Reverious

I just came home from an 8-day business trip to India. And I wanted to share some of my experiences and thoughts about the trip.

Indians have no sense of time.

The official time-zone of India is International Standard Time or IST in short. But if you ask any Indian he will say that he follows Indian Standard Time, a time-classification that equals delays of anything between 30 minutes to 2 hours.
This was both anoying and practical. Anoying because you could never expect participants in meetings to show up on time, and practical because being delayed by the insane traffic didn’t do any harm at all.

Indians have no sense of traffic safety.

This was actually the one thing that scared me the most about India.
They do have traffic laws down there, but the problem is, that nobody follows them, which in the end result in complete pandemonium on the streets.
Imagine cars constantly cutting each other off, driving in and out between each other. Overtaking any way they can, even on the wrong side. Squezing in any gap between cars, even small gaps between humongous trucks with only a few inches to spare.
Two lane roads have become 5 lane roads in the hand of Indian drivers, actually the word lane might not even exist in their dictionary.
Turn signals are not used, instead they use their horns

to signal each others about a pending overtake, which only intesifies the chaos.
I think I might have had at least a handful of near-death experiences while driving around in caps down there, and I wouldn’t like to drivere there myself for anything in the world.
I think this would be the ultimate challenge for the guys from Top Gear on BBC. Driving three super-cars through the streets of one of Indias big cities, without getting any scratches!

Indians like to eat spicy food.

This of course came as no surprise for me. I was prepared for the spicy lunches and dinners, but what did take me by surprise is, that they also eat spicy food for breakfast.
A typical south-indian breakfast consists of a Dosa which is a kind of pancake served typically with some form of rice and curry sauce.
It was a fun experience to try the genuine local cuisine the first couple of days, but I must admit that I quickly became quite tired of the taste of curry, even more as I was hit by a severe case of Delhi Belly during the last 4 days of the trip.

Everything in India is cheap.

Or almoast anything at least.
I went to a local bookstore in Chennai were I was able to buy books at a fraction of what they would have cost in most western places.

I bought hard-bound copies of “J. M. Barrie“, “Charles Dickens“, “Robert Louis Stevenson” and “Sun Tzu” with leather-covers for 150 rupees each which is about $3 USD
You could also buy science and computer books for hundreds of dollars less than what they would have cost at home. Sadly I didn’t have room in my luggage for big and heavy science books.
But it wasn’t only books that was cheap, also food was cheap. In Mumbai we went to a luxury beach lounge restaurant where we had a three course dinner with wine and drinks. Total price for 5 people: about $250 USD.

India have very persistant beggars.

Let me give you an example: We were sitting at a local beach cafe in Mumbai and eating some lunch, when a female beggar spotted us in our very un-indian clothes. She new that she wasn’t allowed inside the premisses of the cafe, so she camped on the beach outside the cafe where she stood for at least an hour looking at us and begging for money. We eventually had to flee out the back entrance.
Another female beggar followed us with her children all the way from the beach to our hotel while begging for money and grapping our arms and clothes. There was no way of telling her of, only the guards at the hotel was able to stop them.
In Denmark we are used to being able to just telling them “no” and then they will move on, but “no” just doesn’t cut it down here.

You have to know someone to get anything done in India.

India is very driven by curruption, and you feel it everywhere you go. And I felt it personally the most when my camera was stolen, and I had to report it to the local police to get my insurance company to pay.
I went to a local police station in Mumbai and tried to talk to the police, but they just sent me along to the next station, and generally wouldn’t listen to me. Luckily one of the PR-guys that we had hired to plan a press conference knew a high-ranking official at another police station, so I was able to get the report.

All in all it was an interesting experience, but I must admit that it was a somewhat hectic trip.
On the 8 days the trip lasted, I had to take 7 different flights, hold 3 different press meetings, 2 customer meetings and 1 meeting with the local police.
And disapointingly the last hotel that I stayed on was nothing short of horrible. It had pidgions on the bathrooms, crows outside the windows, refrigerators that made more noise than a bulldozer, bulldozers next door digging holes in the ground, beds as hard as rocks and did I say that there was a bottle of juice in the mini-bar that was over 2 years too old. Sadly I only figured this out after I had drank it. It took me a couple of hours to puke it all out again.
Oh well, at least it was an experience for life.