My First Trip to Shanghai

**post backlog**

Early December of last year, I had the opportunity to head to China for a work-trip. My first time on the mainland (I have been to Hong Kong before), I wasn’t sure what to expect. Other Indian people at work in Redmond had told me to be prepared for the difficulty of getting wholesome vegetarian food and the difficulty to explore the city on my own without being able to speak Chinese. Both were great advice but not as optimistic as I’d hoped. Thankfully, only one of them proved true when I visited.

I was impressed by the infrastructure in Shanghai and also by the fact that there were SO MANY people everywhere! We landed there late Saturday evening and headed straight to bed. The following morning, my manager, who also travelled with us and had been to Shanghai a few times before, showed us around the city. We walked miles and travelled even more miles on the subway which he expertly navigated. Shanghai is a bustling metropolis that, like a lot of Indian cities, manages to be cosmopolitan and traditional all at once.

A few truths:

1. Subway can get you anywhere. For the rest, there are cabs. It helps to be planned and prepared and to carry the little cards with addresses written in Chinese (and carry extra cards)
2. You need to haggle. It’s amazing how with zero common languages between you and the storekeeper, you can still score a great sale.
3. Food- okay, this is tricky. There are vegetarian food options; you just need to know where to go. If you’ve got a local with you, you’ll do fine. On your own, you need the cards (that say “I do not eat meat”), some patience and a little bit of spirit of adventure. Since it was my first trip, I was cautious about not wading into fried-lizard territory for fear of being (physically) intolerant.  Maybe next time… I also carried a bunch of protein bars, ate lots of noodle soup (delicious), steamed veggies and rice. On my last working day there, I managed to get the office cafeteria to custom make veggie-egg fried rice for me all on my own. If that’s not a win, I don’t know what is!
4. The teas are really awesome. And yet, you’re more likely to find Starbucks and other coffee stores and Lipton tea bags. I fell in love with this bottled sugarless Oolong tea and I don’t know what it’s called. It helped me quench thirst when I was out of my bottled water.

A few reflections:

1. There is definite westernization happening in Shanghai… more pizza joints and Italian restaurants.
2. People have their noses in their phones ALL.THE.TIME even while crossing the road
3. Roads bring me to traffic. The traffic is all kinds of chaos. And like India, it all seems to work.
4. The people I met at work there seemed ambitious, eager to learn and very hard working.
5. People love to sleep on buses. Employees carried neck pillows to sleep on during their commute. I thought that was a little unusual.

                                          The Shanghai skyline in the night

Back in Sao Paulo!

When I took on my current job, I was told that travel would be an important part of it. It took a while for me to get my travel papers in order but I finally got that done on my trip to Canada over the summer. So I was ready to hit the road… er the air.
Work took me back to Sao Paulo a couple weeks ago. A bit of visa drama later I showed up at our SP office in the middle of the financial district of the city, groggy and ready to take on the week. After sleeping through most of the afternoon meetings and going to bed at 8pm, I was alright for the rest of the week.

This time, my trip was zero touristy and 100% work. But more interesting to me was to compare and contrast the Brazil of 2009 with what I saw this time. If it is possible, there are more cars on the road and the traffic gridlock is frustrating… makes you wonder how people drive at all. I remember taking the underground train last time but most ppl I spoke to at the office there seemed to think of public transport as a non-option. As the host of the World Cup and the Olympics later, I sincerely hope SP does something about the traffic and the stress its people undergo in their daily commute.

The trip was not without its share of adventure though! While being on the 31^st floor office for the week had its perks by way of gorgeous views (read daydreaming fodder during meetings), a fire drill in the middle of the week had us walking down all 31 floors. Without lunch.

It was great being back and re-familiarizing myself with the little observations I had the first time around. I was once again struck by how much like India Brazil looks and feels – though perhaps cleaner. I’m pretty sure I’ll be going back again and hopefully next time I’ll be able to take a couple days off to visit Rio.

Caipirinha count on this trip = zero

Fresh fruit count = insert some large number here (happy me!)

Longest car trip on SP roads = 4hours

View from our office in SP

Butter cookies I couldn't get enough of

Still Searching for the New Normal

This weekend will mark three months since I left the Bay Area. It seems like forever ago. Needless to say, I still miss it terribly and miss my life and friends there. As you can tell, I am in the midst of new-city-blues that just won’t go away. Blame it on having to find new everythings, from where to grocery shop, how to manage your evenings, what to do on weekends, your favorite gas station etc. Right now I’ve been looking in earnest for places to get a haircut.

I completed the car purchase I was trying to decide on and have been driving my SUV for close to two months now. I can’t believe how quickly I’ve adapted to driving the bigger car. I still wistfully gaze at sandwiched “Compact” parking spots where my car will not fit but overall it’s been a positive adjustment. Of course having the extra space in the car means I have to be careful not to constantly dump stuff in it.

My apartment, while now mostly fully functional, still has the occasional box sitting in a corner waiting to be thrown into recycling. Some things still haven’t found a spot where I am completely happy with them but it’s a work in progress. My kitchen has been getting a lot of use as I have been cooking almost every day now.

Work, while not insanely busy, has a schedule that is not under my control. Working with global teams means my work day often ends very late. It also tends to begin later than it did in my previous job (I honestly cannot believe I would show up to work at 8am when I was at Walmart.com!). However, multiple stakeholders and awful scheduling conflicts means that no week looks like the one before it or the one after. This makes it very difficult to plan a life after work on the week days.

This past weekend was first time in three weekends that I stayed local and didn’t go to Portland to visit the sis. I went to dinner at a colleague’s home in Seattle and really enjoyed meeting some new people.

The search for the elusive normal is far from ending. I seem to be making a habit out of it!

Another Year, Another City

A friend recently remarked that the last year and a half has brought too many transitions for me, and there’s a lot of truth there. I’ve blogged through most of my moves and that’s a lot of posts! This year, I’m giving the Pacific Northwest a chance to win me over. I’ve been in WA for three weekends now, having started work a few days ago in Redmond. This past week all my stuff from my home in CA got here and I’ve spent most of this weekend unpacking boxes and finding a place for everything in my new apartment.

Work has been pretty busy already and unlike my previous jobs, the expectation here is that you’ll just carve your own ramp-up plan and get upto speed. This is new for me, but also interesting because it allows me freedom to ask my questions, form my impressions and understanding. Also, for the first time in my career I am not working in a cubicle and that’s a whole new experience. Here everyone gets their own “office” and while that’s great for some privacy and concentration, it’s also really quiet. I like being in the thick of things, where all the action is happening. You learn a lot just by accidentally overhearing a conversation or you’re able to provide clarification easily. Here the quiet time in my office makes me wonder what I’m missing out on that I should be learning. The one constant at my new company is that everyone is really passionate about their product, their company, their job and they work hard everyday to take their vision forward. This is refreshing and inspiring.

The bad news is that I still miss the bay area terribly. Every evening on my drive home, I have to convince myself that I can make it another week without wanting to go back there. There is nothing wrong with Bellevue, it’s nice, it’s green and it rains but I’m indoors anyway so how does that matter?! But it’s lonely, everything’s new, I don’t know where to go for anything and for once, I have no clue what to do on the weekend. Remember, I don’t own a TV either. I hope I figure things out soon enough so that I can stop feeling so displaced all the time.

The big question weighing on my mind these past few days has been what car to buy. I sold my Nissan in California and I’m ready to upgrade to something that’s a little more powerful. Should I get an SUV? Is it too big for me? Is it something I can use in the city? 

Role Models

As an early user of Google Plus, I have come to love the flexibility and selectivity the social network affords me, especially in comparison to Facebook, whose privacy settings I have finally given up trying to understand as they apply to the timeline format. More on that in a different forum. I started to add companies to my circles when they first came out with that. And recently I’ve started to add people I don’t personally know. I call this new circle the People I Admire circle.

To this circle, I recently added Drew Houston. This was in part inspired by reading about him in the much tweeted about LA Times article (which, by the way, doesn’t really add much to the much circulated Forbes article about him and Dropbox) and also in part inspired by his Google+ profile. I discovered that he went to undergrad the same years as I did, albeit in a totally different part of the world! He, and the article, made me think about my years as an undergrad, around the time I began this blog. I think about my ideas, motivators, priorities at that time and hold it up against what they are today. If you had told me back then that I would be where I am today – literally and figuratively, geographically and professionally – I would have dismissed you as an incompetent fortune teller.

bI realize now the importance of having role models. But that’s just such a generic thought. I wish I had known the importance of having role models for the right reasons. My undergrad major was driven by my desire to escape computer programming. I turned to mechanical engineering because it’s what my father had done. It was an easy choice. In retrospect, it was a great choice, I loved my coursework and the skills I acquired. But in 2001, I had no idea what it entailed and what I was going to do with it four years on. Same time, half the world away, Drew Houston was getting into MIT and thinking about starting his first tech company.

Back then I didn’t know he existed. Today I admire him immensely, not just because he has this wildly successful company that actually means something to a lot of people and not just because he has this strong vision of building the next Apple or Google. I admire him also because as someone who is the same age as I, he has shown vision, maturity, motivation and determination to do something with his life. I think the word I’m looking for is focus. He has remained focused on the thing that matters most to him professionally, and given it his all. He’s just one example. There are other thirty year olds I can hold up… or the twenty two year old Doogie-Howser-of-the-tech-world co-founder I met a couple months ago; or the Google Guys whom I’ve admired pretty much all my professional life! In comparison, my own professional history reads to me like a drifting log.

I am still trying to figure out what my “thing” is going to be… you know, the thing that you were born to do, the one you’ve been preparing for your whole life without actually knowing it. A month ago, I stood at (what seemed at that time) a very important, life altering crossroad in my professional life. I had been building up to it for a while now, taking certain decisions and choosing a path to get there. When I finally reached, I threw out the obvious choice and selected an entirely different one to go down (remember the drifting log?). I still can’t extrapolate forward the dots in a way that makes any sense. But I now have role models whose successes, failures, tenacity, creativity and focus I can look up to. I am fortunate that my role models are real people, who I could easily run into at a terminal at SFO. It makes the dream seem that much more achievable. It makes me believe that I will be able to connect the dots someday soon. All I have to do is keep moving forward.

Truth Be Told...

It has been an eventful few months. Being the normally reticent person I am (at least online), it comes as a surprise to me that I feel this urge to let it all out on this post today. Two months ago, I found out that for me and a hundred and fifty of my colleagues, the end of the year will be our last day at our current job.

Since then my emotions have alternated between deliriousness at the freedom from a place that I had been unhappy at for a while and lost at having to start the job search all over again. Since then I’ve thought a lot about my work and my time there. Places and people and how much I enjoyed being part of it/them. I think about how the excitement of it all slowly morphed into dissatisfaction over the course of this year, at the pace of activity and the lack of challenge. Since then I have also realized that this year has been a blessing in disguise.

A Darden alum I spoke to gave me the best advice – it is not personal, move on. I have had the opportunity to meet with my colleagues since then and I take comfort in the fact that I left at the top of my game, having garnered respect from the people I worked with and knowing that they appreciated my contributions at work. And if I ever doubted that comfort, I have had help and support pouring in from friends, ex-colleagues, ex-bosses, neighbors… I am blessed to have this support system around me and I didn’t even know about it. No one gets anywhere without help and I certainly would be nowhere without the support, emails, phone calls, introductions and what-have-you that everyone in my network has been offering up.

Working in corporate America comes with its own share of risks, maybe more so than working in corporate India. You have to be competent, driven and constantly performing. But you also have to be visible and audible. But most importantly, at corporate-anywhere, you have to be good to the people you work with so that when you get thrown a curve ball you have the support system in place to make the most of it.

I am looking forward to the close of the year because next year I get to start all over again (more on that in a different post). I get to move to a different city/state, a different company and get to expand my professional network. My new company has a great relationship with Darden and a lot of Darden alumni, and I’m looking forward to connecting with them

The End of Summer

I was thinking about summer vacations from my childhood today. I remember I used to have one or two months off in the summer (varied based on the school I went to, and I went to a few). Some summers we visited my grandparents, others I went to summer classes during the day. Funnily enough I remember with great clarity the summers from my childhood; my adolescent summers, not so much. I remember thinking back then on the last day of school that I wanted to do something “useful” that summer. I don’t know if I ever defined “useful”. Obviously I didn’t do much useful back then, else I’d have remembered. I’ve thought about those summers a few times since then and always wished I could get them back again.

Here in San Fran, I don’t know whether we really had a summer. Sure, we had some brilliant days but I wouldn’t know much about them if they came from Monday through Friday. My indicator was the view from my window at work, of the expanse of the Bay, of the flights coming in or going out from the airport a few miles south… and then on really clear days, you could see San Mateo bridge in the distance, the unmistakable lopsided arch the bridge makes. I may sound wistful, but I know for a fact that even on those days I had much rather be at my desk, working, than anywhere else. Adulthood is strange. You want the vacations, but then you don’t want the vacations.

And now, before we know it yet another year is coming to a close. I smell winter in the air. I see more leaves fly from beneath the wheels of my car when I drive out than I did a few weeks ago. The sun comes up later and sets earlier. I love the winter, especially in California where there is no snow to deal with. But suddenly, like the kid back in school at the end of a summer spent lazing in the sun, I feel like I may have missed out – on perfectly good weather, time, conversations, people. I want to wake up in the morning to sunlight streaming through the blinds, sit by the patio with the doors open. I want summer to come back. I want it to be the beginning of September again, the beginning of summer.

Baseball at the Ballpark

Last week I went to my first baseball game ever. My company holds its annual company day at the games every year, where they take all employees to watch a home game (right term?) at the Giants Stadium, tailgate included. If you know me you’ll know that I cannot be bothered to show up at a cricket game (though there are exceptions to that), and so I figured that I probably wouldn’t go to a baseball game any other way. This seemed like a good introduction to the sport and to understand first hand why this country is so obsessed with this sport even though they think cricket is the most boring game ever.

It is with a degree of amusement that I conclude that baseball, much like its bat-and-ball cousin from the east, is all about the hype and the emotion and less about the game. In fact, I will go so far as to say that baseball is probably the real gentlemen’s game, over and above cricket. There’s no chest thumping, fist-in-the-air declaration of strike/out, cursing at the batsman/striker and fighting with the umpire. The players come to the pitch, do their thing, chalk up their stats and leave. Home runs are action-replayed to the soundtrack of Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life or Van Halen’s Jump or any other heavy-riffed-guitar-playing-hair-band tune. Everyone has a good time, and crowd participation is way better and not resorted to throwing stuff on the field. Unfortunately, no one proposed on the big screen (or does that only happen on tv?)

So now that we have my expert opinion of the game out of the way, I have to spend some time ruminating on the stadium itself. Giants stadium, also known as the AT&T Ball Park, is H-U-G-E! Surrounded by the bay on three sides and downtown San Fran on the other, the view from up where we were was phenomenal. Blue blue ocean, dotted with boats of all sizes and the San Mateo bridge in the distance. It was great to see my colleagues outside of the cubicle setting, and good to catch a break in the middle of the week.

I wish the Indian cricket team would come play a game at the Ballpark. Now that would be a game I would gladly go to!

No more excuses

Sunset picture from my window at work

It seems to have become a trend of sorts for me to disappear from my blog for weeks on end and then resurface with a post on an excuse for my disappearance… like anyone’s counting! I won’t make excuses this time. I’ve thrown myself headfirst into my (not so new now) work, into settling down in this (not so new now) city and just generally reconfiguring life and times overall. At some point I even had a nice end of year post crafted in my head all ready to be hashed out on the keyboard but I let it go. Now it seems that the urge to write has built up inside until I finally was able to put fingers to keys to hash this out before Facebook, Netflix and all the other distractions on the interwebs drag me away again.

In the months since I last posted, I have found and made a home for myself in this wonderful area and while not everything has been perfect, I think I have made peace with the fact that that’s exactly how it’s going to be – not perfect but good and definitely something I can work with. I have been trying desperately to get my reading habit back but I’ve had to contend with just reading the California drivers manual!

The weekends have been passing by in a blur of social and home-related activities. In the nesting process, I have a project every weekend that I have to tackle… one weekend it was the linen closet while another it was the bookshelf. Needless to say nothing gets done a hundred percent but I am working on it. Add to that a baking/cooking project and a mandatory me-night that I’m trying to make a habit out of. I want to spend the next few months reaching out to the community at large, trying to get to know places and faces and events around the Bay and discover newer interests and pastimes.

The Darden group in the Bay is a large and fun gang of people and so there have been frequent meet ups and social events. We recently even hosted current Darden students at our respective work places and I’ve had a very satisfying time playing alumnus to students and helping them with my insights on school and recruiting (which is after all the all consuming sole conundrum of business school life). Slowly but surely it is becoming a way of life to make time for Darden centric events – be it phone calls with students or socializing with the D-crowd in the Bay.

I think I am on track in the reconfiguration-of-life project!!

The End of a Long Journey

... And the beginning of a new one.

I am writing this from LAX as I wait for my flight to San Francisco. Chances are I will continue this on my flight (yay for free wi-fi) and then continue some more from San Francisco. There is a lot to say, and I’m hoping to make up for the silence of the past couple of months. I board this flight today with some small degree of trepidation but also with a fair amount adrenaline rush that can only come at the beginning of a new adventure. I’ve lost of how many flights I’ve boarded in the last six months but I can tell you that this is the sixth city I will be heading to in as many months and hopefully I’ll stay here for a while. As I checked in my mammoth suitcase at the curbside check in a while ago I thought to myself that I’d feel very suicidal if I had to lug it through another airport any time soon! Thankfully it is the end of a long journey that began at Charlottesville and took me to multiple places and people… but it is over finally.

From having zero job-offers to finally getting something I was so passionate about (but didn't realize until epiphany struck), life has changed indeed! In my obsessive search for the perfect job over the past two years (and anyone who has been through the process will tell you it’s a two year process), I have discovered much about myself and not all of it has been flattering. But all of it helped me narrow and broaden my search as the situation demanded. That discovery helped shape my final decision and the subsequent move from the east coast to the w(best!

It is normal to be job-search-obsessed in business school. I thought it was just my class reacting to the havoc the economy wrecked on us. But as it turns out, it is an affliction of every bschool student no matter what the economic climate is. And dutifully job-search obsessed though I was, I will openly admit that it was not without a large dose of self-doubt and the road was not always clean and clear. I will also admit that my ultimate success was not so much hard work as it was just sheer luck. And that is what makes the “success” so hard to celebrate. There are others in my class – some close friends too – that still haven’t found their offers and I know that the difference between them and me today is just dumb luck, a fortnight and nothing more.

I was discussing with a classmate today about our respective job searches and while he has found success too, we both had to acknowledge that we owed our success and sanity to our network of personal and professional contacts. Our alumni base had been very generous to us during our search process, even if just with advice and words of encouragement. Our classmates at Darden have been great with all the support, the couch to crash on or even just over the phone with all the positive cheer.

While my life moving forward is very different from the way I had envisioned it during the summer of 2008, I am pleasantly surprised and very thankful for the way it did turn out. Don’t punch me in the face, but sometimes you just have to trust the process!

A Third Summer

This past weekend I moved to Florida to begin work with a company on a short-term basis. While the move proved more difficult that I had expected – more on that soon – I was struck by just how different the weather here is compared to any of the places I’ve lived at in this country. After a dry, hot start-of-summer at the Ville and a hot-by-day-cool-by-night summer at southern California, the heat and humidity and thunder storm filled weather of Ft Lauderdale is quite a change… and quite reminiscent of Madras.

The move here itself was very last minute – due completely to my own denial that the vacation with the sister had to end! – and therefore not as smooth as I would have liked. My achievement for the week would probably be successfully navigating from my hotel to the office without the GPS and without getting lost! Work, on the other hand, is pretty fast paced and energizing, which is great! I have been on the job for three days now and I am already staffed on an engagement and have deliverables due pretty soon! Work hours are long, compared to any of the places I have worked at before, and I am still trying to squelch the temptation to pack up at 6pm!

Personally though, the move has been challenging. For the first time, I am struck by how much I have relied on my social network and support systems in the past. I am not all alone here – MV, a fellow Section D’er, and her fiance – live/work in Miami and have been a phenomenal source of help and support, especially in the first couple of days after I landed here. But I miss my sister and miss eating healthy home cooked meals. But maybe I should use the time back on the east coast to do a spot of travelling… definitely something to work on.

(obligatory iPhone picture for this post coming soon - how about a thunderstorm?)