I reached into my backpack the other day and found money from six countries. Man, I’ve been everywhere! In coins and bills I had Argentine pesos, Brazilian reais, more pesos from Colombia,  Malaysian ringit, Indian rupees and American dollars. (Somehow the shekels, naira and yuan I’ve collected didn’t make the voyage)

A rolling stone gathers no moss, now it’s time for liftoff!

I heard San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom, say that 75 percent of the world’s population lives within five hours flight from Bangalore. I have a suspicion he is right.

Last week I traveled to Malaysia, leaving  the familiarity and comfort of India for the first time in six months.My first stop was Singapore, which in spite of its large Indian population is the antithesis of all things Indian.

In Singapore I had one of the best sushi meals of my life (thanks, Mike), but on the whole, I found the place boring and soulless–not unlike walking through downtown Seattle. Between bouts of exhaustion I found myself  comparing Singapore’s oppressive logic to the exuberance, noise, foul smells unimaginable chaos of India and feeling proud of having lived in Bangalore and adjusted over time. Walking around (and around, and around) Raffles Place, I saw a small pile of trash bags and  instantly seized on the opportunity to snap a photo, almost as though I had uncovered some hidden flaw in Singapore’s grand plan.

The next stop was Kuala Lumpur, for some Saturday night revelry. Tired and smelly, I arrived in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur’s backpacker epicenter, an hour after sundown.  Choc-a-block full of hostels, bars and restaurants, Bukit Bintang was perfectly insulated island of travelers from across Europe and South America. Here I met Italians, Belgians, Argentines and a study abroad student from Tanzania.  With so many tourists shuffling from one watering hole to another, we could have been in Beijing, New Orleans or New York.

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The stars have aligned for 2010 to be a bangup year!  On Monday Andrew Sullivan from The Atlantic linked to my video ‘The Philly Beard Project’ on his blog, ‘The Daily Dish.’ The video went viral and in the past three days it has clocked more than 200,000 views.

It’s impossible not to notice the beards when you visit Philadelphia and I thought the story had to be told. In New York it doesn’t happen, nor is it common in D.C. or Boston, but Philadelphia is the city of ferocious facial hair. Why? As an inquisitive journalist, I knew I had to get to the root of the issue. I learned a lot, but I feel like I know less than when I started.

Filming in Philadelphia exposed me to some wonderful people and delicious hoagies and I’m convinced there are many more beard stories left to tell. I hope I can return to Philadelphia soon to continue the important work soon. If you haven’t already, for your enjoyment I present the first installment of the The Philly Beard Project: The Sunni Beard.

Happy New Year folks. As you can see from the none-too-subtle photo, I’m very excited about this year’s world cup, which is now just six months away.

2009 and the decade it capped was tremendous by any metric and the years to come promise to be even more full. TechTrotter will be marking its first full year as an entity in just a matter of days. In the weeks and months to come, expect to see some changes and new features rolling out.

Also, I apologize for the slow pace of new material coming up on the site. I’ve been hard at work launching my career as a proper freelance journo and it is a time consuming endeavor. Many of you have also received handwritten letters with my name at the bottom. If you’re still waiting on yours, please make sure to mention it in the comments and I will be sure to remedy the situation.

Tomorrow I head back to Hyderabad aboard the TATA Jagriti Yatra train. Updates are soon to follow, along with reflections from a week in Jaipur. (Photos already on Flickr)

Thank you for making me a part of your life . I hope to return the favor with interest.

Wishing you and yours a bountiful 2010.

Sincerely,

Chikodi Chima

The Khemka Social Entrepreneuship Forum at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, may as well have been called the conference on scale. While the attendees and presenters were scheduled to touch on various nuances of social entrepreneurship, the word that arose again and again was “scale.” Sponsored by The World Bank and the Ford Foundation, The Khemka Forum was an gathering of 100 top stars from various disciplines, business and organizations who met to “accelerate the business of social change,” so said the event Web site.

For statistics junkies and demographers, India is the promised land.  ”India is like a miniature Europe,” said  Professor Madhukar Shukla, but even this colorful metaphor understates the complexity. The world’s second largest country by population, seventh largest by land area and boasting the 12th largest economy in the world, according to Maps of India, India is home to more than 16 percent of the world’s diabetics and a whopping 41 percent of all poor people on Earth call this country home, according to Nation Master.

President of the ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, Dr. Nachiket Mor, said that India, a pilot program has 15 million participants. With so many languages, cultures and religions united under a single flag, the true test of any innovation are those that can reach India-scale, in the words of Teamlease owner, Manish Sabharwal. Firstly, Sabharwal said, it is critical to identify those businesses that are babies and those that are dwarves. You can give all the food and attention you want to a dwarf and it will remain a dwarf, while the same care will make a baby grow and grow. Companies work the same way; some are destined to remain small because it is in their DNA, while others have the potential to impact millions. Identifying those ideas and companies and making them India-scale was the order of the day and one of the most important challenges of the years to come.

One hour from the center of Hyderabad is Ramoji Film City, India’s equivalent of Universal Studios in Hollwood. The 2,000-acre site, with an amusement park and two hotels, can boast of an impressive array of  amenities. Accommodating over 5,000 daily tourists, as well as the needs of wedding parties, conferences and associated gatherings.

We went to Ramoji Film City to scout out locations for a possible conference and we were told by our guides from the events team that 20 movies can be shot on the ground simultaneously as well as accommodating nearly 600 hotel guests and various wedding activities. As part of our tour of the conference facilities, we got to see the Hotel Sitara’s four themed VIP suites. Apparently it is standard practice for the director, the hero or the executive producer to have lodgings with an unmarked door that leads directly to the fire exit. One can assume this extra evacuation measure is in place to safeguard the screen icon’s well-being and has nothing to do with enabling affairs or off-screen trysts between star and costar.

Later in the site tour, we visited the giant, empty sound stage, where thousands of attendees could gather before a main stage, were it to be assembled, followed by the Moghul Gardens, Princess St. and a dash to catch our flight at the Bangalore International Airport. All were sets of course.

The most striking thing about Ramohji Film City is the way in which the studios allow for the trickery involved in making movies. In essence, Film City is a blank canvas onto which we can paint any dream.

While my family and friends in the U.S. were busy preparing for the Thanksgiving holiday, I was in Tamil Nadu helping school children prepare to become global citizens. With my roommate, and buddy, Ahmed, in tow, we headed to Madumalai, a tiger preserve in the shadow of the Ooti mountains to volunteer teach and take in a nature safari. None of the credit belongs to me, except for the few photos I snapped along the way.

We departed from Bangalore’s Majestic bus terminal just after 11pm and, to everyone’s surprise, we arrived in Madumalai ahead of schedule at 4am. As remote of a destination as it was, this posed a bit of a problem. No could come round to pick us up for several hours and more urgently, the area was known to be inhabited by wild tigers. Elephants too roamed the area at night, and I was desperate to see either species, but it was not to be. There was no cell phone reception and no one we could call if we did have service, so we hunkered down  on the stone benches outside the wilderness safari ticket booth, wrapping bodies tightly as a brace against the cold night air. I desperately wanted to see one of the area’s wild elephants of tigers, carnivorous or not, but it was not to be.

At 6 am, the first jeep of the morning arrived to cart our chilly bones at to a research station where we to stay for the night. At the research station forestry and wildlife scientists from India and the U.S. were engaged in the study of the area’s elephants, plant life and, upon our arrival, breakfast. I can’t say enough about how spectacular the cook was. Deceptively simple, his meals of boiled beans, sliced beets and loads or rice were some of the best I have had. If you put a pot of his sambar in front of me now, I would probably devour the whole thing! Restored in body and mind after some idli, and a potent tumbler of tea, we ventured out to the first of two school, in Mavanala.

While  the signboard in front of the school said it was a “tribal” school, I was unable to discern anything about the school or its pupils that would differentiate them from other students I have taught in Bangalore. The schools we visited were Tamil, meaning that instruction happens in Tamil, however,  I was greeted by hearty shouts of , “Hello, how are you?”  from students as soon as we pulled up at the school’s gate.

Tell me more …

Moving to India has been the start of a necessary reeducation.  We live in a knee jerk era and as time passes I am fighting to overcome my ingrained reactionary tendencies. Although problems arise seemingly over night, this is rarely the case and it is equally true that meaningful solutions must take time. However, whether its business, politics, health or romance, I am used to expecting immediate solutions. I attribute this largely to my American world view.

The most important period of my financial education came at the height of the dotcom boom, 1998-1999, a most American of occurrences. As a senior in high school, we engaged in the ages old ritual of choosing a stock portfolio and monitoring its fluctuations daily. At this time, the NYSE and NASDAQ were reaching stratospheric heights;  each subsequent trading day demolished the previous day’s market-topping record. The word “day trader,” which later came to mean bathrobe clad, quick buck mercenary, still had some allure as savvy investors won and lost tens of thousands of dollars from their living rooms.

In this era, any feat of financial legerdemain seemed not only appropriate, but encouraged. Technology–in the form of worthless dotcom stocks, as well as desktop trading software, offered anyone the chance to become a millionaire. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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My favorite locale in Bangalore is the approach road in front of my apartment. I don’t know for certain whether the road has a name, but it has a permanent place in my heart. Though I have derided the road as bomb-scarred, and joke to friends that driving on it is like taking a trip 20 years into the past, I still love the road because it is here I go to see the real India.

Sploosh! Sploosh! A black cloud of flies erupts each time the  Muslim fishmonger dumps out a cup of water  to cool his decomposing wares. These rivulets trickle over the bodies of big, beautiful fish trucked in each morning, only to be passed over by value-conscious shoppers on the hunt for small fry. Too bad. I want to see any small business owner succeed, but I fear he misjudged his potential market locating among Hindu non-meat eaters.

As the fish slime coalesces on the concrete below, it mingles with the brackish fluid that flows through the open sewers and past a small slum of some 15-odd tarpulin hutches. Here, mothers bathe their children from buckets, youngsters tell each other stories atop a pile of felled trees and smoke wafts from scattered cooking fires. Each time I pass, the sewer stench, wood smoke and scent of frying onions simultaneously uplifts and appalls me, but this is my India.

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I am home! I suddenly realized. On Old Airport Road,  watching traffic careen through a chaotic intersection, I felt for the first time that everything was exactly as it should be. What a glorious mess! But  it had become my mess.  I was beginning to think like an Indian.

After three months in Bangalore I’m much more comfortable in a country known for overwhelming all five senses. The bright colors, spicy foods, heat and rain complemented by a distinct urban potpourri are unmistakable qualities of the Indian experience, but while they assault, ambush, and assail the body and mind, I know I will miss them when I’m gone.

In a country as large and diverse and diverse as India, there are few things that link Hindu, Muslims, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Jew alike in this psychedelic tapestry. Anyone who spends enough time here realizes that they too have an inner Indian and, in a country that wholly embraces reincarnation, this isn’t hard to believe.

The following are some tricks I have picked up to help me think like an Indian and learn to love this country along the way.

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