It’s Friday morning here, the sounds of men banging hammers against concrete have been going for well over an hour now. They say in New York, or is it London, that you are never more that 10 feet away from a rat, well here in India the equivalent is that you are never out of earshot of a man banging a hammer against something hard. We passed some major milestones this week on our Indian experience and there is definitely a air of transition around the WMG house.
But it doesn’t feel like an ending, it feels like the beginning of something new, we’re not really sure what it is because we’ve entered the fog of transition. Like the morning fog that covers the land and plays havoc with air travel on these cool December mornings in Delhi, the transitional fog obscures both the way ahead and behind.
We’ve left our jobs here and are spending a lot of our time enjoying the sites of
the city. It’s good to put that part of our experience behind us. We came here to learn what it’s like to live and work in India, we have achieved that and are quite pleased about it. Living here has been a real trip, but the work experience was pretty disappointing. I’ll get into this in more detail later perhaps but we found that the key factors that bring joy to work were simply missing here and try as we might to adapt our expectations and craft our environment we were largely unsuccessful at making work fun. That’s really OK though because it was the experience and struggle that we were looking for. What was more difficult for us I think was the real lack of personal and and professional respect that we experienced, this is not something either of us is used to. Our work was not without its highlights and good times though. We have made some good friends here with a number of our colleagues and these are the things that we hope to remember and carry with us home.
Like the good AMSers that we are, I guess we’ll have to write one of those “lessons learned” entries soon enough but this isn’t it. This is just another milestone.
White Man\'s Gandhi Blog 