Bombay/Mumbai | Mumbai/Bombay

I found a great quote today: “A businessman might go to Mumbai to hold a meeting, but he would go to Bombay to hold a lover.” That’s the best explanation I’ve found for the difference in the semantic choices of overly conscientious foreigners and comfortable locals.

Bombay is a city of stepped levels: intermittent skyscrapers; endless highrises atop rolling hills; groves of flowering trees block the street view. Seas of slums like boxes stacked on boxes; a haphazard adobe of blue tarps, brick, and corrugated metals held together through sheer will. Minute shops line the streets, hawking cell minutes and soda, cloth, furniture, samosas, haircuts. Chaiwallas and bananawallas and pantswallas and all the other wallas cart their wares. Below it all, the fish women and flower women squat with their baskets. The ocean is brown with refuse and feces; the mangroves impossibly tangled with colorful garbage. The roads are filthy and the thought of monsoon flooding terrifies me. Everywhere hoards of people toil, eat, honk, laugh, chat, sleep, shit, buy, and sell. It’s a lot like New York. But the magnitude of the income and education gap is constantly palpable, caste system remnants visible always, a potential deadweight to India’s rapid ascent.

water source for street food vendors

Until August, I am lucky enough to be a guest member of a powerhouse social enterprise team bent on improving the lives of India’s rural and peri-urban poor through access to clean water. Wello’s innovative tool, the WaterWheel, is in its third cocreated design iteration and ready for production. My project involves evaluating end user impact to fully develop Wello’s value proposition, as well as financial scenario planning to define the business model. Our office space is entirely covered in Post-Its. 

We will spend June here in Mumbai, engaging with partners, coordinating logistics, and studying urban water use habits. The entrepreneurial atmosphere ensures fresh questions and challenges on a daily basis, something I missed during my brief foray into corporate life last summer. Risk is allowed, creativity is encouraged, MBA lessons are put to good use. And my daily breakfast consists of papaya, pineapple, mango, watermelon, pomegranate, banana, and yogurt, keeping a smile on my face. Lunch is panipuri, paneer, strangely addictive jeera crackers, and all the fresh juice I could ask for.


In July we head to Rajasthan to work in the field, connecting with our target market and gathering baseline data. While I look forward to lake palaces, camels, and riotously dyed saris, I am not entirely ready to abandon my cityscape. Three weeks ago, I came to Mumbai. I’m still discovering Bombay.

First month!

Namaste! Time sure does fly. It's surprising that one month has passed already.

Here’s a quick rundown on what’s happened since my last post 

Life in India:

• Being in a new place can be intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with your surroundings and know the how-to's, the "scary" place becomes home. I do admit that I'm thankful that most people understand and speak English here :) 
• It takes about a week or two to overcome the jetlag, situate yourself, be confident and know where you're going, and even start to do what the locals do
• Sunscreen is a MUST
• Delhi belly: 1 Jen: 0

Internship with Start Up!:

• Client project: According to the latest Intellecap Study of India's Social Enterprise Landscape, the education sector in India faces "a huge gap between the supply and demand of quality education for India’s youth, and the nation’s continued growth depends in large part upon filling this chasm."  I'm working with a Delhi-based not-for-profit organization that strives to enhance the quality of educational curriculum through heritage walks. The organization conducts study tours and walks through monuments and other hubs of Delhi’s culture and history in order for children to experience live heritage education. The walks are meant to be interactive, using storytelling and other materials, to inform children about their city in a creative and interactive manner. They've walked several hundreds of children from more than 45 schools in Delhi and is today a sustainable organization. In the remaining two months, I’ll be conducting a market assessment (interviewing key stakeholders and competitors) and working closely with the entrepreneur to develop an operational plan, business plan and financial model in order to scale the organization over the next three years, and hopefully lessen that gap between supply and demand of quality education.   
• Two new interns from other graduate schools in the US have joined me here. We will also be joining forces to work on an internal project together.
• Note: For those of you who read my previous post, I had talked about advising an organization focused on women empowerment. That project didn't pan out, however when working in the social sector, flexibility is KEY.

Excursions: India is a country rich with culture and history. Every part of this nation is unique in some way be it food, entertainment, dress, infrastructure, language, and historical sights.

• Delhi: Red Fort, India Gate, National Museum



View of Udaipur from City Palace



Samosa

• Udaipur: Udaipur, known as the City of Lakes, is a 10 - 12 hour bus/train ride away from Delhi. Another Start Up! intern and I decided to make this trip in a day. We left work early on Friday afternoon to catch a bus that departed at 4:30 PM and arrived in Udaipur the following morning at 6:30 AM. Upon arrival, I was able to compare Delhi to Udaipur -  different colored auto rickshaws and the prevalence of stray dogs and cows in Udaipur. We took the auto rickshaw to the area surrounding the City Palace. Since the Palace wasn't open before 10 AM in India, we had some time to kill so we walked around the areas, started our “window shopping” and even had the courage to try some samosas from a street vendor. 

• Agra: Went to see the magnificent Taj Mahal this past weekend with other WDI Fellows in India. We wore our WDI shirts and posed for the camera in hopes that our photo will make it into a newsletter ;)   

First week!

Since the end of February, I very much looked forward to my summer internship working in India as a WDI fellow with Start Up!, an angel investor, incubator and consulting firm that strives to launch, strengthen, and scale social ventures in India, and now it has become reality.

It’s been close to a week since I landed in New Delhi, India, with no working phone and no sense of direction. While the first few days were rough in getting used to the different pace and infrastructure of life here in Delhi, I now have a working phone and become accustomed to the random honking, constant haggling for an auto rickshaw ride, and of course, the intense summer heat (109 degrees Fahrenheit today!). Thankfully, I’m now more in the know of the various neighborhoods, what each area has to offer, and how to haggle a decent price with the auto rickshaws. 

Furthermore, my stomach has been fairly content with the level of spicyness it gets to indulge in every day :) In addition to the spice, I even got to try some Himalayan food in Hauz Khas Village.  This is the Yeti special non-veg (clockwise starting with the tingmo (the white bun - tastes like a chinese mantou), lungs, tongue, sausage, and meat).

I've also made a few new friends along the way, especially since I'm one of the early birds here in Delhi. Knowing other people here has definitely helped make the transition less daunting. 

As for my internship, I started this past Monday, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a busy summer but in a good way.

Start Up! was founded in 2007 and since then has partnered with social ventures in the non-profit and for-profit continuum. These social ventures are ones that aim to maximize philanthropic capital in the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). The Start Up! office and team are small, vastly different from my past work experiences in corporate America. However, it’s great because this means many opportunities to take ownership in my projects and take the initiative to grow and learn more about the social enterprise space in India.

I have several internal and external projects to pass my time for the next 12-13 weeks, apply what I learned this past year at Ross, and further refine my business skills. Internally, I will be developing a refined business plan and financial model for Start Up!, creating a business plan for Start Up!’s business accelerator with two other interns who will be joining me soon, and reviewing the design of an incubation toolkit for internal use. My external project is expected to be evaluating the market feasibility of a social enterprise.  They provide young semi-urban Indian women with an online platform to share their thoughts on various issues through video blogs. I’m definitely looking forward to working with an organization whose mission is to empower women.

That’s all from me for now. I will take more pictures soon. I'm looking forward to hanging out with the WDI Fellows who will be joining me here in India very soon!