February 10, 2007
Mumbai and the Marriott
I'm going to have a few more posts over the next couple of days about India as I get a chance to write them up. There's just so much to say.
Our last three days in India were packed full. By the time I got on the plane Friday morning in Mumbai, I think I'd slept something like nine hours in the previous three days. I was asleep before take-off and ended up sleeping most of both flights, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Tuesday was our day at Satyam. The drive to the campus was a good example of the dichotomous India: We passed row after row of shacks on the way there, shanty towns filled with cows and camels, and very primitive communities. Then, once inside the gate, it was an oasis: a golf course, helipad, and even a zoo, complete with roosters, peacocks (including a rare white peacock), deer, emus, and love birds. Flags from each of the 53 countries where Satyam does work line the main drive. We spent most of the day listening to panel discussions in the center of the campus, and I stumbled across two great ex-pats from the Washington area who were the first westerners to take top positions in India with Satyam. During the lunch break, several of us sat out by the campus swimming pool in the sun—the granite benches were much too hot to sit upon, so we all sat on our notebooks.
Tuesday night we had a very nice dinner poolside back at the Hotel Kakatiya Sheraton where we were staying with a bunch of the Satyam executives. Afterwards Kara and I headed out into the city for a random and totally unsafe autorickshaw ride. Alan on our trip had done it the night before and it really sounded like fun. Our driver was completely baffled by our request—the idea that anyone would just go out and drive around was really confusing. He took us out for a while—zipping through the darkened streets, up onto the highways, down onto the surface streets through the neighborhoods—and then we went asked to go back to the hotel he ended up pulling over and asking someone to interpret. The man on the street kept saying, "But your driver says he picked you up at the Sheraton. Now you want to go back there?" Eventually we worked it out and we made it back in one piece.
Early Wednesday morning found us at a Verizon call center in Hyderabad, one of 13 Verizon has around the world. This one operates from 7 a.m. to 12 midnight EST, and so was just winding down as we showed up at about 7:30 a.m. The place was filled with amusing peppy posters, encouraging people to be friendly and learn about cultural events in the U.S. Evidently the staff is encouraged to read CNN.com each day so they know what's going on in the U.S. that day. The call center is run by Nipuna, the BPO (business process outsourcing) wing of Satyam. Across the street from the IT park was the office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), that was literally bordered by shanties.
Then we were off to the Reuters Overseas Development Centre, which does a lot of IT infrastructure and some of the strategic planning for Reuters. The company has been one of the leaders in offshoring strategic and back-end functions and has a major center in Bangalore.
Wednesday night was a mess: The plane we were supposed to take to Mumbai blew a tire upon landing in Hyderabad so it was delayed and then canceled. We scrambled around, running the length of the airport to get our bags and rebook our flights. When the discount airline, Spicejet, with the next flight didn't accept AmEx, we started handing over credit cards to try to book the flight. I'm, in retrospect, happy to say that my Mastercard won't let me charge several thousand dollars in plane tickets in the middle of the night in the middle of India. We finally arrived in Mumbai at our hotel around 1:30 a.m., and I nearly had a break down over not being able to get my internet working. By the time I fell asleep, it'd been another 22-hour day.
Thursday morning we awoke in daylight. I was so confused and disoriented since this was the first morning of the trip that I'd awaken after sunrise. This was the scene out my hotel window. After a drive through Mumbai in a bright yellow school bus of sorts, we spent the day at the NASSCOM convention, which is the major trade association for IT/outsourcing companies in India. The convention was held in the Grand Hyatt, and when lunch came around Kara and I excitedly had a pizza lunch in the hotel's Italian restaurant. I like Indian food as much as anyone, but my stomach wasn't used to eating it three meals a day.
For our last night in India we headed to the J.W. Marriott hotel in Mumbai, which everyone we talked to singled out as one of (if not "the") night hotspot for Bollywood stars, over-the-top weddings, and nightlife. It was, indeed, one of the most impressive hotels I've seen anywhere in the world, and since it borders the ocean, there's a beach just beyond the amazing swimming pool. We had an incredible dinner at the courtyard buffet—probably the best meal of the trip—and it vastly improved my grumpy and exhausted mood.
Then it was back to the airport, one final glimpse of the Mumbai streets and the endless chaos and noise, one final run through the bureaucratic rigamole that is any process in India, and then back aboard Air France for the 9,000-mile journey home.
> Here's my full third set of photos.
