Live from Bombay

Arriving at Mumbai yesterday at midnight, I had more than 6 hours to kill before boarding my domestic flight to Bangalore, where my friend Poornima's wedding will be. I tried sleeping in the lobby, but was disrupted three times by the airport staff. Tired of being taken for a hobo, and feeling none too sleepy since my internal clock thought it was 6:30 PM (not 4:00 AM), I abandoned the nap and opened my laptop.

Using a computer without internet connection is sadly limited. I started out by playing songs in iTunes, which amused me little. My desktop also shows a continuous slide show of photos from the Flickr and Sartorialist blogs. (You can add this photostream feature as part of Google Desktop). Still bored, I thought to read web pages stored in my cache.

Each time you visit a website, your computer stores an impression of that page as what is called a cache. These impressions aren’t of what the web address would take you to in real time; instead you see a less-fancy version of what your screen had shown in the past. A cache doesn’t show graphics or pictures; I don’t actually know why, but I think my roommate Arnab might, since his research and internship are about data storage.

I accessed cached pages using Google Desktop; this tool lets you search your computer the way Google.com lets you search the internet. Old e-mails, Word documents, and cached pages all are there (at least until you manually clear your cache). This tool let me access Poornima’s phone number and address, as she had emailed the info to me but I left the notebook it was written in at my friend apartment in New York. It also let me read web pages from the New York Times and the Freakonomics blog; pages that I had previously skimmed and now read all the way through in my bored state. Because I wasn’t online, though, clicking on notable links that the writers had added couldn’t take me to new pages that I was interested in.

As a last note: I eventually thought to check the wireless connection to see if I could pick up any signals from the airport. I was thrilled to find I could! (Although I shouldn’t have been suprised; conversations with Indian friends the last two years have told me that India is absolutely a wired country.) There were two providers; Airtel and Tata. The Airtel welcome page said it provided wireless internet for free, but you had to receive a login name and password by phone. When I entered my American mobile number, I never got a message. Perhaps you must have an Indian number. The second provider, Tata, charges for wireless access and would have let me buy a day for 52 rupees. I tried to make order, entering my phone number and address as required, but again, my American number wasn’t recognized as valid.

In economics (and economic history at LSE), we frequently discuss the consequences of transportation and communication barriers—especially in the context of those barriers falling. For example, when roads and train tracks were built across Europe, countries were able to specialize in the goods that they were best at, and import most everything else. Thomas Friedman and company currently observe how fast communication barriers are falling. Part of my job at Google is to chat with AdWords users who have problems or questions, and when I log in to the chat program, I see a long queue of chats completed overnight by people with Indian names. (We have a twin office in Hyderabad). Country-wide cell service let me call my parents in Seattle from an airplane grounded in New Jersey to let them know that had I made it on board, never worrying about which area code I was in. Still, communication costs are not so fluid that I could connect to the Internet freely using my American cell phone and chat with my (awake) friends back at home. Or, um, review the slides of Google training sessions that I will miss while on vacation.

(Addendum: as the airport lobby filled after 5:00 AM, I looked around and saw more men with laptops surfing the net than I saw women in saris. I did not, however, see women in saris surfing the net.)