So, what did you expect?

Just to set the record state, this is not one of the students from the University of Hyderabad. This week has started out with good points and not so good points. Let’s start with the good points. I gave a marketing lecture at the University of Hyderabad on Monday to the incoming MBA class. I don’t have the pictures that were taken, but will share them when they arrive on IST. The campus for the school was deemed too far away for students to come to class only seven years ago. Now, of course, there is construction all around the campus and throngs of students in the various studies darting around in the same traffic patterns on campus as on the streets of the city. So, what do you expect?
I received flowers and a small framed Indian print. I had lunch with the faculty and had a wonderful time. It was a Cinderella story. I got back to the hotel, changed my clothes just in time for my next scheduled appointment with the relocation people. A knock on my door was a message delivered from the desk from the relocation people saying that the appointment was cancelled due to the political strike that was taking place. It wasn’t safe to go out and there was a government threat of a curfew. So, what do you expect?
I did a lot of correspondence yesterday, virtually all of it by e-mail. I have a neat new Samsung smart phone. Deb and I have matching Samsung smart phones. It’s like the “Dueling Banjos” of phones from Deliverance. You know who the backwoods picker is – me! I got a pre-paid card from Vodaphone. Now THERE’s a brand you don’t hear about much in the USA, but every other entrepreneur in Hyderabad is a licensed Vodaphone agent, just like they are licensed to sell the state lottery tickets. Deb got a month-to-month plan. Her phone works. Mine does not. So, what did you expect?
Today started with a little uncertainty. In fact, India is something of a mathematical proof of the uncertainty principle. You can think you know where something is at any one time, but you can’t figure out when the thing is going to be where you want it to be. Conversely, you think you know when something is supposed to be where you want it, but you don’t really know where it is. Heisenberg must have lived in India. Deb’s passport was required for Indian customs to screen the shipment of our stuff. Allied-Lemuir took the passport on Thursday last week as part of the necessary documentation. Well, to keep the story short, customs didn’t give the final OK on the shipment until Saturday, Sunday they weren’t there, and Monday, the agent ostensibly was caught in a traffic jam caused by the strike. Soooo, the passport was to be returned today. It finally got here. We can only guess what state our shipment is in. So, what did you expect?
Oh, yeah, House Hunters Hyderabad. Of anything I am absolutely sure of, you will NOT see an episode of this on HGTV. We started out in Gachibowli. Now this area has been identified as THE place to be in the next 3 years. There is building everywhere. And where there is building there is. . . . RUBBLE, huge piles of rubble. Some entrepreneurs will find something to do with the rubble, but not today. Supposedly we were no more than 10 minutes from Deb’s office, but I swear I couldn’t see over the rubble to know where I was. I’m not going to bore you with the different properties we saw today, but the best one was the Indian version of your grandmother’s 1950’s decorations. But it was relatively clean, had A/C in every room, and water every day. We’re movin’ forward. So, what did you expect?

Rickie, We hardly Knew Ye!

Our second weekend started pretty much as we have become accustom. The power goes out for about 30 seconds once an hour. It always goes out just long enough to reset everything. We worked out at the gym in the hotel. There were a few other people on the cardio machines. But what is now somewhat humorous is that you can tell the “newbies” when the power goes out and they ask “Is this a power outage?” Well, duh, welcome to Hyderabad. Deb and I thought our Rochester home was on a fragile part of the power grid.
Deb had her first experience with a Hyderabadi manicure and pedicure. She was referred to the businesswoman Shashi who has her shop in her gated home in Banjara Hills. We got to learn a lot about her family from her 5 year old granddaughter who was visiting from Canada. Siya was an Indian version of Chatty Cathy. She reminded me of Leigh when she was that age. I ventured across an Indian six lane road to shop at the Indian version of Whole Foods. As I came out of the store, the traffic had picked up. I was watching for the traffic to lighten up when our driver, Ashraf strolled across the road through the traffic and said “come now.” So I must have seemed like a real wimp. But we walked back through the traffic.
We went to see Knight & Day last night. This was a Hyderabad moment. Waiting in line for the “will call” tickets, we noticed people handing their cell phones through the voice hole to the attendant. Well, they were showing him their confirmation e-mails. This one movie-goer was having some problem and kept handing the phone to the attendant and he kept handing it back. This went on for about 10 minutes as the line kept getting longer. We finally got through the ticket process and went through two security processes before we get to the theatre entrance. We got some popcorn and a drink that also came with two samosas. OK, that’s not bad. We found our screen which was still being “cleaned” so we were standing outside the doors chatting with a fellow from Microsoft who was flying back to the States last night and had time to kill before he went to the airport. As we were chatting, one of the security guys came out of the door with a little cage in his hand. And WHO do you think was in the cage? Well, it wasn’t Mickey Mouse, but none other than Rickie Rat! Well, Deb was searching for some place to hide the food and wondered if she had anything to put over her open-toed shoes. Anyway, we still went in and watch the movie, but Deb was a bit skittish for the rest of the time. She did take the time to stand by the poster outside the theatre to show we actually were there.
Today we went to mass at a small church associated with a school in Banjara Hills. We walked through a beggar-lined gate to a courtyard. I handed out some cookie packs to some of the beggars. I had confirmed yesterday that the mass was in English. The mass was celebrated on IST (India Stretch Time) so it started about twenty minutes past 9. Deb and I assumed that the priest intended to start the mass at 9:20, but tells the parishioners 9 so there were fewer stragglers. The choir was made up of students of the school and had reasonable voices. The music was an electric guitar. There was a neon cross in back of the alter. Fortunately it was NOT a neon crucifix.The homily was just about as unintelligible as the Tamil mass the week before, but I got the “hospitality and generosity” which appeared to be the main message. Check. I handed out more cookies to the gauntlet of beggars as we left the courtyard. We got back to the hotel and attended a local shopping event at the convention center. It was the typical aisles of vendor booths. We meandered around. Deb was drawn like a moth to the flame for the bangles and jewelry booths that were peppered among the many clothing booths from Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata as well as locals from Hyderabad. Once again, we were the only Caucasians in the place. This is becoming a trend. From another source, I got a round figure of about 1000 expats working in Hyderabad. That’s about one tenth the numbers in Bangalore. So we don’t even qualify to be considered a club.
We then took a driver from the hotel over to the “local crafts” village called the Shilparamam. Our driver also acted as our tour guide. However, we believe that he got some kind of kick back from some of the vendors who appeared to know him. Hmmmmmm?!? The locals seem to come to the park area of the village just to walk about without the traffic or rubble.
Ooops, scratch that about the rubble. Well, we got out of there about 1500 Rs lighter but we had a good walk about, even with a reasonable grade. The park area has some art work which appeared to me to be rubble on a pedestal.
Then there were some statuary depicting various indigenous populations in the area with cows, elephants, and goats. I can get that outside the gates every day. Well, not the elephant.
Interestingly, there is a mandate for the village to offer training courses for women. Quite a list!
Hope to have some news on the residence search tomorrow.

Rubble, Rubble

One of my favorite David Bowie songs is Rebel Rebel. Its origins come from when he was in the persona of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Well, while driving through the streets of Jubilee Hills and Banjara Hills, Manhapur, or Gachiboli. Ziggy keeps popping into my head with the words “Rubble Rubble”. I tried to shake it but it just keeps coming as often as the piles of stones, mud, trash, and whatever lies all around us. Not that this is unusual or unique to Hyderabad, but it is a dominant feature during our drives so far. Actually these smaller, more numerous piles are probably more productive for the trash pickers than the enormous trash heaps outside of Mexico City or Sao Paulo, or JoBurg or (the name of your favorite Third World City of more than 20 million goes here) reside. Now THOSE are trash heaps. Some people are born, live, and die on the same dump. Fortunate for me, I was only born and grew up on one. As many know, the dump outside Jerusalem was a Biblical metaphor for hell (Gehenna Dnoora) but then, Revelations was written before Detroit had Kwame Kilpatrick. Bowie, with that far away stare, on a rubble heap -- in that awful stretch leotard -- and the red hair that was a precursor to the mullet – it’s a bad visual.
During the first six months living in our townhouse in Raleigh, we had construction all around us as well, so we had the piles of debris with the perfunctory waste from the Mexican workers’ lunches purchased from the lunch wagon that played “La Cucaracha” over its loudspeaker. At night Deb and I would go out in our alley and shovel the gravel, nails, fish bones, and some undistinguishable, but fragrant stuff into a pile, then call the construction manager to come clean it up. We were is worst nightmare—activist owners.
We admit that New Jersey is not without ITS share of rubble piles. Some may recall The Sopranos episodes where Tony’s waste management firm was remediating asbestos in buildings in Newark and having some “issues” with the New York family not allowing Tony’s crew to dump out on Long Island, the closing scene is a dump truck pulling up to one of the lagoons off the NJT and dumping his load of toxins. Well if you ever take the Dover line of the NJT into New York Penn, you’ll see the same disgusting environments and without much effort identify waterways that have been fouled by multiple thousands of dump trucks of any number of hazardous wastes for decades. If you see Secaucus, you’re where you oughtn’t to be.
Hey Now (Talking Heads)
I want a bicycle, well a tricycle, for my service cart. All you need is the Bruce Willis equivalent of Die Hard character riding one of these carts, loaded with just about any material you can think of. We were behind this one carrying boxes of stuff on the way to the office. On the way to the police station we were behind one that was loaded with bamboo branches. These were probably once passenger rickshaws but everyone I’ve seen thus far is in some commercial purpose. Many of the loads are so heavy that the owners have to get off and push the loads up even slight inclines. I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer the ox cart we saw on Saturday.
Over the top
This evening, a Jain wedding was taking place in the convention center. A ballroom wouldn’t have been large enough. The hotel manager, Nagarajarao, took Deb and I through it. There were about 2000 guests. The bride was in a sari that probably had about one bar of gold woven into the material. Her attendants were in beautiful saris but not even close to that of the bride. There were alters, a palace, and tents set up in the hall and the ceiling was completely draped with billowing cloud-like sheets. There must have been well over a million flowers everywhere. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. OK, another stock photo, but since we were the only Caucasian wedding crashers in the room, I wasn't going to whip out my camera. Like I said before, I'm losing my edge. It was intimated that in USD, the cost was half a million at least. I thought the Jains avoided worldly possessions? Judging by this, I was way off. Must check my Joseph Campbell books when our shipment is delivered, I may have misread something.

Falling asleep at the keyboard. Night night.

Back again. Just learned yesterday we may be extending our Novotel stay by a couple weeks. Oh boy! I actually thought about this in the context of “Waiting for Godot”. Well, waiting at the Novotel is better than in a ditch. We’re becoming “family”. The wait staff knows us by name. Even the security people who pat us down and wand us every time we enter smile and greet us.

Slumcow Millionaire

I must be losing what little of a photographer’s edge I ever possessed. Not that I ever considered myself to be remotely close to Annie Leibovitz’ mastery of spontaneity when she was on tour with the Stones. When I had two mechanical cameras, I always had one at the ready and one shooting. Note to self: I have to get a digital slide scanner to get rid of the thousands of slides we have in boxes down in the garage. I’ve also got thousands of B&W negatives that I should digitize as well. Oops, losing focus. Now, with the digital camera, point and shoot just takes the connection away. Then again, you also start thinking about how much time you have the power on, so when am I going to have to change batteries? Now photographers using digital cameras carry a power pack the size of a motorcycle battery, but they can shoot Gigs of photos and all with a power-hog flash.
I’m starting today’s post with the one picture of cows by the roadside I took on my way back from my first trip to drop Deb off at her office and I still have a number of activities that are yet to come. To start the day off, I surrendered my passport this morning, which makes me uneasy. I’ve sent a requisite e-mail this afternoon requesting letters of occupancy from the Novotel that I actually obtained from the duty manager yesterday evening. Don't think about it. I’ve been back and forth from Deb’s office two times already and beginning a third in a little over an hour from now.
My last trip back was for a signature on a huge pile of paper with three passport photos clipped to the top sheet. My third trip back will be to pick up Deb. Our driver has been instructed where to go. I thought I heard “old city” which makes me a little nervous, but I might get a chance to give you a shot of the Charminar that I actually took from the window of our car.

I'm BAAAAAaaaaaak!
OK, if you add Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains, Cafe Rick's and put them in this environment, and you have a picture of where we were today. Think of HiTec City as "the burbs". The "Old City" is just that. The city center is about 400 years old with the Charminar at the hub was deemed inadequate for effective commerce nearly 200 years ago, so when you grow the population to about 2 million at the epicenter you've got one continuous flow of humanity.

But the real gem of the adventure, a honest-to-goodness hold-over of the British Raj, was the police compound. And THIS was right out of Casablanca. We met a third-party "facilitator" who helps Novartis foreign nationals get their documents cleared outside the gate of the compound. She quickly led us past a group of men outside the gate to a small cottage where two men were seated at a small table and a group of people were crowded around them. The facilitator motioned to them, one of the men looked up and waved us through a door into the central courtyard. We walked through the uneven ground to another group of buildings with a line of people outside the door. Once again, our facilitator walked right past the line into this old office space that could be right out of a Rudyard Kipling story. There, under a ancient, slowly rotating ceiling fan was another wooden table with one man seated on an old wooden chair. He was leaning back, looking at a young man and woman. A second man was standing next to the table. He was talking to the couple and pointing in the direction from where we just entered. Since they didn't have a letter in their hand, I think that their residency request was temporarily unfulfilled. Another young man was also standing at the desk. From his looks, I picked him to be a northeastern African, possibly Somali. As the young couple left, this man began to speak. The man standing gestured for this young man to hold on. Our facilitator motioned us up to the table. She told us these were our letters. The standing man gestured for Deb to sign. There were three places that required signatures. Then I went through the same process. We were done. The seated man had mumbled maybe five words and gestured a couple times. The standing man turned the pages and pointed to where our signatures needed to go. It took just about three minutes and we were walking out, back through the crowd that just saw us walk in. Now, I'm not a cynical guy, but judging from what we had to go through for our visas in New York, the two men at the desk in the office with the ceiling fan were so accommodating that we don't think it was a coincidence that we were in and out while these other people looked like they had been there for a while. Just imagine Claude Rains taking his casino winnings from the croupier as he was closing Rick's for illegal gambling -- and thanking him. Enough said.
Here are some shots from the markets surrounding the Charminar and a few of the structure itself.

I knew it would happen. It eventually had to. Both Deb and I rinsed our toothbrushes under the faucet in the bathroom. You get a little careless and you could be dealing with the traveler’s dilemma. Fortunately, we’re just at the one-week mark and really are doing well overall. Just need a little more sleep at night and the world will be good.
We hope to get our residency letter tomorrow which will give us the ability to look for a place to stay. The hotel is comfortable, but confining. We’re only about three kilometers from Deb’s office, but as you’ve seen, it takes a while to get there. I’m hoping to rent a bicycle to get around. On Wednesday I go to see a friend of a friend of a friend who has an outsourcing business in Segunderabad for which he would like to increase his US sales. I’ll get to see his operation and talk about what we can do.
Deb and I have been taking walks around the hotel and convention center grounds. It reminds me of the old “The Prisoner” series where you have surroundings that look like you have your freedom, but there are boundaries that you can’t and shouldn’t cross. Yesterday we noted that the complex has its own waste water treatment facility. From the looks of things, the waste water is recycled to use for landscaping and fire protection. Now that’s not unusual as anyone who visits Florida knows that the watering systems are non-chunky waste water.
Well, I have some phone calls to make today and some stuff to get done for Deb. This is a short post.

Beggars' Banquet, Tamil Mass, and Babu

I really wasn’t expecting this much excitement. I didn’t include it in the last post, because of the topics of immediate importance (read: Bum Showers), but during our outing yesterday, we came across one good reason NOT to have traffic lights in Hyderabad – beggars. Here is the beggar carrying an infant around who had been incessantly tapping on our window until she determined we weren’t going to give in and immediately turned around to the car next to us and began tapping on their window. While I didn’t take a photo, we were accosted by a one-handed beggar outside of the Food World, right after we had been accosted by a marketing rep for a skin lightener product who was handing out free samples to Food World patrons who spent a certain amount of money. Like Deb NEEDS a skin lightener! I mean, we could see her when they turned the lights off during a Carlsbad Cavern tour we went on in New Mexico years ago.
We have been advised by locals and expats to buy cookies to take with us when we are out and about as the beggars won’t refuse anything you offer and are therefore obliged to go once you have given them something. These would be great rules for telemarketers as well.
Deb suggested and rightly so that all Christian churches look alike to other religions and could we distinguish between one Hindu temple and another along our drive route or could we tell a Sunni from a Shia or Sufi mosque? This morning we got our 4:45am wake-up call to get ready for our ride to church. We thought we had identified an English mass at 6am at a church (St. Mary’s) in Secunderabad, but when our driver took us to a Methodist church, saying “they have English at 6am”, we opted for the Tamil mass at St Mary’s even though information in the hotel’s brochure said English at 6. OK, the photo of St. Mary's is a stock photo from their website. Come on! It was 6am and pouring rain when we got there. The big Pieta in the courtyard was pretty impressive. The mass really wasn’t pure Tamil. It’s like Tagalog in the Philippines is spoken as “Taglish” which is a mix of English and Tagalog, this was “Tamlish”. The priest’s homily wove in and out of Tamil so you had to listen very closely to catch when he would start making a point in English with his very heavy accent and when he was speaking (and gesticulating) in Tamil. He was making a point which ironically I heard on Friday evening at an expat event. A social worker on Friday observed that any caste higher than a Dalit looks down on the castes below them with some degree of disdain. The priest suggested that one cannot say they are devout in their faith if they do not look out for those less fortunate then themselves, so live the faith through Christian love sic (agape). Interestingly the “sign of peace” (which is a handshake most everywhere), is akin to the Hindu and Buddhist greeting of a slight bow with hands pressed prayerfully together. Kind of like the integration of the Christmas tree and Easter egg.
But the REAL excitement, heralded by a letter from the Novotel management under our door early this morning was that there would be celebrities at the Convention Center and to expect throngs of fans between 10 am and 4 pm today. When we were arriving back from mass, there were people already queuing up outside the security gate. Who, you might ask, would that celebrity be? Why would they be in Hyderabad on a Sunday morning? Well, it was none other than A. R. Rahmon! Wait, YOU don’t recognize him? He’s a dual Oscar winner in 2008! Best musical score for a movie and best theme song. OK, not many people saw Slumdog Millionaire, but this is THE guy. And his fans were here, numbering in the thousands, for the unveiling of a new CD compilation from his latest film starring a local acting legend, S. Ramesh Babu. Babu has been acting for 28 years. He was doing Bollywood films before it was known as Bollywood. He is an action film guy, the Indian version of Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies.
Rahmon was in the hotel at a VIP suite. We were told his location by the hotel manager and concierge. We’re well-enough known by the hotel staff that we get some of the inside scoop on what’s happening. They also know we have been taken twice: once for a 450 Rs bottle of Evian water at our first dinner and 2000 Rs for the ride to church this morning. I actually thought the ride was well worth the money as our driver gave us a choice of churches, he drove us around the Hussain Sagar and through part of downtown Hyderabad (but not the old city), giving us virtually unintelligible running commentary like most guides on the NYC Gray Line tours.
But it appears that the crowds were sated by their celebrities' appearances as they go marching back to Hyderabad and all points around.

And so we will disperse as well for today.

Under the Banyan Tree

For any of those who were wondering why they haven’t actually seen me in any pictures, Deb took a couple of me on Saturday as we went walking around the grounds of the hotel and convention center. Here I am under a Banyan tree, you know, the one that the Buddha sat under to find his spiritual center. From the legend, he sat on one side at a time but when the world tipped he moved to another spot until he found his balance. Well, in the case of this particular Banyan tree, if I moved toward the camera, I would be likely to be hit by any number and types of vehicles. If I moved directly back, I would fall into the retaining pond that, from its effluence, told me that I would be in deep doo doo – literally. Off to the left of the photo, an Islamic school marching band was going through drills with all their parents all dressed in their white pajamas looked on. And so, where I was standing was the right place to be.
All righty then, I knew I forgot to tell you something special about our drive to the hotel from the airport the first night. Our driver, who was courteous and competent (great qualities for the job he was doing) asked us if we would like some music as we drove through the rain and gloom. Deb quickly spoke up, “that would be great, we’ll listen to whatever you like” (hoping that would keep him happy and focused on the obstacles ahead, which were many). Well, I know I was shocked when he turned on a station whose first song was a Muzak version of Brittany Spears’ “Oops, I did it again”. Now, this immediately created a flood of memories of the music the Gypsy violinist decided to play when I proposed to Deb in Budapest. He started playing “Somewhere over the rainbow”. I presumed it was the only American music he was familiar with, though I was anticipating a more traditional Hungarian or Romani tune. So you can appreciate my shock, once again, as we travel literally half way around the world to be introduced to the musical tastes of an indigent Hyderabadi -- and it’s a bad rendition of the Pop Tart’s banal second Top 40 hit.
It’s Saturday! Deb and I actually slept through the night, so, aside from it being “hotel, sweet home”, things must be synchronizing with our new time zone. We had a plan for today: exercise, lunch, and then go on a date. We had arranged for our driver, Ashraf, to pick us up and take us to the Cineplex in Banjara Hills, about 10 kilometers away. We had attempted to get an account from Cinemax to buy the tickets on-line, but the registration time was on IST (India Stretch Time) so that we didn’t have the password back before we had to leave. Our thinking: who in India would (1) be going to the cinema in the afternoon, and (2) what self-respecting Indian would prefer to watch an American action film with a fading lead actor when they could choose from about half a dozen Indian action films. Now, Bollywood has one of the largest studios in the world in Hyderabad. The set lots total several square miles and we’re planning a tour eventually. But I digress. “Knight and Day” was sold out. Fortunately our driver was still inching ahead to the parking deck as we started walking back trying to decide what we would do until he showed up. We caught him and after a quick stop at the Food World market, we drove back to the hotel, our date night thwarted.
What I REALLY wanted to talk about today is bum showers. No, this has nothing to do with some of the homeless guys in Penn Station attending to themselves in the NJT restrooms, though that is a story in itself. I’m referring to the personal hygiene regimen for which the Indians believe (1) they invented, and (2) is far superior to the Europeans (which includes the Western Hemisphere) using paper after toileting. Least you think I am suffering from heat stroke from our walk this morning, I offer the article that started our discussion. The editor is in a running argument with contributors, one from Japan, a country that also claims the invention, and a Pakistani who claims the invention was theirs after partition in 1947. The editor also says that the shower is a technological transfer of an ancient Indian practice for which he says was noted by such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling refer to in his writings for the benefit of a newbie coming to the Raj. I admit that I am firmly entrenched in the “European” camp, I have studied this alternative method, which is like a free-style bidet and I still am unclear as to the practical application as a Westerner. This may be one of the few items for which, even if adopted, I will probably not mention again.
I feel much more centered now. We’ll be getting up early tomorrow for our next adventure -- going to mass in the morning. We have a driver scheduled for 5:30am to go approximately 15 kilometers and be there for the 6am English mass. We’ll let you know how THAT goes.