We had taken a bit of anti-anxiety medication in order to aid our slumbers on the night bus from Karwar to Bangalore so we found ourselves, once again, the last to wake up and exit the bus, and doing so in a quite relaxed and unhurried manner. It was cold outside, maybe even as low as 60ºF. After all the boiling and sweating of the trip hereto, we savored the chill.

The Speed TRs had suffered no damage on the ride, thanks to Scott’s careful negotiation and generous tipping of the baggage handlers; they were waiting for us in a neat little pile by the bus. So relaxed were we, that the normal barrage of touts, cab drivers, auto rickshaw wallahs, goods sellers, and con artists failed to even slightly miff us. We joked and giggled with them, eventually parting like old friends and wandering across the street to buy some coffees from a stand.

We had booked accommodation at a local hostel by the name of Mass Residency, and they were kind enough to give us the number of a metered cab company that was more than happy to send a man to pick us up and take us to the hotel for only a fraction of what it had cost us last time we arrived in this city.  The owners of the Mass Residency were two fantastic blokes, who were glad to serve us coffee, learn about AsiaWheeling, and show us to a very affordable, clean, and comfortable room on the 4th floor of their most comforting guest house.

We could smell the ink from the AsiaWheeling seal of approval already. The day was still quite young when we climbed on the cycles and headed in search of breakfast.

Shortly into the wheel, we realized it was Holi in Bangalore. Holi is the Hindu spring holiday, and a celebration of color. One of the main modes of celebration is the tossing of colored liquids and powders onto one another. So in our search for a restaurant, we stopped to ask some very colorful fellows for a recommended dosa house.

And by golly, did they deliver. They directed us to a local institution by the name of Maiya’s, and dear reader, if you are ever in Bangalore, you must visit this place and have one of their vegetable-stuffed dosas.

They were prepared much like a traditional South Indian dosa, but the potato filling was replaced with a rich blend of vegetables, and the accompanying coconut chutney was delicately spiced and bright green.

We also sampled their rice porridge and their vadas, which were delightful.

The coffee was strong and hit us with the caffeine blitz in a refreshingly manic way. Renewed and refreshed, we climbed back on the cycles and took a circuitous route back to the Mass Residency. Many of the shops in Bangalore were closed for the holiday, and the sight of fellows covered in spatters of neon color was quite commonplace. It must be noted, however, that Bangalore is one of the most tame places to experience Holi. In many cities in North India, we would not have been able to wheel without battling huge crowds in the streets, and getting soaked ourselves with color.

We got back to the Mass Residency with just enough time for a little furious working on correspondence before meeting with our dear Mr. Kulkarni for a quick bite to eat and to thank him for his most gracious services at the India Bureau. Nikhil came in the door bearing a very exciting cardboard package. It was our Maui Jim’s. Maui Jim, as you, dear reader, have no doubt already read on our partnership page, is our sunglasses partner. However, through a series of miscomunications, we had not been able to pick them up before leaving for the trip. Since then we had been hoping to receive them in various cities, but each time fate stepped in the way.  Finally, we were able to arrange for a direct transfer between the Maui Jim India Bureau and AsiaWheeling’s similar entity.

With the solemn intensity of Indiana Jones recovering a long lost artifact, we tore into the packaging and removed two cases, which appeared to be made out of pressed bamboo, but had the weight of steel.  We opened the cases with gentle creaking noise and there they were, gleaming with perfection, nestled in tropical patterns. Some serious AsiaWheeling spectacles.

With the previous day’s unwelcome return of the starvation crazy hour, we decided we had better eat a couple of overpriced fruit salads and drink a few cups of Nescafe at the Cozy nook before heading out.

We then checked out of the hotel, stashed our bags in the sandy back room of the little straw beach shack that served as a front desk for the place, and unlocked the speed TRs. We pushed them toward the sea until the sand became crusty enough to ride, then hopped on board, pedaling down the beach, past all kinds of sunburned merrymakers, and dismounted once more to mash them through the expanse of mounded sand that separated us from the rest of Goa.

We headed away from crowded streets and tourist-centric businesses of Palolem Beach heading south, climbing up into the hills. The sun was bright and the road quite smooth.

Outside of town, we stopped for a more legitimate breakfast of dosas and vadas and began to truly lay into the Speed TRs. I was getting used to riding with the bend in my chain ring, and found that some gears could still provide me with smooth riding. The sun burned the mist off, and the temperature rose as we climbed up into the scrubby coastal hills.

As we rode farther from the sea, the touristy joints became fewer and fewer, and the more familiar Indian roadside stands began to dominate. At one point, we stopped for a bottle of water at a little cluster of painted yellow cinder block shops near the arched entrance to an invitingly remote mountain road. There was a large circular sign proclaiming this way to a “protected site.” What that meant, we were not quite sure. One thing we were sure of, however, was that we had begun to sweat so profusely that both of us looked like victims of a drive by water-gunning. After drinking two bottles of water, we purchased another two and strapped them to the backs of the speed TRs before heading into the protected zone.

We followed the road to a large temple, which warranted a short stop, before a right turn onto an even more remote mountain road called us deeper into the Goan high country. Now we were well into the farmland. The air was dry hot, and ground was cracked and speckled with crusty senescent vegetation. Despite this fact, the vast majority of the farms appeared to be rice paddies, indicating that Goa is not always as dry as we had the pleasure of encountering it.

Onward and upward we wheeled, taking the occasional side road which petered at a little farmstead, at which point we turned around, heading back to the main thoroughfare. By the time we crested the highest point in the road, it was well after noon, and time to turn back. We could not resist the temptation to take a brief detour onto one of the pounded dirt paths that wound its way between the smaller rice paddies.

At one point we found ourselves in a strange area where a matrix of new roads had been recently built, but it seemed the project had since then been aborted. It now lay as a naked grid-work of poured concrete, awaiting houses and businesses to flesh it out. All it got, that day at least, was two fellows on folding bicycles in Panama hats, rolling from the concrete matrix onto the packed earth farm paths and eventually back onto the main road, toward town.

We were able to stop for a quick Indian haircut at a roadside shack;  the haircuts did not result in the desert of flesh favored by barbers in Uttar Pradesh.

We had enough time for a late lunch/dinner at one of the myriad seaside restaurants that flank the white swath of Palolem Beach. It had been a hard wheel and we were tired and hungry. When I wandered to the back of the restaurant, I noticed how at home I had become with the Indian style of urinal. Here, as in many places, the bathroom featured a normal urinal, but with only half the usual amount of plumbing, with a working flusher, but a drain that just emptied onto the sandy concrete at one’s feet. Having been here for some time, I found myself easily engaging in the necessary dance to avoid peeing on one’s shoes and returned to find Scott in the restaurant, our meal steaming before him.

We dined on biryani, fried fish, palak paneer, dahl makhni, and tandoori roti. The sun sank toward the water as we discussed India, and the strange cocktail of stresses that it put on us.

As the sky became orange, we left and walked down the beach to arrange for a taxi that would drive us across the border into the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, and from which we would catch a bus. When we arrived to meet our driver, there were a thoroughly disconcerting number of bait and switches with different models of cabs and different drivers, as they presumably struggled to figure out which cab would accommodate our cycles. Being old hands at packing the speed TRs into even modest cabs, we assured them that any of the wide arrange of models that had trunks would work. Finally we all agreed on a particular driver-cab combo and were off.

Crossing the border into Karnataka required the payment of a little baksheesh to police who were controlling the border. Our cab driver had already alerted us to this, and, in fact, included it in the price of the cab. So Scott and I were none too surprised when he slowed the vehicle down as we approached border control, scrolled down his window, and handed a wad of cash to a cop in shiny aviator sunglasses.

It was night by the time we got to the bus station in Karwar. The bus would have no bathroom, so I dashed off to purchase snacks and urinate one last time, while Scott began negotiating with the bus operators to secure a safe spot for the speed TRs in the belly of the bus. The street vendor that I selected had plenty of biscuits, little bottles of fruit juice, and Magic Masala chips, but was short on change for the 12 rupees he owed me. So we negotiated a rate and he agreed to pay my change in bananas. Laden with biscuits and bananas, I made my way back to the bus where we climbed on to find it very clean and comfortable, equipped with bunks rather than seats, and while there was no A/C, we were able to open a long thin window to let in enough air to allow us to sleep.  The quarters were close, but with the exhaustion of the day, we were able to sleep soundly on the upper bunk double bed that had been reserved for us.

Before we knew it, we were back in Bangalore.

We awoke to the sound of the surf in our delightful little bungalow at Cozy Nook. Ours was a little stand-alone hut that hovered about three feet in the air on a set of stilts, and was built from all kinds of found materials – mostly second-hand bits of wood and plastic, with a number of plastic and canvas tarpaulins spread over the top.

Inside there were a few cobbled-together solutions meeting the need for cabinetry, and a large bed in the center, with a vast blotchy expanse of mosquito netting. There was a little outdoor bathroom tacked on the back with a cold water shower, a toilet, and a chipped green wash basin. The place was just dripping with character and quite comfortable. There was even a single outlet for charging our various machines.

We drank our first cup of coffee in the Cozy Nook restaurant. It was Nescafe, so it was decent, but nothing to write home about. Nescafe is sort of like the McDonald’s of coffee. It’s quite easy to find, and always can be relied on for consistent mediocrity. From there, we made our way to the cycles. It had probably been a poor decision, leaving them locked at the entrance to the beach. Certainly, the crowd of locals who formed to chat with us and ask the cost of the Speed TRs thought so. We just thanked goodness they were safe and sound. We asked for a breakfast joint recommendation only to find that there was no option in our current town for local breakfast food. It was too touristy. We would need to wheel to the next city over, about  four km away.

We were beginning to get hungry, and all that Nescafe on an empty stomach was beginning to get uppity, but four km on the Speed TRs seemed manageable, so we took off. Immediately, as I began to pedal, I noticed something was wrong with my bike. I looked down at my chain and grimaced as I saw what the issue was. It seemed that the ring had been quite ravaged by the baggage handlers at Go Air, leaving it bent to such a degree that the wobbling in the chain threatened to shift the rear gear with every rotation of the pedal.

This would need to be dealt with. But first: food. It was then that we realized we were also out of money.

The hunger began to lay in more strongly, as we wheeled in search of an ATM, the damage to my cycle fed into the downward cycle of blood sugar, no money in the wallet, and mounting despair. When we finally located an ATM, we were nearing the point of madness. I was able to get some money, and we should have just eaten at the nearby south Indian coffee house, but when we looked inside, the madness took hold, and we became scared that the place was not clean enough.

So we wheeled on. The next city we came to was filled with uniformed Indian school children, clogging the road, screaming at us, and scurrying to-and-fro in beige pleats. All of them, it seemed, were recently let loose for a lunch break, and we were barely able to wheel through the crowd. We did somehow, and finally made it the rest of the way through this city, but still were unable to find a restaurant that looked like it would not give us cholera. Both of us were becoming frantic and jittery. My stomach was a churning pit of coffee that sent electrical shocks through my body, and my grip on logic and reality was getting quite tenuous.

We turned around and decided to take a random turn through the midst of the crowd of children, toward a spot where a number of streams of traffic seemed to be originating, honking and belching smoke. We wheeled on while the children called out to us, one of them grabbing at my rear rack as we rode by. On the other side, we were able to find a very crowded and decidedly filthy restaurant. We were quite delirious by this point, and parking the bikes proved a harrowing experience, with shop keepers coming out and scolding us for parking, telling us to move on farther down the street. We finally found a spot; it elicited some minor complaints but not enough to raise the shop keeps from where they sat, so we locked the bikes and went into the restaurant.

It was crowded and steaming hot inside the long narrow space. No one seemed to be smiling and we were forced to yell over the clang and hiss of the kitchen. We sat down, but no one came to take our order. The other clientele frowned into their food, hitting us with darting scowls. I have no idea how long we sat there. It could have been three minutes or 30. But finally we just got up and left, climbed back on the cycles, and rode wordlessly back to the original restaurant we had seen near the ATM.

It proved to be delicious. We ate a giant meal of two dosas each followed by more cups of milky sweet coffee. The feeling of blood sugar returning to my system was glorious.

Back on the road, we decided to wheel north, through the beautiful Goan countryside.  We climbed over large hills, the tops of which were covered with senescent vegetation, and the cracked mud of long forgotten rice paddies.

This arid desolation was put in stark contrast with the deep green jungles that lay in the valleys spread out in the mists below us.  We took a few detours to explore the surrounding towns.

Very much unlike the town we had visited before breakfast, these were all tourist industry towns, sporting endless rows of little restaurants, guest houses, and liquor shops. Also of some interest was the prevalence of signs in Hebrew and Russian, indicating that tourists from such places were common here. The road quality had diminished greatly from the impressively smooth main road, and we clattered over potholes and stretches of course gravel, my wounded Speed TR performing admirably.

After a brief waypoint at a nearby beach, we pedaled back to the main road, which was refreshingly smooth. We followed this uphill for quite some time, until we reached a kind of arid highland plateau. The heat and the climb were getting to both of us, so we paused here to purchase refreshments from a bright blue concrete shop, and take stock of our situation.

We finally decided to turn back for the day, lest we be trapped on the other side of this great hill, with little want for the massive climb. So back we went.

It was certainly time to eat again, when we passed an interesting feminist restaurant/commune/shop. We decided to eat there, and support the cause.

We were far from disappointed at the decision. They served an interesting organic take on the classic Indian thali, with beet relish, and a rich fresh vegetable raita.

These were by far the freshest vegetables we had eaten in a meal for all of our time in India. It felt good to put something other than fried batters, potatoes, lentils, and rice into our gullets. Unbeknownst to us, I think the Indian diet was wearing on our systems, for this meal sticks out quite starkly in my mind as one that fueled and improved me significantly.

We wheeled the rest of the way back to Palolem Beach at a lazy pace, as we discussed the finer points of international marketing strategy after re-joining with our friend Sam, whom we had originally met in Cochin.

Our flight to Goa was not until 3:00 pm, so we were able to indulge once again in the comfort of Win’s apartment, rising late in the day to be greeted by Win’s staff who were quite eager to make us a traditional Indian breakfast, followed by a few cups of that, now oh so familiar, sweet milky Indian coffee. Win had arrived home very late the night before, and though we had done our best to communicate to the servants that it would be okay for them to go home, the entire staff had stayed the night, setting up beds on the kitchen and living room floors. At one point I found myself apologizing profusely when in the middle of the night I had tripped over one of them on the way to find my cell phone charger.

We resisted departure as long as we could, feasting on the abundance of Internet, filtered drinking water, and cups of coffee which Win’s staff so generously gave to us.

When the time came, we hauled the bikes downstairs to the courtyard, where we began to pack them up.

We could not do this, however, until one of the security guards finished taking a ride around the building on the Speed TR. This he did with much gusto and a huge grin, taking quite a few victory laps on Scott’s bike, while I headed out along frontage road looking for a cab.

When I finally made it to the intersection, I found myself confronted with a fuming, deafening gridlock of black and yellow cabs, all honking and screaming at each other. Most of these had fares and were too locked into the mayhem for me to attempt to make contact and initiate bargaining. On the other side of the raging gridlock, I found a number of cabs that all seemed to be lorded over by a central character, a large fellow in the flowing white gown and cap which advertised his religion. He had a number of cabs and rickshaws. The cabs all seemed unable to go to the airport, and a rickshaw was too small to fit ourselves and our luggage. For one reason or another each cab driver I spoke to seemed unwilling to go to the airport. Finally I was able to find a driver in one of the small van taxis they call “Omnis” who seemed interested in driving us to the airport, and though I was making good progress in nonverbal communication with him, the white gowned fellow came over and began to play translator, taking the opportunity to work out some sort of profit-sharing deal with the driver. Soon we had agreed on a price, and our man was jamming the Omni into gear, suspension lurching and belts squealing forward into the steaming gridlock that separated us from Scott and the bikes.

Some 10 minutes of horn honking and traffic jam aggravating later, I pulled up to find Scott smiling at me from behind his sunglasses. All our bags were packed up and piled neatly in a corner. The staff had lined up to shake our hands, as the security guard who had ridden the bike started to give us the hard sell on why we should just leave the Speed TRs with him, since we were, after all, going back to America, where folding bicycles grow on trees.

Wrong on both accounts, we assured him. And with a tip of the Panama hats, we were back on the road. The van had no third gear, so the ride to the airport was very loud. But soon enough we made it. Negotiation of the domestic part of the Mumbai airport proved quite simple. It had been remodeled since we visited it during the pilot study, and it now gleamed with all the new wealth of India.

I went off in search of some Vadas to snack on while Scott waited in a vast and snaking line to take advantage of our free coffee coupons (Thanks Go Air). I was just returning when I heard Scott scream out in pain, “Aye! Aye! Aye!” It seems that just after his long wait was finally over, he was proudly returning with the scalding load when a small portly woman, in an attempt to traverse the massive the line, ducked and wove behind him, scuttling through Scott’s legs and popping up at precisely the right moment to spill boiling hot boiling milky brew all over the two of them. I hustled to grab napkins and Scott and the woman began a fierce bout of apologies.

Later on, Scott was running his arm under cool water. “We just can’t seem to execute a domestic Indian flight without some mishap,” he observed. Would it really be India if we could?

Onboard Go Air’s flight from Mumbai to Goa, we found some subtle increases in the pricing of on-board snacks compared to the Bangalore-to-Mumbai leg, but for the most part were once again quite impressed with the airline. We also had the great pleasure of sitting next to a beautiful young architect from Goa by the name of Anna, who was happy to sit in as a surrogate member of the AsiaWheeling advisory board for the flight, explaining to us that travel back to Bangalore would be much easier by bus, and showing us on a map how we could take a cab to another city in the nearby province of Karnataka, and catch a bus from there to Bangalore.

Very much in Anna’s debt, we exited the airplane into the fresh air of Goa, which we savored for only a second before being herded into a bus and transported to the airport’s interior. Goa is certainly a tourist destination. The airport was like a less organized, less expensive version of the one in Bali, with many tropical potted plants, beach imagery, and figurines depicting men carrying loads of coconuts and scantily clad women whipping their shawls around in the sea air. We couldn’t wait to do the same, so we quickly piled into a taxi and headed south toward our hotel, a place that had come highly recommended by our friends in Mumbai, by the name of Cozy Nook.

It was in a place called Palolem Beach, in the south of Goa. And when our driver finally got there, we were not only quite hungry but surprised to find that our hotel was only reachable by walking down the beach. Rather than deal with that on the cycles, we locked them to a pole with a large “no parking sign,” which was being widely ignored by the locals, and headed down the beach.

It was a bit of a trek, and gave us the chance to take in the world around us. It was a nice white sand beach, covered completely with inns and restaurants.  Everywhere we looked there were white people, mostly in the sort of hippy-esque Indian influenced garb that is oh so common among those post-army-service Israelis who seem to be spread all over India and south-east Asia, spending a little time traveling and relaxing after what was no doubt an extremely intense experience. These made up the majority of the vacationers, but the group was also spiced with large numbers of older, more affluent looking European and Australian types, bathing in the greenish brown opaque sea, playing Frisbee on the beach, or strolling and attempting to fend off the many begging stray dogs which scurried everywhere.

We were almost to the Cozy Nook when my stomach suddenly tensed into knots. I had forgotten my Ukulele back where we parked the bikes! “Sorry, Scott,” I said “You’ll need to haggle for the room and check in alone. I need to run back and see if it’s not too late to save my baby.” So I threw down my pack, took off the Panama hat, and began to sprint down the beach. A couple of stray dogs joined me at first but soon lost interest. My legs began to throb and demanded I slow down, but I refused them. Finally panting and wheezing, I scrambled up off the beach and across the concrete parking area, but my uke was nowhere to be seen.

My heart fell like a stone into a frozen abyss of defeat. How could I have been so stupid? How was I supposed to sit by the beach here in Goa and strum Jimmy Buffet’s Margarittaville without my trusty uke? What an idiot I was… Ah, cruel fate.

Just then I heard a fellow call over to me. It was our cab driver. He was sitting at a nearby Chai stand, sipping tea and in his hands… my ukulele!

I ran over to him with tears in my eyes and took the instrument. I looked down at it. Not so fast, I thought, there are still a few more places we need to go together.

Finally, we were managing to catch up on sleep, and feeling some of that old time AsiaWheeling energy surging back into our systems.  We awoke and took a whiff of the air of this new city sprawling before us.  Wheeling it would be a new challenge, and a welcome one.

Staying at Win’s place was the height of luxury. It too was a serviced apartment, but very different from those we had the misfortune of lodging at in Bangalore’s Diamond District. These were staffed by a crack squad of savvy and motivated personnel. It seemed we could not go more than four steps in that apartment without bumping into a service person offering us some kind of pampering.

Win’s staff made us delightful breakfasts of toast, omelets, exotic fresh cut fruit, and an endless supply of meticulously prepared little milky cups of coffee. The staff was also constantly offering, and at times we even took them up on, the service of lunches and dinners, which proved to be lavishly decadent and expertly spiced, with many courses, ranging from cooling fresh salads, to spicy curries, to home-made chapatti.

These dishes were served to us at so extreme a level that we were not even able to spoon our own seconds from the main platter. The apartment’s staff consisted of three fellows, one who seemed to focus on cooking and work in the kitchen, one who did mostly cleaning, and another who focused on serving us things and making sure we were comfortable. In an apartment with only two bedrooms, a modestly sized living room and a small kitchen, that was quite the crowd. Most of our time at Win’s we were quite outnumbered by the servants. To be honest, for both Scott and me, being so lavishly served was a somewhat disconcerting experience.

From an intellectual perspective, I can appreciate that these fellows were simply doing their jobs, and doing them quite well, so for this they have all my respect. I can also appreciate that in the Indian economy, this was a pretty good opportunity for these fellows. They were making decent money, and got to spend all day in the luxury and comfort of Win’s apartment, making sure that Scott and I had enough coffee. But at the same time, being served is not an easy thing to get used to. I was never quite able to relax, and found myself feeling guilty from time to time when I took them up on an offer of service. And I was never quite sure to what degree I should acknowledge and interact with the fellows as I went about my everyday life. It seemed strange to greet them every five minutes. I certainly don’t do that with Scott. But they were greeting and acknowledging me every time we passed or drew near. And was my acknowledgment and greeting taken as a request for some service to be performed? I am sure you are beginning to get the idea, dear reader.

So while the service was great, we were also quite glad to strike out on our own onto the boiling streets of Mumbai. Arthor Danchest, of Tiffin Talk fame, had given us directions to a beach side drive, which he assured us would make a delightful wheel, and rather than get there via the crowded and deafening highway we had traversed the night before, we thought we might cut across town through the vast sea of crumbling one-story structures that lay between Win’s place and the railway line, which cut off his half of the neighborhood called “Bandra” from the part of that same neighborhood popular with Bollywood stars.

We were only a short bit into this wheel when our phone rang. It was Nikhil, our India Bureau Chief. It seemed that our berths on the upcoming train to Goa still languished quite low on the Indian Railway’s wait-list. And it seemed to Nikhil that we would likely not get a seat. Shucks; we would need to take a bus or a plane. “The buses will be very uncomfortable,” Nikhil explained. This seemed rather a strange assertion, as he had offered them up as a viable option earlier, but we took his advice, and called an unscheduled return to home base to purchase airplane tickets. The staff at Win’s seemed thrilled to see us again, and glad to hear that we were not, in fact, arriving in search of lunch (which, under the impression that we would be out all day, they had not been preparing). In order to merely spend more than we planned to, and not fully break the bank, we needed to leave a day later than planned, cutting our time in Goa short, but giving us another day to enjoy the bizarre luxuries of Win’s apartment.

Back on the road, we made short time of traversing the sprawling low-income neighborhood, dodging a couple of bits of rubbish that were thrown at us by the local children, and stopping once or twice to gain our bearings, only to attract a phenomenal crowd of locals, interested primarily in estimates of the price of the Speed TRs.

We finally broke out into the vicinity of the railroad, where we portaged the bikes over a pedestrian walkway, finding ourselves once again in familiar territory from our un-fortuitous wanderings the night before. It was every bit as loud as we had remembered it, but the speed of traffic was slow, which allowed us to wheel more safely as legitimate parts of the traffic. As we wheeled west toward the water, I found myself wondering: how do the people of this city learn to deal with the incandescently searing noise. I was constantly finding my nerves blitzed and eardrums nearly blown asunder by a passing moped, while the locals seemed not even to notice. Was it possible that devastating hearing damage had actually lessened the intensity of the street noise to a manageable level? Or had they developed some yogic, water-off-a-duck’s-back, inner-strength-exterior-malaise system?

I was torn from this interesting vein of thought when, in a way that was always unsuspected but never surprising, the hunger hit. We were able, luckily, to find in short order, a delightful and succulent Punjabi restaurant, which was happy to serve us some of the most delectable raita of my life. The Palak Paneer, Dal Makhni, and Tandoori Roti were not bad either. While we ate, they played a most fascinating Punjabi Hip Hop.

Back on the cycles, we made our way to the water and rode north, but not before posing for a quick one with the staff of Punjabi Sweet House.

The sea view was startlingly apocalyptic, with brown waves lapping against a dead and blackened shore. Many of the locals, however, seemed to be quite enjoying the place, out for picnics on the barren moon-like expanse or strolling along the stone walkway.

We rode north until the presence of a railroad blocked our progress. There we were faced with a decision. We needed to be in the south of the city to meet with our dear friend Mr. Kaustubh Shah, and we could take a local train there. Or we could attempt to make our way the entire north-south length of Mumbai on bicycle. We had no idea how to do this, but if we relied on our compasses and kept making our way south, the geography of Mumbai should funnel us to exactly where we wanted to be.

Scott and I looked at each other and at my calculator watch… Dealing with the plane tickets had taken some time, but this is AsiaWheeling after all, and how many times does one get the change to wheel the length of Mumbai? There was really only one choice. We called a rauche and headed south.

The wheel took us through a variety of interesting neighborhoods, past wandering cows, piles of burning garbage, women in fantastically bright saris, strange construction sites, shops selling all kinds of goods, dead ends, very sick people wandering the streets like pale, sweaty, zombies, gentlemen welding with just a pair of sunglasses as protection, and a number of overflowing sewers clogged with garbage. We thanked our stars that it was not the rainy season, for we can only imagine what happens when the monsoon rains take all these things and whip them up into a seething choleric soup. This wheel was harrowing enough, in the bright sunshine.

Eventually we found ourselves on the main North/South road, which took us right toward Kaustubh’s part of town. You see, Mumbai is located on a few great islands, and we were working our way down the length of the largest of these. So when we once again broke free from the interior of the city and could see the ocean, we were much encouraged. We had to be close. We celebrated our imminent success by stopping at a strange cluster of tea stalls outside the headquarters of YesBank, a local retail bank.

We re-hydrated and re-caffeinated while chatting with some fellows from the YesBank Corporate Intelligence unit before climbing back on the Speed TRs. The North/South road ended there, and we began a process of zigging and zagging our way toward the southernmost financial district.

As we rode, we found ourselves at times feeling like we were in New York, at times Palm Beach, and at other times San Francisco.

When we finally reached the correct neighborhood, we felt like we were in Europe. Large churches and baroque government buildings were flanking great parade grounds. In the background a few skyscrapers loomed.

It was once again time to stop for a couple of delicious vada and South Indian coffees at a local poorly lit joint, before returning back to the seaside to watch the sunset.

No sooner had we pulled our bikes onto the seaside walk, than we were quite surprised to feel a tap on the shoulder and turn around to find none other than Mr. Kaustubh  Shah himself, smiling at us.

That evening, we dined at Moshe’s, a local eatery famed for its blueberry pie, and discussed a number of potential business opportunities that had come to our minds since being in the country. As the evening drew to a close, we loaded the cycles onto the local train and headed back to Bandra.

The extremes of experience that had transpired the day before had left us exhausted, necessitating an indulgence in sleep, which would under any other circumstances be downright shameful. We woke so late, in fact, that we barely had enough time to work on correspondence before our most gracious host, Win Bennett, wandered in the door, home from work. Furthermore, with only barely enough time to overcome the preliminary chatting phase of interaction, we once again needed to excuse ourselves to hop on the cycles and head to an interview with Tiffin Talk, one of the first local news radio shows in Mumbai.

It was 7:00 pm and the sun had set. Win explained to us that traffic would be thick, but we were confident by then in our ability to navigate dense traffic on the Speed TRs and set out, expecting to make better time than had we taken a cab.

Outside Win’s apartment, we attracted quite a crowd, as employees from both Win’s and the surrounding buildings gathered to see the strange foreigners in Panama hats unfold their bizarre cycles. The crowd grew even more delighted as we attached our Knog Frog LED lights, and showed off the Speed TR’s internal headlamp, powered by the front dynamo hub.

Already running a bit late, we wheeled out of Win’s place, down a long thin crumbling drive called “Frontage Road,” which runs parallel to a giant sewage duct. Following Win’s directions, we climbed onto a nearby highway that proved to be quite unlit, and trafficked by an alarming number of taxis and auto rickshaws with no headlamps. While dark shapes roared by us on this giant unlit highway, we thanked the stars that at least we were lit up like aircraft carriers.

Traffic finally got thick as we were exiting the highway, wheeling our way around a vast curve. Soon we were forced to stop amidst a thick swarm of cars, auto rickshaws, and motor bikes, all pumping noxious smoke from their tailpipes. I coughed on the acrid exhaust, and found myself stunned at the ambient noise level. It seemed everyone in Mumbai had installed or modified their horns to create something louder and more unique. The horns also exhibited a strange anti-correlation with the size of the craft bearing the device. A gigantic cement truck might have a horn that merely made a cutesy “tickle tootleoo” noise, while the smallest 40 cc scooter would sport a gigantic fog horn overlaid with piercing and sweeping sirens.

Needless to say, in the insanity of the traffic, the noise, and the dearth of street signs, we ended up quite lost. This being not so atypical a situation for the AsiaWheeling team, we rode on, trusting in our compass and asking directions again and again, each time getting rather conflicting data. We were encountering another interesting Indian societal trait: when confronted with a request for data that one does not have, it seems it is more socially acceptable to provide vague or downright incorrect data than to admit ignorance. So with each sample, our pool of possible directions grew larger and more conflicted. Nevertheless, we kept on riding, hoping that the radio show was not live (since we were quite late by this point). We finally questioned a well-to-do Indian fellow who was so exacting and loquacious in his direction giving, and so debonair in his electric purple, well pressed silk shirt, that we began to gain hope in the validity of our trajectory.

And sure enough, it worked. We strode, sweaty and triumphant, into the courtyard of the makeshift studios of Tiffin Talk and recorded this interview:

(iTunes Link | Direct Download | Tiffin Talk Stream)

With that out of the way, we were free to meet up with Win and his friend Alex. Arthor Danchest, the host of Tiffin Talk, also gave us the pleasure of his company as we indulged in a little culinary escapism with them at a local European restaurant.

We awoke, for what might easily turn out to be the last time during the entirety of the trip, separately, in our rather sprawling flat at the Diamond District Serviced Apartments. I could hear voices in the hall and walked out the door of my room to find Scott struggling once again to communicate with a group of three fellows who had appeared at our door. Somewhat earlier, it seems, Scott had woken, phoned down for breakfast, and these three men had arrived quite flabbergasted and confused. For you see, dear reader, at some point earlier that morning, while we still slumbered, some fellows from the serviced apartments had crept into our room and deposited two cups of coffee, a loaf of white bread, and a cylindrical Indian schoolchild’s food storage container filled with what later proved to be spiced omelet in the dining room.

Not for the first time, we found the presence of the fellows to be an uncomfortable one. They moped around the room, making strange gestures that were perhaps solicitations for tips, and spent much time looking at our belongings, at us, and at each other sheepishly. Finally one of them worked up the nerve to ask whether we’d like him to make toast. We happily agreed and attempted to emanate positive energy into the icy room while heartily laying into breakfast. We were making what we believed to be a concerted effort, but the fact that they had unlocked and entered our room while we were sleeping, needless to say, was also disconcerting, hampering our ability to connect with these people on a human-to-human basis. I doubt thievery was an appreciable threat, but our privacy certainly felt violated. And now, with the inarticulately justified presence of these fellows, we found it quite hard even to enjoy our now cold and many hours old breakfast. Considering this was the most expensive accommodation of the trip to date, why were we not basking in splendorous joy and luxury?

Though lines of communication were still quite frayed, in the time since the arrival of the service crew, we were able to order two more cups of coffee, which were made in some far away place and delivered in more Indian School children’s lunch equipment, appearing downstairs with all our luggage only some five minutes after the scheduled check out time, which in India is early.

We stowed our belongings in a spare room that seemed to play the role of servants’ quarters at the Diamond District Serviced Apartments, and soon found our man Nikhil wheeling his way across the sprawling interior courtyard of the Diamond District toward us on his Hindustan Hero bicycle. “I trust you have slept well?” he asked. All unauthorized entries aside, we had, and soon the street was whipping comfortably underneath us.

Nikhil needed to eat, so we stopped into a local South Indian coffee shop, and had another couple of cups while Nikhil dug into a huge pile of honeyed grains with dried fruit in them and a big puffy fried poori.

Our first waypoint was a local market district, which jostled and smoked beneath the stern facade of a looming Catholic church. We parked our bikes outside the church, where a large crowd of children soon gathered to ring the bells, shift the gears, and ask us where we were from.

By now we were completely used to this type of behavior and simply let it occur, making a mental note not to pedal too hard right after remounting the cycles. Inside the church, we watched as hordes of Indians walked through the well lit halls, some of them sporting a cross painted over their third eye, stopping occasionally at enclosed glass cases, pressing their hands against the glass, and peering in fiercely at the mannequin icons of saints inside, before closing their eyes and praying a bit.

Back in the market, we wandered around peering in at the various wares; some of the market was conventional shops, but much commerce took place in outdoor, mobile stalls, or laid out on large tarpaulins.

We called a waypoint during the stroll to purchase another bike lock, bringing AsiaWheeling’s grand total to two.  With newly doubled security, we piled back on the bikes toward the corner of Mahatma Ghandi Road and Brigade Road, where we were to meet the lovely Shivani Mistry, whose name, which may have come directly from an Ian Fleming novel, made us all the more intrigued.

She was suffering from some navigational and logistical troubles acquiring a cycle, but promised to be arriving shortly.

We sipped coffee at yet another startlingly posh (and dare I say escapist) recommendation of Nikhil’s, where we quite surprisingly ran into a couple of Brown University graduates, who were living and traveling in South India (escapism pays dividends sometimes). No sooner had we finished our coffee and chatting, than we found ourselves face to face with Ms. Mistry herself, armed with a flashy mountain bike, purportedly the personal cycle of the owner of the bike shop, which he had provided upon finding his rental supply depleted.  Photo below courtesy of Shivani Mistry.

Next order of business was finding a South Indian Coffee Shop to fix the starving problem, and throw a little more caffeine in the system. When cycling in hectic Indian traffic, I’ll take all the lucidity I can get.

We acquainted ourselves with Shivani over the meal, and spent some time showing off the many feats of The WikiReader.

The coffee shop was great. Serving slightly greasier than usual, but extra tasty dosas and vadas, plenty of coconut chutney, and strong sweet coffee. Perhaps even better than the substance was the decor, which featured a number of strange tilted mirrors, lots of hand-painted labeling, waiters in strange white and red traditional suits, with giant belt buckles resembling huge polished seat belts, and plenty of vintage posters from the Indian Coffee Board.

Back on the road, we found that although it was Ms. Mistry’s first time wheeling the Indian roads, she was quite the natural, with lightning fast reflexes, an open mind, and a knack for signaling her intent.

We made our way back across the city toward that flawed Diamond District, which we happily overshot, instead opting to explore the old Bangalore Airport.

We approached it on a semi-closed, palm-tree-lined road, and there we found the old airport itself to be completely closed down. Ms. Mistry happily rode up the handicapped access ramp and down the deserted walkway, while we looped through the parking lots.

Soon we saw our female compatriot re-emerging, somewhat flustered and grinning, followed by an Indian serviceman with a rifle. The armed man wobbled his head in a way that decidedly communicated “not okay for wheeling.” Fair enough.

Cycling back, we saw two eerie images adjacent to one another.  One public service announcement next to a biscuit ad made for quite an unsettling combination.

Traffic sped up, and we continued on.

After a brief stopover at Nikhil’s residence, a delightful apartment on a sleepy street near the old airport, we were back at the Diamond District Serviced Apartments, where we collected our belongings.

They had been moved around a bit, but still seemed to contain all our important or valuable belongings. My ukulele had quite obviously been removed, de-tuned, and replaced in its case, but “no harm no foul,” as they say.

Nikhil began a series of phone calls with his cab company of choice, inquiring as to why the 6:00 pm cab that he had arranged for us was nonexistent, while we collapsed the speed TRs and discussed the finer points of AsiaWheeling and Yoga with Ms. Mistry.

It was not until around 7:00 pm that our cab finally arrived. The driver immediately began to demonstrate negative characteristics, attempting to re-haggle an already more than reasonable fare, showing a total lack of connection to the machine he was piloting (marked initially by an inability to open the trunk), and generally exhibiting glassy eyed dopiness. We were a little worried, but thought back to that old Jerry Seinfeld bit: “after all, the man is a professional,” so we took the keys from him, opened the trunk ourselves, and loaded the cab.

We waved goodbye to both Mr. Kulkarni and Ms. Mistry as the cab eased its way somewhat confusedly around and out of the compound. I must say here that we, for the first time on this trip, must publicly bestow the AsiaWheeling stamp of disapproval on the Diamond District Serviced Apartments. A lack of understanding in the departments of service, communication, and price performance, left us with a resoundingly sour taste in our mouths. A taste made only more sour when we found ourselves having to notify our driver that though it was night on the unlit side streets of Bangalore, he had neglected to activate his headlamps. The taste grew downright acidic when the fellow took a startlingly long time to locate the controls to activate the lamps.  We were now on full alert.

It was no more than 10 minutes into the drive, when our driver pulled into an intersection, while merging, and crunched into a small blue Tata that was driving in the lane to our left. Scott and I thanked God as our dumbfounded driver successfully avoided a concrete barrier in the center of the street, and popped the car over the edge of a walkway, narrowly avoiding a large river-like open sewer, finally navigating to the side of the road, as a hissing of air concurred with the right side of the car lowering a few inches closer to the ground. At the end of this, he turned to us with the same glassy eyes and said “tire puncture.”

“Damn straight it was a tire puncture!,” we voiced in exasperation. And a whole simultaneous harrowing experience to boot! As the driver got out of the car, and began furiously arguing in Kannada with the fellow he had just crunched into, we bust into action. No one appeared to be injured, and the damage to the two cars appeared to be minor enough. You see, dear reader, we had a plane to catch in less than two hours and we were in the middle of the smoky highway during rush hour at night in Bangalore. Scott began to work on flagging a new cab, and I called Nikhil. No answer.

In the meantime, a large cop in a wide brimmed hat, one side of which was pinned to his head by his badge, was pacing and surveying the scene. Finally, I was able to ring Nikhil, and the phone was passed from the cop to our driver to a fellow in a black shirt who had recently joined our small crowd in the middle of the highway, seemingly with the sole intention of stirring the pot. I’ll never be quite sure what they were all talking about, because just then Scott hailed a cab, and we began the hurried process of haggling and moving our luggage out of the wounded and crumpled cab.

Much to our delight and relief, we secured an even better deal with this cabby, who appeared quite alert, drove a registered airport taxi, and was all ready to rejoin traffic and help us make our flight, when the traffic cop came over. Our cabby began to look very worried, and spoke to us in whispered tones… “There was no accident… This police man. Nothing happened. Okay? 100 rupees there will be no accident.”

So there it was: the first bribery solicitation of AsiaWheeling. The total was about $2.50. Scott and I looked at each other, I looked at my watch, and we handed over the rupees.  Talk about innovation in Bangalore…

Back on the road, the intensity of what had just happened began to wash over us. Our new driver darted expertly through the traffic, but we were rattled, and with each move I clenched the ukulele like a long lost friend and babbled, unloading my anxiety in a verbal torrent on Scott.

We reached the airport, and paid our driver, rushing to the counter, and pacing like crazy people, both tortured by a terribly vocal need to urinate. In order to enter the airport and reach the bathroom, though, we needed to get our tickets, which meant waiting in line. What seemed like an eternity later, we were exiting the bathroom. And heading towards the Go Air Counter.

After congratulating the Go Air employees on one of the best attempts to upsell us to business class that we have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, we were given free coupons to get some hot tea from a nearby vendor. As we drank the tea, we finally began to relax.

Security was surprisingly tight, though we were able to stroll through sipping our tea. All our unchecked belongings were thoroughly inspected, detected, and returned to us bearing numerous stamps. We then made our way into the terminal. It seemed so clean and organized, with many little tidy western looking shops, free drinking water, and some delightful and shockingly expensive restaurants. When our flight turned out to be delayed, we decided to indulge in a little of the over-priced food, digging greasily into big plates of parathas and gravy. Beer was being sold at over $10 a can, so we sorrowfully refrained.  That was one culinary escape we couldn’t quite afford to make.

As the night wore on, the flight became increasingly delayed, and with it our fellow passengers restless. By 11:00 pm, though there had been no alert to queue for boarding, many people were crowding around the ticket counter. The stench of anger was beginning to fill the room. Meanwhile we were happily working on correspondence, drawing in the kind of zen approach that business travelers acquire in order to deal with the American air travel system.  About the time that we were taking a break from correspondence to chat with a segment director for Slumdog Millionaire, the crowd became quite angry, necessitating the dispatch of armed guards.

When the equipment finally landed and boarding appeared to be beginning, we were quite flabbergasted to find that the crowd was refusing to board. Their argument, it seems, was that the plane was so delayed, that they were so wronged, that at this point they would rather not board, and fight on. Having been hardened by the American system, and quite used to absurd and offensive delays, we made our way through the crowd of furious Indians, feeling not unlike scabs, and somehow simultaneously chagrined and guilt-ridden, we boarded our flight for Mumbai.

When we landed in Mumbai, we were happy to find our cycles and baggage arrived as well, all in fine shape. We were unhappy to find that the prepaid taxi counter had closed down, necessitating the arrangement of more unregulated transport. As we made our way toward the crowd of taxis and drivers that were lazing in the heat of the Mumbai night, we soon attracted a great crowd of fellows around us, engaging in some truly despicable maneuvers, all designed to induce panic and confusion.

However, we had been through so much that day that we were completely unflappable.  Scott responded to the crowd that encircled him, all speaking at once in frantic tones, by squealing the old playground vocalization “Nananananananana!,” closing his eyes, and pushing the cart forward.   I turned to the fellow next to me who had been screaming, touching my arms and chest, and attempting to whisk my luggage cart away toward his taxi. I put my hand on his shoulder: “Relax,” I said. “Everything is okay.”

We made our way over to the cluster of taxis and began fiercely bargaining. By now it was about 3:00 am. Finally, we found a likely 16-year-old young man who was willing to drive us the 20 minutes to our man Win’s house in Bandra for a price that might be considered merely over-paying, rather than being robbed blind, and we took off.

Not long into the drive, we realized that our man spoke no English, and also had no idea where we were going. But in a shining act of navigational prowess, Scott used some notes he had made from a previous phone call with Win to navigate us close enough to his building that we could ask a fellow who was wandering the streets in a long flowing white robe for the remaining directions.

We were quite thrilled to finally make our way into Win’s luxurious apartment. The journey had taken us to the extremes of experience and back again into the comfortable womb of good fortune. Win had arranged for his staff to leave meals out for us, and we happily dug in. The fates had made a concerted effort to keep us out of Mumbai, but we had foiled them. Here we were. We looked out over one of the biggest cities in the world, re-playing the intensity of our day. Part of us was exhausted, but another part was wired on the madness.

We made it. That was the last thought I had before exhaustion took hold and I collapsed into the clean, sweet smelling sheets.

Well, dear reader, as you may have noticed, we’ve been wheeling around Bangalore with our dear India Bureau Chief, Nikhil Kulkarni, conducting a special report on entrepreneurship and innovation in that most interesting Indian city. And while we’ve been sharing those reports with you, we are also quite aware that many of you rely on AsiaWheeling as a source of data on interesting Asian foods. And, as you won’t be surprised to hear, we’ve been doing plenty of research on that as well here in Bangalore.

In fact, before we share some of those experiences with you, it might be relevant to mention an interesting phenomenon that we have been experiencing while eating and relaxing with our friends living in India. Namely, that many of them practice something I will define here as culinary escapism.

Culinary escapism, for the purposes of this piece of correspondence, is the propensity of an individual to pursue culinary experiences with the aim of escaping from his or her current surroundings. This can manifest itself in a few ways, but in AsiaWheeling’s experience it almost always means expensive food. Be it Indian or of some other ethnic variant, we have found that all of our friends in India use meals as a means of temporarily relieving themselves of the many stressful jolts that spice this country.

We, here at AsiaWheeling, being in pursuit of the extremes of experience and generally agreeable fellows, have been happy to follow suit and engage in, even foot the bill for, some quite flagrantly escapist meals. So, dear reader, you may find the following series of images to be startling in their lavish nature. We did too.

We have little need for culinary escapism here at AsiaWheeling, since the local cuisine refreshes itself every few days, and we are, after all, in search of, among other things, presence and lucidity within our surroundings (hence all the coffee).

Nonetheless, this phenomenon is worth taking a second to discuss, because it plays a very important role in both the lives of wealthy expatriates and anyone else here who can afford to eat food from a different culture. I imagine most of the non-immigrant clientele at an Ethiopian restaurant in Boulder, Colorado are practicing (an albeit diluted form of) culinary escapism as well. I dare say even many of you out there, dear readers, engage in a little bit of it while reading AsiaWheeling.  Of course, one may even argue that AsiaWheeling’s entire gastronomic adventure is an extended bout of culinary escapism.

What makes it so particularly interesting here in India is its prevalence and its intensity. As we dine with our friends here, we are without exception, also engaging in some of the most extraordinary escapism I have ever seen.

Is it India? Is it our friends? Likely a little of both, but while our budget for Bangalore lies in tattered rags at our feet, rejoice with us in the myriad of interesting places where we joined our friends to seek shelter from the reality outside.

We pulled the bikes up alongside a charming colonial coffee house by the name of Koshy’s. It’s somewhat of a Bangalore institution, as I understand.

We were meeting there with one of Bangalore’s rising stars, a fellow by the name of Gautam John. We sat down with Gautam over a colonial breakfast of English-style ham and eggs, and plenty of coffee, tea, and toast. We were thrilled to hear a bit of his story.

Gautam began his career as an entrepreneur by starting his own food company. It was an ingredients supplier, providing mostly processed and dehydrated foods. The shop was named “Foods and Flavors,” and he grew it to a respectable 150 employees before striking out in search of something more existentially fulfilling. Gautam found what he was looking for when he joined Pratham Books, where he could draw on his entrepreneurial experience to help them grow their non-profit. He only planned to spend six months, but so far has logged just over two and a half years at the firm. Why did he do this? Certainly it was not the money. As Gautam explained to us, non-profit workers in India can expect to earn about 25% what they would in the for-profit space, compared to a much higher ratio in the west. “For me, it’s the mission of this organization,” he explained. He simply loves the fact that his work is helping his fellow Indians.

Pratham Books was a non-profit publisher, which focused mainly on children’s books. Now it is the largest children’s books publisher in all of India. Its stated mission is to put “A Book in Every Child’s Hand” and they are well on their way, with plenty more work ahead. Currently the company produces about 1 million books, which are distributed mainly by third-party organizations (both governmental and non-governmental) to children in Indian villages. In addition they distribute another 2 million of what they call story cards, more rudimentary short stories, delivered on folding cards.

“We focus on high value for the child by producing books with rich illustrations and with text in their local languages,” Gautam explained. They sell these books to their distributors at heavily discounted rates. Setting a price, no matter how small, rather than giving the books away, Gautam explained, aids in the perception of value associated with the product, encouraging its more efficient utilization.” We are a non-profit, but we run in a way that is very close to a sustainable stand-alone business.”

Gautam also does work at another non-profit called the Akshara Foundation, a service which couples nicely with his work at Pratham. This organization works to aid the government in measuring its own efficiency in primary and pre-primary education. They administer a system of tests that measure Indian students’ acumen in reading, writing, and arithmetic. “The three Rs,” as Gautam described them. “Our tests produce much better data than the Indian government… and they’re not always happy to hear it.” Over 325,000 children in Bangalore have undergone the testing. Using this data, the organization works to implement remedial interventions aimed at helping weak students to catch up.

The work being done by  Pratham and The Akshara Foundation is just another gleaming example of the thriving spirit of entrepreneurship here in Bangalore. At the end of the meeting, we presented Gautam and Pratham with a gift from AsiaWheeling and our esteemed partners at Openmoko: a Wikireader. The wikireader, as you may have noticed, is our faithful companion on AsiaWheeling, providing us access to Wikipedia in all its textual glory, all from the comfort of a hand-held, touchscreen-enabled, year-long-battery-life-endowed handset.

Pratham Books,  AsiaWheeling wishes you continued success.

When we wheeled up to the unassuming, and somewhat brutal exterior of the Janaagraha building in Bangalore, we were not quite sure what to expect inside, and it seemed to us a not-for-profit institution,  which purported to do an impossible number of things for free, which in America would certainly be done at great expense by government-contracted consulting firms. Furthermore, they were performing these valuable services, in addition to huge initiatives mobilizing voters, and raising public awareness of relevant social and political issues.  It seemed too good to be true. What kind of sham were they running inside this brutalist concrete building?

Inside, we were quite floored to find no sham at all. Just a whip sharp team of knowledgeable, passionate, and extremely motivated personnel, working hard on a Saturday to make Bangalore, and India as a whole, a better place to live.

The office was big, but not that big. Same goes for the team. The power was out in Bangalore at that moment, a reasonably common occurrence, but the office seemed hard at work in the window lit offices, working fiercely under still fans on computers that ran from the building’s back-up generators.

Our first meeting was with the voting and political literacy initiative. India is the largest democracy in the world, and many accuse it of crumbling under its own weight, unable to function due purely to its own massive scale and complexity. “This does not have to be so,” the folks at Janaagraha posit. And they are doing much to put their time and money where their mouth is.

In India, the makeup of a particular rural community is relatively static, but in the large cities like Bangalore, massive migration from rural areas to the metropolis make registering voters, disseminating information, and overseeing the implementation of projects quite difficult. Consequently, voter turnout in urban India lags significantly behind that in the rural areas. Janaagraha is doing a few things to help. First of all it has a dedicated team researching issues, aggregating local views, and disseminating relevant information to urban voters. It uses this data to promote certain candidates and attempts to streamline and simplify administrative tasks (like voter registration, error correcting in voter lists) through automation.

As the folks at Janaagraha explained to us, Bangalore has been without local government for the past three years. The elections have been stalled by outstanding court cases pointing at blatant gerrymandering of the city wards. “We might have local elections, hopefully, sometime in the next six months.” But even Janaagraha expressed significant fear of further delay. In the meantime government will continue to come down from the state level, which means that appointed Karnataka executives will continue to have absolute power over the decision-making process for the city. “A further issue is that state government has been unstable,” Janaagraha explained.

But voting is just one of the many issues that Janaagraha is addressing in the city of Bangalore. Traffic and urban planning are also foci of the organization. “We use what we like to call a systems approach,” a representative from the traffic team explained. The systems approach is basically a suite of strategies which, together, are hoped to address a given issue more effectively.

Some traffic-related examples of the “systems approach” are the encouragement of local citizen groups to participate in relevant legislation (bottom up), coupled with policy recommendations that take a regional perspective (top down). Janaagraha is recognizing that Bangalore traffic is the result of inefficiencies at both the microscopic (like a poorly designed intersection) and the macroscopic (like the layout of regional transport systems) levels . Janaagraha also produces a children’s book titled “Me and My City,” to help the city’s young people understand issues of urban transport and how the macroscopic geography of their city relates to day-to-day life.

Janaagraha is fighting for more transparency in government, pushing for a publicly available record of budgets and expenditures for publicly funded projects. Such a strategy would help to plug leaks in the system, such as the “March Rush,” familiar in one form or another to western publicly funded organizations as well – a scramble to spend the entirety of the budget before the powers that be re-examine the organization and decide the next period’s funding.

Another example of the Janaagraha systems approach is the establishment and publication of benchmarks for public projects and services such as electricity, water, and transportation for use by both the government and the populous in placing their public services development in a more global context. “Without a system of benchmarks, many officials will refuse to disclose data indicating their own substandard public services.” These benchmarks are quantitative, using a system of matrices and linear transformations to quantify and weigh various conditions. The results of the benchmarking studies are also made available at no charge to the public, obscuring only the parts of the studies that present national security risks.

Janaagraha also houses a non-profit consulting group, which provides pro bono consulting and technical assistance for public projects. This team concentrates on urban infrastructure and transport consulting, which they describe as “anything that affects the mobility of people.” Bangalore is about 8% roads. As Janaagraha explained to AsiaWheeling, studies indicate that a city of the same size and type is best served by surface area of 20%-25% covered by roads. This is one of the main reasons for the traffic problems in the city. So streamlining bottlenecks such as mergers and intersections is extremely important. And Janaagraha has been doing plenty of it: 28 projects in totality over the last two years. I was particularly interested to hear that one of the fellows, now hard at work re-designing Bangalore, was once doing the same thing not far from my home in Iowa City, Iowa.

Well, dear reader, as far as your humble correspondents can tell, here is a real-world organization where idealistic approaches to urban reform are being coupled with passion and smart management to implement real change in a part of the world where it is no easy task