Start of my visit to UK

This is my first visit outside the Indian subcontinent and it is a funny feeling. It has been more than a month since I landed up here. I came to UK on the 13th of August, just 2 days after the UK police nabbed suspected terrorists. The timing wasn’t that great as I had to make lot many changes to my trip plans. I had to buy a new bag so that I could accommodate many things in one bag including the hand luggage and handbag. I had to leave behind quite a few things. All the flights that day were delayed and there were long queues in the airport. I was happy to see one of my pages being filled in the passport after 6 years of getting it. I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai and Mumbai to London Heathrow. The Air-India flight was peaceful and it is not that greatly different from a domestic flight except that there are more number of seats, the food is served couple of times more and there is alcohol provided too. I finally landed in London Heathrow after 22 hours from the start of my journey. Three of us had started the journey together – Raviraja Dubba, Pradipta Nayak and myself. We were expecting some amount of frisking and scanning of our bags or a thorough check, but did not find anything of that sort. There was a big queue for the immigration check and were apprehensive. But it was just a cakewalk for us. Then we boarded a Taxi to Basingstoke and realized the stupid system of communication while finding the roads here. They call a circle a Roundabout and the call nth exit for getting out of a circle. Hardly any landmarks are stated as we often do in India and finally after a while we landed at the Copper Beeches hotel at 11.30 pm on a Sunday night.

We checked into our respective rooms and found out that the rooms were ridiculously small in terms of the size. I was put up in a 10 x 10 ft room including the bathroom and a cupboard. We had landed up in the second half of the English summer and found that the day breaks at 5am and night is realized around 8pm.

We were at the office by 8.30am the next day. In the next week or so started to get accustomed on the work front and trying to understand the scope of our work. Still most of us on the assignment are getting a feel of the work environment in UK. It is quite different to that India. People come on-time or early and leave after exactly 9 hours of work irrespective of the workload. Unless very very critical they do not hold back at the office. People hardly are on the phones, and they do not chat around much. People use more please rather than a thank you. People are at various positions irrespective of their age and most of the people like to do the same job day in and day out. Atleast this is the understanding. People speak primarily for work-related things only. I was also exposed to some British sense of humour but it would take a longtime to start really understanding them.

Joining Wipro Technologies – Bangalore

I joined Wipro on the 10th of July 2006 after spending a little more than 3 years in Capgemini. I was very apprehensive while joining as I was leaving behind 3 years of comfort at my previous firm and all of a sudden came to new organization where I did not know anybody, the culture is different and the processes are different and all the infrastructure(computer, login ID’s, bus pass etc.) w.r.t me would have to be streamlined. I first met Raviraja Dubba in the induction program and he seemed to be a lively guy. Next few days were spent shuttling between various offices to meet the JDE management. Param is the JDE practice head mainly aligned towards sales/BD and Mohan Chennasamudram the delivery manager. I also happened to meet Vishal Saxena, Nirmal Assudani and Jagannath Kannan. I also met/contacted my Wipro pals – Mahantesh Halejolad, Gopi Hombal, N Sriram(who referred me) and Arun UJ. After the first few days was given oppurtunities in the Lexmark project-Kolkatta and Cardinal Health report development team-Bangalore but did not work out. Now I was asked to move to UK on the project Arjo-Wiggins for 5 months. I found out that Wipro isa very process driven organsisation with each everything happening based on approvals and approvals. It is a stark contrast compared to my previous organization where it was just through a simple mail instead of a system. The whole Wipro runs on an SAP system which is integrated with HTML interfaces. There are few more for quality and other tools. There is a website designed for the wiproites to discuss, buy/sell, matrimonials and many more things. This is a really wonderful concept.

Lost in thoughts