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.

All around town, we had been seeing billboards promoting Ask Laila, a mobile, local search engine.  Now we were lucky enough to be ascending the staircase in an office building on one of Bangalore’s happening roads to the very office of this firm.  Nikhil, our Bureau Chief, checked us in at the front desk and we entered a room of work spaces.

It was well past 6:00 pm on a Friday, and the engineers were hard at work in front of computer terminals running command line scripts.  We were warmly greeted by Ask Laila’s CTO, Birla and his team, and seated in a corner conference room.

He began by explaining that Ask Laila was a tool for individuals to find local resources, such as hardware stores, plumbers, and restaurants, from their mobile phone on the go.  The service, he explained, is also popularly accessed from the web, as 60% of web search traffic is looking for local results.  Ask Laila can also be used as a tool for business owners, who can claim their listing, keep it up to date, and populate it with information that may ingratiate it in the eyes of potential customers browsing lists of results.  In these ways, Birla explained, the model is comparable to Yelp in the U.S.

However, as we learned from Indus, Birla reiterates that creating something like Ask Laila in India isn’t as simple as porting over the Yelp model.  For example, in the United States, one can purchase a vast index of businesses, addresses, and phone numbers akin to a digital yellow pages to incorporate into a local search engine.  In India, this did not exist until Ask Laila painstakingly located, called, and catalogued the businesses into their own proprietary database.  Furthermore, while there is a large group of users searching on their mobiles, as well as searching on the web, it’s more difficult to reach out to business owners to populate their profiles and keep them current.  Such shopkeepers and business owners are not generally web savvy, and especially outside urban areas do not have immediate access to a computer.

The technology must also accommodate users whose first language is almost certainly not English, which creates non-standard spellings of words as search inputs.  For example, the name Nandani, a girl’s name in India, may be spelled in a variety of ways illustrated below.

Ask Laila’s team has created a series of rules for grouping these non-standard spellings of words to produce the intended search result for the user, even if the spelling is not exact.  This allows people to search naturally and find what they are looking for.  Additionally, this series of relationships has not been catalogued as of yet and could prove both useful for other web search businesses, as well as fascinating for linguistic studies in the country.

But the tall tasks Ask Laila has had to take upon itself have placed it in a rarefied competitive position. Ask Laila now powesr mobile local search for AirTel, one of the India’s (and the world’s) biggest mobile phone providers.  This partnership has allowed Ask Laila to scale its technologies and optimize its search rules, like the one illustrated above, with a vast number of users.

The engineers at Ask Laila were sharp as tacks, and impressed us both with their understanding of the business and product, as well as their love of cycling.  At the onset of the company, they bragged that 50% of the employees cycled to the office, as it was much faster than facing traffic in a car, bus, or motorcycle.

After learning about their projects in greater depth, we bid farewell and safe cycling to the team and set off on the road for dinner.

In Bangalore we were to spend the next two days meeting with individuals and institutions that embodied innovation and entrepreneurship.  The meetings began in the garden patio of the Bangalore Leela Palace, where we wagered the coffee would be strong.  Nikhil, our India Bureau Chief, had arranged for us to sit down with Indus Khaitan and discuss how technology is engendering change in communication, information access, banking, and education in India.

Indus has made a life for himself as a serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor.  In May 2009, Indus joined The Morpheus as a partner.  The Morpheus is an early stage investment firm that works with startups in the first 12 to 18 months of business, a period known as the “valley of death.“  As a firm, they act as a “limited-cofounder,” in a hands-on capacity to assist founders by offering their wide breadth of experience, making critical introductions, and providing a nominal amount of capital.  The firm refers to this combination of support as its “Business Acceleration Program.”

The comparison that most people make with a project like Indus’ is Y-combinator, an early stage startup incubator created by Paul Graham, active in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts.  However, Indus is quick to point out that one can’t so quickly draw direct parallels between the Silicon Valley startup world and that of Bangalore.  This rings true both in the business models of the startups themselves, as well as the role institutional investors play in startup growth.  The Morpheus’ portfolio companies not only include web startups, but also real estate firms, retail businesses, and professional service providers.  The Indian markets pose challenges for startups in all sectors, and The Morpheus is able to provide support across many industries.   As Indus says, “India has a lot of unsolved problems.”  This allows The Morpheus to branch out from the traditional technology-focused institutional angel investment model, while retaining the possibility for exponential growth across a broad base of portfolio companies.

Indus introduced himself in a reserved, yet youthful manner.  After dispensing with the small talk about his time in Northern California, as well as the experiment of AsiaWheeling, we began discussing the sea change occurring in the Indian consumer market.

Negative Interest Rates?

We began the conversation with an uncommon financial phenomenon seen rarely outside the dark offices of Swiss Banks: negative interest.  The story began with a team of Indian railway laborers maintaining track in the country’s north, and earning heightened wages as a result of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, legislated in 2005.  Not accustomed to earning such wages, and because of the cost and difficulty of remitting it to the village in which their families  resided, the laborers would squander the cash on vices.  Beginning to regret the errors of their ways, the workers began requesting their supervisor to physically retain their wages in the worker’s custody.  For this custody, the supervisor charged a fee, essentially creating a deposit account for the workers with negative interest.

Why didn’t the workers simply open a real bank account?  The fact Indus shared, is that 81% of India is unbanked.  Because of the personal identification required, poor rural branch proximity, illiteracy, and a host of other issues ranging from trust to regulation, most Indians do not have bank accounts.  This opportunity, in particular, is one that has been rediscovered by technology firms.  With the emergent developments such as sente and airtime banking in Africa, the players positioned most obviously are the mobile phone providers.  With excellent rural penetration and customer trust, these mobile providers could potentially turn every basic phone into a device for sending, receiving, and depositing cash.

However, Indus explains, the mobile providers like Airtel and Vodafone aren’t licensed to engage in such activities;  regulation prevents it.  In their place comes a recently formed consortium of firms: Nokia, Obopay, and Yes Bank.  Nokia, the hardware firm that dominates the handset market in India invested $70M in Obopay, the mobile software startup. Together, they have partnered India’s Yes Bank to capitalize on this opportunity, which represents the first step to providing scalable options for the now unbanked.  Game on.

Learning from the Liquor Business

Conversing about this opportunity allowed us to analyze one of the truly massive oligopolies of India: the mobile phone market.  India has over 700 million mobile phone subscribers, with anywhere from 400M to 500M active at any given time.  Indus specifies that 95% of the connections are prepaid, offering ease to the consumer in budgeting and activation, as well as ease to the provider in reducing credit risk.

Moreover, Indus mentioned that many of the lowest-income users of these phones do not know how to save or recall a number in the phone book, using the phone purely to receive calls (which is free), or simply call the last number dialed in the phone.  AsiaWheeling and Indus brainstormed for a while on how one might design a phone to suggest common numbers for saving, which could be driven by an interactive voice interface.  While such innovations would increase the cost of each phone in both hardware and an initial phase of software development, the decreasing cost of manufacturing and huge scale of the consumer base may soon warrant a similar technology. No doubt, firms like Nokia are undertaking such research across the global south.

While India looks strikingly modernized sitting in the garden patio of the Leela Palace, the reality is that 70% of Indians reside in rural areas, subsisting on farming and fishing.  One of the major challenges faced by both Indus’ portfolio companies as well as giants like Airtel is reaching this vast, disparate, and relatively unconnected population.  In fact, Indus exclaims, these rural areas command 60% of the marketing budget for such larger firms.

How does one market in a village?  Many of the villages these companies seek to market to are not even on the books of the local government, and require a re-discovery by the private sector, a theme we saw repeatedly in India.  Almost quaintly, firms like Airtel will send mascots dressed as mobile phones to villages to strut around as loudspeakers play music and corporate slogans.  Radio, one of the most pervasive and low-cost mediums of mass communication, is used in conjunction with such physical appearances, alerting the populous of an event or giveaway in the village.

Outdoor marketing is commonly strategically placed on temples and shrines, which welcome the income and serve as a fantastic replacement to the billboards that are non-existent in the vast majority of villages.  Where did they learn these marketing techniques for the fragmented rural market?  Who taught companies like Airtel how to sell to the common man?  Indus elucidates for us in a hushed tone: they learned from liquor companies.  While we were initially surprised, it became clear that the liquor industry’s marketing has been some of the most original and effective. As AsiaWheeling was told in later interactions, the liquor store is the easiest shop to find in India, as it’s the only business with a queue.

Extremely Lucrative Schools

Ask Indus what he’s looking for in terms of talent to staff the startups in his portfolio, and he’ll tell you that specialists are the most desirable.  Whether it’s in marketing, software architecture, or engineering, a specialist proves a critical asset to the firm.  This comes as no surprise, given the value of experience in any labor market. Particularly, Indus looks for those who have a proven knack for marketing, which, he quips, is so sorely lacking in many Indian firms.

This brought us to learning about the phenomenon of for-profit educational institutions that have been on the rise to cater to the many new entrants to the “knowledge labor” pool looking to ingratiate themselves to potential employers.  Many of these schools are tiny, ad-hoc institutions using space in an office building, peddling meaningless degrees.  However,  operating such an institution proves to be “extremely lucrative.”  Because of regulatory and bureaucratic obstacles which would otherwise let new entrants in easily and drive down profitability, 90% of such schools are started by former politicians.

Interestingly, he notes that in funding and hiring new grads he puts no stigma on not having graduated from an IIT or IIM, which are the de facto top schools in India for engineering and management, respectively.  Indus claims that the drive of those graduating from second-tier schools is often heightened because they have more to prove, and their level of intelligence and training proxies that of a tier-one grad.  However at any level, he reiterates, the soft skills of persuasive communication, interpersonal coordination, and branding are in demand.

Exacting in conversation, with a swift recollection of figures and percentages, Indus proved to be a fantastic introduction to AsiaWheeling’s time in Bangalore.  The broad, yet interconnected nature of India’s evolving consumer-facing industries provided a firm foundation for the remainder of our investigation of innovation in India through the lens of this city.

Our overnight train to Bangalore appeared to be late by two hours. So we threw down our packs on the filthy concrete platform, and began to give our backs, sopping wet from wheeling from Cochin to the Ernakulam train station, a fighting chance at drying.  A crowd soon formed around us, interested in learning more about the Speed TRs.  We were happily chatting about AsiaWheeling with everyone from one-eyed Indian Railway employees to students commuting from Ernakulam to Bangalore, when the train quite unexpectedly arrived very nearly on its original schedule. So we packed up our belongings, bidding fond goodbyes to our new friends, one of whom insisted on sprinting to the other end of the platform to confirm our bogie (the Indian term for train car), as we chased behind him on our cycles, fully loaded, and ringing our bells to part the massive, hurrying crowds.  Once again profusely dripping with sweat, we hustled into the 2nd Class A/C car. It was much like our previous (3rd Class A/C) car, with the welcome addition of curtains, allowing one to seclude one’s self, more or less, in his or her bunk. One marked difference here, however, was that it appeared I did not have a seat. Scott’s name showed quite clearly on the grubby, dot matrix printed roster that  had been scotch taped to the side of the train, but mine was nowhere to be seen.

To give a little background on the situation, the Indian railways are tragically over utilized (or the rail ticket market undeserved, depending on whom you ask). Booking tickets and gaining a spot in a preferred compartment require booking to be made not just a few days, but a few weeks, or in some cases a few months, in advance. And unfortunately, our dearest comrades at the India Bureau had swung into action too late in the game, which meant that for the rest of our time in India, the lead-up to each train ride would be a bit of a nail-biter, as we monitored our spots on the wait list, and began to lay the preliminary contingency plans.  Our confirmation on this train, for instance, had only come through that day. And had we not gotten word of it, we would have been scrambling to find a bus or shelling out serious cash for a chartered cab.

But confirmation had come, and we were accordingly somewhat puzzled at the absence of my name on the roster. We piled the cycles in one of the cramped spaces in between cars, and I waited while Scott went in search of the ticketeer, hoping that upon consulting the bloke, we would find that I did indeed have a seat. In the meantime, as the train left the station, I tried to steady the Speed TRs whilst defending against the heavy metal doors of the train, which swung open and slammed shut with the rhythm of the rails. Our fellow passengers struggled to file by me as I made sheepish apologies. Countless food and beverage sales people gave me their very best pitch as to why, with my pack still on, one hand on the cycles and another struggling to catch the giant swinging steel door which threatened to bash into the cycles and at times my person, I might also be interested in buying a few Cokes and a veg biryani.

Finally Scott emerged, happy to report that I did indeed have a seat. We even managed to stow the cycles reasonably elegantly in the under-the-seat storage zone. In fact, the ticketeer had signed off on the storage spot until the mechanic, smelling a fat tip, came out to sternly instruct us that we must store the cycles with him in the same way we had on the train to Cochin. We happily indulged him, since the fat tip he was looking for was really something more like 75 cents, and settled into the ride. Glad to be free of our baggage, we ordered the aforementioned veg biryani, which turned out to be quite tasty albeit somewhat polluted with sand. And when a family full of screaming children moved right next to my bunk, Scott and I decided it was time to insert some earplugs and call it a night.

We awoke the next morning, as bright yellow sunlight streamed into our train car and cool, dry air blew in through the open doors. Bangalore was refreshing, with a climate many compare to that of northern California.

I brushed my teeth in the train sink, and spent the rest of the ride into Bangalore, hanging out the train door, watching the scenery go by, growing steadily more and more urban, until we were pulling into the Bangalore central station.

At the station, we quickly bypassed the crowds of touts offering us cab rides into town, and located the man Nikhil had sent for us. The car was quite nice, and with some maneuvering, easily fit both cycles and all our stuff. We were also quite prepared to forgive the fact that it was significantly more expensive than the asking price of the touts. We made initial radio contact with Nikhil who assured us that breakfast was being prepared for us at the Diamond District serviced apartments, the accommodation that he had arranged for us. When we arrived, we unloaded our belongings, paid the driver, and were introduced to what would turn out to be one of some 10 different people who proclaimed to be our main point of contact at that strange hotel.

Perhaps to call it a hotel is misleading. The Diamond District Serviced Apartments is one of the most popular and posh housing developments in Bangalore. Once a failed project, dubiously financed, it was sold off at fire-sale prices and redone to be the newest, most elegant and urbane compound in the metropolis.

We had given the India Bureau only one directive regarding our Bangalore accommodation: we would like wireless Internet in the rooms. So it seemed, as we learned more about this place, that we would be treated to a little more luxury than we had asked for. Fine by us. Scott and I were ready to blow the budget a little on some Indian TLC, so we followed the two men who had been dispatched to lead us up to our room.

“Is this okay?” they asked. Our room was quite clean, much more like a sprawling flat, with a living room and a kitchen, a balcony with a washing machine, two bathrooms, and, for what might be the only time on the entire trip, separate bedrooms for Scott and me. “This is more than okay,” we replied.

We were quite unaccustomed to such luxury, and had only begun to explore the space, and search among what seemed like thousands of ambient wireless networks for the correct one, when a team of three men knocked on our door. Two of them went immediately to work in the kitchen, whipping up a dozen pieces of toast, two very spicy pepper omelets, two thimble-sized cups of coffee.

In the meantime, the third man produced a credit card terminal from his voluminous blue pants and began to demand a truly alarming amount of money from us. When we dug more deeply into the nature of the bill, we found a bizarre system of charges had been tacked on since we were leaving in the evening of the next day and presumed therefore to be pro-actively in violation of checkout policy. We proceeded to address this, but the bill negotiation proved unsettlingly similar to pulling teeth, not because the fellow spoke only a few words of English (AsiaWheeling deals with this predicament all the time), but because the man was completely unwilling to listen to anything other than verbal communication. By the time we had struggled our way through the bill and reduced the price to a merely budget-busting and no longer nausea-inducing amount, we were quite exhausted. I laid in with the credit card, a hitherto underutilized part of the AsiaWheeling toolkit, and Scott laid in with valiant attempts to communicate our interest in access to wireless Internet. Meanwhile the fellows in the kitchen had finished cooking and come into the living room to loom uncomfortably, averting eye contact and grinning sheepishly, giggling from time to time at our vast expenditures and struggles to communicate.

After a truly taxing battle for communication, we finally ascertained that there was no wireless in this room, and that  for the time being, we would need to either buddy breathe from an Ethernet cable or pay another few thousand rupees to AirTel, the local giant wireless company for we’ll never be sure quite what. Fair enough. Buddy breathing it is. With that done, we quite exasperatedly shook hands with the credit-card-reader-wielding chap, and turned to the other two, who proved to be even more unwilling to invest in communicating with us. Thankfully, the main pieces of communication were simply “yes please” and “let’s eat.” Our attempt at “May we please have another two cups of coffee,” however, was quite difficult, but finally a message of one kind or another seemed to go through, because both chaps promptly started looking really nervous, glancing all around the room avoiding eye contact, then shuffling apologetically away.

What was it? Was there some vast cultural divide here in Bangalore? We had hitherto experienced absolutely no problem communicating with our hotels in India, and in general, the amount of effort seemed to vary inversely with the nightly rate, with the experience usually landing on the scale ranging from “exciting challenge” to “piece of cake.” Here we were well within the realm of “debilitating struggle.” Were the staff all kept sedated with some sort of strange gas? Were they all lotus eaters? Or was it Scott and I? We had no idea.

Our first waypoint for that day was to be a meeting with a local angel investor and serial entrepreneur. Thank goodness Nikhil was an hour late in meeting us, because we were just getting ready to head straight to the meeting spot, when our two coffees arrived.