Headed South

On Wednesday we started the trek across the country from New Delhi in north-central India to Pondicherry in southeast India. It started with us checking out of the hotel. As a part of that process, I asked to confirm our reservations for our return stay. Of course, I had to move from the check out desk to the check in desk. Since, as we’ve already discovered, there’s no shortage of manpower in India, they have separate people to do the checking out and checking in.

Good thing I checked. They had almost everything wrong. The previous night I made reservations for Dave and me both, but the next morning, only I had a reservation and it was for only one night instead of the two we needed. According to their records, I made the reservation on the internet, which I didn’t. They asked (or told) me at least 5 times that I had. It was a very frustrating experience. Finally I handed them my business card and said fix it and email me the reservation information. We were getting late.

The trip through the airport was quite something. We had to show our itineraries before we could even get inside the building. Then we had to go through their baggage security check. They run your checked baggage through the x-ray machine before checking it.

Remember all the salt I bought? I forgot to mention that I had some of it in my carry-on luggage when we left Paris, and it nearly got confiscated. Apparently the little vials of crystals looked a little too suspicious. They eventually let me have them, and I swore at that point to be sure and have them in my checked baggage from then on. But with the security screening method in Delhi, they found the salt in my checked baggage and asked me what it was. Since the language on the containers was French, they couldn’t tell for sure what it was. Again, though, after some period of deliberation they decided it was ok, sealed up my bags to prevent me from putting anything else inside, and let me go.

The flight to Chennai was uneventful, but pretty awful. The rows were very close together, I suppose to account for the generally smaller Indian stature. But for a big guy like me, it was extraordinarily cramped. And since it was a 2 ½ hour flight, it was a lot of unpleasantness.

We arrived at the airport in Chennai and almost immediately spotted Shorav Kasera and Mohan from Integra. Shorav is the new (compared to last year) account manager for Thomson and Mohan is the fellow we had as a driver last year. Mohan is a fellow with bright eyes and a great big smile who wants you to think he doesn’t know any English, but I suspect he knows way more than he lets on. They went outside while we collected our baggage.

We had about a 2-hour car trip to Pondicherry, where Integra’s offices are. It was a long, but uneventful car ride. We saw a couple of monkeys along the side of the road, which was kind of cool. We also saw lots of people wearing orange clothing walking along the side of the road. Shorav explained that there was a festival at a local temple, and Shorav explained that it was an auspicious occasion and orange is an auspicious color.

We checked in at Hotel le Dupliex, where we stayed on our previous trip. It’s a French colonial building with its lobby and restaurant outside in the courtyard. The rooms have 20-foot ceilings with a little loft area on a “second floor” in the room where the television is. The walls and floor are covered in teak wood and the furnishings are all antiques. It’s quite a stunning place. Our stay last year was memorable for its quality. This year it was memorable for other reasons. My air conditioning was not working when we arrived and the power in my room went out twice in the first 3 hours or so. Power outages are a fairly common occurrence, and that’s what I thought it was at first. But when I realized that the air conditioning (which had by now been fixed) was still running, I figured a fuse or circuit breaker had blown. Anyway, everything eventually settled down and we had lunch and dinner in our rooms while we refined our training materials for the next round.

The next morning, after a shower with no hot water, we headed over to Integra’s new facilities. Wow, what an impressive location! They have one of the tallest buildings in Pondicherry, and in fact, we learned they are the largest private employer there. Their previous facilities were in 14 or so buildings which were connected via the network, but which made for some difficulties for groups who needed to work together. Their new facility is 6 stories tall with plenty of room to grow. One of the first people we met was Bhuvana, one of the trainees from last year.

The class was made up of a few “repeats” from last year, and about a dozen new folks. We were pleased to se that a couple of project managers joined as well. We started with the review of the “old” training material and then launched in to the new workflow. As with the previous locations people’s eyes lit up when they saw how complete the information package is in terms of both scope and detail.

After class, we had a tour of the facility with Shorav and Shyam. We learned that Integra has an industrial engineering department where they analyze tasks done by their staff, set norms for how long a task should take, and then analyze the data that is returned on completed projects. They also have a robust workflow management system that charts the progress of work through their system. We talked about populating project-level information directly out of the PPF and eventually accepting two-way feeds between their system and IPS.

We’ve discovered something very interesting about elevators (at least some elevators) here. Manufacturers seem to load only one song into the music system for their elevators. The elevator at Integra features a musak version of the Carpenters’ “Yesterday Once More.

Then Shorav took us on a bit of a sightseeing trip. We visited a very famous temple to Ganesh (a deity depicted as an elephant), where we were ushered inside (after removing our footwear), and were then treated to a service that concluded with us receiving a blessing from the priest, complete with ashes on our foreheads and a gift of a flower from Ganesh. An incredible experience we’d never attempt to do on our own. We stopped next at a couple of Catholic churches. One was Sacred Heart, I believe…not sure about the other, but it was painted a salmon pink sort of color. We went inside this one since there was no service going on. We were surprised to see the driver come along with us and cross himself and genuflect as he entered the church. Shorav explained that it’s very common for Hindus to worship in Christian churches. Since theirs is a polytheistic society, adopting another god or another style of worship is not a huge leap.

We then met up with Shyam and Sagayrag, Innodata’s CTO for dinner. We ate at the restaurant atop the Promenade, a hotel we’ll be staying at next time. The restaurant is open-air, and that, plus the food and company, made for a very pleasant end to the day…if you ignore the fact that the elevator was made by the same company as Integra’s. “When I was young, I listened to the radio waitin’ for my fav’rite songs…”