Authentic...what?

Let’s experience a little bit of India through day to day activities! Don’t expect much, after my first week at work, I discovered that working full 12 hours a day and having night life in the city closing at midnight can not be too fun! But still...


Saturday, 16th of June: heaven on earth as I spent half a day at the Taj Residency Spa - a first ever in my life. Massage…body treatments….you feel so nurtured that you’d wish you were rich!


Take a short look, would you…?


Then…later on… attend the hottest house party in the city, my friends have some friends, so we get in but it takes half an hour just to cross the crowd to be able to enter! People dance here! No lie! Finally!
The crowd is great, the DJ is said to be one of the best in India in the house music industry, and he makes the crowd groove! The rhythm is crazy out here but we are all enjoying! Unbelievable!
Now it’s midday and everything freezes for a second: the music stopped, damn, it’s over. Everybody follows the rule; Bangalore is very strict with playing music and serving booze after midnight! So we move the party to the house of some friends whose parents are in Europe on vacation.

I can recognize the modern western chicken and the wide plasma TV, but otherwise there is a little bit of family history and cultural heritage everywhere. The two worlds come together and there is nothing strange in it. For me as an outsider who didn’t expect this is strange. I smile to the two golden frogs behind the door at entrance, they are for good luck. I admire the beautiful art pieces on the walls. It’s just a matter of mini-seconds for the dog and me to become friends! We all start dancing; the rhythm is still there, we are in the mood for more partying! And it is happening!


The weekend ends with brunch with the expats…we are a colorful bunch of people: from the Chicago office, London office and Dublin...one Spanish, two Indians, 4 Americans, 2 British, 2 Irish, a Romanian, a Kuwaiti…
My dear AIESEC friends…I never took the opportunity to go on a traineeship….know that this is my traineeship!
My dear non-AIESEC friends, know that a traineeship is a student exchange program where a student is sent to complete a paid internship in another country working for a company after a matching process takes places between the two. Sounds familiar? Well know that AIESEC takes the commitment to ensure that cultural ready - ness exists and monitors the relationship along the time span to ensure both parties are gaining from the relationship.


Where does everything end? But where does everything go to? A smile is sufficient? A though maybe is enough? I am having a good time, I might not be able to understand how everything works here, it’s still a mystery to me the “how come?” associated to a beautiful house next to a piece of land where people live without water and sanitation in a wood-made-nylon-covered type of living spaces…and then you have “Please horn” on the back of every bus or commercial vehicle, but anyway the horns is everything you can hear in the street, they don’t follow any driving rule basically…and please bargain if you plan to buy something because most probably they have at least a 300% price increase just because a foreigner shows up in the door of their store…...