Californians and Indians

Goans know how to enjoy life…

In my unbroken string of holidays (I can assure you, I’m getting to the point where I’d rather be in one place!) I have just returned again from Goa.

Goa seems more relaxed than other parts of India, and it’s certainly more relaxed than Mumbai: yoga rhythms, beer and fish in the shade, and water buffalo wandering lazily around.

But our cab driver, Danny, had a more pronounced take. A Goan himself, by residency if not by birth, he praised the laziness of his fellow Goans. “We are lazy! We want to enjoy life,” he said. “We do not want to work too hard.” If you tell a Goan to sweep, he promised, “All he will do is sweep. No more.”

We had some complaints about our hotel’s management, and he said this was because they were not Goan - “they work too hard, always focused on making money.” 

Even better, by reputation they were “cray cray” - which is either some Goan phrase I don’t know or something he picked up from slang-dropping Americans.

America is boring

I just got back to Mumbai from LA, where I grew up. Landing at LAX used to feel like a stressful experience: the lines, the harried travelers, the burst of heat and noise on the street outside.

And now? LAX feels like an oasis of extraordinary calm and order. And the trip home from the airport, on the 105 to the 110 up into Pasadena, features one civilizational marvel after another: universally accepted traffic rules; clear sidewalks lined with lush grass and well-kept trees; and only a handful of people sleeping rough on the roadside.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. But it feels like things are more or less organized. My time in LA was all easy trips to Target and delicious sushi meals; the most stressful event on any trip out was not being able to find a parking space. The air never smelt of anything - just of itself. Enormous, flawless piles of fruit gleamed in the supermarket. The sidewalks and streets were not just free of trash, they were clean - as in, occasionally sparkling. Everything had a set price in the shops. I felt happily average. And in the face of all that sensible order over the course of two weeks, well - I got a little bored.

Los Angeles has always felt exciting to me. When I lived in Paris and Boston and Bruges, I used to think of that Joni Mitchell lyric: “It’s too old and cold and settled in its ways here - but California, California! I’m coming home!” I thought of Los Angeles as this enormous, thrumming place of underground music and entrepreneurial hustle and riotous diversity.

No longer.

Mumbai is a metropolis with the throttle open. The aspiration hums like a turbine. I didn’t know excitement until I moved here. In America, where is the gut-wrenching excitement of being driven in a rickety taxi by a madcap driver whose insurance policy while barreling through red lights is the strong application of horn? Where are the bananas so overripe they split in the bowl and the mangoes warm from the sidewalk fruit vendor, dripping with juice? Where is the haggling, and the hassle, and the bustle of the market? Where is the stink of human life - of cordite, and the fish docks, and the seafront crowded with squatting men? Where is that feeling of being at the center of the universe, at the start of some epic story of human development and urban innovation?

Here, there is everything to play for.

Innovation Nation

I’ve been working in the social innovation sector for the last three years. I’ve just developed a blog about it for something called Design Public - an event I’m missing this weekend because I’m in California - and I thought I’d share it and some thoughts on social innovation in India.

I’m convinced that social innovation is “the next big thing” - and that in ten years it’s going to be part and parcel of the way governments and social sector institutions do business (at the moment, it’s embraced by forward-thinking governments and institutions but mostly as an add-on rather than a core part of their work).

The biggest problem with the social innovation sector is that anyone who doesn’t work in it has very little idea what it actually means - so I’ll explain: basically, it means that we apply innovation approaches - experimentation, piloting, design - to things in the social sphere, not just the business sphere. So instead of making a better phone or scale or golf club, we make a better classroom, pre-natal program, train service.

And India is probably the most exciting place in the world for all kinds of innovation - particularly social innovation. This is for a few reasons.

First, necessity is the mother of invention. India has some of the most entrepreneurial, innovative people in the world. There is actually a word in Hindi - jugaad - which describes the cheap, scrappy, innovative work-arounds that seem to typify this place.

Second, India is investing in innovation - big time.The headline here is that India is raising a $1 billion innovation fund led by communications revolution guru Sam Pitroda.

Third, the scale of the challenges in India means that we can’t just keep doing things in the same old way - charity, aid, and small-scale interventions alone can’t solve problems for India’s hundreds of millions living in poverty. For example, there’s an incredible project underway to create the world’s largest biometric database for Indians - issuing previously untracked and undocumented millions with unique identity numbers that could revolutionize their relationship with state services.

Anyway, it’s an exciting place to be. I’ve been on a sort of self-imposed sabbatical, writing a book and a bunch of short stories, and it’s hard to stay away from this work - the potential, and the excitement, is enormous.

What I learnt on holiday

                                        

I just completed the Himalayan Annapurna Circuit (organised by the excellent Intrepid Travel) and I feel bereft now that it’s over.

Part of it is, of course, getting back to civilization. But there is also the enormity of the experience: the 155 miles walked through landscapes that help you see how utterly insignificant you are; the scores of hours of conversation with people who were only recently strangers and are now intimate with the music both of one’s iPod and bowels; and the strange, simple pleasures of the trail - of apple pie, of going to bed at 9:30, of peeing behind rocks, of dirty jokes, of songs, of sunrise, of baby goats, of taking off boots, of fires, of dancing, of beer, of entire weeks spent just walking.

And of course, it’s also the beauty - the incredible, brutal, diverse riot of life everywhere you look, from the minute to the majestic. One day might find you walking from apple orchards into a forest, crossing a teal blue river and then ending up walking for hours at in an enormous, dessicated river valley. The next might take you through foothills to hot springs, and the next you’d climb up through rhododendron forests with every tree boasting blossoms the size of softballs. There were moments during the trip when I looked around myself and thought: “This is, in fact, heaven.” (Like, um, here. And here. Oh, and here.)

What I learnt on holiday was impossible to encapsulate in something as shabby as words, except to say that experiences like the one I’ve just had are the best ways we have of tapping into the heart of life. 

And, in case I seem too serious, I also learnt the following ten more practical lessons:

1. If you think you’ve seen the worst toilet in Nepal, you’re almost certainly wrong. A worse one is coming, and it may not involve a door or even an actual receptacle for waste. Possibly just a pile. Enjoy.
2. Sometimes it’s just about putting one foot in front of the other. The top comes eventually, even if it takes you six hours of climbing in the freezing cold.
3. And if going uphill seemed like the bad bit, you’ve never descended 1700 meters in an afternoon.
4. Benjamin Franklin said, “One should eat to live, not live to eat.” Though I’d usually be inclined to ignore this, on a trek food is, most importantly, fuel. The guides and porters eat dal bhat twice a day for a reason.
5. If you have the chance, but not necessarily the desire (given your aching legs, beauty fatigue, etc), to hike to see something special or other, I’d be inclined to just do it. Because you might meet this guy and he might give you a blessing. For 100 rupees, but the guy’s got to make a living, right? Lama-ing doesn’t pay what it used to.
6. But know your limits. Rest. Abandon ego ye who enter here. The mountains will kick your ass in ways you didn’t know it could be kicked. Hello mountain sickness, nice to meet you.
7. Plato said (let’s hear it for wise old dudes from the past!), “You can learn more about a man in an hour of play than a year of conversation.” Play cards with other people on the trail. And play cards with your porters and guides. They will beat you, but you’ll still have fun.
8. But don’t play cards every night. That’s just boring.
9. Movies are a great pleasure, especially when they are shown in a wood-fire-heated projection room and watched from the comfort of a yak fur covered bench.
10. Carry candy and pens. For these guys!

Borrowing Hemingway (whose Paris memoir I read during the trip): “If you are lucky enough to have [hiked the Annapurna Circuit] as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for [the Himalayas] are a moveable feast.”

Everybody must get stoned

Holi is tomorrow. 

As it is my first Holi, I am a little nervous and excited.

However, I am also fascinated to learn that one of the reasons everyone loves Holi so much is that, as one friend put it tonight, “Everyone is stoned. Grandmothers, children of five years old. Everyone.” Apparently there is government-sanctioned marijuana (bhang) sold on the street.

But drugs are illegal in India. Go figure.