I can’t believe today is the 4th of July. I hate missing the 4th. I just now (at 9:30pm) realized that I’m missing it. I’m also missing a Morrissey concert tonight in Hyde Park. Sean bought us tickets in March, but once I got the internship, it was decided that Gez would take my place. Well that all bummed me out a little … not to mention the fact that I have to work tomorrow (Saturday). I feel like I need some time off … not that we’re killing ourselves with work, but it’s been a big week for me, so I’d like a day off.
Today was pretty cool, all in all.
We started the day by taking a drive with our boss, Satish, to view the salt works. It took us about 1.5 hours to reach the works, and on the way, we saw and learned many interesting things. For one, we now realize that the town we walked through on the first day is not actually Mithapur. It was funny because we noticed that the houses right around us were relatively nice but then, suddenly, the neighborhood became decidedly less nice. The houses were smaller and more run-down looking. The streets were not paved, and the drainage was not as good. We were trying to find the market that day, and we noticed that the end at which we started was rather basic, small shops made out of scraps of wood, corrugated steel, and handmade bricks. As we got closer to our hostel on the way back, the shops improved dramatically. Apparently, the dividing line between this town and Mithapur is the railroad tracks, and this town is on the proverbial other side of those tracks. I’m glad to know that this place is not Mithapur because then I might be a bit disappointed that Tata wasn’t doing a better job of taking care of its employees, who live in the Tata-built homes of Mithapur.
Chai breaks are very important here. It seems that when we’re in the office, cups of chai are delivered by servants at 10am and 3pm. Today, we were at another building, a couple of kilometers from the main Tata office, and chai was brought over from the main office by a servant. Bottom line: They don’t miss chai breaks. Just after we took off for the salt works, Satish turned to us and said, “For the next four hours, we will not be going through any villages and will not be able to get any chai. Would you like to stop for a cup on the way?” I declined because my stomach was finally reacting to something I ate (been waiting for this moment), but Lee accepted. Our driver suddenly pulled off to the side of the road in the middle of a very bustling part of that poorer neighboring town. Satish motioned to a boy for three chais, who poured the chai and then walked barefoot in his filthy clothes through deep mud to deliver the glasses. A simple sort of drive-through, I guess. When they were finished, the boy returned to collect his payment and the glasses. He dumped the dregs of the chai into the mud on his way back to the hut.
The salt works were very beautiful and interesting. Satish explained to us in detail how Tata has a system to collect seawater from the Bay of Kutch (off the Arabian Sea). The seawater flows through various flats, becoming more and more saline along the way (as water evaporates). Eventually, the water ends up in crystallization fields, where the salt is harvested. Tata has some pretty advanced processes to make use of all the by-products, and now produces soda ash, cement, table salt, and bromine.
Satish’s job, before starting work in the Community Development group, was to do research and development related to environmental preservation and pollution control. It’s quite clear he’s a nature lover, as he brought along two sets of binoculars and a bird book for the ride. He explained how birds migrate along two paths, one from Central Asia and one from Eastern Europe. The migration paths meet in the middle of a desert in Pakistan, and then the combined group of birds continue migrating toward Southeast Asia. Their path goes right over the Saurashtra Penisula where Mithapur is located, and due to natural environment here (mangroves, mudflats) and the wildlife that proliferates in the salt works, the birds often stop to feed in the works. We saw so many beautiful birds: greater flamingos (TALL, white, with pink bills that have a black stripe), lesser flamingos (smaller, pink with a blood red bill), spoonbills, painted storks, herons, and egrets. I never imagined I’d see great flocks of pink flamingos soaring through the sky … but I did.
On the way back to Mithapur, we drove through the neighboring town Dwarka again. This time I noticed that Dwarka has something in common with Mumbai: The shops look totally run down on the outside, but when you look inside, they appear quite nice. I even saw restaurants and hotels that might be reasonably comfortable. Perhaps it’s the fact that there are no paved roads that really makes everything just look dusty and dirty … and uninviting for Princess Valerie. (In the developed world, I am no princess. But here, I am happy to have some creature comforts … for example, toilet paper, which the Tata office bathroom does not have!)
Other things we saw:
- A flock of camels;
- Naked children bathing under a pump in the middle of the country;
- A giant, three-story tall statue of the deity, Shiva;
- Simple beds made of sticks and woven material in the middle of fields ... for farmers to lay on while guarding their crops from animals at night;
- A shrine to a local deity in a field that was meant to bless the crop;
- A village with mud huts (look like giant beehives), straw huts, and huts with a wood frame and cloth stretched over them;
- Women walking with big water jugs and massive piles of straw on their head;
- One small white, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with a tall Indian man and an Indian child in the middle of nowhere. Wonder where he came from …
Fortunately, someone came today that was even more of an oddity than us … at least I think so. It was a Japanese man, who showed up at breakfast wearing a bright orange Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt, blue and green plaid shorts, black dress socks, and black dress shoes. Later, I caught him outside with his laptop … looked like he was trying to get a wi-fi signal, which is a big joke. I think he’s gone now though … boo.
After lunch, we went to the Training Centre (another building outside the Tata main site). There, the two women we are working with – Durga and Rehana – were waiting to introduce us to some of the women we will be helping this summer. There were about 11 women and one man sitting on cushions along the edge of the room. They are students in the Tata’s Rural Entrepreneurship Development Programme. About half the group is currently involved in a business they started four months ago making bags out of a material called Rexene. So far, they’ve filled one order for 1,750 bags … which came from Tata. Tata donated the bags to school children. Although this sounds a little silly – Tata helping women to start up a business only to be their sole buyer – it is apparently only a stepping stone to help build the confidence of the women in the group. Now, the women are planning to go to the local towns and market the product to shop owners. My role will be to help them identify new products to make based on market research (uh, a bit more manual research than I’ve done for other B-school projects … no web surveys here), get orders from shop owners, negotiate with shop owners on price, and complete the sale. These women have very limited experience in sales … not to mention the fact that most of them are illiterate and take a lot of time to understand business concepts. So, while this will be low tech for me, it is real development work that I expect to be even more challenging than anything I’ve done before. Particularly because I do not really understand the context in which they operate. The negotiation part terrifies me – not because I can’t negotiate but because the shopkeeper is sure to have much more experience than me and because a rupee here or there doesn’t mean as much to me. Durga, who is very friendly and speaks good English, insists that I will have the upper hand as a foreigner. Whoa.
So anyway, these women discussed marketing in Gujarati for 45-minutes or so (with Durga writing me notes in English to explain what was going on). Then, Rehana, who has several years experience teaching entrepreneurship to women, assigned them the task of preparing informational signs for a new group of trainees that start next week. She handed the women newspaper clippings (in Hindi or Gujarati). The women that could read explained the articles to the other women. They organized the articles by topic (e.g., technology, innovation, marketing) and then glued the groups of articles to poster board. Afterward, the group reunited to discuss the articles. It seems simple, but according to Durga, it takes very simple tasks like this to convey business concepts … and the concepts must be repeated over and over and over. Sometimes the training takes one month, but other times it takes three.
In fact, one of the ways in which they select people to join the REDP programme is to conduct simple tests that help the team to understand the personality and motivations of potential candidates. Even if a candidate cannot read, she is handed newspaper articles and is asked to glue them to a poster board in whatever way is meaningful to her (based on pictures in the articles or the creation of shapes on the board). The woman’s explanation of her work is used to identify whether she is capable and motivated enough to go through the training.
So, even though it seems strange to me to be doing some of the work of branding and negotiating with buyers, I suppose I will be setting an example for the women to follow in the future, as well as establishing relationships and precedents – i.e., a starting point for women to plug into and learn from.
Enough about that though … it’s only one day so I hardly understand all the ins and outs.
After work, Lee and I decided to walk down to the beach. The walk down was quite beautiful with palm-trees and benches lining the 2km walk. On the way, one of the women from the REDP programme recognised us and invited us into her home. As they do here, she tried to offer us water, but we’re not allowed to drink it. It’s painful to turn them down, especially when we can’t clearly explain why, but it must be done.
Her home was small but cozy with two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. She made sure to point out that it was wired for electricity and had a fan. Seemed like she wanted us to stay, but we wanted to see the beach and besides, the limitations of language makes it very difficult to chat.
The stroll to the beach is a popular one it seems, with couples, families, and youth walking and riding motorcycles up and down it. At the beach, there is a children’s playground. One slide has a giant Indian man’s face painted on plywood sitting above it so that the slide comes right out of his mouth. Not something we expected to see on this otherwise pristine beach.
On the way back to the hostel, we passed the REDP woman’s house again. This time, her husband was sitting with her and he invited us in. He spoke pretty decent English and grilled us with questions about who we are and what we’re working on. He works for Tata as a packaging engineer. We spoke with him for a few minutes and then took off again. Before we left, he assured us that we are welcome in his home any time – “my home is your home.”
Back on the road, there were four little girls standing up on a mound of dirt, leaning against a wall. As we passed, they each said in succession, “Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.” They then asked us in good English how we are, where we’re from, and what our names are. They didn’t seem impressed by the fact that we were visiting from England, but they were impressed with the fact that we are originally from America. One of them repeated it after me in just the way my friend Nathalie says it, in a half-whisper with the tone of amazement, “Am-er-ica!” They each told us their names, and one of them made sure I knew that my name is “very sweet.” We promised to see them another day.
So another day goes by – it was long and full of interesting and beautiful moments. Somehow though, it’s hard to believe I’ve only been here five days. It feels much longer and it seems like the weeks ahead may stretch on forever. I’m getting more comfortable being here, and I enjoy the experiences, but it’s not easy … and I still think about home all the time. I think what’s really making it tough is the fact that we still don’t have a good, reliable way to communicate with home. I had hoped to make it to the market this evening to buy more credits for the mobile phone, but all our diversions on the way to and from the beach caused us to get back too late. We’re going to bug the Tata staff again tomorrow to get Internet access.
One more quick note about Indian TV/radio:
- Right now at midnight, I am watching Seinfeld, which will be followed by Friends … It’s disturbing and comforting to know that anywhere in the world I go, I am likely to find Friends.
- Yesterday, I saw an Indian re-make of Planet of the Apes. In one particularly tense moment, the camera froze on the image of two monkey men, did this blurry/wiggle motion, and then the monkey men started to sing and dance Bollywood-style. Awesome.
- There is Bollywood stuff on *all* the time, as well as really over-the-top, seemingly un-ironic Indian movies. Think Indian guy dressed up in a clearly fake beard and costume turban to look like a genie, overacting in the worst (best?) possible way.
- I can’t get one popular song out of my head, “Singh is King, Singh is King, Singh is King!” Singh’s kind of an Indian gangsta dude. It’s (on) way too much.
- On the way from the Mumbai airport, Lee heard a report on Wimbledon. The reporter only covered the ladies matches, and he referred to the ladies in very funny, pseudo-sexual ways. For example, the female tennis stars were called “beautiful tennis princesses” and the Williams sisters were described as “black magic women.”