Maybe I was just being Naïve. Coming to India this summer, I expected things to be different. All I had been hearing is how fast India was becoming the next China.

When I was here six years ago, I was amazed at the high level of poverty and corruption that existed throughout the country. Going from city to city, it was all the same. The basic necessities like food, water, and electricity were scarce. In many of the smaller towns, trash collection was non-existent. My most vivid memory of that trip was visiting the village where my grandfather grew up. He showed me the tree next to the lake he used to sit under to keep cool in the summer. Since then, the tree had been cut down and the lake had dried up and been turned into a landfill.

So you can understand why I would think things would be better, given the country’s impressive 8 % annual GDP growth rate.

What doesn’t show on paper is how few people are actually affected by this growth rate. In India alone, almost 400 million people still live in extreme poverty. That means that over 1/3 of India’s population lives on less than $1 per day. Why aren’t these people benefiting from this incredible growth? Its not that the money isn’t there, it’s just going to all of the wrong places. Let me give you an example. A family friend tried to pay her taxes on her property so she could sell her house. When she approached an official about the matter, he offered to waive the charge in exchange for a small “gift”. She refused, but he still wouldn’t give her the proper paperwork. She had to bribe him just so that she could legally pay her taxes!

It is important to note, however, that the growth rate is so high despite all of the corruption and poor infrastructure. How can a corporation run efficiently enough to compete with the rest of the world in a country where you are lucky if you have power 20 hours in a day? How can you find so many intelligent, motivated people in a place where over 1/3 of the population can’t afford food or clean water, let alone go to school? Yet despite the overwhelming odds, India still manages to grow.

There will be a day when every Indian is given the opportunity to compete in the global playing field. But that day isn’t today. The money that is pouring into this country must go to building up the infrastructure, not the vacation homes for a few government officials. An 8 % growth rate cannot be sustained forever under the current conditions.

Maybe the world isn’t quite as flat as you think, Mr. Friedman.

The one thing I fear most about travelling in a developing country is getting sick. The image of musty overcrowded waiting rooms and dirty needles stuck in my mind all of last week as I became increasingly ill. What I found, however, was quite unexpected.

Walking into the hospital lobby, I wondered if I was hallucinating. The place looked like the Ritz! Marble floors, large glass windows, and a beautiful receptionist with a big smile greeted me at the front desk. The whole experience was totally painless. Within one hour I had visited the doctor, had a blood test done, picked up my medication in the in-house pharmacy, and was out the door. And the best part? The whole bill (not just the co-pay) for the checkup, blood test, and drugs was under $30!

Welcome to the rapidly growing Indian private health care sector. The “Max Super Specialty Hospital” is one of many new private hospitals popping up all around Delhi. Low costs for medical care coupled with a rising middle and upper class have caused the industry to boom. But the real market for these hospitals aren’t Indians – It’s Americans.

An increasing number of people from around the world are beginning to travel to India to receive health care at a fraction of the cost of what they would pay at home. This new phenomenon is known as Medical Tourism, and its only going to get bigger as health care costs continue to grow in the US.

So the next time you need a heart transplant or even a face lift, think globally. I know I will.

Hey Everyone,

I’m sorry it took me so long to get an email out. I havn’t had internet access for the past week and a half, and I finally found an internet cafe. Thanks for everyone who wrote me, and I’m sorry I don’t have time to write individual responses.

First off, I would just like to say, IT IS HOT. It gets over 100 degrees and it is humid! Right now I am in a small town called Auroville on the coast of southern India. The town was developed about 45 years ago by the UN and the Indian government to try to create a place “free of national boundaries”. The whole idea is that the city belongs to no country and that they can make their own rules. I’ll write my own impressions on it later, but for now I’ll just say that it is definitely a cool place to be. I am taking this two week course on arches, vaults, and domes with this crazy french architect who is obsessed with vaults. I sleep in a vault, I eat in a vault, and I take classes in a vault. The man’s house is even a vault! There are about 20 students in the class, most of whom are Indian. There is 1 other American, 2 Canadians, and 2 Frenchmen. The class itself has been amazing. The work is challanging but fun, and a lot more engineering and math intensive than I expected, considering that almost everyone here is an architect. The first week was all theory, and we each designed our own free-standing vault. (I never knew so much went into designing a vault – It took me three full days!) This week we have been actually building arches and domes. Today we went to the site of one of the buildings that the architect has designed. It is a temple right on the beach. The previous temple had been destroyed in the Tsunami, so it was pretty amazing to go out there and see it.

The past two weeks have been very emotional for me. It has been a while since I have been to India, and I had forgotten about the level of poverty that exists here. Travelling to the worksite today, I saw how a majority of the 900 million people are living. The saddest thing that struck me was not the condition of the houses that they live in (which is terrible), but the fact that there is no trash collection. It’s difficult to concieve, as we take advantage of things like this, but just imagine if all of the streets around your house were covered in trash. Dried up lakebeds are used as trash dumps. It is hard to walk anywhere, as you are literaly walking on garbage. Another thing that we take advantage of is animal control, which they don’t have. And there are animals everywhere! There are cows, oxen, chickens, hens, goats, and stray dogs roaming around everywhere, even in delhi. Imagine seeing an ox crossing the road in the middle of a major city. The other day I was in a town outside of Auroville and I saw a goat that had rabies (I think). It was just standing there completely still, foam around the mouth, and its eyes were rolled back in its head. It was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. I sleep in a room with 4 other Indians, all who are in architecture school in Mumbai.

There are no showers – we just have a bucket and a faucet. There are also no toilets – just holes in the ground. And no one here uses toilet paper, which has been quite difficult for me! I actually got pretty sick last week. I have been drinking purified water, but I don’t think the purifier we have is good enough. Auroville has a central purifier that is about a 5 minute bike ride from where I am staying, so I go there now to fill up my bottles. To get around, we rented motorbikes. Ok my time is almost up, but I would just like to say that despite my rather negative email, I have been having an incredible time here. I will just close up with a funny story – I have already been electrically shocked twice since I have been here! Both times were when I was taking a shower at the place I was staying at in Delhi. When I approached Raja (my father’s cousin) he said, “don’t worry about it, we’ve gotten used to it!” Its definitely a different way of life here. Anyway, I hope everything is well, and I will email you when I get back to Delhi on Sunday!

Jayson

PS: My cell phone company texted me a free joke after I activated my cell phone:

A young child wrote a letter to Santa Clause that said, “Send me a brother.” Santa Clause wrote back, “Send me your mother.”

The Devil may be shivering in his boots, but at least now he can run Windows on his Macintosh computer.

Thats right, Hell has actually frozen over. This past week, Apple released a beta version of their software “Boot Camp” which will be included into their next version of Mac OS X. It allows Macs with an intel processor to install and run the Windows operating system.

But how could this be good for Apple? After all, they would argue that OS X is superior to Windows. Unfortunately, there are many people out there who can’t buy a Mac because the software they need is only available on Windows. Boot Camp is meant to provide a saftey net for those people who feel they can’t switch over because of that one program they need to run in Windows. The question is, will it help seduce current Windows users over to the Mac?

The response from the community has been extremly positive. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says, “Whether you want to run Mac or Windows programs, an Apple computer may be the only computer you’ll need.” And Analyst Shaw Wu of American Technology Research says, “We believe this is a big deal and potentially could be a significant game changer…We view this as an incremental negative for HP, DELL and other PC makers as Apple will be able to garner additional PC market share.” Apple’s stock even jumped 10 points on Boot Camp’s announcement.

This news is great for current Mac users. I personally enjoy computer games, and would love to run a copy of Window on my Mac. Also, there are many people who need Windows for work. For Apple users, this can only be a good thing.

But will it really be enough to tempt all of these PC users to switch? Initially, maybe so. But over time, those people who are coming from a Windows background will be compelled to consistently boot into Windows, where they feel comfortable. Its like giving a drug addict the option to buy coke while in rehab. Whats the point of learning a new operating system when you can just use what you already know?

It is important to note who the people that are getting excited about this: geeks. It’s easy for a technically minded person to switch between operating systems. But for that average person who gets fed up when they can’t find the Control Panel or Internet Explorer, don’t be suprised when you find them booting back into Windows for good.

As the technology and film industry gear up for the next-gen optical format war, it is important to step back and ask the question: Who will ultimately benifit from this?

Next month, Toshiba will be releasing its first HD-DVD player. Sony has also announced their first Blu-Ray player and expects to go to market before the end of the year. Initially, excitement from early adopters may drive sales. But in the long run, with the uncertainty of what movies will be available on which format, consumers will turn to an alternate source for their hollywood fix: the internet.

Within the next year a number of companies are poised to begin offering legal downloads of movies online. Starz has already opened an online movie store called Vongo, which offers unlimited movies for $9.99 a month. And with the expected release of a true video iPod, Apple might just have a thing or two up their sleeve. Although the quality of online video will initialy be nowhere near High Definition, as bandwidth increases over the next few years we will see legal and illegal downloads approaching and even surpassing that of the next-gen optical discs.

Unless Toshiba and Sony can agree to play nice, this next battle will prove a loss for both companies and mark the demise of a physical video format.

image courtesy of www.hometheaterfocus.com

Cartoon courtesy of The Daily (University of Washington)

I don’t think Shawn Fanning had any idea of the battle he was about to begin the day he released the first version of Napster

8 years later, the war is more violent than ever. On one side you have millions of Americans who have found a way to steal and get away with it without any social or moral repercussions. And on the other side you have the RIAA vigorously preaching the sins of copyright infringement to a body of people who just don’t care. Its like watching a substitute teacher hopelessly trying to calm down a classroom of unruly students.

But is it fair to put all of the blame on the people? For the first time, we have found a way to move and manipulate our music far more than we ever have been able to before. Not only is your music stored on your computer, but it can be put on an MP3 player, burned to a CD, and even streamed through a wireless connection to your stereo. No longer are you tied to listening to the preset order of tracks on a CD. You can now match and make your own mix of music however you would like. People steal music not only because it is free, but because it is versatile.

It took a while, but the record industry is beginning to understand. Companies like Apple and Real now sell music online per track. You can move this music to an MP3 player, burn it to a CD, and mix it they way you want it. But its not enough. For one thing, if you buy a song from iTunes, you can only put it on 5 computers. While this seems like a lot, when I buy my 6th computer 20 years down the road, I’m still going to want my music. Also, if you buy a song from iTunes, it will only work on and iPod. If you buy a song anywhere else, it won’t work on an iPod. Does this mean I’m going to have to buy iPods for the rest of my life just so that I can listen to my music?

As long as the internet exists, people will continue to steal music. But until the music companies can get it right, why shouldn’t they?

Along with poverty, hunger, and disease, philanthropists have found a new problem to throw their money at: the technological divide.

Enter the $100 laptop. Developed at MIT by Nicholas Negroponte, the laptop is aimed at the millions of children in third world countries who do not have access to the benefits of technology. Running a 500 Mhz processor with 1 GB of memory (no hard drive) and a version of the free Linux operating system, this computer isn’t going to run Doom 4. But of course, thats not its purpose. As Nicholas Negroponte put it, “If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.”

But how can these laptops work in a world with almost no modern infrastructure? The bright minds over at MIT have a few interesting ideas. First, the laptop will be hand powered. A crank wheel allows up to 40 minutes of power for every one minute of cranking. There is also the option to change the screen from color to black and white to help conserve energy. The laptop will also be Wi-Fi enabled. However, instead of having to be directly connected to a Wi-Fi base, the laptops will talk directly with each other, creating a mesh network. This means that in a rural village only one person actually needs to be connected to the internet. This laptop will relay the connection over to everyone else in range. Then these laptops will again relay the signal, creating a giant hotspot.

So when can you pick one of these up? “Never”, says Negroponte, on his website www.laptop.org. “The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives.”