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

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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Every journey in Bangalore begins the same miserable way. I leave the apartment and walk down our bomb-scarred approach road to the auto stand where a pack of flea-bitten rickshaw drivers try daily to extract every last paise from my pockets. A short ride to the “sig-nill,” 2 km away on Wind Tunnel Road, costs 20 rupees and anywhere beyond this natural boundary, the price jumps to 100 rupees, an arbitrary amount they know the can get from me. The current dollar rupee to dollar exchange rate is 47 to one, so why get in a tizzy about two measly bucks? After a while in India, it’s necessary to stop thinking like an American and behave like a local.

I don’t mind paying a little extra, but I abhor the feeling of being scammed. When I get a driver who seems nice and charges the metered rate, I don’t mind throwing in a little tip, which I’m told is a big no no!

When I told my roommate how much I dislike being overcharged for rides by rickshaw drivers, he told me it was my own fault and then fault of every Western bleeding heart who comes to Bangalore. It seems there is blame aplenty. Could the fault lie with multinational corporations, whose giant campuses have caused property values to soar and kickstarted neighborhoods overnight? Is it the flood of expats and Non-resident Indians who brought their Western customs and hard currency to the local market? What about the tourists who cling to Bangalore’s scant cultural offerings for out-of-towners? Why not call it a little bit of everything. After all, this is India.

The pyschology of tipping has many layers. As an American in India, I’m happy to pay the same off meter price I consider extortion, if I get to feel it is given as a tip instead of an overcharge. The notion of a choice, however, is crucial. In the U.S., we’re expected to tip enthusiastically and often. It’s not a choice; it’s a hard and fast social convention with little or no escape. Cab drivers, barbers, waiters, mechanics, bar tenders, florists, and delivery boys are just a few of the folks who expect tips for their work, in New York, arguably America’s most expensive city. With already high sticker prices, people in service industries earn meager wages in exchange for generous tips–the adage goes–in order to survive. In Bangalore, says my other roommate, a tip of five percent is considered acceptable, depending on the nature of the service, but there is no hard and fast rule.

A gratuity or a “tip” is a word of mysterious origin, but the meaning is clear. A tip of some amount is given to the servicer on top of any standard charges as a gesture of appreciation for outstanding service and a measure of goodwill.

According to Straight Dope columnist, Cecil Adams, the practice of tipping may have Latin origins, in which case it was a “stips” or gift, but tipping as we know it today has its origin in Great Britain. Adams writes,

Tipping spread from England to colonial America, but after the revolution it was frowned upon (temporarily) as a hangover from the British class system. One only tipped one’s social inferiors, which, lest we forget, did not exist in the brave new world. Unfortunately, the working class eventually got around to swallowing its pride, and tipping returned with all the fervor it possesses today.

As an American, the very idea of being someone’s “social better” makes me as squeamish as paying. From that point of view, its easy to see how a display of largesse is not about altruism at all, but instead reinforces the class standing of the server and the served. In India, with its outlawed though well-reinforced caste system, the idea of different social classes doesn’t strike anyone as a big deal from my personal observations.

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Today  The Atlantic announced the full release of The Atlantic Wire, a slick compedium of political news and opinion from around the Web. It’s actually rather brilliant.

Herein lies a problem, however. While I just found a new content site that combines a beautiful interface with a stimulating blend of opinion, I have to access articles from on their site which is a huge problem. This morning I read an article in The Globe and Mail  called ‘Information-Rich, Attention-Poor,’ that sums up the situation very succinctly. The quantity of information I have readily available is almost infinite, however, my attention is scarce. All the multitasking and browser tabs in the world isn’t going to make me more thoughtful or well read when I can only devote a minute or two to any particular news item.

The Atlantic just made this problem even worse by creating a site I want to visit, but probably won’t because I don’t have time. Adding a new content source to my daily routine has zero transaction costs, but takes effort and some repetition to become a habit. What’s needed is a new delivery system that takes any work out of the process.

Earlier this week I had an article published in VentureBeat about Busk, a startup I encountered while I was in São Paulo this July. Busk uses real-time search technology to deliver news content based on tagged keywords and topics. Any mention of the word cricket, for instance, would search a database of 15,000 manually-added news sources and 100,000,000 articles to bring back every mention of the word cricket. Not too bad.

While this solves one problem, it doesn’t fully address the addition of a single source to my daily reading diet. One solution would be to change my home page,  but in doing so, I lose the page that I used to have there. Similarly, with an RSS reader, such as Google Reader or Feedly, I have to check them whenever I want to know about the latest articles posted. As it turns out, Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages are becoming my preferred method of receiving news. I filter most of what I know about the world through these two sites. Anything worth knowing finds its way to me. To put it another way, I’ve become accustomed to the news seeking me out, instead of going to it.

While Facebook and Twitter are good at presenting information in a ‘river of news’ format, it’s far from perfect. For instance, I have to be logged in to either site and separate hard news from social fact. While I don’t have much of a problem with it now, this is due to the scarcity of news sources I receive on Facebook and the sheer volume of duplicated news on Twitter. If I was more serious about it, I would need a more robust solution and so far I’m not aware of one that does the job. I’m sure there is a product out there that stays on top of interesting news sources–preserving the user interface without commodifying the information–and adds new sources without pain. If you’re out there somewhere, I hope we meet soon!

While the Western world slept, India’s next generation of tech entrepreneurs was meeting to discuss the future of cleantech at Startup Saturday, a monthly event. On the verdant campus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore campus, nearly 80 people gathered to talked about the challenges and opportunities of meeting India’s future energy needs through innovation, reducing consumption and even converting human motion and waste into electricity. Bangalore has been one of the world’s startup hotspots for much of the past decade, so it’s not as though the West was unaware of the meeting.  Any meeting at 11 am Bangalore time is the middle of America’s sleeping hours.

Although we got to the event late, I still got to see a couple very interesting presentations. Karthee Madasamy of Qualcomm Ventures (whose list of succesful exits includes PayPal) spoke about cleantech companies in which his firm invests, both in the U.S. and Asia. One of the most shocking revelations of Madasamy’s talk was the opportunities available entrepreneurs who can reduce the power consumption of India’s mobile phone towers. Madasamy said that after the Indian Armed Forces and national rail system, celular phone towers are the number three consumers of diesel fuel in the entire country. Only 10 percent of towers are “off-grid.” Tell me more …

Last night, my neighbor’s snores were loud enough to wake the dead. I almost to put on the ceiling fan to drown out the noise,  but as the morning sun warms the wet clay, the near silence of night has given way to din of the day’s activities. Washing, cooking and the feeding babies all contribute to the sonic landscape. My Bangalore is the sound of water sloshing from buckets onto concrete floors, the sweet smell of wet clay and burnt petrol fumes, fried onions and spices.  With the sun overhead, Bangalore is alive,  bodies are everywhere, as are cars and cows, restaurants and shrines.

Having lived here before, albeit briefly, I feel I know what to expect out of this city–crippling traffic, frenetic energy and a friendly, welcoming atmosphere. This time will be different, as I am here to stay. As such, I’m looking at the city with a different set of eyes, though they are cast upon a familiar scene. I’m living in the ultimate Bangalore bachelor pad with Anu, a venture capitalist and Ram, one of my business partners at Ixoraa Media. Our complex has all the amenities, including a swimming pool, tennis courts and a game room with ping pong tables, and billiards.

Just down the road from our apartment are gleaming glass complexes for Microsoft, IBM and Fidelity Investments (though very corporate, the structures would win architecture awards if they were in Sao Paulo). Just across a narrow dirt road is the old Bangalore City Airport (HAL). While I slept off the jet lag and exhaustion of 35 travel hours, two fighter jets used the nearby runway, creating an incredible roar. Already this morning there have been three. Tell me more …