With more than a little bit of nervousness, I buckled myself into my seat on the long flight to Bangalore, India. I was part of a trainee program within Accenture to gain more knowledge of offshoring and to learn how to work with other cultures. Since so many future projects will contain offshore elements, myself and a group of colleagues from Norway and Sweden would need to understand our offshore model.
Looking back on the six months I spent in India, it’s hard to know where to begin describing the experience. I could start with a fact: India is the world’s fourth biggest economy—but it’s changing fast! We saw for ourselves radical change in just a half a year’s time. Bangalore was a very hectic city with too many people and a traffic infrastructure (or lack thereof!) that drove me crazy. But it had a lot of charm as well. As a foreigner you have lots of options for parting with your money because the prices are so low. We had many gastronomic experiences and shopping was a dream. General common sense and the ability to drive a bargain are critical! In India you find insane levels of wealth in one place and next door poverty like you have never seen before. It’s a completely unbalanced scale. The differences make India so fascinating and heartbreaking all at once. This is especially true in Bangalore. country’s heart and soul.
When I arrived in Bangalore I had few expectations, actually. I hoped for new challenges and to build new relationships. Those expectations were exceeded. The first weeks were crash courses in the subtleties of Indian culture: that “yes” often means “maybe” and “five more minutes” can take an hour! We come from a country where time is often viewed as “wasting” or “going.” The Indians seemed to perceive time as an never-ending resource.
Working days differed a lot, too. Our group was very independent and individualistic. But individuality is not necessarily prized in India. This was my biggest challenge because I don’t like to be micro-managed. I need flexibility. With that said, confronting different ideas helped me grow personally and professionally.
Neha and Shimla, two of the girls from my project, deserve credit for making our trip so memorable. We spent so much time together outside of work, and their warmth and curiosity made us feel so welcome. The friendship made the journey even richer and I got to experience India from a local perspective and not as a tourist. It is strange how you can travel so far away and build new relations with people from a total different world than yourself.
I got to travel a lot and those adventures will stay with me forever. In the West you find the nicest beaches and a rainforest. Take the coastline from Mumbai to Goa and experience natural wonders everywhere. East is the home to the holy river Ganges where you can wash away your sins!
India is a land of contrasts. It has so much to offer if you’re open to the experience. Mark Twain describes it well: “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked."