The Monday after my cycling adventures was a national holiday, but I had to get some work done, so I basically just hid in my hotel room and cranked away all day long. It really does suck trying to combine pleasure travel with business travel.
I had scheduled a little team building for Tuesday. One of my primary motivations for taking this trip was so that I could get to know the people who work for me a little. Prior to this, they were just typed words over IM or email, and it is impossible to manage people about whom you know nothing. I can't play to their strengths or minimize their weaknesses, let alone ensure that they are happy with their work. So, at the team's suggestion, we took an afternoon off and drove to a go-kart track that also offers a bunch of other activities - everything from archery and shooting to rock climbing, roller skating, and billiards.
As soon as we arrived, I knew that mistake number one was not grabbing a couple other groups from the office to come with us. Unlike similar places in the US, which have all kinds of corporate business going on during the day, we had the place to ourselves. And racing go-karts with 5 people really isn't all that entertaining. Still, a little adversity isn't the worst thing for getting to know one another, anyway. The karts were fun, but it was abundantly clear that none of my engineers has spent any time behind the wheel of a car of any kind. Poor Latha was inching around the track at about half speed. The guys got up to reasonable speed relatively quickly, but we were so spread out, it really had no vibe of competition whatsoever.
That's Venkat, who I actually had a little difficulty passingby the end of the session.
After the driving, Latha expressed an interest in trying out the roller skating. And quality skates they were, too - for 1962
Needless to say, none of the team had ever so much as placed a skate upon their foot. The 'rink' was just a slab of concrete with some painted tires defining an oval. Right from the start, I was seriously concerned about someone having their feet get out from under them and shatter their wrist when they hit the ground. The crashes happened - repeatedly. Fortunately, injuries were avoided.
There's the team leader, Vasudeva, just getting going.
That's Siva, joining the fray.
This is Venkat. This is his first job out of university.
The tragedy of the day was that as I was uploading all of the photos to my photo site on the following day, my hard drive crashed. I lost all but 14 photos from the day and every single one of the videos I shot. Of course, I'd already deleted them from my camera. I had a backup of my entire computer from the day before, so the only thing I lost was the photo gallery from this event.
The hilarity of this scene just cannot be conveyed by the image. All 3 of them moved exactly like zombies from a George Romero movie. I don't think one of them rolled a foot more than an inch in any direction, but they very carefully stepped around the track, arms akimbo, moving for all the world like the living dead. I was cracking up on the sidelines, with absolutely no way to convey why. Not a lot of Romero fans over here in India, I think.
It took Latha a while to find shoes that worked (they were about 4 sizes too big, though), and she could barely move without falling over, initially. I have absolutely no idea what is considered inappropriate contact between a man and a woman in India, but I had to grab her and lift her back onto her feet a couple of times just to get her over to this rail. She did eventually manage a complete circuit of the track, though, as did everyone else.
To be fair, those craptastic skates were pretty hard to skate on. The ones I had didn't even have the two axles parallel to each other. If I allowed my feet to roll, they would each describe a slightly different arc along the ground.
You can almost see in this picture that the wheels are cockeyed.
Here's Latha and I, having survived our circuit of the rink. I don't think roller skating was quite as much fun as Latha had imagined it might be.
I'm going to cut this short, as I've run out of pictures and none of the other 'events' was much more successful. The archery equipment was way too badly damaged to have a hope of shooting straight. Their experience with guns was such that I had to show them how to hold the air-rifle we were given to shoot with for that event - though I did prove to still be a crack shot, even with that crappy gun. I have no idea why I'm such a good shot, as I've only been shooting maybe a half dozen times in my life, but I tend to hit what I'm aiming at. Must be my far-sightedness coming into play.
The interesting part of the day, at least for me, was when I took them all out to dinner. I have very limited experience of the dining choices in Hyderabad, but my engineers don't make enough money to have experience with it at all, I'm afraid (I don't set their rates). So I figured if we were gonna do something outside their range of experience, we may as well go all the way, so I took them to a pretty fancy restaurant that does a fusion of indian, thai, and western cuisine.
Things got interesting right away. For starters, the menu was exclusively in english, and while they can read and write fluently, they weren't recognizing food names, especially since many of them were actually french and italian and such. So I had to interpret the menu for them as best I could. They eventually just asked me to order for them, so I tried to get a variety. We were 2 vegetarians and 3 omnivores, so I had to get things for everyone. For starters, we had some spicy fried chicken pieces drizzled with wasabi sauce and an asparagus, gruyere, puff pastry thing. The veg option went down really well. The whole table was pretty enthusiastic about them, and it was clear these were flavours that my team were not at all familiar with.
The shocker came when the entrees arrived. I can't find a menu online and it has been a week, so I couldn't tell you what I ordered anymore, but as soon as the food arrived, one thing came clear - nobody besides myself had ever eaten with cutlery before. I demonstrated as best I could, and they got the hang of it relatively quickly, though at one point, I did catch Siva pushing his food onto his knife with his fork and then lifting the knife to his mouth to eat. I figured the eating by hand thing that I had witnessed in the lunchroom was a preferential thing, not a total lack of familiarity with eating utensils!
The conversation around the dinner table revealed some more shockers. But first, some background.
At my mom's suggestion, I've been reading a wonderful novel called "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry. Much of the book is set in the time immediately after Indian independence and the partition of the country into India and Pakistan, as industrialization first started to gain a foothold and the rural population began to migrate into the cities in greater numbers. Several of the most important characters have to "break" out of their place in society (a "caste," which defined exactly what work you were eligible to do and who you could interact with, socially, in a strict heirarchy) in order to learn what was supposed to be a more useful skill in the city. Much of the book is spent illustrating the enormous difficulties they have to overcome in order to make the transition to city life, which included living in shanty town slums, abuse by police and government alike, and pretty much every hardship you can possibly imagine.
At the time of the dinner, I was in the midst of that very story, and what started to become clear to me is that every single one of my engineers is also the first of their family to leave a rural village to gain an education and come to the city. And much of their stories have direct parallels to the stories in the book. Granted, they aren't living in a garbage heap on the side of the road (though people still do, here), but they are living in tiny rooms in hostels on the outskirts of town. I didn't want to pry into just how good or bad conditions in the hostels may be, as I don't want to emphasize the difference between their lives and mine, but my suspicion is that the book has probably given me a pretty good idea of just how bad it may be. One long weekends like the one we just had, they all go back to their families in the village, which may only be 120-200km away, but which may take as much as 8 or 10 hours to travel to.
In fact, my team leader, Vasudeva, went home on Friday as a single man and came back on Tuesday engaged to be married to a woman he had only met that very weekend. And they'll be getting married by the end of the month! In fact, they've rushed the wedding a little in order make it possible for me to attend, though it isn't clear that I'll be able to, as it is still after my scheduled departure date. I'm incredibly honoured that he would make such an effort to have me attend his wedding. It won't be a lavish, 3 day party, as upper class indian weddings are rumoured to be, as he comes from a rural farming family. He says it will last from about 11am to sometime in early afternoon. So hopefully, the airline will be accommodating about a schedule change.
Anyway, back to my story. Between the arranged marriage and the first generation city-dwelling engineers, the book started to pick up a lot of relevance to me. Unfortunately, while beautifully written and incredibly poignant, it is also nothing if not depressing, and I'm afraid I now find it impossible to see the India around me without at least a little of the tint that was applied by the book.
I really tried to come to India with an open mind and open heart about what it would be like, but if I'm honest with myself, what I've seen so far really isn't all that pleasant. Admittedly, Hyderabad is anything but a center of tourism, which doesn't help things any. There is almost no expat presence, and socializing with my employees just isn't possible, both because of cultural inhibitions on their part and because, quite frankly, they can't really afford to have fun - a fact that I really don't like, to be honest. When I ask them what they do for fun, their only answer is the occasional Hindi movie. Between the hours spent commuting to and from work from their hostels on the outskirts of town and the long journeys home on the weekends, they have very little leisure time and I don't think they are overly inclined to spend their hard earned cash on frivolities (not that I'm not happy to treat them). On the one hand, I'm sure they are making more money than anyone else in their family can even dream of, but on the other, it is hard for me to justify, to myself, paying them so little. The only real fix I have available to me is to work to grow the company and lift everyone else along with it.
So that was the teambuilding day. It was actually pretty successful. The more junior team members are much more comfortable talking directly to me, and I know much more about them as individuals, so my major goals were accomplished, even if not in the manner I had expected.
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