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Neil Miller November 16, 2015 Filed Under: Book Reviews, Communication, On the Job

Book Review: Doing Business in 21st Century India

Doing Business in 21st Century India

Gunjan Bagla’s Doing Business in 21st Century India is the best book out there for the person heading a business unit in India, overseeing an expansion process, or wanting to start a new venture. Expatriates on work assignment and casual travellers can gain some good insights from, but the biggest value comes for the person who has to keep the full business picture in mind.

Bagla covers an overwhelming scope of information in only 200+ pages. He is a consultant who works with companies who want to expand and improve their India operations, and you can see him demonstrate his expertise. In each section of the book, he delivers the most poignant advice and keeps the applications relevant.

(Listen to my podcast with Gunjan Bagla here.)

The book covers the following topics:

  • Introduction to Indian Business
  • Cross Cultural Communication
  • Human Resources
  • Marketing
  • Finance
  • Legal and Accounting
  • Travelling and Living Tips

[Read more…]

Neil Miller October 19, 2015 Filed Under: #IndiasNotIndia, Indias By...

Indias By Language

If you ever need a reminder of the diversity of India, just take a look at any currency note. On the back, you will find the value of note in fifteen languages, along with English and Hindi.

Currency Note

 

India’s languages are perhaps the most telling way that this is a country of countries. It is possible that you could have a room of four or five Indians and none of them would be able to understand the other.

 

Why should I care about the languages of India? Don’t they speak English well enough?

It’s true that most Indians that you will do business with speak English at a high level. In fact, most of them speak at least three. Understanding the linguistic talents of Indians will give you a lot more respect for their abilities and make you less likely to correct any inconsequential errors you notice.

A person’s ‘mother-tongue’ is a very special and intimate part of their being. It is quite rare for an outsider to be able to recognize someone’s heart language. If you can show that you care enough to know even just the name of someone’s first language, you will build a lot of relational capital.

Finally, it is important to recognize that when you work with a group of Indians, you should insist on people using a language that is universally known and most comfortable. For example, if you are working in Chandigarh, and everyone speaks Hindi except for you (and they are not comfortable in English), then the onus is on you to up your language skills. However, if you are in Chennai with a group of Tamilians and a few northerners mixed in, you should insist on the team using English and not Tamil for the sake of those who will feel uncomfortable and left out.

 

Wait, I thought everyone spoke Indian?

[Read more…]

Neil Miller October 12, 2015 Filed Under: #ChaosBeatsLogic, Into India, Transportation

Do you speak Air Horn?

Horn Language

 

My dad liked to play this joke growing up. When we were driving and he saw someone he didn’t know doing some yard work outside, he would roll down his window, honk the horn and wave. Being a small mid-western town, people would usually wave back, assuming they knew the ‘honkee’. Dad thought this was hilarious. (Like most fathers, Dad’s jokes were really only funny to him.)

His trick worked because in my culture, a horn honking meant only one of two things. 1) I am six inches away from hitting your car, or 2) Hello, I know you.

In fact, when I was back in the US for about two months, I heard someone honk a horn a total of four times over sixty days, and two of those were at me for my poor driving skills.

Here in India the horn is, shall we say, more loquacious?

Here is a handy guide for understanding the meanings of the Indian horn.

 

 

The Single

Short, subtle, proper. Used by passive drivers to calmly communicate unimportant information to neighboring cars.

http://learningindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Single.mp3

 

Possible meanings include: [Read more…]

Neil Miller October 5, 2015 Filed Under: Into India

14 Indianisms You Should Start Using Now

Indianisms

You have probably spent some time on the list of over 110 Indianisms that I recorded over the past few years. It has been a fun project to stop and make a note when something sounds slightly off to my American ear.

However, I have a feeling that the term “Indianism” gets a bad rap. It has some automatic negative connotation and is seen as a bastardization of the Queen’s English.

In my opinion, I think many Indianisms actually improve on existing English usage, and some of these innovations should be standard across the English-speaking world. So, I’ve given some thoughts here on which ones I think are better, and which ones aren’t.

Immediately, I must admit that this list compares American English with Indian English. I am fully aware that a large chunk of these words are British in origin and may still actively be used there.

In selecting which phrases where superior (American or Indian), I used the following criteria. A phrase is better if:

  1. It has no direct equivalent
  2. It uses fewer words
  3. It has fewer troublesome alternate meanings
  4. It makes more logical sense to use
  5. It makes communication clearer

[Read more…]

Neil Miller June 29, 2015 Filed Under: Mark Twain

The Best of Mark Twain on India

Mark_Twain Best

 

Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite writers and I finally got my hands on a print copy of his India reflections in the book Following the Equator.

I’ve added several posts where I’ve quoted some of my favorite excerpts. Aside from his usual wittiness, I was amazed at how many of his observations are spot on for today’s India even though Twain’s trip was in 1887. All of the selections can be viewed here, but I’ve given a little introduction to each of them along with my favorite quote.

 

Mark Twain on an Indian Train

A beautiful section on Twain’s first ride on a train and the hospitality he encountered there. A great reason to check out Tips for Train Travel in India!

My favorite quote:

There was plenty of time, hours and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen–there was no hurrying it. [Read more…]

Neil Miller May 11, 2015 Filed Under: #ChaosBeatsLogic, #PowerPlays, #See1See100, Book Reviews

Book Review: Now, Returned to India

NRI Cover

There is one group of people with whom I always hit it off. In the airport, at a business meeting, or at my favorite South Indian restaurant – you get that feeling that you are living the same life with a different cast of characters.

Who are they? Returned NRIs. Indians who have spent some years living and working abroad and have resettled in India. Whether it is their global outlook, their similar stories, or their traditional values, I get so connected to them that I have to remind myself that I am not one of them.

Amar Vyas’ book NRI: Now, Returned to India is a nice read that will quickly immerse you in the pressing topics facing returning NRIs. It is a narrative book, loosely (if not strongly) based on real events from the author’s life. It grabs your attention without being too pedantic (like this blog), and is comically believable. [Read more…]

Neil Miller March 29, 2015 Filed Under: Daily Living, Mark Twain

Mark Twain on the Indian Heat

Brass Knob

 

[Taken from The Complete Works of Mark Twain: Following the Equator, Volume 2, Harper and Brothers: New York, 1925.]

It was winter. We were of Kipling’s “hosts of tourists who travel up and down India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed.” It is a common expression there, “the cold weather,” and the people think there is such a thing. It is because they have lived there half a lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted. When a person is accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. I had read, in the histories, that the June marches made between Lucknow and Cawnpore by the British forces in the time of the Mutiny were made in that kind of weather–138 in the shade–and had taken it for historical embroidery. I had read it again in Serjeant-Major Forbes-Mitchell’s account of his military experiences in the Mutiny–at least I thought I had–and in Calcutta I asked him if it was true, and he said it was. An officer of high rank who had been in the thick of the Mutiny said the same. As long as those men were talking about what they knew, they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they said it was now “cold weather,” I saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told the change to porcelain was not usually made until May. But this cold weather was too warm for us; so we started to Darjeeling, in the Himalayas–a twenty-four hour journey. (203-204)

 
Click here for all of the Mark Twain Selections on India.
Image Credit: Leo Reynolds on Flickr

Neil Miller March 29, 2015 Filed Under: Cultural Adaptation, Mark Twain

Mark Twain on Cultural Adaptation

Zenana

 

A good lesson in trying to use our own cultural rules to judge someone else’s. In this story, Twain recounts how some Europeans tried to ‘liberate’ some women in India who were used to going around fully covered.

 

[Taken from The Complete Works of Mark Twain: Following the Equator, Volume 2, Harper and Brothers: New York, 1925.]

 

While we were in India some good-hearted Europeans in one of the cities proposed to restrict a large park to the use of zenana ladies, so that they could go there and in assured privacy go about unveiled and enjoy the sunshine and air as they had never enjoyed them before. The good intentions back of the proposition were recognized, and sincere thanks returned for it, but the proposition itself met with a prompt declination at the hands of those who were authorized to speak for the zenana ladies. Apparently, the idea was shocking to the ladies–indeed, it was quite manifestly shocking. Was that proposition the equivalent of inviting European ladies to assemble scantily and scandalously clothed in the seclusion of a private park? It seemed to be about that. [Read more…]

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