Weekend Update, work continues to pile on

So I’ve been given a few more assignments that will surely make my life a bit more interesting over the next 3 weeks or so. In addition to the work I will be doing for CampusConnect, I have been put in charge of creating the microsite and brochure for our alliance with Oracle. Oracle, for those of you who don’t know and I certainly didn’t, is a manufacturer of software and hardware products designed for business use. "IndiaIT" has an alliance with Oracle, as they do with Microsoft, SAP, and others, to create solutions that enhance the Oracle products. For instance, "IndiaIT" will create a solution with Oracle that enhances a company’s ability to upgrade their Oracle platform more efficiently, thus minimizing downtime and whatnot. Hopefully that is clear to you, because it hardly means anything to me yet. Whew, I never thought I would ever work with anything like this.

Anyway, this brochure and microsite must be ready by the time Oracle World comes around on 17 September. This means I must have the brochure ready to print and the microsite ready to launch by the end of this month. Did I mention that we’re starting from scratch to do this and I haven’t had extensive experience with either of these media? This blog may become a place for me to vent for the next few weeks. As it is I’ve only had this assignment for a day and I am scraping time to write to you folks.

I’ve also received the green light, actually more of a yellow light, to begin pre-production on a video presentation to be delivered at recruitment information sessions in the United States about the experience of moving to Bangalore and working for "IndiaIT". I called Bruss last night to talk about what would go into such a project considering my directoral skills are minimal at best. His response when I told him of the project, “Nate, it seems that they brought you to India to promote yourself.” Surprisingly enough, these have all been my own initiatives in an effort to find work in the downtime before I was given the Oracle project. We’ll see where this goes; hopefully I haven’t overloaded myself like Winnie did. I have a conference call with the US later this week to discuss the feasibility of such a presentation. Assuming all goes well, I will begin pre-production for my first 8-10 minutes feature film in the next week or so.

That’s about it on the work end. You’ll be hearing more as I get deeper into it. I haven’t been able to read any of my books for the past few nights because I’ve been reading case studies about Oracle in an effort to make heads or tails of it. I can tell it’s coming slowly.

I didn’t get to write yesterday, so I’ll give you a rundown of the weekend.

Friday night I went to a tapas restaurant with a bunch of other coworkers. It was a great time. There was “live” music, and by “live” I mean that there were two Indian guys standing at keyboards covering Billy Joel, Michael Bolton, etc. covers. The weird thing: they were definitely lip syncing with the vocal track. They would be singing Piano Man, and then turn to talk to a guy next to them, but the vocal track didn’t skip a beat! WTF?! Who knows if they were even playing the keyboards? Is it possible they were paid just to stand there and mouth the words to all of these songs? A part of me died…We then went to Blu Bar, a really nice club at another one of the hotels in town. A good time was had by all. Here are a few pictures:

I have no idea what is going on here

Or Here

Hahaha...banana leaves

Saturday I went to Farah’s house for lunch. Man, her house is something else! Three cars in the driveway, seven or eight servants at any given time, and the whole house was marble. Just crazy! The food was also amazing. We had prawns, crabs, rice, various South Indian dishes…At one point I mentioned that I liked mangoes, and within 10 seconds there was a dish of freshly cut mango in front of me. I’ve decided that if you can be rich, living here can be quite a luxurious experience. Farah and I hung out for the better part of the day. We got coffee with her friend Kamya and then met up with Winnie and Josh. We had dinner at this standing street side restaurant. I still don’t know much about Indian food so Farah ordered for me. The guy behind the counter hands me an empty dish and then he scrapes some food out of a few different pots and tosses it on my plate. The Department of Sanitation would’ve had a fit had they seen this!

We went out to a bar where we met up with more of Farah’s friends. They were all very cool! The bar closed at 11:30, which is really starting to get annoying by the way, so we decided to go buy some beer and hang out at my apartment. I didn’t realize there were liquor stores open at midnight? Well, there aren’t. We drove to this place just outside of town and pulled to the curb near this house. A kid who was probably 14 ran to the side of the car and took our order. We asked for 8 Kingfishers and a few minutes later he brought them out in a box and put them in our car. We gave the kid Rs. 600 and drove off. Not a bad system, if you ask me. Someone could make a killing doing that in Evanston!

That’s it for now. I’ll do my best to keep you updated as the work load gets heavier and more interesting.

P.S. I’m starting to think that the digital camera my mom sent me has been confiscated (read: stolen) by the Indian police. I have yet to see it, so I’m starting to think that I won’t. Until then you have to deal with the pictures that Winnie takes, and her only pictures are of us out on a weekend night goofing off. These are more interesting anyway, right?