A Perspective on an Expat's
Life in India

chillibreeze writer — Nalini Hornigold

The natives of Bangalore find it difficult to believe that their sleepy “Pensioner’s Paradise” has almost overnight become the hub or center of the software world in Asia. Imagine how overwhelming the traffic situation in Bangalore would be for an expatriate, especially one from the vast country of Canada.

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I work in a multinational company and my immediate supervisor is a Canadian. He first came to India about four years ago. I would like to share the obstacles that he faced or rather had to overcome during these four years in India and how some of them literally drove him crazy. When he first came to India he did not take to India at first sight but slowly over time India and Indians “warmed the cockles of his heart”.

On the work front, the time sense (or the lack of it) of Indian employees was something this man could never understand or accept. When any meeting was fixed at 11.00 a.m., he would always be present in the meeting room 5 minutes before the meeting started with his laptop all set up and ready. The earliest that anyone would come for the meeting would be a few minutes after the hour. Others would start trickling in 10 minutes later and sometimes the last entrant would come in almost 20 minutes late. The time my manager would have allotted for the duration of the meeting would have been 1 hour. The constructive time left for the meeting would be only 40 minutes. As this meeting started late, the subsequent meetings would also get delayed and it would annoy him considerably. Since he was a hypertensive I sometimes wondered if he wouldn’t literally burst a blood vessel when he saw people strolling in late and unapologetic about it too!!

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It was only halfway through his stay in India when he realized that all his shouting did not change things much and the only way he could avoid his BP shooting up would be to set up the meeting for 10.45 a.m. and he would himself attend it only by 11 a.m. He kept lamenting that after he left India he wondered if he would ever regain his earlier prompt sense of timing.

We Indians are a hardworking lot and happily work late daily and even through the weekends. He was very particular about working hard during office time but evenings and weekends were for family. There were times when due to the time difference, he had to take conference calls late in the evening, and he always took these from home. He usually did not let work interfere with his time with family.

The other thing that he found difficult to digest was that he felt Indians argued and discussed a lot before they would accept anything new. If he suggested something new, such as a change in the existing procedure which would enhance output and capability, his counterparts at the office would not accept it easily and would discuss it threadbare before accepting the idea or making the change. He said that even if it stared us in the face we were not able to accept anything new without a fight or after a big discussion.

He could not believe the traffic, crowds, dirt, noise and pollution. He had been warned that traffic was pretty chaotic in India but he had not imagined in his wildest dreams that it was as bad as it really was, and that it was steadily getting worse each day. The fact that drivers in India use the horn indiscriminately while driving was something he never reconciled himself to until he left.

The population of India has crossed one billion a while ago and is still growing. That fact would hit him every weekend when he visited any of the malls in the city or tried going shopping. The crowds that he saw in the malls would make shopping a nightmare, especially over the weekends and he felt like he was literally being smothered. There were people everywhere. He would nostalgically remember the times when he would go for a walk in Canada and not see a single soul outside.

When he spoke to women he would think nothing of casually touching them while talking – and that was very disconcerting to Indian women! In India we do not touch someone of the opposite sex unless you know them very well. He would come back from his travels and greet me with a kiss on both cheeks. I was lucky that I didn’t get a bad name in office because of this!!

The India of his youth was the India of elephants and snake charmers shrouded in mystery. The India he had read about was one of the fastest growing economies of Asia, the country where 60% of the population was below 30 years, the largest democracy in the world. The India he saw was a strange mixture of age old traditions and beliefs combined with a people who were striding into the 21st century with confidence and élan. A country on whose roads bullock carts side by side with the latest cars imported from the west was a common sight; a country that took him totally by surprise.

He ended up having a love-hate relationship with India when living here but he missed it terribly after leaving. Over the four years he lived here, he had grown to love India, especially once he accepted there were some things that he had to put up with that may have been part of the charm of living in India. He is now planning to come back for another stint here

If expatriates come to India with an open mind and no preconceived notions, than they will just love living here for the duration of their stay.

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—About our writer:

Nalini writes for chillibreeze.