Well, just next week, on Friday 19th we will be flying to Bangalore. Me and four other guys. We will be working at Accenture as part of our summer Internship. Three of us have just finished the second year of Computer Science at the ETH Zürich. We are all studying at the ETHZ, the others being master students. Mr. Kossmann is the professor who organized this internship. He contacted Accenture and convinced them to take us for an internship. We had the pleasure of having him as a professor in the lecture Introduction to Databases, and I know he would love to come with us and do the internship himself, so I just want to thank him for giving us the opportunity.
I will be keeping you updated on our experience about the internship and about the people and culture in India. I have never been to India before, not even Asia, so this is really going to be a first for me. I have been reading Kulturschok Indien this last week, which is a really nice lecture, but I have been warned to take everything in the book with a pinch of salt, as Bangalore is a very modern city, and the book is mostly based on the rural life.
I would like to write here some of the clichés I have read, just to make a comparison at the end of the internship and be able to see how much of what you normally read about a place is true.
- India is overpopulated, you will see children everywhere
- People are very outgoing, they speak a lot, and they will invite you to eat very often, even if they do not know you very well
- Bureaucracy. Everything takes longer than expected
- It is normally very filthy, on the streets and even in restaurants.
- You will surely have stomach trouble at some point.
- People prefer talking than answering emails.
The only experience I have had so far has been with the visa. I sent my visa application together with passport, copy of residence, payment receipt, pictures, letter of invitation and payed return envelope on Tuesday 3rd, and received my passport back on Friday 6th. In it I found the business visa for India. So that was my first very good impression of Indian bureaucracy. I just hope it stays that way for the whole summer, though something tells me I will have many more opportunities to prove my hypothesis.
I will be writing as often as possible, however if I do not have enough time I will try to write min twice a week.
Hope you stay tuned, see you in two weeks.
Posted by conradoplano 
