Soon after I joined my current job, I volunteered to contribute for an IT newsletter. It is intended primarily to be circulated via email within the entire IT workforce, about 700 of them in US. I was enthusiastic that this was a great oppurtunity for me to try something different. I was disappointed after I spoke to the editing team that the newsletter carried only news and articles about internal IT systems and very little outside of it. I thought I could write interesting articles about new technologies, but there was no room for it. I am too new to the group to introduce any change yet.
As a part of this group, we had the regular review meeting today for our march newsletter to review the draft version. I was excited when I read the headline for an article, the read something like ‘from burger and salads to chutneys and samosas – a 5000 mile trip to India’. A interesting headline indeed. My boss’s boss, a vice president, had made a trip to India to visit our offshore partners. I rushed to read the details. As expected there were moments of continious surprises for him all along his trip, right from stray children pestering for a dollar in mumbai airport to free roaming cows in chennai. They covered an impressive three cities, mumbai, chennai, pune in just 4 days. They didnt miss anything and encountered every thing inbetween awful and awesome. They were natuarally bewildered by the ‘World Famous’ Indian traffic, Temples, Bullock Carts, folks in lungis climbing wooden scaffolds trying to build a mass transit rail system! and a whole lot of fascinating India.
They summed up with the usual statement, ‘India manages well between eastern and western cultures, poor and rich, educated and illeterate’. I closed the newsletter with mixed feelings. After all, India would have retained all the riches she ever needed, if not for the western civilizations bleeding thirst for supremacy. It was like a tornado sucking up everything it sees on its way to ruining !
