Having been pretty loopy due to jet lag on my last trip to Europe, I followed the anti-jet lag program outlined in Overcoming Jet Lag (Ehret and Scanlon, Berkeley, ISBN 0-425-09936-9). It really works -- after two days, I was sleeping at night, waking at dawn, and alert all day. I highly recommend this approach to anyone traveling over four or more time zones. If you still smoke, you'll like international air travel. I quit over ten years ago, and the noxious clouds that wafted from smoking sections of my Lufthansa 747 put an unpleasant edge on what were otherwise good (but long) flights.
I was en route from Chicago to Bangalore for 26 hours. This entailed a four-hour layover at Bombay airport (2 am to 6 am) to change planes. The local version of "skycaps" are pretty aggressive in hustling your bags (I had to wrest my luggage cart by force from one that popped out of the shadows.) Out at 6 am to Bangalore. The Wizard of Oz kept coming to mind, where Dorothy, having just been dropped by the tornado into Oz says, "Well Toto, looks like we're not in Kansas anymore."
I stopped by the Motorola facility in Bangalore (Motorola is a client.) It is one of the few software development organizations on the planet to have been assessed at SEI level 5. They routinely produce systems with measured failures on the order of 1 per million lines of code. This incredible performance is in part due to their designing a total software process from a clean sheet just a few years ago with these achievements as explicit goals.
Traffic in Delhi is frequently gridlocked. It seems that motor scooters, motor cycles, and auto-rickshaws (three wheel open passenger carriers) outnumber cars by nearly 2 to 1. There few autos other than Maruti's (the Indian Auto Manufacturer.) There are four Maruti models. The taxi and "family car" version appear to be clones of the late 1950's English Ford and early sixties Fiat subcompact, but if they breakdown, "any four year old in any village can fix them." Unleaded gas is a new and optional idea. There are no emission controls on anything. Most of the two-wheelers have two-stroke engines; there are many diesel cars and trucks. Only Mexico City is said to have worse air pollution.
While in Bangalore, I took a day trip to the Nandi Hills, where a Hindu temple over 1,000 years old built from granite slabs several feet thick perches atop a 3,000 foot peak. The peak juts abruptly from the very flat central plain. The temple is still in daily use. As I circled it for a good camera angle, I noticed a TV antenna fixed to the stone roof. Later, I was beckoned in and given a Hindu blessing. Just below the temple, an Indian film crew was shooting a scene for an action flick where the hero nearly plunges over the edge in a jeep (this nearly happened during the filming.)
The Indian idea of negotiation is a process which continues to push -- "no" is seldom taken at face value. However, the people I met were unfailingly polite and engaging. Theirs is a religious culture which seems to impart a subtle kind of spiritually to all things.
About five years ago, the Indian government allowed "Multi-national Companies" to establish software development facilities, provided the software was developed for export. The relatively low cost of labor, land, and facilities made this attractive to the "MNCs". This has spawned a viable software industry (it was virtually non- existent before this program.) I'd guess that the value (i.e. derived revenues) of software exported is now on the order of $20 billion a year. This will grow.
At present, severe limitations in general infrastructure are a primary weakness of the Indian software industry. For example, the power grid fails every four hours in Bangalore. Tap water is contaminated in all locations. The main roads everywhere are clogged beyond comprehension. It takes at least a year and a payment of $1000 to get a phone line -- I'm told that people hoard phone connections. Fully half of the population (nearly four times ours and growing faster in one-third the land) is illiterate; three-fourths are rural. Village India remains the social and political anchor. There are shooting civil wars in progress in several states owing to ethnic hostilities. There are wide cultural gaps with the west in general and blatant hostility to America in particular. The Indian press is whimsical in its reporting, glibly mixing innuendo, sarcasm, and polemics. In the press, the Indian side can do no wrong and American business and government is presumed to be lying and malicious. I did not get the sense that there are greater or lesser versions of Bill Gates waiting in the wings -- there seems for the moment no desire to define a market or to blaze a path with new products. For the time being, this will be left to the marketing partners of the software EOUs (Export Only Units.)
In spite of its problems, India is quietly becoming an international software giant. The government appears to have provided the right combination of incentives along with a relatively low hassle support (a radical change for this government, I'm told.) What has evolved is something like a coordinated, rational strategy for industrial policy. The preferred strategy does not seem to be "off-shore" development (i.e., lots of cheaper body shops) but the establishment of many highly capable software product organizations that can develop and support complex systems. A concern for quality and desire to make effective use of state of the art technologies was evident. It seems the lessons of software engineering have been well studied. The pigheadness and ignorance that plagues many software development organizations here (see Ed Yourdon's The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer) may have been avoided. I sensed a kind of "We Try Harder" at work -- the better to offset (western) concerns about quality. There is a very conscious effort to adopt best practices and a strong work ethic.
Good to be back. After shaking off my westbound jet lag, I bought prime steaks for dinner, which I rubbed well with garlic and pepper before grilling.