A Brief Visit to India

May 1, 2000

It's been nearly six years since I last visited India, and this trip was a whirlwind journey to Bangalore and Bombay, primarily to attend a meeting of Mascot Systems, on whose Board of Directors I now serve.   One of the nice things about flying from New York to Bombay is that it involves only one stop, in Frankfurt.  The first leg of the journey, from JFK to Frankfurt, is about 8 hours; and after a layover of an hour or two, the second leg from Frankfurt to Bombay is another 8 hours.  However, given the tensions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East during the last several years, I was a lot more conscious on this trip of the flight path during the second leg: it took us over Kosovo, Poland, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and a few other places that might be inclined to shoot at unknown aircraft flying overhead.  But the journey was uneventful, and I arrived in Bombay around midnight, some 18 "real" hours and 10.5 timezone hours away from my starting point.

I can't remember now whether Bombay airport was better or worse when I was last here in 1994; in any case, it was still hot, humid, and dank, with a slightly unpleasant odor that reminded me of stale perspiration and formaldehyde.  Unlike the strikingly modern airports one tends to see all over the world these days, Bombay's airport looks like a typical civil-service environment from the 1950s (think of the local Motor Vehicle Bureau in your home town, and you'll know what I mean); the walls were banged, scratched, and gouged, and the floors were covered with old linoleum tile.  At least the customs and immigration checkpoint was reasonably efficient; however, I later heard from a fellow traveller that she had spent two hours waiting in line to get into the country just a few months earlier.

To fly to one of the interior cities in India requires transferring from the international airport to the domestic airport -- roughly equivalent to transferring from JFK to LaGuardia in New York, or from Dulles to National (whoops! Reagan) airport in Washington.  Thus, I had to retrieve my baggage, clear customs, wander out into the main area of the terminal and track down the information about shuttle buses running between the two airports.  That wasn't a problem, but once you emerge from the airport terminal, you tend to be besieged by young men, children, and various quasi-official "helpers" of all kinds, most of whom want to carry your bags, escort you to wherever you're going, or generally make themselves helpful.  Merely pointing to the general area where the shuttle buses were located was enough for a young child to expect a donation of some kind; "I deserve something," he said to me earnestly.  While all of this is still a bit of a culture shock, my previous visits prepared me for it; and having seen the way that aggressive gypsy cab drivers accost innocent tourists at LaGuardia and JFK airports, I hardly felt in a position to be critical.

The shuttle bus from the international terminal to the domestic terminal only took about ten minutes, and it took us through a residential area of tiny shanty-like shops and stalls, all busily occupied with shop-keepers and customers.  This might not seem unusual, except for the fact that it was 1:00 AM by the time I got this far; I couldn't help but wonder whether activity goes on 24 hours a day.  In the midst of the shacks and shanties along the way, it was intriguing to see huge billboards mounted up on girders, much like one would find anywhere else in the world; the billboards advertised all manner of products and services, but at least half a dozen were advertising Internet ISP's and dot-com companies.  The Internet has definitely arrived in India -- though, as it turned out, opening a local Internet access acount is a much more bureaucratic and inefficient process in India than it is in the United States, where a credit-card number is sufficient open an account and begin surfing the 'Net in 10 minutes or less.

Because my flight from Bombay to Bangalore was scheduled for 3:00 in the morning, the local carrier decided that there was no need to roll out a high-capacity jet for the trip; instead, we flew on a small turboprop plane, reminiscent of the planes one usually finds with regional carriers in the U.S.  The plane probably held about 80 passengers, and every seat was full; alas, there was no air-conditioning for half an hour after everyone boarded, because the cockpit crew was busy finishing their paperwork.  Apparently embarrassed by the delay, the captain came on the intercom and told everyone how deeply apologetic he felt for the delay, which he promised would last only a few minutes longer.  It was actually another half an hour, so the sweltering plane full of drowsy, sweating passengers finally lurched into the air at 4:00 AM.

I finally arrived in Bangalore around 6 AM, and was delighted to see that the termperature was a cool, pleasant 64 degrees Fahrenheit; this was in stark contrast to my last visit to the city in August, 1994, when the city was dusty and sweltering, and the congested streets were filled with honking vehicles of all kinds, spewing pollution into the air.  Actually, even at 6 AM, there was a lot of traffic already on the roads: bicycles, scooters, cars, and tiny three-wheeled yellow-and-black devices known as auto-rickshaws.  But there was less pollution than before, and the entire city looked clean and sparkling from the air, as the plane came in for its landing.  A taxi drove me briskly along the highways to the hotel, past cows and dogs munching on trash and garbage along some of the streets, past young children playing cricket on dusty sandlots (at 6:15 in the morning!), and past several more dot-com bulletin boards and advertisements for Compaq computers.  Palm trees waved over the usual array of tiny shops and rickety stalls along the way, together with the occasional government building and an imposing building that advertised itself as a "software finishing school".  Perhaps the most interesting building, and one that demonstrates the benefits of outsourcing non-core-competency parts of a business, was one whose entry-way sign read, "Indian Air Force Institute of Dental Sciences."  Huh?  I can understand the need to have a couple of dentists hanging around the local air force base, in case a pilot needs to have a tooth pulled before zipping off to bomb someone; but what on earth is the point of having an institute of dental sciences attached to the Air Force?  Well, I should learn to be humble: no doubt there are far sillier things going on in our own Defense Department, and I just haven't seen them yet.

I finally arrived at my hotel -- the Oberoi, on Mohatma Gandhi Road, which I highly recommend -- checked in, and crashed into bed to recover from jet-lag. The next day was spent in a series of business meetings; I didn't even go outside the hotel.  In the evening, some colleagues and I flew off to Bombay, and that was followed by another day of meetings before I finally left for the airport at midnight for a 1:45 AM flight back to the U.S.  The ride to the airport was like a drive through Bedford-Stuyvesant or Harlem in New York: long, dark streets with knots of young men huddled together on street courners.  No traffic lights, just cars careening madly along, honking at one another as they approached an intersection.

Alas, the return flight started off badly: a one-hour delay turned into a two-hour delay, and it was ultimately three and a half hours.  Check-in at the Delta counter was fine, but it took an hour to get through the immigration checkpoint; the lines were 10 wide and roughly 200 deep.  Long lines of people with skullkaps and dashikis, men with neatly trimmed beards, and women in their shawls.  Many of the women and children had intricate, elaborate tattoos on their hands and arms, inscribed with a brownish ink; I never did figure out what that was all about.   Once through immigration, I ended up in the boarding area with a couple hundred other people, mostly dozing and sleeping in their hard plastic seats.  The departure display board mounted over the gateway onto the plane would spring into life from time to time, flashing random gibberish at the passengers; it finally ended up displaying the putative departure of Iranian Airlines to a destination identified as "W: VVWAM".

The last posted departure time for my flight was at 3:30 AM, and five minutes before that time arrived, two bored ticket agents sauntered up to the gate and announced over a scratchy loud-speaker system, "Would anyone without a seat assignment please come up and talk to us?"  Whaat?!? We've all been sitting in this room for well over an hour, the flight is now more than two hours late, and only now are they coping with the possibility that there are ticketed passengers who don't know what seat they've been assigned?  And then, five minutes later, another announcement: "Would Mr. Jones, Smith, Harrison, Ford, Adams, Brown, Carruthers, Johnson, and Samson please come up to the gate?"  Whaat?!?  Actually, the names were not simple English names like the ones I've used; instead, they were multi-syllabic names of various national and ethnic origins, none of which I could spell or pronounce.  But the intended individuals apparently did recognize their names, and a dozen of them shuffled up to the gate, dragging their belongings along with them.  Why this bit of bureaucratic paperwork could not have been accomplished hours earlier was another mystery that never got answered; in any case, we finally shuffled onto the plane at 3:45 AM and took off at 4:15 AM.

The only advantage of a middle-of-the-night departure, delayed by three hours, is that everyone fell sound asleep as soon as they sat down in their seats.  No screeching children, no loud arguments, no raucous music; I think that everyone on the plane (with the hopeful exception of the cockpit crew) slept soundly until we reached Frankfurt.  A one-hour layover gave me the opportunity to get a cup of coffee and wake up a bit; but I fell asleep again as soon as the Frankfurt-to-New York flight took off, and slept most of the way home.

Whirlwind trips like this don't offer an opportunity to get an accurate view of any country or its culture; it would be like visiting Manhattan for three days and then trying to explain what the United States is all about.  The only significant impression that I got on this trip, as compared to my longer visit in 1994, is that the Internet has truly arrived.  It turns out that there are 3.2 million PC's in the country, which sounds impressive until you remember that the population is now approaching 1 billion; by contrast, nearly half of U.S. households have a PC, and countries like Finland had an ever higher per-capita ratio of computers.  On the other hand, India does have some 37 million cable-TV installations, so one might anticipate a rapid growth in high-bandwidth access to the Internet in the coming years.  As for the Indian software industry, it turns out that the annual compounded growth rate was approximately 50% throughout the 1990s; last year, it was 59%.  Since the software industry was almost non-existent at the beginning of the 90s, the current revenue figures are still relatively small: $3.9 billion for the 1998-99 fiscal year, of which $2.6 billion was exported, primarily to the North American and Western European continents.  From this point onward, though, the same kind of growth rate is likely to have a more significant impact on the global industry: India plans to achieve annual software exports of $50 billion by 2008.  Since the U.S. software industry currently generates about $120 billion annually, India's presence will soon become quite noticeable; indeed, it's already noticeable in financial terms since the market capitalization of Indian IT firms was $24 billion as of September 1999. For more information about the current state of the Indian IT industry, visit the website of the country's National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM).