Word from the street

First off, a thank you to all the readers and a shout-out to those who recently left their first comments: Mills and Jessica - thanks for checking in!

In an effort to become less of an obvious tourist, I have not been taking my camera with me recently. No, it's not a compact point-and-shoot :) So, unfortunately I don't have any Ankur original pictures for you today. However, I managed to find a picture of the place a I visited today (and the subject of this entry) from a random blog.

I visited the old Ahmedabad city today. The entrance to the old city is marked by a large brick archway, an entrance familiar to many who might have visited any old city (e.g. Siena), although the delineation is not quite as clear cut given the immense crowds (see attached picture). Within the 1 to 2-mile area, there were probably well over 10,000 different vendors/shops. I am not kidding. In this entire area (Gandhi road and its surroundings), the shops are about 10 meters wide and probably 15-20 meters in length. And they are sequentially aligned... endlessly. It's absolutely amazing.

Every shop specializes in a particular merchandise and the competition is fierce. We went there to look for a couple of (modestly priced) fans. There must have been 25 to 50 fan stores that I saw while we carefully meandered around rickshaws, bikes, bicycles, and of course pedestrians. To make things worse, all the fan shops are all next to each other. Then you move on to the next block and there are, say, an equal number of shoe stores lined up, waiting for you. Think about that. It's Adam Smith's dream of what competition looks like: a very large number of suppliers competing on nothing but price to earn your business, and you--consumer--have an almost unrestricted ability to price shop just by walking a couple feet from one store to another store. Every economics student should visit a place like it.

Along with the myriad of shops, as the picture below shows, there were just as many people shopping. There could easily have been over 200,000 people there. As you can imagine, small crowded spaces don't tend to smell like fresh roses. The old city is generally a place to look for bargains; it's not a place for the faint-of-heart or the claustrophobic, but you'll be sure to save some dough.

The other thing I got to do was to chat with a couple of locals, shall we say. Topics of conversation:

1. Rain (this has been a big deal as the rain is supposed to have started and it's vital for existence here, so say a prayer to the rain saint, will you?)

2. The city's growth; when this gentleman (now in his 50s) was growing up, he saw one motorcycle every 30 minutes during the day; now it's 1 every second, all the time on this very street.

3. Pakistan and its harboring of terrorists. He pondered aloud: why does America support Pakistan?

4. The juxtaposition of unusually happy and smiling people given the circumstances here in a rather corrupt government.

Something else of note. As you know, the poverty level is very high here (but it's improving). As such, you'd expect a lot of homeless people begging for money (a la Washington DC). Surprisingly, shockingly even, you don't see beggars. Perhaps it's unique to this city, I don't know. I have only come across a handful of people (probably 5). Instead, people here are incredibly tenacious and creative: they will do something (work) to earn a few bucks. I worry that in the US we are regressing and thinking about how much the government owes us instead of creatively and entrepreneurially engineering our way to new highs.

You just walk around here and realize that this place has some mystical magic; that it exists beyond any and all rational human logic; and, that its existence is probably good enough proof that God exists.