Last three weeks presented me with a lot of different challenges and learning opportunities. While I have become quite adept at driving the car here, I cannot say the same about dealing with public and private offices here. On many occassions, I have been presented with options that are totally illogical like the bank blocking my credit card application because I was not using the right sales represntative! But overall, life has been good so far and the expatriate re-entry factor is not that high and I see that coming down fast.
I attended my first networking event here at the TiE Kerala dinner event. Even though the topic of the speech was not appealing to me, I still attended the event to get into the groove of things here and with the hope of meeting a few fellow entrepreneurs. The speech topic was Raising funds in the International markets and the event was supposed to start at 6:30 or so. By the time we walked in at 7, people were still standing outside the hall and chatting. Luckily the meeting started in a few minutes. The first thing I noticed was the lack of the fairer sex in the meeting. There were a total of two ladies and one of them was the presenter and the other one was the wife of the outgoing president.
The hall soon filled up and we must have had close to 60 folks in attendance. I was in for a surprise as Ms.Roshini Paulose (Pole Star Advisors Pte Ltd, Singapore) started her presentation and gave a good overview of the subject. She had an excellent command of the subject and her London School of Business experience showed in both her language and her knowledge. After about 40 minutes of presentation, she opened the floor for questions and here again, was another surprise for me. Audience had brought real life working questions and it was a very interactive session. I walked in not expecting much and this was a great session.
The presentation was followed by a bit of networking and the bar was opened. At first, I only noticed a scotch (could not depict the brand, a local product I assumed), there was no wine or beer, though at the end I saw couple kingfishers floating around. One thing I was impressed about was the fact that they did not require any registration and it was only done at the door and managed the food buffet pretty well.
Another major event in the last few days has been the first day of school for my daughter Veda. The excitement surrounding the first day took me back almost two decades 
The frenzy was still the same, getting the books, bags and above all, getting the school uniform stitched ! I too did the same thing as many parents and made the last minute tailor shop trip on Sunday night to get the uniform for Monday morning. Nothing beats the JIT methodology for uniforms!
Veda was pretty excited for the first day, even though she had no clue how different this school was from the one in Canada. The noticeable thing on the first day was not the school but the traffic approaching the school. The entire street looked like a giant parking lot and even walking to the school was very difficult (oh, there are no sidewalks by the way). We walked in to the school and found out that Veda was in division B of the 1st Standard. After we went to the class and Veda found a spot, a teacher came to the class. Almost all the parents mobbed her to get information about the timings, scheduling, books and a lot of other details. It made me wonder why they never thought of putting this information in a booklet or even just a notice and pass it to the parents before the school even opened ! But other than that, it was just another regular day and Veda was satisfied with the class and now in her fourth day of school, she is still excited in the morning to go to school. Wheww, that was a big relief to Vani and I.
Professionally, in the last little while, I am trying to deal with the concept of ‘cyclical’ time. I remember taking HR classes for my MBA at SMU that spoke about the cyclical time and the challenges. Having not spent too much working hours in India, I did not realize the impact of this probem until now when I am managing the firm and meeting other folks. Time is thought of as a commodity that is infinite and is available in abundance. Meetings start late as a rule. Even folks who come for interviews are either way too early ( I had someone show up an hour early sometime back) or late. Even casual coffee commitments are late !! And the funny thing, it is well tolerated and accepted ! I have already given my take on the issue to the team at Cabot and I am hoping to change the trend somewhat here, at least within our working environment.
Well, there is lot more coming in the next few weeks…Kevin Schwenker is visiting from Halifax next week and I am looking forward to seeing him here and hopefully before the next blog, I would have moved in to my new house
Cheers….VT
