Innocent Naivety

A truck full of police officers

Some days back my scooter got towed away because I parked it at a wrong place. What to do… first take an auto rickshaw to go back to office, then find out how you get your scooter back for which of course you don’t have any papers because you took it over from some of the former trainees which already had taken it over form some of the former trainees of the former trainees. J I found out that this doesn’t play a role at all, you just go to the police station with your driver’s license and the key in your hand, say which vehicle is yours, pay the fine and drive out again. Since I’m white my friends advised me not to go by myself… because the fine would surely be higher and some documents might be asked, my international driver’s licence maybe not accepted and so on… so an Indian friend of mine went in to get it.When I was about to give him the money, he asked if I wanted a bill or not: with receipt it’s 100.-Rupees fine (2.20CHF) without receipt 50.- Somehow in my head it made sense…yeah sure, if they have to issue the papers it’s more work so more expensive. I was wondering for what reason people might ask for a bill though… who is keen to have a memory of a fine? But since nobody seemed to bother, I didn’t waste any further thought to it. Yeah, the smart ones of course realise very quickly, it’s got nothing to do with the paper effort. But I was too naïve to think about corruption at this moment. I just applied my logic and not at all the Indian one. So what happens is that with bill, the incident is registered and the money goes to the police’s account. Without bill, there’s no track. So basically you just bribe the police officer in charge who will keep the money with him.

My first case of corruption! Now I understand why accused people insist they didn’t do anything at all ! J

Streetlife in Baroda

Business Trip to Chennai and the Temple Experience

The project I am leading in TCS includes processes at different locations across India, mainly Baroda with around 650 and Chennai with around 1400 associates. After having planned and launched the project successfully two weeks back, I got to go to Chennai (formerly Madras) for a couple of days. I met my team, the leaders and some other key people for my activities and finally got to know the face behind the calls and mails I was having everyday. I also took advantage of my company paid flight to the South of India and added a weekend to visit some places around.

An absolute highlight was the trip to Tirupati. Together with 4 friends from the Janus batch who have been placed in Chennai after our common induction in Bombay, I got ready to visit one of the most important temples of India, every day thousands of pilgrims come to this place, often easily reaching 100.000. My friends had prepared me well in advance that we will have to queue up during hours to get in. The result was the following journey:

- 22.30 departure in Chennai

- 2.00 arrival at the ticket counter to get the 50 Rupees fast track ticket which reduces waiting hours from 12-13 to 5-6 hours

- 2.00 – 5.00 sitting in the queue to wait for the ticket counter to open

- 5.30 – 8.00 –go to a crappy hotel, “freshen up”, have breakfast, travel to the temple.

- 8.00 – 10.00 queuing up to get into the temple (which is absolutely fantastic timing, everybody was absolutely thrilled that it was so quick

- 10.19.53 – 10.19.55 see actual idol inside the temple

- 10.20 – 12.30 roam around the place, visit souvenir stores, etc and leave

- 12.30 – 19.00 lunch in same crappy hotel, travel back to Chennai and visit one more much smaller temple on the way

So now some of you might wonder why the hell someone would take all this hastle for only around 3-4 seconds. Good question, I asked myself the same before I went there. The answer is the religious power of this temple. Generally, Indian temples are the exact opposite to our churches: they’re beautiful from outside, but inside there is only the idol of a god placed, some priest and the place where you give your offerings to the god. and that’s it. Temples are relatively small, people just quickly go inside to give their respect to the god and then go out again. Often they stay around the temple for a while to pray or meditate but hardly inside. In general, for me it was mostly a little bit disappointing to see.

However, the visit of Tirupati was a perfect illustration of why the temples are so special. The temple in Tirupati is dedicated to Vishnu and Hindus believe that you can only visit it if the god called you to do so. It is said that if you plan to visit it without being called, something will cross your plans and you will not be able to come. Many people are said to have tried various times to come before they were actually able to visit the place. Once they are there, many people shave their head and offer the hair to the god. Also women. Even though everyone knows that the hair will be sold for good money make wigs, they do it for the god.

Waiting in the queue, people chant and shout for the god. I felt like on a soccer match where suddenly one shouts something and everyone around shouts the name of the god in a chorus. The moment you are inside the actual temple, you get carried by the crowd, yelled at and physically pushed by the security guards to move quickly. There are so many people there, you can hardly breathe and to be honest I was so tense that by the time I realized that I should have a look at the inside of the temple and the idol, I was already carried out of it by the crowd. There is nothing calm and contemplative in this temple at all, as we usually imagine religious places. It’s loud, smelly, crowded and absolutely stressful. But still…it is amazingly peaceful. When the people come out of the temple they have this amazing happiness on their face to have been able to see this god. This makes the place to be surrounded by an extraordinary energy… It may sound weird for us, but it’s just an incredibly spiritual aura.

The VIP Feeling

Earlier, I had described that since I arrived in India, I can comprehend how celeb's must feel when paparazzi hunt them for a picture. To prove that I'm not exaggerating I'm showing you two pictures of mine in the newspaper! Both of them were taken in my first 3 weeks in Baroda.

First, a picture of some of the interns at a concert on page 3 of the India Times was shown.

„let’s dance“

About 1,5 weeks later I attended the anniversary of a local newspaper and even though the picture doesn’t really make the impression that this party was a success, my shot landed up in the report about it. I mean, look at my bored expression! It must be a huge thing to have a foreigner attend a party that such a picture is printed.

Oh yes, and I got the offer to be on TV as well. Actually already twice: once to be in a Bollywood movie (many young tourist roaming in Colaba, Mumbai must have been asked that question but if you look at those absolutely untalented white peeps dancing in the background of some Bollywood movies... you really don’t want to be associated with that!) and once in a report about foreigners enjoying the Indian Navratri festival. But i declined these "honours". After some weeks in India, I guess no additional attention is required.

A festive week in Baroda

Since last weekend India is in Diwali fever. It's the most important festival in India and linked to the story in the Ramayana epic where Lord Rama comes back to India after defeating Ravana in Lanka (Sri Lanka). Basically, it is the festival of lights: every house is decorated with colourful lamps and candles are lit around the house every evening during one week. Families also decorate their homes with flowers and rangoli (sand paintings). On saturday evening crackers, fireworks, "bombs", volcanos are lit and fill the streets with life... and noise. This actually happenes three days before and three days after as well. People get very excited about it. In addition the state of Gujarat was celebrating New Year on Monday, so you can imagine how fantastic the mood is over here at the moment. :)

Piece of art made of sand at a rangoli exhibition

In our office we celebrated this event last Friday: from Thursday evening on, everybody was buzzing around, putting up flowers, ribbons, painting rangoli on the floor to turn the whole office into an absolutely faboulous place. No wall, no window, no desk was left out. We can't even imagine anything similar to this. Unfortunately security restrictions in our office prohibit pictures to be taken otherwise I would have been able to share this with you. All these efforts were done for the purpose of ecorating the place beautifully together, not to have it decorated. It's really the process which is important. Because on Friday evening everything was over. For this event everyone was wearing traditional dresses: men would come in kurta and women all wore a saari.... including me. Everybody was absolutely thrilled about it, much more than I was myself. And I even got a special award for it in the internal Diwali competition. :)

My friend Raj and me wearing the traditional Indian dress for office celebration.

Settling and adapting the Indian lifestyle...

These last weeks I have been able to really settle here in Baroda and I'm getting used to my life in India. This includes adapting to the busy and work oriented lifestyle…

My TCS project has started its activities and keeps me quite occupied. In addition, the working hours here are a bit different: usually people start around 9 and finish at 7 in the evening. It’s basically the same for me. But because my project involves people from different locations and different shift timings (they work in the evening/night) I often come a bit later, at 10, and also stay longer. So usually I reach home around 8.30 or 9. This week, I even left office twice after 11 and once after midnight. It was very tiring... but worth it. The launching of my project went off very well. But the consequence is that I caught I cold and I'm fighting against it on my valuable weekend! :(

Some weeks back, I finally found a very nice apartment here in Baroda, which I am sharing with other people. As for now Robert, a guy from Croatia who works with a software developing company and his polish girlfriend Anna live with me. One friend of the Janus batch (my TCS induction group) was supposed to move in here as well, but his plans were changed a bit. In general, a guy and a girl living together is something not at all normal here in India… people stay with their parents until they get married and in case they go for work to another city, a girl would never live with a guy. That’s an absolute no go because it implies that there could be something going on between them. I could tell very quickly from the surprised faces from the people I talked to, that this is a fact I shouldn’t mention too often from now on. our apartment, is a very nice three bedroom apartment with a big living room and in one of the fanciest neighbourhoods of Baroda. For this jewel we pay “a fortune” for local standards: 12’500Rupees or about 180Euros, for all of us together! J But once you look at the salaries and the costs of living here, you’ll understand how much this money is actually worth.

Three weeks back, I attended a wedding in Delhi.I was so excited to go there, I bought a beautiful Saree to wear and went there with on of my best friends here in India, Sreejith, who was the best man for the wedding.The wedding was “unfortunately” a bit sophisticated and simple so that the whole dancing and colourful traditions were left out. On the same day Sreejith’s sister got engaged (arranged marriage, i'll dedicate a post to this soon as well) and the ceremony for this was quite vivid and exciting. Generally the brides wear very traditional, colourful and rich dresses and lots of jewellery, which just looks amazing.

During that trip, I also took the chance and visited Delhi a bit. ...and I really fell in love with that city. It has a lot of the Mogul architecture and a large Moslem community. Two factors which give the city a very special and different character.

The dancing hall at Red Fort

Even though i was wearing a well covering shirt, long trousers and had a scarf to cover neck and shoulders, they insisted that I have to rent a "full cover" (ugly, sweaty pink overdress) to go inside the Jama Masjid (Mosque) ...a trick to make some money?

The busy streetlife in the old city / muslim area.

Feel like having chicken?

In a bag

The bag seems to be a very important item here in India. You can get everything in a bag.

I had already shown the milk in a bag.

There are also chinese take away noodles in a bag.

You can even get a nice parcel full of food and beautiful presents from Switzerland - which your sister sent you in a originally square parcel putting so much efforts, love and money into it - crushed in a bag.

Men carry a "handbag" here. Yes this is the word they use for their bags. By the way, from a western perspective, men here generally have a quite feminine touch. They walk around holding hands or embraced holding each others shoulders. They wear pink and red bracelets with beads and pearls. Dear European men, you would have to revise your definition of masculinity over here. :)

Picnic in Rajasthan

Last weekend I was invited to join a group of 25 associates from TCS to join them on a picnic in Mt.Abu. My first though was something like…oh nice a picnic on some nearby mountain sounds like a nice little distraction. Not quite. A ‘picnic’ actually stands for whatever short trip. I found out that they rented a bus for two days to go to a beautiful neighbouring state Rajasthan. So sure I was in!

The way up to one of the temples.

It was repeatedly communicated that we would leave at “10pm sharp!” in front of our office. I can’t believe, I still fall for that! …I was present at 9.55 and was the second person to be there. J (Last week I thought I had learned it and arrived 5mins late at an important meeting and I was the meeting had already started!) Around 10.45 our group became complete and we got slowly going. The buswould take us to Mt.Abu by the next morning. It was a very funny ride. Honestly, I didn’t really expect adult people to sing and dance on the bus. It was a lot of fun… remembered me a bit of AIESEC. Just on a side note… India must have influenced AIESEC a lot. The culture of the people here is very close to the one in the organisation… I’m very often quite surprised. So after some shyness, I joined the activities a little…although it’s a bit hard to sing along hindi songs and dance the choreography of Bollywood movies you don’t know.

I just had to wear this traditional dress...

After some issues with the hotel (according to the board on the roof it’s “the only place to stay in paradise in Mt.Abu which is comfortable and amazingly clean”-we changed after 5mins J ) we went to explore the place. During the next two days I realized with what different eyes I see the world around me. All the people on the trip were very impressed by the beautiful mountains and the lake…I was thrilled to know that the Pakistani border is close, to see the beautiful carvings in the temples, to see a lonesome man having a little store (and house?) on the top of a rock to serve the thirsty tourists.

The radar "against" Pakistan

Shop in a rock

Unfortunately on Sunday morning many people fell sick. Not me though, I was all happy. We thought that the lonesome man’s fresh lemonade must have been a little less fresh than we thought. (I smelt on it, had 1 tiny sip and passed it over immediately, smelt like big pot of rotten vegetables)Finally o Sunday afternoon I fell sick as well…so it can’t have been the lemonade. J We had hired some caterers to simplify the meals for our big group, maybe something was wrong with their food. You’d probably think that hiring caterers means that some people in Mt.Abu offer this service for the tourist groups or something similar, don’t you? (at least I did J) Wrong! This is India. Here, you just hire 4 people in Baroda, make them buy all the food in advance, bring all of it plus pans, cups, cutlery, etc. in the bus and join you for the entire 2 days. They travel on the bench behind the driver (all four of them) and cook food for 25 people whenever you want it…and no problem if you arrive 4 hours later.

Oh yes, by the way…of course the bus has no toilet…and with about 8 out of 25 people suffering from vomiting and/or diarrhoea this ride can be a bit uncomfortable. I think for me it stopped 3 times… and once I couldn’t help it and just opened the window. This is India, right? ;-)

Traditional Rajasthani

It was a beautiful trip: the places were beautiful, the people great fun and Rajasthan is very nice for art crafts shopping. I’ll definitely have to visit other places in this state during my stay here.