Tourist action, shopping & CMS prototype presentation

At this particual moment it’s Monday June 22nd around 22.45. Gerrit and Vincent are waiting at the Radjiv Gandhi Airport at Hyderabad. Our plane leaves at 01.05 to Frankfurt. Lieke will visit Bangalore again tomorrow before leaving India.

As promised, we would tell you about our non working day at Hyderabad. First we went by Riksja to the Charminar (http://7wondersofhyderabad.com/charminar/charminar.html). It’s a very big building with large opening on every side and with a large tower on every corner. Via every tower you can climb to the first floor. In earlier days it was possible to climb to the second and third floor. The guide told us that there’s a mosque on one of those higher floors. Now it’s forbidden to go there. Around the Charminar are a lot of different people. People who want to enter the Charminar for religious purposes, Riksja drivers, children and women with babies begging for money to buy food and young buys who want to sell things like balloons, sunglasses and other things we didn’t need.

Very close to the Charminar there’s a mosque, the Mecca Masjid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecca_Masjid). Before entering the terrain we had to get rid of our shoes. In front of the mosque is a big square. When we were crossing the square a man approached us and started talking about the mosque. The man kept telling and telling and slowly more Muslim children started staring at us. Probably they don’t see very often white men and a girl with blond hair. Then only Gerrit and Vincent entered the mosque; Lieke wasn’t allowed. When it’s time to pray for Muslims the mosque has3000 places to pray. And still the man kept telling and telling. When we finished visiting the mosque the man had one more thing to tell: “You owe me money for telling things about the mosque”. It was a little weird, but we gave him some money because he was already getting a little angry.

When we left the big mosque we went across the Charminar to walk through a big Bazaar. A lot of things were sold there: shoes, Indian clothes, ugly jeans and fruit. But also strange things like second hand tooth brushes, fifth hand watches and radio’s that also play cassette tapes.

After having lunch in a very cold (some Indians use the A/C more than needed) restaurant we took the Riksja to visit the Birla temple (http://www.indnav.com/servlet/Browse?mt=goToName&name=Birla+Temple+Hyderabad). It was a beautiful temple on top of a rock hill. The whole temple is made of marble. Here also we had to take of our shoes and leave our bags, cameras and cell phones behind. The whole temple had beautiful creatures of Indian gods, like Ganesha and Shiva. All Indian visitors waited for every statue to worship their god and to pray for themselves, their family and their friends. A very impressive temple, very impressive habits, but also on top of the temple the view over Hyderabad was astonishing.

We still needed some shopping to do for our families, relatives and friends at home. Visiting a shopping mall in Hyderabad is much more different than visiting for example ‘de Bijenkorf’ in Amsterdam. There’s more personnel than customers. And as a West European customer they treat you as if you are an important Royal or as if you are Mr. Obama himself. They tell you they can make a custom made Saree for women or custom made suits in half a day. We also wanted to buy something for the people of MV Foundation. It was hard to decide what we should buy, until the idea came up to buy things for the kids at the schools. We went to the toys department and bought some flying saucer (Frisbees), tennis balls, a chess games and dices.

When we arrived at the MV Foundation office this morning, we noticed that our Logica colleagues in the Netherlands (Geert Jan & Ruud) and in Bangalore (Ashok & Animesh) had been spending a big part of their weekend on working on activities related to the Child Monitoring System (developing, developing, developing). Great to see they wanted to make sure that Gerrit and Vincent could demonstrate as much as possible regarding the Child Monitoring System.
After lunch we went to another office of MV Foundation in Hyderabad, because the MV Foundation people said they wanted to provide us a big meeting room with big screen for the presentation. Wouldn’t that be great! It’s not a meeting room as we have at our Logica offices. The screen is the back side of a big plastic promotion flag. The meeting room itself contains a lot of plastic chairs, an old dining table and a lot of archive boxes. The really great part was that 15 to 20 people attended our presentation, including the most important man of MV Foundation, Mr. Venkat. In total about 1100 are paid MV Foundation employees.

We showed the MV workers the parts of the system that were developed. All of the attendees were very interested and when the demonstration was finished they were discussing a lot and they were questioning several things. A very good part of the demonstration was that they also tried to think with us in the process of developing. They had some extra ideas on the existing parts in the prototype, but they also made suggestions on parts of the system that weren’t concluded initially in the requirements phase. Those ideas came up, after showing the system to the white screen. Showing screens and processes in the systems is making the system alive for the MV Workers. Suddenly they started to understand things. Demonstrating is a much better method than explaining things during discussions without any visual aids. During such a presentation all the attendees are discussing with each other. Also an older woman gave all attendees chai, great cookies, and a little later drinks like very sweet Sprite and Fanta. Such a meeting is not as organized as we’re used to back home. But somehow, at the end, the desired results are achieved. We clarified issues with MV Foundation and we also have a good insight in the wishes that MV Foundation still have, but that weren’t mentioned during the requirement phase.

After finishing our presentation the people started clapping. All together a trip of hard working, but also a week of a lot of impressions and experiences came to an end. That doesn’t mean that the project for developing the Child Monitoring System has come to an end. Still a lot of work needs to be done in several places in the Netherlands and in Chennai and Bangalore in India. We can board our plain soon.
Bye bye Hyderabad, Amsterdam here we come!