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Two Weeks In India

Originally written during my fourth and last trip to India as an Application Engineer, this details two weeks of life on-the-road as a technical/presenter/trainer. Reading and editing this in early 2005, it’s interesting to see how hard the local India team works, and how hard they work Application Engineers. Customer names and non-Adobe people’s names are removed to protect the innocent. Some months after this trip, my job had a sea-change which doesn’t involve extensive travel such as below. Other personal observations have been edited to protect the not-so-innocent — Nick Hodge, March 2005.

Friday 6th September 2002

Last night there was a hoax bomb scare at Sydney International Airport tonight. US and UK decide to bomb airfields in Iraq. Bush is increasing his rhetoric against Saddam Hussein, working himself up for the anniversary of September 11th. Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan has an assassination attempt on his life. A strange time in the world; it seems like the drums of war are beating in a every increasing tempo. Probably not the smartest time to be travelling to India for 2 weeks.

There is no doubt from a business perspective that India needs extra work. Always a volatile market, it seems to be lagging a little in the region. Spending two weeks will permit longer visits to customers to move them into the current state of play with Adobe technology. Whilst Aaron has visited regularily in the previous 4 months, a concentrated effort can only help.

What makes this trip a little harder to aclimatise to is that this is the end of a week of holidays. Half way through I seemed to come somewhat mentally unstuck and unhinged. Somewhat disturbing to say the least. More than anything, it felt like an anxiety attack. I think I need to be “connected” more than I realise.

A small consolation is that the ticket is business class on Singapore Airlines. This will assist the 8hr + 5hr trip. Singapore Airlines also has inflight power, so I have more time to get ready before I arrive.

Saturday 7th September 2002

My prediction on world events is that Bush will highlight the involvement of Iraq in September 11th at the UN. He will use this as a reason to get rid of Saddam.

The flight from Sydney was pleasant. Managed to go through 8 chapters of the FrameMaker 7.0 Classroom in a Book. Arrived in Singapore on time, but the arrival gate was at one end of Singapore Airline’s gates – and the Delhi gate was at the exact opposite end. It must have been a good 1Km away! Thankfully, had just enough time to change my money to Indian Rupees.

Thanks to the 15 hours of 1980s music, getting through the FrameMaker stuff is much easier. Whilst not a FrameMaker neophyte, I am gaining more respect for the composition engine. Whilst InDesign has all the gliz and glamour of a Porsche, sometimes you want a BMW that goes from point a to point b and easily generates documents.

Safely collected by Angiah at Delhi airport. You can see the dust as you decend into the lights. This is strange as its rained here recently. The smell is interesting, too. The culture shock isn’t too great. Hotel. SMS Avril. BBC World. Email. Sleep.

Sunday 8th September 2002

Well, the world seems to be in one piece still. That can only be good news.

Spent the day finishing off the FrameMaker 7 Classroom in a Book, and then starting to prepare the content for the FrameMaker session. As a part of the demo, I had installed the Microsoft Voice SDK; but I think that I need to do this in a controlled environment because OfficeXP went haywire attempting to launch PowerPoint. I think it was wanting to install the voice stuff on the server from Sydney. Through a 28.8Kb modem connection: I don’t think so!

Another frustration: the power supply here is bogus. The power went off for 5-15seconds about 6 times today. As my laptop battery doesn’t seem to be recharging successfully from the power, this causes the laptop to immediately shutdown. I hope I am not frying the poor Dell.

Had dinner with Angiah and Niyam in the hotel. Niyam is an interesting character; someone the local team uses as a presenter when Aaron and/or I am not around. Exchanged our life histories, and points of view – especially on Opensource and the whole movement.

Monday 9th September 2002

Up at 6am. In fact, earlier than this as my insides came to terms with the environment. Light breakfast and some tablets help out. Keep drinking water. Finishing off preparation for the events on the 11th and 13th with FrameMaker. Using an amalgam of the CIB stuff plus the excellent demo created by the FrameMaker team. Interesting to see the reaction based on the content; its hard to factor in because I don’t know the level of the audience, so some of this will change at demo time. Have to finish this off tonight, plus prepare for the GoLive demo tomorrow afternoon.

Being picked up at 9.30am for a 45 minute trip to visit a customer. These are the guys the local team want to start to use InDesign in production. As there is a drop-dead date of November on PR from Adobe on this, its going to be a tough ask to get anything done by that time. I have bought the latest issues of Australian Cosmopolitan and Cleo to show how this stuff prints. Spoke to Aaron from the car on the way. The picture seems “hazy” as to output situation. This is going to be interesting to say the least.

Gave them the whole ACP story. Many questions on spot colours etc (my favourite topic in InDesign)

Lunch in the centre of the city at a Chinese food place. Strange to eat Chinese food in India. Found out at lunch that Quark sells for about Re20K (AU$1K) here. QuarkXpress 5.0. Quark are doing deals in their adopted home country.

Afternoon back at the customer’s place. Took one of their QuarkXpress documents and opened it perfectly in InDesign 2.0. Not even major text reflow issues. Managed to output this to their HP5000 internal postscript black and white laser, and found that their printer use Scitex Postscript Level 2 style output.

Added lots of transparency effects onto the first page spread, generated a rather large Postscript file (200Mb) — export PDF (40Mb) and Distiller 5.0 (10Mb) the same first page spread for them to test with proofing (Epson proofer, at the printer end) and also get film from. Probably get to see this when I visited them next week.

The issue with these guys is getting momentum and finding a core reason for them to move to InDesign style workflows. We cannot determine the motivations at the present time, but it seems that the IT guys are at least keen to progress, and will push it through.

Heard on the news that someone managed to get a knife through security at Mumbai international airport and attempted to hijack a flight from Mumbai to the Maldives. Let’s hope that someone plugs that security hole before I get there.

Lots of sleep.

Tuesday 10th September 2002

Read in the paper about the Mumbai airport security problem. Everyone seems to be pointing the finger at someone else, not even sure “where the knife came from”. A train crash outside Calcutta. The minister was blaming sabotage before getting evidence. Everyone here in control is a political player, and wants to ensure that someone else is blamed for problems. What a strange country.

Fly to Bangalore.

I managed to “sign” myself through the features of InDesign – especially in comparison to QuarkXpress.

Off to lunch (south indian vegetarian at some government run hotel that was closed for renovations) then to a government customer. In a government complex in Delhi, and looks like any gov’t organisation the world over. Their video conferencing facility acted as a demonstration centre: so I managed to demonstrate 7 Adobe applications in a “network publishing” context. Mainly stressing how they work together, and this should change their attitude.

In the middle of an afternoon meeting, the heavens open up. The rain storm cleared the skies. Delhi, without the heat and the dust, is a great city. It needs to rain more often.

At the airport, flying India Airlines. Not my favourite airline, but security is very tight. Everything is checked twice before you get onto the plane – including two physical pat downs, and you also have to point out personally your checked-in baggage to ensure it gets onto the plane.

Arrived at Bangalore safely at 11.00pm, knowing I have 2-3 hours of work to get through. Check the Photoshop installation (which was causing me hassle in Delhi), run through some finer points of the FrameMaker demonstration. Bed at 2am.

Wednesday, 11th September 2002

Up at 6.30am, in dread for what is going to happen during the day – being September 11th.

Go through another quick run through of the demo of FrameMaker. At 9am, go to the room and meet Shipra, reaquaint myself with Shanavas from End to End. We have a good 110 people for the FrameMaker session, with 90 staying for the Acrobat advanced session. The demonstration goes well, and as always I have more content than I require to fill the time (something I was concerned about!) Many jibes at Microsoft, Australians and unstructured publishing. It seemed like all knew what XML was, but not many were using FrameMaker 7. This bodes well for sales. Mahdu, director of Quebec Computing, distributes WebWorks Publisher and does FrameMaker-related sales almost exclusively. Hopefully he will translate the day into sales. I knocked the power cord of my laptop out during the demonstration 3 times. Laptop, having no battery backup, crashed. Not a good look at all.

Lunch was in the Park Hotel; which must have started/opened at the height of the dot-com boom, as everything has an “i-theme” and the rooms are trendy black and purple. The lunch was in a Spanish-Indian restaurant. Strange mix of cuisine. I wonder if this is to do with the Portugeuse influence of Goa, a few hundred kms to the west of Bangalore?

Off to another customer. The Bangalore office is a hub for the southern region, but by no means the central decision making body. I strongly recommended adding Pitstop to their workflow to ensure the quality of PDF. They have purchased a copy of Quite Revealing. Cool! I may have got a little heated and frustrated in some of my responses to all. [Presentation to 10 people]

Found that I hadn’t put my battery into the laptop correctly, so it was unable to recharge. Bugger, Bugger, Bugger.

Bed early tonight. Thankfully, its been a day of remembering rather than destruction. Time to sleep.

Thursday, 12th September 2002.

Today is a “Bandh” in Kanataka (the state that Bangalore resides in) — a general strike. Its due to some protest over water supplies to the Tamil Nadu state that Chennai resides in. It means that at least one of our appointments today has been cancelled as the people decide to stay at home.

I read in the paper that in one previous general strike that there were protests on the street resulting in “unneeded deaths”; and yesterday there were radicals distrupting traffic and breaking windows in Tamil Nadu based buses. Any cars with Tamil Nadu state-number plates were “recommended” to stay off the street so as not to cause disruption. OK, this is a good place to be right now. Even Angiah is not adventurous enough to go far from the hotel.

Up early, 6.30am. Ready for a full day including flying to Chennai.

Went to another customer, a smaller local newspaper, printed in the local language and english. The streets were very quiet due to this strike.

Their workflow is a similar copydot scanning workflow, with a heavy reliance on OPI. They are still on Photoshop 5.5, and therefore I showed them the new world of PDF, Photoshop PDF with vector information intact — and managed to squeeze in a demonstration of InDesign/InCopy. It seems that the per-seat cost of QPS (Quark Publishing System) is around Rs90,000/- whereas InCopy with SmartConnection Pro is Rs$35,000/-. QPS is only a year old, so it hasn’t paid for itself, yet. They are using Agfa RIPs and are doing CtP today. Copydot scanning (two Eskofots installed) must have cost them lots of US$! [Presentation to 7 people]

In the afternoon, Angiah and I quickly went out and grabbed some Bangalorian snaps for future roadshow content.

Before we left the hotel for the airport and Chennai, there were people chanting; seemingly protesting on the street – or so I thought. It is some festival of Ganesha where the locals throw plaster-cast versions of Ganesha into the ‘lake’ in Bangalore. I have yet to determine why. The Bangalorians follow their large Ganesha on a cart and loudly progress through the streets.

Airport, Jet Airlines flight on an ATR-72-500 (propeller) plan and landing in Chennai uneventful. Took the flight to explain the printing process to Angiah.

Friday 13th September 2002.

So called “black friday” in the Western world is no impediment in India.

More unrest in the Jammu/Kashmir “line of control” area between India and Pakistan. I fear that this will not end well. There is a significant unrest between the Hindus and the Muslims here. About a year ago, in the Gujarat state, there was systematic ethnic cleansing – started by Hindu-based politicans. The west has heard very little about this. The balance the the BJP party (currently in power nationally) is a party lead by Sonia Ghandi. She is a left-leaning politican who is in fact Italian. The political arrows aimed at her because of her Italian heritage are many, including claims of corrupt deals with military equipment and heritage items. Whilst religion plays a part of politics here and in Pakistan, there is little hope for a peaceful resolve. This is highly ironic as both Islam and Hindu beliefs are very peaceful – until people get involved.

Heavy rainfall in Delhi “is causing chaos” – including at the Adobe office. Evidendly, the basement floor has been flooded again, causing a “day off” in India whilst they pump out the excess water. Bad design that I hope doesn’t befall the new office being opened in the next couple of months by San Jose execs.

The Sheraton in Chennai is old, and starting to be very tired. Even the employees are tired. They upgraded my room to a “suite”, but a larger room makes you even more lonely. I will resist the upgrades in the future. Why don’t Indian hotels supply Intertouch – faster internet access?

It looks like the US and Iraq don’t see eye to eye on “weapons of mass murder”. Saddam, the master of brinkmanship, will take this to the wire again. The central question is the resolve of GW to take this to its end. At least the news on the Adobe front looks good. There was even a mention on CNN of the “better than expected” Q3 results.

The FrameMaker/Acrobat event in Chennai haf 140/90 people respectively at the event. Nothing contriversial or new as a part of the demonstration. Nearly all had never attended another Adobe show, and few had FrameMaker — bodes will for sales.

Afternoon preparing for the two customer visits tomorrow, and the Monday GoLive 6.0 and AfterEffects 5.5 Press demonstration in Delhi. Re-learning more applications. Oh joy.

Saturday 14th September 2002.

Whoops! I’ve just realised I’ve missed the Body Corporate meeting back in Sydney. I wonder if anyone will notice/care.

Working today, believe it or not. We have two customers to visit.

I think I have mentally decided that my time is best spent with technical management types rather than the mass end-users. Speaking to end users in large customers at early stages of change is only upsetting and they do not get the big picture. Management can clearly express the problems across the board, and you have an opportunity to solve their problems. Instead of small feature questions …

After these visits, we fly back to New Delhi with Jet Airlines.

Presentation to a limited number of people, showed ID2 and PS7 (PS7 still acting wierdly on my laptop: I think I am due for an OS overhaul, or at least a reinstall of probably IE6). This customer has their own Unix-based page makeup system, but also have about 30 licenses of QuarkXpress. They “complained” that the Distiller 5.0 wasn’t taking QuarkXpress output where an EPS saved from Photoshop with JPEG compression and printed as separations — the image was only on the black plate. Its because QuarkXpress’ separation engine isn’t smart enough to decode the JPEG data in the EPS (or strip the EPS open) and separate it. Further proof that QuarkXpress’ separation engine is “old and tired”

Talked to the second customer’s prepress people on Photoshop 7.0, InDesign 2.0 and Acrobat/PDF. A few indepth InDesign questions as they transition their internal ad makeup to InDesign. Finish at 5.00pm and off to the airport.

Nearly 3 hour flight to Delhi. Evidently, Delhi has been innundated with rain again, causing traffic jams etc. There was no evidence of this when I arrived, but it was 30degC and very humid. Bed at 11.30pm, ready to go at 5.00am!

Sunday 15th September 2002

Up at 5:00am for a long, long drive to Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal. Agra is south-east of New Delhi, along a dual lane highway for 4 hours. Whilst the road is dual lane, this doesn’t stop people coming the wrong way on your side of the road. Indians do not believe in road rules, and never going backwards. The number of near misses on this trip counted at least 4.

I was accompanied bu Angiah and Krishnan from FutureSoft; along with the driver for the car. When you hire a car in India, you get the driver too. Noone in their right mind would drive themselves on this road!

Count: 6 monkeys, 5 camels and 1 bear. We almost ran over 2 twos and 2 people.

There was a McDonalds about 1 hour out of Agra, which we visited on the way in and out.

At the Taj, you park about 2-3Kms from the main site. Beating off kids trying to sell crap the instant you get out the car, ignoring them is a difficult task! Walk up to the Taj entrance. Cost of entry for foreigners: Rs250. Cost for Indians: Rs10. Rs250 is still only AU$10. Further two levels of security check, and inside looking at this wonder of the world.

The Taj is an Islamic building, made by an Islamic king as a tomb for his wife. He spent the final years of his life in the “Red Fort” looking out a window on the Taj. Evidently, it was built over a Hindu temple. Therefore, the Hindu extremists want to “blow up the Taj and rebuild the temple” — hence, the strict security.

The Taj itself is made of white marble. Inside the darkness (representing death) there is a very, very small casket replica where this Queen is entombed. When you leave this inside area out into the sunshine, the white marble (which represents life) which blinds you. Its an impressive construction in this part of the world.

4 hours back, McDonalds and hotel. Email photo of Taj journey to all!

A shower and sleep was very welcome. And the pepperoni pizza, too.

Monday 16th September 2002

Alarm at 6.30am. Defer. Alarm at 8:00am; have to get up now. Pickup at 9:00am for a large customer visit. Upon arrival, find out this is a 4 hour training session! Eeek. Time to pretend I know something and start an ad-hoc training course. One person in open Q&A asked about InCopy and InDesign – managed to do a 10 minute demo. Managed to generate a training course, creating vector/bitmap work in Photoshop 7, and weave in Photoshop 7 new features.

Two hour, yes, two hour car ride to the next customer to do a demonstration of GoLive 6 and AfterEffects 5.5. Not 100% prepared, and had to do the demo on their PC. This makes it very difficult to demonstrate without key demo files, Photoshop, Illustrator etc. Also with GoLive, the key part is the Dynamic Content stuff – again requires specific configuration that can take 30-40 minutes to prepare. Not a good look doing it this way. I will insist that this was a waste of time at the beginning of the demonstration.

Get back to the hotel at 6.30pm, do some emails and have a Thai dinner. Good hotel restaurant. Started to read “The Last Viceroy” — all about Louis Mountbatten in the 1940’s when England was letting India go. Many interesting comments about India that are still relevant today. Hindus and Muslims still seem keen to kill each other – as is evidenced in the elections in Kashmir. 300 people have died just due to the elections. What a crazy world we live in. Or is this just India?

Tuesday 17th September 2002

Up at 6.30am. Not feeling 100%, so breakfast is not on the cards this morning. Thank goodness for excedrin, stemetil, lomotil, berocca and museli bars. Pickup early at 8:00am for an engineering institute.

The visit was infact to a customer – a part of the Indian Govt. Gotta love socialism! These guys have purchased and bought into the Acrobat story, but want to have a server-based PDF creation mechanism for Autocad files.

Last meeting meeting is “cancelled”. OK, that does it for today. What a waste of a day. Nothing gained at all, really.

Early to bed for a 4:00am wakeup to fly to Mumbai.

Wednesday 18th September 2002

Up at 3:00am. Earlier than the alarm clock! Off from the hotel at 5:00am for a 6:50am flight to Mumbai. Sleep most of the way.

The Regent has changed its name to Taj Lands End. OK. But that doesn’t make the highspeed internet access in the room work. No time to work it out now. I’ll wait until this evening to get it going. Need to reinstall software; probably IE6 is a good place to start.

Off to a large customer in the main city. 1hr later, meet the head of Production. It was good to converse on issues in the prepress world. I need to formalise a process of supporting these guys with PDF and issues with their Harlequin 5.1rx RIPs. Spending more time with them tomorrow. Had issues with Distiller made PDFs not RIPping; probably due to LAB colours in the .ps that Distiller passes through.

One hour and 30 minutes later, arrive at another customer. Do 6 application demonstration in 3hrs45minutes to about 12 people. I wish things would go to the scheduled plan in India, rather than meander into whatever.

Another 1hr drive back to the hotel. Mumbai has notorious traffic issues. Friday is “off” as its the Lord Ganesh day. Angiah and I will spend the time in some instensive training on a couple of issues.

Spend the night preparing for large customer tomorrow. Late to bed.

Thursday 19th September 2002

In the morning, do a Photoshop 7/InDesign 2 training/presentation to designers. Hopefully they liked what they saw.

Emergency trip (45minutes) to a magazine publisher; probably one the of biggest magazine publishers in Mumbai to fix up PPD/printing issues to Linotronic style devices. They print out separations to Distiller to PDF to the RIP; which seems to work OK from InDesign 2.0. Their magazine is currently transitioning from Quark to InDesign, and other titles will transition soon. This is good news. At least the output issues are solved, and their are able to get film out.

Back to large customer for a presention to the prepress/workflow guys (1 hour trip). Spent time going through Pitstop and why not everything can be solved with Photoshop (they were probably also using Photoshop as a word processor!). Highlight Quite Revealing as well, and InDesign as a prepress tool! Including fixing up of LAB (Postscript colour management turned on). Pitstop as a Quality Circle. Hopefully they use Pitstop, as this will help them out in many areas.

After finishing here, decided to have dinner with local team members at the Taj Mahal hotel, near the Gateway to India. Quick photograph in the darkness then off for a 1 hour trip back to the hotel. I think I spent 4 hours in the car today just around Mumbai!

Late to bed, high speed internet access is down (surprise). If it were working, then I would have gone to bed really late.

Friday 20th September 2002

We are going to attempt to get back to the large customer this morning and finish off the presentations. Today is Lord Ganesh(a) day; the day you immerse your personal Ganesha for his once-a-year wash. OK, but it seems that most of the city stops! Last day of official work in India (unless an emergency arrives)

One hour trip and present Acrobat for business use. Designer, who asked me yesterday about “Accelio forms” (reads the web too much), got to see Acrobat forms including saving to a database.

One hour back, lunch, review the two weeks and determine the next steps. Goodbye to local team. Do emails and catch up with Aaron. Work, and early to bed I think.

Saturday 21st September 2002

Up late-ish, breakfast and pack. Basically, the trip is over. Now the waiting for time to the airport.

Had an escort and a driver in the car to the airport. Through customs and onto the plane. This flight is a Manchester-Mumbai-Singapore flight, so there were many bemused Poms on the ground in Mumbai. Had to explain the strange security situation in Mumbai to confused english crowd. Whilst I am no India expert, I’ve spent two weeks here and the confusion is now par for the course.

Sunday 22nd September 2002

Singapore early in the morning, just enough time to do the exact reverse of a couple of weeks ago: bathroom, money exchange, lounge. I literally walked off one plane and onto the other with no waiting. Bees dick.

Sydney late in the afternoon. Good to be home.