Category: India

Bangin’ Out In Bangalore

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It was at a packed intersection in Koramangala that the general absurdity of a night out in Bangalore first became apparent. Vikram, our stylish college student friend, was driving Em and I to the MG Road area and its assortment of bars and pubs, blasting an addictive dance track on the stereo, but the music wasn’t going to push us through this red light faster. As we waited for the lights to change, a woman in rags holding a crying child approached the window. “I don’t care if you can’t dance, just wanna see that ass bounce,” bellowed the speaker system as she held her hand out to us, then to her mouth, then to us again. I pushed a ten-rupee note into her hand and wound the window up. She stayed in the same spot as the lights changed and watched us as we pulled away, her flat expression unchanged by our encounter.

…read more at The NRI…

Everyday Mornings on the Indian Railways

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Taking advantage of the extraordinary Indian Railways is a regular component of my life in Kerala. Being a hardworking Technopark salaryman I have to catch the train to and from work most days, which in and of itself is not all that remarkable; people do that all over the world, from Tokyo to London to Los Angeles. What makes my journey unusual, as I’ve mentioned before, is the fact that I’m the only regular who is a white man – the saip in their midst. How much I should interact is a constant dilemma as I try to balance the expectations of whoever it is I talk to, the many others watching, and indeed, the expectations I have of them.

…read more at The NRI…

Profile: Indra Nooyi – Chairperson & CEO, PepsiCo

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The most powerful woman in the post-millennial business world is an NRI. It’s official. Forbes says so. For four years running, the distinguished business magazine has ranked Indra Nooyi at the top of its Most Powerful Women in Business list, as well as placing her third on its Most Powerful Women list in 2008 and 2009. She is the chairperson and CEO of PepsiCo. She shares a birthday with Bill Gates. She counts Henry Kissinger as a close personal friend. She is married with two daughters, one adult and one teenaged. She is an avid supporter of the New York Yankees. Still, while a profile of this remarkable woman can call upon any number of career highlights and snippets of family information, one question remains in doubt: who is the real Indra Nooyi?

…read more at The NRI…

Kerala: Drinking to the Max

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I found out about the BBC’s recent big story about Kerala when I was browsing in the Reliance World internet café below my office.  One of my colleagues – a Malayali, same as 95% of the people who work in my Technopark office – came to me with a big grin on his face.  “Hey, did you hear there was a story about Kerala in the BBC today?”  I told him I hadn’t, but was quickly interested to know what it was about.  Kerala in the news! Exciting!  “Yeah,” he said, grin still fixed to his face.  “It said that Kerala consumes the most alcohol in the whole of India!”

There it was on the BBC’s front page.  ‘Kerala’s love affair with alcohol’ read the headline in bold type.  I had expected an appreciation of the palm trees and backwaters seen in Incredible!ndia, or something equally charming and inoffensive, but this was an exposé of the state’s runaway drinking culture.  Normally, when there is bad international press about your homeland, you tend to react with either shame, disgust, protest or a combination of the three.  My colleague, however, seemed almost overjoyed to tell me that he and his fellow Malayalis were becoming world renowned for their drinking prowess.  A typical reaction of a young male anywhere, I guess, but it neatly sums up the attitude here.

…read more at The NRI…

Smile Like You Mean It

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My first friend here in Kerala was my trainer at work.  He’d been lumped with task of getting me up to speed in my new profession, and he proved himself to be a genuine, sweet soul with remarkably little pretension.  He’s been a particularly welcoming presence since the first day I came to interview at the company, teaching me the ropes of the various systems in place – both formal (an entire new lexicon of terms to understand) and informal (where and when to get the best local chai).  We bonded over anecdotes, philosophies and – thanks to a shared interest in amateur photography – ‘snaps’, as they’re known here.

I was gutted when I was unable to attend his wedding in early ‘09.  I think he was, too: “I had told so many people you were coming!”  Fortunately, I had a chance to atone for my sins when his house was finally finished.  (That’s a story in itself, going right back to before he was born and his father’s decision to strike out on his own in business, hoping to one day provide better for his children than his parents could for him).  Along I went for the housewarming with the four good men pictured, also colleagues, all of whom have been and continue to be remarkably open and welcoming.  Several unintended detours across Trivandrum eventually led to the chess-patterned paving and impressive façade of my colleague’s newly built home.

…read more at The NRI…

Friendly Neighbourhood Festival

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By Varkala standards, the air was a little bracing one January morning last year when our elderly neighbour informed my girlfriend and me that the local Hindu temple would hold its festival at the end of the month; it would run for four days.  Now, this temple isn’t large or overly celebrated; just another neighbourhood temple, really.  That, combined with the fact that I was still relatively new in India and had no idea what the phrase ‘temple festival’ actually meant, led me to a somewhat understated reaction.  A festival, I thought.  How quaint.

Over the next couple of weeks leading up to the festival, excitement and expectations grew.  On the final night, there would be a Kathakali performance that lasted all night, and six or seven elephants would join a parade at dusk down our street.  It sounded like good fun, but I’d heard of festivals nearby that had fifty or even a hundred elephants.  How incredible could six or seven be?  You’ll enjoy, said our neighbour.  Sure, I said, trying to believe him.

…read more at The NRI…

Visas, Hotels and Bureaucracy

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“Sir.  There is a problem with your visa and you must vacate the hotel immediately.”

We’d already taken a shower, unpacked our clothes for the wedding reception and were trying to relax and watch some mindless TV.  I tried to reason with him.  “I thought the situation was clear.  I have the required papers showing my visa extension is under consideration and I went and got papers for my fiancée.  Our stay was approved.”

The attendant was unmoved.  “I’m sorry, sir.  You must vacate immediately.”

I resisted the urge to slam the door in his face or shout obscenities, despite my overflowing exasperation.  It wouldn’t do any good to get angry.  After nearly a full day of running around Thiruvananthapuram trying simply to get a room for the night, it was finally time to give up.  Bureaucracy had beaten us.

…read more at The NRI…

India: A Foreigner’s First Impression

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My initial arrival in India was apparently much like everyone else’s.  Two in the morning – or should that be night? You can never be quite sure in Delhi.  Hot and dusty as all my friends in Japan had said when I told them I was going to India.  First experience of an Indian ‘Q’ at an exchange counter; somehow fought my way out with some cherished rupees.  Through the near-absent customs check – keep up now, we’re all in a hurry – and into the maelstrom which, fortunately for me, had at its centre a 20-something guy holding my name on a discoloured piece of A4.  Whisked away without a word into a beaten-up blue van and off into the night.  India smells different from anywhere I’ve been before, I thought.  Driver and his pal got me to the hotel but became angry when I only tipped them Rs. 20.  I trusted no-one, not even the albino gecko on Hotel Vivek’s lobby wall, until I was locked away in my room and could put my head down on a pillow and…

…sleep.

…read more at The NRI…

Indian Students in Tech Elite

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“It has really been a dream come true for all of us.” Aranya Choudhury probably never imagined he would stand inside the most advanced high-energy physics research facility ever created.  The Large Hadron Collider became operational on 10th September 2008, and Choudhury, 20 years old, was one of 11 Indian undergraduate students selected to spend 8 to 13 weeks there as an intern, rubbing shoulders with some of the brightest minds of our time.

For the uninitiated, LHC is essentially a 27-kilometre-long tunnel concealed beneath Switzerland.  It’s the flagship project of CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) and is designed to smash the tiniest known particles into each other with the intention of, among other things, recreating the conditions present at what we call The Big Bang.  As a layman, perusing documents and articles explaining why it came into being, who brought it to fruition and what potential discoveries it may trigger visions of a sentient technology that could finally bring about the human apocalypse à la the Terminator or Matrix films.  “The Large Hadron Collider begins to learn at a geometric rate.  It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, December 7th.  In a panic, we try to pull the plug.”  Something like that.

Who Wants To Be An NRI?

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My first full-time job was at a BP petrol station in a heavily immigrant-populated suburb in Auckland, NZ.  Fresh out of high school and with two months to kill before heading down south for university, there was no way my mum would let me lounge around the house all summer, so off I went into the bottom end of the job market.  The staff were a wonderful motley crew – under a Sri Lankan manager were a few seen-it-all Kiwis, a couple of Chinese, a Saudi, a Pakistani and another new high school graduate like me.

By far the largest complement, however, were the NRI boys; among them a fresher from Hyderabad, a family man from Delhi, a quiet Tamil and a cricket-obsessed Punjabi.  I knew from the proliferation of Indian restaurants and South Asian faces behind convenience store counters that the ongoing influx of NRIs was, by the standards of NZ’s tiny population, an explosion.  I hadn’t actually found myself in a position to interact with them in any meaningful way, though; NZ’s changing ethnic makeup remained something about which I had little understanding.  Until, that is, the day I joined BP.

…read more at The NRI…