India Business Trip

What do you write about your first trip to India that won’t have been said in a thousand other blogs, travel sites, books, films and TV series?

My abiding impression: it’s a complex, confusing, dense (air, scents, bodies, noise, traffic) wonderful place.

It would be lazy and simplistic to talk in terms of haves and have-nots, corporate affluence and street poverty. Yes, that is there on a stark surface level. But something our host for most of the week, ( the very interesting and also himself complex, in what I think is a typically modern Indian way?) Chetan, was keen to point out; was that the slums are not the end of the line but the beginning for some and to others an acceptable , not hopeless way of life.

Myself and one of the other guys from our agency (Richard) were out there to talk about partnering (‘off shore’ is so Financial Services, 5 years ago you know) – I was uncomfortable with the term ‘outsourcing’ not so much for the implications for our place as all businesses have to adapt in changing markets - but more because it implies a one way, imposing approach to collaboration. What we were there to discuss was, to my mind, genuine partnership - in that a lot, if not all the skills sets my team have in web site design, programming, animation etc were available in greater depth than we have in our office.

That doesn’t mean ‘right sizing’ within the UK team, it means a real chance to expand the throughput of work, cost effectively for us and with people who have the same approach to client service and professional results. With the chance to work with intelligent, urbane, educated skilled guys; to boot.

This cocooned middle class white man felt relieved to discover there was no place for the talk-a-bit-louder-about-what-we-expect-from-you post colonial nonsense that I guess may have prevailed up to the least few years (I would never have done that anyway, I love meeting people form different backgrounds and cultures but I’m sure that parochial view did exist in the spearheading UK brigade initially?).
Anything like that approach would have been a source of both irritation and amusement to the skilled professional in India already collaborating with Australia, Asia Pacific region and the USA. Another cliché but to my mind , increasingly and where they are placed on the world stage - ‘They don’t need us, we need them’.



Things that delighted me:

- The friendliness of the drivers we were provided with, with a real pride in showing us all the monuments and parks we went past.

- The hopitality of the guys in the various offices we visited – they shared their time and enthusiasm for their work with real pleasure

- The sheer joyous, encouraging, random craziness of a thousand vehicles within earshot; all constantly beeping their horns to ensure 6 and half widths of traffic fitted through 3 lanes of road. Aural lubricant that actually seems to work. And works even better if you accept your vehicle will always be forever scratched and multi-dented.

Things that perturbed me :

- Peeing in an office toilet about 3 inches below what I think was a rats nest in the ceiling space, complete with loud scratchings..

- looking to my left and right in the constant traffic jams and seeing spumes of Beetel nut (I think?) spit flobbed out of taxis, motor bikes and rickshaws.

- opening a packet of (what I thought) was after dinner (chocolate) mints and finding an assortment of nuts and seeds collectively called ‘after mint’.
Actually really nice and I’ve bene eating it at home snce ;-)

So .. India (okay, city centre Delhi and Mumbai) : loved it and would go back again tomorrow.