Memo from the "Fake" India

Note: Errr, I wrote this almost a week ago when I was in Goa. I had horrible wifi issues the rest of my time in India and could never post it, so I'm posting it now. From Chile if you read the above post...better late than never right?

I’m writing this from one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed. It’s a villa at the Taj Exotica in Goa—a sleepy little beach community south of Mumbai. The weather is perfect. We have our own pool on our terrace overlooking the beach. I’m watching the sunset and sipping a cocktail next to my long-suffering husband as leggy white birds hop around on the lawn and bearded black crows fly from palm tree-to-palm tree, seemingly just bitching to one another. (Maybe it’s about the wifi, because that seems to be the only thing that sucks here.)

And yet, rather than blogging about how lucky I am for this two-day respite, I’m thinking about how lucky I am that I don’t think this is India.

I’ve noticed a huge disparity in the impressions of people who vacation in India and those who do business in India. And a further disparity in people who are wealthy and do business in India and those who are middle class and do business in India. Had I come here and spent a week at this resort—or thousands like it—had Ayurvedic massages and laid on the beach being wait on by a smiling Indian staff, I’d no doubt come home and gushed, “Oh, I LOVED India.” Similarly, if I’d flown first class, stayed at the nicest hotels and asked all of my meetings to come to me, I’d say something like, “India is fascinating! Why aren’t more people doing business there?”

As it is—flying more than 20 hours each way in a middle seat in coach, living in five star hotels that barely live up to that billing, and spending more of my three weeks in traffic than in meetings—I can’t sum up my personal experience in India in one verb or adjective.

It is hard to do business here. I can easily see how urban Indian life could grind anyone but the wealthy down over time. Despite the near ubiquity of English-speakers and the similarity in terms of a democratic government, India would be a substantially harder place for me to move to than China or even Rwanda.

But that only represents more opportunity for local entrepreneurs. India isn’t a gold rush right now. A lot of money is pulling out and even a lot of local entrepreneurs and investors are wondering if consumer Web and local IT services will ever take off here. People are simply sick of waiting for this huge 1.2 billion person market to wake up and start consuming and a lot of them are leaving. Several local entrepreneurs have decided to  build companies aimed at Western markets instead.

And guess what? That’s exactly the time anyone with a clue should be doing early-stage investing in Indian companies aimed at the domestic market. It is waking up. It’s not developing the way the US did or China is, but it is developing and it’s nascent enough that only the locals get it.  I’ve spent three weeks in this country witnessing its sometimes horrific fits-and-starts of modernity (let’s just say I’m more familiar with the smell of human feces than I’d like to be) and meeting more than 100 impressive and not-so-impressive Indian entrepreneurs. I have no doubt that the next generation of multi-billion Indian businesses are probably starting up right about now, and someone with a strong stomach (ahem, literally) will win big.