Santa Claus is there!

Indian Santa Claus… Indian chai, some medicines and a very nice book of an author I’ve been following up on later:

And, ladies and gentlemen; Mexican Santa Claus… dinner anyone?!

I’m ready for vacations…

Davide is O.K.

I woke up in the middle of the night as the neighboors next door were calling for help, as David, on of their sons I presume, was not feeling well. While listening to the debate weather them calling an ambulance or not, I took a book I’m reading called “Ganesha on the Dashboad”  by V. Raghunathan which questions many of Indian traditions, as they lack, what the Indian author describes as “scientific temper“.

Which brought me to the question: Why are people buried when they die?…

To my understanding it’s some foolish tradition that happens to be a big business for packing nicely a body that is going to decompose anyway, not to mention the space it unnecessarily occupies in this piece of land called cementery. What if Hindus were buried instead of cremated? would there be enough space in India for all of them? I wonder if burying is actually cheaper than cremating, or viceversa. or maybe it has to be with a sociological explanation, desguised as a religious one (as usual).

If it’s a sociological explanation, then maybe the Christian view has to do with nature, decomposition and nurturing the land. Maybe this is why bodies were buried… considering, of course, there were no space constraints in ancient times. But where they in India?… I don’t think so, which complicates far more my assumptions.

In any case, I thought it was an interesting topic to investigate on, hopefully I’ll get some answers. And yes, it sucks to be waked up un the middle of the night, but at least I’m almost done with the book.

At the end  don’t think no ambulance came, so in case anyone was worried, Davide is O.K…. and I go back to sleep.

The Road For Coffee

Find a few obstacles right off the office…

In India people are very warm and gentle, they can easily offer a ride to a stranger who needs help to cross the street…

The contrasts here are such, that from one street to another a meter to another you find so different realities…

Indian Starbucks…

Coffee and a Samosa?… why not..

The reward….

India is indeed a challenging place… that’s the beauty of it

Marketing is Overrated Anyway…

One of the most recurrent things I heard from people turning to their countries after living in India was that life back there was boring… And now that I’m back in Mumbai I have to say that I can’t agree more…

But if there’s someone out there who thinks the contrary, then I hope she/he has good arguments to prove it!

Indian Week

This week is randomly particular (and fun) because my best friend in Bangalore visited me in Rome and we were around together with his girlfriend and my ex roommate from India who now works here as well. On Thursday I have another friend from Paris, who I met in Bangalore as well, coming to spend some days over here.

At work we have the Mumbai team here for some meetings and they were very kind to bring me a little Ganesh figurine, postcards and other stuff I asked them for. Things started to get interestingly surprising when the Indian boss asked me if I would like him to speak with my Italian boss about me spending some months working in Mumbai office to “catch up” on the business.

I told him I would be happy to have a coffee over it

Safety First

I think one of the things I have wrongy taken for granted the most in India is its safety, at least in Bangalore where I have spent the last year. This picture right here is very interesting because I took it sometime around 1:00 A.M. when I was coming back from having dinner with a friend and needed some cash.

The guy you see in the picture covered with the blanket is perhaps the security guard of the bank or a homeless person. In either of the cases,… harmless.

Nowadays in México there is no way in life that I will get into an ATM to withraw money at 1am. Especially in Monterrey, chances are that our harmless Indian guy would be in fact a criminal with an AK-74 waiting for someone to come in. If you are lucky he would only take your money, and I say lucky, because it can go as far as shooting or kidnapping you.

Last December when I came to Monterrey after studying in Milan, I heard the most terrible stories of people very close to me who had suffered some kind of violence regarding the drug war in Monterrey. When I spoke to my friends at that time, I think the only one that was happy with the idea of me coming back was my mother.

After I did, it was not until I woke up one day to the sound of gun fire happening in a main street very close to my house that I realized how much my city had changed in the almost two years I was away.

And then, luckily for me, India happened… and I will always thank life for that opportunity…

Broadband Service in India: A Love Story

It took five weeks for Airtel, the supposedly most reliable mobile and broadband service company in India, to connect Internet in my house when I moved there last year.

The day they finally came (on a Friday around 9:30 PM), there were five technicians in my living room… one was holding the computer, one was reading some kind of manual, other was proofreading what the guy holding the computer was typing, and the other two were watching supervising what the other three were doing (I assume).

Since I recently moved to a new apartment with existing Internet connection, I stopped by the office of my previous provider to inform them that I am cancelling the service. It is true, I confess, that I didn´t had any bill or account number with me, but they were not able to locate my phone number in the system, perhaps because it´s from another mobile company (Aircel). Next thing they asked is my account number, for what I reply that I am walking-in in a rush and I have no bill whatsoever, as I declared myself guilty of previously.

One would think that perhaps the easiest way would be to search by name, and I do understand that within 1.2 billion people there could be a lot of matches of people with the same names and my logic could actually be nonsense for them, but yet for undisclosed reasons they said it was not possible to search customers this way. Then I don´t want to sound too idealistic, but apart of a number I am also a person… right?

Then I spoke to some kind of manager to explain that I was there trying to end our customer-company relationship amicably, and that I just wanted to know the balance so I can pay and close the account.  She kept arguing that she needed the account number or registered cellphone number in order to search for my account.

I asked her what would happen if I would owe a lot of money to the company and it was perhaps their last chance to ever see that money again, for what she responded: “Sorry for the inconvenience sir, we can´t help you without this information”. It is obvious that it is not me who they should be helping, but themselves…

But since I am in India and learnt to be a patient and positive person, I was looking at the bright side of singing up with them for some iPhone package to be paid in installments, get a free phone with my previous address and then disappear!!!

The Indian Dream

“All men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights… including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”

These are the ideals behind the Declaration of Independence of the USA and the hope of development and prosperity. Since I have been living in India my view of the world has changed dramatically because I see a shift of the places where one can find possibilities as an ordinary person to hope for a better future, something that has historically been attributed to the American Dream, the immigrants and natives that helped to build that country.

In modern times, emerging economies are playing a mayor role in balancing global output and consumption when strong economies are struggling with debt problem and stagnating growth. Every time you hear that the GDP is growing, it means nothing else than people buying more and more stuff, and this is precisely where opportunities rely on:

GDP = C + I + G + NX

Where:

• C= Consumption
• I = Investment
• G= Government spending
• NX = Net exports = export – import

One of the main examples I like to picture is the increasing GDP per capita of countries like India, where even a few more Rupees in their pockets represent a massive amount of disposable income for consumption, which is translated in sales increases of virtually anything you sell.

Let’s take a look at this beautiful chart that I took from We Are Social:

The first line means that people coming from rural areas will (theoretically) engage in productive activities, resulting in increasing disposable income, translated into consumption. The potential I talk about is also related to a study I read some days ago saying that a 10% increase of urban population represents a 30% increase of the total output for a given country.

In North America, Western Europe and even Central and South America, the population living in rural areas is in average 20%. Just in India, the people living outside of the big cities and metro areas is around 70%.

That’s why it is interesting to analyze cases at individual level, for example, the mobile penetration in Asia. How many more mobiles can you sell in the US or Europe?… perhaps those mature markets focus more on replacing cellphones, rather than buying a new one. Then of course the accessories, services, apps, mobile content, etc, but that’s is a consequent story.

Well, it happens that in emerging regions there’s still a huge market for acquiring a mobile as you can see in the chart. Just in India there are around 850 million devices, with a population of 1,2 billion. This means that there is still market for at least 350 million more cellphones… that’s the size of the whole population in the US. And that’s just one example in a million, you can translate the same into electronics, appliances, housing, lifestyle, etc… interesting, isn’t it?

It is nothing new, of course, that all of the most economically powerful nations in the world are doing business here since many years ago in strategic sectors like retail, telecom, infrastructure, etc. But I want to stress the fact that those opportunities are as well converted into low hanging fruits for entrepreneurs and small investors.

Translation?… I have been working with some small companies to launch digital ads to bring more customers, a friend of mine is thinking of opening a restaurant with a fraction (10 to 20%, bribes not included) of the investment that you would require in America or Europe. Someone very close to me ended this week by a random coincidence in a models agency just for being white and another met some people to possibly do some translation services and language courses. The point is, you can make business literally out of thin air…

The difficult part is pondering the bipolarity of India for a long term settling decision because of the challenges that I have described earlier in posts like Poverty and Economic Development and Bittersweet Bangalore.

And trust me, although the economic temptations are huge, I can tell you that even after being in India for almost one year and thinking I am “adapted” to living here, the decision is still a very though one.

So I guess, at least in my case, only time will tell… and the clock is ticking fast…