Relocating & adjusting to life in India again ... PART 4

Its been one month @ Samsung and in Bangalore.

I have read quite a lot about returning Indians finding it difficult to adjust to the Indian work culture in different blogs / forums. So far things are not crazy as I thought it would be.

At work - I’ve had one on one meetings with the department manager and with a HR person in charge of new recruit adjustment. Both made sure that I was getting along / adjusting well in India and the job. Both of them were very impressed when I told them that I was not going to make any comparisons with life & work culture in America vs India till I hit the six-month mark and that I was going to take things as they come.

Some differences that I see in the work culture here –

In India, you end up spending more hours at work. That does not mean you are working all the time you are in. It includes breakfast, lunch and one snack/coffee break.

It is more of quantity work than quality work.

There are more hierarchies and small requests have to go through many layers for approval.

Being a programmer (in my case), I spend more time following procedures and doing lots of non-developer work.

There are more people on a team than really required. In the US 3 people would do the work of what 8 people do here. The reason I was given - high attrition rates in India.

If you shed the “I am the America Returnee & I am the most important guy” image, colleagues / teammates are pretty friendly and helpful.

I will stop with work related comparisons here and talk about my adaptation of Zen Habits.

I had started simplifying and de-cluttering my lifestyle over the last 2 years in the US and I have managed to continue the effort here. Relocation to India has helped immensely to get rid of a lot of stuff I don’t need. In Bangalore, all I own are some clothes, a laptop (mac) with mobile Internet connection, a bi-cycle & a motorcycle, a non-smart cellphone that acts as a camera, radio / mp3 player & torch (LED flash light). Believe me when I say this – the torch has been the handiest feature in my cell phone. When I was in the US, a colleague who had relocated to the US from India had a cell phone with a torch and I remember laughing at him and he had mentioned the same thing. Now I know what he meant. It took me a long time to convince myself to get a mac. But considering the power cuts here – it is one of the best things I bought. I rented a fully furnished apartment – it saved me the trouble of buying furniture and basic home appliances. I carry my own cloth bag around and have reduced my plastic bag usage to minimum.

Most of you reading my blog now might already know that I go to work by cycle 3-4 days a week. I was scary has hell when I stepped out of the cycle shop with a bike in hand. But in the very first couple of days, I realized that it was an awesomely awesome thing that I had started. Surprisingly, there are few people in my office who commute to work by cycle. The traffic here is scary and I still don’t have the guts to drive a car.

A couple of interesting incidents with the cycle –

I went to a restaurant to get some take out food. There were a few guys sitting on their fancy motorcycles – a Bullet & an Apache. I parked my cycle right between them and turned off the rear flash-light (a blinking red light below the seat of my cycle that lets people know that there is a cyclist here) and walked in. One of the guys came to up me and asked me if it was a GPS / GPRS / some other cycling paraphernalia that I have not even heard of. He said he had seen some fancy stuff in Germany. I laughed and told him that I was less gadget savvy and it was a just a blinking light and both of us burst out laughing.

My cycle is plain simple – no gears & old school design. I had a very similar cycle when I was in my school days (wow that was in 1994-95). When I stopped at signals – on multiple occasions, people have asked me how comfy it felt to cycle. There was one guy who said the old days are coming back as more people were going back to cycling. One other guy was envious – he was telling that cycle was the fastest way to get around and I could not agree more with him.

more to follow ...