Bombay and Pune

On the most recent India trip I also went to Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune. I arrived in Mumbai on Monday night after a long trip – 5 hours to Singapore, a 5 hour layover, and 5 more hours to Mumbai. I stayed at a hotel near the airport – a Marriott that was ridiculously overpriced – about US$350 per night for a so so place. I had meetings the next morning in the hotel with some local logistics providers we might work with. I was really just trying to pump them for information about local business practices and they were fairly open. I had tried to push the meetings to the morning so I could go downtown in the afternoon and it worked out. I took a cab, one of these old black Fiats with yellow stripes. They are very small and when you get in the back seat you feel like you are sitting very high, almost like your head is going to hit the ceiling. The traffic is absolutely horrible and it took me almost 1 ½ hours to get into the city. I had an MP3 player with only Pimsleur Chinese grammar lessons on it, which didn't do much to take the edge off the boredom of the traffic. We stopped at a place where people wash clothes - a warren of little sinks and tubs. Quite a place.
He dropped me next to the port at the Gateway to India which is an old British archway in the manner of Wellington Arch or Marble Arch in London. I walked around the old colonial district between the Gateway to India and Victoria train terminal. Here's a picture of a cricket match on one of the streets in this zone. After that, I walked around a central market district which was pretty chaotic and kinetic. I didn't see another non-Indian person for at least an hour.

I remember driving past one of Mumbai's many big slums and seeing lots of kids standing on top of the corrugated tin roofs of their houses flying small square kites. I thought it sort of makes sense that if you didn't have a yard or a lawn or any open space, you take advantage of the relative openness of your roof.

After a couple of days of meetings in Mumbai, we drove 3 hours to Pune, which claims to be the Detroit to India. There's a lot of auto manufacturing near here. It's a pretty scruffy place with not a lot to recommend it as far as I could tell. The most memorable part of Pune was a trip we made out to a General Motors auto plant that is being constructed. The construction crews lined up on this road outside the plant, which was in the middle of nowhere, and waited for the gates to open so they could start their day. It was a pretty amazing sight to see the hundreds of workers with their lunch pails all lined up in the boondocks get ready to build an incredibly modern auto plant.

Flat earth

I went to India for the first time last week.

The first thing that struck me about India is not the poverty or the press of the masses, but instead a mustache concentration has to be unrivaled anywhere else in the world. I kept thinking, are there really that many off-duty cops in this country?

We made a stop in Bangalore, which is sort of Ground Zero in Thomas Friedman's Flat Earth world. I thought that the UK, US accent options in this sign for English lessons was sort of funny. There's actually a decent number of manufacturing activities in and around Bangalore, which is what brought me here. I ended up eating lunch in the employee cafeteria of a large consumer electronics distribution warehouse. My mom has always been a quasi-vegetarian, so I picked up some of those tendencies growing up. I think if you are strict vegetarian then India's got to be one of the best places to live because they have so much vegetarian food and a lot of it is very good. Bangalore itself has a very nice temperature, sort of like San Diego, though it's landlocked and much more polluted. The town itself is a bit nicer than most of the other Indian cities we saw, though there is quite a bit of the hodgepodge disorganized zoning here. This is the place where I definitely saw the most foreigners. We had lunch at an amazing hotel that I think was called the Leela Palace. It was huge, old-ish looking and had really pretty gardens.