January 15, 2008

Day Eleven: Course Wrap-up and Convergys
After breakfast our class joined at 9:30 to summarize our learnings and evaluate the course. The major learning points will be summarized in a separate section. We presented business plans that we had developed as a side project. I was impressed with the ingenuity despite limited preparation time.
After lunch we met with Sanjit Singh Bal, Director of Business Development for Convergys in India. We discussed the prospects of business process outsourcing (BPO) in India and competing countries and how companies are partnering with Convergys to improve efficiency. Click here for the Convergys transcript.
After our meeting, about eight students and our professor reconvened by the front gate to head to a local shopping mall featuring a store called Fabindia, reportedly a great place to get authentic Indian clothing for fair prices without bargaining. We were not able to secure a driver from MDI, taxis were occupied, and rickshaws seemed full. To our rescue came Rahul, a student at MDI that offered to drive us pro bono. He was a first year from Chandigarh and very friendly. We got to the large mall, plastered with advertisements, but I was amazed at how empty the mall was and how many stores were closed. We grabbed dinner at a Chinese restaurant to celebrate the trip with our professor.
A few interesting notes after a few days in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi: The power outages are so routine here that business as usual proceeds without interruption. Cars dodge cows but edge each other to near collisions. Poverty is everywhere, but taxi drivers will not pick us up for short trips because the standard payment is insufficient.
I wrote and packed until about 1 AM, attempting to push my circadian rhythms slowly back into US time zones.