Today is Monday Dec 10 2012. I arrived in Hyderabad, India at 2am this morning, got to my dorm room at the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT) just after 3, slept like a baby until 9am. We are about 8 hours behind NZ local time.
The weather is amazing - Winter in Hyderabad is like December at home - 27 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. So good to be warm again. Highs in Portland right now are barely getting over 10. And I say 'in Hyderabad' because India is just way too large a place to generalize. Different climates, different customs, different cultures, different languages in almost every one of India's 35 states and territories spanning over 3.2 million sq km. (NZ is 270,000 sq km). Its all about context.
People are friendly as here. From the moment I stepped off the plane people have been smiling, waving, and offering to help. Inquisitive, too, of course. This morning when I awoke I walked across the yard to the campus, stumbled into the mess hall and was greeted by a guy who said 'you want breakfast?' Best boiled eggs I've had all week.
I had lunch with a couple IMT students and got a good lay of the land. Hyderabad is the capital of the state of Andra Pradesh, near the top of the southern part of India. Not sure what the altitude here is. Massive diversity and disparity. Villages just a couple miles from the IMT's campus are without power much of the day. My lunch mates told me about different parts of this city having different customs, different dress codes, different languages. There are no general rules of thumb here, its all about the context you're in. Everything is here from bejeweled decadence to squalor, and everything in between. Hyderabad is a hub for India's IT sector, and it is growing. A quick search here tells me that all the big names are here, and not just for tech support any more either. For example, Microsoft's largest R&D campus outside the US resides here. The students I sat with were not from Hyderabad, but chose to come here precisely because they want to leverage that growth for their careers.
To sum up, my first impression of India is that of a living breathing encyclopedia of 200 years of globalization. And if I look really hard, I will see legacies of empires, cultures civilizations and gods that have been around for many thousands of years longer.
India is also becoming a hub for people and organizations who want to harness entrepreneurship and other elements of the business world into initiatives that have a real positive social impact. These are referred to as Social Innovation (products and services that have clear societal benefits), Social Enterprise (businesses with social mission), or Social Entrepreneurship (people doing social innovation and/or enterprise). That is why I'm in India - a two-week study abroad program as part of my Portland State MBA to learn and practice social enterprise. You can follow along here.
So, tonight I will meet a guy at the station and with him jump on an air conditioned train for a 6 hour ride to a village called Bhimavaram, where I will meet up with the other seven students and two instructors from Portland, and our hosts from the Byrraju Foundation.
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