Scott Visits India

Food, Sleep, And the State of Things

May 18th, 2006 at 11:42 am

I think the worst thing about working until 3am is that in order to get 8 hours of sleep it means I have to sleep in until 11am. And the worst part about that is it means I miss breakfast, by far my favorite meal of the day. Then again, maybe the reason I am craving breakfast is because I have chosen from the same three things for lunch for 5 days now. You can only eat so many “chicken and cheese on brown toast with no sauce” sandwiches for lunch, and only so much Pizza Hut for dinner. Street vendor food, here I come! Just kidding of course, I don’t want “Delhi belly” as we had another American here tell us that is what the feeling was called.

To answer one of the questions in the comments, we are working these hours right now to try and cover part of the work day here in India and part of the work day in the US. We are suppose to be working 3pm-12am, but we seem to get out later and later each night. Next week we will actually be working something like 5:30pm-3:30am to match East Coast time exactly. Should be interesting how my body adjusts to that for four days before returning home.

While I am answering questions, Abou it is interesting you bring up how they respect the employees personal time here because basically…they don’t. In fact, last night when some of the host company employees were leaving, they were making sure we knew we had their cell numbers and could call them at any hour - they were always available. I made a comment about how in the US, a lot of people don’t use their cell phones while at work, and in my old department it was even against policy to use them. However, people here will often be in meetings or standing there talking to you, get a call on their cell phone and answer it in the meeting (and remember, these meetings are 10 people in a tiny room all standing up), trying to move off to the side, but not necessarily even leaving the room. The employee last night had said that in India (at least at his company), they do not have personal time and he was hoping this was something that they would pick up from western culture!

OK, here if a good story for you to close out the post. Yesterday on our way to work, our driver Sandeep (who speaks very little English) out of the blue said, “Do you like me?”. We sat there confused for a second, not entirely sure what he was asking us and how our response would be taken. Sure, he had been a good driver, always there on time, nice enough to smile at, but we can’t really have a conversation with him. So eventually we decided on “yes” and went with that. Then he told us if we went to Agra (where the Taj Mahal is) that he wanted to drive us. Ahh, ok. So he was trying to ask us if we were happy with his services and if we wanted to hire him for the trip. I can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. He sat there at the office waiting for almost 12 hours yesterday for us to be done with work. Yes, I know it is his job, but I will help at least one person here right before I leave and reward him for being a good driver.

I did manage to take some pictures yesterday on the way to work. We still haven’t gotten away long enough to do any site-seeing, but hopefully this weekend we will get some of that in.