Diary from New Delhi
Friday, 24 September
On Wednesday, I went to India Internet World. The air conditioning inside was such a welcome relief I was quite content spending hours wandering from booth to booth and pretending that I had a deep interest in enterprise applications. Though I didn't need to as there was plenty else to keep me content. What a jam-packed show. Even by first day standards, there were throngs and throngs of people. And all of them male (blue oxford shirts, gold-rimmed glasses) except for the typical beautiful Bollywooded women hired to lure the young men into the booths. At COMDEX the lady booth magnets are scantily clad; lots of Marilyn lookalikes with bad, cheap makeup. At India Internet World, the saris are bright and cheerful.
Rakesh Mathur, founder of Junglee, gave the keynote. Standing room only, of course. It seems that one of the challenges India faces (both Rakesh brought this up as well as a number of other successful Indian entrepreneurs at the conference) is keeping the talent at home. In the country here in India. VC funding in this bulging country is limited. So, Silicon Valley gains what India loses. Obviously, this needs to change and an environment needs to be created here that fosters Indian Internet entrepreneurs. There's something wrong that to make it big one has to make it big in the Big Ol' U. S. of A.
That said, at the moment, it seems that to get anything accomplished here in India takes many times more effort than it does in the States. Getting online isn't easy. Not true. Getting online can be easy. Staying online can be the challenge.
India has some great websites and they were all on show at Internet World. One that I used before I arrived was called 123India.com. Very slick, it's aimed towards Non Resident Indians (NRI's). And there are many scattered throughout Malaysia, Africa, Canada, USA and the UK. This is a huge market. What struck me most when I was back in San Francisco and looking at Indian websites, in particular at Indian news sites, is how the priorities of the audience are obviously quite different: On American news sites, business, tech and national news are right up there at the top taking up one's entire screen. Scroll down or look along the bottom left-hand side of your screen and you'll find the junky stuff. On Indian sites, horoscopes and Bollywood news have priority. At the press conference for the show, the panelists (Made It Big Indian entrepreneurs) made nothing short of a plea to the press to heroise Indian entrepreneurs rather than Indian movie stars. (Personally, I think the States would do well with a really tacky TV show along the lines of Entertainment Tonight but focusing solely on the muck and gossip of the personal lives of well known tech stars.)
Another site launched at the show specifically for Indian IT professionals is ITspace. The site is being positioned as THE technology portal for India. Sort of like a Planet IT but targeting the Indian CIO market. At the moment, it has the basic online techie community stuff: news, forums, and the such. In the next six months they'll add a developer's network (an Indian builder.com?), a home network (SoHO stuff), a jobs channel and an auction channel. No books though. Odd, huh? The shipping is too expensive. Having popped into a technical bookstore in downtown New Delhi the other day, I can say with assurance that access to the latest tech books is slim. Seems like a big market to me and a small hurdle that is worth figuring out.
Other interesting bits at the show included a product called "ISchool2000" (a soon-to-be defunct name) which is a project that has been undertaken by both the Asia-Pacific Education and Research Foundation and Wondersoft. It's a school management system that's based on the open source LINUX platform. (Microsoft may be here, they may have poured money into our country, a piddle in the pool for them, but you try and get Microsoft to offer any support here in India--that's the sentiment regarding Windows versus LINUX). They're still implementing this product into their first school about an hour north of Delhi so I've made arrangements to go take a snoop around in a couple of months. School intranets are fairly common in the States, for sure, but in India this is nothing short of revolutionary.
A Trip to the ISP
After much fussing and a visit to the hotel from one of the ISP's service providers, I ended up going to the main Delhi office of Satyam Online. Honestly, it's so silly to be hassling about getting an Internet connection. And I just know that if it's difficult to get tech support in Delhi, it's going to be impossible in, ohhh, say, the Himalayan foothills. Call me driven, I'm not leaving this crazy city until my modem makes a healthy double ding da-di-ING da-di-ING (yes!) sound.
I've used the same taxi driver for the last couple of days. He's from Punjab. He doesn't wear a turban like everyone else in his family. He has spiky hair. And he wears big, baggy straight leg pants. They all use the hotel parking lot as their home base. But he had a different car yesterday morning. It was resting on a dirt mound, nose towards the street, down. It didn't start. The angle on the dirt mound suddenly took on importance. Taxi driver's family surrounded the back of the car and pushed while taxi driver tried to get the engine to go. We slid. And then coasted, not stopping, into oncoming traffic on a big, wide avenue. We continued to coast and the family continued to push. Into oncoming traffic. I couldn't stop laughing. Really, I should have been worrying whether Blue Shield covers these sorts of accidents, or more importantly, had my Blue Shield insurance gone through. I opened the door and hopped out and demanded to taxi driver's family that we start over in a fresh car.
And so we did. Off to an address that taxi driver promised he knew but we both knew he didn't. He always asks me what country I'm from. So, yesterday, seeing as we had a longish drive ahead, I gave him some new questions to ask his female customers. He doesn't ask guys anything. That's what he said when I questioned him. Offers to take me to Punjab were declined. For once, his offer to wait for me was accepted, though.
He waited for two hours while the ISP tried to figure out what was wrong with their connections and my computer. I never want to hear about lousy office conditions in Silicon Valley. We never really did figure out the problem. I came away knowing that I needed another plug, however. A sort of plug-adaptor thing that they said I'd never find in Delhi. Bah. With taxi driver outside waiting (you wait, and I'll pay you when I return), we set off for another unknown alley that apparently--apparently--was where all the electronics shops were located. And so they were, little holes-in-the wall filled with plugs. And below me, pulling on my scarf, were street urchins. I can't bring myself to give them anything. I wonder if that's the wrong decision but I'm adamant about that.
Yesterday evening, I went to a mobile phone store right off Connaught Place (SEEE PEEE to locals). They had a sign indicating Internet access. All the customers were Indian in the Internet Cafe, no backpackers. Talk about fun, I ended up spending hours there talking to both the other customers as well as the guys who ran the store. All of them had been to Internet World. All of them wanted to know what the latest and hottest website was in the States. All of them had plans to go to America. And all of them looked at Craig's List and marveled that such online communities exist in the States. And Chicky (that's what his Unfold-Me business card says in silver joined up writing), head honcho of the store, said he would pay A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G for my laptop. (slim little Sony deal). His diamonds wouldn't stop flashing in my face. And the Mont Blancs in his shirt pocket were super fat and gold. But he and his guys sorted me out with my laptop and my modem and so maybe I said, just maybe, I'd swing by on my way out of the country and sell it to him. But only if he throws in that lapis Mont Blanc.
Tonight, to the Himalayan foothills by train.