Continuing my trend of waking up early on Monday mornings, I got up by 6.45 AM that day. Since I was going to get me regular filter coffee, I had to make do with the instant coffee that was available in the room. I then logged on to the Internet to check the morning newspaper of The Hindu. I took my time to get ready, but by 7.40, I was out of the room. We all then headed out to the office building where the meetings were arranged. After leaving our bags in the room, we then stepped out to receive the customers. By then, I was sporting my blazer and thankfully it still fit me (it was short even when it was first stitched 4 years ago). And I must admit this - the only thing that makes me look good is the blazer, but I think the blazer/coat-suit has the capacity to make anyone look good.
Anyways, the customers then came along in their car to the front of the building. We were introduced and I got a really knuckle breaking hand shake from the man. I don’t give a dead-fish hand-shake but this one was almost crunching the bones and I had to strain that extra bit to return the favor. The lady, however, gave a normal hand-shake. We then took them to the conference room and then we kinda started getting into the official portion of the visit. And a quick racial profiling - the guy is a Maratha who's settled in the US for almost 20 years and the lady is a red-headed Caucasian.
One of my senior managers gave a presentation about the organization and left the presentation about my unit to me! It was my first time presenting those slides to any customer. The only other time I'd even seen these slides was during a client visit in Jan '08, but my job then was to only click the buttons to move the slides while some other senior managers were doing the talking. So, when I had to start presenting these slides, I got a bit nervous and for the first couple of slides I couldn’t really do anything more than just read what was there. Luckily the senior manager was still around, so I deftly (or so I think) pointed to him and asked "Would you like to add some more?” I am sure he thought "Add? What did this guy say in the first place for me to add? I actually have to create not add." But he did bail me out for the first couple of slides and by the 4th-5th slide I regained my composure and was able to present a decent picture.
The rest of the day went quite peacefully with a good time spent on going around the campus. The campus at Hyderabad is quite a big one and needless to say, the two of them were really impressed. We ended the day around 4.15 PM and started the quasi-official part of the day. The plan was to take our clients to Charminar, but by the time we got there, the gates were closed. So we saw the monument from outside and spent the rest of the evening walking around the Chudi Bazaar (Bangle Market). There were quite a lot of small shops peddling bangles of various shapes, sizes, color, stones, artwork etc. All these were of course made of either glass or lacquer or glass or some metal and none were made of costly metals like Gold or Silver and none of the stones were actual precious or even semi-precious stones. And one had to bargain real hard otherwise we were bound to pay up some 4 times the actual cost.
We tried our hand at bargaining but failed miserably. While the language was not an issue - most of the shop-keepers spoke in Hindi and Urdu and my program manager's mother tongue was Hindi. So also the client. And I too could manage some amount of spoken Hindi though it may have sounded like Mehmood in Padosan! The real issue with bargaining was the very skill. And call me anything, but I think women are winners when it comes to bargaining. We were all given instructions to start at 25% of what the shopkeeper asks. But I found out that none of us could really ask that value. We men invariably started at 50%. And even on the odd occasion that we started at 25%, the shopkeeper simply refused to talk further and we too just walked away. I am sure women would have managed to keep the shopkeeper interested in the sale, but the only woman in our group at that time was a "Gori" - white lady - who didn’t speak Hindi. So that settled the matter and after an hour of walking around the bazaar we simply returned to the car.
We went out to some restaurant for dinner. Having stayed in AC the whole day, then being exposed to lot of dust at the bazaar and all this on a stomach that was rumbling with the food in the office, it was slowly getting into my head and I was not feeling too well. Even at the dinner table, I didn’t eat anything properly. We finally dropped off the clients at their hotel and when I returned to my room, it was after 11 PM. I still had some office work to do and I wound up the day after another 45 minutes or so.
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