Bulls, Meals and Microfinance: Welcome to Lubby in ‘Luru

The bulls have become endearing to me by now.

I have a favorite one too. He sits right on the main road outside my office on Sarjapur Road in Koramangala. It’s gotten to the point where I worry when I don’t see him sitting in his place each morning as I swerve by in my auto-rickshaw. I feel happy and assured now when I see his owner hand-feeding him his breakfast, and I just cannot help but smile when I see the confused and flustered expression on his face as he tries to fling away the yellow and red tassels that hang off his purple-painted horns so they don’t land straight into his eyes.

Luckily, for him it’s been almost a month since Pongal, the 3-day South Indian festival in mid-January celebrating the winter harvest for which he received his colorful but impractical adornments, and the tassels are starting to fall off. Granted, he won’t look as cute or fashionable without them, but for his sake he might be a bit more skillful in his job as a cart puller with an unobstructed line of vision once that happens. However, it seems that prowess in navigation is a highly undervalued quality when it comes to bulls in India and somehow I don’t think that anyone will notice much. No one hires a bullock cart for their efficiency or aptitude. That's one thing that I have learned.

Bullock carts and their adornments are subjects like many others that I painfully had but a cursory knowledge of before coming to India four months ago. Who knew that a delicious 3-course Andhra Meals lunch could be purchased for Rs. 29 (about 60 cents) or that there is more to Bangalore than Infosys and call centers? Blame it on the stereotypes (read: my mom), but I thought that South India was just about eating idlis and dosas, going to temples, wearing heavy silk saris, doing Bharatnatyam, licking the sambar down your arm, and being a tech geek. But, alas, it seems that there is much more…

As you all know, I came here to work in the microfinance industry, the budding but trendy-as-can-be arm of international development with seemingly the eye of every investor, philanthropist, and profit-driven but socially-conscious business person in the world. Even Jon Stewart got in on the action when he invited Professor Mohammed Yunus, the head of the Grameen Bank and the winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microfinance, on the Daily Show. (For the record, just in case you were wondering, I didn’t just leap on the bandwagon after Yunus won the Nobel. I was here for a full three weeks before that happened. I mean, I can’t help it if I can predict the trends.)

Here in Bengaluru, as it is now called, I work for Ujjivan Financial Services (http://www.ujjivan.com/), an urban microfinance start-up, as a Product Manager. Btw, do you all get the name of my blog, now? ‘Lubby’ for my childhood nickname (which unfortunately lives on to this day thanks to Rajni) and ‘Luru for my new home. The truth is that the title for this blog was originally supposed to be ‘Lubby in ‘Lore’, but you know India, the name of the city changed before I got around to writing my first entry. You just cannot make up that kind of craziness. It’s just too good.

I came out here to work for Ujjivan because I wanted the experience of being on-the-ground, seeing microfinance in action, learning and developing my career, and exploring India. In the past four months, I am pretty happy to say that I have accomplished all of that with the hopes of much more over the course of this year. I’ll talk about my work more in later entries, but all I will say now is that working out here thus far has been exciting, interesting, cutting-edge, and exactly what I wanted from this experience. A side bonus was that upon moving here, I also became a star of “MTV’s Real World Bangalore”. True, the cameras haven’t shown up to the house yet, but everything else is in place for our own reality show. We are three Indian-American girls who live, breathe, socialize, work and bitch about each other all under the same roof. I wish that I could say that it’s as damn-cool as it sounds (note the sarcasm).

In any case, welcome to my small piece of the web. Stay tuned for updates on latest and greatest in urban microfinance, D-R-A-M-A in the low-income housing sector, hot Bangalore parties, adventurous weekend getaways, Veronica Mars commentary, my growing tea addiction, goats, bulls and the occasional monkey.

Reading: Blink and Last Week’s Economist
Listening to: Dixie Chicks – Bitter End