though. It's a very casual workplace, mostly because all the work I do in Chennai (unless I'm in the field) at the office I could easily do from home. Some days, in fact, I don't even go into the office!

So, by all appearances my daily life seems very laid back. However, it's not. Immediately when I get to the office, I have a ton of emails to catch up on that were sent in the middle of my night (my bosses are located in the U.S, 9 1/2 hours behind me). I quickly move through my self-made to-do lists of the day (everything from arranging travel and accommodations for myself and a bunch of surveyors over the next week to doing literature reviews to tracking down district-level statistics to writing up questionnaires to ask in the field). Then, conveniently, the end of my workday coincides with the beginning of my bosses', so I often have calls with various people during the 6pm to 8pm window. In these phone calls, I could be instructed to do various things, such as work in the office on tedious calculations for the next week or magically find a train ticket to Bangalore for the following evening so that I can do field work there for a week. Finally, I usually choose two of the following four things to do with the rest of the night: go out for dinner and/or drinks with co-workers or others from my newly-formed friend group of expats/Indians, go run on the treadmill at the gym (the only running option, considering lack of lower-than-100%-humidity weather and inability to wear shorts in public), veg on the couch in front of a pirated episode of the Office or Arrested Development, or practice yoga for an hour or so. Oh, and read books. A lot of them. I've probably read more books in the last two months than I did in the last year in DC.

I've written more about the field aspect of my job, which I'll post about at some point. However, regarding the "living in India" part, I think I've adjusted well socially. I'm not as lonely, I know my way around Chennai, and even though it may not be the most happening place (most restaurants are veg, bars are spare and the ones that exist are in expensive hotels and are closed by midnight), I feel like it's home and it's a fine city to live in. So there's a lot missing: a dance floor with good hip-hop, ovens, pancakes, washing machines, woks. But if you look hard enough, you can find it or a substitute. That's why I started to feel like India was normal. Then, I took a trip to Turkey and saw how much cleaner it looked to me than it has in the past...and realized that India had changed my definition of "clean."

A note on the previous post

I edited it after some more reflection. It's purpose is as much to explain my job to the few readers of my blog as it is to organize my own thoughts!

What am I doing?

Many of you have been asking what exactly I will be doing during my time in India. I actually didn't know myself, up to today! Well, at least it looks like I know what I'm doing, though it seems like that could all change instantly. Today I had my first meeting with Sendhil, the economist I'll be working for. Our first meeting prompted my discovery of a Border's-like bookstore near my flat, which made me feel a bit like home.

The first part of what I'll be doing is already underway; I'll be coming in at the survey stage of a project on sugar mills and the effect of ownership schemes of sugar mills on farmer productivity. Stop here if you're not interested in the technical details. In each sugarcane "command area," all farmers must sell to only one mill, which is either privately owned or a co-op. The goal is to determine, through this constraint, and through studying villages that lie over the border of two command areas, how much the ownership structure of the mill affects the productivity and efficiency of the farmers in that command area. Since it's in the survey stage, it seems like most of what I'll be doing is monitoring the survey and measuring additional variables, like soil quality of land plots.

The second part of my job is more interesting, for me, and more challenging. This one falls under the category of designing financial access products for poor people that will (hopefully) eventually be rolled out by ICICI bank, our strategic partner. It has to do with the rubric used for credit scoring -- in an urban setting, a bank applies basic inputs to a model (like income, consistency of income, age, education, etc.) to determine the credit risk of a borrower. According to this view, one would expect farmers to make bad borrowers -- they face many shocks and have unsteady income. However, farmers are not bad borrowers, and many pay back their loans. Clearly, the model used by an urban bank is missing something more subtle when applied to rural farmers. We need to understand what behavioral characteristics are correlated with a farmer's credit risk, so that banks who lend to rural borrowers can apply an efficient and more fair rubric to this setting. These behaviors could be anything like taking better care of their land, or farming a more intensive crop, or weeding fastidiously, or using a certain type of fertilizer. While figuring these behaviors out, it is also my job to figure out what makes a farmer more or less productive, and what behaviors are associated with planning ahead.

So, how does one figure out these things? Well, you visit Indian rural villages. Lots of them. And you talk to people who don't speak your language, with a translator. This should be the toughest part, since it's where I have no experience or skill set. Not to worry, however, because Sendhil said he hired me because I had no skills (even though it doesn't make sense to me, it makes sense to him, and that's what matters). I'm excited about that aspect of it though, and I think it should be fun. In a primer for doing field research, I'm actually given advice to pretend like my car broke down on the side of the road and ask people for help, as a way to enter a village in a non-threatening way.

Another challenge is that this will involve a lot of daunting background work for me. I have no idea what crops are even farmed in India, let alone which crops would make good areas of study, what techniques farmers use on their land, etc. Even once I figure that out, it will take a lot of trips to "the field" (i.e., the villages) to talk to people and see if my hunches are right. Also, the next crop cycle (for three-month crops) is in Dec-Feb, so I want some concrete idea to at least be underway by then. I guess I'll just have to take it one step at a time, and keep asking questions along the way. Another thing I should mention is that either of these has the potential to completely fall apart at any stage of the game -- by nature of what can and can't be done with ICICI or our survey team capabilities or a lot of other factors. I am really excited about this particular project though because it's right at the intersection of behavioral and development economics, which is what I wanted to learn most about. So I would be sad if it fell through, but not devastated. Either way, I'll still get experience.

A word on organization: I was hired by Sendhil, but I work at the CDF (see link to the right), which seems kind of like his lab in India. He's here until Harvard resumes in September. The IFMR, which is the larger organization over the CDF, is partnered with J-PAL (also see link to the right), which Sendhil is associated with, but I'm not sure if these projects have anything to do with J-PAL or one of the multitudinous other "initiatives" and "centers" he is associated with.

Hindu religious festival

My first weekend in Chennai, I've had a multitude of experiences unlike anything I've ever seen before, but I'll focus on one for now. Last night, my roommate and I were wandering out looking for something to eat (not Indian food, for once). On the way, we passed an interesting-looking gathering of a bunch of people in front of a Hindu temple building three large fires. Some kids told us that someone was going to walk across the fire. That kind of hooked us, so we decided to stay around and see what would happen.

I'm glad we did, because we ended up being sort of taken in by one of the priests' families. They had us come inside the temple -- I had never seen the inside of one, and it wasn't what I expected, relatively small, with no seating that I could see and a shrine in the back. I was impressed by the kindness of these people and how willing they were to have us as guests -- no one wanted money from us for sitting there, or for taking pictures. It's terrible to expect they would, but I guess I'm already used to being seen as the white foreigner who had enough money to buy a plane ticket to India, and must have 50 extra rupees to spend on an overpriced autorickshaw ride. It was just nice to not be on my guard for once, to feel like someone was being genuine. One thing I do regret is that I never caught what the festival's meaning was; Indian English can be tough to understand, especially above the din of music coming from loudspeakers. I got the impression that the ceremony was the end of a three-day festival that comes in the middle of a 10-week fasting period, but I could definitely be wrong. We did actually end up seeing a youngish man (and a few others) walk -- actually, hop -- across the coals, after much preparation and pomp and circumstance.

Later that night, or rather the next morning, I heard extremely loud drums that I actually thought was a thunderstorm at first, but it could have been part of the same festival. The drumming and light music continued in the street for a few hours, until about 6am. This is one of the lessons I'm learning: some things just don't make that much sense here on first impression, and you can't really question them or try to apply logic to them.

Pre-departure

This is where I'll post travel happenings and photos. This does not get you out of personal email communication, through which you can get all the juiciest details about my True Life: I Moved to India.