Trip to India - Entry 2

Only six days to go! Next week, we have to be at the airport at 5am. That... is severely lame. We go from Seattle to Newark, NJ, then from there directly to New Delhi.

Today we discussed our final readings and started our preparations for the actual trip. Highlights:

Discussion points:

• What is the future of IT outsourcing in India? In a country surrounded by conflict zones, with seriously lacking infrastructure development, how efficient is it, in reality, to outsource?
  
• Will India continue to be a low cost center for inexpensive service support, or will those jobs migrate to even more low cost areas such as Vietnam or the Philippines?
• How should India's economy diversify from such a service based economy to one more conducive to manufacturing and general labor jobs? Can India's economic boom be sustained if there is no large working class population to sustain it as in the Western model of development?

Packing points:

• Wet wipes are a must. When you are sweating for hours in a hot, dusty place - being able to wipe your face and hands can be all the difference between misery and tolerable conditions
• Thieves will grab the necklace off your neck! Carry a moneybelt or something similar
• Bring only one check in bag so that you can buy lots of stuff on the trip and carry two bags back to the States at the end

Okay, so the last one isn't actually a packing tip... but it's definitely a good idea!

Only one paper remaining to be written, and then it's time to spend hours on a plane, crammed into tiny seats and watching movies that somehow, everyone has already seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfMYK25d0EI