Travel, Beer, Indian Standard Time and Wiki

The past four years of travelling outside the subcontinent to the new continent and now to the oldest continent of the world has given me one of the wonderful experiences of touring the world over. Of all the positive or negative aspects being a consultant, the one I really admire and love is this opportunity to explore the world, experience different cultures and traditions.

A group of consultants when travelling to Germany were invited by our common acquaintance to a glass of beer on a Friday evening dinner. One of the striking cultural differences between India and rest of the western world is consumption of alcohol. In India we consider this habit as a social taboo and I believe it's mainly because of the way people consume alcohol and carry themselves, where as in the western world meeting someone over a glass of beer or wine is one of the most common bonding experiences. And from the little experience I have in this area, I assume it's one of the easiest way to make friends, who doesn't want to have a glass of beer.

On this particular Friday evening true to our roots of working late evenings at office we turned up at the brewery, the place of our dinner, per Indian Standard Times. And to our great surprise and relief we were happy to find our friend still waiting for us at the dinner table 2 hours after the scheduled dinner time. As the evening passed we treated ourselves to some of the world famous German beers and I must say I never was a beer person but it has been a treat to have a glass of world famous spicy beer and Half-a-Wei-zen one of the famous German beers. I recommend these to any one who loves sipping beer.

Our German friend has made it a point to read the Wikipedia pages on India and it's history. We on our part and as part of our consulting profession make a point to read the wiki on the cities where we live and the habits of the people. This provided us with a common ground to discuss and express ourselves without being foreign to other person's views. However I must say the experience of knowing about other country from that country man could be more enlightening than reading 100 pages of Wikipedia. Of the many topics we discussed that night, like the different geographies of India, the different flora and fauna and of-course Bollywood, the  one topic that compelled me to key-down this blog post is the explanation offered by one of my colleagues at the dinner table about Indians. And I must say this is the best explanation that I had ever heard about my country, it's people and would strongly believe no-one could have put it better. Well in the best of interest of keeping the blog shorter the explanation is in the next blog post.