Thursday, July 17, 2008

In India

This post comes after probably my longest break after I begun blogging last year. Needless to say I was occupied but for different reasons this time.
In June, I was occupied with elective courses which ended on 30th June (with 2 takeaway exams left). On 1st July I left Paris for India and have been in India for 2 weeks now.

Before leaving for India, I was having a really hard time with the trains in Paris - In one week, I encountered delayed trains, cancelled trains and a metro strike. For my last class of Corporate Strategy, it took me almost 2 hours to reach school on a Saturday morning because of an undeclared train strike on RER-B. When I left for India, I thought that I had left my travel woes behind. But that was not meant to be for my misfortune continued. To cut the long story short, after reaching India, I encountered a cancelled domestic flight, an unconfirmed train ticket and it finally took me a 21 hour bus journey (in a non-sleeper coach) to travel from Pune to Bhopal.

After I reached home, I was in for a surprise with the internet connection. In my hometown (Narsinghgarh), I have to use dial-up internet connection which provides data transfer rate of 3-4 kbps (yes, there is no typo). With this speed, I was barely able to check my mails and faced a really hard time accessing the net. There is no broadband facility here. After speaking with multiple vendors (ISPs) and exploring multiple connection modes, I settled with a GPRS enabled internet connection using my phone. Even this does not provide a great speed but it is definitely much better than the dial-up connection and I can do the basic surfing and communicate with people.

I have been in India for 2 weeks now and might stay here till Aug end. During this time, I will be travelling a lot. If any of the prospective HEC participants want to meet me, drop me a line and we can plan something out.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi rahul,
great blog. This is subhanko here. I had met you once in pune for an informal pg meet (sometime in 2005). i was keen on talking or meeting up with you to discuss more on the HEC Paris MBA program. I am currently in Mumbai. If you are planning to come to mumbai as part of your schedule we could catch up. alternatively you canmail me your cell no and we can speak.

Thanks
Subhanko (subhanko@hotmail.com)

Anonymous said...

I am surprised to know that. In fact one of the things that caught my eye in India was the abundance of mobile phone antennae, and I sort of imagined that broadband was easy to get there.

To be true when I tried to connect it wasn't that easy, but still reasonable enough in Delhi.

Best regards

NoeL said...

By now, you must have gone back to Paris.. I wanted information regarding HEC Paris... How can i contact u? I dont want to put my queries here!!
Awaiting reply,
NoeL
noelatwrk@gmail.com