On the second day, Maya Gadgil and Matthias Litzke, 
the two employees of ZHAW accompaning us students, introduced our school to our guest, Ashwin Merchant. Following the short introduction, in his role as Deputy Head of Swiss Business Hub India he held his presentation “Riding the Indian elephant”.
The interesting and educational lecture was divided into two parts: In the first half he introduced his firm Switzerland Global Enterprise and told us about it’s different functions and mandates. It’s main business concept is to open the Indian market for Swiss companies and vice-versa.
In a second part he pointed out the main cultural differences between Switzerland and Indian.
The most interesting information we thought noteworthy:
- Most important factors in the indian culture can be summarized by ABC:
- A: The allmighty god (reglion)
- B: Bollywood
- C: Cricket (the national sport)
- More than 7 million people use the Mumbai public transport system each day. That nearly equals the whole population of Switzerland.
- In the North there’s a credit culture, in the South there’s a debit culture.
- In Switzerland we have the watches, in India they have the time.
In the afternoon we got the chance to visit the company Cognizant. After driving for 15 minutes Standard Indian Time (approx. 60 minutes) offices we arrived in their offices in Mumbai. There we received an introduction into the health science sector of the Indian branch. We took a tour of the company where we had an insight into the workplaces and workenvironment of the local workers.
After his nomination to “Bachelor of the day”, Joel Minder had the honor to hand over the “roses” to his favorite speaker. Special thanks to all the presenters.
