Dinner Out in Mysore

After clocking out of training today, 15 of us decided to eat out in Mysore tonight. It started during our lunch break when we complained about the food in the food courts and how hard it would be to survive 6 months off of it. So Amjat and Alex come up with the idea of eating out in Mysore. I was short on money, but still willing to go and so were the rest of the guys at our table (4 of us were eating Dominos btw) and pretty soon it evolved into a 15-person adventure.

At about 7:00 pm, we each split up into groups of three to ride in these 3-wheel cars called "Ricshaws," basically a very small vehicle (probably smaller than a Volkswagon Beetle) that seats 2 in the back (although 3 can squeeze in most of the time) that runs on 3 wheels. If you haven't ridden in one before, it's hard to describe the feeling you get when you're inside. First of all, I felt cramped and the top of the car was really low, so I basically had to lean forward the whole time. And the driving is crazy in India, not only to you have to watch out for oncoming traffic swerving into your lane, but the road is littered with speed bumps that are really hard to see. That made for a roller coaster like ride and a lot of the time, I felt like I was in a really cheap race car because we frequently would swerve out of our lane to pass buses and trucks.

We ate at a nice hotel. The menu had a variety of dishes from Indian to Continental. Most people ordered two dishes each, other decided to split dishes together and get 3 dishes. I shared chicken pan-fried noodles, lamb with green peppers and some naan. Alex and Jackson got some Tiger Naan which looked really good. I would recommend the Tiger Naan with the lamb as dipping sauce. The noodles were okay too.

The Infosys curfew time is about 9:30 pm. We all got back at 9:30, barely making the curfew time. I'm not sure what would have happened had we not made it. The meal was about 250 Rsm for me and the ricshaw was 200 Rs. roundtrip for 3 people. Not bad considering where I come from.

Contract update

During the night, more details came out about how we're gonna get paid and let's just say it's so different from the contract I signed that HR is gonna make us sign a different contract in class tomorrow. The dispute: whether we get paid in U.S. dollars or in Rupees. The conflict: the exchange rate and the high Indian taxes. We'd be paying more tax if we were paid in Rupees. HR wants to pay us our entire salary in Rupees for the duration of training which is in direct violation of the contract I signed which states that we get paid about 60% of our salary in U.S. dollars. Infosys plans to use 41.9 Rs./Dollar as the exchange rate. Checking the currency markets now, the exchange rate is 43.415 Rs./Dollar. So we're missing out on about 2 Rs. per dollar and if you know my salary you can do the math. The Rupee continues to weaken against the dollar which doesn't bode well for the exchange from Rupees to U.S. Dollars when we get back to the U.S. It could go up to 45 which means we could lose about 3-4 Rs./dollar in our salary. Of course there's also a chance the Rupee could fall to March 2008 levels which was around 40 Rs/dollar, but the point is, I'm not interested in playing the currency market with my salary. I want something static. So I'm extremely unsure of how things are going to work out with the location and the money situation. Morale is low here amongst the U.S. batch and it continues to deteriorate as the frustration grows towards the Infosys's system in India. Could it be culture shock?

So far, 80% of the promises they made have not come to fruition. I'm low on money, the location situation is weighing on me, and the salary situation isn't looking up either. But I should look on the bright side. At least I'm in fast track. Short term that's a great thing because we are actually working on relevant material. It could be bad in the long run because the fast track path may influence the IBU and U.S. location for the bad.