India, you will be missed.

It's hard to believe I'm leaving already. It feels like I just got here and should be staying for another 2 months but the calender says that it's time to go home. I'm eternally grateful to all the awesome people I had the pleasure of meeting on this trip for making it a journey that I will never forget. I especially want to thank Joe Salverage, Mohamed Saleem and their families for making me feel at home here in India. I honestly feel like I have two new families in India and I will always remember their kindness. They took every measure to make sure my time here was well spent and that I was never in need of anything. Thank you.
I had a great time in this country and I'm sure I'll be coming back very soon. From the beautiful landscapes to the people's love for life, I will truly miss everything about this country. Sure, India is far from perfect but that's part of what makes it so great. India is a place that will always remain timeless, yet at the same time it is on the verge of complete social revolution. It will be very interesting to see where the next twenty years takes it and I have a feeling that India will be a place that cannot be ignored. There is still so much that I want to see and do here so until next time, keep the Kingfisher cold, the parada's hot, and the days auspicious.

India, I bid you adieu.

Indian Culture

I only have about a week left in India and I wanted to share some of the things I've gathered about Indian culture. After being in India for an extended period of time I believe that I've been able to get a more accurate picture of the country than had I only been here for a week or two. My extended stay has allowed me to get accustomed to and better accept certain differences that exist between India and America (more precisely Southern India and mid-western America). These differences were only shocking on the surface and after accepting them, I was able to better see what's really going on here. Indian culture is extremely old, and it seems like over time they have learned to live more naturally. What I mean is that the majority of Indians do not concern themselves with certain customs which may seem normal to a westerner, but which in reality are fairly unnatural. For example: It is somewhat of a custom in India to discard of your trash where ever you might be at the time (what most would call littering). As you can imagine this amounts to there being garbage everywhere, especially in urban areas. This isn't because the people have no respect for their surroundings or are too lazy to throw their trash in a trash bin, its just that the thought of doing so has never occurred to them. For the poor man, this also goes for defecation. Now let me ask you what is more natural, discarding of your waste wherever it gathers, or seeking out certain "trash receptacles" in which to throw your junk. Trash doesn't just disappear; in America most of it goes to the landfill where we never have to see it again. Here they can't just say "out of sight, out of mind".
Another example of this is in the way most Indian people eat. Instead of using silverware Indians eat with their hands. This may seem barbaric and unsanitary but it makes sense when you think about it. When you eat at a restaurant they always provide the silverware. How do you know it's clean? How do you know that they even washed them? With your hands, you know where they've been and if they're clean or not. I should also mention that Indian people do not use toilet paper, they use their hand and water (cleaner than TP if you wash your hands with soap afterward). This might seem to contradict what I just said about eating but in India there's an rule: Wash with your left hand and eat with your right. This is the logic most Indians go by.
These natural ways may also be behind other aspects of life in India. From birth, children are rarely scolded or punished for bad behavior. They are allowed to run free and wild and learn from their own mistakes. This is probably what fosters the free spirit that most Indians seem to posses. Childhood freedom could also be the reason that the traffic in India is the way it is. At first, the traffic seemed like utter chaos but now I can see that there is a method to this madness. When driving in India, fortune favors the bold and defensive drivers die in fiery crashes. You have to make your intentions know early to avoid getting hit or hitting someone else. Traffic lines are only a loose guide and they are rarely obeyed. It's a dangerous life for pedestrians and motorcyclists but that's just the way it is.
There's a lot more to this subject than what I've said here but I hope you were able to get a small glimpse of what life is like in India from this post.

Delhi

It's been about a week since I got back from Delhi and again, sorry for the delay. Delhi is a beautiful city that blends both new and old India into one delicious experience. Being India's capital, it has the feel of an important political and cultural center, like Washington DC but much older. Many of the old buildings in and around Delhi are relics from former rulers (mostly British; some ancient Mogul sites). However, Delhi leaves no doubt about India's complete independence and there are the monuments, Gov't buildings and national museums to prove it. The city is dripping with culture, provided by its rich history and at the same time Delhi is a perfect example of a change going on throughout India. Just outside of the city is one of the many, and possibly the largest, silicon valleys of India. In just 6 years a huge industrial center has popped up to accommodate for new IT businesses both from within India and abroad. This fast growing suburb of Delhi shows just how accommodating and adaptable the Indian IT sector is. As the world has growing needs for technology services, India is working hard to immediately fill them. This is possibly there greatest attribute for succeeding in a globalized world.

On the Road

During the past week I've been traveling quite a bit and haven't been doing a good job of keeping you all in the loop on what I'm up to. I had the chance to tour around Madurai and visited the massive temple there. It's very old but they keep up the paint job so that it still looks new. I didn't get to go inside because I was wearing shorts that day but it looked like their wasn't much to see besides a bunch of souvenir shops. I guess it's recently become more of a money trap than a temple. Still cool to see. Last Friday I rode the midnight train from Dindigul to Chennai. First time on a train and it was pretty uneventful. Tried to sleep most of the way but figured out that alot of Indian people snore, women and children included. In Chennai I took an autoricshaw tour of the city which was pretty cool. It's a very old and very beautiful city and even though my driver couldn't tell me what everything was, I still had a good time. I also tried my hand at working in India's booming IT field with Ahmudha, Joe's wife, at their IT business, Valley Creek Software. I'm pretty computer illiterate and wasn't much help. After coming back to Dindigul early Tuesday morning I went with Franklin to the neighboring state of Kerala. This is a beautiful mountainous region famous for spice and tea growing. We toured a tea plant and got some free tea, a whole kg, I think. Also tried to visit an elephant reserve but they were closed when we got there. Hopefully I can see some before I leave. Well, that about brings you up to date. I'll be leaving for Delhi on Sunday so hopefully I'll have some interesting stuff to talk about when I get back. Also, new pics are up.

Amendment to last post

I know I told you that I wouldn't dive into politics anymore but what I said in my last post may seem a little ethnocentric on my part and I want to clarify myself a little bit. Hopefully I haven't offended anyone of Indian background or citizenship as that is not my goal.
Yes there are certain classes of people in India but this is also true in America, although there may be far more people belonging to the lower classes in India. Also, I was confusing the term class system with caste system, which is what I really meant to say. The Indian government does surprisingly recognize certain people as members of a lower caste, but to my understanding this is mainly for the purpose of a type of title nine reservation of jobs for people from poor backgrounds. While there are people who have not taken to capitalism as well as others, there are no official laws in India that deter anyone of a lower caste from increasing their individual wealth, as was the practice of the former caste system in India. What I meant by stating that the caste system still exists in India is that the social and socio-political structures in India are still very much enthralled in such a system. This mostly takes place in rural areas where the poor, uneducated masses of India live. Here it is easier for politicians to get away with making poor farmers believe that they need to pay money for certain constitutionally protected rights. I believe that there is also a level of ignorance that exists here that makes it easier to adopt a caste like system.
I hope I haven't offended anybody by saying this. If there are any Indian people reading this who believe my views to be false in any way, please let me know.

Update

It's been a while since I've posted anyhing so I thought I'd let you all know what I've been up to. I've been pretty busy doing stuff with the owner of the pickle factory, Saleem. Other than the pickle factory Saleem has a few other projects going on. He's building a small resort in the hills which is very nice. Besides his bungalow in Sirumalai he's also got one in Kodaikanal which we visited last week. This town has been a tourist spot since the beginning of colonial times and has only recently started to be visited by Indian tourists. Most of the white folks I saw there were Israeli tourists coming to hunt for the "magic mushroom" in the surrounding hills. Needless to say there's also a few hippie colonies in that area but you don't really hear much from them. They stay pretty busy drinking their tea and smokin their ganja, which by the way is legal in India. Something about bigger fish to fry. Kodaikanal is a very nice town and clean, which is a rarity in India. I would go there a lot if the road up didn't make me so sick. Winding mountain roads and no traffic laws are a bad combination.
Saleem recently had the pleasure of offering his bungalow to the governor's son, a very powerful man. I was able to tag along and meet his family, who were looking for a break from politics to watch the start of the world cup. Even though India didn't qualify, the people here still go crazy for football and that has been pretty fun. We went partridge hunting yesterday which consisted of driving around the open fields outside of Dindigul and blasting the birds from your open window. Not much different from some of the hunting in SD. It's very illegal to hunt in India unless you have the proper permits, which we didn't, but as they say in India, "if your rich, nobody bothers you".
I'm a foreigner here and I've been told to stay away from political discussions so I wont go into how the remnants of the class system are everywhere and it seems to be very much alive in India, and I wont discuss how most people here don't have a clue what to do with capitalism. I wont even think about discussing how corrupt the government is and how shady politicians and public servants keep people poor for their own benefit. I'm just not gonna do it. If you want to here about that you'll just have to watch the news.

Settled in

I've been in India for about a week now and I'm starting to feel at home here (sort of). It's so different than the US and I'll probably never get completely used to it. Extreme poverty (as an American would think of it) is a part of everyday life and for most of these people there is no way of rising out of these conditions. I read in a newspaper the other day that a family of basket weavers, (mother, father, and three small kids) committed suicide by drinking poison. This makes me think that they once had a better life because most of the people here have nothing to compare their desperate condition to. So they are content with their lives because it is the only thing they know. The large contrast between the American and Indian ways of life has shown me just how lucky I am to have been born in a developed society. I would say that for India to come up to American standards of living would take at least 20 years. A monumental cultural shift would also have to take place for this to happen. Much of India remains a cultural backwater and many here are still set in the ways of their ancestors. This, I think, is the biggest challenge to the developing side of India. On one hand you have huge growth in the IT and private business sectors and on the other there are still a lot of people who are living basically the same way today as they have been for centuries. For example, most of the food in India comes from a large number of small subsistence farmers who usually have less than an acre to work with. It would be much more suitable to development to have large farms so that people could focus on other aspects of life like education. There are many things that India has figured out from a spiritual and intellectual standpoint but culturally, they need to make up their mind about the development of this country.
I will probably do some traveling later this week so I'll have some new pictures and new stuff to talk about in my next post.

Life on the Farm

I have been living in the Dindigul area of southern India (about an hour by plane from Chennai) for the last four days and I like it much better than Chennai. The poverty within the town of Dindigul is about the same as in Chennai but the area around the town is a lot more appealing. Most of my time is spent on Joe's farm getting a feel for his operation. I've also visited another farm, Franklin's, which is run a lot differently than Joe's. I took a motorcycle ride up the mountains outside of Dindugul and got some great views of the valley. Afterward I toured the Salim's pickle factory. He has a very impressive operation and would like to get into the Midwest pickle market with a supply chain through South Dakota. If all goes well we will be able to work something out.

Chennai, finally!

I finally got to Chennai at 5:30 this morning and was happy to see Ken and his project center manager, Dr. Joe waiting for me outside of customs. We ate some good old Indian breakfast and talked about some of the trip options and about some of Joe's business ventures. Dr. Joe is a "capitalist of the highest order" and he is ahead or the thinking curve in the business world, of India and beyond. He seems like a brilliant person and I can already tell I'm going to learn a lot from him. But for now its time for some rest.

Dubai

After an unexpected layover in Chicago on Wednesday night I was able to get a flight to Dubai the following day where I had to wait another 29 hrs till I could fly to Chennai, India. This gave me a chance to explore Dubai and mix it up with some of the locals, many of which were not originally from Dubai but workers who travel back and forth from there home country to make money in the city's (until recently) booming economy. Many of the people I talked to didn't even speak Arabic.

Dubai is a very diverse city that is being built to accommodate may different cultures. It is considered the business and cultural center of the United Arab Emirates and there are thousands of freshly built and unfinished skyscrapers, hotels, shopping malls and other lavish buildings to prove it. However, all this new construction has recently come to a grinding halt and it seems like every other skyscraper is topped by a motionless industrial crane. Dubai is a city built on debt and due to the current state of the global economy, it has defaulted on a lot of this debt. But according to some local papers things may be looking up for Dubai in the near future and if they are ever able to finish their enormous projects, it will definitely be one of the worlds most extravigant cities.

Also, every single American I met in Dubai ( which was only about five or six) was a military contractee of some kind either coming or going from Afghanistan or Iraq. They couldn't really talk much about their line of work and nor did they want to in that neighborhood. Although Dubai is a world cultural center, it is very close to the war zones and there is still a lot of resentment towards Americans in that city. While most people were very friendly, there were a lot of evil looks to put up with.

(Pictures coming soon)

See you in Chennai

en route

Wed. May 26, 2010: 9:35 pm
I am now sitting in the Eagle Creek project center in Minnetonka Minnesota killing time before my flight to Chicago. From there I go to Dubia with one stop in Washington DC to change planes. From Dubia I will fly to Chennai ariving at 3am on Friday (Chennai time). My next post will likely be later that day.