Business trip: New Delhi

As you could see from the theme of the Weyia party, this year India is on the ADB map. Although we have a local team in Mumbai I was asked to help a little bit on the organization of the demonstrations for the Convergence India trade show at New Delhi. I went there with 3 colleagues from Taipei office, we met the Indian team there and another colleague from Switzerland also joined.

I will not bore you with the details about the work and the trade shwo and I will focus on the the impressions of my first visit to India (in business trip mode).

The flight from Tapei-New Delhi takes about 6 hours. From Germany or Poland it takes roughly the same time. India is one of the few countries in the world in a “30 minutes” time zone. India Standard Time (IST) is 2 hours and 30 minutes ahead from Taipei time zone.

For the last 2 years there has been a lot of promotion of India as a tourist destination with the slogan Incredible India. 2010 is a special year at New Delhi because the Commonwealth Games, a kind of Olympic Games for Commonwealth countries, will take place in October.

Before going to India I was already alerted about all the “dangers” in India. After landing the first impression is heat, tons of people and chaos. New Delhi has around 16 inhabitants, just a small number when compared with 1.2 bilion in the whole India. The taxi ride between the airport and the hotel (with a driver from the hotel) is a little shock, specially until you get used to the Indian way of driving. The funny detail is that every keep saying that Mumbai is a lot worst…

Being on a business trip, in order to minimize risks with water or food, we stayed at the luxurious Taj Palace (but we still used bottled water for everything). In fact the hotel has just received awards for 2 of its restaurant and 1 of its bars.

We were lucky and Marek (a polish colleague at Taipei office) and myself could take the Sunday off to visit Taj Majal, a good 4 hours drive from Delhi. It is an exhausting one-day trip but it allowed us to be tourist, to see India outside of a big city and to bump into cows everywhere. At Taj Majal a guide explained about the history, simetries and colour changing marble depending on the sun light. While waiting to get in, we briefly talked to a small group of people from Afghanistan … indeed the first time I ever spoke to a person from Afghanistan.

What I enjoy the most on a “long” (6 days) business trip is that you have enough time to learn a little bit about the culture: talking to people, reading news paper or watching local TV channels (with cricket all the time…). Let me highlight two details:

• The body language from Indian people is really complex, specially when “yes”, “no” or “maybe” is involved. Check the video to see how the boy says “yes”. Note: this is not my video footage.

This video is a complete guide to Indian (Punjabi) body language. Enjoy! :)


• It was also easy to feel that most of the weddings are still arranged by the parents, with no real love involved between the groom and the bride. On Sunday Times there is a huge supplement about “Matrimonials”. Click on the image to go to a related websiste


At the same newspaper I could also see that Wilbur Sargunaraj is now famous at YouTube with a song (and videoclip) in favour of “Love Marriage”.

… and I could not manage to go to a movie theater to watch a Bollywood movie.