Day 7: Delhi

Our seventh day in India and last day in Delhi began with a meeting which we had been very much looking forward to, Chief Justice Y.K. Sabharwal, the soon to retire leader of the Indian Supreme Court. Though our time with the Chief Justice was necessarily short, he did leave us with one particularly powerful quote:

“Delay defeats justice.”

This seems particularly applicable in the Indian judicial system which is afflicted with a staggering backlog cases. At the lower court level, there are some 15 million cases waiting to be heard, and at the supreme court level, there are a full 2 million cases in backlog. This has been an area where Chief Justice Sabharwal has attempted to make changes, but the system is still in the early stages of the reforms that will make it optimally efficient and effective. We also got the opportunity to sit at the back of some of the courts in session and watch the Chief Justice in action as one by one he quickly assessed the merits of the different cases put before him, dramatically slamming down the files of the rejected.

Salim's ambitions to become the next Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court were far from subtle

The study trip then moved back to the Sheraton where we had a very unique opportunity to participate in a panel discussion with 5 important Indian business leaders and policy experts. These included Vineet Nair (President of HCL Technologies), Malvinder Singh (CEO of Ranbaxy, a large generic pharma company), Vikram Akula (Founder and CEO of SKS Microfinance), Prof. Bhrama Chelani (strategic affairs expert at the Centre for Policy Research), and Ashish Gupta (COO of Evalueserve). On top of the great opportunity to speak with yet another set of very important Indian leaders, this event was also a TV 18 CNBC exclusive which aired primetime on Indian national television. I can say (because I was there and I just know) that we really did represent the GSB well.

On the TV 18 Set

Paul comes one step closer to his Anchorman ambitions: "Yup, it's true. My cologne is made with bits of real panther"

One last stop before we head to the airport to depart Delhi for Bangalore, just about an hour and a half spent visiting L.K. Advani, leader of the opposition party and arguably the second most important politician in India today (after the Prime Minister of course). The meeting was a phenomenal and unique opportunity, and more than perhaps anything else, it was a great chance to see a truly successful politician doing what he did best… being political. We got to ask about 30 questions, and of those, we got really satisfactory answers to about 3. That’s certainly not Mr. Advani’s fault, there were multiple television cameras there, multiple microphones, and he is poised to potentially, even at the current age of 80, make a play for the position of prime minister in the next election. Given this, no matter how much we may have wanted answers to our questions, I’m sure that none of us hold his evasiveness against him.

L.K. Advani (the guy in the middle)

And then it was off to the airport… we all prayed to our respective deities and crossed our fingers that traffic would allow us passage to the airport, that fog would let us leave the airport (in an airplane, of course), and that we’d arrive in Bangalore with at least a little time to sleep before the morning, and day eight’s meetings with it, rushed to meet us.

Getting into the Bangalore Infosys campus at 2am is not easy. Security is tight here. The police officers guarding the entrance originally wanted to inspect and catalogue every single piece of electronic equipment in the group. (That’s about 8 laptops, 20 cameras, 10 mobiles and 9 iPods, if you’re interested). Luckily, we persuaded them we could be trusted and they let us in. [Note: although we thought this security was excessive at the time, we read in the papers two days later that a terrorist had been caught with explosives and blueprints of the Bangalore Infosys campus].

Marcelo later regretted his decision at 2am to flee Infosys security guards on a bicycle