I recently returned from India where I spent 10 days on a business trip to Bangalore. This city was an incredible experience at every level. Having never been to India, I wasn't sure what to expect, but every day brought new insights and I am eager to return soon. Personal - The Indians I met brought new meaning to the word hospitality. Before this trip I thought the Arabs were the most gracious hosts; but the Indians were as generous and thoughtful as the Lebanese, Palestinians and Jordanians I know -- and then some. Not an hour went by that someone wasn't wondering if I was: comfortable, hungry, tired, bored, thirsty, lonesome, overwhelmed, etcetera. At the end of every day we would start to plan out the next day and they would ask me when I wanted to start our meetings. When I would say "whenever it's convenient for you," they looked at me as if I was speaking Swahili. They didn't have any ego or pretense in their corporate hierarchies. When we went to visit fab shops or engineering firms, CEOs took time out of their day to lead the tours. No task was too menial, no kindness was overlooked. If you are looking to go somewhere with a "personal touch," I recommend this area of India highly. One anecdote: We were producing a prototype that required powder coating (a process for painting metal parts) and one of the parts wouldn't be ready until 30 minutes after the powder coating shop closed. The owner of the shop was telling our chief engineer that he would need to close up and go home since we were already late. I pulled our engineer to the side and told him to offer the man double the price of the entire coating job to stay open the extra 30 minutes. He looked at me in an almost hurt way and said "In India, the most important thing is not always the money. A personal touch is always the best thing." He told the man that I wanted to go out and have a glass of tea with them while we waited for the last part. The man was very happy that we invited him and kept his shop open for us. I felt like such a crass American.
Cultural - I only took one day to tour and was able to visit the palace at Mysore, a wetlands sanctuary, a Hindu temple and a Christian church. There are only about 25 million Christians in India (about 2% of the population) but they are heavily concentrated in Southern India and so Bangalore and Mysore have many churches. I saw a dozen or so large churches and cathedrals in the course of my normal travels. The Indian Orthodox Christian church is not Protestant or Catholic. It was established around AD 48 by St. Thomas who visited Kerala (adjoining state to Karnatka - Bangalore's state) and as such is more like the Greek Orthodox church in it's history and organization. The firm that hosted my visit has several hundred employees who are split about 40% Christian, 40% Hindu and 20% Muslim. My driver was Hindu but had a crucifix dangling from his mirror while one of the Christian executives had Hindu idols in the pockets of the car doors. Bangalore also has significant Muslim neighborhoods in which Christians and Hindus shop and work.
Economy - Demographers predict that India will overtake China some time in the next couple of decades in terms of population. In terms of education, I think India is probably ahead already. If Bangalore is any indication of what's going on in the rest of the country (and it's probably not, Bangalore leads rather than follows the nation in terms of high-tech) India will surpass the Chinese sooner in engineering and software design. Notwithstanding what I just wrote about the wide variety of cultures in India, the clear national religion is education. Every family strives to send their children to the best schools, institutes and universities. The colleges may exist in a sea of poverty, but their campuses are pristine islands of learning and achievement. Every Indian I spoke with told me of either a) their educational pedigree or b) the educational achievements of their children. In India education is wealth. Money is not nearly as important in the culture as education.
One day we needed to go shopping for some timing belts and bearing assemblies. The streets were lined with book vendors who had hundreds of titles stacked 6 feet in the air. A few were novels, some more were business non-fiction; but 80% were science, software and engineering titles like "Fluid Dynamics," "Mechanical Devices," "Programming in Perl," etcetera. Chemistry, Physics, Software, Electronics were all subjects about which you can buy scores of texts from a hundred Bangalore street vendors. The neighborhood where we were building our prototype was filled with hundreds of machine shops with lathes, casts, drills, punches, presses, brakes, etcetera. Interspersed with these shops are offices with engineers working on the most advanced CAD/CAM/CAE packages turning out elegant solutions for customers around the world. Outside, the streets are dirt, the sewers are open and barefoot children and livestock share the roads with trucks, scooters, motorcycles and bicycles. 100 yards away, HP is building a 2.5 million square foot state of the art software center. Progress is coming to India in this way. Dirt roads take educated engineers to cottage industry offices where they design and manufacture software and hard goods for GE Healthcare, IBM, Microsoft, John Deere, Catepillar, HP and a host of other multi-national companies.
One company we visited had 10 advanced CNC machine tools making parts for Canadian and US customers. In my conversation with the CEO of the company he told me that he had started his business in a small shed (garage) 6 years ago and now has 180 employees in three facilities. (The funny part of that conversation was that he was showing me a part coming off the line and told me that it was made for a company that he was visiting next month in WV. Turns out the company is right up the road from my farm.)
India does not see itself as a low-cost producer. The firm I was visiting has architects on contract to do renderings in the Phillipines and Chile where they believe the quality is higher and the wages equal or lower. They are looking to Bolivia and Vietnam for accounting and to other countries besides China for manufacturing. They recognize that their political infrastructure makes it hard to compete with China in manufacturing and would like to establish themselves as a knowledge-based economy.
Political - I didn't get to spend too much time on politics while I was there except to note that one day we were warned not to go to a certain area of town because of a riot happening there. There was a march of Muslim "students" protesting the killing of Sadaam Hussein. This protest turned into a riot with shops sacked and cars burned. Bangalore is in the stable South of the country. This sort of thing is pretty rare. While I was there, several people were kidnapped and killed in the north of the country where Muslim/Hindu tensions are much more pronounced. We don't hear much about this in the US, but it is a serious and ongoing conflict. Likewise, the Indo-Pakistani conflict is as serious a threat to regional stability as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to Middle East peace.
There are not many countries that I feel compelled to return to immediately, but India is definitely such a place.
