Skip to main content

Vendor Hunting In India

When I met my old manager for lunch a few weeks ago, she had recently returned from a two week business trip to India. The agenda was to size up the different outsourcing vendors who were in the fray for a sizeable multi-year contract. The relationship with the current vendor was souring rapidly. I asked her about her impression of India and of the businesses that she had gone to assess for fit with the company's needs.

Most of the positives were around the great tradition of Indian hospitality and how she had been treated like a queen. Maybe that scored even higher than it would have otherwise done because she is African American. She must have been pleasantly surprised that our colonial hangover does not predispose us to elevate fair skin over dark.

I hated to burst her bubble by telling her about our national obsession with fairness and products that claim to enhance it. I did not tell her that desis are savvy enough to look past skin color when business deals are involved specially if the customer is a woman and a gorgeous one at that.

Being her first trip to the country, she had not known what to expect but having been able to fly too and fro between a number of cities left her impressed. She had not counted on travel within the country being as simple. She could not stop gushing over the hotels all of which were among the best in the city in question. Between airports, chauffeured cars and the swank office complexes, she had tasted the best slice of the Indian pie - she realized the experience had been far from holistic.

As far as the actual purpose of her trip, she was not quite sure if she had accomplished what she had set out to. The facilities had been visited, the big honchos and the line managers had been met with . Did she feel more comfortable about recommending one outfit over the other based on her on her impressions ? She did not know. She was considering making a follow-up trip in 2007. I asked her what the high points of her trip had been. "The food and the jewelry" was her immediate response. I noticed the three strand pearl necklace she had on. "I got this from Hyderabad" she told me.

She may fare better on the second trip if she is able to sift out the many distractions that India presents to a foreigner visiting for the first time. Familiarity may however promote too intimate an understanding of the country and its unique challenges that could come in the way of dispassionate decision making.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more