After a long flight from LA to Frankfort to Mumbai and a quick night sleep, we had a driver take us the 2 hours up into hill country to Pune. After passing the "Respect the Rules of the Road" signs, traffic thinned out once we were on the highway. Billboards for vacation homes lined the road the entire way up into the hills as a sign of India's quickly growing middle class. A slight haze hung in the air, another sign of the quick industrial development of the country. In Pune, we passed one mini tech city after another... Wipro, Infosys, and finally our destination, TCS where over 20,000 IT professionals work every day supporting companies across the globe. During our short visit, we sat next to Japanese, English and German customers also visiting the vast complex.

The juxtaposition of new and old was apparent when we saw an ox-cart passing in front of one of these modern office buildings and tiny three-wheeled tuk tuks zip along dirt side roads and past pop-up shacks selling everything imaginable.

After three days of meetings and several nights out tasting the local cuisine (including street paan - which I later regretted) we headed of to Ahmedabad to visit the SAP support staff.