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.

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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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We tempt fate at our own peril, but traveling with a bottle of hand sanitizer has been the furthest thing from my mind lately. As I grow more comfortable in and fond of Bangalore, I continue to push my limits both in a geographic and culinary sense. My favorite part of Bangalore is the city’s Muslim Quarter which includes the neighborhoods of Shivajinagar and Frasier Town. In Frazier Town as in Shivajinagar, I’ve found my inner caveman and it is here I’ve truly abandoned all practical advice, joyously munching street corner kebabs cooked over coal, devouring romali roti-wrapped katti rolls and sipping sweet chai from filthy shot glasses.

With each visit, I further relinquish Western standards of food hygiene and rely more and more heavily on my immune system to keep me from harm. India has made me question is the premise of cleanliness, especially as it is practiced in the West. To what extent does hygiene protect us, and how much are we deluded by our rituals of food safety?

In many ways modern Bangalore is stuck between two (or more) eras. As the hyperlinked hub of India’s hyper-ambitious new role as a world player evidence of the region’s technological muscle abounds. Multinationals’ offices are strewn far and wide and sleek new cars maneuver through traffic with even sleeker passengers gabbing into high-end smart phones. At the same time, however, it’s not uncommon to see donkey carts and SUV’s stopped at the same traffic signals. Actually, I take that back–for whatever reason, those donkey carts never seem to obey traffic laws and yet they never get tickets. Go figure. In any case, Bangalore’s high end restaurants, such as Caperberry, can compete with the likes of New York and San Francisco in terms of menu, ambience, wines and price. Restaurants on the other end of the spectrum can be truly appalling.

Many of my favorite Bangalore haunts are either on the street or at least partially exposed to the road, with all of its accompanying dust and vehicle fumes. As often as not, these restaurants will have a hand-washing sink with a cold water tap (of course) and no soap. Even if it were possible to rinse my hands clean, I’m putting those germs back on when I turn off the tap. At Imperial, my favorite restaurant on Residency Road, a squeegee is all that is used to clear the table for you after the last guests have finished their meal. In the U.S., some form of antiseptic is sprayed or wiped on the table before a new customer is seated to protect us from germ–or so we would like to think. If I kept track of how often I saw Bangalore waiters pick their nose before handing me a plate of food, I would have gone crazy months ago.

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After three months spent in Bangalore, I have completed all six episodes ‘The Story of India’ a comprehensive but by no means exhaustive account of India and her people. Narrated and presented by the BBC’s Mike Wood, the documentary exposes viewers to the rich tapestry that is Indian history and culture, North, Central and Southern alike. As a new inhabitant, I found was captivated from beginning to end, but I’m sure that my Indian friends who know their history would still learn something from watching.

The series begins in Kerala, where Wood says that the earliest Indians migrated from Eastern Africa, settling in India’s extreme South more than 70,000 years ago. He takes us to a village where the brahmin families recite mantras so old they are unlike any know language and yet they preserve the earliest human speech forms as they were spoken millennia ago. Adding further evidence to the argument, Wood visits a village in Tamil Nadu where the resident’s DNA contains a marker, M130, that conclusively proves that their ancestors have been living in the same place for over 70,000 years–making all non-Africans in Europe and Asia their descendants. As someone who delighted in the study of prehistoric archeology in college, such information makes me giddy at the possibilities.

Should I live in India another 20 years, I doubt I will have the opportunity to conduct such an exhaustive and exilhirating sojourn, but I comforted by the fact that even in a lifetime, one can only know a tiny sliver of all that is India. I feel fortunate also that the BBC funded such a massive undertaking which has contributed immensely to my understanding of Indian history, mythology and customs, though it is surely no substitute for personal experience and interaction.

Embedded below are all six episodes for your viewing pleasure. While you may not have time to watch all six in a single sitting. I implore you to watch the first 15 minutes of the first episode dealing with prehistoric Indian history. If you are Indian, you are bound to learn something about your own history and if you are non-Indian, you may be shocked what it teaches you about your views on the world.

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