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.