India in the 21st Century

One of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of India can be finding most anything. This is compounded by a number of factors:

1. Its fairly rare for streets to be signed
2. Its fairly rare for buildings to be signed with an address (especially in older sections)
3. Addresses do not follow a logic we are familiar with in the newer sections that occasionally to have some signage. So an address may be D-249 Banipark, but Banipark is the neighborhood not a street and D-249 is generally next to D-248, but the other side of the street may be D-115
4. Indian's directions tend to be very general like 'go down the street more' but you have no way of determining if it is 100 yards, 6 blocks or 3 miles.
5. You can ask where something is and be within 100 feet of the location and they will never have heard of such a business
6. Indians have a national trait of having to know everything. So in a situation where they don't  know its extremely rare that they admit that, instead there is a 95% probability what they tell you is pure fiction. I have developed the 0.5 second test. After you ask direction, if there is more than 0.5 second delay before they answer 9 times out of 10 it will be fiction.

For this trip I brought my laptop and PDA/GPS so I could get work down while here, but it has been incredibly handy in getting around, buying tickets, researching places to stay etc.


When I arrived I picked up a Tata Photon (a USB modem for the cell based internet) (about $20 for the modem and 5GB of download) for situations where the hotel didnt have wireless. So on the train from Delhi to Alwar, cockroaches were crawling all over the walls, seats and floor, passing through rural areas where most live on about $1.00 and getting internet speeds about the same as my dedicated DSL line in the US that costs 10 times as much.


So to find things I go to http://maps.google.co.in/ which has the best street map and points of interest locations, then go to Google Earth and go to the same location (Google Earth has a somewhat more limited level of detail) Get the lat - long for the location. Enter the lat - long info into the GPS and head off. If its very complex I can trace a route in Google Earth and export the route as a KML file and bring that into the GPS for turn by turn direction.


The only problem with this system is that 25% of the Google Maps locations are not on the locations where the particular thing actually exists, so you can walk to the location and find its in a different part of town. But those times are definitely outweighed but getting right to your destination and not having to haggle with rickshaw wallahs.

I also picked up a local SIM card when I arrived. Cell service here is much better than in the US, with a saturation rate that would be the envy of US cell companies. Everyone has at least one cell phone. Even kids of say 12 years, street laborers, everyone has one. When you move down the street nearly everyone is talking on their phone. The method here is a bit different though. Because it is so intensely noisy, they speak into the phone directly in front of their mouth and when they finish speaking then they put it to their ear to hear response.