Author: sara28

Prior to our company visit to Accenture August 18th, we attended three lectures at XIME.   The first session focused on managment education in India and featured the president of XIME, Professor J. Phillip.

The business schools in India are some of the largest in the world and graduate more than 160,000 students annually.    Since there are so many schools, there is a lot of competition and demand for high performers.  Most of these schools are located in south India where there is a high literacy rate among women and population growth is less.  What I found most interesting was when Professor Phillip lectured about David McClelland‘s theory that people have three basic drives; achievement, affiliation and power.  A business professionall will likely be less successful if he or she has an improper balance of any of these aspects.

The second lecture focused on cross cultural aspects of doing business in India.  Some interesting subjects that were covered included India’s many red tape heavy government procedures, how many Indians view the castes today, and the how India’s government and businesses got to where they are today.

The final lecture was given by Dr. M. P. Ravindra, an employee of Infosys on sabbatical at XIME for the next year; it covered Information Technology (IT) in India.  His lecture focused on the evolution of IT in India and it’s current challenges to achieving greater success.

Later that afternoon we visited the company Accenture, which is an innovative back-end software provider, emerging technology leader and provider of other customer services such as software development life cycle consulting.  We were able to test out their latest technology related to consumer services.  They also overviewed how they provide some of their accounting services such as accounts payable processing.  I was impressed with their many layers of security assurance and controls for handling their customer’s information.

We left our hotel at 5:15 a.m. for a sunrise tour of the Taj Mahal.  After buying our tickets we zipped past the mosquitos and hawkers on an extended golf cart to the security entrance.  Unfortunately, Kelly’s Flat Stanley was confiscated at entry, they interpreted his flat paper existance as a toy.

The Taj Mahal is a Mughal mausoleum built by the heartbroken Shah Jahan after his favorite wife  Mumtaz passed away giving birth to his 14th child.

Taj facts:

• It took 22 years to complete and more than 22,000 craftsman, each focusing on a specific decorative art.
• Specialists were brought in as far away as Europe to produce the intricately carved marble screens inside.
• The marble inlaid designs are semiprecious stones, each painstakingly formed using a stone wheel.
• The four slender minarets at each corner of the Taj are designed to lean slightly away from the mausaleum so that if there is an earthquake they fall away.
• On the west side is a mosque and to the east is an identical building that was used as a guest palace.
• Shah Jahan began minor construction of an identical, but black marble Taj for himself across the river from the white marble Taj, but the Shah was imprisoned by his son and unable to complete it.  The Shah was eventually interred next to his wife in 1666.

After we toured the Taj, we drove to the domestic airport to board a plane to Bangalore, where we will stay at XIME University.

On the way to Agra, we stopped at Fatepur Sikri, a ghost city  with palaces and a mosque that were abandoned over 400 years ago after the people living there suffered from water shortages.  The mosque is actually still used for worship.  At its prime, this city was larger than London and was constructed by Akbar the Great, regarded as the greatest of the Mughals.

All of the structures we saw were intricately detailed and made out of red sandstone.  At one time the designs included precious stones and gold, but this was plundered long ago.  Some of my favorite highlights of this site were…

• The white marble courtyard had a life size parchisi court with a place in the middle for the king to sit; he would use his concubines as pawns.
• The Diwan-i-Am (Hall of Public Audience) is where Akbar dispensed justice when citizens would present their cases to him.
• Akbar was known for his respect of other religions.  He counted Christians and Hindus among his many wives and several of the pillars at this site have images of different religions on them.
• Close by, there is a monument called Hiran Minar, made to honor elephants killed in battle, stone tusks point out of the tall pillar.

Later this day we toured Agra Fort, on the bank of the Yamuna river, which was also begun by Akbar in 1565.  His subsequent generations added to this structure, some using intricately detailed white marble and colorful inlaid, painstakingly carved stones.  It was originally made as a military fort, but later upgraded to a palace.  It also served as a prison for Shah Jahan when his youngest son seized the throne after Shah Jahan made his older brother king.

When it was upgraded to a palace it was decorated with gold and precious stones, but these were plundered over the years by the Marathas, Jats, Nadir Shah and finally the British.  Some of my favorite spots included…

• The Shish Mahal (Mirror Palace) has every wall inlaid with mirrors of varying sizes.  It is said that a single lamp would illuminate all of the mirrors when properly placed.
• Musamman Burj and Khas Mahal is a white-marble octagonal tower where Shah Jahan was imprisoned during the last eight years of his life.  He could only look at the shrine to his deceased wife (Taj Mahal) using a mirror from this place as his site was failing at the time.
• The king’s bathtub (Hauz-i-Jehangir) is in front of the palace, it stands about 10 feet tall with little steps on the side to climb up; it was carved from one piece of stone.

So far India has been so increadible; elephants around every corner, snake charmers, intricate decorations (even trucks on the highway) – it’s saturated with colorful art and culture.