Same Same, but Different

I come to India to take a little vacation. A break from my hectic life as a vagabond. All this moving around and painting things and saying hello to friends and goodbye to friends was just too much. I needed to stay in one place and no do anything (apart from painting) for at least a month. Since September, I've been on the move so this is a nice change of place.

So of all the things that I could possibly be doing, what do I find myself doing? Excel spreadsheets. Can you belive that nonsense. I come here to chill out and instead I'm helping the people here with thier total backwards system of doing things. For hours today I'm helping this guy figure things out. It brings me back to my days of working with annoying clients in Virginia. All in all, it's quite humorous I guess. It's just my fate to be pulled into computers wherever I go. Fortunately it comes easy to me, since all programs are really the same whether you're making music, organizing schedules, making pictures, whatever - it's all the same functionality.

What is different between here and America is the thought process. The American corporate way of doing things is boring and annoying and leads to boring work lives, but it does get things done. Things are efficient and actually get done. In India, things are backwards a bit. They do things totally different cause they think different. Things aren't set up in a hiearchy. It's every man for himself. It sounds chaotic and it is, but it works. And it will work a lot longer then the American system will. America will go bust long before India will. I think it has something to do with the consolidation of power, but I'm not sure. I think when all the capital/power is in a few people's hands then those few people start making bad selfish decisions. It is that whole, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely thing. So don't always assume that people have your best interest in mind. Some do, most don't.

In India people aren't too concerned about their government, they make do with what they have and the government is just some abstraction far away in New Delhi. Speaking of New Delhi, I met a guy from there who works for Aetna insurance. He's the guy who decides if you get a claim or not. So if you break your leg and file your claim, Yogesh is the guy you'll talk to. The funny thing is that he's required to tell people he's working in Conneticut.