Press Conference

We got visitors in class today. There were four journalists came from New Delhi to visit SDM and us, the students from America. Supposedly, they are going to find out about our experiences in Mysore so far, but it ended up been that we learned the roles of press in India.

I got a lot out of it, but I don’t think the journalists got much out of us. When Mary asked what will consider being the news of 2007, one of them said that in one instance where 20+ kids were kidnapped and the police officers were not the first ones who took actions on. I don’t know how much longer it took until someone found two dead children bodies buried somewhere, and later been identified as part of 20 kids kidnapped and the rest remain unsure. These 20 kids were coming from lower class family and that’s why their kids didn’t get much of attention as they should. In contrast, when one government official’s child was kidnapped, the police force found his child in two days. These two examples set a really good ground for us to understand the corruption and inequality in this country, which is exactly what Verna was talking about. Todd did ask the journalists on what they think of the book Being Indian, and they honesty responded that they have not. But they did say that Verna is a well known author in India, which I thought is interesting. Verna’s writing style is very different from the Western. He’s like a factual writer (I’m not saying that everything he wrote about are facts; he likes to write a bunch of statements and not go much into elaborating them), which I found very difficult to read on. According to Rajiv, Being Indian is a very controversial book in India, which I could see the reasons now. The writing style he used made the readers want to believe that what he wrote is all facts, and I’m sure many Indians may disagree.

After the “press conference”, we had a little coffee break where I asked one of the journalists for whether an employer would prefer a new hire to have higher degree of education or someone that has more experience. His response satisfied me. He said it really depends on the position you are hire for. If an employer is looking for a plant manager, he probably would prefer experience over education. However, if he’s looking for engineer, he would probably look for someone who has the higher education. This totally makes sense no matter where you would go in the world.

Later in the afternoon, we visited the TVS plant. The ride to this plant is even bumpier than the one we went to yesterday. There were several speed bumps that were 3 or 7 in a role. That was bumpy! And when we rolled down the window, the smell wasn’t all that pleasant either.

Once we arrived at the plant, the security was a tough one to pass. No camera, no bag, and no purse. We finally got the permission to enter. We sat through four PowerPoint presentations in their conference room and I have to admit that it was tough to do after the ongoing schedule we had. We finally tour the plant!

The TVS plant is much better than the Automotive Axle we visited yesterday. Again, I don’t know much about this industry, but you can tell that this is a quality plant. The facility is clean and most of the workers have their safety protection gears on. The plant is well equipped and organized that we all think it will work just as well as it would in U.S. No wonder why they won the Deming award.