Delhi/Gurgaon... and corporate offices

I have a summer internship at a multinational consulting company. Now, because Delhi doesn’t really have a culture of undergraduate summer interns and I know nothing about accounting, I don’t have much to actually do. So when I am not reading fanfiction, or looking into colleges to transfer to, I observe things.

It is fascinating to note the sort of work culture that this place has. It’s quite different than anything I would have expected, because on the one hand I think of sloppy government and bureaucratic offices in Delhi and on the other hand I think of corporate offices as somewhat cold, mechanical places on the other. However, at this company’s office, and I am made to understand that the case is not much different at other corporate offices around here, there is a whole different atmosphere. People work quietly at their laptops, yes, but it is not entirely unusual for some folks to just sit together and chat or gossip. And they talk about anything, though the most frequent topics seem to be GMATs and business colleges in the US. Hmm… what does that say about why people are here in the first place? Yep. You got it. So that they can get the requisite “work-ex”, as it referred to here, and then go to the US for their MBAs, which will naturally lead to bigger and better things in the future. Aha! So the American dream lives on? Not quite. If you listen some more, you’d realize that while they are all for getting their degrees at US colleges because of the brand value such degrees hold here, they do want to come back and “serve their country”. Except if you listen some more, it isn’t that they want to serve their country, but to exploit the fact that they can easily have chauffeurs and domestic helpers and all sorts of other things to make life easier for them, that they could not have afforded in the US or in a western European country due to the much higher costs of labor. So that’s what this is about!
Also interesting to note is that though the place has a little gym, hardly anybody uses it. Which is not unexpected, of course, but I just wonder why it is there at all.

Another thing interesting about the workplace here is, that despite the fact that this is the office of a company based elsewhere, the office itself is distinctly Indian. And by the office I mean the people, not the office building. This is quite an odd thing to observe – that the office building is so un-Indian. It is all glass and concrete, which is astounding impractical for a hot country like India, and centrally air-conditioned, naturally, which makes it an absolute environmental disaster. Besides, central air-conditioning and buildings that are meant to be in a temperate climate just don’t work here on so many levels. One of my biggest grouses with them is how little ventilation they have. You need to smell the kitchen area to know what I mean. The smells of Indian spices and masalas are overwhelming to the point of being nauseating!

I guess I can’t really provide much more than a surface look at the corporate offices here though, because I don’t have insight into the how the higher echelons work or anything of the sort. Maybe that is a topic to be discussed later, or for you to tell me?