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We woke up pretty early in the morning (7:30am) to go visit the Taj Mahal. Awesome! We ate breakfast and piled on the bus at 8:30am. We hired a tour guide and a bus for the day and the tour guide would prove to be very helpful and knowledgeable. We finally arrived at the Taj at about 9am.

Because of pollution concerns, we had to park over a mile away and take these electric powered cars to the Taj. The other option is to take these horse drawn rickshaws, but we decided that the electric cars were the way to go.

The gate that surrounds the Taj is also pretty impressive and very large. They screened everyone to make sure that they did not have anything that could be considered dangerous or damaging.

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Day 8 was a Saturday and the beginning of the weekend in which we would trek down to Agra - home of the Taj Mahal. However, before we would begin the six hour bus ride to Agra, we stopped at Apollo Hospitals.

Apollo Hospitals is one of the largest hospital groups in Asia. They are privately owned and cater to both foreign and domestic patients. One of their marketing points it that they are much cheaper than any doctor in the Western countries. The cost for a procedure done there is about 1/5th the cost in the United States, which make it very enticing for those without insurance or those who are looking to get elective procedures completed.

The bus ride took longer than expected (almost 8 hours) because of the numerous breaks that people wanted to take. We finally arrived in Agra at the Taj View. These accommodations were much better than those at MDI and the running hot water was welcoming.

The seventh day I spent visiting Avery Dennison and Cybermedia. Avery Dennison is a very common name in the United States and produces self-adhesive labels. It was interesting how they described the process and how they dealt with the increased pollution when their products need to be very clean. They basically use a ton of air purifiers and their mixture for the paste is a little different than what you would see here in the United States. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any pictures.

Cybermedia is a publication company based in India. They talked about how publication differs in India and the United States.

After visiting the two companies we went to a mall. Apparently Delhi has a lot of very good malls and that is part of its attraction.

The second day in Bangalore was spent visiting IBM research in Bangalore. It was interesting to see how they were able to enter the Indian market as a company that is largely based in other countries. The second company we visited was HP Labs but the speaker was able to come to our hotel which saved us time as we had to catch our flight to Delhi.

Lunch was quick and brief before we had to catch our bus to the airport. After landing in Delhi, the first thing I noticed was that the air quality was very poor which made breathing very difficult.

We arrived late at our accommodations at Management Development Institute (MDI). MDI is trying to be a partner university with the University of Maryland. MDI’s accommodations are similar to those that you would stay in if you were in the middle class. Some differences included the rolling blackouts that occurred on a daily basis and the very limited supply of hot water (20-30 liters). In order to take a shower, you are supposed to put the hot water in a bucket then mix it with cold water. The use another cup to pour it over yourself.

The other problem was that everything was very dusty because Delhi is constantly under construction. I’m curious of the long term health effects of the poor air quality.

My first day in Bangalore was spent visiting two IT consulting companies: Wipro and Infosys. Wipro was fairly interesting as we were able to see how they were able to successfully integrate themselves in the India economy.

The next company we visited was Infosys. They were hosting five different schools so Infosys brought out their top executives. Infosys is built on a campus kind of like you would see at Microsoft or Google here in the United States. Infosys had everything from on campus housing to dry cleaners to bars - it was like a small city.

After arriving back at the hotel, I was too tired to go anywhere so I ended up staying in the hotel and watching some TV.