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Study Abroad India

Business July 23, 2014

On every company visit, we were so welcomed, so well fed and given interactive lectures and extensive tours of their beautiful campuses many of which included pools, food courts, recreational facilities and food marts. On Wednesday afternoon we got to visit the TVS Motor Company. We entered a conference room where we were shown a brief video explaining how TVS began and how vertically sourced they are. As you drive around India, it is as common if not more so to see two wheel vehicles and auto rickshaws as it is a car. TVS is the third largest two-wheeler manufacturer in India and we toured the facility that assembles the vehicles. It was a remarkably clean and well organized facility optimizing on automation except where it is cost prohibitive. For example, we walked past the paint booth line which most of the production was done by robots except for the very end which had personnel performing the “touch-up” painting. Our guide told us because of the variation of parts, it is not cost effective to program the robots for all the variations and makes more sense for the human eye to catch and touch up missed spots.

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Study Abroad India

July 31, 2014

Rag GhatOn our last day in India it was incredibly hot and humid. Near the Red Fort in Delhi we visited Rag Ghat, a memorial honoring the site where Gandhi was cremated after his assassination in 1948. There are many memorials to others in the area but the shining attraction seems to be the one of Gandhi as he meant so much to India. You drive into hectic city life in Delhi where you are in the midst of crowded streets, gruesome traffic and vendors in your space trying to sell you their wares. Then you walk into a beautiful spacious garden area filled with grass and flowers and quiet and follow the path to his monument where you respectfully remove your shoes before entering as you would for a religious mosque. In the center of a brick enclosure stands the black marble monument on which burns an eternal flame in his honor and atop are five rings of flowers that our guide said each represents one of the elements. This visit seems to be a perfect example of the extremes we found throughout our trip to India.

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Study Abroad India

Lecture July 21, 2014

On our first day at XIME, we were given a lecture by Mr. Chiranjiv Singh who is a former additional secretary. Hearing his lecture was a wonderful introduction to India because he effectively explained the vast diversity in language, religion and culture that we were going to experience. We often found ourselves looking for clues in people’s wardrobe that we saw that would point to the area they may have been from or what religion they followed. The information he gave was constantly reinforced throughout our trip. He explained some of the origins of the major religions and the key beliefs for each. We are used to diversity in the US because we are a melting pot of people from other countries. For India, it is the people of India embracing influences from so many other countries on their own culture over thousands of years. What a great way to inspire guide students to relate to another culture!