Time zone: GMT+1

Now I’m back in Prague, after three harrowing days in New York, a 7 hours-on-the-tarmac flight out of JFK, and many bus, tram and subway rides later. Now that the exchange rate is 15 crowns to the dollar (as opposed to 36 when I first came in 2002), Prague is a rather expensive place to be. Taxi ride home: $25. Drink at the fancy hotel bar: $16. Internet: 1 crown a minute. Hence the brevity of this post.

In essence, the inflation-happy low-interest-rate US Fed has been robbing me of my extravagant Czech vacation, and you my reader, of blog post reading pleasure. Curse you Greenspan Legacy!

India post-mortem part 1

A lot of people have been asking me what I thought of India, and my emerging stock response is that I liked it OK, but I just couldn’t deal with the random failure. Essentially, most things in India work 85% of the time. So you can’t discount them altogether as being dysfunctional and work around them. Lots of times the phone or the power or the laundry service will work as it should. But at random, fairly frequent intervals, systems will break down, things won’t work, and there you’ll be, wondering how you’ll get clean clothes or make a phone call or get into the city or whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s not chaos. Lots of people describe India as chaotic. It’s not that. It’s spontaneous dysfunction. Like little chaos tornados frequently touch down, and whatever you planned to do that day becomes irrelevant.

Presumably native Indians evolve systems to cope with these frequent little failures. They develop a laid-back attitude, or probably have several levels of back-up plans for any given endeavor. I’m sure the phenomenon is manageable with the appropriate foresight. But as an American who’s used to picking up a phone and hearing a dial tone with 99.9999% confidence, it’s tough to handle, and sufficiently aggravating to make me lukewarm on the place.

rocking palo alto

hmm. apparently i’d forgotten that my internship stipend didn’t cover my hotel / car expense while in california - so I rented a room off craigslist to stay on the cheap. now I’m living in some teenager’s bedroom while he’s off in school, sharing a bathroom with the family’s two other kids. free wifi though.

Birth of geography

A couple notes on the Internet front:

1) it’s difficult to understate the quality difference between being here in Silicon Valley, next to the servers serving the content, vs. being in Bangalore with many many thousands of miles in between.  The speed of light is not fast enough. 

2) Bangalore Internet is “tailored” to show me India content.  A google search invariably produces all this local Indian nonsense, instead of the US top ten PE deals in 2007 that I wanted to find. 

3) In the US you perceive the Internet to be constantly updating - e-mails stream in all day, news headlines update, things happen.  But in India, the Internet dies for the day while the Americans sleep.  You come into work and your inbox has 50 e-mails, but nothing new all day.  There are no blog posts or instant messages.  It is static. 

4) the US internet works most of the time, and mostly pretty well.  In India, there are constant outages, slowdowns, service problems.  It’s not the warm happy feeling of being constantly plugged into the grid.  It’s a probability: 80% of the time, you’ll get what you need to happen.  Other times, bring a book.

5) US websites use your IP address to know you’re coming from India, and are reluctant to accept your credit card orders or serve you streaming TV.  Indians are second-class internet citizens, unaware of the content they’re missing.

6) Ad targeting breaks down, and keeps serving me ads for US citizenship services, and Hindu dating sites.

Goin’ back to Cali

Long time no blog.  There are several reasons for this: 1) The internet in Bangalore became so slow it was unuseable, and/or it crashed.  2) I was busy flying 36+ hours from India to London to LA to San Jose 3) I was busy scrambling around Indian trinket shops trying to find that one perfect wooden elephant with the carved elephant inside.  All the shops have them, now I have at least 10 versions of the same.

Since my glorious American return, I’ve visited Denny’s, McDonalds, Starbucks, In-n-out, and Costco within a 24-hour period.  I’ve been enjoying the various Californian sights including: grizzled tatooed shaved-head man with a goatee, driving his pretty girlfriend around in a convertible sportscar BMW.  Paparazzi chasing a starlet’s friend through the Burbank airport.  Silicon Valley billboards for firewall equipment, network hardware, and database software.  Cars cars everywhere.  Blazing fast internet.

Now I’m in a Palo Alto cafe, about to do some presentation writing, e-mailing and general geekery.  It’s good to be back, I have to admit.

Brain factory

Image via Wikipedia

One interesting thing Infosys does is hiring.  They hire thousands of employees per month.  Thousands.  They’re past 90,000 employees now, and growing at 30% per year.  To handle this phenomenon, they’ve built factory-like training facilities like this one in Mysore: NYT Article. Employees come by the hordes and gruel their way through a four-month live-in training regime.  They’re housed in more than 15,000 rooms on campus (making Infosys the largest hotel chain in India).  Then they’re stamped with the Infoscion seal of approval and sent forth to program the world’s mundane business applications.  The joke around Bangalore is that the security signs at Infosys say “Warning: Trespassers will be hired.” 

Also interesting is the enormous strain these huge employers put on the public infrastructure of their cities.  There’s a bus depot taking thousands of Infosys employees around the city everyday.  Once the bus caravans hit the streets at 5:30-6:00, traffic is bottlenecked behind them until at least 7:30.  City infrastructure can’t keep up with demand, so the companies themselves take a very proactive role in pressing for better roads, etc.  It’s not clear, with their Special Economic Zones, how much the tech companies actually shoulder in terms of a tax burden, but I’m guessing it’s not enough to pay for the necessary improvements. 

The processes and scale of this undertaking are truly impressive.  Not sure how much longer they can grow like this . . .

New photos posted

Behold!

Around town and Nandi Hills: http://flickr.com/photos/brianvladi/sets/72157606056206905/

Goa: http://flickr.com/photos/brianvladi/sets/72157606016003071/

Optimal Accent?

I’ve decided that the reason Indians can speak so fast is that their English pronunciation is heavy on the consonants. They really enunciate their syllables, rather than swallowing them like most Americans would. Consequently, a constant stream of hyper fast words is intelligible (well, not to me, but to them).

Along a similar line, I’m beginning to wonder which basic English accent is going to rule supreme in 80 years or so.  I’d say American English has a head start in terms of global media consumption, but the Indians certainly have demography on their side.  I bet my childrens’ children will aspire to a perfect Delhi pronunciation.

Weekend o’ India

Given that I only have a few weekends left, and that my India portfolio is getting a little work and temple heavy, I resolved to spend less time with my undergraduate colleagues and more time in crowded urban markets causing a stir. This was easily accomplished. A few notes: 1) It is of paramount importance, when observing a white guy walking down an Indian street, to know where he’s from. People will cross the street, ask me where I’m from, and retreat to the other side of the street again. Occasionally they’ll want a picture with me. 2) The streets are by far the worst part of Bangalore. Filled with honking, polluting vehicles of every type, a short taxi trip through the streets of the city will leave you sweaty, choking on fumes, and 45 minutes late. 3) I went to Nandi Hills, a mountain retreat where there are temples, drunken groups of men, stunning views, picnic gardens, and lots of monkeys. There will certainly come a time when I am no longer amused by monkey antics, but that time is far away. 4) I somehow manage to walk away from most temples, markets, or tourist sites with a dot on my head. Dotting foreigner heads is extremely fun for most locals. 5) Booze is surprisingly hard to come by and well regulated. We wandered the streets for a while to find a beer joint, and were informed that our presence with women (not too many ladies in the pub) was creating a disturbance. 6) In the old town, there are great many shops selling exactly one item. There’s a store for pots. There’s a store for electric motors. There’s an entire street full of just mango and lemon stalls. Shopping this way might be friendly, but it’s definitely a full-time job. 7) The muslims have beautiful mosques and curious youngsters, but plenty of surly older people who will shoo you out the door for wearing shorts. 8) Breakfast in a restaraunt is hard to come by. 9) The clubs closing at 11:30pm is preposterous. Many clubbers apparently eat dinner *after* the club these days. 10) The cool, see-and-be-seen coffee shop on the main MG road plays gangsta rap from the early 1990’s.

Ethnocentric food

One theory I have about why people in America are disproportionately fat, is that they’re disportionately displaced from their evolved habitat. Like lizards. Apparently if you own a pet lizard, you’re supposed to figure out where it would live in the wild, and try to find bugs from that area to feed it. The lizard evolved over thousands of years to digest its local fauna, so it’ll probably be unhealthy to replace that diet with something foreign.

I could imagine something similar being true of human diets. Some humans evolved in a habitat filled with spices and certain kinds of fruit and lots of legums. Other humans evolved in island places with lots of fish and seaweed. Still others had bison and corn.

So perhaps to keep a human healthy, you should figure out what that human’s stomach was adapted to process, and feed the human that.