It only took a few moments, sitting at my desk in the office to completely forget where exactly I was working. Call it a daydream, zoning out, whatever… but, for a moment, I had to remind myself where I was. Within the walls that surround the Orion building (one of the satellite campuses of HTS in Bangalore) is a small piece of the United States. Corporate posters, desks, cubicles, computers, corner offices, large diagrams, and whiteboards all seem too familiar to be seen halfway around the world in a, so-called, developing nation.
But truly, what makes all the difference in the world is the language. The background hum, a composition of English, technology buzzwords, and people reading from a bowl of Alphabet Soup, monitored subconsciously while focusing on the work in front of me plays an interesting trick on the mind –”this can’t be India, can it?” The feeling continues unnoticed until suddenly my focus changes to the lady who just answered the phone, speaking in Kannada, (or is it Bengali? Tamil? Hindi? Doesn’t matter… I’ll never know the difference) and suddenly my mind corrects itself.
Even the fear of a complete breakdown in communication during meetings is non-existent. Beyond any traditional language, the language of business and information technology transcends all languages, and is the ultimate common denominator. There is no such thing as the Hindi word for data architecture, no such thing as the Kannada word XML, no such thing as the Bengali phrase for process gap analysis –just one word (granted, being originally conceived in English is always a plus).
Where things do differ generally revolves around teamwork and communication within the workplace. The art of indirect communication, and, essentially what we call in the United States, water cooler talk have a very important place in the office, and is a direct result of community being embedded deep in Indian culture. Emails are usually to the point, but conversation in meetings start and end with personal conversation (and maybe some business in the middle). It makes the transition into a new workplace (not to mention, a new country) much easier when they are very interested in talking to you, and I am eager to learn from them. The first meeting I had with my manager was about 5 minutes of a project overview, followed by about a half hour conversation about my trip here, classes at home, his thoughts on the best pubs and eateries, and our experiences in the new Bengaluru International Airport.
It’s comfortable here. At the end of the day I’ll pack up, badge out, pass through security, open the door and step back into Bangalore, India.
There’s a bit of anticipation budding inside me right now. Each morning, the walk to catch our shuttle begins with fewer sidewalks and space to walk apart from oncoming traffic, and the return home: even less. Sidewalks around the city are being torn and dug up, exposing an intricate network of drainage ditches leading into the various lakes and streams around the city. It seems the city is rapidly preparing for the upcoming monsoon season by clearing out the trash that accumulates during the year, and reinforcing the some of the walls, as well as building new drains. If the rains from the monsoon are even half as intense as these people working to prepare, we’re really in for an experience. What can I say? I love storms…
Thankfully, Bangalore sits safely atop the Mysore Plateau, at a comfortable 920m above sea level, so we really shouldn’t experience the same flooding currently disrupting life and business in Mumbai. In some places the water has risen waist deep, disrupting all transportation except for those trusty rickshaws and their 2-stroke diesel engines weed-whacker engines.
Situations like this have prompted the US Consulate in Mumbai to issue a travel warning to all US citizens planning to travel to Mumbai. While the statement had good intentions, it was interestingly enough misinterpreted by the mayor of Mumbai as criticism against the safety of the cities drainage systems (basically, they just open up all the manholes in the city and let the water rush into them). The statement in question was the Consulate’s semi-legitimate/semi-laughable concern (I’ll link that article too because of Canada’s apparent appreciation of alliteration) about travelers falling into an open manhole. One reporter’s response: “Americans can put up with a little bit of rain, if they can put up with 8 years of George W. Bush. This city is safe.” The US Consulate issued a response and apology, albeit with a bit less humor. They also revised their original warning to advise US citizens traveling in India to “apply common sense” to this situation. Thanks!
I’ve started to notice some knee-deep waterlines on some of the buildings around the city, not as noticeable in Koramangala (where we are staying), but more noticeable around the MG, Brigade, and Infantry Road areas. My guess is that most of them are left from 2005, when the rains set all-time records. But with meteorologists questioning why the monsoon season has arrived earlier and stronger than years before, I can only think we might be in for something out of the ordinary.
Consider the fact that the largest city I’ve ever lived in is State College, Pennsylvania (at a mere 44,000 people). The transition from life in a small, rural college town to an emerging urban supercity that is experiencing growth so fast it threatens to tear the city apart has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
Perhaps one of the most exciting things about moving into Bangalore is that right at this moment, while I sit quietly facing my laptop, there are 6.2 million other people in this city doing something.
Interesting to note, 6.2 million would be written as 62 lakh in India. A lakh is the equivalent of one-hundred thousand and is written 1,00,000 (one comma zero zero comma zero zero zero). So the urban population of Bangalore is written 62,00,000 (literally, 62 hundred thousand). There is also the crore which is 100 lakh, or 1,00,00,000 (10-million). For example, crore is used in the Indian title of the popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? game show: Kaun Banega Crorepati. It literally means “Who will be a ten-millionaire?”
It’s a drastic understatement to say 6.2 million people are just doing “something” right now. But when you start the think of all the somethings, all the things people can be doing, the simplicity of the statement unravels right into the chaotic nature of this city. These people are not hiding, they’re out and about. They’re walking, driving, riding bikes, cramming into a bus, dodging traffic, running to catch a shuttle, shopping, operating a business, going to work, going to school, talking, laughing, yelling, cooking, eating, cleaning, building a new building, cutting grass, sweeping a sidewalk, arranging piles of fresh mangoes into a pyramid, waiting for a cow to move from the middle of the road, chasing chickens, and sometimes just sitting down to relax. I really wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that was just what I saw on the way to work this morning. There’s really no other way to describe it, it makes New York City seem orderly on a level that is just boring.
The majority of the chaos in the city comes from traffic and “driving.” The main highways in the city are no wider than a typical US three-lane highway. However, somehow in India it’s possible to cram cars, bikes, motorcycles, rickshaws, and buses into 7 or 8 “lanes.” I feel I can use the word ‘lanes’ because, actually, there are dashed lines painted on the road. But, what these lines actually mean to drivers is beyond my comprehension. One of my favorites parts of driving is when an inbound lane is congested, the outbound lane (usually less congested) and the surrounding sidewalks instantly become relief for drivers in the inbound lane. There is no second thought, or even a slight hesitation to drive right into oncoming traffic.
Traffic intersections are a real visual and audible treat. I think the best way to visualize this is to imagine an hourglass filled with sand. Flip is over (green light!) and watch thousand of little pieces of colored sand (cars, bikes, motorcycles, rickshaws, and buses) filter in as close as they can to the bottleneck, just waiting to make it out the other side. Add in the fact that the grains of sand in the back really think they can make it all the way to the front by passing through the other grains of sand and then, give them all ridiculous horns, and I think you can start to understand how traffic works here.
If you’re still trying to imagine this in your head, continue with the hourglass and sand analogy. Remember too, that along with the people and machines on the road, there are people, plots, shops, buildings, palm trees, and maybe a couple blades of grass that occupy the remaining space in the city. So imagine that hourglass of traffic buried deep in a sandbox and understand that the surrounding sand in this analogy is at just about the same density of people and places within the city.
All of this culminates into a feeling I’ve never quite felt before. Imagine coming home from work everyday tired and mentally exhausted. Not because of a long day at the office (what a terrible excuse), but because of the sheer amount of processing and interpretation the brain must do to prepare a chemical and electromagnetic representation of everything happening around you while you travel home from work. Sight and sound are truly overwhelming; but, disappointingly enough, I’m sure with time it will become second-nature.
So I’m watching the clock tick away the last couple minutes of this evening -my last full day in the United States until school starts again in the Fall. Depending on how you read that, it might seem like I’m in a somber mood. No way. But, I’m still trying to understand why it hasn’t quite hit me that I’ll be living and working in India for the summer, I’m thinking it’s the rapid sequence of events taking place before this day.
I have most of my things packed, except for a few things I’ll need in the morning. I have 10 weeks worth of stuff packed into a suitcase and my backpack. It’s funny to think that I needed a whole vehicle to move my stuff into my apartment last summer for my internship in Richmond, Virginia.
So here’s how the next few days look for me. I’m reading over the itinerary again, and the one line from the intro to 24 keeps popping into my head, “My name is Jack Bauer, and this is the longest day of my life.” Long day indeed.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll meet Steve to catch the 9:45am AMTRAK to Philadelphia. It looks like the trip will take about 5 hours, arriving in Philly around 2:50pm. I was a little hesitant about taking the train, but with gas prices the way they are, a $36.90 ticket to Philly was the obvious choice. We’ll need to find the right SEPTA line once we get into the 30th Street Station to go to the airport, but it should be easy.
We should arrive at the airport with plenty of time to get through check-in and security and then meet up with Joel and Larissa (the other interns) before our flight.
Our plane from Philly to Frankfurt leaves at 6:00pm EST, and arrives at 8:05am local time in Germany (which I think is around 3:00am EST). We’ll have a short layover in Frankfurt, until we’re off again at 11:05am. Our second flight arrives in the brand new Bangalore International Airport at 12:05am (Saturday) local time (which is about 2:30pm Friday EST). Wow… what a mess.
We’re meeting Sandesh, one of the HR people from Honeywell at the airport in Bangalore to help us find our apartment and check-in. We’re probably all going to look like zombies after being confined to a seat in an airplane for an entire day. That’ll be an interesting first impression.
Just looking over all the travel details is making me dizzy. I won’t stop moving from Thursday morning until Friday afternoon EST for a grand total of 8,610 miles.
It’s quite remarkable how fast everything for this summer internship came together -but, combined with a busy Spring semester, projects, and finals, I didn’t really expect anything else.
The whole process began during the Doing Business Across Cultures panel session that a few of my friends and I were planning. We had been approaching different companies about sending associates to talk to our students about their experiences working in a global business environment. Without getting into any other details, one of the companies we approached was Honeywell International. Throughout my correspondence with several contacts within Honeywell, I learned of a potential international internship in the making. While the details we unclear, the potential was enough to get me excited. One of the goals of Doing Business Across Cultures, besides raising awareness, was to plant a seed in some of the companies that hire our students, to promote international programs, and maybe… just maybe, provide and international internship. To hear that this opportunity was right around the corner… amazing.
The actual process for this internship didn’t begin until one week before Spring Break. An email went out to all IST students informing us of this opportunity and a resume submission opened on our job posting service. I’m pretty sure it was at that moment (the moment I submitted my resume) that I took the deepest breath I could, and held it. I continued to hold that breath for about a month, throughout the whole interview process.
The interview process was fairly typical with the exception of the final round of interviews. The final interviews would be with our potential managers (from India), for the project they had created for the intern. In other words, I would be interviewing over the phone for a project with no specific details, other than the [always] ambiguous job description of “business analyst.” Oh, and it was at 7:00am too.
The early mornings are never too kind to me, especially during allergy season. I woke up about an hour before my interview to clear my allergy symptoms and have a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (I remember that detail only because it was that morning I became a born-again believer in the taste you can see). Anyway, I’ve had phone interviews before, but this was really quite an experience. I joined the bridge at about 5 minutes before 7:00am (I guess that would be about the equivalent of arriving at an interview 15 minutes early) and promptly at 7:00am I was on the phone with Ram and Vinay from Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab. The interview lasted about an hour and ten minutes and I was quickly back to bed, not necessarily because of the time, but because of the amount of open-ended, situational questions during the interview -there was definitely some intense analyzing required to answer some of those questions.
At this point, all I could do is wait while holding that deep breath I mentioned a couple paragraphs before. The situation became even more nerve-racking when the time line for offers kept being changed.
After all the waiting was over, I stood in my apartment bedroom holding an offer letter from Honeywell for an internship in Bangalore, India. I was told I would be receiving this offer letter by Lori (Campus Specialist from Honeywell who had been our point throughout the entire process) on a cell phone call that came to me in the middle of class. Having recognized the numbers, I immediately left the room and took the call outside the classroom. As soon as I heard the good news, I pretty much stopped listening to the phone as my mind was going crazy. I must have looked crazy too because when I came back into the classroom and sat down, my group members told me to calm down and asked if everything was okay.
Exhale.
This summer, I will have the incredible opportunity to travel to Bangalore, India to complete an internship with Honeywell International. More specifically, I will be working as a Business Analyst at the Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab within IT Services and Solutions and the SAP Center of Excellence. It’s going to be a very aggressive 10-week schedule: combining work, life, travel, and the experience of being immersed in one of the fastest growing cities in the world.
I’ve started this blog to share my stories and experiences with family, friends, colleagues, peers, professors, and really anyone interested gaining one more perspective into life and business as an expatriate in India.
