Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Going Back Home


We finished the training today. The evaluation from the participants were good. It was a good 9 days here with a lot of information shared to the users. I personally feel that they have learned a lot during these past days. I did not contribute much, sticking to the PowerPoint presentations. I allowed my friend from head office to dominate the stage because he is the true expert. In fact I suspect that he may be a genius if his attentions is more focused. Nevertheless, I think the users where in awe of his knowledge and ability. I contributed more by showing him around and arranging the whole training agenda.

I will be going home finally tomorrow afternoon. My flight is at 2pm but I feel tired and have no idea where to spend my spare morning. Usually, I will have something planned already, going to a temple or a park. But I feel tired. My nose and throat is raw and dry and I did not sleep well in the past days. I keep walking up due to my dry throat and have difficulty breathing. So I did not have a good sleep. My voice is also very strange and I could not speak too much although I try to handle both the starting and ending presentations. I also try to send out the materials to everybody. My friend is the star of the show during the training and I am willing to recede from the limelight.

I think I should be humble towards my abilities on this subject and not pretend that I am an expert. In fact, I am more the project manager and not the subject matter expert. I have loads of things to do as well, particularly testing, coordinating with my contributors, answering important emails and planning for the transition. The outsource company wants to conduct the training in Bangalore with my current contributor but they do not like any competitor in their premises. So we are stuck but I threw the problem back to him, letting him find the venue for the training in Bangalore. Not a good feeling, doing all these things, with a stuffy nose, dry throat, fatigue and enduring the cold.

Listening to the book 'Shalimar The Clown' and living in the northeastern Chinese city in the winter is far from my ordinary reality. At least my colleague from Europe has similar experiences on winter. So I am in an entirely new world enjoying an internal life driven exotic by Rushdie's book and living the cold winter scape in this strange city that often seems moored in the past in certain places. I was surprised when I found that some American soldiers who surrendered in the the fall of Bataan where shipped here to work in factories. I believe there were about a thousand men who where shipped from the prison camps in hot and humid lands of South East Asia to the freezing winters of North China.

There are also similarities. Rushdie's book is centered on Kashmir also a cold place. The novel is about the struggle between India and Pakistan which echoed the actual reality last week when terrorist attacked Mumbai. It was found out that the leader was a known terrorist from Kashmir. So I understood the passages about the snow and cold in Kashmir, experiencing it myself here. Now I have also to talk to my colleagues in outsource who are also young Indians, successfully riding a wave of outsourcing, led by their famous writers like Salman Rushdie. There are similarities all over the place.

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