One in a Billion: Reflections from India

My name is Taylor Jacobson and I’m an analyst in Oliver Wyman’s Boston office. I have a keen interest in the intersection of education, global economic development, and social entrepreneurship. I graduated from Duke University with a degree in Economics and Public Policy Studies, and a love for fried okra and country music. I’m an idealist with the standard accompaniment of –isms: environmentalism, liberalism, vegetarianism – and a tad of hypocrisy. I enjoy skiing, cycling, reading, and my friends.

Since joining Oliver Wyman, I’ve enjoyed a steady diet of rich experiences, seemingly impassable challenges, stimulating questions, incredible people, and the requisite dose of travel-related mishaps. Through it all, the common thread has been a learning curve as steep as I have wanted it to be and personal gratification on a daily basis.

Thanks to Oliver Wyman’s Non-Profit Fellowship Program, I’ve continued the trend, spending five months in 2008-09 in and around Pune, India, helping to launch Teach For India. I've used this blog to report and reflect on my experiences, from the mundane to the potentially life-altering, and to share some of the valuable lessons that I learned along the way.

Read more about Teach For India in my article Gandhiism 101: Learning to Be the Change.


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Entrepreneurship Essentials

Monday, April 06, 2009 - 3:11 AM IST

I recently attended the Wharton India Economic Forum in Philadelphia. Like most conferences, it tried to do too much, packing as many bigshots into the agenda as possible and attempting to cover the most fundamental and challenging topics in 80-minute panel discussions. (The student organizers did a fabulous job on both counts.)

Amidst the star-gazing and shameless networking, I also gathered some concrete takeaways. The most striking was from the panel on entrepreneurship in India, in which Sabeer Bhatia, venture capitalist and co-founder of Hotmail, enumerated his criteria for being a successful entrepreneur:

  1. Have a great idea. Mr. Bhatia put it this way: “If you can do something 10 times better, faster, or cheaper, come talk to me – I will invest in your company. If it’s less than a factor of ten, I’m not interested.”

  2. Have a great team. Another online entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Yatra.com Dhruv Shringi explained: “You can’t do it alone, but only work with people who are smarter than you. That’s the only way you’ll get value out of your team.”

  3. Pressure-test your concept. “Listen to critics. You’re most certainly biased and you need critics to help you address the flaws,” said Bhatia, who talked about how he’d made the “team cynic” responsible for coming up with strategies for addressing each of the weaknesses in the Hotmail business plan.

  4. Spend carefully. “Running out of money is a sure way to fail. Do as much as you can to make sure you’re investing your capital wisely.” Bhatia emphasized that it's not worth bothering with Nos. 2-4 unless you've addressed No. 1.


Search by Caste

Sunday, April 05, 2009 - 2:15 AM IST

I gave a presentation at the Boston office a few weeks ago to share with my colleagues my experiences at Teach For India. Afterward, another analyst asked me how influential I perceived caste to be in modern India.

In the US, caste is one of those concepts you learn in high school history class – one of the five “key terms” at the end of the chapter on India in the world history textbook.

Yet it didn’t occur to me until that moment just how hidden the influence of caste had been to me. I can count on one hand the number of times it came up explicitly in conversation when I was in India. But each time the general theme was “Don’t underestimate the influence of caste.” I can remember one of my friends recounting her experience at another NGO where poor women in rural areas prepared meals for even poorer school children. Some parents had refused to accept the meals for their children because the women preparing the meals were of the lowest, “Untouchables” caste.

Back in Boston, I told my colleague that I had hardly encountered caste at all and wasn't qualified to answer her question.

Two days later, I was perusing a website launched by one of my friends, www.secondshaadi.com, a dating website for divorced Indians (shaadi means marriage). Because of the taboo on divorce in India, anyone who is not only divorced but also looking to remarry, is by definition very progressive.

On first glance, SecondShaadi.com looks like any other dating website. Then I noticed a link just below the main console: “Search by caste.” As I’ve now come to expect, even amidst India’s most liberal bastions, old traditional India is near at hand.



Reverse culture shock

Tuesday, February 17, 2009 - 6:55 AM IST

8:25 PM EST – In the few days before I flew home to Boston, Indian and American friends alike said, “Do you think you’ll feel much reverse culture shock?” I thought these people were being melodramatic. I confidently thought and said that those who reported suffering from “reverse culture shock” were most likely pretending – or delusional. “It’s only been 5 months. It’s not like I forgot what Boston is like,” I’d reply.

Well, I’ve discovered that reverse culture shock is very real. A month has passed, and I’m just beginning to recover from an emotional state equivalent to the physical phenomenon of sea-legs. When I’m not antisocially lost in thought, my conversations are full of inane links to India, like: “You eat dinner a lot later in India than here.”

The challenge for me is not readjusting to the culture, but rather learning how to share my experience with people who are interested. I am trying to package my time in India for mass consumption, but I’m not yet done processing it.



Being American

Monday, January 19, 2009 - 2:22 PM IST

While we were stuck in Mumbai traffic yesterday, my friend Klaas asked me if I felt disconnected from the US, being abroad during Barack Obama’s election and inauguration.

Unequivocally, I answered “no.”

It’s true that I have been disconnected in some ways. I can’t tell you how any of the Boston sports teams have been faring, and I missed the wedding of two close friends and a family reunion. But, being in India has in fact increased the connection I feel to my country.

When I was living in the U.S., I always thought identity tags like nationality, religion, race, and gender just shouldn’t matter. Why not judge one another on character alone? Or as John Lennon put it, “imagine there’s no country, no religion too.”

My upbringing made this ideal tenable. My parents are American with ancestry from at least six different countries. I was raised Jewish but celebrated some Christian traditions. My household was half-Democrat, half-Republican. The list goes on.

So why do I now feel so strongly American?

Living in India, I wear my identity on my face; it precedes my every interaction. I’m an American before I’m anything else. Being American is fundamental in what I know and what I don’t know at my job and in my career-focused life goals. It’s evident in my sense of possibility about the future and pride in tomorrow’s inauguration of America's first black President. It’s in the privileges I’ve had through my education and the privilege I have to be here in India. It’s in the way I look at arranged marriages, gender roles, and women’s issues. It’s even in the way I laugh when Aamir Khan, “the Brad Pitt of India,” takes a time out in the midst of his latest Bollywood flick to sing and dance.

In the process, I’ve discovered that American isn’t just a superficial tag dangling around my neck – it’s who I am.



Ready, fire, aim

Monday, January 19, 2009 - 1:48 PM IST

Yesterday I interviewed Shaheen Mistri, the CEO of Teach For India, to learn what it takes to lead a non-profit.

Without hesitation, she said that belief in your purpose is the most important factor. “It doesn’t matter if we achieve the objective in my lifetime or in three lifetimes – what matters is that I believe in where we’re going.”

Shaheen does whatever it takes to achieve her mission. Whether she is speaking to an audience of skeptical recruits, imploring a CEO to sponsor Teach For India, or asking a team member to work through the weekend, she looks the person in the eye and doesn’t hesitate.

Second on her list is the ability to take risks. Throughout my initial phone conversations with the team, the message was clear: “We are flying by the seat of our pants.” In my first call with Shaheen back in August, she tested my stress threshold. Ten minutes after the call, she emailed me to re-emphasize: “I want to make sure you are okay with the lack of structure you’ll be coming into.”

It was a fair warning. Yet, in my first month here, grappling with what we were trying to accomplish in the given timeline, I thought the goals she set were a little crazy. I was well out of my comfort zone.

A college professor of mine, Tony Brown, taught a leadership course and was known for his unconventional style. Unlike traditional college courses, often focused on theoretical exercises like research papers, Tony’s emphasized projects and his measure of success was tangible results. To energize his students when a class discussion got too academic, he would interject: “ready, fire, aim!” Now I understand what he meant.



New Year's resolve

Friday, January 02, 2009 - 11:06 AM IST

The muses must have felt slighted when they discovered I was feeling low on blog content, because they delivered me a rotten story on a platter last night.

I was walking late at night, as I often do, down a familiar and quiet alley, and two young guys on a moped rammed into me from behind. At first I thought maybe they were drunk New Year’s revelers and would just carry on, so I gave them a scornful look and kept walking. However, they hopped off the moped, approached me and demanded my wallet.

Just a few weeks before, I had chatted with my friend Dan about the various times people had tried to rob him during his 11 months of travel in Asia. He noted that he had found people in India to be generally non-violent, and thus felt comfortable being confrontational when a few young men in Delhi tried to rob him.

With Dan’s words echoing in my mind, I said “no” and kept walking. The resolve of these two men to obtain my money was apparently not completely superficial. Thief number one grabbed my shoulder and demanded my wallet again. I pushed him and a shoving match ensued, reminiscent of a fourth-grade playground scuffle. Thief two joined in for a moment and then, for whatever reason, thought the better of it.

At this point, thief one reached into his pocket and started coming at me again. I am not completely stupid, nor completely fearless, and the threat of a knife sent me backpedaling. Though it was dark, I soon realized his hand was empty. We played fisticuffs once more until they apparently figured they were making too much of a scene and gave up.

I turned around and continued walking, wallet intact, but not before offering the two of them an emphatic expletive.



A dry spell

Thursday, January 01, 2009 - 10:22 AM IST

I hit a dry spell for blogging in the second half of December. It’s hard to say why with any certainty. There are a few possible reasons:

  1. My thoughts have been turned inward lately. Or forward. I’ve been fixated on and distracted by the impending end to my stay in India, and whatever is next …

  2. The well of content has been dry, or at least I have perceived it to be dry.

  3. I have been insufficiently diligent. I’ve been spending my time with people – talking, doing, being – but not writing. I have learned that writing can happen only when I sit down and do it. Sometimes I forget this and wait around for the words to come before I make the time to write.

I am currently reading Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit one is proactivity – spend time thinking about only those things that you can change, and then take action. Covey would tell me that reason three is the culprit here, and I suspect he would be correct.



Tragedy of the commons

Sunday, December 28, 2008 - 1:45 PM IST

Crossing Yerawada Bridge on Friday morning, I watched a man on a bicycle take one plastic trash bag, then another, and toss them into the Mula-Mutha River below, like a newspaper boy making his morning deliveries.

In this man’s decision analysis, there were no costs, only benefits, to discarding his trash in this way. The Mula-Mutha is already so polluted that his trash will have an infinitesimal negative impact on the river and zero negative impact on him, personally. The convenience of chucking his garbage en route to work is, by comparison, significant.

In most of the developed world, people do not pollute so flagrantly. It’s not because the rich are more ethical. It’s because society’s collective conscience and knowledge about pollution creates social pressure to behave in a certain way. Submission to social pressure has benefits, like acceptance; breaking social norms, likewise, has costs, such as scorn.

The difference between India and wealthier nations is easy to model using the basic economic framework above, of costs and benefits. What’s more difficult to understand is how these societal norms came to be and how to change them.



On terrorism

Saturday, December 27, 2008 - 12:18 PM IST

Yesterday I was forwarded a note, “Stop Think Cry Love,” written by a high school girl from Bangalore in response to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. A few excerpts:

These people are our age. They are people who we see in movie halls and at street corners. They are not aliens of another race. Terrorism was not brought in from Mars. It breeds within us. The worst part is that we created it …

It is discrimination when the age-old story of Hindu parents refusing to marry their daughter into a Muslim family repeats itself. It is discrimination when parents of Muslim children refuse to sing Hindu bhajans. It is discrimination when Christians refuse to participate in Hindu and Muslim festivals. All of this is discrimination. And every form of terrorism and extremism finds its roots in this kind of discrimination, which is practiced in each and every one of our homes. That is why we need to look at our homes and our thinking before we cry out in rage …

We can go on talking about stepping up security, straightening out our coast guards and eradicating terrorism. But the problem lies not in our security system but in us. It lies in our madrassas, in our temples, in our schools, in our homes, and in our minds. And until we realize our role, until we open our eyes to this truth, not a thing will change.

I was in Hyderabad last weekend driving to dinner with a brilliant and experienced social entrepreneur, David Kyle. In the first five minutes of our acquaintance, the thread of conversation went from Hyderabad to living in India to American perspectives abroad to his experience of discussing 9/11 with people in India.

He said that, in his opinion, Americans have a skewed perspective of terrorism; that terrorism is a horrible fact of daily life for countless millions of people. The storyline of 9/11 is dramatic and terrible, certainly – hijacked planes, toppling skyscrapers, 3,000 lives lost all at once – but at the end of the day, one life is one life, and each life has significance.

He talked about how he had watched the towers collapse through his office window in downtown Manhattan on 9/11. Having worked around the world as a banker for 20 years, he responded by taking personal responsibility for ending terrorism through a career change. He is currently building a for-profit fund that makes loans to low-income Indian private schools to build critical infrastructure like classrooms and girls bathrooms. He is party to the belief that education is the determinant of life outcomes and is at the root of the solution to terrorism.

The shared theme of these two anecdotes is the need to take individual responsibility and action to change the world. Individual action is, in fact, the only kind of action one can take.

For me, with just 34 days remaining until Teach For India’s final application deadline, the salience and importance of this message is now coupled with a similar urgency.



Urban donkey herding

Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - 12:24 PM IST

In early October I was exploring M.G. Road, Pune’s main shopping district, for the first time. As I waited to cross the street, a dozen donkeys came running down the block, swiftly moving with the flow of traffic.

I suspected that somewhere nearby were one or more donkey herders, but their presence was not apparent. Moreover, these particular donkeys were speckled with purple paint and adorned with sparkly ribbons. Was this a rare breed of creative, intelligent donkey with no need of supervision?

This morning as I walked down North Main Road, three white donkeys emerged from a side street and hung a left, coming straight toward me at a steady clip.

Important to note here: Traffic dynamics in urban India can be summarized using the two-party game known by economists and children alike as Chicken. In other words, hold your ground as long as possible in hopes of getting the other party to “chicken out” first, but don’t get hit or hit your opponent.

I held my ground, hoping the donkeys would play by the rules.

Sure enough, the donkeys shifted course. However, to my surprise they also veered into the center of the road, as if carried by a sudden gust of wind, threaded their way through the rush hour traffic, completed a U-turn, and came to a standstill on the other side of the road.

A split second later, two young men on bicycles appeared. They exchanged worried glances and started yelling at the donkeys from across the street.

Crisis averted, donkey-herder mystery debunked.



Feels like home

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - 2:29 PM IST

On Tuesday night I worked at a Café Coffee Day in Koregaon Park until I got kicked out at midnight. I moved to the curb out front while I crafted the punch line to the article I was writing. When I finally looked up, I noticed a young man was sitting beside me.

“Working hard?” he asked.

“Too hard.” We laughed.

His name was Samson. He and I sat and chatted for a few minutes before the late hour compelled me to take my leave. I set off on my thirty-minute walk home, encountering mostly night laborers and stray dogs along the way.

Last night I was out in Koregaon Park again, this time meeting a friend, Shibani, for a drink. She told me about her exciting but daunting potential transfer to New York; I told her my thoughts on possible long-term opportunities for me in India. We went our separate ways around 11:30 p.m. and I set out on my walk again.

At the halfway point, there is a dark alley that’s usually empty and silent. A motorcycle (better known as a two-wheeler) broke the silence, approaching from behind.

The driver sidled up to me: Samson. He asked me where I was headed and offered a ride. I hopped on the back, and as we cruised along with the night air blowing in our faces, we swapped stories from our work days and I had the distinct feeling of home.



Principled hypocrisy

Wednesday, December 03, 2008 - 11:09 PM IST

I’ve been working at Café Coffee Day for the past five hours, and in that time I have been approached by a number of beggars: Three times since I sat down, a boy of six or seven has approached and knocked on the window to get my attention, and I have ignored him.

I’m trying to make sense of the thoughts colliding in my head. On the one hand:


On the other hand:


The de facto policy of the circles I travel in is to never give to beggars. I’ve adopted this approach, despite the misgivings above, with some exceptions (I went through a brief phase of giving pocket change, 1 and 2 rupee coins).

The reason we have a policy is to reduce the cognitive dissonance we feel when withholding money we have aplenty from those who lack it. Making up our minds and sticking to a rule makes it easier to say, “I am not giving to you because you are a beggar, and I do not give to beggars.” End of story.

The problem is that this isn’t really the end of the story. I am not someone who looks a homeless, hungry six-year-old in the eye, does nothing, and feels nothing is wrong. On the other hand, my “policy” makes me feel a bit like a hypocrite.

I suspect there’s no easy answer. For now, I will remain a hypocrite, albeit a principled one.



My yoga teacher’s son

Friday, November 28, 2008 - 1:45 PM IST

I got the first call yesterday at 2 a.m. – my father, his voice trembling, checking to make sure I was safe. He was the first to tell me that terrorists had attacked Mumbai just a few hours earlier.

Text messages flew back and forth for most of the rest of the night, until I had heard from almost all of my friends. I finally fell asleep around 5 a.m., only to find myself being attacked by a dog in a nightmare. A phone call from a friend’s mother saved me. I managed to assure Lisa that her son Daniel was safe, having headed away from Mumbai when I last saw him. I didn’t mention that just a few days earlier we had eaten dinner at Café Leopold in Colaba, one of the half-dozen locations where the terrorists had opened fire, targeting Americans and Brits.

Despite the urging of several friends to stay indoors, I decided to go to my usual morning yoga class – my mind was racing and I knew nothing better to calm me down than the firm instructions of Mrs. Kamdin, a subtly powerful woman whose admonishing looks could put an army general in his place.

When I arrived at her building, the security guard shook his head and said simply: “Mumbai.” No class.

I found out that night that Mrs. Kamdin’s son was one of the 170 dead. He was a chef at the Taj Hotel. I keep trying to picture how she is handling this, or how I would console her, but I’m drawing blanks.

I did yoga alone in my room this morning.



Breaking through

Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 10:53 PM IST

In a previous post I discussed my frustration with the haves versus have-nots dynamic in India, as reflected by my relationship with Rajendran, the caretaker of the guest house I’m lodged at in Delhi.

Rajendran often stares out the window onto the street while I’m eating breakfast. He’s got the air of a daydreamer, when he’s not dutifully attending to my every need.

Yesterday I decided to brave the language barrier and try to actually connect. I can’t even remember what I asked him, but it didn’t take long for him to open up. His wife and thirteen-year-old son are in Nepal, I discovered, along with the rest of his extended family. He’s been apart from them for six years.

Breakfast ended and I thanked him, as usual.

This morning, work stress and a prohibitively slow internet connection put me on edge. I was sitting on the couch with computer in lap, contemplating chucking it against the wall. Rajendran walked over, presumably to ask if I wanted tea or water or anything else.

Instead, he extended a tin box with a photo on it. “My family,” he said, pointing.

He kneeled alongside me and handed me his family photo album. For the next hour as we looked at the photos together, I lost my stress somewhere in Rajendran’s tacit narrative.



The theory of in between

Sunday, November 09, 2008 - 8:03 AM IST

By the time I was a teenager, I found it so pleasantly easy to fall asleep and wake up well-rested when staying in hotels, that I consciously looked forward to the opportunity to do so.

In high school, I began traveling alone more frequently, and it became apparent that I found equal solace in air travel. While I witnessed  the bustle, urgency, and stress that emanates from airport terminals, what I felt was tranquility. I even sought occasions to fly alone to avoid the risk that my travel partner’s anxiety would ruin my relaxation.

This phenomenon is widespread in my life. There was the three-week camping trip in Colorado when I was fourteen. (Upon returning home, I tried sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag in a failed attempt to preserve the esprit of tent-dwelling.) There was spring break my sophomore year of college, when I borrowed my dad’s car and drove around upstate New York for a week. I look back on that as one of my best vacations ever.

It’s no wonder, then, that when looking for a job, I found the busy consulting travel schedule mildly appealing.

I look back on my first year on the job, living in Boston, as the best year of my life; I was really at peace with myself. I’m certain that the fifty-some-odd flights over eighty-plus days on the road actually helped me somehow. (I had just two really bad days that whole year, and can tell you the dates and the cause of each, but that’s another story.)

My question is, why?

My current theory is that being “in between,” as I like to call it, removes the emotional clutter, the accumulation of meanings and experiences, good and bad, that color each moment spent in a familiar place. Being somewhere new allows me to live in the present.

If my theory is correct, my next question is, how can I bring this serenity into my daily life without moving around constantly?

Note: I write today on my 60th day in India, having spent 37 of those on the road. I am currently in New Delhi, at the midway point of 17 consecutive days of travel.



(Un)comfortable luxuries

Sunday, November 09, 2008 - 10:03 AM IST

It’s Sunday, mid-morning at the corporate guest house where I’m staying in New Delhi. The thirty-something caretaker Rajendran knocks on my door.

I open the door. “Lunch?” he says, asking me whether I would like him to make me lunch today.

“Yes, 1 p.m.?” I answer, knowing his next question will be “What time?”

“Non-veg? Veg?” he asks. In India this is a critical question. A significant portion of the population is “veg only,” often for religious reasons.

I tell him I’m veg, thank him, and close the door. A minute later he pokes his head back in my room: “Market, one hour.” He’s heading to the market to buy food to cook for me.  I say “thank you” again.

As he leaves, a pang of guilt washes over me, a reaction I’ve come to expect from daily interactions like this. I want say something else – invite him to eat lunch with me, ask him how old he is, what his hobbies are, and what it’s like to work here, tell him I’m sorry he has to wait on me. But the language barrier stops me. Rajendran smiles politely and closes the door.



Delhi smog

Sunday, November 09, 2008 - 10:27 AM IST

On the rikshaw drive home from dinner last night, the street light hung in the Delhi smog, giving the night an eerie yellow hue. The thick air and buzzing motor muffled the street sounds, and the city seemed strangely empty. For a moment, my rikshaw driver became Charon, the ferryman of Greek mythology, slowly paddling me to the underworld.



Cultural pyromania

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 - 8:34 AM IST

My first Diwali, the biggest festival in the Hindu year, begins at 5:30 a.m. when a cracker explodes in the driveway 10 feet from my window. It’s Monday in Chennai, the city in South India where I’ve come to celebrate with my colleague Kavita’s family. I decide I am grateful, as she has not come through on her promised 4 a.m. start.

We spend the day eating and relaxing, then at 8 p.m. the house begins filling with more relatives. Dinner is an afterthought, as the thirty-odd guests gather in the driveway and spend the evening lighting firecrackers and telling jokes.

My apathy toward lighting firecrackers is somewhat incongruous with the local firecracker obsession. I stand on the front steps of the house, vicariously enjoying everyone’s euphoria and the up-close-and-personal show. I'm joined by two little girls who apparently identify with my ennui. An older woman stops to chat with me and seems amused. I’m tempted to clarify that I’m simply bored, but I think back on July 4 celebrations with my brother (“Taylor, you’re such a downer”) and I decide to laugh along with her.

After all, I am amused, and also pleased to have been included in this distinctly Indian cultural experience.



My ignorance, unveiled

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - 10:49 PM IST

I’m walking back from a session with my Hindi tutor and I must look particularly out of place today. A third rikshaw driver honks his whiny horn and veers toward me, offering his services as if I can’t see him, as if a white kid walking down the street in Pune must be looking for a cab. An elderly man hobbling along in the other direction stares at me as if my hair is on fire. Two teenage kids lean out of a bus as it sputters by and yell at me in Marathi, amused by something I can’t understand. A ragged, barefoot woman with a sickly infant appears out of nowhere, tugging on my sleeve, grabbing my hand, begging.

My impatience bubbles to the surface; I just want to be left alone. If just one of those encounters had pushed me a bit further, I might have justified the stereotype that Americans are rude and self-entitled, which would have only made matters worse.

As I walk, I keep thinking. What if I contended with such nuisances every day of my life? And what if they weren’t always so paltry? I wonder, would I learn to shrug them off? Grow a thick skin?

It dawns on me – in my life I’ve just skimmed the surface of understanding the concept of prejudice, of being treated differently because of how you look. Suddenly the concept takes on a new, more personal meaning.



Inane bureaucracy

Thursday, October 23, 2008 - 10:54 PM IST

Our lawyers notified us today that law prohibits us from incorporating under the name “Teach For India” because it has India in the name. Apparently only governmental organizations can use this noun, our using it would imply that we are trying to take on governmental responsibilities. In essence, we are.

Ironically, we can still use the Teach For India brand name, as long as we conduct all official legal business under a different title.



India Unbound by Gurcharan Das

Sunday, October 12, 2008 - 6:51 PM IST

India Unbound was an initially daunting prospect. I had little faith that I could engage myself in a presumably dry discourse on Indian history. However, my ignorance on all topics Indian was impetus enough for me to start reading.

With this book, Gurcharan Das proves my assumption wrong – Indian history is anything but dry. India Unbound tells the story of India’s recent past in a way that helps me feel connected to and part of India today.

Das’s youthful optimism in describing his sense of possibility after independence evoked the impending U.S. presidential election and my hope for the future of America. He traces the increasingly realist path of his own world view, as India’s first prime minister’s legacy became a series of leaders whose blind adherence to faulty ideals bridled India’s entrepreneurial and intellectual spirit. Short stories from his life show his frustration in witnessing how his country squandered forty years of opportunities. These accounts stirred up my feelings towards today’s stagnant U.S. policies on climate change.

Das writes a regular column for The Times of India, the country's pre-eminent daily newspaper. He will be writing an article about Teach For India as part of The Times of India’s support for our launch. I might even get to meet him!



Complaining in cyberspace

Sunday, October 12, 2008 - 11:19 PM IST

Life here has been challenging. The incessant roadblocks to progress are frustrating. The organizational politics are stressful. The unending stream of next steps (that were supposed to happen yesterday) is exhausting. And the paid-guest living arrangement I have is an aggravating constraint on my independence.

Don’t misunderstand me – the place and the work suit me well. But I’m accustomed to feeling la joie de vivre darn near all the time, and frankly things have not been going this way of late. I began to demonstrate an abnormal proclivity to complain to everyone and to no one in particular via Google instant messenger.

A minor spat with a co-worker on Thursday got me thinking. Life has been coming at me a little too fast for my comfort and I needed to step back, get some perspective. So I grabbed my backpack and headed on foot to Pune Central to pick up some groceries.

As I was perusing the aisles, singing along with the Billy Joel song playing (Indian mall music is stuck squarely in the 80s and 90s), my spirits began to lift. It occurred to me that such a simple solitary act, grocery shopping and singing a song I knew, was exactly what I had been missing. I had accepted the professional and social status quo of the team and let myself become overly reliant on others. Although this may have made sense initially, I was increasingly missing my usual sense of self.

On Friday I dove headlong into me things. It was a major success – I found a yoga instructor, who I’m meeting early on Monday before my Hindi lesson. I celebrated this with a small solo dance party. Between Saturday and Sunday I spent hours walking around Pune, expanding my mental map tenfold. I toured the famous and mysterious Osho Ashram. I did some shopping, picking up my first yoga mat, a couple simple kurtas (traditional Indian men’s wear), and a two albums of South Asian rhythms. (It took some time to persuade the owner that I genuinely wanted her to tell me her favorites.) I exercised (twice!). I stayed in at night and read. It was a huge step in the right direction.

So here’s to the first day of the rest of my India.



Be bold

Wednesday, October 08, 2008 - 8:40 PM IST

We’re at a recruitment event at S.P. Jain, a top management institute in Mumbai, with about one hundred final-year grad students in attendance – all prime candidates to become Teach For India Fellows.

Shaheen’s presentation explains how the tangible benefits of a Teach For India Fellowship – increased likelihood of securing posts with top MNCs and grad schools – and the intangible benefits – development of transferrable leadership skills – are directly related to one another. “Corporates are telling us they want our Fellows,” she declares.

One student objects: “I don’t think most Indian students will be willing to take such a risk.”

Shaheen rebuts: “Like I said, this program isn’t for everyone. This year we’re selecting just one hundred of India’s most outstanding graduates. We want only the best, because a problem of this magnitude – providing educational opportunities to all of India’s children – requires the best to solve it.”

Shaheen’s reply is compelling but this student’s concern is real. Like most social enterprises, Teach For India faces many obstacles.

First, in India to choose teaching after university is to throw away your career in one fell swoop. Here, where achieving economic stability is paramount, the norm is to find the best corporate position possible. India’s top graduates view teaching as something mundane, simplistic and alien.

Second, Indian college graduates are far less independent than their American counterparts. Until age 30, they may defer to their parents, who play a major role in the decision-making process. This means that even if we can capture the passion and idealism of India’s best graduates, they still have to contend with objections – or outright rejection – from their parents, who often espouse more traditional viewpoints about teaching.

These obstacles mean we have an uphill battle. However, they also mean that Teach For India has the potential not only to change education in India, but also to start a revolution in the way people think about social responsibility.

“Be bold,” Shaheen implores her audience.



Be the change

Sunday, October 05, 2008 - 1:48 PM IST

“If you can see the problem, then your mind works. If you can see the opportunity, then your heart works.” – Jayeshbhai Patel, founder of Manav Sadhna¹

In honor of Gandhi ji’s 138th birthday on October 2, I write this blog with one objective: I want you to care.

Yesterday I met an eight-year-old, Sanjay, in a Bandra slum. He told me he wants to be an engineer when he grows up. I sat down on a dilapidated bench with some paper and crayons and was quickly surrounded by a half-dozen other kids. I wrote my name in big block letters on the top of the page and then passed the sheet around. One girl, Sunita, jumped at the opportunity to show off her beautiful handwriting, and a few others quickly grabbed at the paper. Two girls shied away, embarrassed. 

In India²

When we look at figures like these it’s easy to think the problem is so big that you or I simply can’t make a difference. But to Sanjay and Sunita and these two illiterate girls, one teacher could make a lifetime of difference.

Development economics research is largely inconclusive, but there is one consistent finding: Education – empowering an individual with knowledge and the ability to act in his or her own best interest – is at the core of the solution to virtually every global issue, including health and violence.

1. Manav Sadhna is an NGO that has been providing health and hygiene, education, and employment services to India’s underprivileged since 1990. Click here for a beautiful film about Jayesh Bhai and his work.
2. Statistics from the World Bank website and the Aser Report, 2005.



The indispensable rupee

Saturday, October 04, 2008 - 7:44 PM IST

Today I got a phenomenal haircut for 40 rupees (that's about USD 90 cents) which concluded with a scalp massage. This is a good example of the awesome stuff you can buy for really low prices in India.

Example two was my lunch on Wednesday. I bought two hot, fresh vada pao (fried spicy mashed potato patty sandwiches) from a street vendor for 5 rupees each.

Consuming street food is ill-advised for your health, but I'd made it three full weeks without getting sick (read: diarrhea) and I was starving. You can get a really high quality Indian meal for 50-120 rupees so it's not really necessary to indulge in the 10 rupee variety. You can't beat a bargain though. I didn't get sick so I bought street food from another vendor the next day, at which point I realized I was being a total moron. I have put this behavior on hold for the time being.

More so than haircuts and street food, or virtually anything except water, I am a consumer of cab rides. This means I'm constantly haggling with drivers who are optimistic about my ignorance. Negotiating an auto-rickshaw driver down from 80 rupees to 40 last night (my starting point was 30) was a very gratifying victory.



The Song of India

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 - 11:14 AM IST

I was perusing ProFlowers.com this morning in search of a plant. Selecting a plant online is a bit of a crapshoot, so when I came across a modest but pretty orchid-looking thing called “The Song of India,” I decided it was a sign.

Then I got to thinking: What is India’s song? I thought back on my encounters of the past three weeks.

Hotel lobby music. I spent several nights at a classy lodging called Hotel Fariyas. After finding that the internet signal only worked in the lobby, I was privy to several consecutive hours of a 90-second jingle that can only be described as maddening. After I relocated to the Gordon House for a brief stint, things went from bad to worse. They had opted for a remixed, electronic version of the Aladdin soundtrack.

Elevator music. I have discovered that the Law of Elevator Music extends across international borders. Having spent a great deal of time coming and going from team meetings at Surjeet’s 17th story Bombay apartment, I can tell you that Kenny G is indeed a great musician when compared to the cohort of elevator music composers.

Street sounds. I’m convinced that Bombay drivers are connected to their horns by nerve pathways; no sooner has the notion of the honk been conceived in the driver’s mind than the horn is blown. And what constitutes an occasion worthy of a honk? A local cab driver wouldn’t understand this question. What occasion isn’t?

Bollywood music. My exposure to Bollywood movies has been limited by the scarcity of good new flicks lately. However, the radio stations are always abuzz with Bollywood classics, new and old. Bollywood movies are a bit like musicals, full of song and dance, so I suppose the American analog to Bollywood music would be showtunes, the difference being that in India, Bollywood music is by far the most popular genre.

Indian idol. Last Saturday evening I ventured into the unknown – Indian TV – and was rewarded with Indian Idol, an exact adaptation of the American version down to the personalities of the judges, save of course for the music, which is all Indian. Is it too late for me to jump on the bandwagon?

A taste of home. On Thursday night I went to watch a co-worker's son's cover band play. There's little that can beat a bunch of Indian kids covering American grunge music. Her son had Kurt Cobain totally nailed.

It seems that the Song of India, mirroring the diversity of the country itself, is an incredibly eclectic mix.



Les personnages

Monday, September 22, 2008 - 7:44 AM IST

Kavita provides the comic relief, mocking Sheela’s sorry attempts at an Indian accent or my consulting-speak. She is the only Indian national on the team besides Shaheen (the CEO), making her a scarce and precious resource.

Mariyam is both the realist and the team mom, helping us navigate the confusing world of Maharashtra (the state containing Bombay and Pune). She serves as the liaison between Teach For All, a network designed to support the launch of the Teach For All model in other countries, and the team in India.

Shikha is the social butterfly, the only person on the team to successfully branch out so far. She has spent most of her career in the non-profit world, and is the first person I’ve ever met who is from Las Vegas.

Shaheen is the passionate advocate for poor youth. She dropped out of Tufts University at 18 to work with slum children in Bombay and her network of supporters – in the slums and in board rooms – has been growing ever since.

Sheela is the spark plug, the organized chaos. Her boundless enthusiasm coupled with her planning ability is one of our most valuable team assets, especially when the work week spills into the “overwork” week.

Surjeet is the diplomat, carefully navigating the complex political waters that we’re encountering in these early days. She has a background in non-profit and government, having returned to non-profit in what she describes as an effort to save her optimism and idealism from the bureaucracy monster.

That leaves me. I’m the consultant. The only guy. The white kid. The youngster. And, as Kavita has charmingly dubbed me, The Teej.



Re-discovering community

Thursday, September 18, 2008 - 10:31 AM IST

I spent two hours yesterday evening in Ambedkar Nagar, a Bombay slum, commonly called a “community.” When I first heard this term, a voice inside me shouted “euphemism!” After my experience, I can tell you that the term community is incredibly apt. 

Ambedkar Nagar is a city unto itself – twenty thousand people living in the space of a large city block. Every inch is occupied. People, dogs, and bicycles flow around one another like water molecules.

A small boy, no more than four, slipped in a mud puddle as he walked past us. His sister, perhaps six, firmly admonished him. When you have few clothes and no running water, it’s important to stay clean, even if you are surrounded by filth.

A tailor sat in an alcove he’d fashioned with a tarp and a small table, a light bulb fixed over his sewing machine, a bin of cloth scraps at his feet, and an assortment of earrings for sale hanging at his side. We bought five colorful handkerchiefs from him for 10 rupees, about 22 cents.

We followed Shaheen into an alley like a crack in a boulder, just wide enough for two people to squeeze past one another. After just 100 yards or so winding left and right, up and down, I had a moment of complete disorientation and felt anxiety wash over me. Then I turned around and noticed I was being accompanied by three smiling little boys.

We arrived at the home of a young woman Sandhya and her daughter Tairunbee (top left and front center), who proudly invited us in. Shaheen explained how the woman had been one of her first students, only five or six years old at the time. Her one-room home was immaculate, and we pulled our shoes off outside the door, awkwardly trying to avoid stepping in the wet alley or falling over. This home was relatively spacious and comfortable, which is to say it was about the size of a large cupboard, with a solid roof overhead and a small, buzzing TV mounted to the wall. The eight of us barely fit inside.

As we walked back out through the alley, I peeked into another home where half a dozen kids sat on the floor, learning to write. Their huge smiles beamed out at me. “Keep studying!” I told them.



A new kind of homogeneity

Thursday, September 11, 2008 - 11:40 AM IST

Today I met briefly with Shaheen and then took the first of many 4-hour train rides between Mumbai and Pune. Upon arrival, I met Shikha, Kavita, and Mariyam, which leaves just Sheela. The team is all young Indian and Indian-American women. Oddly, this will be by far the most homogeneous work setting I’ve been part of.



Mumbai is a bewildering and amazing place

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - IST

Mumbai is a bewildering and amazing place. On my cab ride from the airport to Surjeet’s apartment, there was a “close call” on the road every 16.3 feet, and a horn honked every 0.6 seconds, approximately. I’m guessing that we covered at most five miles in the 90 minutes we spent weaving in and out of traffic. Note that traffic is used loosely to include trucks of all sizes, cabs (miniature in nature, my head was firmly pressed against the roof), auto-rickshaws (smaller yet, with a buggy-like character), motorcycles and dirt bikes (fearless), cattle-drawn carriages, bicycles, pedestrians, and stray dogs. It seems that it’s normal for a ten-year-old girl to weave through six lanes of moving traffic.



On advice and books

Saturday, September 06, 2008 - 10:27 AM IST

In preparing for India, I have accumulated far more of two things than I had anticipated: advice and books. Two observations therein:
  1. Indian-Americans are far more prevalent in my life than I realized. In the past few weeks, at least 30 emails have been sent on my behalf by Indian-Americans who are within two degrees of separation from me

  2. Books are really heavy. I fear my intellectual eagerness may have been excessive – I brought approximately 60 pages of reading per day of my trip, excluding a massive GMAT study book. We’re talking Tom Friedman, Jeffrey Sachs, Ayn Rand, Amartya Sen – yikes



Naming a blog

Thursday, August 28, 2008 - 1:44 PM IST

Have you ever named a blog?

This ostensibly easy task took me over a week. My first instinct was that naming a blog was like naming a child; that I’d have to find a name with the right ring to it, and a deeper meaning. After all, a blog’s name, like a child’s, is forever the instrument of the first impression it makes.

So I dug into my archive of special words and quotes. I played with eudaimonia, a word that combines the notions of happiness and virtue.  I asked friends for advice. One proposed ubuntu, a term in a South African dialect whose meaning pertains to the interconnectedness of all people. I’m grateful for having learned this word, but could I really give a blog the burden of such a powerful name? I continued in this vein, experimenting with titles about deeper meaning and purpose and values.

I realized that I was trying to capture the essence of my soul in the title of my blog. That sort of thing can be tough to capture in a few words. I’ve now accepted that if there’s to be any distilling of my essence, it will have to happen over the course of many words, many blog entries, many days.

I’m pleased to say that after trying on many blog titles, I’ve found one that fits – One in a Billion: Reflections on India. If you have ever struggled to name a blog, I empathize, and wish you luck.



Speaking English

Thursday, August 28, 2008 - 3:20 PM IST

Today was the last day of my project, a seven-weeker helping a major international hotel group prepare a business case for a major systems transformation. Usually on the Thursday drive from the client to the airport my case manager Raj and I would talk about case work and client politics, or theorize about social dynamics and international relations. But this last day was different. Driving out of the parking garage for the last time, we both exhaled a little longer and drove in pensive silence for a bit.

Raj was first to bring up my impending fellowship: “You’re really going to learn a lot from this experience, Taylor,” he told me matter-of-factly. “I’m even a bit envious of you.”

We got to talking about India, where he’d grown up. When we landed on the topic of multilingualism he recounted a line one of his teachers had often used: “You can’t speak English until you think in English.” That one line, more than anything, had enabled his successful transition to life in the United States. I’ll try to take that lesson with me to India.



Dare to be true

Thursday, August 28, 2008 - 3:42 PM IST

I vividly remember practicing for those daunting case interviews during the fall of my senior year in college, trying to hone my skills. When all my interviews were done, I’d come out of the fray with a job, but I still felt a competitive pressure when I started. The differences between me and experienced analysts, only a year into the role, were stark. The learning curve climbed steeply in front of me.

Fast forward four months, and I’m sharing a 2 a.m. cab ride home with a colleague, Anton. As can happen at 2 a.m., our conversation turned away from consulting. Anton, commonly recognized by my colleagues as a “Rockstar” (high performer) discussed his interest in social venture capital, and I felt a tension somewhere inside me relax a little.

At the end of that project Anton gave me some advice. He told me to let my true self out a little more on the job; that people would remember me for being real. That piece of advice was a turning point for me. I realized that being good at my job didn’t mean I had to be my job. It was alright to just be me. Since then I’ve tried to be open about my desire to leverage my consulting skills to do something besides consult. Sometimes I still balk – there’s a right and a wrong time and place for everything – but more and more I’m finding Anton’s advice ringing true.

"Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: a fault which needs it most, grows two thereby." – George Herbert



The knot

Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - 11:40 AM IST

Today is Tuesday, August 26, which is technically six days before my Non-Profit Fellowship is scheduled to begin. The confluence of several factors is creating something of a knot in my stomach.

Pre-emptive nostalgia. The past 15 months have been, without question, the best time of my life – stable, happy, rewarding, fun, and full of growth – and leaving for India is a definitive pivot. Sure, I’m only leaving for 5 months, but I can feel the seismic plates shifting beneath me already. I tell myself that the time is right, though, that I’m ready to leap.

Anticipation. I’m excited! Helping launch Teach For India – leveraging the “consulting toolkit” I’ve theoretically assembled – is at the intersection of so many of my career interests. The underpinning is that my future vision of myself is as a social entrepreneur using education (building infrastructure, creating policy, disseminating best practices) as a vehicle for change.

I love traveling and exploring new places. I’ve never spent significant time in a developing nation, though, and the longest I’ve lived abroad was the semester I spent in Paris during college. I’m ready for the next degree of cultural immersion.

Uncertainty. I’m not prepared to leave, and I don’t mean mentally. I need to get vaccinated, but I’m not sure which vaccines I need, where I’ll get them, or most importantly, when. That’s the challenge of traveling on casework up until the last day.

I haven’t booked my flight to India yet. I’m waiting to transfer all the rewards points I’ve accumulated from every source into my British Air account. I’m not holding my breath, but I am counting on the transfer happening faster than the “up to 6 weeks” indicated in the fine print.

I don’t even know yet when I will roll off of the project I’m on! (“Roll off” is a term used by consultants for “finish a client project.”) It may be this week – or it may be 6 weeks from now.

I don’t have a job title or description with Teach For India, or a place to stay in Pune (the city I’ll be living in), or even a book about India. What I do know is that the Teach For India team’s enthusiasm and vision have inspired enough confidence in me that I don’t mind. It doesn’t hurt that two of my future colleagues, Shaheen and Surjeet, will meet me in Mumbai when I arrive on September 10.

I’m comfortable with uncertainty, which is good, because there’s plenty of it to wallow in at the moment.