Hyderabad – Day 3

It was a full day today. It started with a couple of 1:1 meetings and then a deep dive on another product called EI that is the broker for disparate systems that schedule emails through a third party solution for designing and sending email. This was the first time I’d gotten a decent look at the solution architecture and was impressed with the work they’ve done around failover, redundant and low latency round trips. They consistently and with high frequency beat their SLA for delivery by more than 50%.

After those meetings, I came back to the hotel for a couple of hours. I’m just about over the jet lag now, just as I’m about to return.  I took a quick nap and then caught up on email, news and did some planning for the next leg of my trip. Still haven’t figured out if I’m going to head over to Ireland or stay in England. Probably won’t decide until I get off the airplane at Heathrow. :)

Then I went to the place where my team was watching the game. It was quite a ways out of the city and as I’ve figured out, my driver, Mohammedarif doesn’t know how to read. I gave him the printed directions to the location, but he didn’t seem to understand. So, I read it for him. It was on temple road. So, instead of taking me to the resort where the party was, he took me to a temple. I was really tempted to go into the temple. I wanted to see it, but needed to get to the party. India had already had their 50 overs and I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t get to see much of the game.

So, I gave him Shrinivas’s (one of the team leads) number and he called and got directions. We made it there just as the game began to turn bad for Pakistan and the party was starting to get crazy. These guys are nuts about cricket here. I learned a little more about the game and watched with interest. It’s actually quite fun to watch and reminds me a lot of watching a baseball game in terms of the rhythm, progression, settings, sights and sounds.

In the end, India won. The guys went crazy and started dancing up on the stage where the game was being projected. One of the guys insisted that I go up and dance too. I said, no thanks, I don’t dance with guys… He wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, yes, somewhere out there, probably already on the web, there’s a video of me dancing with a bunch of crazy Indian cricket fans celebrating their win. This whole country is cricket crazy. Large corporations declared this day a holiday or let people have flex hours or half a day off.

Here’s a picture after the celebration and before the fireworks.

Fun night. Quite memorable. One of the guys leaned over to me when it was apparent that India was going to win and told me I was good luck. I said I was glad they were winning or everyone would think I was bad luck!

Tomorrow is an easy day. They’re letting me off with one meeting and then I get to go out and do a little sightseeing before catching a 4:20 AM flight to Dubai.