So its been over a week since I posted my last entry. Things have settled down a bit and I have gotten into the groove of my daily life here.
So last week Ayush took me to New Friend's Colony to a restaurant there to get some food. One thing India is known for is the street food. The only problem is that most of it is not safe for foreigners to eat for various reasons. It sits out all day, its prepared with dirty water, the street vendors don't have gloves or wash their hands, etc. Even most Indians won't eat the street food. It makes it very hard to resist when you're walking down the street and you smell delicious food cooking (and being sold very cheaply) but you cant have any. Suffice it to say, I was more than just a little excited for this little trip.
After work we get in his car and make our way over to New Friend's Colony. First we stood outside of the restaurant and had this thing called golgappe. It is a spherical crunchy (but hollow on the inside) piece of food. The consistency is like that of a tortilla shell but it tastes nothing like it. The vendor in front of the restaurant dipped it in a red sauce and a green sauce. My instructions were to take it all at once. It was delicious. We then went inside the restaurant. Ayush ordered two other types of chaat AKA street food (one with potatoes and one with some other type of vegetable). They each had a red sauce with a white sauce. The combination included a little bit of spice and a little bit of sweet.
We also had some sort of chickpea dish with paneer (Indian cheese) and bread of course. It was fun to spend time with Ayush and eat the Indian foods.
On Wednesday, another intern, Mrenali came back from her little vacation/break/whatever she was doing. So in total, there were 4 Indian interns and me.
Thursday and Friday were relatively uneventful. The first real assignment I got for work was kind of overwhelming. My mentor asked me to examine the concept of beneficial ownership and talk about how it applied to the Indian context. Apparently, little or no law had been made on it and it was up to me to do some research. Not only did he expect me to find the answers, he also wanted me to come up with the questions. So basically, he gave me the SEBI Regulations (the equivalent of the Security and Exchange Commission in the US), the Companies Act (basically the law of corporations here), and the FEMA manual (all the regulations regarding foreign exchange in India). My task was to look through these things and find inconsistencies and things that are not clear about the concept of beneficial ownership. The materials given to me were well over 3000 pages, so it took a lot of time even to skim it to come up with some questions.
By Friday, (two days later) I had come up with what I thought might be 5 relevant questions and had partially attempted to answer one of them. He took it for comment. In the mean time, I was given another assignment about gambling, which was fascinating. Basically, I had to do some research into Indian gaming laws and what the internal government's policy was on the subject. In doing so, I also learned a lot about the different legal ambiguities surrounding it. The gambling law here is really interesting and in a state of flux. There are interesting legal questions like whether the internet is a public place that I thought about (even though they had already written the memo on the law part it was still fun for me to think about the answers to these kinds of questions).
Another thing that is really great about my internship (that I don't think others are getting) is that Venkatesh will sometimes teach us classes on relevant Indian/US laws. He knows a lot about US law so that's always his basis of comparison, which is particularly great for me. This week he taught us classes on how an IPO is offered in India (on Thursday) and on Friday he taught us about the elements of a mergers and acquisitions deal and how its done here. I enjoyed getting the background and was especially appreciative that he was willing to take the time to teach us. The other interns think that the only reason we were given the class was because I was here. They even said they were grateful that they got the classes because other Indian firms do not teach them about Indian laws in this way. I hope more will continue so that by the end of my internship I will have a decent working knowledge of corporate law. (Also, I am grateful because the learning curve is steeper than I thought it would be. I wish I had taken a class in either corporations or securities regulation before coming).
On Friday, Krista decided she wanted to go shopping with a friend of hers at work, leaving me to find my own way home. I had decided by this point that taking a taxi by myself would be too expensive. I don't want to spend 300 rupees just to get home if I don't have to. Although Professor Krishnan told me not to, I decided to try and brave a rickshaw home.
It actually was not too bad! I am not sure why he told me not to (probably b/c he thought I wouldn't get a fair price or because it was hot or something like that). The first guy I found was willing to give me the meter (a rarity here) and I gladly took it and even tipped him when we got home. The guy actually did me a huge service by giving me the meter because now I knew what a fair price home on the rickshaw would be. It was great for my future ability to bargain a ride home every day.
The ride was also not too bad. It was hot, but that's India. I enjoyed the wind blowing in my face and definitely enjoyed paying less than half the price of a taxi cab. I resolved after this never to take a taxi home again. I will probably continue to take the taxis to work, though, because they are nice, always use the meter, are always reliable, and most importantly, they are air conditioned. Taking the cab will allow me to come into work clean and unstressed.
For the weekend, I just planned to go sightseeing in New Delhi and get to know the city a bit better. That's all for now.
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