Author: amw119

The trip to India was certainly incredible and it will have a lasting impact on me for the rest of my life.
XIME was great, they were extremely hospitable and the lectures were very informative. We had the opportunity to have discussions with the other students about India, China, and the US economies. We also had lots of tea breaks between lectures, the tea tasted great and helped to reenergize us.
The company visits were also great, they were very hospitable to us and let us in to almost every part of their facilities. Of my favorite were the visits to Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital and Infosys. Both had huge facilities located on huge plots of land. They were like mini towns.

My favorite sightseeing was the jungle in Coorg at the coffee plantation and white water rafting. The road leading to Coorg was the bumpiest, windiest, and longest road I have ever driven on. It was impossible to sleep because every new bump would jar me awake. The scenery was lush and green with trees and plants indigenous to India.We saw a little bit of wild life on the way there like an elephant and its baby and some white spotted deer. We had chicken biryani- a blend of spices, chicken, sauce and rice. Apparently it is quite labor intensive to make, it cooks for like half a day, and that is what makes the chicken so tender. It was delicious. White water rafting was one of the most fun things I’ve done and the scenery of tea plants surrounding our river was truly a beautiful sight. As Jessica mentioned, we all worked as a team very well to overtake the rapids.

The Taj Mahal in Agra was my second favorite sight. Agra was hotter than Bangalore and there seemed to be more poverty there on the streets than in Bangalore. It is also home to the Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri fort built by the Great Mughal Emperor Akbar, and the Agra Fort later finished by his successors. The Taj Mahal is truly a sight worth seeing. We went on a morning visit around 6:30am and the marble of the palace appeared normally white. When we finished the tour, the marble looked a little more white, this is because the marble is translucent and appears different depending on the exposure from the sun. It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz. The building has no paint, the decoration on the walls are made of in-laid semi-precious stones, creating a pattern. It is almost like a mosaic, but instead of grout between each piece, it is the marble itself. The entire structure is symmetric, except for the tomb of the deceased emperor next to the tomb of his wife inside. The emperor did not have plans for himself to be buried there, he built it out of love for his wife. However, his son had him buried there when Shah Jahan died. After our tour, we were taken to the place where the marble and semi-precious stone inlay is still made by the ancestors of the artists who worked on the Taj itself. A couple of us bought some octagonal-shaped slabs of marble with designs on them constructed of the semi-precious stones, and we were each given a complementary marble elephant.

Most of the food was delicious in India, I think I prefer the southern Indian food over the Northern, but there are some dishes that are the same for both areas like dal makhana, paneer, and naan. I really enjoyed tandoori chicken, the naan, chinese noodles, dal makhana, paneer, and a sweet called jalabi. Surprisingly, I didn’t get sick at all while on the trip, but after I returned home, that is a different story…

Adjusting to the culture I did not find an extremely hard challenge. However, we had guides and Dr. Vijay right alongside us advising us what to do and what not to. We attracted many stares, but it didn’t bother me very much. I knew they were curious, and I was staring around at them too. Most educated Indians were also unaffected by our differences, they have been exposed to so much American culture that it doesn’t surprise them to see us in their country.

One thing that really stuck out to me about India was the coexistence of life. Cars, bikes, people, cows, elephants, camels, and dogs all share the road together, with hardly any rules governing traffic. Everyone looks out for each other and all life forms are respected. There also didn’t seem to be any hostility, anger, or violence any place that we visited and everyone was very welcoming and happy. This was definitely a great experience and taught me to have more patience and gave me a different perspective on my life, the US, and our place in the world.

Infosys ‘s corporate headquarters is located in Bangalore and is the second largest IT company in India. It was started in 1983 by seven entrepreneurs – N. R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, Kris Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh, Ashok Arora, and N. S. Raghavan, with only $250 USD. The first product produced was banking software for Data Basics Corporation in New York. Infosys went public in 1993, started the Infosys Foundation, dealing with healthcare and social issues, in 1996, and was listed on the NASDAQ in 1999. Throughout the ‘90’s many global Infosys offices were opened, including sites in California and Europe. In 2004, the business model was realigned and revenue reached $1 Billion. Shortly after, in 2005, the Infosys Global Education Center was opened on the Mysore campus. Infosys is now home to over 130,000 employees and makes around $6 Billion in revenue.
On Friday, we all travelled to Mysore to visit Infosys’s training campus. The training campus is the largest corporate training hub in the world and has 11,000 rooms on campus to accommodate the trainees. It has a capacity to hold 14,000 people, with the help of the second Global Education Center opened in 2009. In addition, 5,000 employees work on-site in production, actually dealing with clients. Undergraduate students from India, mostly in the engineering and computer science fields, are recruited to train at the training campus for 23 weeks, this ensures that they are software engineers by the end of their stay. They go through a rigorous training course M-F, beginning with general training and then going into specialized technical training. After completion of the 23 weeks, they are randomly placed around the company sites into specific projects like Java and dotnet, based on company requirements. If the student performs poorly in the training course, they have to leave the campus. The percentage of poor performers is now between 3-5%. American graduates are also accepted, but they are not trained as long.
Living as a trainee at the Infosys training campus is like staying at a hotel resort. It is a 350 acre campus with 400 facilities, of which seven spell out “Infosys” if looked at from an aerial view, 7 food courts, and the largest corporate library in the world. The campus also provides 2 gyms, an outdoor swimming pool, several outdoor sport facilities including soccer, field and track, cricket, tennis, and badminton. There is also an indoor bowling alley and a table tennis room. There is a 24-hour employee care center with counselors to help keep employees and trainees in the best mental and physical shape so that they can perform their work at optimal level. The campus also boasts a large 4-screen movie theater, where it screens new releases on the weekends for the students.
I was blown away by how spectacular this training campus was and made me want to be recruited to work for Infosys. They really seem to care about their employees and make sure that they receive the best training possible to be able to perform their job, this is apparent in the fact that it spends $12,000 to train each trainee.

Mr. Rajogopal Kishore from Capgemini Financial Services visited us to discuss the Indian IT industry. Mr. Kishore had several years of experience within the IT field, including working at Infosys. He briefed us on the timeline of the IT industry in India, which began in the 1980’s. During this time, India was in a major budget deficit and needed to seek out a way to propel its economy. Indians traveled to America offering programming services to companies, for a fraction of the price they were paying in-house. The Indians made improvements to the software and began to offer maintenance, enhancement, and creation of new software. They then began to offer many more technological services like design of software, development requirements, architecture, and customer support. Now, Indian IT companies take care of the entire back office maintenance for American companies. In 2002, India started consulting and researching and looking into other countries to do IT services for, which led to a clash of cultures. Presently, a lot of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and outsourcing of call centers is actually done in Manila, Philippines because they speak much better English and have knowledge of the IT industry. India is then able to focus on Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) instead. Another point he made is that the IT industry will start to flat line in the future, rather than incline due to employees staying longer within the company.

Mr. Kishore also spoke of clouds and the IT sector. Company applications can be put onto a cloud and can be run from anywhere, and the company can also more easily and efficiently host their CRM applications in the cloud. He states that clouds will positively affect the industry and that some government regulation is needed to help with security and privacy issues. However, he remains that creative destruction is needed to bring about change in the right direction.

Some advice that Mr. Kishore gave us as international students traveling back the United States is that we as a generation should fully embrace collaborating with India. India greatly looks up to America and sees us as positive, energetic, and innovative, but we do not embrace them as freely. Our job is to learn how to do business better with India and to bring about understanding of their business styles. For instance, they are generally afraid to express themselves because they do not disagree with their elders, therefore we need to be clear about what we want them to do and the deadlines we want them to meet. If they express any doubt, we need to find a way for them to realistically meet deadlines, rather than them telling us they can and then approaching us on the day it is due and telling us they can’t. We also need to communicate well with them, over communicate actually, and have sessions to discuss how integral their job is to American business. We should also praise their good work and make them feel like they are worthwhile, because then collaboration in the future between the two nations can be an even more grand thing.

I finally arrived in India after a series of delays and long flights. Although I was an entire day late to India,I had the luxury of getting to spend a day in Germany. I didn’t get to explore the city, but I did have some authentic German food, much of which I couldn’t read the title of, but it was good! They serve a lot of meat- frankfurters and meatballs, and breads. 

Today was my first official taste of getting to see Bangalore in the daylight. We met Prof. Philip, president of XIME, in the courtyard for some tea, and he gave us some background information on his education in India, as well as some statistics about Indian business schools. He then introduced us to Mr. Selvam George, chairperson of 5E Sepraise, who was our first speaker of the day. We headed up to the lecture room and George explained to us the nature of his company. Surpraise is a splice of the words service and praise. 5E Serpraise is a comprehensive human resources training initiative for organizations. The fives E’s are as follows- Educate corporate employees through training programs and employees through certificate programs, Enrich executives through gainful placements, Enjoy the subconscious learning and outsource for the fun activities of the organizations, Empathize-enable social service organization through professional management, and Energize- enabling people towards superordinate and self actualisation goals.

George also compared and contrasted Indian management methods to those of Japan and the United States. He also touched on the differences between traditional Indian management styles and contemporary styles. He said that today, most companies have adopted Western values plus mixed management methods from the leading nations, rather than Eastern values and Western (top) methods.