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I have the fortune of having friends with whom I can share my enthusiasm and wonders of my journey. My consistent reaction is Incredible India.

A journey of this type takes preparation, physical as well as good old homework. You need to be prepared for the long travel and the toll it takes on your body. Also, it really helps to do some reading. I subscribed to A Lonely Planet and found it to be honest and accurate. An appreciation for a different culture is good. Whether it was the traffic, incessant car horns, relentless hawkers, unidentifiable odors or what westerners perceive as poverty,unless you are prepared India and it’s differences can overwhelm you.

I fell in love with women in the breathtaking rainbow of color saris holding babies with a red dot on their tiny foreheads. Little children with big beautiful brown eyes searching you like you were a martian. The smell of cooking food and the spices that make it all taste so wonderful. It’s a miracle of India that I lost weight having Naan every day. A primarily vegetarian diet helps. I ate everything: fruits, raw vegetables, bread washed down with an occasional Kingfisher.

I found humor in the souvenir vendors who started off at US prices and as you continued to walk their commerce skills kicked into hyperdrive and you ended up at a few embarrassingly low Indian rupees. Unfortunately, I also saw visitors with poor reactions to a young boy merely trying scratch out a living. Then it became time to put the universe back in balance.

I can’t wait to return to it all, Incredible India.

In 1999, my family’s cab company was invited by then San Francisco Supervisor Gavin Newsom, to test a clean air taxi provided by Ford Motor Company. My father, a thirty-year veteran cab driver who also suffers from respiratory ailments, determined that after driving a typical ten-hour shift in a compressed natural gas vehicle he was more alert and did not feel the typical cab driver malaise. We decided that our company would participate in the first clean air taxi program in San Francisco. It was through this program that I was introduced to people at the Bay Area Air Quality Resource Board, San Francisco Airport, Ford Motor Company and The City and County of San Francisco, most notably, Rick Ruvalo. Rick is now doing clean air work in Thailand.

In 2004, I had the opportunity to work on World Resources Institute’s Eradicating Poverty Through Profits Conference in San Francisco, where I was introduced to C.K. Prahald, the author of the book, The Fortune At The Bottom of The Pyramid. I am now reading the book for the second time. This conference exposed me to a group of people committed to doing work on a global scale. The conference chairman was Bill Kramer, a dedicated individual with whom I enjoyed working with on the conference and share a friendship to this day.

The commitment of people like Rick and Bill made me realize there is good work to be done and all it takes is the desire. I thank Ode for providing a forum for like-minded people to share their stories and I am proud to be a part of this community.