Maximum City
One of the 2 million publications students at Virginia Commonwealth University can check out from the library is Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, by Indian author, Suketu Mehta. It is considered one of the essential non-fiction texts penned on modern India. The city and country described in the book is one of the contradictions created by the mélange of ancient cultural traditions and the modern influence of Western culture and money. I found this India in Mumbai, Pune and now Bangalore.
Mumbai is a city of 11 million people and from the decent in the air it resembles a large city in Arizona, as the blue tarps atop the makeshift homes remind one of the pools found at homes in the west. Only the tarps in Mumbai greatly outnumber the pools in Arizona.
Traveling the streets from my hotel to the USEFI offices, the American School of Bombay, and Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, I had the feeling that I was in a European town, but more French than British. But the energy and pace are not European, but distinctly Indian. The irony of the infrastructure is that when you travel the highways of Mumbai you get along faster without distinct lanes than you would if everyone waited in line. An ambitious cabbie has no problem treating the highway like a slalom ski course, weaving from side to side in an effort to latch on to the momentum of a train of cars with space in front of them.
Space. To say it is at a premium is to say that New York is a village. Vidyanlankar Institute of Technology owns an impressive 60 acres of land right in the middle of Mumbai. They have eight learning centers throughout the city, equipped with the first Macs I have seen in the country. This might make them the single largest landowners in Mumbai. There I visited with their senior staff and spoke before a group of 100 students interested in the programs at VCU. They were very impressed with the amount of public/private investment in the university and came to understand how the $50 million raised for a scholarship endowment in the School of Engineering could benefit them as they considered offers from competing universities. Or, how a $355 million successful fundraising campaign could create infrastructure improvements to a university, which passes along that generosity to its students with new/improved resources like a stock market housed in the School of Business, or the 50 research labs housed in the new engineering building.
Speaking of investment, Pune is one of the Indian cities experiencing shock from an infusion of FDI and outsourcing from Western nations. The site of cranes and bulldozers in Pune will last longer than those found at Springfield Interchange near DC or the Big Dig in Boston. It is not uncommon to see a man riding an elephant down the street glancing at his reflection in the window of an all glass building of a transnational company.
In Pune we met for three hours with students looking for information about studying abroad. Here, I met several young women looking to carry on the tradition of Indian filmmakers. They were interested in our School of Arts with a concentration in filmmaking and CA. These women, knowing the international reputation of the School of Arts wanted to increase their chances of gaining recognition with a degree from a top-ranked program and were undeterred by the competitiveness of entry into the program.
This characteristic is an outstanding trait of many of the students I am meeting. They are ambitious and polite almost to a fault. They are beginning to understand that it is okay to promote their talents in their Statement of Purpose, completed with an application. Their hunger for learning and success is refreshing and it is a reason that many of our 125+ Indian students are successfully earning scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships at Virginia Commonwealth University.
I have landed in Bangalore and I am going to meet one of our alumni who is in software development. Within 2 miles of the airport, on our way to the hotel, I saw a Dominos and a TGIF Fridays. There is serious money in the city and my hotel is located on Richmond Road.
In Bangalore we will visit the International School of Bangalore, RV College of Engineering, PES Institute of Technology, Yashna Trust College the MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology. The fair will be on Monday night from 5-9pm at the Taj Residency in Bangalore.
Last note. In Mumbai a drunk driver struck an elephant at 1am in the morning on a busy road. It was the second time it had been hit as three years ago it was slammed into by a bus. This time it was not able to recover and it died. The driver of the truck and the owner of the elephant have both been arrested for their irresponsible behavior. The partner of the dead elephant spent the next ten hours mourning. He placed himself in the middle of the highway his enormous body blocking the road for an entire day. Eventually he picked himself up and walked away.