China trip

I finally made it back to China in Oct. I was there for 10 days from Oct 14 to 24, first to attend ad tech in Beijing, and then to see friends in Shanghai, Nanjing and Kunming.

I loved every moment of it — it was exhilarating to be back in a place I find so exciting, and meeting up with old friends was the best therapy I could have asked for after some pretty stressful months.

I gave talks on entrepreneurship to MBA students at CEIBS in Shanghai and at Beijing University in, well, Beijing. They were well received, but I came away with the feeling that while the students were curious about entrepreneurship, there wasn’t much desire beyond that. I could be wrong — what would I know from meeting them for a few hours?

Some photos from the trip are here.

“We don’t need GDP, we need life”

I wish I could have said that. It just about sums up what I want from life.

Great quote, isn’t it?

Check out who said this and why.

Careful against drowning, please

小心溺水 — xiaoxin nishui — means to be careful from or against drowning, but these sign makers couldn’t be too bothered by the nuances of english. I think this sign is hilarious!

You bet I will!

Sikh policemen in Shanghai

Not now of course. I’ve read somewhere that back in the days of the British concession in Shanghai, the Brits shipped a bunch of Indian Sikhs to police the roads of Shanghai.

我以前听过英国控制上海的时候, 英国政府带一些印度sike教的人到上海当警察.

Today, I found a picture:

India needs less bombast

Personally I find TOI to be the crappiest of India’s major english newspapers. Incidently, TOI has the largest circulation of all english dailies which is not too surprising — increasingly, in all aspects of media, there is a correlation between more scale and dumbing down of the audience.

So, for once, I was even more surprised to find a thoughtful editorial in TOI. It’s a theme that I agree with — we, in India, think the world of ourselves, whether it be our aspiring superpower status or technologocal achievements or culture. We love in indulge in self-congratulations.

The fact is that India, the country, is a piece of crap. The country is creaking, chaotic and people here take the act of survival of the self in the worst possible way by thinking that they can get ahead only by pushing back someone else. The win-win mentality doesn’t exist here.

Don’t take me for an India-hater. I’m Indian, and after living abroad for many years, I’m back here because I’m excited about working here and exploring new opportunities. But the smugness of people and the media here drives me nuts.

Back to the TOI article, while the Indian media is gloating over being “the fastest growing telecom market in the world,” the article says:

‘ While India grapples with 2G, dropping quality standards, calling 256 Kb/second speed as broadband and 3G Spectrum, the world has moved on. In UK, British Telecom is already offering 8 Mb/second speeds to household users. More importantly, closer home, China has tested its own 4G technology for mobile telephones.

Strangely the Indian media and everybody else took just a cursory note of the Chinese announcement, for the China story is the real story in the long run.  ‘

This article is worth reading. It’s not just another one of those statistical comparsion articles but provides a thoughtful critique of Indian bombast.

Chinese temple in Bombay

Following a tip from this blog, I visited a Chinese temple near the Dockyard Rd Station today. It was appropriate timing too since the Chinese new year has just passed!

I had no idea that Bombay has, or rather — had, a Chinese community. They originally came here as sailors and traders many years back, and some, like Mr. Leung, the caretaker of this temple, came here to flee the 2nd world war and the subsequent political mess in China.

Mr. Leung is from Guangdong, and his wife Dorothy is a second-generation Chinese who he met here in Bombay many moons ago. It was bizarre meeting them because neither one speaks Chinese. Mr. Leung is a Cantonese speaker and even he admits that what he takes for Cantonese today is most probably very different from what it actually is — that’s how infrequently he speaks it.

The temple itself is in a residential building sandwiched among many others in a Muslim area. The Leungs have maintained it very well — for a place that hardly gets any visitors nowadays, it is still very neat and looks well put-together. I know it takes discipline to maintain a place like that so my kudos to the Leungs.

The temple is dedicated to Kuang Kun — and my next job is to figure out who he is! My guess is it’s a warrior general, but I’ll have to check on it.

Howard French on China’s soft power

Howard French, a NY Times writer based in China, has written an excellent post on China’s rising soft power vis-a-vis USA’s. In one especially powerful paragraph, he writes:

“… For a rich, free and culturally powerful country such as the US to lose a soft power contest with China seems all but impossible. It would be like losing a boxing match with a one-armed man. But in the global battle for hearts and minds, China does have one distinct advantage. It has not started any wars lately (emphasis added).”

The article also provides a good overview of the Beijing Consensus, an alternative to the doctrinaire Washington Consensus that a number in countries in the developing world find difficult to swallow.

China’s broadband internet penetration passes 100 million

Wow is what came to my lips when I read this.

“China had 137 million people online by the end of last year, up by almost a quarter from 2005, the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) said. The number of Internet users rose by 23.4 percent to comprise 10.5 percent of the country’s population, said the CNNIC report Tuesday.

…Broadband users exceeded 100 million for the first time to reach 104 million, or 75.9 percent of all Internet users. Another 17 million Chinese went online via mobile phones, accounting for 12.4 percent of the Internet population.”

Source: indiaenews.com

Just to give you a comparative idea, at the end of 2006, India had approx 8 million Internet users, of which 1.5 million, or 20% or on broadband connections. The number of internet users in India is growing at the same clip as China, i.e., 20%. (Thanks Mukul for all these stats!)

Bluetooth advertising

Marc van der Chijs’ blog has a fascinating post about blueetooth advertising in China. This is something entirely new to me. Given some so many yuppies (or puppies as we call them in India (the P stands for Punjabi’s)) sport bluetooth headsets, they are a great captive audience for some advertisers.

Pioco, a Chinese company is doing some pretty interesting work in this sector. Here, borrowed from Marc’s blog, is a pretty unique example:

” … a Ford Focus is projected on a wall, and next to it is a small camera. If you stand in front of this camera, the image is projected onto the screen, so it looks as if you are driving the car. What happens then, is that a picture is taken of you in the car, and sent to your phone by bluetooth. A very cool idea, and one that works well because Pioco has developed a technique so that only the person standing in the spot where the picture was taken does receive the photo.”

Cool, huhn?

Biking trip in Xishuanbanna (southern Yunnan)

One of my good friends Bryan and I went on a 5-day biking trip in Xishuanbanna over the new year holidays. We left Kunming by sleeper busy on the night of the 29th for Jinghong. We returned on 3rd morning 2007.

We had an amazing time. Xishuanbanna is one of the most beautiful and interesting parts of China. We had great food — grilled fish and fresh pineapples all along the way! We were astounded by the hospitality of some of the people we met along the way, particularly Yi dajie and her family in the small Dai minority village of Masai, who hosted us on the 31st.

We did some pretty hard biking on this trip. In particular, we did an uphill climb of some 8 km on the 3rd day from Masai to a Yi minority village of Gaoshan which was gruelling in every sense of the word. I’m in pretty good shape but I really struggled on this climb. It’s a pity that after all this hard work to get there, Gaoshan turned out to be a really shitty village.

A more detailed log of this trip is available on this site.

The Flickr photostream is here.

If anyone’s looking for some good mountain biking in southern China, I strongly recommend Xishuanbanna. The landscape, food and people are fantastic and you can easily rent really good mountain bikes at Xiong Brothers in Kunming or in Jinghong itself.