India with MBAs and Social Entrepreneurs

Here's a blog--my first attempt--that's cobbled together from some email missives I wrote to friends and family while in India last month with 19 Duke MBA students and an operations professor (originally from Kolkata). They were there for the two-week field work portion of a course, the Global Consulting Practicum, centered around a business consulting project for one of four selected social entrepreneurial NGOs in Jaipur. I was there because I was just damned lucky (technically because it's Fuqua policy to send a second faculty or staff member on trips like these, just in case). Because it's all retrospective vs. real time at this point, and I have the technological klutziness of a neophyte blogger, I will send it all in one big post.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4. When I was in business school 25 years ago, there were no Indians in my class (lots of Japanese--in the early 80s, we were all trying to emulate their economy) and certainly no thought of traveling to India (or anywhere) as part of the curriculum. If I had, I'd be writing about my experiences in a bound journal. Well, the World is Flat now, the Japanese economy is hardly to be admired, about 20 percent of the Fuqua MBA students are Indian and I have email to not only record my thoughts but also actually share them. If I had remembered to put the Nikon photo download software onto my loaner lightweight laptop, I'd be able to send you photos, too. The photos would be dominated by mounds of fruits and vegetables, surrounded by the hardworking Indian men, women and children who sell them at the Jaipur wholesale market or in city "farmer's markets" or simply on the side of the frighteningly traffic-clogged and chaotic city streets. The photos always portray a crowd, since a group of four western MBA students and one middle-aged woman attract a crowd of friendly, curious onlookers requesting to be in photos. Hard not to oblige.
So why the fruits and vegetables? Because I've had the good fortune to spend my first two and a half days in Jaipur with the four MBA students who are consulting to NASVI, a national collective to better the lives of street vendors. There are some 20,000 street vendors in Jaipur, a medium-sized (for India) city of about 4 million, and they are subjected to everything from police harrassment and inhumane working hours to lack of credit for purchasing the wholesale goods to the entrance of retail outlets into the market (some are for the first time selling produce. Walmart is trying to enter the market as a wholesaler; the students will get to talk with their chief merchandising officer in Delhi next week). Street vendors who are successful own homes and send their children to good schools, so even though this is part of the informal economy, street vending can be a good livelihood. But how to get more than just the top 10% to have decent lives?

We've been going around with the head of the Jaipur branch of NASVI, a jolly, plump fellow named Gunshaum, and an econ PhD student from Mumbai who's been consulting to NASVI, a tiny, bright fellow named Debdulah (whom we call "Deb") who serves as translator. We've spent time at several city markets, including one in Gunshaum's neighborhood, which allowed him to show off not only his stand and workers but also his home about 50 feet away, and the three tiny rooms (perhaps 500 square feet total, plus a nice balcony) that house his wife and three kids, sister, and parents in-law. As in Turkey, one is served tea (chai!) at absolutely every turn; Indian tea has milk, sugar and wonderful spices. It is the only thing we can accept off the street because it is boiled.

THURSDAY, MARCH 5. This morning's excursion proved one of the most fascinating three hours I've spent in any country: we went at 6:30 to the wholesale market, to understand the supply chain issues the street vendors face. It's 5 km x 5 km in size (purportedly the largest ONE in Asia) and absolutely teeming with people, trucks (plus some camels and donkeys for those not so well off) and mounds and mounds of fruits and vegetables. We learned that there are A, B and C wholesalers, A being the most powerful who sell the largest quantities (tens of thousands of dollars a day), with C being those who sell small quantities to those who can't buy much each day. Prices are agreed to in a "silent auction," which
consists of buyer and seller in a handshake position making gestures and squeezes under cover of a handkerchief.

In the afternoon, we went to two government offices to get their perpective and learned that there were efforts to find street vendors proper permanent places in the city so they would not block traffic. But efforts are slow, and only a fraction of them will be accommodated.

Friday, March 6, 2009. Today we spend the entire day at a quarterly business meeting of the NASVI respresentatives in the state of Rajasthan, where Jaipur is, headed by the organization's founder, Arbind Singh, who was just awarded India's Social Entrepreneur of the Year award. The four-hour meeting at a hotel involved 25 representatives, all men and street vendors themselves, sitting around

a U-shaped conference table discussing--with lots of animation and shouting--what NASVI's priorities should be in light of the recent change-over in government. They talked about a drive to get vendors licensed, helping them get pension insurance, working with local officials to educate them on vendors' rights, etc. (Kent, Fiona and Timur, the organization reminds me of Western Service Workers Assoc. in Santa Ana.) We all adjourned for lunch (more absolutely delicious spicy vegetarian food and heavenly flat breads, of which we've eaten great quantities), then talked with Arbind for a couple more hours to get the specific focus of the MBA consulting project right. It will be on economic issues and improving credit and other conditions for the most marginalized vendors; even though policies and laws play an important role in their fate, there's not much that Duke MBAs can add to those efforts. Tomorrow, nearly all of us (three students have other plans in India) will leave at 6 a.m. for Agra to see the Taj Majal. I'm sure it will be amazing; but having spent the last three days going where tourists never go, I've been pretty amazed already.

SATURDAY, MARCH 7. Over the weekend, we left our social entrepreneurship projects behind and became tourists. Saturday, the 18 of us boarded a comfortable tour bus at 6:15 a.m. for the five-hour drive to Agra, to see the Taj Mahal. The drive provided views of the outskirts of Jaipur and hundreds of small villages along the road, as well as the agricultural land in between. The villages consist of between two and ten attached cinderblock store fronts, in some state of disrepair, with the dwelling spaces stacked behind. When we passed by one of the larger villages, the guide told us that the per capital income was $250, with a 40% literacy rate for men and 18% for

women. Reading Edward Luce's excellent book on Indian socio-economic conditions, In Spite of the Gods, reveals that multiple government programs designed to help the poor often do just the opposite (Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen calls it "friendly fire," akin to accidently killing ones own troops in battle), due to massive corruption and slowness in the public sector bureacracies (e.g., selling the government issued quality wheat on the black market and making only rotting grain available to the "below poverty line" (BPL) people who qualify for food aid). I was happy to see on the way back, in the dark, that the villages for the most part had electricity, probably for only part of the day.

The other distinguishing feature of the bus ride was its extreme bumpiness, owing to the disrepair of the road (and perhaps the loose suspension of the bus as well). Much of it had been modernized, but most of it had not. It was impossible to read, for example, and there were also innumerable stops and slowdowns to navigate the huge bus around tractors, camels pulling carts, trucks and passenger cars. Where there were not potholes, there were speed bumps. When we got home late that evening, there was a news story on TV about an economic development project to build an expressway between Delhi and Agra to cut the trip to the Taj Mahal in half, plus supply the villages along with way with aid to do repairs and modernization. There was supposed to be a public-private funding partnership which somehow hadn't materialized (not even really because of the economic downturn), so the project was already a year or two behind.

At last we reached Agra, a large and poor city, despite its major tourist attraction. In an effort to reduce pollution damage, certain industries have been banned, and one takes a battery-powered bus from a distant parking lot to the Taj itself--all good. What can one say about seeing the palace itself, such an icon of India that we've all had in our heads since we were small? It is indeed beautiful and enormous and white, raised on a high base so that only the sky shows behind the bulbous domes and towers. It was built by the Mughul king Shah Jehan to honor his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, when she died at age 39 in childbirth delivering their 14th child, because of high blood pressure. It took some 20 years to complete and 20,000 people (I forget the number of elephants who had to carry all the marble from the Jaipur area). There are Koranic writings all around and semi-precious stones inlaid into the marble. Much like European palaces and Topkapi in Istanbul, it's set in a serene garden area that provides a rare and much-needed respite from the throngs of people and noise outside the walls.

Of course we took a million photos, as did the professionals who sold them back for about $2 a dozen. The afternoon sun was hot and draining, but now I have seen four of the Seven Wonders of the world: the Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza in Mexico, Christ the Redeemer in Rio De Janeiro and the Colosseum in Rome. Still to do: Petra in Jordan, the Great Wall and Machu Pichu. The Pyramids of Giza are only "honorary;" I think they were bumped in the last judging period a few years ago. Imagine.

After the Taj, we took a bus to the nearby Red Fort, which was built by Shah Jehan's famous and admirable grandfather Akbar in about 1530. The latter was known for his religious tolerance and efforts to treat Hindus fairly, despite the fact that the Muhgels were Moslems. As was the case with other rulers who allowed local religions and cultures to flourish, Akbar's rule was considered quite successful. Shah Jehan's son, on the other hand, was much more fanatical and was so appalled by his father's extravagance on the Taj Mahal plus his grand plan to build another one in black for himself, that he put the father under house arrest for eight years in the Red Fort, where he could look across the river at his beloved Taj. The son's 50-year rule was plagued by constant fighting, as he never seemed to catch onto the fact that imposing one's religion and culture on others is not, as we would say today, a sustainable strategy.

When we reboarded the bus at 5:30 everyone was exhausted from the sun and emerging cases of "Delhi belly," so did their best to doze between the bumps. At about 9:00, we pulled into the same roadside eatery (and sourvenir shop) where we had had lunch to have some dinner. The zombie-esque group ordered french fries and omlettes and naan (flat bread), except for me, who ordered a full portion of some truly delicious yellow chicken curry with nuts and raisins. The rest of the bumpy ride home was almost unbearable; I had to keep rationalizing that of course it as worth ten hours of uncomfortable driving to see the Taj Mahal. And of course it was.

SUNDAY, MARCH 8. Sunday was as energizing as Saturday was ennervating. We got a later start, 9:00, to see fewer sights much closer by and experienced the joy of discovery instead of the mental management of a cliche. On the outskirts of Jaipur, about half an hour's drive from our hotel, is the Amber Fort (sometimes called the Amer Fort--in any case, not named after the color). It dates from about the same time as the Red Fort in Agra and in typical fort-like fashion is located high above the city. We arrived to see visitors being transported up the steep roadway to the palace within on elephants, so we all lined up for our own. There were a dozen elephant drivers milling about, so there was no wait as we situated ourselves two-by-two on the platform saddles. Pranab (the lead Fuqua professor) said that when he had come in November to help organize this trip, there were some 100 people standing in line by 9:00; so the elephants are also a victim of the economic downturn.

We were guided around the fort and palace rooms, elaboratedly decorated with wall and ceiling mirrors with glass imported from Belgium. It put the mirror designs on all the trinket pens and boxes in context, design-wise. It was breezy and relaxed and the views were amazing; people were in a cheerful mood. There were high-quality government shops, one supporting tribal crafts, with fixed prices The hawkers near the parking lot (all youngish men, a few teenaged boys, but no actual children) were persistent, as they are everywhere in the world; I bought four books of postcards (48 total) for $1.50 and the packet of the professional elephant ride photos for the same amount.

An hour's bus ride north took us to Samode Palace, which is a 19th century palace that's been converted to a five-star hotel. The courtyard style, Mediterranean and bouganvillia made me think of the Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara, minus the ocean, of course. We had a fabulous buffet lunch there in a fancy dining room with special china, took a quick tour of the palace and then roamed around in the charming and relaxed village below. People bought a few textiles and a little jewelry and were, I think, relieved to see villagers who were poor but not destitute.

We headed back to Jaipur and at about 6:00 the bus let us off at a wholesale market that some people had previously discovered and wanted to return to. Three of the students, John, Callie and Nathan, decided to see some sights in the old city instead of shopping, which was my desire as well. We we walked for about 45 minutes and eventually found the Govinder Temple packed with worshippers going full tilt. It was all open at the sides, so we could see well the throngs of people doing laps around the interior perimeter of the temple to the chanting music of the "choir," who accompanied themselves on tambourines and drums. Others were sitting at the back just chatting, and some people who didn't go in were nonetheless praying with hands in the air.

The temple was festooned with yellow and red silk bunting in honor of the Holi Festival, which will be celebrated in earnest on Wednesday, March 11. In the markets around the temple, they were already starting to sell small bags of brightly colored powder (nowadays containing lead and other nasty stuff, but once pure vegetable dye), which people throw at one another (Holi is known as the Festival of Color) along with water pistols and balloons, in a big, mostly drunken free-for-all from about 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; they then clean up and nap and then go out to visit relatives. We are eagerly awaiting this day, have planned no work or visits, but had heard various warnings about our need, as foreigners, to stay inside our hotel to avoid the fray. We'll see.

After a while watching the worshipers, we wandered over to a large park full of metal playground equipment and, naturally, decided to ride the merry-go-round for 5 ruppees each (10 cents); John and I chose the giraffes, Callie and Nathan the roosters. We strolled among the familes out with their kids and then walked through a neighborhood to a busy street and hailed an auto-rickshaw to the main restaurant street for dinner.

An auto-rickshaw is a three-wheeled golf-cart-like vehicle that's colorfully painted, makes a lot of noise and fights to defend its place in the pecking order of animals, pedestrians, bicyles, human-powered rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, cars, minivans, trucks and buses that clog Jaipur's impossible streets (the traffic direction is reversed, British style). One is usually heading into what looks to be oncoming traffic, so it's best to pretend when in one of these rickety vehicles with three or four friends (there is really room for only three passengers) that it's the "Back to the Future" ride at Universal Studios and the oncoming traffic is really just a movie screen (that also emits the smell of exhaust and occasionally garbage or sewage). It's a really good ride, in that it is fairly terrifying and the seats move to emulate sharp steering manoevers to avoid potholes and other drivers.

We ate at a decent but not great restaurant known for its meat dishes; because it is in all the guidebooks, there were quite a few westerners, but the Indians still outnumbered us. After paying about $21 for the four of us, we walked half a mile up the road to the wildest ice cream shop imaginable, a kind of Baskin Robbins with more flavors, endless varieties of concoctions and wall-to-wall people getting their favorite treats. Then it was back in a different auto-rickshaw home to our hotel, the Ramada, which fortunately has seven stories, since the driver had not heard of it and we had to guide him there by sight. It was only 10:30, so there was time to do a few emails and tune into an amzing TV special on the financial network, an interview with Turkish author Orhan Pamuk (taped while he was in Mumbai). He talked about his various novels, including the new one, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 2000, about a man so obsessed with a former lover that he builds a museum to commemorate the relationship. In Pamuk's words, it's ultimately about collecting. A must-read for the collecting-obsessed Kuran family.

MONDAY, MARCH 9. Project work resumed, and I was lucky enough to join a different student team working on a project with Bodh, an innovative education NGO dedicated to raising the education level of poor girls, in both rural areas and urban slums. The Bodh team had spent the previous week learning about Bodh's unique approach and pedagogy, and also visiting one of their rural schools and the girls boarding school at their headquarters in Jaipur. Their consulting project was centered around improving fund-raising practices and results so they needed to understand the Bodh story. Today we were off to a co-ed preK-8 school in a Muslim slum. After a short drive from our hotel, we arrived at a small, three-story building across from the slum's mosque and were ushered in to the teacher prep room. Teachers, mostly young, sat planning their lessons, while a lead teacher attempted to explain to us how the school is run (democratically with no principle). She showed us a composition book with notes from their monthly neighborhood parents council and explained how teachers take turns spending one hour a day out in the community trying to round up students who had not shown up for school. At first we thought they were recruiting new students, convincing families to send their girls to school; but we learned that the school is full and an additional floor being built.

We started touring the classrooms, starting with a room for three-year-olds (about 45 of them) who sat in front of peg board with counting beads. The point was to learn 1 - 10, but some of the pegs were too short to fit 10 beads. Confusing perhaps, and suboptimal, but these kids had it much better than those who were our wandering around the neighborhood without a shot at an education. Extensive graphs on the walls as we moved to classes of older students revealed great attention to measuring grade-level achievement for each of the genders (whose numbers were admirably) balanced, as well as enrollment and attendance. We finished by taking a million pictures of the eager, endearing students as the morning group left to make room for the afternoon gang.

We all went back to the hotel so the team could begin to work on their recommendations. I did some work and emailing as well, then headed by auto-rickshaw to visit the City Palace, an ornate affair in the center of old Jaipur set up as an historical museum. It housed the usual collections of costumes, household objects, weapons, etc., as well as a "Friends of the Museum" exhibit hall with artists selling their paintings, textiles, wooden boxes, jewelry, etc. On the plaza were dancers with drums and other instruments, all dressed in red, yellow and orange, performing in honor of Holi, the holiday of color that was to commense the next afternoon. Most memorable was an entire room devoted to polo. Who knew that Jaipur had been a world polo power in the 1930s and had won the Polo World Cup (not sure if it's really called that) in 1959? Because it was the city's mayor (or maybe the governor of Rajasthan?) who was the team captain during these glory days, museum visitors got to see his various uniforms, boots, sticks, etc., plus lots of photos of the team.

I made it back to the hotel (in an auto-rickwhaw driven by an enterprising young guy who produced business cards of "regular" jewelry-making clients in Long Beach, Santa Monica and Newport Beach, CA) in time for my scheduled massage at the hotel. At $20 for an hour (vs. $80++ in the U.S.), I couldn't resist the splurge. There was, ironically, an absence of the exotic Indian relaxation music that's mandatory at American spas; nor were there any sheets for modesty. A different but great experience--hard to be unhappy with a massage. Later, we all met for dinner on the hotel rooftop with Pranab's aunt as the guest of honor. An executive at UNICEF in Jaipur in charge of education and child welfare, she had helped find two of the projects, including Bodh, through her connections there. She was a lively (like Pranab), youthful woman who had devoted her entire life to educating poor children; her perspectives on the issues the students had been encountering were eagerly received.

TUESDAY, MARCH 10. Holi would be starting later today, so many offices were closing early. Most teams, including the Bodh group, decided devote the day to sightseeing and shopping. We started out with a trip into the hills to visit the "Monkey Temple." Of course this large and elaborate structure had a proper name, but when our guide Vikram stopped the van at a street vendor stall to buy 20 bunches of bananas, we knew that the working nickname was not a metaphor. Sure enough, there were monkeys everywhere, expecting to be fed (wonder why). And really bold cows, who had also acquired a taste for bananas. Most interesting on this Holi-eve were the human species washing themselves in the pools of holy water--first the women, then the men--to clean away all the bad stuff of the previous year, since Holi starts a new year with fresh possibilities. Not clear why it starts off with throwing colored powder on everyone's cleansed body, but this is hardly the only mystery of Hindu religious traditions.

At the students' request, Vikram took us to the large textile/tailor shop of his best friend from history grad school, another Vikram. The two guys got measured for "kurtas," the PJs-in-public comfortable suits that Indian men wear, and looked for gifts for wife and girlfriend. The three gals considered wall hangings, beadspreads, skirts, dresses, scarves, bathrobes and other textile gifts, then assembled collections and started to bargain. Many special treasures were procured at prices that could never be matched at home, and 10 or so workers in the little shop were delighted to have customers in such a down time for tourism.

We ate lunch at a nearby guide-book restaurant called The Peacock where the Bodh team had been on their first day. One of the students (she and nearly all on the trip were well-traveled, by the way; some had been Peace Corps volunteers, others had spent a year or more in Africa, Nepal and other such places) remarked that today she found the bathroom there pleasantly clean, where on their first day, she'd been put off by its primitiveness. Amazing how quickly one makes the psychological adjustment from U.S. opulence to Indian poverty. The worst of the latter, of course, cannot be imagined away or rationalized no matter what.

After lunch we went to the city sports arena for the annual Holi Elephant Festival, organized by the Jaipur Tourism Commission. There we met up with the rest of our Duke group--and every other westerner in Jaipur! As promised, elaborately decorated elephants paraded by and displayed themselves to judges on the field in hopes of prizes (well, I guess it was really the drivers and owners who did the hoping). The parade included horses, camels and "marching bands." Despite several impressive singing and dancing acts, the best entertainment was 1) the urbane parade announcer trying to get tourists to sit down so others behind them could see, then clear them off the field, all without raising his voice and 2) the sporting tug-of-war between a dozen tourist volunteers (including two adventuresome Duke MBAs) and an equal number of Indian elephant drivers. The former outweighed the latter by about 50% and won little elephant statues. A few of us then headed to India's biggest movie theater to take in a Bollywood film called "Delhi 6." It had already started, but since it was in Hindi, we weren't really expecting to understand much anyway. Experiencing the cavernous theater, built in the 50s, and the Indian audience of crying babies and viewers singing along with the songs--like musicals everywhere, Bollywood characters need the smallest of excuses to burst out in song and dance--was, as they say, worth the price of admission. At intermission (yes, intermission), we got a plot summary from some local engineering students, but no amount of effort on their part could do justice to the multiple plots including aspiring to win Indian Idol, Hindu-Muslim violence, caste discriminaton, a thwarted arranged marriage, health care drama, extended-family togetherness and squabbles, etc. etc. Fortunately, the leading man was playing an American-born Indian who'd returned to Delhi to accompany his grandmother, so he occasionally burst out with an English sentence that gave us a temporary handle on the plot. The best one accompanied his epiphany that: "India works! The people make it work!" Could be the theme of our trip. As he is falling in love with the Indian Idol contestant, they enter one of the coolest dream sequences in the movies, transported to a Times Square that has both yellow cabs and auto-rickshaws, restaurants and Indian street vendors--a surreal blending of cultures and locations that surely every immigrant in every country in the world wishes could come true.

The guys went next door to McDonald's for dinner and I took an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel, passing dozens of neighborhood groups gathered around bonfires to mark the eve of Holi.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11. Holi is here at last, and all offices and stores are closed. Time to go out and throw colored powder and water at each other. But we have been warned off the festivities, by a whole variety of sensible people, owing to overall drunkeness and drunk driving and the one-day reprieve on the social taboos against groping women in public. Still, a small band ventures out with Pranab and the bags of powder they've purchased, bravely "playing Holi" around the block from the hotel. I walk out to see what's going on and am of course pelted with powder myself. Soon our whole group is in the hotel's circular driveway covering each other with colors to the whoops and horns of passersby on motorcycles, and of course takign photos like crazy. Noticing the unbelievable mess we've created, we give a huge tip to the staff who must sweep up and hose off the driveway. After showers and triplicate shampoos, we spend the rest of the day working on the consulting reports and reading. My job by them has become that of press liaison, having worked through the Fuqua office in Delhi to find a PR agency to get press coverage for our project. We've got a Times of India reporter slotted for the next day, and I'm writing briefings on Duke in India, social entrepreneurship and the like. That evening I join Pranab and about 10 students for dinner at a restaurant near the movie theater that serves beer in gumball-like globes instead of pitchers. There are a few dressed up Indian families, but it seems like Holi, not unlike Thanksgiving, is a holiday of entertaining in the home.

THURSDAY, MARCH 12. Three of the consulting teams are making preliminary presentations to their clients this morning; the Bodh team has stayed up till 2 a.m. finishing theirs. Pranab and I head to the Center for Microfinance, where we chat with the director about his desire for ongoing work with this group, or another one from Fuqua. His organization serves as a kind of information clearinghouse for microfinance practices in India, a resource to lending organizations as well as self-help groups that initiate microfinance; his business challenges are around efficient and effective information dissemination. When we join the students in the conference room, we see that they have gone beyond analysis and recommendations to actually design a templated newsletter. From there, Pranab and I head to the impossibly-named CECOEDECON, "short" for a string of English words that describes this diversified social service NGO with a $33 million budget and patchwork quilt of projects in health, education, job training, social justice, child protection, etc. designed to create a higher quality of life through their own special brand of combined interventions. The presenting question for the consulting team is what to do about a particular rural school which has lost its funding. The students and CECOEDECON staff are gathered around a conference table with copies of the 40-page PowerPoint presentation; they recommend, boldly but sensibly, that the organization consider divesting of the school and making an arrangement with another NGO with more depth in education to take it over. This does not go over well. OK, option 2 . . . By the end, the team has provided pages of specifics on fund-raising, branding and communications, including position descriptions and organizational structure changes, plus an impressive list of potential funding sources and specific fund-raising training programs coming up in the region.

A CECOEDECON staff member and one of the students accompany us back to the hotel, where we meet the Microfinance director and one of those students for the interview with the Times of India reporter. He speaks to us for an hour (over tea, of course) and writes a measly but positive article about Duke's commitment to India.

There are a couple of corporate meetings scheduled for Friday in New Delhi, where my Duke business development colleagues are, so I decide to go back a day early to meet them. The travel agent finds me a small car and young driver with a few words of English, and we head off for the 4-5-hour drive to the big city. The road is packed with large trucks hauling goods creating a canyon effect for our little passenger car. Tailgating in India is not an offense but rather a requirement. So it's only a matter of time until, passing through a small town about half way to Delhi, a truck changes lanes into our car (at about 20 mph) and crunches it up pretty badly. I shriek involuntarily and the driver showers me with "sorry madam's." He jumps out of the car, which has been pushed by the truck to the shoulder of the road and is now surrounded by curious townspeople, and starts talking to people. This goes on for about 20 minutes, and I realize he is trying to find witnesses who will attest to the fact that it is not his fault. He tells me, "Truck driver drunk." There is no evidence of this--the truck is long gone by now; maybe he is drunk, or still under the influence of the long-acting "bong" halucinogenic that people smoke on Holi. But the point is that no one is hurt, no witnesses emerge and we have a long way to Delhi. Actually, the point is that this guy is rightfully terrified of losing his livelihood and at the very least paying a large sum to get his (or his company's) car repaired. We drive a short way to a tourist restaurant. "Me tea take," he says, "My head is . . ." and he gestures about how the head of a person considering the loss of his livelihood would feel. The rest of the trip was uneventful, but when we arrived at my high-rise hotel in a new industrial suburb of New Delhi, he asked me to write a note saying that he was a good driver. I did.

FRIDAY, MARCH 13. My hotel desk clerk told me it would take "15-20" minutes by cab to get to my colleague bob's hotel in downtown Delhi. It took one hour and 50 minutes. A city of 15 million people created traffic issues reminiscent of L.A. But I got to see the city. Fortunately, he was still there and we headed to Fortis Hospital Corporation for our meeting. Fortis, founded and owned by a Fuqua alumnus, is an unbelivably impressive system of 24 hospitals, soon to be 40, achieving some of the best outcomes anywhere. Their flagship Delhi hospitals attract a large number of patients from other countries, part of the "medical tourism" movement that's providing a bit of safety valve to the impossible costs and under-insurnace that characterize the American system. We meet with their VP of HR, a very sharp guy who's spent most of his career in the automotive industry. Bob reinforces various aspects of Fuqua's relationship with Fortis, most immediately as host to our upcoming class of Executive MBA studnets who will be in Delhi for a one-week residency.

We head back to the hotel for lunch with Vinoo, the new regional director of Fuqua's India partnership. Throughout the lunch, he answers his cell phone, since that's the number in the various ads for upcoming information sessions about Duke's MBA programs. Vinoo, who has a great track record for building enrollment in Indian business schools, answers these cooly and politely, knowing that we are challenged to be selling an expensive new program (Cross-continent executive MBA) into this economy. But the desire for an American MBA among Indians, Chinese, Russians and others is extremely strong. After lunch, Bob and I meet Debu, a Fuqua marketing professor who's agreed to be faculty director of India, and head to our meeting with the head of HR for GE India. He has worked all over the world, and provides a wealth of information about the local labor market, shortage of talent with management experience and a global perspective, what GE is trying to do about it (mostly through their brand-defining in-house development programs, unfortunately for us) and how the new economic crisis is impeding those efforts.

Back at my own hotel, I meet up with Pranab and the students for a final dinner before heading to the airport for our midnight flight back to the U.S. (14 hours to Chicago, then abou two from there to Raleigh). I enjoy some Ambien-induced sleep, watch "Slumdog Millionaire" with fresh eyes and finish In Spite of the Gods. We part at RDU at about 10 a.m. Saturday morning, and after catching up with Timur, who's been in Turkey, I start the round of mindless errands designed to keep myself up till evening. I head to Super Target for groceries. For the first time ever, I stop at the aisle that sells Indian food, prepackaged meals and cooking sauces. I pick out the things I have come to love and hope they do not get too badly lost in translation.