The danger of a single story - Chimamanda Adichie

Brilliant thought about how we might perceive the worlds beyond our own.

Kuala Lumpur and my Indianization

Last weekend was a long one due to the Muslim Eid al-Fitr festival, which is celebrated by many here in India at the end of Ramadan. For the three days, some of the other international TCS trainees and me spontaneously decided to do a trip to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Jiipie, my second Asian country ! And what an amazing trip. I am still not sure if I loved this city because of its actual greatness or because it was such a pleasant change to Chennai.

In front of Petronas Towers

Before I’ll elaborate a bit on the second part of the statement, I’ll quickly share my perception and experience in Malaysia. So on Friday morning 2am, a Spanish couple, a Mexican guey, a Brasilian gaucho, a French Monsieur and a Swiss Meitschi started their trip to Kuala Lumpur. We went to visit some mosques, the Petronas towers, some markets, Chinatown, some hindu temple and a historical city 2 hours away called Malaka. It was n amazing experience because KL is a very clean, organised, well-structured, well developed and extraordinary cosmopolitain city. Actually it felt as if we hardly got to know any real “malaysian” culture. Because Malaysia is a Muslim country, unfortunately many local sights and restaurants were closed due to Eid festival. I don’t know if the experience had been different at another point of time. Oh ya, by the way, it is also a shopping paradise. J A bit expensive, compared to India, but great and easy shopping places. The group of people was great, we had great fun and surely made the best of this weekend!

Traditional malaysian attire

Beautifully clean promenade in Malaka

To get back on the interpretation on why I liked KL so much: As described above, there is a huge contrast to India in terms of… almost everything. KL felt very similar to, let’s say, a Canadian Metro if you come from any big Indian city. I was quite surprised. I realised, that I had taken India a bit for an Asian standard, even though - if I just thought about it for a second – I would never even think of attempting a generalization of this diverse continent. But as I had never physically visited any other asian country, India had unconsciously become my Asia. Everyone reading this would not be surprised when I say that I was absolutely flabbergasted when I saw KL. J No dirt on the streets (and everywhere else), no constant noises, no animals on the street, an absolutely developed public transport system, etc.

The "modern" transportation system of Malaka :)

This surprise about my own perception made me think further: Have I become partially Indian? Does an individual while adapting to his/her country of residence loose earlier standards and values? Of course one does and I did so too, I had to – to a certain extend – to be able to live here at all. But to which extend would I have expected this to happen?

Some 2 weeks ago, I was sitting with the trainees (some more people than the KL crew were there at that point of time) and we were discussing the justification of gender roles in different geographies. To my own surprise, I strongly defended the point of view that a woman could be a housewife in certain regions of the world if she feels proud of it (which is usually not firstly an individual decision but often comes with the society’s perception of gender roles).

Sign at the train station in KL

At another occasion, I was discussing an incident with Fabian, which happened in TCS where somebody strongly violated a security policy (to use the network for personal messaging). The consequences taken by TCS were quite strong and in our European thinking maybe a bit exaggerated (the individual left the company). My point of view was clear: as a service provider, which works directly with our customers data and often even on their network, there can be no excuses for security violations. Once you accept a weak link in the security chain, the whole chain will tear. Fabian agreed to the point, but our argumentation was a bit different and my stand quite rigid. I realised that I had been exposed so much to this purely customer focussed servicing mentality which many Indian companies and individuals have that I wasn’t ready to move from my point of view towards a more tolerant and people focussed perspective.

What a funny anglicized language!

Like this there were another few incidents, which made me realize that values, which were very important to me before coming here, suddenly were not in the main spotlight anymore because I felt the need to adapt them to Indian society and business mentality. If sometimes people say that you wear “pink glasses” when you are in love, or wear a “different hat” according to the wished result of your thought process, that's how i feel. I am wearing the “Indian glasses” or a “culture hat” when discussing a topic. I have always defended the viewpoint that things, which seem absolutely wrong, might make sense in another geography (e.g. arranged marriage, armed fight against protesting violence). Now, I observe to have gone a step further… I am taking and defending the other point of view. This is a very interesting experience for me and I am curious about the development of it. How will I be able to stick to my own values and not just be taken into the values of the society I am in? Will I become more Indian than modern Indians (because they would probably not agree to my “new” ideas, but they are more “western” in thinking)? Time will tell…

Fish Therapy: little fish eat dead skin cells from your feet, absolutely uncomfortable feeling but very amusing...

My visit to Switzerland !

My internship with TCS officially ended in July. But because Janus, this Management Traineeship Program I am part of, is still running until February 2011, I decided to stay back with TCS in India for some time. I got offered an employment contract, which I accepted.

However, I took a 1 month break in Switzerland to get a new visa and - most importantly - to visit my near and dear ones back home. That was an amazingly relaxing, energizing and just really really great break from the challenging India experience. I got picked up by my mom, sister, grandmother, aunt my friend Sandra and Fabian at the airport, got a little surprise party with many friends on evening of my arrival, went on a 1 week vacation with Fabian to Ticino (Italian part of Switzerland), visited my Grandmother in Austria, had some great nights out with my sister, enjoyed spending time at home with my mom, visited some more dear friends and family, partied during the traditional Spitzer's BEACH'N'BBQ in our house, went to various concerts. In a nutshell, i had lots of plans, lots of fun, a great time... and way to little time for all of it!

But now, I am back in Chennai and back on the adventure to explore this country, it's customs, the business culture and to learn a lot from it for my future. I have set some new goals and focus on how to deal with India, TCS and myself. For example in situations which trigger a lot of frustration. Or about the way I want to learn more about this country. Let's see what this second episode of Incredible India has in store for me.

One last thing, my blog posts have become quite rare in the last months, I plan to change this again. If you enjoy reading my blog, I would appreciate if you left your comment from time to time, no matter how short, unimportant or meaningful it might be or not. It has been giving me a lot of motivation to write, to know that people are actually reading my entries. Please keep it up! J Thanks a lot!

So now, let's see what will happen with athese good resolutions... J

some of the guests at my surprise welcome party, organized by my sister Nina and my boyfriend Fabian

the most proud grandmother in the world... of course I HAD to bring my Saree home :)

scenic Swiss landscapes

amazing holidays in Ticino with Fabian

Impressions of BEACH'N'BBQ Party: ...the grill

...the Swiss recycling concept :)

the breath-taking sunset view from our garden

A Business Analyst in Chennai - major updates !

Oy, oy, oy... that's what happens if your internet doesn't work for a couple of weeks, your sister comes to visit you, you get shifted to a new location and you decide to extend your stay in India... You totally ignore your blog. :)

So this was the short version of it. For whoever is interested in some more details, here comes the longer version of the two latter points:

After many moments of frustration, fights to get a definitive answer, following up on relevant and irrelevant people, TCS transferred me with 1 week's notice to Chennai (earlier Madras) in the state of Tamil Nadu, in South India. As part of the Janus Program I am in, I got assigned a new role and responsibility: I am now a Business Analyst for the Technology Team. Who would have thought that I would work in the IT team? :)

My task is threefold: 1. I need to understand the customer's requirements if they want some IT application to be developed by my team. I understand it, put it on paper and then coordinate between customer and the developers to make it happen. Why me in that position? Because I have a non-technical background and am able to understand and communicate with the customers on a more general level than the technical people. On Friday, I had my first customer meeting with an internal customer within TCS and one little challenge became quite obvious: I have absolutely NO idea about IT (my near and dear ones can attest that) and my customers knew more than me... and at the end of the day I'm still working in an IT company and EVERYONE has an idea about IT! :) Ya, that was fun. I think they had a good time too... The other parts of my task consist in analysing a set of IT applications/tools we have and finding some gaps to make them more user friendly. Again, the target is to make it fool proof for non-technical guys in order to increase their usage... so I fit the role perfectly. The last part of my role is kind of a marketing campaign for the same applications. Again same factor helps: if I can understand and see the benefit of using this... everyone else should also get it. :)

This role is very interesting for me because I am getting exposed to a totally different aspect of work: I am in customer contact, get to use my analytical skills and can focus on my communication skills as well. Seems perfect to me and so far I am enjoying it. Also my new boss is somehow much... let's say... he actually communicates with me, gives me some rough guidelines and ideas about what I should be doing and gives feedback. In two weeks I already feel much more comfortable here than in 10 months in my earlier role.

And Chennai... oh my god Chennai! It has bars, clubs, actual restaurants you can just chill out, it has the sea and a nice beach, many places to see. It’s an amazing contrast to Baroda. But it is hot, humid and dirty here! Honestly, how can such a large population live in such a place? I'm dying if I'm not in a room with AC. It's around 40-45°C hot, plus around 80% humidity which makes it a huge sauna of 5 million sweaty people, smelly streets and smog as much as you can imagine. It's not really recommendable in the summer season I can assure you. But it has a beach and places to go, so I’m happy !!! :)

Oh yeah, and another important update is that I decided to extend my stay in India. In July my 1-year traineeship is ending and I have accepted an employment offer with TCS. This means that I will come back to Switzerland in July for 1 month, enjoy my family, my love and my friends, pure air, comfortable life, good food, nice landscapes and of course Spitzer’s BEACH’N’BBQ on July 24^th !!! After that I’ll come back to Chennai, continue in my role for some time and then possibly take over a third assignment as part of the Janus Program which is ending by the beginning of next year.

Indians in 90 seconds

Just perfect !!!

...and from a Tata company. ;)

Arranged Marriage – Love Marriage

What do you think about when you hear about arranged marriage? – a poor 16 year old girl who is being married against her will to a 25 year old man… or possibly something similar, right? At least when I arrived in India, I had quite some prejudices against arranged marriage, I didn’t really know how it works and gave it a negative connotation only. This entry is dedicated to this topic nobody in the Western world really understands if you haven’t directly been exposed to it. I want to show you how I have gotten to experience this concept, what made me get rid of my western view and why arranged marriage actually fits Indian society quite well.

North Indian wedding ceremony

I recently read a book of a successful contemporary Indian author called Chetan Bhagat. His books usually talk about the story of individuals in India which face some problem with an aspect of Indian society: education system, arranged marriage, etc. In the book “2 States” a couple from different origin and cast are in love and want to get married which is very difficult in India. The synopsis of the book says the following “Love marriages around the world are simple: Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. 
They get married. In India, there are a few more steps: Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy. Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl. Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family.
Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married.”

Indian Bride: rich make up, beautiful dress and a lot of jewelry

Let me give you a little background to regular marriages in India. First of all it is important to know that Indians usually stay with their parents until marriage if they live in the same city as their family. So except if you study or work in another city you would not live alone or with friends and surely not with your partner. Consequently, before a couple gets married, they don’t live together, they supposedly don’t have sex and they don’t hang out the way we do (staying out late at night etc.). This is the way it happens mostly. However, in big metropolitan cities this is slowly changing, living relationships are coming up etc. But seen overall, these cases are still a very small minority. So what happens when a couple gets married is that the girl moves to the house of the family of the guy. She will live there with his family either until the parents die or stay to live with another son. Living there she’ll be included into the family as a full member and learning the way of doing things according to the boys family. There, another crucial factor comes into the play: the cast/community. Basically the society is split into 4 main groups, the Varnas: 1. Brahmins : clergy and teachers wielding religious authority. 2. Kshatriyas : warriors, nobility, and administrators, wielding political power. 3. Vaishyas : merchants and farmers or cattle-herders with economic prosperity and 4. Shudras: servants or unfree peasants. Within every varna there are hundreds of casts. The cast system is not only applicable to the Hindu religion only but is also lived by Christian and Muslim Indians. India is a very much value driven society and according to its nature, every cast has very different values which are lived and preserved with rigour.

South indian wedding ceremony

So, in order to get back to our primary topic, the marriage, let me ask a simple question: Who would you trust most to keep up your family’s tradition? Who would you want to include into the everyday life of your family? Who would you want your daughter to spend her life with? Of course, someone who has similar thinking and values than you have. Someone from the same background. Someone from the same origin. In a nutshell, someone from the same cast. Consequently, arranged marriages don’t have to have anything to do with “family politics” as we might be tempted to believe according to western thinking. I don’t say that one should exclude this reason, which is of course valid for many cases mostly in rural areas. But I want to underline that for the parents it is also strongly linked with the assurance to find someone for your child who shares the same values and who can care for your child the way you would do.

So how do you find someone from the same cast? I can’t generalise on this but what I have seen it is mostly one primary reason: Internet Matching Sites. Yes, of course there are also family friendships, etc, but what I have most commonly observed was that the family looks for a suitable partner on a marriage website. It’s he same principle like our dating sites, just that it is particularly for wedding and the profile includes things like cast, origin, complexion (fair or tanned skin), profession of parents and siblings. Check it out yourself on www.matrimonialsindia.com, for example. It’s quite entertaining. J So the whole family looks for a future partner, not only the individual him/herself. The opinion of the parents is very important, as they “know” how to select the best matching partner.

Foto shooting at the wedding reception

In case someone wants to get married to someone he/she fell in love with and who is not from the same cast, often a drama begins. First because the authority of the parents is put into question, second because they’ll have to live with a girl with different traditions or give their daughter away to a family with different traditions and thirdly because the community will point at the family for not having gone the good way. There must be even more reasons to this, but it seems like not getting into arranged marriage is somehow like getting off the track of being a good son/daughter.

The dowry which the girl's family gifts the groom's family. Often displayed at the reception function.

In a case of love marriage of course the scenarios differ a lot, as some families are more liberal than others. But on the bottom line it is still surprising for most of the people when they hear that a couple of very different background manages to get married. Sometimes you also hear of the term “Arranged cum Love” which is basically a love marriage but which has the buy-in of the families so that it seems as if it was almost arranged.

There is another aspect of this whole arranged married thing. In India you should be married at a certain age. The older you get, the less chances you have to find a good partner. There “must be something wrong with you” if you are over age. Even though maybe you just continued with your education or were in a challenging job or whatever. The first impression says that there’s something fishy about you. So girls should be married at the age of about 27 latest and guys maybe at 29. Unimaginable in Europe, you get married when you found the right partner. But what if the right partner will be taken already or doesn’t want you just because you’re a bit older? Arranged marriage is a social structure to avoid this scenario, it ensures you to find a suitable person in time because the whole family will be concerned about your good future and will help you. And since values and origin are predominant in Indian households, the’ll be able to help you to find that person because they share the same. I don’t say that love is excluded from this… there has to be some spark between the individuals even in arranged marriage, but there is no time to test it the way we do it in Europe.

Wedding couple

This is how it works: family decides its time, they look for a partner, find one which seems to fit, get in contact with the family (or possibly the person directly), they check if things fit, show interest, stay in contact for some time and arrange a get together of the two… during 15-30 minutes the interest has to be confirmed or you decide that it wasn’t the one (which is ,as I understand, rather rare since you have checked the family and its values through), so you confirm the interest, the parents fix a date for engagement together with some astrologer (around 1-3 months later) and a date for wedding is set (maybe 4-6months later), they get married, the girl moves to the groom’s family the day after the wedding… and that’s it. It’s a very quick thing. After 4 months your life took a turn of 180°. One important fact to be considered in order not to create any misconceptions: The individual is involved in most of the steps, depending if he/she already wants to get married or not. But in any case the final decision of saying yes is taken by the couple. Indirectly the parents of course have a large influence, because their opinion is highly valued but the one saying yes to the choice of the family at the meeting is the individual him/herself.

Dressing up for an engagement

Musical impressions from Goa

This song was performed in a beach bar at Anjuna Beach and reflects the Goa spirit as we know it in Europe quite well. It became Fabian's favourite song for the rest of his stay here... and I became a victim of his singing skills. :)