Travels with Tavish

It has been quite a while since I posted, but I will try to keep each day’s recap short.  On Tuesday morning (5/21), we visited the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and heard a great talk about infrastructure in rural India, microfinancing, and an ethical dilemma about viewing the poor as an underexplored market for cheap, single-serving products.  I will be writing a blog post about this talk soon, and will post a link when it has been uploaded to my trip’s blog.  We had a free evening to explore the area, so I went to Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road, the shopping district near our hotel.  I had a chicken wrap from a street cart and tried a few bites of Indian McDonalds.  Of the items we tried, the McChicken Masala was the best; the “Big Mac”-type burger (chicken and a different sauce) and the McAloo Tiki were forgettable.  Wednesday (5/22) consisted of an academic session in the morning and a visit to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in the a...

On Saturday (5/17), we began our tour of Mysore with a visit to the Infosys headquarters.  Infosys is an IT company that has many branches around the world and mostly works with US and European clients.  The campus looked eerily similar to the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond: lots of green space and curving roads to navigate the many buildings.  The Infosys headquarters has the capacity to train up to 20,000 new employees at a time; these young professionals live on the campus in single or double dorms.  They do not have kitchens, so they eat in food courts.  They have great sports facilities, company-owned bikes to ride around the grounds, and a large outdoor pool.  The vibe I got was scary, overly-nice college campus.  In addition to driving us around the campus in oversized golf carts, Infosys also told us about their environmental sustainability ranking—Infosys is the 8 th -most environmentally friendly corporation.  This is largely due to...

Hi Everyone, The last few days have been pretty busy academically.  On Wednesday 5/14, we heard a lecture on the challenges of modeling the summer Indian monsoon from Professor Subimal Ghosh of IIT-Bombay.  India receives 80% of its annual rainfall between the months of June and September; accordingly, much of the agriculture of the country relies on this rainfall.  Predictions and modeling trends are difficult and often inaccurate (I have notes on this lecture that I am happy to share when I return).  The group then traveled once again to IIT-B for two more talks.  The first was from the Center for Rural Sustainability.  This group focuses on designing simple, elegant solutions that can be replicated and used by India’s rural poor.  We saw examples in the shop of a pedal-powered water pump, two different machines to make brickettes to preserve organic material used as fire-starter, and a seed-dryer, among other machines.  I loved the sh...

We have had late nights the last couple nights, hence I have not been able to post anything until today. On Sunday (5/11), we visited the Elephanta Caves in the morning.  The caves are on an island about 1 hour away from the city of Mumbai.  They were great and have a lot of history.  The quick version; built approximately the 6 th century, they were “discovered” by the Portuguese in the 15 th century and named “Elephanta” because inside the cave was a stone carving of an elephant.  The cave is massive: 15-ft high ceilings, appx. 5,000 square feet area, took 200 years to carve out of the rocky hillside.  More details when I show pictures back in Seattle. We left our hotel in Colaba (southern end of Mumbai) and journeyed to our new hotel in Pawai, in the northern part of the city.  On our way, we took a quick ride on Mumbai public transportation (luckily it was not jam-packed, as it was a weekend) then visited the Indian Institute of Technology-B...

We began today with a walk around a district of Mumbai that we had not yet visited.  We walked through some fruit/vegetable stalls and visited a temple.  My favorite part was the many floral stalls where we saw men tying and weaving flowers into floral necklaces (similar to leis).  We then hopped on our bus and headed for Dharavi. As I mentioned yesterday, Dharavi is the largest slum in the world; it hosues over 1 million residents.  It is not a slum in the traditional sense, though; Dharavi is home to the strongest entrepreneurial spirits in the city.  Almost everyone is self-employed.  India has no welfare or government safety net—if you don’t work, you won’t eat.  We first saw the clay pottery district and saw all parts of the pottery-making process.  There were piles of red powder that colors the clay at one house.  Another area was allotted for measuring amount the correct amount of clay for each pot.  Next, the pots were spun...

Today began with a visit to the US Consulate in Mumbai.  We heard from a foreign service officer and a public affairs project manager they spoke about a variety of topics including manufacturing, agriculture, and terrorism in India.  One interesting factoid: 50% of India’s population works in agriculture, but this industry only accounts for 14% of the country’s GDP; residents usually spend between 40% and 60% of their income on food.  India is working to make agriculture more efficient and to lower food prices for the population, but this poses other problems.  For instance, if much of the workforce leaves agriculture, millions of new jobs must be created for them in other sectors. Lunch was again amazing.  Every time I have Indian food in the states, I eat until I can’t eat another bite; I have continued this trend so far in India.  I am loving every bite and so far it is sitting well in my stomach. We had a long afternoon academic session today,...

Hi Everyone, I arrived safely in Mumbai last night after a long day of travel.  The highlight of the travel was in Munich where we had a short layover at 9:00 am local time (4:00 am east coast time).  I bought a pretzel for breakfast.  As I walked up to the register and handed the man my 2 Euro coin, he asked “Pretzel, no beer?” We arrived to our hotel in Mumbai at about 2:00 am local time.  My roommate and I were not tired, so it was 3:30 before we went to sleep.  Surprisingly, I felt great at 8:00 this morning (the crash came later).  We took a combination bus/walking tour of part of the city of Mumbai.  The humidity is very oppressive, but luckily we avoided being outside during the hottest part of the day today. My gtoup visited the Ghandi Museum, the house Ghandi lived in during part of his life.  The museum included his bedroom, dioramas depicting his life, and many quotes.  We then visited a Hindu temple where a wedding w...

Safe Travels from Seattle family and friends.

Hi Everyone, I am posting this to make sure I know how to use this type of blog before I go abroad.  Throughout my trip I will post when I can, making the entries short enough so that they are enjoyable to read. I am making my final few pre-trip preparations--I will be acquiring more toothpaste at CVS this afternoon.  I depart Tuesday evening, 5/6.  I can't wait!