Doing Business in Real Time
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The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Hyderabad, Impressions of India
We landed at the Hyderabad airport around one o’clock Monday morning and headed to our hotel for a few hours of sleep before meeting the IT team we came here to work with. A car picked us up at 8:00am at the hotel and drove us to the development center of the global electronics and software company where we are doing a 30-Day Blitz.
This experience is giving me some appreciation of what it might be like for Indians who leave their country and come to a strange new place like the United States to work. If I find India different and overwhelming at times, I can imagine that Indians must find my country different and overwhelming at times too. Here are a few impressions I’ve had in these last several days.
Let’s start with the traffic; it’s jammed and chaotic to put it mildly. The other night our hosts arranged a dinner for us. At the end of the day we got into a van to go from the company’s development center in the outskirts of the city to an upscale restaurant on the waterfront of the lake in the middle of Hyderabad. This time of year is monsoon season here and it started raining heavily. As the rain poured down, our van merged into a mob of motor cycles, cars, trucks, buses and motor scooter rickshaws all headed downtown.
I’d been warned about the traffic, and it wasn’t going so fast that I felt like I was in danger (most of the time) but the traffic was bumper to bumper and moving steadily. Our van and the crowd of vehicles around us weaved back and forth between lanes, squeezing past each other with inches to spare. The air was filled with car, truck and motor bike horns beeping continually as the whole procession flowed like a river into town. As we got further into the city the road become narrower and pedestrians began to blend into the mix as they walked along the side of the road.
At one point our driver turned off the main road and took a short cut that had us winding through very poor neighborhoods. There were lots of people, narrow streets, crumbling pavement, and little open shops lining the curbs on either side.
After about an hour of this, we arrived at our destination. The restaurant where we ate was like a fancy restaurant in California. It was in a new building with air conditioning, a floor to ceiling picture window running the length of the wall that faced the lake, and it served very good and very spicy Indian food. It’s a cliché to say India is a land of stark contrasts, yet it is true.
During the day, while we are at the company’s development center, I am struck by the remarkable similarity of the work environment here and the environment at the company’s headquarters back in the States. There’s a similar blue jeans casual dress code in both places, people gather in conference rooms for meetings, and teams of men and women work together on projects.
I also notice something else. One day the women on our team will be wearing shirts and blue jeans, and the next day they’ll be wearing flowing Indian saris of embroidered fabrics in shades of red, green, blue and saffron. I can’t help but admire their style and their refusal to be pigeon-holed into the standard western style of dress.
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