Meet the Press...again

Saturday (Happy Birthday Gene!) we started out on a two and a half hour bus ride to visit a few temples. They were beautiful. I have learned so much more about the Hindu religion from experiencing the culture around me everyday. We visited a few more temples; we then enjoyed a wonderful lunch at a restaurant recommended by A.R. After lunch we visited yet another temple. This temple has some of the most beautiful architecture I have ever seen. It was incredibly nice to get out and see some sights, we haven’t been about to do much of that while we’ve been here. We got home in the late evening. It was Gene’s birthday so a group us were going to go out. As it turns out, I got pretty sick and spent the night puking my guts out (I apologize if that is too much information). I spend Sunday home in bed, writing blogs, and sleeping. I missed out on a pretty great day of more sight seeing I’ve heard.

Monday started off with an interesting lecture from Professor K. Balakrishnan on “Indian Perspectives in International Branding”. I am a marketing major, so it was especially interesting to hear him talk about the differences in Indian branding. He told us that the function of branding is to create risk, and that certain brands in India can only be sold in particular states of India (which I though was especially interesting), also the objective of marketing is to disorient the customer and the objective of the brand is to reorient the customer. I have never herd it stated quite so bluntly before, and I liked it. He then showed us commercials from a company called Asian Paints. The commercials obviously had different colors and different music associated with them, but over all I felt that they were much like American commercials.

Then we stuck around for yet another press conference. There were about four or five reports asking us question after question. I thought the MBA students that answered questions for the group did an excellent job over all. The reporters asked Harvey how Americans view outsourcing, he replied with a very honest response explaining that at this point in time many Americans are not a fan of outsourcing. I myself have been having this conflict. In the section on outsourcing in “The World is Flat” it states, “The Indian companies were good and cheap, but prices wasn’t first on consumer’s minds- getting the work done was, and India was the only place with the volume of workers to do it”. I know that many businesses need to out source to survive, and Indian workers need jobs just as much as anybody (maybe even more), but it doesn’t seem fair to exploit Indian workers for lower wages and move jobs out of our country at the same time. I guess I haven’t come to any sort of conclusion quite yet.