Infosys InStep Week Five

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Oh I get by with a little help from my friends

- Billy Shears, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
I picked out a line from "With A Little Help from My Friends" to start the racap of my fifth week here in India because I feel it captures what happened the past week.

My recent problems with my visa ushered in a wave of support from a number of people, ranging from classmates, alumni and even readers of this blog. I'd like to thank the support people extended during the past couple of weeks. I've briefly mentioned in my last post that the resolution to my issues is almost here and hopefully I'll be able to hurdle my visa issues this week. Heck, I've been told that I've set the Infosys InStep record for most visit to the Foreigner Registration Office (FRO) in Bangalore.

But apart from the issues, the week also gave a chance to connect to more people as over 40 new interns mostly from US schools came in. The new group is diverse and I'm practically re-adjusting to the new size of the people in the internship program because that means more names, more conversations and, of course, new friends to interact with. Good thing I've kinda developed my memory for remembering names and faces because I think I can recall around 75%-80% of the new interns' names and a little background about them. This should be pretty useful in the future.

As my stint here in India will be done in less than a month, I've been more conscious of going out to new places and sites here. The last week, I was part of a group of 12 people went to Chennai and Puducherry:



The group that went were a mix of "old" and new interns: Me, Ha Hong Dinh (Vietnam), Vitaliy Rapp (Germany), Anouar Kiassi (Morocco), Antoine Boulenger (France), Brian Carroll (USA), Angelina Clarke (USA), Karina Flores (Mexico), Margaret Moscoe (Canada), Ece Kizil (Turkey), Yi He (China) and Mingfei Yan (China). As you could see, the group is a culturally diverse bunch and the experience of interacting with people of different cultures is something I've grown to like. By the way, half of the people who went were MBA's, the other from IT programs, so the symmetry in that perspective gave the trip a better flavor.




Chennai was very hot, as if we went in the middle of the summer. Good thing we were able to hit the beach and enjoy the breeze. Another fun part of the trip was watching Bollywood movies in the mini-bus we were in-- I guess we found a lot of humor from stuff we don't fully understand. (We watched Om Shanti Om by the way).

Week Five marked the final half of my Action Consultancy and things only would be winding down soon. Only three more weeks of work and weekend trips left.

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