Douwe Osinga's Blog: There's always a guy

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

India is a guy country. I don’t necessarily mean the fact that it is very much male oriented. It is, though then again in surprising ways it isn’t. When feminists in Europe were burning their bras, the world largest democracy was run by a woman. We got to talking to a group of Indian women in saris that turned out to be civil engineers building bridges. What I mean is that when you need to arrange something, there is always a guy.

I suppose it explains why relatively few things can be done over the Internet here; you just call your guy and he takes care of things. We wanted to go to Chennai over the weekend and I tried buying tickets online. There is a decent website that kinda slow, but it lets you find trains and make reservations but only if you have a local credit card.

Then I read this Google leaflet for new expats and it mentioned there was a guy you could txt in situation like this. I did and he replied he would arrange for it the next day (it was past 10PM by then). The next day, he gave me a call and said there would be another guy waiting at the parking lot at Google.

I gave this other guy our details and some money and all was arranged. Strangely enough this way we got reservations on a train that the website had said was full. Guy beats web, I suppose

1 comments:

Teemu Leinonen said...

The old web beats the Web.