Bi-Swing Windbreaker. Hmm. An orientation I didn’t know about. And they have their own wardrobe, of course, that’s a clear way that a subculture demonstrates affiliation.

I’ve begun to post my India pictures to flickr. Lots more to come and I’ll post again once they are all up.

Fit Technologies designed a clothing sizing system that radically reduces complexity and confusion and helps guide shoppers to a product that will really fit their body type. But a better solution for consumers isn’t necessarily a better solution for retailers or manufacturers, and even though they are giving it a shot, it seems likely to fail.

Retailers that commit to it must find space for more merchandise, train workers to understand the new sizes and explain the new system to customers � a struggle for stores that already have few employees on the sales floor.

Then there is the reality, however counterintuitive it may be, that retailers and clothing makers thrive off sizing confusion. Consumers who find a brand that fits are likely to stick with it and a standard sizing system would encourage them to visit other stores.

You may want to click that image to see it larger. It’s a list of sex chats available on Skype. I’m sort of surprised I never heard this mentioned before. Of course it’s being used for that, upon reflection. I’m sure I could find something about it in Google, but I sort of got curious today and was rewarded with a rather funny list of Skype usernames.

Another hilarious Tim Goodman skewering of crappy TV (new series The Bedford Diaries) in WB lowers its standards one last time

The WB sent two episodes. To finish the first was like having dental floss wrapped around your spleen and then pulled up and out of your mouth by a runaway horse. Second episode? There’s not enough Percocet on this continent.

Through wincing eyes, one must endure young Owen getting paired in a class assignment with a pretty young girl who — gasp! — was the sole survivor of a rash of students who jumped off a very, very tall building in a suicidal leap. (Apparently they had all seen early screeners of the series.) Having survived (she has a small limp, because anything more would be ugly by WB standards), she’s paired with Unlikable Fabio and he says to his video camera later: ‘A girl who would jump off a roof. There is something very hot about that kind of crazy.’

There might be a word missing in that quote. If you put both of your hands over your ears and yell ‘Make it stop!’ at the top of your lungs, then it’s quite difficult to be verbatim about these things.

Mostly unrelated to the rest of this Metafilter thread was this brilliant comment

Remember that different cultures focus on different features when thinking about race. Americans focus on skin color and eye shape. But from what I’ve heard, what strikes most Asians about white people is their long noses, big chins, and pale hair, not their eyes or skin.

Sure enough, you’ll sometimes see an explicitly American or European character in anime, and they tend to have gigantic long noses and huge jutting chins. Hair color is a little more complicated � after all, anime characters of all races can have bright blue hair � so we probably shouldn’t read too much into it.

So the round-eyed, small-nosed, small-chinned, black-haired (or magical blue-haired) characters are meant to be Japanese. They just conform to Japanese ideas of how the Japanese look, not American ideas.

(Another interesting thing to notice is that Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters in anime look blatantly different, while American artists tend to draw them all more or less the same way. Again, evidence that race looks very different through Japanese eyes than through American ones.)

Hadn’t really thought of that before - that our cultural lenses create different, not opposite, physical/racial archetypes.

Broadband National Scam? I don’t know. I just got a phone call from this company (some sort of reseller or provider of well, broadband services). They had my number, obviously, my first name, and they claimed I did a search on their database yesterday for broadband services, and was I still looking. I did no such thing. I haven’t heard of this company or visited this site and I can’t imagine what I did online yesterday that would have sent my info to them.

Anyway, I told them they had the wrong person, but I was kinda shaken. Maybe it’s just a sales technique to convince recipients of cold-calls that they aren’t all that cold. I don’t know.

Update: Later today I got a recorded phone call from the same company, offering me a deal with Comcast High Speed Cable Internet. I reported them to the FCC for violating the Do-Not-Call registry. Very weird. I post this all here because someone will probably end up Googling this when it happens to them and maybe this provides some measure of reassurance, if not actual resolution.

Update: I received this email today

I have been forwarded your complaint regarding what appeared to be a “cold call” about broadband service. Broadband National manages 1200+ websites for various broadband service providers. This is how we received your name and number. As of today, we have since removed your name from all internal records and have placed you on our Do Not Call list. We do apologize for any inconvenience.

Regards,
Debbie Garrett
Consumer Products Manager

I’ve finished uploading more than 200285 photos from Bangkok to flickr. Check ‘em all out, but here are a few samples

It’s butter

Ronald does the wai

Crockery Flower

Detail: Shrine at a shrine at a temple

Working Boat

Thai Coke

Reserved for monks

Monk awaits

Soi Cowboy

Big Bowling Pin

Reindeer pair

Much of user research hinges on unpacking words that mean one thing to one party and something different to another. Now we bring science into the picture, using MRI.

The research team found that while the same words were being used to describe people and products, different regions of the brain were activated when subjects were talking about one or the other. The fMRI scans detected that there was a greater neural response in the medial prefrontal cortex regions of the brain when applying the adjectives to people. But when focusing on brands, like Wal-Mart, Starbucks or Ben & Jerry’s, the left inferior prefrontal cortex was activated, an area of the brain known to be involved in object processing.

In other words, you can call it love, but fundamentally, we process the emotion differently depending on the object.

[via MIT Advertising Blog]

In the Hong Kong Art Museum store, we found a bunch of cute products with this funny character Matchman. I was trying to figure out which trinket to buy and bring back as an odd cultural souvenir until I stumbled across some pencil cases or stationery with what seemed to be serious religious overtones. I looked further and realize that it was a sneaky Jesus-pushing character, designed to appeal to “the kids” (and naive foreigners, I guess). I hate seeing that stuff sneaking past us, doesn’t speak well to the mission, if it’s about tricking you!

Shades of Veggie Tales!

Check out this podcast; an interview with me about listening and innovation (entitled The Listening Revolutionary).

The whole thing is 25 minutes, but honestly, I haven’t listened to it beyond the first 30 seconds - I start hearing stuff I said that I wish had said differently, or better, or not at all, but the conversation felt good while it was happening, so I’m going to trust that what’s up there now is reasonably interesting and hopefully worth your time.

It’s passe, I guess, to make fun of bad error messages. How 1997! But still, this is hilarious and disappointing (seen while browsing a dynamically updating website).

Transaction (Process ID 98) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

Just announced! I will be one of the panelists at Design2.0 - San Francisco.

The theme of the event is Products and their Ecosystems: Understanding the power of context in product innovation

Moderated by Jesse Scanlon of BusinessWeek
and in addition to myself, the speakers are:
Diego Rodriguez - IDEO, MetaCool
Peter Rojas - Engadget
Robyn Waters - RW Trend

I’m really looking forward to the event.

The latest search terms leading to this AllThisChittahChattah

all seasons bistro lansing MI
penis sex blogs
Picture of an Airline ticket’
make tshirt xxxxxl 5x
MyNetworkTV telenovelas
toyota corolla 04 background code for myspace
india innovation
pics of single indian women in san antonio
First trip to India Bangalore
female butch/studs
lucky luke catchphrase
erawan shrine destroyed pictures
Read-Ink Technologies
Mumbai Sex Blogs
recycling icons
miguel,ceo
tiger paw cereal
hotmail.com,charter.net,sympatico.ca
sex blogs
images messy homes

Days after blogging about the dramatic impact of Latino culture, there’s a front page story in the SF Chron about Latino-owned businesses.

Theirs is one of a increasing number of Latino-owned businesses in California and across the country that reflect the nation’s growing Latino population. The number of Latino-owned businesses in the United States grew by 31 percent between 1997 and 2002, more than three times the rate for all businesses. In California, Latino businesses grew 27 percent, more than twice as much as businesses overall, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“It illustrates that the contribution they make to the economy is growing rapidly,” said Lee Wentela, chief of the bureau’s economic census branch. He said 15 percent of all California businesses are owned by Latinos.
…
Indeed, the vast majority of Latino entrepreneurs nationally have only themselves on the payroll — 87 percent versus 75 percent for all businesses.

The impact of Latinos on California and its economy is deepening. In 1997, 336,405 Latino-owned businesses took in $51.7 billion in California. In 2002, the 427,727 Latino-owned businesses in California had $57.2 billion in sales and other receipts, a 27 percent rise in the number of businesses and an 11 percent increase in their economic impact.

In 1997, Latinos accounted for 9.8 million or 30 percent of Californians. By 2002, their number had risen 21 percent to 11.9 million, and they made up 34 percent of California’s population. Nationwide, the Latino population grew 33 percent, from 29.2 million to 38.8 million, or 13 percent of the total population.

The Hapa Project showed up on one of the pre-show ads at the SF Int’l Asian American Film Festival last weekend. It was cool to see the Hapa again, I had heard the term but had forgotten. It’s slang for (a person) of mixed racial heritage with partial roots in Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry, and the project is a book of photos (and an exhibit) of people who self-identify as Hapa.

Reminded me of a spirited and interesting discussion on Metafilter recently about racial identity and racism, epitomized by the What Are You? question.

Projective Techniques for Projection Technologies, my paper for the dux05 conference, has just been posted online. Check it out!

To facilitate the development of a new home-entertainment device (a portable projector with built-in speakers and a DVD player) we conducted in-home interviews that explored home entertainment activities, presented a demo of a rough prototype, and brainstormed with participants about future refinements.

I don’t often get to talk about my consulting work, so it’s great to have a fairly detailed case study published and available.

Design brings more cultural mashups. Al Quds jeans, from Italy, are designed for Muslims.

The bagginess is to ensure the wearer avoids stiffness while bending down repeatedly during prayers. The pockets are for holding all the accessories Muslims have to take off while they worship. And the jeans have green seams - because green is the sacred color of Islam.

Insane Thai beaten to death for destroying sacred Hindu shrine

A 27-year-old mentally disturbed Thai man was beaten to death by enraged onlookers at a world-famous shrine in downtown Bangkok after he destroyed a popular statue of a Hindu deity with a hammer, police said.

Thanakorn Pakdeepol, who police said had a history of mental illness, was killed after he broke into the Erawan Shrine and used a hammer to shatter a four-headed statue of Brahma covered in gold. Thousands of Thais and tourists seek good fortune at the statue every day.

We were just there in January. Here’s our pics.

Tracing the roots of a Canadian icon

Wendy’s International Inc. is expected to spin -off a 15-per-cent stake in Tim Hortons this week, and curious observers are watching to see how many of the shares will land in Canadian hands.

The stock will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange, but the vast bulk of Tim Hortons’s coffee sales still occur north of the border, where the chain has strong roots.
…
Tim Hortons now has about 2,597 outlets north of the border and 288 in the U.S.

Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan cheered when they learned that Tim Hortons is opening an outlet in Kandahar.

Hmm. Eating Timbits in Afghanistan? A new book idea!

When I spoke at Easy6 earlier this year, some of the speakers reminded their audience that companies were doing business in India becaus of the innovation spirit, not because it was cheaper. There is some evidence that it’s actually cheaper elsewhere, even. I wondered at the time how much of that was just blowing smoke; a big lie that people have bought into so they can have pride and work hard and not be seen as America’s Call Center, etc. So it was cool to see an American perspective supporting that supposition in the New York Times.

Read-Ink, one of the self-financed operations, is developing an advanced handwriting recognition software that can read scanned forms, claim forms, medical records and even digital tablets.

Its founders, Thomas O. Binford, a retired computer science professor from Stanford University, and his wife, Ione, a former manager at Hewlett-Packard, arrived here four years ago with five suitcases. They say they are now close to signing up their first business customer.

The signs of this shift toward high-value work are becoming more visible. Executives at Silicon Valley Bank, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and provides consulting services to technology and venture capital firms, said they were seeing twice as many Indian start-ups looking for capital investment than even a few months ago.

Nice bottom of the pyramid example - Nike designers help create sport hijab for Somali women in Kenyan refugee camps.

Just went through an annoying hotel booking process.

I was hoping to get a corporate rate, for which I would have to call and ask for it. I finally gave up sitting on hold, figuring that the cost of me on hold (wasted time) was probably close to the discount I might eventually receive.

Went online, and see the the Marriott hotel we’ve been recommended have two different room styles for almost the same price (one has the word “spa” in the name) but there is nowhere easily found on the site with information about what these rooms actually contain, or hey, what they look like.

I pull the trigger on the fancier rooms. I fill out all the online forms to book the reservation. The UI has a little spot to send in comments. It’s nice and wide and is about three lines long. There is text that says “45 characters maximum, including spaces” but I see the box not the warning, and I put in a whole message about our arrival. Nope, they send me back several times until I get it down to 45 characters, which is less than 1/3 of the available space.

My confirmation arrives and buried in all the visual jargon is a little notification:
Promotional email unsubscribe
Periodically, Marriott Rewards sends email about your account balance and membership status, member exclusive specials, and other program information that may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive these promotional emails, you may unsubscribe here.

I click on that, and it takes two steps (including specifying which of all the possible newsletters they generate do I want to unsub from), and then they tell me Please allow 10 business days for processing.

Nice.

From Stuart Elliot’s email-only column today

A Reader Writes: In asking you a question recently about the music in an AT&T commercial, I mentioned a college paper I wrote about “floating signifiers in popular culture,” and in answering me you asked what that was.

This is probably more information that you (or your readers) want to know, but the concept of “floating signifiers” comes out of post-modernist cultural criticism building on the language of semiotics.

Signs and symbols tend to communicate specific meanings to those who use them. That which is signified is somehow related to one or more signifiers. For example, the American flag is a signifier of both the nation and of patriotism to that nation. Logos are designed and created to become signifiers for specific companies or products, and can eventually become signifiers for entire life styles.

Floating signifiers are no longer attached to their original meanings. Either through the passage of time and changing values or intentional manipulation, they become attached to new, totally unrelated meanings. The song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was effectively used by the advertising world to shift the meaning of the “grapevine” from the gossip mill spreading rumors of infidelity, which the song lyrics originally signified, back to a literal grapevine, the source of all those dancing California raisins. They successfully created a floating signifier.

In the case of Toyota using the music from the sea chantey “A Golden Boy Again” in a commercial about football, Toyota was attempting to shift what they thought was a football signifier to their vehicles - not knowing that the song had not been successfully separated from its sea-chantey origins.

That left many viewers wondering why an auto maker would associate itself with “drunken sailors.” In this instance, the advertising world was not successful in creating a floating signifier because the song was too strongly attached to its original meaning.

A nice little essay about meaning and media and culture!

WaPost on a stellar Hispanic car salesman

On the outside, a Hispanic car salesman may not appear radically different from the domestic model. But on the inside, he is thinking about how to bridge more complicated cultural currents. To succeed, he must also sell well to non-Hispanics, while in dealing with his own community, he must decide if he will be their champion — or use their trust to take advantage.

‘I have not received one call saying anything bad about German. That speaks highly of him,’ says Alejandro Carrasco, operator of Radio America, 1540 AM, a dominant figure in local Hispanic broadcasting who crusades against businesses preying on Latinos.

The Hispanic car salesman must also be savvy to differences. Hispanics are much more likely to take the advice of friends and relatives about what to buy and who to buy it from. They seek a guide in a land of dizzying choices and information overload.

If a car has a problem, a non-Hispanic buyer will report to the service department. Not Hispanics.

‘They come and see the salesperson, even if the service person speaks Spanish,’ says Gus Casabe, used-car manager at Alexandria Toyota, one of a handful of Hispanic salesmen in the area as long-established as Vidal. ‘It’s some kind of different relationship between the salesperson and the customer than American people have. . . . Once you get into a relationship with a Spanish customer, unless you do something crazy, it’s almost forever.’

Vidal says this customer loyalty is simply a cultural instinct of Latinos — a triumph of the relational over the transactional. ‘That’s what we are,’ is how Vidal explains it. ‘It’s our culture back home.’

Although the press is mad to talk about cultural and economic changes brought on by India and China, I think as interesting/complex/challenging a story is the globalization of the US through increasing immigration. This here is just one example of many, of course.

Worst NYT Mag cover. Evah.

This version isn’t quite as craptastic because it doesn’t include the horrible headline splattered on the print version:
Looking for Mr. Good Sperm

Wow. My newspaper has turned into my spambox.

Judd riffs on the SXSW Cabal

They’ve got the throbbing pulse of the masses of young people who are disaffected and just making so much media they don’t know what to do with it. Well, that’s not true� they’re tagging it. All of it.

I can relate to Judd’s frustration, even if I don’t share it currently and specifically where he is. I’ve straddled so many professional communities (various flavors of product design, interaction design, anthropology - and of course those groups break down into too-anningly-many-to-list-here sub-cliques/specialties) in my career (as I think Judd continues to do), being accepted by some, rejected by others, tolerated by more. Of course, I’m not unique in doing this, although I’m sure the mix I inhabit is a bit of a fingerprint.

It’s fascinating and stressful to come up against the self-proclaiming power of a new-to-you group and marvel at the self-referntiality and incestuousness. And easy to see the reasons you wouldn’t want to be a part of any group that would have you as a member. And sometimes that has proven right, and sometimes it takes some time to the mutual acceptance/tolerance.

How do ya like my tag cloud down to the left there? It’s just some website that offers to create a cloud for you, but of course, they don’t use the technorati words to generate the cloud, they somehow decide what words are your keywords based on…some…analysis, I guess, of your site.

I’d much rather have the keywords that I’ve already chose for my site - the ones that appear at the bottom of each post - be generated for that cloud.

So if anyone knows of some code snippets that would let me have a technorati tag cloud on the blog rather than a “zoom cloud” - that’d be great.

Update: done

In a great example of demography (and other factors) driving cultural shifts, Latino-style soaps will be appearing on English-language TV in San Francisco.

MyNetworkTV’s dramas - called ‘Desire’ and ‘Secrets’ - are each hourlong programs featuring 65 episodes that run over 13 weeks.

The network describes ‘Desire’ as the story of ‘two brothers on the run from the mafia who both fall in love with … the same woman’ and ‘Secrets’ as ‘an in-depth look at the dreams, successes and tragedies found in the fashion industry.’

MyNetworkTV, which officially premiered last month, is the first network to produce English-language versions of Latin American-style soap operas, said Les Eisner, the network’s spokesman.

‘These story lines will be guilty pleasures. There will be beautiful people, intriguing and captivating story lines with a cliff-hanger at the end of each episode,’ Eisner said.

Called ‘telenovelas,’ Spanish-language serial dramas keep tens of millions glued to their sets throughout the hemisphere. They differ from traditional American soap operas primarily because of their finite story arc. Eisner said the network is ‘Americanizing’ story lines and creating them with the same production value of regular prime-time programming.

‘This (telenovelas) is a concept that I, as a television person, have looked at for a long time and said ‘Why doesn’t anyone do that for an English audience?’ ‘ he said. ‘It attracts younger people, and it attracts just the kind of audience advertisers desire.’

From the New York Times, Indian workers in San Francisco and Redmond, WA can order Indian food delivered for lunch from some small businesses that echo, in some fashion, the tiffin delivery seen in cities like Mumbai.

I’ve written a little An introduction to ethnographic research that has been posted on the new blog for the Core77/BusinessWeek Design Directory. I’d be happy for any feedback.

Core77 has fixed the problems with the slideshow in my recent Letter From Asia article. If you couldn’t see the pictures in the piece (the pop-up slideshow with more images than appears in the body itself), you may want to try again.

Last year I applauded Q107 for owning up to their deceptive presentation of a Rolling Stones bootleg as a simulcast of a club show in Toronto. I was probably too easy on them in hindsight, but whatever. Some other folks pursued the misleading handling of it by The Mighty Q with the government regulatory body, and got some satisfaction. The ruling is quite lengthy (but includes a lot of detail from the broadcast) and says, in part

As a preliminary matter, the Panel wishes to note that “promotions” are not limited to such advertising as occurs prior to a broadcast, aired in order to entice listening (or viewing) of an upcoming program; they may also include trailers, bumpers and other types of promotional material that are aired during a broadcast. Such promotions serve to identify a program that is already underway for those listeners/viewers who may be surfing or just tuning in, on the one hand, or to encourage already engaged audience members to remain tuned to that broadcast. It follows that the bumpers aired by Q107 going into and out of the commercial breaks during the Rolling Stones concert, as well as other language used by the host, all fall under the heading of “promotions”, as anticipated in Clause 12 of the Code. The question for the Panel is, then, whether those promotions were misleading.

On that point, the Panel considers that an ordinary reasonable listener could reach only one conclusion. The show promised to them was to be the live Rolling Stones Concert from that night. Nothing less. While the station said, in its reply to the complainants, “We certainly did not intend to deceive any of our listeners”, it hardly took their sensibilities into account. From the get-go, it said, “As promised, live Stones in Toronto comin’ up …”. And how coincidental was it, from a listener’s perspective, that the broadcast of the “old” concert began at precisely the same time as the live concert? And that the background sounds at the start of the concert were those of a crowd cheering and instruments warming up? To compound the likelihood that the audience would believe it was that night’s live concert, the radio host said:

Uh, the club gig, live, tonight, right now in Toronto at the Phoenix Concert Theatre. As promised all day, the Stones live in Toronto. Enjoy everybody, on Q107. [Emphasis added.]

According to the complainants (but unverified by the CBSC), similar comments about the upcoming “live” Rolling Stones performance were made on air for at least 36 hours leading up to the broadcast. Also, the bumpers during the broadcast stated “This is the Rolling Stones live in Toronto” and “This is the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band live.” The repeated juxtaposition of the word “live” and references to the Phoenix show occurring in the identical time period as the broadcast concert clearly left the impression to any listener that the broadcast was indeed that of the live 2005 Rolling Stones show. This impression was compounded by the sounds of a crowd cheering and other typical concert noises which served as background audio when Scholes was speaking. Further remarks such as “Phoenix Concert Theatre, 410 Sherbourne, the club gig for the Stones before they embark on their tour. It’s, uh, happening right now. More live Stones comin’ up, hang on” would have led any reasonable listener to assume that they were in fact listening to the concert then taking place at the Phoenix.

The only consequences are that Q107 has to broadcast this decision a number of specific times. But still, it’s pretty cool.

It’s interesting to try and capture and document and share as rich an experience as our two week trip through Asia. I took hundreds of pictures and have been posting the best ones here, here, and here, trying to tell a small story with as many of them as I can. It’s sort of a scattered way to narrate what we saw, but it’s also manageable from my end; little pieces, the visual does most of the heavy lifting, and it’s mostly chronological. As I write this I’m a little more than halfway (I believe) through the pictures, so that database on flickr, if you will, should continue to accrete.

But of course, there are lots of experiences that don’t get documented in the photos, other observations, feelings, or conclusions. My recent Core77 article takes one slice at that, but let me try and add some more.

One of the best things about the whole trip was the local connections we had in each city we visited. We didn’t manage to link up with anyone in Bangkok (and we were there for less than 48 hours, I think), but we had a fantastic time with people in Hong Kong, Bangalore, and Mumbai. First of all, these were all professional connections. But these were friends, if not at the beginning then certainly by the end. “Work” was a way to have made these connections (most of which had existed over the Internet pretty much for a couple or years or so), but it didn’t feel like “work” to spend time with them.

I realized that I’m personally pretty lame when people come to visit from other countries; this may simply reflect the culture I live in, I don’t know. People took time off work to come hang out with us, to show us around, to take us places we wouldn’t know to find, to show us how they lived, what their homes were like, what their lives were like. They really opened up to us and shared stories that made us feel connected. We got relevant suggestions for books, stores, souvenirs that were not simply standard tourist advice, but came from people who “got” us and what excited us about their city. One person brought us an extra cell phone that we borrowed for a few days, encouraging us to make international calls since they were free on their plan. And it didn’t seem like it was work on their part; I felt like the time spent together was very mutual.

What a world we live in, in 2006. I can get on a plane and go somewhere on the planet, and I’ve got a connection with someone there. I’ve experienced this Internet-enabled phenom many times before but somehow this seemed the most dramatic.

Separate from the intentions of these friends, the hosting played out differently in Hong Kong and in India. We felt very comfortable on our in Hong Kong, the transit system is amazingly well-designed, there is a lot of English available, and we only had one difficult travel experience. I actually was the most relaxed I had been in months. So the good times and the help we received was a bonus. But India was different - the friend who hosted us and helped us feel relaxed and comfortable played a major rescue-type role for us.

We didn’t like being in India. We never felt comfortable on our own.

It’s probably not too strong to say that we hated our time in India. In fact, we changed our flight and came home a day early, deliriously happy. It’s actually been hard to think about and talk about India, giving me a bit of chest-tightening PTSD every time.

All this would have been different if we could have spent all our time with our wonderful hosts. Those times felt great. And I fear hurting their feelings by sharing our negative experience when we were not with them.

And maybe our negative feelings reflects on us, I don’t know. Lots of people who visited before told us that India was an “experience” but not necessarily a positive one. Others I’ve met since speak positively about it - people who spent more time rather than less time - there’s an adjustment process we didn’t get to go through. I guess all of what I write below would be dramatically different if we spent 3 weeks or 3 months in India rather than about a week.

I feel like we have travelled a reasonable amount - I guess that’s just me normalizing our experience. We haven’t been to Kuala Lumpur, but we’ve been to a fair number of places over the years. We are curious and like exploring and just seeing what’s up.

So anyway, what about India was problematic for us?

There are a number of things that often get cited as problems with India: traffic, crowds, pollution, poverty. Those aren’t necessarily fun things, but I don’t think that was it. I’ve seen traffic, and pollution, and crowds (and certainly have not seen such poverty). They can make a new place like India overwhelming, tiring, dramatically different from home. But they wouldn’t ruin a trip.

The fact was that we just could never be comfortable (except in our hotel rooms, or with people who we had arranged to be with - our friends, or the conference). It just seemed that every interaction, big or small, was fraught with uncertainty and so much extra work. You can’t do anything - get from A to B - get some food - go see a tourist attraction - without a large number of small interactions that are unusual, that are “off script” (at least the script we carry in our Western heads), and that require some amount of negotiation that we had no preparation for.

Much of it had to do with feeling like you were going to get scammed around every corner. And the amounts of money were trivial, but it led to a feeling of being out of control, not being able to relax and enjoy something because your guard had to be up.

Example: we go to a temple (the Bull Temple). We had a driver that day, so he stops, and lets us out. We walk past the people selling stuff and ignore them. We approach the temple entrance (it’s like a room filled with a big statue with one end opened), and there is a chair and someone telling you that you have to take your shoes off. So we do that, and leave them outside the temple. As we walk in, someone joins with us and begins talking with us. a young kid. I don’t care what he’s telling us, I’d just like to look at it, but suddenly we are in a “scene.” In hindsight (and perhaps reading this) you can probably identify coping strategies to deter this, but we couldn’t at that time. It took too much “work” (or think of it as energy, if you prefer). We could not enjoy looking at this big black statue of a bull, we couldn’t look at each other and discuss it, we were forced by our need to stick to social norms to sort of politely acknowledge the information. Can’t hang up on telemarketers? Don’t go to India. At the end of the bull the boy says “I guide you now you give me money?” and then the woman with the chair for taking your shoes off and on also demands money.

It wasn’t clear up front that this would require money; you don’t know when or how you are entering into a transaction, you are a bg white target, and you don’t know the rules. That pretty much sucks.

And this goes on everywhere that tourists go. It goes on outside the front of the hotel where you ask them to get you a taxi or a driver, or whatever. You can’t figure out who is playing what role; they all have uniforms or not uniforms, and you don’t know what is going to happen next, so it requires vigilance. You go to the airport and people descend on your taxi and start unpacking your bags and carrying them away. We had to learn from that and prepare for the next time and stop them from doing that if it were to happen again. No one intervenes on your behalf. The taxi drivers don’t care. They don’t close the window when beggars run up in traffic and stick their heads in the cab and start asking for stuff.

It made walking down the street an incredibly daunting experience - not because anything so bad happened to us, but the fear - and it was indeed fear - of an unpredictable unmanageable encounter that could be just around the corner.

We saw a fair number of beggars - small children that would make a pathetic hand to mouth gesture with little piping voices as they clutched at sleeves. They staked out corners and when you waited for traffic to come they would descend. There was nothing to make them stop. It wasn’t frightening, but it was annoying and intense, and it was frightening how I began to see them as pests rather than people; how I began to dehumanize them and wanted to swat them like flies for their minor but persistent annoyance. We didn’t give money, I think for fear of being assaulted, and with that whole “oh, you’ll just be encouraging them” fear lurking. It was often very sad, especially as we walked back to our hotel with leftovers from a restaurant one night. Do we help someone if it means the difference between suffering and less-suffering, only for a brief period of time? I’m sure the moral answer is yes, but we were in self-preservation mode through our foreignness, our discomfort, our naivete.

There was a marked lack of a counterpoint to the odd interactions - the lack of pleasant interactions with strangers. In most places you go, you probably can have someone smile at you, or at least give friendly but not servile service. Again, on our own, we didn’t have that in India hardly at all. The facial expresses we were greeted with looked - to our Western eyes - like a hostile stare. I don’t presume to intuit the feelings behind how we were looked at (though there was a lot of persistent staring that is not appropriate in our culture), but it’s hard not to take away the feeling that you’re trained in - that you are being viewed with dislike. Mostly by men - there are a staggeringly disproportionate number of men on the streets and a woman may find that difficult and uncomfortable - again, even if nothing happens.

We had a nice elevator chat with fellow travellers (from the UK, I think) at our hotel. We were greeted by young children lining up at the famous (yet amazingly crappy) Prince of Wales Museum who seemed excited to see white people and waved and called “hi” - first the girls in one line and then the boys. The “hi” and wave passed down the line as we walked by and it was incredibly charming. And amazingly rare. I think another little child smiled at us as we ate a meal.

(By the way, it was really really crappy - faded dioramas that were covered in dust, lots of dead animals, sad bent railings, with a few lovely new architected wings at the end of the trail)

And the lack of general welcomingness takes its toll. And so it’s easy to look at the lack of development, the poverty, noise, debris, chaos, and filth and be critical, but I kept reminding myself just what was bothering me.

I know there have been tremendous economic shifts that have impacted North America and India in terms of jobs and so on, but I really can’t see how that is working. I wonder if there’s just huge class distinctions so I don’t see the white collar as a tourist. But you look at this place and you think “there’s no way.” There are so many people and so much poverty and illiteracy that you can’t think of the total population as a market, or as a workforce or whatever. Mumbai is one of the world’s largest cities, and it has amazingly low - for example - numbers of people who have been online, ever. It’s not London. It’s got some of what London has, but it’s a lot of different things on top each other. As I’ve written, you’ve got IT parks and poverty right next to each other. You can look at the IT park and say, wow, things are changing. And they are, but you can’t forget the weight of the stuff that is missing. I will say that there was a remarkable lack of denial about all of this - you can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about these problems (and many more).

As an aside - reading the newspaper was fun. The politics are so dramatic and so complex, it was fun trying to figure it out, as well as see the latest scandals and gossip around the Bollywood stars (scandal being a relative term; it’s a very conservative culture).

Back to my screed: it’s hard to find a chain store. It’s hard to find an advertising message that isn’t incredibly naive, like it’s advertising to children. Reminders of the purity, safety, and quality of products - implying that if you have to think about that, maybe, well just maybe, that isn’t what’s being delivered at other times.

This is just one experience; I know business people from the West travel regularly to Bangalore and other cities to work with their colleagues. I don’t know how that works; I just feel so skeptical. It’s a hard place to go to.

My India pictures reveal stunning images: hovels; a lovely Donald Duck trash bin on a shopping street that is probably the dirtiest thing you’ve ever seen; an international airport that looks more decrepit and chaotic than you can imagine.

I’m not an economist or an international development expert and I wasn’t conducting business in India (though we attended a conference and visited Microsoft Research, so we saw a bit), but for much of the time I had to gape and wonder how this thing we read about is happening.

One last thought - watching what you eat was crazy tough. I learned to shower facing away from the water to minimize what I swallowed. Could you drink fresh juice? What about X? Or Y? There were so many different complex food choices that came up. I opted for caution over exploration, and I still got a little bit sick. Sadly, I also got sick of Indian food (not ill, but rather my desire abated). On our last night we found a restaurant with an amazing looking buffet of every kind of food, including Indian. I had to pass, with great regret, knowing that a week hence I would give anything to b