Delhi.2

January 9th

Akshardham

My body has officially adapted to India's time zone...this morning my body didn't protest for more sleep. We headed out early for Akshardham, a beautiful temple made of marble and pink sandstone, surrounded by expansive gardens and walkways. After 35 years of planning, the building process took only 5 years with the help of 300 million volunteer hours. The project was funded largely by donations, and it is currently operated volunteers whose sole objective is to teach about their faith.

The main temple is intricately carved, providing visual reminders of spiritual messages. For example, the base of the temple is a trim depicting the elephant's relationship with nature, man, and the divine. The carvings read a bit like Aesop's fables, each with its own message of purity, harmony, or faith.

Our group was free to walk about the campus for the morning. It was so peaceful that I wish we could have stayed longer.

ISKCON Temple

After walking around Akshardham's grounds, our group headed to the ISKCON Temple in Delhi. ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) dedicated this temple to Lord Krishna, an incarnation of another Hindu god, Vishnu. Krishna is a source of joy and love and destroys sin.

Monica's family joined us at the temple for a quick tour and lunch. A noontime worship was in session, and we were invited inside amongst the music and clapping. I felt like the tourist stamp was blazing red on my forehead, so I took to the walkway that encircled the temple. Unlike the outdoor walkway at Akshardham, this one was inside and not nearly as elaborate. As I found out, the walkway is around all temples--visitors walk clockwise around the temple as a means of preparation for prayer. At Akshardham, there were mantras played over a speaker system inside the covered walkway; here, at the Krisna temple, there were paintings along the walls.

Management Development Institute (MDI)

Our last stop before flying back to Mumbai was at MDI, a post-graduate business school. Our group met with a group of their students and discussed challenges and stereotypes associated with the BPO model.

Stereotypes

• A decreased integrity of company data and/or customer personal information when it is outsourced. In reality, many Indian firms with outsourcing contracts have more stringent security procedures than US firms. Employees at the larger firms had to walk through metal detectors before entering the facility.
• There is a perception that only men work at outsourcing development centers. In reality, there are plenty of women employed there, although they represent only about 30% of the workforce.

Challenges

• Overcoming the dire warnings from the media and campaigning politicians that outsourcing is "bad" and will result in the loss of thousands of US jobs. Outsourcing, they claim, will ultimately put a whole class of the wage-earning service sector in competition with their highly skilled overseas counterparts. This viewpoint ignores the benefits to be realized by BPO. One of the most important benefits was highlighted in an article of the Wall Street Journal, written by Douglas A. Irwin:

"As many businesses themselves purchase services, their lower costs will result in savings that can be passed onto consumers. If a capable radiologist in India can read x-ray pictures at a quarter of the cost of doing so domestically, important health-care services can be delivered at a lower cost to everyone, putting a brake on exploding medical costs."

Just some food for thought...

After our visit with MDI, we headed to the airport to fly to Mumbai.