Day 66--En Route to Vietnam

28 October. 11°43’N, 83°40’E. Course: 113°. 14 knots, En route (thank you, Bob) to Vietnam

Where do I start to describe India? It is, indeed, a land of contrasts. Or perhaps a better way to put it is as the local tourist bureau characterizes the country: “Incredible India!” It is, indeed, hard to believe one country can be a place of such side-by-side abject poverty and tremendous luxury. Victorian palaces on streets canopied under huge shade trees and, also under those trees, piles of litter several feet high. Women carrying short straw brooms bent over to sweep to the side the endless dust and dirt that seems to cover everything. Captain Kingston told us he’d like to shrink-wrap the ship during our stay in Chennai. In fact, the day before we arrived, the crew covered all the stairs and hallway carpets with cardboard and plastic to help reduce the dirt carried back on our shoes from being ground into the fabric. I’m not sure if India is beautiful in an ugly way or ugly in a very beautiful way. It’s both.

On Friday, as the students and others were streaming off the ship to explore Chennai, buy saris, eat some curry . . . whatever . . . I stayed onboard catching up on a few loose grading ends and checking e-mail while the bandwidth was relatively wide open. At 2pm, then, I ventured forth into the sounds—and smells!—of Chennai.

I wanted to accomplish two things. First, I looked online and found a local JVC dealer. The camcorder I bought just before sailing has been behaving badly, sometimes turning on when I open the viewer screen, sometimes not. I think the internal computer keeps forgetting how to access the internal hard drive, resulting in the camera’s doing nothing besides making a slight whirring sound when I flip open the screen. After I open and close the screen many times, the camera suddenly comes to life and, for the rest of the shooting session, behaves as it should. In the meantime, I’ve lost the shot I was going after. Fortunately, I have my inexpensive Canon digital camera (“Thanks for 20 memorable years. Love, Hewitt Associates.”) that takes passable videos. But I bought the JVC to record this voyage, and I want it to work.

My second target, after the JVC service center, was the Taj Coromandel Hotel, part of a luxury-hotel chain that owns the Taj in Mumbai, where last year’s terrorist attack killed many people including a father and daughter from Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. I wanted to check on equipment in the hotel’s rooms and, after confirming high-speed internet, CNN, and ESPN, make a reservation at their sister property, Fisherman’s Cove.

As soon as I got off the ship and showed my papers to Indian security guarding the port, I was accosted by rickshaw drivers. Chennai rickshaws are of two types. One is an open-air buggy, very much like the old Chinese rickshaws. The Indian rickshaw, however, is pulled by a rider on a bicycle. The other is called an auto-rickshaw. These are most similar to the covered motor scooters driven by meter maids (and meter men) in larger cities. The driver sits in the front seat and steers with a scooter-like yoke, controlling speed and brakes with foot pedals. Two customers—three if they’re very small—can sit behind the driver, preferably with little or no baggage. These rickshaws are everywhere in Chennai, operating like taxis in US cities. They’re metered, but the fares for foreign tourists are all negotiated before the ride. And even then they can change, as I later discovered.

A ride through the streets of Chennai, particularly in an open-air rickshaw, seems complete chaos. The lane stripes on the streets and highways serve only a decorative purpose. Cars, rickshaws, bicycles, busses, trucks, motor scooters, and pedestrians all vey for the same small space at the same time. They’re all very polite in their maneuvering, tapping constantly on their horns to say, “I’m coming up on your right,” or “please give me room to pass,” or, “excuse me but the light has turned green, and we can go now.” But they’re also unrelenting, passing others with barely inches—literally!—between vehicles, both the vehicles being passed and the ones coming toward in the opposite lane. And all this happening as the traffic flows at 40 to 60 kph, not yielding, certainly not stopping.

I was unsuccessful in getting my camera fixed. The folks at JVC—very polite and helpful—said they’d need 10 to 15 days to get the necessary parts. By then, I’ll be in Hong Kong, so I thanked them and climbed back into the rickshaw. Our next stop was the Taj Coromandel Hotel. Because of the Mumbai attacks, getting into a Taj property is much like passing through TSA security at a US airport. They search all bags, look at papers, pass visitors through a metal detector, even scan the underside of rickshaws and cars looking for explosives. Indians refer to the Mumbai attacks as “our 9/11,” and they take security very seriously. Armed guards also check papers at entrances to ports (as we found out), and they have occasional checkpoints on highways leading into and out of cities.

I learned what I needed to learn at the Taj, made my reservation at Fisherman’s Cove for Saturday night with a request for an extra-night’s extension, and returned to my rickshaw and driver for the return ride to the ship. My driver began trying to tell me something in his Tamil-very-broken-English language, and I finally figured that he wanted to take me to a craft shop. I said “no, just take me back to the ship,” but he was adamant that I at least stop off and look. It was clear that simply by taking me to the shop, he would get some form of kickback, so I agreed to a 5-minute stop. “I’ll buy nothing.” That’s all he wanted.

We stopped at a storefront on a clean, tree-lined street, and I wandered through the shop looking at old steamer trunks, carved wooden elephants, brightly colored saris, silk paintings, all the kitsch one could imagine in a shop of Indian handicrafts. True to my word, I bought nothing. But the driver didn’t care. He went into the shop as I sat in the rickshaw and returned a minute later smiling broadly and thanking me as if I had fed his family for a day. I may have.

When we made it back to the ship, the driver insisted I owed him double the INR500 (500 rupies, about US$10) price we had negotiated for our 2+-hour round trip. He claimed that the INR500 was “each way.” But I plopped down the 500 rupies plus a 100 rupie tip, and walked away. He had just received 5 times the average daily income for over half the population of India. And the “each-way” gimmick he had tried mirrored the same tale almost everyone from the ship experienced on his or her first rickshaw trip. A ship like ours arrives in Chennai, and a rickshaw driver can earn enough to feed his family for a month, probably longer. So the drivers pull out all stops.

On Saturday morning, I joined 40 others from the ship at a welcome reception hosted by a senior administrator at a Chennai women’s college. Our host is also an SAS alum who offered the event in celebration of the 100th voyage of Semester at Sea. The problem for us was that, by Saturday morning, most voyagers had dispersed to various destinations around India, leaving only a skeleton crew of a few students and passengers.

The college had orchestrated a 45-minute performance of dancers and singers, some performing traditional Indian steps, others performing that mixture of wild east-meets-west gyrations that are associated with the Bollywood musicals: hands flying, bodies leaping, boys and girls doing half somersaults, all to very, very loud music. And each number was announced with great enthusiasm and hyperbole: “Prepare to be amazed at the flashing colors and flaming torches as our dancers whirl and twist in astounding feats of physical agility.” As I said, it was Bollywood transported onto a small-college stage, and we all applauded with genuine appreciation despite the false starts, missed steps, and occasional wrong musical selections.

After the “grand finale,” the announcer surprised us with, “And now, we’ll be dazzled by wonderful dancing performed by our American guests.” This came as a complete surprise; no one had expected that we’d have to return the favor and entertain our hosts. Fortunately, one of my intercultural comm. students, Terrance Smith, was along on the trip. Terrance has a very outgoing personality—“flamboyant,” he calls it—combined with great self-confidence. In Paul Wagner’s documentary class, Terrance introduced himself by saying “I like to shock people,” and he has lived up to his self-billing, if not by shocking, at least by finding many ways to entertain. Among his talents: he’s a superb dancer.

So Terrance took his iPod to the folks running the audio system, and within a minute or two, he was on the stage going through the opening moves of a type of line dance I’ve seen students performing on the 7th deck. Soon, Terrance was joined by 10 to 15 other students. And, within another minute or so, several of the women’s college dancers joined in as well. At the peak of the dance, at least 30 kids were on the stage, maybe half SAS and half Indian. It was a true cross-cultural moment.

I returned to the ship a little after noon, and at 2pm, a taxi and driver picked me up for the drive to Fisherman’s Cove. The Taj Fisherman’s Cove is, in all respects, a luxury resort sitting on the beach about an hour south of Chennai—yet another in the endless string of Indian contrasts. It was here that I spent what I’ve described to my fellow travelers as “my first weekend in 2 months.” It’s true: there are no weekends on an SAS voyage. The pace is relentless, whether on the ship or in port. So, for 2 days and 2 nights, I vegetated at a 5-star resort, lounging by the beautiful pool, drinking a G&T at the swim-up bar, eating wonderfully delicious Indian food, catching up on US and world news on CNN, even watching the final Yankees-Angels ALCS game Monday morning (Sunday night, NYC time) on ESPN. I also spent some time uploading pictures and videos through the hotel’s very fast internet connection, and I even got some work done: clean-up lesson planning for the remaining classroom days. (We’re almost 2/3rds of the way through the classes.) It was a weekend of sloth and self-indulgence. And I’m completely unapologetic.

Yesterday, I escorted 30 of my business comm. and intercultural comm. students on an FTD to Perot Systems, a Chennai client of Hewitt that handles data processing and customer services for many US health-care systems: Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Tenet Healthcare, and others. Our hosts at Perot (as in Ross Perot) were, in what I now know as typical Indian fashion, exceptionally accommodating, gracious hosts.

Minish Jani, Perot’s director of corporate communication, briefed the students on what Perot does in India. Then we broke into 2 smaller groups for a tour of the offices. We saw what looked like several hundred Perot associates, each sitting at small cubicles, rapidly reviewing and coding medical procedures into the computer systems of their US clients. To be hired into one of these positions, an applicant must have at least a bachelor’s degree and, preferably, a master’s in a health-related field. The application and testing process for the positions is rigorous, and the training—including training in the arcane, convoluted US health care system—takes weeks. They have 50 applicants for each opening. Starting salary: $250 per month.

We also sat in for part of a class on American English for new employees working in the Perot Systems call center. At the moment, they were being taught how to pronounce the American “short-i” (“eh”) sound. They heard the sound, repeated it, saw how it’s formed by the mouth and tongue, then, to practice recognizing the sound, wrote various “i-sound” sentences they heard spoken by a recorded voice: “Is this his missing sister?” “Mister Smith is a persistent listener.” I haven’t yet seen the movie “Outsourcing,” but, from what I’ve heard, we were watching a scene. It was both funny and fascinating.

There’s little wonder India is starting to dominate the outsourcing and customer-service business. Americans certainly would have a hard time competing with the discipline, intelligence, and work ethic we saw in these people starting their $3,000-per-year jobs.

I returned to the ship at 1730, we turned in shore passes and duty declarations, and, at precisely 2000, the shore crew tossed the last line off the piling, and we headed, again, out to sea. Next: through the straits of Malacca, where Indonesian pirates wait to pounce, to Singapore for a brief refueling stop, then on to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and the stop that many of us children of the 60s are most looking forward to: Vietnam.