First I'd Like to Thank All My Loyal Fans

I arrived in Ahmedabad on Wednesday morning in a horrible mood. By a stupid twist of fate, I had to miss my flight that morning and had wasted a 4am wakeup just to find myself waiting in the Jet Airways lounge in Delhi Airport for three hours for the next flight.

It was already hot in Ahmedabad when I arrived (cant imagine summer, if this is what Feb feels like). Just the drive from the airport made me pissed to be wearing a suit in this climate that clearly calls for loose fitting white clothing.

Ahmedabad is the biggest city in Gujarat, but has been culturally and economically far more insulated from change than the metros of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Bangalore. That is until recently, when the thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of Gujaratis who live abroad (i.e. all the Indians in MoCo, MD) but think of this city as home, have started buying property and pumping money into projects here. In the past few years, Ahmedabad has been on an outright sprint of growth and modernization. The economy is booming and the population is multiplying as people move into this city from the rural outskirts.

Driving North along one of the new outer ring roads in the western part of the city, one looks out to the right and sees apartment buildings, mega-malls and other odes to westernization sprouting up everywhere. On the left, one see some of these projects as well, but they are still few and far between. Mostly this is still agricultural land, complete with thatch villages, roaming shepherds and lots of sun-baked land waiting for monsoon water.

In this setting, on Ahmedabad's outer ring road, I pulled up to my first meeting with a colleague from Delhi. We went upstairs in a large, mostly vacant strip mall type edifice. The building was a “very Indian” quirky combo of marble, glass, and dustiness. Down a hallway lead us to the office of a broker that I had contacted to help us with some research.

Fast forward and hour and a half to the point of this post: As the meeting was finishing, a young guy, Dushyant, comes into the offices and introduces himself.

“Are you the Noah Waxman with the Blog?”

“Huh?”

“Weren’t you in Kashmir?”

“What?”

“We are big fans of your blog. Very good blog. He is my father, we are fans.”

Dushyant, are you out there? Thanks for the compliments. I cant tell you how fun it is for me to realize that people here in India are reading this. The world is such a small place that we would randomly meet up. I still don’t understand how you found this blog since it is not really searchable on google (on purpose). Awesome.