Reflections on India

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

Wow, it’s so hard to believe that we have almost reached the end of our time in Bagar. I remember coming here two months ago with the main goals of getting hands-on experience and doing development work in rural India. When I look back, I realize that the most exciting aspects of my experience have been the entrepreneurship project, our interactions with the other fellows, and most important of all cultural immersion.

Let me tell you a little bit about my involvement in the entrepreneurship project team first. For the past two months, I have been working with Pulkit, a consultant from Booz & Company, and Apeksha, an ex-investment banker from Citigroup on a small business development initiative. This initiative, which aims to help small businesses start, grow, and prosper in rural India, was initiated at the beginning of this year by offering a business course for college-age students. During my time in Bagar, we have helped five different entrepreneurs with business planning and teaching them the basics of marketing and accounting.

As I do not have an operating knowledge of Hindi, my main focus was on primary research and the creation of financial models for our clients. It was particularly interesting to visit surrounding villages to collect information from suppliers, retailers, and end customers. It was somewhat challenging at the beginning to deal with the resistance from the local community as the concept of creating innovation here in Bagar sounded unrealistic to them. The fact that I have been challenged a lot actually means that I have also learned a lot. Living here for two months have definitely improved my problem solving skills and taught me how to live in adverse conditions. Hopefully, the entrepreneurship project will evolve in a rural consultancy in the next couple of months offering the following services when the next batch of volunteers arrive:


In addition to working with five local entrepreneurs, I also lead an independent consulting assignment with the Bagar Employment Institute (BEI) and created a condensed strategic and financial plan to refine the institution’s business model. As a part of this project, I had the chance to travel to Jaipur in order to talk to larger institutions, which Sasha has described in his last entry.

As a side project, I have been visiting the different historical sites around the village with a local student in the evenings. I am still working on the creation of a map and a tourism booklet for Bagar. I hope the tourists who visit the village and the next batch of volunteers at GDL will benefit from some of the information I have collected.

Be it strolling around the rat temple in Bikaner, or traveling through the contrasts of the streets in Jhunjhunu, or staying over at the farm of a family in Khudana, the most amazing aspect of my trip to India was to experience the spirit of rural India. The spirit of rural India is strong, alive, entrepreneurial, creative, and willing to step up to the challenges of poverty and despair. It’s a force that is helping transform the world we live in and will continue to do so for the incoming years. I feel honored to have had the opportunity to experience this spirit through my internship at GDL. It was a true pleasure to see how a young country with a centuries old civilization is working hard every day to improve itself and give its best to the world.

Cengiz Rahmioglu

BEI

Bagar Employment Institute

The Institute was started nearly two years ago to address the serious lack of job relevant skills in the local young population. Those who get good jobs in the surrounding cities have some amount of command of spoken English and at least basic computer skills. While many students can read English fairly well from the limited amount they learn in school, they can barely speak it. Computer skills are generally worse as virtually none of the schools in this area, or as far as I know any rural area in India generally do not include computers in their curricula in any serious way (mostly due to lack of electricity, funds and teaching expertise).

Thus there are huge numbers of private, for profit computer and English institutes all over the country, with new ones opening daily. There are 3 or 4 just in Bagar itself from none two years ago. The quality of instruction and one's job prospects after having attended any of these institutes is obviously quite patchy.

I spent most of my time here developing and teaching a 6 week course in computer hardware, networking, troubleshooting and administration as the main course the institute offers currently is a 4 month basic course covering copy/paste, the use of email, Internet and office programs and typing. I taught my lessons in the mornings and spent the rest of the day writing the lesson for the next morning.

In the last week, with the course finally complete, Ive been working closely with two of the students in the course who were selected by BEI's head to be the new instructors for the course. Teaching the course was extremely difficult what with my limited amounts of broken Hindi and the students patchy English reading and even worse spoken English skills. I learned a fair amount of grammar and syntax trying to translate handouts and tests while those students with better English learned a good bit about computes. The head of the institute, Kaushalji, very kindly sat in on nearly every lesson translating good parts of them and adding his own explanations.

I also spent time in Jaipur and some of the closer towns and cities interviewing the directors of other computer centres in order to get an understanding of their classes and operations in order to help BEI improve its business model in advance of a planned future expansion to other towns and villages in the are.

Sasha Riser-kositsky

too much

As our time at GDL has well passed the month marker, a bit of reflection never hurts.

What follows is just a collection of random things we've learned so far.

Lesson 1: The best food is cart food (whether in Bagar, a smaller town, or Delhi itself).

Lesson 2: The bus system is amazing, as long as you can stumble through enough Hindi to figure out where the bus goes. You can always get to where you need to go.

Lesson 3: It's much easier to chill with the kids than try to stumble through conversations with their parents (who are usually very busy anyways).

Lesson 4: Wake up at 0600, go to bed at 2200-2330.

Lesson 5: Don't try to spend serious time in Rajasthan without having some kind of grasp on Hindi (or Marwari would work OK I guess).

Lesson 6: "School" is spelled सोकाल and "beauty" is something like बुयतय. Its hard enough to read Hindi, but when it turns out to be transliterations of English words, it's all the more confusing riffling through a dictionary trying to find a meaning.

Lesson 7: Hindi keyboard layouts are finicky. Does anyone know to get a layout that will abbreviate the letters properly? This one won't shorten the स.

Lesson 8: Storms always mean more power cuts than usual.

Lesson 9: The local water around Bagar is perfectly safe to drink. The problem is only with the fluoride content, which only becomes an issue if you drink it for your whole life.

Lesson 10: You cannot deflect the kids when they are set on doing stuff with you. They never get tired of staring and demanding Hindi songs be played. Five of them just barged in and kept plugging in different sets of earbuds. Only Hindi songs are enjoyed. Cameras are also popular. Once, the kids next door took over a hundred pictures in 20 minutes.

Lesson 11: Animals sometimes barge in since we're in a rural area. A very confused goat stumbled into the office a few days ago, stared and then left. Cows come in to eat empty cardboard boxes. Dogs sleep in the hallway outside the bathroom.

Lesson 12: Indian vegetarian food is the best food in the world.

Lesson 13: No matter how early you get up, if the sun has risen, it's hot. It will remain hot 24/7 regardless of the sun. In fact, you generally end up sweating more at night over dinner than during the day.