on india...

So as many of you are aware, I've spent a decent amount of time in India, especially for a foreigner with no ties to the land. After senior year of college I was in Chennai and mainly Madurai (both in Tamil Nadu) for a month working with a research team from MIT and Harvard whose goal was to perform a needs assessment in a cluster of villages around Melur. As the resident technology guy, I was working on brainstorming technological applications for internet kiosks that we had placed there.

A couple of years later, I spent three months, two in Hyderabad and another in a cluster of villages, working on developing software for another internet initiative there. This included quite a bit of hanging out with locals, aka "ethnography".

Although I haven't been able to share these most recent experiences with my compadres that we've been reading about (and it sounds like I'm missing out on a lot of fun) I thought I'd throw out a few of my thoughts on India to see if we can drum up some discussion. I'm sure many things have changed since I was there, but I'm sure most things have stayed the same.

The most striking thing to me looking back on my time in India, especially in the bustling cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi is the sheer density of people. The major streets are a chaos of cows, autorickshaws, bicycles, motor scooters, cars, colorful trucks filled to the brim with random agricultural goods not to mention a very healthy dose of pollution. You feel like you're defying death on a constant basis. I remember seeing someone literally getting run over by a motorcycle and heard multiple stories of people being hit head on by buses. I had to ride a motorscooter through Hyderabad once and it was absolutely terrifying.

It became clear to me after a few weeks that there are so many people in India that human life is not worth very much. Examples abounded. I got in an accident in the aforementioned motor scooter that scraped it up pretty badly. To fix the damage in the US I'm sure would have cost hundreds of dollars. How much did it cost to repair in Hyderabad? Less than a dollar. Why? Because human labor is nearly worthless. How much did it cost to hire an interpreter to stay with me in a village for a month? A hundred dollars. Even the poorest city people I encountered had their own servants. Do you know anyone in the US with a live-in servant? I didn't think so.

There are so many people that it is extremely competitive to get good paying jobs because there are often hundreds of qualified unemployed or underemployed people to fill the handful of jobs positions on offer. The acceptance rate at a place like IIT (equiv of MIT in India) is on the order of 0.01% or probably less. I saved a newspaper article -- from the Deccan Chronicle if I recall -- which recounted the story of a local student. This student evidently lived somewhere where electricity was very spotty (often the case no matter where you live in India) and unfortunately for him, there were numerous black/brown-outs during a time when he had to study for college entrance exams. In fact, they were so frequent that he committed suicide because he couldn't study enough. No joke. It is a constant rat race there, and most people lose. This phenomenon made me sad on a regular basis...