An Inveterate Traveler’s Notes to Finding Gems-in-the-Rough

I’m an inveterate traveler, with my family whenever feasible but mostly for my work as an academic and entrepreneur in the world’s emerging markets. Not that I like sitting in pressurized air cabins 30,000 feet in the sky for a dozen odd hours on end, but a few days every couple of months, encountering the less-familiar, forces me to examine anew whatever I’m working on.

I’ve found that I now avoid the ‘famous’ parts of the cities to which I travel in favor of ‘mingling settings’ where I can rub shoulders with the local residents going about normal life. Of course, I still enjoy meeting accomplished people and giving rarefied seminars in think tanks and universities, but I do that anyway in Cambridge. 

So, what are examples of settings I increasingly frequent?

Museums are a favorite, and these are increasingly opening their doors to less traditional audiences, making them more attractive to me. The Beaux-arts setting of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, or the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai (now renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji museum), while utterly different from each other, are two of my favorites from encounters over several decades now. Museums remind me of society’s anchors, where things seem to stay the same even as societies’ change.

But good museums do more than anchor memories. My local museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, had a lovely exhibition on the Japanese contemporary artist, Murakami, last year, where he features his cheery-looking, modern reinterpretations of several centuries’ old Japanese classical works of art. That idea captures a lot for me. Even the familiar acquires a new interpretation amidst today’s change.

After museums, I love to find cafés that are local hangouts. Nothing against Starbucks, which I frequent myself in Boston, but the local entrepreneurs are the ones to find, they have the pulse of the street. In the typical setting I find interesting, you’ll see clusters of folks chatting intently about contemporary issues – what could be a better briefing on the locale! – some lingering characters working intently, and lots of traffic into and out of the café. These have been fixtures of most societies – from the Turkish coffee shops, to European outdoor settings, to India’s chaiwallahs (see Chai Point where my student and I have created just such local settings across India).

The third setting is rather new-fangled. Incubators and accelerators catering to would-be entrepreneurs. Why these? Because these offer the simplest – frankly, most efficient – ways to get a handle, not on new technologies per se (you can read about those in the journals and science mags), but on how youth are interpreting the possibilities of these technologies in their own settings. Axilor is an example in Bangalore; you could do a lot worse than spending an hour with the young and energized hotshots who gravitate there!

Lastly, the clichéd public square. Yes, it has tourists and such (including me, I suppose), but these remain places to observe carefully. Taksim Square in Istanbul with several local eateries, Tiananmen, especially super-early in the morning, in Beijing when there are more locals than tourists mixing with the security apparatus, Red Square on Sunday morning with the babushkas going to the chapels and churches, and so on.  

What do I get from these meanderings? Well, it’s hard to come up with accurate data and information in the developing world despite, or perhaps because of, the explosion of information in the modern era. So the more touch points to reality the better, for my role both as an academic and entrepreneur. And it’s an easy, enjoyable way to access what economists would call ‘under-priced information’, that is information that’s there for the observing, but to which too few pay attention. Gems in the rough.

This feeds directly into my work. As an example, in atmospheres of mistrust that permeate developing countries – can you trust the government not to arbitrarily change the rules? Can you trust the security forces to be unbiased enforcers of the law? Can you trust that the wheels of justice will not grind too slowly if at all? Can you trust that the data you see are accurate? – How do creative entrepreneurs build world-class enterprises, as they have in settings I’ve frequently written about? This led to my most recent book, Trust.

So, as my dad says, in Hindi, I have wings between my feet, in other words, I can’t sit still! तुम्हारे पैरों के नीचे पंख हैं. For good reason!