From Kelley To Delhi

Crouching in the velvet cream colored sofa of the college reception hall, I was dreaming of the bed lying idle in my hostel room, which after a long day of mine in the class, was enticing me cruelly to embrace it and forget about the High-Tea arranged in the evening to confluence us with students from Kelley School of Business, USA.Just when my body posture was gradually taking in the safety of the sofa, the students from Kelley gushed into the hall with such energy and vibrancy that I, as if in a reflex action, sprang to my feet at once and rushed towards them with my right hand extended.



The first person I met was Ben - an executive from General Motors – who was present here in the capacity of a Guest Lecturer on the subject cross-culture management. The first person I am meeting in a supposedly students’ meet is not a student?! But my reservation quickly dissipated with the first crack of joke and we started conversing about my experience in Chicago and about his experience in India (that too in the middle of summer). That day was recorded as the hottest day of April of this year! Being with GM for last 18 years, he shared stories of its heydays at Hummer and rough days of bankruptcy.  And suddenly in the midst of this confabulation, he took a sip in his tea and asked me a question very seriously. “What you think would be the biggest problem one foreigner would face while starting a business in India?” Okay! I wanted to consolidate all the reasons and present it to him in such a manner that it wouldn't tarnish my country's image. But at the end I couldn’t and I let the question go. We exchanged Facebook ids (Business Cards are passé these days) and departed so as to meet other people present there.

I moved around the hall for few minutes and was pleasantly surprised to notice the energy with which my classmates were conversing with our guests. I had to brush aside my compulsion of perturbing any group to make myself a part of the discussion going on in that group. There I met Yvette and Hiroko. Yvette had a very interesting profile of IT-Journalist in Michigan, USA and I bet because of the profile’s abstruseness she had to clarify it to everyone she was meeting – including me! With Hiroko – an intern in an I-Bank in USA – We shared a lot of perspectives about each other’s countries. Though in terms of IT USA is now much closer to India than Japan, but geographically, historically and culturally it’s the other way round. At one time, as it happened that both of us were rebuking our own countries but were fervently praising each other’s.

And amidst all this share of emotions and experiences, the mighty mosquitoes coerced us to move from the reception hall and settle ourselves in the computer lab room. But as you know, these indigenous creatures knew their way to the lab better than us and have means to quickly reach there too!

Anyway in the lab we were joined by Max, an executive of Phillips Morris, Japan, who was such a vivacious person that from thereon it was a “Maxathon”. He steered our gossips, at will, from wild topics such as mosquitoes’ physique in Japan vis-à-vis India and cultivation of various rice varieties in Japan to serious topics as work culture gap between India, US and Japan and policy challenges in Japan’s present agriculture environment.

I was a bit drowsy at 5 in the evening, yet here I was almost 3 hours later deep in conversation and it was only around 8:30 PM that I felt the hunger pangs.

As I departed it felt as if a group of friends who had met after a long time had a deeply satisfying discussion and now it was time to return back to the world each one of us had come from.

-Subhradeep Bhatacharya