Bollywood

Bollywood is a big deal.

And going to the movies here is quite an event.

In Jaipur, I went to one of the biggest and best theaters in the country. The lobby was amazingly decorated and an attraction in itself. Seats were purchased and assigned ahead of time. There were three tiers - much like going to a theater on Broadway. I bought box seats for R91 (~$2.25), and had a luxury box avoiding some of the chaos. Even though this theater only had one screen, it probably held 2,500 people. Here is a photo of the lobby.


The movie we saw was called Partner. Not uncommon for Bollywood films, it was based on an American film - in this cash Hitch. Same plot, similar jokes, even down to the fact that the main characters worked for a newspaper.

What was different though was the song and dance routines. Every 20 minutes or so, there was a huge song and dance routine, with elaborate costumes and choreography. These routines are quite common, and most movies feature around 8 major song-dance routines. Popular songs often show up on MTV India as videos, taken largely directly from the movies.

And the crowd gets into it. Whenever a star appears on screen, everyone yells. People sing and clap along with the songs. They scream and laugh and talk throughout and are as much of the entertainment as the movie itself.

This NYT article discusses Hollywood's latest efforts to capture some of the Indian cinema pie.

I also saw the Simpsons movie in Bangalore. Another very nice theater, though this was a 10 screen multiplex that could just as easily have been in suburban America (except for the assigned seats and talkative crowd). This theater was much smaller than Jaipur though, maybe since the movie was in english (ticket prices are also higher for english movies).

Finally, the story of Sanjay Dutt, arguably India's biggest movie star is quite amazing and quite current.

India just went through its equivalent of the OJ trial. Sanjay is one of Bollywood's biggest stars. He was arrested after the 1993 Mumbai bombings and charged (along with a few hundred others) with arms trafficking. He spent a year and a half in prison from 1994-95 but was then released on bond while awaiting trial.

His trial just concluded, 14 years later (Indian courts don't move fast). He was found guilty and (quite surprisingly to the public and the Bollywood community) sentenced to six years in prison. The three movies that he is in the middle of filming right now have all been shelved. The "Bollywood fraternity is mourning" (though public reaction seems mixed). But the Sanjay story is definitely all over the news. We know everything from Sanjay's prison sleeping schedule to what type food he is served to the cleanliness of the toilets in his cell block.

Nobody though seems to discuss whether he actually committed a crime. Maybe this was settled long ago, I am not sure. I have asked a few people about it but nobody seemed comfortable talking about it - I think (understandably) the bombings are still a sensitive topic. He is currently appealing to the Supreme Court but will remain in prison at least until it decides whether they will consider his case and allow him out on bail again. I will post further updates as new developments unfold.

Photo Hunt

I have finally gotten around to uploading a bunch of photos from my travels between Shanghai and Bangalore. Here are some highlights in random order.

Karoake in Shanghai

A taste of America in Hong Kong
Sign in Yunnan
Sign in Macau Lotus temple, Delhi

Me, sad Tibetan woman, Yak

Monastary, near Shangri-La

Ferryman's house, somewhere near Tiger Leaping Gorge

Yak tea with Tibetan monk, Shangri-La

Mountains near Shangri-La

Main Square, Shangri-La

New friends, Shangri-La

Random temple on bike trip, somewhere near Shangri-La

Field of flowers (poppies?), near Shangri-La

Much needed rest, near Shangri-La

Monastary view, near Shangri-La

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tso Moriri, Ladakh

View from teahouse, Lijiang

Riverfront cafe, Lijiang

Main square, Macau

Winding mountain roads, Ladakh

Well-decorated truck ("Fruit King"), Ladakh

View from airplane, Leh

Tso Kar, Ladakh

Runaway camel, Rajasthan

Finding some shade, Taj Mahal

Ruins, Jaipur

Fort, overlooking Jaipur

Sunset with Tibetan prayer flags, Ladakh

Indian airport security

India is often thought of in the US as a great place to outsource business processes. Some of the processes here though are absolutely ridiculous. I will describe the process for boarding a plane, which I have now been through 4 times and am just starting to understand.

First, to enter the airport you have to show your ticket to a military policeman at the airport door. If you only have an e-ticket, you have to go to a little stand that is setup for this purpose outside the airport and print a copy of your itinerary from the internet. Then you can show the guy at the airport door a ticket and enter the airport.

Upon passing the guard at the door, men have to go through a metal detector (#1). Women do not. To go through this metal detector, you do not need to take your bags off, you just walk through it, set off the alarm (luggage almost always has metal), get patted down and move on.

After entering the airport, you walk through the lobby towards the check-in counters. But to get to the check-in counters, you must have all your checked baggage x-rayed. To get your bags x-rayed, you need to put a bag-tag on them. Then you walk through the metal detectors again (#2) - both men and women this time, though there is a separate Ladies Line - get patted down and go to pick up check-in baggage. Check-in bags need to get stamped on the bag-tag by security or they won't be accepted for check-in.

Then you check-in. This process is not particularly unusual, except you need to get bag-tags for carry-on bags.

After checking-in, you need to go through security to get to the gates. To do this, you need
to go through a metal detector (#3), get patted down, and get the bag-tags on the carry-on bags stamped.

Once you find your gates, then you have the check-in baggage identification. All bags that are going to be checked for the flight get piled up by the gate for that flight. Before boarding, you need to go to the pile of bags and point to your bags. Then your boarding pass gets a mark written on it and your bag gets marked.

Here is my backpack with destination Jaipur (JAI) marked in chalk.
Finally, to board the plane, there is a final wanding with a metal detector (#4), a final x-ray of the carry-on bags, and an inspection of the boarding pass markings and the bag-tag stamps on the carry-on bags. If all is successful, you are allowed onto the bus that takes you to the plane.

Why 4 (or 3 for women) metal detector screenings and numerous stamps are needed to board a plane is not clear. I guess labor is cheap and plentiful but not especially trustworthy. Still, most foreign travelers find this process more than a bit confusing.

Some travelers, however, get special exemptions from the security process. Note numbers 17 and 19 below.

Holy Cow

I have alluded to India's unique cow dynamics before, but it deserves its own post.

Before coming here, I was aware that Hindus considered the cow to be sacred and did not eat beef. That however is only a tiny portion of the story.

The biggest surprise was how cows are just allowed to wander around. Goats, chickens, and other animals move around the cities, though most are clearly marked as somebody's property. Cows, however, just seem to walk around wherever they please. They wander in the middle of the street in traffic, drink out of puddles in medians, and plop down on the sidewalk. Nobody seems to watch or take care of them. They basically forage through the trash for food, though people sometimes throw them scraps of grains. But mostly, they seem independent and have their run of whatever they want to do.

I have asked a number of people about the cows and have gotten widely varied answers. The most reasonable answer I have heard is this: There are two types of cows - milk-giving cows and non-milk-giving-cows. Milk-giving cows (even though it may not seem this way) are owned by someone who milk and feed and generally watch them. But, since it is illegal to kill cows - and cows can't be eaten - when a cow stops giving milk and becomes a non-milk-giving cow, there isn't anything to be done with them. So their owners just let them go free. These cows just wander around town completely on their own.

In terms of dietary impact, since the cow is sacred to Hindus and Muslims (~175M muslims in India) are forbidden to eat pork, essentially zero pork or beef is served in India. Even McDonald's will not sell either beef or pork so as not to offend its Hindu or Muslim customers (Don't worry, the filet-o-fish is on the menu).

Many Hindus are also vegetarians, and almost all Indian restaurants have numerous "veg" and "non-veg" options. The number of vegetarians varies dramatically by state. In some places, like Gujarat state, the number of vegetarians is estimated to be 90%. But all over the country, each time you book a train or plane ticket, you have to specify veg or non-veg.

Every restaurant posts on its sign whether it is a veg or non-veg establishment and a surprisingly (to me) high number are veg only. Our office cafeteria laughed at me when I asked if they had non-veg options. So lunch is either rice with tomato sauce and yogurt or a dosa (a pancake like thing) with potatoes and sauce. Not outstanding.

The only non-veg options that are commonly available are chicken and mutton. Mutton here, however, means goat, not lamb (or dog). But many of the veg options are quite good and I have really enjoyed Indian food overall. I have definitely had many more veg-only days in the past three weeks than I have had in the rest of my life combined - some because there were no alternatives, but a few by choice.

Still though, I am getting on Atkins as soon as I get home.

Southern India

I guess it should not have surprised me that Bangalore is entirely different from everywhere that I have been in Northern India. But somehow, it has.

I wrote in a previously post about how China should be thought of more like Europe than the US because the differences among provinces in China are of similar magnitude to the differences among European countries than that of US states. I also recently read an article discussing how Europe has been vastly over-emphasized by Western society and should be thought of as a sub-continent along the same lines as China, India, and the rest of Asia. This article suggested that there should be 5 traditional continents (Antartica, North and South America, Africa, and Australia) and a 6th continent of Eurasia. Eurasia would consist of 4 sub-continents - Europe, China, the Indian sub-continent, and everything else.

While I am not sure what the practical purpose of this argument is, I think it further reinforces the idea that Westerners need to remember the political, economic, cultural, geophysical, and linguistic diversity within India and China.

Yet still, when I got off the plane in Bangalore, I was surprised at how big of a change it was going from Northern to Southern India.

Here, there are palm trees instead of deserts, a wet climate, and especially noticable - a vague semblance of order in the streets (there are occasional traffic signals) and somewhat less visible poverty. This factor may be less of a North vs South difference and more because this is the "Silicon Valley of India" but the difference remains.

There is also much less livestock in the streets (though it is definitely still prevalent - this morning a cow came up and started to drink from a puddle inches away from my feet as I waited to catch an auto-rickshaw to take me to the office).

The food is different - much spicier here, and with different breads and less rice than the north.

People speak different languages. In the north, Hindi is spoken by about 200 milion people. Here in Karnataka state (where Bangalore is), the three most widely spoken languages are - you guessed it - Kannada, Urdu and Tegalu.

And while I go most days without seeing a white person, they are more common here. Or at least nobody has tried to take a photo with me yet here.

The Malls of Bangalore

One of the biggest malls in India is not far from my house. Not much else interesting is near my house, so I have already made two trips there.


I wrote some about the amazing economic dichotomy in China. This is the first real place that I have found it here. In fact, in northern India, there was much less dichotomy than I expected. Maybe this was just circumstantial, but during my two weeks in northern India, I was not able to find any upper class areas. Almost everyone I met was in poverty or at most in the lower middle class. There was little dichotomy - everyone was poor.

Supporting my crude impression, McKinsey divides India today into five economic classes. The lowest two buckets - the "Deprived" and the "Aspirers" make up 94% of society. The Middle Class equivalent bucket makes up only 4%, while the top 2 buckets (upper middle, and upper class) each only make up 1% of society.

But here in Bangalore, that small middle class makes its presence felt, at least a little. And the mall by my house is one example of this. The mall has nice depatment stores, medium-high end brand stores (Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Adidas, to name a few), an Apple reseller store, and a nice bookstore. No Prada or Gucci or super-premium brands, but still some pretty nice stores. There is also a Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and a food court with lots of fast Indian food and other Asian food. I had some chicken and rice from a place called Yo!China for dinner. Not great, but it sort of satisfied my first Chinese craving in a while. I also got a US$3 gelato from a pretty good ice cream place.



The mall does have a few weird aspects though:


To enter the mall, everyone has to walk through a metal detector. This metal detector is about 3 feet wide, and everyone tries to squeeze through it as fast as possible. So there are always multiple people going through it at the same time. And you do not have to take the metal detectors out of your pockets or take metal out of your bags. But the detector never, ever beeps. So there is a huge 30ft wide glass entrance to the mall, a line of people squeezing through a tiny metal detector under the watchful eye of security, and absolutely no point to any of it.


After dinner one night, I headed to walk home. But outside, it had started pouring. I asked a guy where I could get an umbrella. He pointed to a store on the second floor. I trudged up there, and asked where the umbrellas were. The clerk said that they did not have any. I asked where in the mall I could get one. He said he did not think anyone in the mall sold umbrellas, but maybe I could go to a few blocks down the street. How does a mall not sell umbrellas in a city where they have a monsoon season?


Also, for a while I got stuck behind three women trying to get on the escalator. They were stopped at the bottom of an up-moving escalator, giggling and not moving. A little confused, I tried first to get around them, couldn't, then stepped back to watch. A few other people came up and tried to get by but couldn't either. After a bit, it became clear that these women (or at least 2 of the 3) had never ridden an escalator before. They were dressed in their "sunday best" sarees for the trip to the mall. They seemed to be in their 40s or 50s. All seemed to be having the best time. Finally, two of them bit the bullet and did a small leap on to the escalator. The third did not jump. The first two shriked with joy. The third smiled, shrugged, turned, and walked up the stairs next to the escalator. All three hugged at the top.


Finally, I bought the new Harry Potter book today. It cost R975, or about US$25. For perspective, I spent R300 / night in Leh for my hotel. But the Harry Potter phenomenon is amazing. India's infrastructure and logistics capabilities are incredibly bad. There are few good roads, almost no runnning water, and the power goes out every few hours. In Jaipur, for a specific example, residents have running water for 15-20 minutes per day. Yet somehow, in every city and town of any size that I went to, you could find the new Harry Potter book. Today, I caved and bought it. Somehow, it seemed necessary.

Animal House

At the risk of over-emphasizing the zoological portion of traveling around northern India, I wanted to write avout two recent adventures with animals who I don't get to play with very often - the monkey and the camel.

First, at dusk one day in Jaipur we went to the Temple of the Sun God. The temple was set in a pretty cool, crazy canyon. Vines and trees climbed their way around the buildings, and the temples were intricately carved and painted different pastel colors. If you picture a sun god temple in India (or if you can't, imagine something from an Indiana Jones movie), this was it.

The temple had two notable inhabitants. First, the sun god worshippers. They chanted songs and banged drums. At sundown, they formed a little, raucus parade and marched from one end of the temple complex to the other to make an offering to the sungod.

Coexisting with the worshippers were thousands of monkeys. They made a similar pilgrimmage jusyt after dusk from one end of the temple to the trees at the other. They also played with each other, climbed up and all around the temples, and pretty much had their way with things. We fed them portions of banana. They would come up, look at me and the banana a bit suspiciously, then reach out and grab it with their hand before scampering off a few feet to eat it. Really cool. And amazingly, no tourists - just us, worshippers, monkeys, and about a dozen military police there for no reason.



Second, I also took a day trip to Pushkar. This tiny (pop. 15,000) desert oasis town was once a major Hindu pilgrimmage site, as pilgrims would come and bathe in the bathing ghats in the lake in the center of town. Now, the town is a terrible mess, rundown, rancid, full of little shops for skeptical tourists.

The lone highlight were the camels. There are camels everywhere in Rajasthan, and we saw this caravan crossing the highway on the way.


The process of riding camels was also fairly interesting.

First, we went to a "travel office" in town and set up a camel ride. Then we took a guy from the travel office in our car to a pretty nice house just outside of town. This was the camel owner's house, and there were 3 camels tied up in his yard. When his two employees saw us approaching, they began to saddle and prepare the camels.


We got on the camels and set off for our sand dune ride. First, we set off down the residential paved street, on camels with our two guides. Then we turned and walked a bit down a major paved road, joining traffic with other bikes and cars. Finally we turned off and went off into the dunes.

Along the way, we had the following conversation with one of the guides who spoke english.

"My boss is a very rich man. He owns 10 camels, 20 bikes, and 1 car. He also has 2 wives."
"Two wives?"
"Yes, the first one could not bear him children. So he got a second one who gave him two sons."
"Oh. I see."

Riding the camels in the dunes was fairly fun, but since it is monsoon season the dunes are fairly green. More dry fields than sandy dunes. Still fairly cool, but we rode for about 1.5 hours. About 30 minutes is plenty of camel riding for me.