A temple in South India built between 1003 and 1010 AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadisvara_Temple,_Thanjavur%5B/caption%5D

My wife and I traveled to India recently, a trip that I always look forward to. We spent time visiting friends and family, but we also had planned a trip to visit five Shive temples in the south referred to as “Pancha Boota Stalams“. They are manifestations of the five prime elements of nature: land, water, air, sky, and fire. In addition, we visited Manipal University in Karnataka. Though they are now Manipal Academy of Higher Education or MAHE, I prefer to refer to them this way for a couple of reasons. This is how we knew the institution when I was going to College in the 70’s. Secondly, MAHE reminds me something that sends chills up my spine 🙂

As I have mentioned before, we always sign on for the $10 a day International Pass from AT&T, which is very convenient because you are using your phone exactly like the way you do in the US. However, because our stay was a little long, we opted to get local SIM card (which is not trivial for foreigners, but because we are overseas citizens of India, we can do so somewhat easily) with the help of a relative. This got us off to a very smooth start in terms of communication.

The plan we opted to was for Rs 500 each, which allowed us each 1.4 GB of data every day for three months! Please note, it is Indian rupees 500, which is roughly $7. As someone told me, this is about the only cheap thing in India! I won’t dwell too much in this, but it was just a breeze. No hassles for turning on hotspot on my phone so I can connect my Mac and work. Except on the flights, no signal issues anywhere. One would think 1.4 GB is plenty. It turned out, it was not enough for me, trying to get some work done using VPN. So, I simply increased the daily limit to 4 GB with another 50 Rupees for 3 months which is about 70 cents. We used WhatsApp to call our family and friends in the US and I used Google Hangouts caller to make calls to those not on WhatsApp. Though international calls could be made using the telephone, we didn’t need to.

But, we made a LOT of local calls, not really for touching base with friends and family, because, literally EVERYONE in India is on WhatsApp and that is a preferred mode of communication. So, when did we need to make local calls? Uber drivers!!! We used Uber heavily for most local travels. You can use it to get a car or “auto” (Three wheelers called Autorickshaw). It was so convenient and simple, except, there were some techniques we needed to learn.

First off, if you already have Uber on your phone and it is connected to your US credit card, not all of them work in India. We always switch to Capital One credit card because there are no international transaction fees and it works everywhere and for use with Uber in India. But that is not what we use in the US and it was not configured for Uber, so after a couple of failures of our regular credit cards, we switched to Capital One in Uber. Secondly, you MUST make sure that your local phone number is associated with your account in Uber. Otherwise, the Uber drivers will be attempting to make calls (if they indeed can do that for international numbers) to a number that is no longer connected. And they always call, because, despite the fact that they have a map, they want to talk to you for two critical pieces of information.

This may be a India thing, but apparently, when Uber drivers accept rides, they are unaware of two key pieces of information – the destination and form of payment. This may be intentional. In a handful of cases, the drivers called to ask me for that information and they cancelled the trip when I naively told them the information! Either because they were not interested in a ride to where we wanted to go, but most likely because we were paying by a credit card. Most of them are interested in longer trips or trips to areas where they can pick up other rides easily and secondly they want cash. I later found out that Uber has an option for cash payment and used it for some of the shorter trips (since I never needed to do this in the US, I was not aware that this option existed!).

I continue to be amazed by Google Maps in India. Literally every nook and corner is mapped and the names of the streets etc are displayed in both English and the local language.

Our trip to Manipal University was very interesting. When I was a student, anyone who could not get into good schools in our state went to Manipal! It had that kind of a reputation 🙂 Now, it is a huge institution with primary focus on Medical School with several large & modern buildings. So many students from Malaysia, various African countries and Sri Lanka come to study there.

[caption id="attachment_2081" align="alignleft" width="300"] St Mary’s Islands