Mumbai is city that’s going places, both literally and metaphorically. Everyone is moving, all the time. Seemingly every building is under construction or being demolished. I haven’t felt this sort of dynamism since I lived in Bangkok in the late 90s. (And where the traffic is far worse than Mumbai).
We visited Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, where we were shown around before the our lecture. It’s charming old place, built in the mid 19th century to study textile technology, so it’s only appropriate that it’s stayed on the cutting edge of applied technology by becoming a centre of excellence for high-voltage research and computer science. (Photos)
The talks went very well; Shwetank and I got a real buzz from the audience who numbered 300 (we expected around 50).
Many of my friends, acquaintances and complete strangers came up to me and expressed their happiness for having attended the lecture. The insights you provided were both eye-opening and immensely useful. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. We had far more attendees than we had expected or hoped for. It is extremely rare indeed that the auditorium gets filled to capacity – for anything.
When you’re far from home and missing the wife and kids, it lifts the spirits to know that what you’ve done has been appreciated.
Dinner was a meet-up at the Hard Rock Café where lots of Indian blogging and twitter luminaries came to sip a beer with us. I was taught some elementary Hindi (like “Tum khubsurat ho. Aati kya Khandala?” which means “Hello, how are you?” but my accent means I get some odd looks when I use it).
Then, a quick tour around the offices of local company Pin Storm and so to bed.
Strengths and weaknesses of Indian tech scene
One of the attendees, Jayesh, emailed me with the question “what do you think about the technology scene in India? What are the strong points and what are the weak points? And what are the measures for overcoming the weak points?”
Great question Jayesh, and I’m replying here rather than by email, as this is the opinion of an outsider, and I’d love to get Indian people’s views.
As I see it, India’s strong points are the skills and knowledge of its computer students and the fact that it recognised the importance of the computer industry early so began training people early.
It is weaker in shifting courses away from older technologies to the new (apparently there are still institutions where they study WAP and WML!) ; bureaucracy moves slowly while trends in IT move fast.
Although Indian students love Open Source, they haven’t yet shown the same affection for Open Standards (there are a lot of “best viewed in IE” monstrosities here). In any economy development costs increase if you have to tinker your IE-only code to take account of all the other browsers and the endless parade of new devices that come out. Using Open Web Standards means (in theory) write once and use everywhere; in practice, that means only tweaking for legacy browsers and crippled devices of which there is a dwindling number, so Open Web Standards reduce development costs as well as promoting inclusion by being available on cheaper machines or mobiles.
This is the best way for an economy like India’s, where the emphasis can’t be on being the cheapest in the world, as that is unsustainable as an economic strategy: there will always be another nation waiting in the wings to claim the dubious honour of being the primary source of super-cheap labour, but that relies on sweat-shop wages, and therefore perpetuates social inequality and misery. Everything I read before I came, all the newspapers I’m reading now, and conversations with the students I meet suggests that’s not how Indian people wish to see their nation developing further.
Some proprietary standards seem attractive, as they can be made fast – but that’s because but they are made, developed (and sometimes abandoned) with decisions made in secret, according to the needs and ambitions of companies that report to an anonymous group of shareholders that demands feeding with healthly numbers every quarter. Can you always be certain that their needs will exactly align with the needs of a nation like India? (If there is one thing that the current economic crisis has showed us, it’s that the chasing of short term profits for institutions doesn’t always translate into economic health for communities.)
Using Open Standards (and participating in their development) facilitates a sustainable economy that promotes inclusion rather than exploitation by allowing you to work smarter, not cheaper.
Health warning: I’m not an economist; this is just based on my pre-trip research and listening to students here.
I arrived in India on Holi, the day when everyone gets drunk and throws colourful powder over each other. Therefore, instead of doing the sensible thing and going to bed, I drank a shed load of beers and had a meal that the Indian Opera interns cooked—a tremendous chicken biryani created by Saif, with chop-by-chop instructions from his mum over a mobile from South India.
After a couple of jetlaggy days in the Indian office, writing my presentation with Shwetank, we took a 12 hour night train from Chandigarh to Jaipur. Once there, we took a taxi for five hours across the Rajasthan desert, seeing camels
and the world’s most overloaded truck:
Finally we reached our destination, BITS-Pilani where I gave a talk on the advantages of Open Web Standards in developing nations, and was regaled with a good number of really searching questions. (BITS people who asked how you can get involved with specifying HTML 5: sign up to the WHAT-WG mailing list.)
Then, back across the desert, stopping for daal and aloo parthas, to the Nana ki Havali, a beautiful old ancestral home converted into a hotel, where there was a welcome beer waiting for me. I also went out for a shave: there are few more luxurious feelings than a really close shave with a really sharp blade by someone who knows what he’s doing.
The next day was a rest day, so Shwetank and I hired the same taxi driver and toured the sights of Jaipur, the pink city: the Jal Mahal, Amber Fort:
I’ve been hibernating over Consumerfest in my wife’s family farm in Chiang Rai, on the lush green mountainous fringes of the Golden Triangle (the border of Thailand, Laos and Burma) where I could pick starfruit, limes and bananas from trees in the garden. (It’s not all idyllic of course: AIDs and prostitution have a terrible effect on the area as I documented in my inaugural blog post Harvesting the young rice.)
On Consumerfest eve, one of my sister-in-law’s cows had a baby (which we called “Christmas”) and, this being Thailand where “if it’s got four legs and it’s not a chair, we eat it”, the placenta was too good a raw material for a meal to be left in the fields.
So here’s how to cook cow placenta soup.
Take placenta
Wash it thoroughly
Boil for an hour to soften it
Cut galangal and herbs, add to pot
Chop all into bite-size pieces
Simmer for an hour
Serve with minced raw buffalo in its own blood
Add toast and coffee for a delicious Christmas breakfast
How did it taste? Not as nice as it sounds, but not too revolting, actually. It reminded me of liver with its offal taste and also of heart’s chewy texture. Basically, the cheaper cuts of meat that most of the UK abandoned fifty years ago when most people got rich enough to eat chicken and other less internal cuts of meat. The minced raw buffalo is like spicy steak tartare.
Christmas dinner was more traditionally English: I barbequed six chickens stuffed with sage and onion, and we cooked roast potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower with Christmas pudding and cake.
After 8 days, 11 universities and 9 kilograms of Nasi Goreng per person, the first Opera university tour of Indonesia is finished.
Here are Bruce’s slides: Web Standards for the Future, (PDF 550K). Note that I was tweaking and changing the slides depending on the University’s focus, so here’s the “full” version that includes everything. No university got all of these. The format is accessible PDF to make it small, as I’ve experienced Indonesian bandwidth speeds..! If you need another format, drop me a line. You’re welcome to share these with your friends or classmates – I hope they make sense. If not…well, you’ll have to invite me back again!
Zibin’s slides: Web Browser Industry (PDF 1M). This presentation is about the mobile web industry -trends today and tomorrow. I’ve also presented Opera’s four main products. The slide about top ten sites transcoded by Opera Mini in Indonesia was the showstopper. Audience giggled upon finding out that friendster bandwidth was more than the 2nd to 10th spot combined.
To celebrate the success of the Indonesian tour, we’ve published a new State of the Mobile Web report focussing on South-East Asian mobile browsing. Bad news for any web site that doesn’t follow Web Standards, with data like this:
Indonesia and Malaysia lead the way for mobile Web adoption, followed by Thailand and Brunei.
Indonesia leads the top 9 countries in page views, with each user browsing 358 pages on average in October 2008, well above the global average.
Growth rates are soaring: Malaysia leads the top 9 with 462.6% growth in users this year, followed by the Philippines (396.4% growth) and Indonesia (329.5% growth).
Friendster is the premier social-networking site in the region, with hi5 coming in second.
Nokia is dominant in the region, with brands like Sony Ericsson and Huawei competing for a distant second place.
So our university tour of Indonesia finished in Jogjakarta, a city that I liked immediately. It helped that we had a great turn-out for our final lecture at Gajah Mada University and some really challenging questions. Then a group of students who organised the seminar (led a groovy punk-loving girl named Alfina) kindly took us for good food and a tour of the Kraton, where the Sultan of Jogja still lives, with the ceremonial army and a legion of staff.
A previous Sultan gave Sukharno and the Republican government asylum in the 40s, and established Gajah Mada University in the grounds of the Kratong, so Jogja has a special administrative status that continues to this day. Our guide, a Gamelan music teacher who’s toured the world, explained that now the Sultan works to promote peace and Javanese culture—the kratong now offers free courses in Gamelan, dancing and puppetry. To demonstrate, he pointed out the pillars of the coronation room which contain symbols of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism in syncretistic fusion, and explained that his family celebrate two major festivals, Eid and Christmas as he is a muslim and his wife is a christian. He went on to pronounce that all religions are as valid as each other and that it’s only the “stupid mafia politicians” who cause religious divisions. It’s rumoured that the current Sultan might run for the Indonesian presidency; if what I saw is indicative of his manifesto, all the best to him from me if he chooses to stand.
That theme of liberal egalitarianism continued the following day (a day off!) when we visited Borobudur, an eighth century temple that reminded me of, but pre-dates, Angkor Wat in Cambodia which I visited last year. Our guide was a lady in a hijab named Aysha, who obviously venerated the monument and didn’t hesitate to scold local youngsters who weren’t showing sufficient respect when climbing to the central stupa. There was also the surreal experience of finding all the local people’s cameras turning from the beautiful monument and onto me, while seemingly every schoolchild in the district quizzed me as to my opinion of Indonesian culture, food and Manchester United’s future prospects.
We also had a great meet-up with loads of local students, some of whom made me somewhat nervous when they examined this site’s CSS and quizzed me about my choice of image replacement methods. Jogja has a lively blogging community which just won an award of 10 million rupiah for their efforts and which meets face-to-face every Friday on Malioboro, the main drag to the Kraton. There was knowledge and appreciation of English designers, and excitement that Jon Hicks has joined Opera. I pointed them to some sites they hadn’t been to: 24 ways, A List Apart, CSS3.info and PPK.
So now I’m just about to go out with Zi Bin for food, and just possibly a couple of Bintangs for our final night in Indonesia. (Putri got sick and has returned home to her family for couple of days.) My suitcase is swelling with some framed carved stone copies of Borobudur temple reliefs and some CDs: Mulan Jameela‘s ballsy “Wonder Woman”, and some traditional Javanese music which I find relaxing to work to. Best of all is the cheesy earworm Indo-pop by “Bukan Permainan” by Gita Gutawa. I dare you to watch her live and not hum the damn chorus for a week.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Jogja is my favourite city in Indonesia, as that would do a disservice to the other universities that welcomed us so graciously, but I do feel a special affinity with the city, despite its earthquakes, recent tornado and the constantly smoking volcano that looms above it.
So, farewell Jogja and Indonesia: terima kasih (thank you very much).
So I’m at Gajah Mada University, Yogyakarta, for the final event in Opera’s Indonesian tour.
The national language of Indonesia is Bahasa Indonesia (bahasa means “language” — in Thai the same word is “Pasa”). Zi Bin says it’s very similar to Bahasa Malaysian, so he’s been impressing the local ladies with his ability to woo quadralingually).
It reminds me very much of Turkish (my third language) because they’re both spelled phonetically, with the letter “c” pronounced as English “j”, and “ay” is pronounced “I/ eye”, but mostly because of the number of English words they borrowed: taksi, polisi, republik, informasi, politeknik, teknoloji, kharisma spring immediately to mind from Bahasa. (This borrowing isn’t all one sided; English borrowed “rambutan” and “Orang-Utan” from Bahasa Indonesia.)
Most Bahasa words remain mysterious yet mellifluous to me. My current favourite is the fun-to-say “dilarang” which rather prosaically means “forbidden”, such as “dilarang merokok” (no smoking) or “dilarang masuk” (no entry).
This homegrown word can be combined to pleasant effect with borrowed words. In a residential neighbourhood I saw the sigh “dilarang klakson” which means, of course, “Don’t sound your horn”- combining English/ Bahasa linguistic miscegenation with naïve optimism, given Indonesian drivers’ love affair with the “klakson”
Thanks to all who emailed; the Indonesian earthquake was on a different island, and we were unscathed. In fact, we didn’t know it had happened until we read the emails!
I rue my nervousness about the trip; Indonesians have been delightfully hospitable. I’m glad I had experience of living in Thailand before I embarked on this university tour. It prepared me for the delicate art of South-East Asian smalltalk, formal speeches of welcome, the formal presentation of souvenir gifts by a VIP, and meant that I packed proper shoes, trousers and shirts—which leave me a sweating mess after an hour, but I know that the effort is appreciated.
Meanwhile, I’m just about off to bed. After two different universities, a press interview and a two-hour commute through a storm in gridlocked Jakartan traffic (not to mention Zi Bin breaking the zip on his only pair of trousers and losing his Mac power cable—presumably unrelated misfortunes, but you never know with these Mac fanboys) this bottle of Bintang beer is one of the finest bottles of beer ever brewed by man.
Actually, that’s a lie. She’s staying at home, and I’m typing this as I look out of my 16th floor window at a panorama of the Jakarta skyline.
After being here a few hours (most of which I spent asleep after 15 hours in KLM cattle class, on which I can never doze), Jakarta seems much like Bangkok. The language on the billboards is different, and there are more ladies in hijab, but there is a similar skyline of high-rise hotels, overhead freeways and the air is filled with the roar of motorcycles and the impatient beeping of gridlocked cars. It’s 28 celcius, not too humid, and overcast as it’s the tail-end of rainy season. I already feel at home.
Breakfast was an eclectic mix of Japanese miso soup, fresh papaya, fresh guava juice, Korean kimchi with Indonesian noodles in chicken and coconut sauce.
As today is a de-jetlagging day, and my 42nd birthday, I’m going to have a long massage and a few hours in the pool. We move to another town near Jakarta late afternoon in time for an early start tomorrow when our hectic schedule for the Opera Indonesian university tour begins. I’m looking forward to hanging out with Zi Bin and Putri, Opera’s Indonesian marketing diva.
The Web is very slow here; gmail is practically unusable, and it’s taken me 45 minutes to download my (admittedly ludicrous number of) emails, so I’m adjusting my presentation to mention Opera’s low-bandwidth mode in the mail client and the ability to ignore specified threads.
My Bangkok next-door neighbour and friend, Steve Van Beek has some spaces left on his fantastic kayak tours in South East Asia. I can absolutely recommend these; Steve has lived in Thailand for thirty years and I’ve met no-one else who knows the language, culture and geography as well as he does.
Prices below cover all accommodations, transportation, inflatable kayaks, equipment, meals, and guiding. They don’t include transportation to the starting point, visa fees, nor accommodation before or after the trip. It also assumes a minimum of five paddlers. Please contact Steve directly if you’re interested.
Jan. 16-29 (Wed.to Sun.) and Feb. 13-17 (Wed.-Sun.): Five days paddling through the 4,000 islands created where the Mekong, barred by a fault line, braids to 14 km. wide. The geologic slip has created Southeast Asia’s largest waterfalls (more water than Niagara) an obstruction which blocks navigation. US$940.
Jan. 25-27 (Fri-Sun), 2008: This trip combines the beauty of the foothills surrounding Luang Prabang with the charm of paddling into one of the most beautiful towns in Asia. We’ll sleep in homestays and experience village life, visit a beautiful waterfall, run some rapids, visit a quiet Buddhist monastery, and pay our respects at the grave of one of Asia’s most fearless explorers, Henri Mouhot. Along the way, we’ll see how villagers and fishermen utilize the river in their daily lives. US$490.
Cambodia: Siem Reap recommendations
While I’m busy recommending South-East Asian fun, I recall that I had a tricky time finding recommendations about Cambodia that weren’t aimed at cheapskate backpackers or sex tourists. So here’s my recommendations; I don’t claim that these are cheaper or better than their competitors, only that they met my needs. They were accurate in August 2007.
Siem Reap hotel
I stayed at the Golden Orange hotel. It’s US$1 by tuk-tuk to the main bar street or a 15 minute amble, and costs US$20 per night (for the twin room, rather than per person). I booked three nights and got a free airport pickup and free breakfast every day.
Rooms were very clean, with aircon and ensuite with hot shower, a fridge and free water. There was free internet. The staff arranged my tuktuk driver for three days, my bus to Phnom Penh and a massage, all at decent prices. I was so comfortable, I extended my stay by a night.
Only slight downside is that the owner’s wife has a small pet dog which patrols the second floor at night. It’s entirely harmless, but can bark occasionally so light sleepers should ask for a different floor.
Siem Reap restaurant and dancing
I thoroughly enjoyed the apsara dancing upstairs at the Temple Bar. It was free to those eating or drinking. The US$5 Khmer buffet was very good, too— as was the fish amok served in a coconut.
Cambodia: Phnom Penh recommendations
Phnom Penh hotel
I stayed at the Tonle Sap Guesthouse, a few metres from Sisowath Quay. It was a functional and clean room for US$18. The Pickled Parrot bar downstairs had good food and beer, and the owners were very helpful about organising a taxi for me to see the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng.
Phnom Penh restaurants
I was very well fed round the corner from my hotel at La Volpaia, which was recommended to me by an Aussie NGO worker. I had great Italian food in aircon splendour, and a glass of good (chilled!) red wine, for about US$12.
For breakfast, I enjoyed watching the world passing by on Sisowath Quay from the pavement tables of Rendezvous, a French establishment.
