The Crown Palace

The Taj Mahal (which means the Crown Palace) is beautiful and amazing. An Indian emperor made it as the tomb for his wife. It took 22,000 workers 22 years to complete. We spent the day making the 4 hour trip to Agra, touring the Taj Mahal with a great local tour guide, eating lunch at a 5 star hotel, touring the Agra Fort, and coming back home. It made for a long but memorable and fantastic day.

The gemstones are set into the marble in a beautiful and precise way. It's so smooth you can hardly even tell the gemstones aren't part of the marble.

Beautifully intricate marble carvings. Wow. We learned a lot about the differences between Italian marble and Indian marble.

In 1968 Andy Warhol said, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Today was my time. I had probably over 25 people come up to me and ask to have their picture taken with me. Apparently many of the people that visit the Taj Mahal have never seen an American and people in their villages never have either. So they like to take pictures so they can take them home and show people that yes, we really do exist. Carl and I laughed every time someone asked to take a picture with us. It was hilariously fun. I really did feel like a celebrity.

Sweet Skunk

To me, weed smells like sweet skunk. I don't particularly like the smell of skunk, even if its sweetened. Well this morning as I was sitting in my room writing some emails, I sniffed once, twice, and yep....I smelled a sweet skunk. I walked in the bathroom and walked out. Yep, a really close sweet skunk. So I went over to Carl's room down the hall and walked past my new neighbors' door. Holy cow. Now I know who has the pet skunk. I pulled Carl into the hall and sniffed and said, 'Do you smell that?' He said "No..." and I said, "It's pot." And he laughed and said, "Oh my gosh, you're right. That's really strong." I said, "My room reeks of it." And he said, "You're going to be so easy to get along with now."

After relaying this story to my friend, Lewis, he said, "Oh yeah. You're normally high-strung. Now you'll just be high."

The good news is that I felt really sick after I ate breakfast but now my stomach is calm. Could be the pepto. Or the pot. Or both.

Just getting the full Indian experience, people. That's all.

ekgaon, Part II

Lest you think that we spend all our time adjusting to the culture, I'm going to fill you in on what we spend our 8+ hours a day at work doing. (For a picture of life in the office, see Carl's blog - there's a link up at the upper right of this page.)

The Company: ekgaon technologies (for more about their vision) works with rural farmers by providing them with solutions on mobile devices to help them become more efficient and productive. To explain (simply) the process: The farmers get loans (if needed) to buy a mobile device and then buy a card that gives them access to ekgaon services. They are asked 3 questions: what size land they have (usually less than 4 acres, often less than 2), what their yield has been, and what their crop variety is. Based on this data, ekgaon uses SMS to communicate with them directly about specific steps for their land. It tells them exactly what to do (how much and what kind of fertilizer to use, how to plant, etc.) They also get market updates on suppliers, buyers, costs, and prices, and weather updates for their area. Currently, because of ekgaon's services farmers' income increases, on average, by 15% (and that includes the farmers that don't follow all the steps).

The Project: ekgaon currently helps 11,000 farmers. There are 300 million rural farmers in India not to mention millions more in surrounding areas in South Asia and Northern Africa. Ekgaon wants to expand into these areas but there is still a lot to learn. Carl and I have basically been given the assignment to perform market research about how ekgaon can expand. We are hoping to meet with potential financial investors, possible franchisees, companies that affect the expansion (mobile phone companies) and organizations that we could partner with because they have similar goals.

The Process: Carl and I only had a few hours with the CEO, Vijay (see pic at right) to understand the company and the project. For the last few days, our goal has been to identify as many companies as possible that it would be valuable to meet with. Once we identified them (through online research), we notified Vijay and got any contact information he had with them (that took awhile and was kind of sparse.) Since then, we have been researching each company online, finding someone to contact, and setting up meetings with them (next week in Delhi, the week after, Bombay). We have set up two meetings for next week (we're ecstatic about this because it's way harder than we thought to meet with these people). This first week is pretty much research online all day which gets very tedious, but we're starting to see the payoff and are very hopeful for our meetings next week. I think we're both nervous that we won't be able to add much value to ekgaon because so much of what we need depends on other people (an absent CEO, non-English speaking employees, and contacts with companies that are busy and don't care) BUT we're remaining positive that it will work out and we figure that anything we can get is more than Vijay would have been able to do himself. I'll keep you posted on our successes. :-)

Here are some of the organizations we're getting to know:

Agricultural Insurance Company of India

NABARD

India Department of Agriculture

Indian Farmers' Fertilizer Co-op

Indian Council of Agricultural Research

Yes Bank

World Bank (this may be my personal favorite)

Union Bank of India

MS Swaminathan Research Foundation

Tata AIG Insurance

Bharti AZA

IFFCO-Tokio

Royal Sundaram

ICICI Lombard

Hindustan Unilever

ITC (they have the best supply chain in rural India - we did a case on them first semester)

Jain Irrigation

Airtel

Aircel

BSNL (check out their website design.... and this is the #1 mobile company in India....)

Vodaphone

Idea

AGRA

Kickstart International

African Economic Outlook

Food & Agriculture Organization

International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics

HDFC

Mr. Carl

This blog post is dedicated to Mr. Carl. Why? Because as it turns out, from what I've seen, India is dedicated to Mr. Carl. When we first got here, people would always address Mr. Carl and whatever he said went for both of us.

"Mr. Carl, do you want some water?"

"Yes"

Out come two water glasses, one for me, one for Mr. Carl.

"Mr. Carl, do you want some tea?"

"No, thanks."
No tea for either of us.

At the restaurant, Mr. Carl orders. Then they walk away. The first day we ended up having to share our meal, because although I had ordered my food, apparently they didn't believe I really wanted it?!

Anytime there is an update at the office, they tell Mr. Carl. He gets the skype messages, the emails, etc. One time, they even called my hotel room and asked for Mr. Carl. Don't worry, I went and found him.

When people talk to "us" they look at Mr. Carl and ask him questions. Occasionally I get in the way and they glance at me, then back to Mr. Carl.

People feel compelled to personally congratulate Mr. Carl on the death of Bin Laden. (Because Mr. Carl had a lot more to do with it than I did.)

So anyway, since India is dedicated to Mr. Carl, I will dedicate this blog post to him.

Carl is great.

This is him watching an Indian music video during work. (It was a long day.)

Mr. Carl trying some Indian food.

Glad you're here, Mr. Carl.

Ekgaon

So here's where I work everyday. It's a tiny little basement. There are usually 4 people in the office - Carl, Me, Ranganathan (a software engineer who has been given the assignment to make sure we're ok), and "The Boy". Vijay, the CEO, would normally be there but he's gone....for the rest of the time we'll be here, which makes things very difficult. "The Boy" is basically like an admin/janitor. He's probably 18. He doesn't speak any English and everyone calls him "The Boy" like he's an indentured servant or something. He's really nice to us and is my favorite person here, I think. I don't have a picture of "The Boy" yet but I'm hoping to get one today.

After we got here we realized our project is completely different than we originally anticipated. In a way, this is good because we thought we were supposed to be meeting with potential partners to "sell" the business and we were kind of nervous that we'd screw it up since we don't know a ton about ekgaon. As it turns out we're mostly meeting with these people to do some market research for ekgaon's expansion. We think one of the main reasons Vijay is having us do this is because people will respond better to Americans. I guess we'll find out.

***Update!! So this morning Ranga left to go to a meeting and "The Boy" came and talked to us for a LONG time. Apparently he speaks better English than we thought. We found out he's 25, has an arranged marriage that will happen next year, and he's worried about his finances. He was a wealth of information about everything from Indian clothes to sightseeing in Delhi. He's from Panta area.

I also forgot to mention another interesting fact: the Indian workday. It starts around 9:30am and goes until 6:30pm. We found this out the first day when Ranga said he usually gets to work around 8:45. Luckily we didn't show up until 9:15 because then we only had to wait 15 minutes for him to come unlock the door. He then explained that he's always here by 9:30 but sometimes comes in earlier.

Welcome to India

So the first 24 hours in a country are always quite enlightening. Here are some things I've learned:

1. Always have the address of the place you are trying to go. (We may not have written down our hotel address so it took our taxi driver a long time to find it and we got here at about 1:30am last night.)
2. Even when you have the address of the place you're trying to go, there's no guarantee anyone knows what the address means. (We may have been a bit late to church today, but we did finally find it.)
3. When people say that everyone in India speaks English, they're lying. (And when people do speak English, it often doesn't sound like it.)
4. "Mild" here doesn't mean the same thing it does when you're ordering Indian food in America.
5. We will be lucky if we're never involved in a transportation accident. (There's pretty much only one rule in Delhi traffic - do whatever you want.)
6. I'm SO grateful Carl's here. I would not like being here by myself. (Carl is my classmate that is working at ekgaon with me.)
7. Jet lag between countries that have an 11 hour and 30 minute time difference is a nightmare. (And yeah, I know... 30 minutes?!? Who decided that?)
8. The Church has the same spirit everywhere. And I love it.
9. There are a lot of things I take for granted in my life.
10. This is going to be an awesome experience.

So as you can tell, I've already learned a lot. :-) I'm really excited to be here and get to work. Carl and I have a lot to do and it's going to be great!

Being Good for Something

A little over a year ago I received a BYU alumni magazine that had a picture of President Hinckley addressing the students at the Marriott Center. In bold letters at the bottom it quoted him, "You are good. But it is not enough to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world." I immediately ripped out the page and hung it on the side of the fridge where I would see it everyday. I think this quote resonated with me because I'm a pretty good person, but this reminded me that my life is not just about me. I feel the pull and the desire to contribute more than I consume. Simply being good is not enough for me or Him.

There have been many times in my life where I've had opportunities to contribute good to the world, probably the most note-worthy being my mission. Since my mission, I've been itching to take a humanitarian aid trip somewhere and make another difference - working in an orphanage, building a house, whatever. Just something where I can contribute. However, since I started school, I have been thinking about how I can use some of the very specific talents the Lord has given me to make a more meaningful, longer-lasting difference. (Not that orphanages and homes aren't meaningful and long-lasting, but more that those aren't my skills.) I am also a HUGE advocate of the idea of teaching a man to fish - enabling him, not just feeding him. So at BYU I've been able to get involved with some social ventures. I LOVE it. I entered a competition with a BYU team and did some consulting for a self-sustaining school in Paraguay and found it incredibly fulfilling. I decided that I definitely wanted to look for more ways to contribute in the social entrepreneurship space.

So here I am. Two days away from boarding a plane headed to India. I'll be spending three weeks in India doing some consulting for a tech non-profit (Ekgaon) with a project that focuses on getting rural farmers out of poverty. Once a farmer can grow enough crops to sell and make a profit, not only does his family have a better quality of life, but he'll be able to send his kids to school and (hopefully) break the cycle of poverty for future generations. Ekgaon has had great success in India so we'll be helping build an expansion plan for other parts of India, northern African and more of south Asia. Then we'll be meeting with some potential financial partners and trying to convince them that this is a great investment. I'm super excited! I think this is a great opportunity to combine my experience in tech with my education at business school and contribute good to the world.


And that's the reason I decided it was time to dust off my blog. I want to keep you all posted on my efforts to follow President Hinckley's advice and my gallivanting around a third-world country (which should be interesting... and educational and fun). Hope you're looking forward to it. I am!