At the Golden Temple
It’s a well-known fact that when visiting tourist locations in India, you will be asked to pose in some pictures, and even get some taken surreptitiously with cell phones. I get it.
I’m generally pretty willing to pose in pictures. I won’t, however, pose with young men because I’ve been told by lots of Indian men that they will go back and tell their entire village you slept with them. No thanks. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
On my way to work one morning, I stopped at the train station to buy a Pepsi. (Yes, it was only 10:30am, but I don’t drink coffee.) About halfway through my rickety ride to the office, I decided I didn’t really want the rest of the Pepsi. I began to hope that someone would come ask me for it—it happens.
Sure enough, at the busiest intersection on my route—and where the most beggars hang out—a woman approached the rickshaw with her hand outstretched. But when she got closer, she tried to snatch the bottle from my hand. Continue reading
Posted in commute, exploring Mumbai, small inconveniences
Jugaad pretty much means the ability to innovate and create things from minimal resources. This article by the Economic Times theorizes that its India’s “most precious resource.” I’m not sure about that, but it sure makes for some interesting scenes. Whether it’s a Punjabi vehicle using a diesel irrigation pump as an engine or a man sticking a large fluorescent lightbulb down the back of his shirt so he can ride his scooter home, it’s almost everywhere you look.
Here are a few examples:
Our previous landlord essentially siphoning water from our neighbors to fill up our water tank. If you look closely, you'll notice that he's also standing precariously on our shoe rack.
Sorry for all the confusion this “House Hunters” thing caused. Our house search actually ended back in February, and we’ve been in our new place for two months. We picked the third apartment. Here are some pictures:
Living room with futon and art
Posted in apartment
I woke up this morning, rolled over and opened my computer to the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. For the next hour, I couldn’t tear myself away from my computer. Eventually, I have to get up and go to work. But I haven’t stopped reading.
The implications of this are obviously enormous and widespread. One thing I’m sure about – after reading this article – is that this isn’t good news for India-Pakistan relations.
Posted in current events
After giving her opinion on a particularly bad apartment we looked at, my friend decided Arnab and I needed some help with our apartment search. She called her landlord to see if there were any apartments available in her building. There was. But it wasn’t available until March 1. This was late January at the time.
Not entirely turned off by the long wait, we went to see the apartment: a spacious one bedroom with a nice kitchen and huge windows. The current tenants had installed a divider to use the sitting room as a second bedroom, but we were told this could be removed. Continue reading
Posted in apartment
This story originally appeared in the Beyond Profit April 21, 2011 e-magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Pre-paid mobile phone services are reaching markets that other technologies have not yet been able to penetrate. How can this model be leveraged in other areas of development?
For those at the bottom of the pyramid, income is not a certain entity. No fixed amount is deposited into their bank accounts – should those even exist – at the end of the month. Their income is changing—from month to month, week to week, even day to day.
Which begs the question: if a borrower’s cash flow is so uncertain, why do so many companies attempting to serve that demographic insist on fixed repayment amounts?
At least one technology, invented in the 1990s, attempted to work around that problem: pre-paid mobile services that allowed people with variable incomes and/or poor credit to use cell phones. Such consumers made an upfront payment of only as much as they could afford in return for wireless services. Continue reading
Posted in work
