Google Goa - Part 2: The bamboo store

Having figured out where our bamboo and the other raw material will come from, it was time to find tools. We headed towards Krishna Nagar as suggested by the bamboo shop carpenter, a thin old man whose skin had tuned black and rubbery from years under the sun. There we made our first purchase - a hammer, a cross cut saw, a tape measure, and 250 grams of nails. There was a hack saw there too but it just seemed a little too small and unprofessional for our grand plans.

Back at the office, after an hour of making measurements and then putting Pythagoras theorem to good use, we finally had the lengths for the bamboo pieces that we needed. All lengths were rounded up to the nearest foot, mainly to reduce the vast diversity of lengths that was needed. The quantity of each was also given a 20% padding for the *rare* occasion when we messed up.

The list in hand, I returned to the bamboo store the following morning. This time I was able to negotiate the price of the poles down from 75 to 50 Rupees, which I am sure was still a lot higher than the what the regulars and locals are charged. I may have tried to negotiate lower but I had run out of shops that I could walk out; plus the fear of doing the arithmetic 45 times 17 got the better or me. Over the next hour or so the bamboo poles were chopped into various quantities of 4, 7, 12 and 15 feet pieces. Ten thatching sheets of 4x6 and rope were added to the mix. The goods were ready to be shipped to the office.

An auto rickshaw had been converted to a truck by adding an open trunk to it. The auto driver wanted 300 Rupees for transporting things 6 kilometers away for a load that was lighter than light. I offered 200 and he started showing me a chalaan (traffic ticket) for 200 Rupees. I told him I'll give him 200 and I'll take care of any traffic tickets if a cop stopped him. After living through years of Alert Level Orange and other Republican fear tactics, I can pretty easily tell when someone is using fear to pull a fast one on me.

It was time to settle my bills with the old man who had for the past hour and a half toiled in the sun, rummaged through the pile of bamboos to find the straightest, greenest bamboo poles and then cut them to pieces of just the right lengths. As I gave him 300 Rupees instead of the 100 I had promised him, a look of disbelief and then a thankful smile appeared from under the layers of dust. Made me feel really sad though. Here I was spending 2000 Rupees a person for decorating a cube, the bamboo shop owner just sat around and made a small fortune, the auto rickshaw guy would make a decent profit for less than a 20 minute drive, and all this old man got for his hard work in the sun was a paltry sum.

The departure of the auto rickshaw from the bamboo store came just in time to save me from my growing guilt. We followed behind the auto in the car, partly because the auto driver was not sure where our office was. Addresses don't mean much here in Hyderabad; everything works by landmarks, and the auto driver was not sure of the landmarks we had told him. Fifteen minutes later, we were at the Google office. He dumped all the bamboo on the ground floor and left. There was of course no traffic tickets on the way.