Incredible India - Day 0-2: Trippin’ to the Lovely Professional University of Jalandhar

Packing for India, both for business & pleasure

Intense. This is probably the best word to describe India and its people. They are everywhere and there are a lot of them. Like really, a lot. Over one billion to be exact, that’s 1.000.000.000. Yes, nine zero’s. That’s about 100 Indians for every Belgian. And they have elections this time of year, 800.000.000 people are voting, making India the biggest democracy in the world. Off to India! 

Let’s talk Global Leaders Programme - India Trip. On Sunday April 6th, all the participants met and, under the guidance of Jessica & Babs (GLP-office employees), we left for a two-hour busride to Heathrow Airport. We arrived a couple of hours early, which gave us the time to get to know each other a bit better. Time management is going to be one of the key issues of this trip… Around 21.30, 45mins later than expected, our plane took of and 7,5hrs later, with the change of time, Monday at 9.30 in the morning (+4,5hr), we arrived at New Delhi Airport. After a short lay-over, and the required border and Visa check, we took a one hour in-land flight to Amritsa, a city 500km. north of Delhi (because they don’t use “New” here). From there, under the guidance of Rajat, we took a 2,5hr busride to Jalandhar. If you counted that right, it means it took us (with time change) 26,5hrs to get to our destination from Coventry.  Oh yeah, we also saw some elephants on the way there, looks promosing for the next couple of days! 

A real-life elephant, with feet, a tail and stuff...!

Jalandhar is where the Lovely Professional University is located (love the name right?!), which is a partner university of Coventry, where we were received like kings & queens. LPU was erected in 2001, but today it already holds 30.000 students and around 10.000 employees, workers etc. who work within or alongside the University. A city on its own. To be honest, it looks a lot like a eastern-european capital. A lot of high, quickly built, appartments buildings in a communistic style. The campus even has its own shopping mall (or what you can call it..) and fire service. An olympic sized pool is onder construction, while several footbal, basketball, volley ball and more courts are already in use. 

After a long day of travelling and a short tour around campus, we enjoyed a meal of indian food and went to bed early. Yes, the university has its own hotel! The Uni-World Hotel is used for guests, like us, and managed by Hotel Management students. I must admit that this is actually a great idea. Our room was located on the top floor, 8th floor that is, with a great view over campus and the city. 

LPU's logo

One of +35 buildings at LPUniversity

Day Two didn't look as promosing as all the other days, unfortunately. We had three lectures about: Indian Industry: Needs and Expectations. India: Growing IT-Giant. and third: Indian Business Culture and Economy. This last one should really have been first as it was presenting India's economy as a whole and would've been more useful if it had been first.

After these lectures, which were both in the morning and right after (Indian) lunch, we had the opportunity to follow a "real" (read: what they reach the tourists) Yog-class. Indeed it's "Yog", not Yoga! In a one-hour class we were thaught about Yog in a nutshell. More intense and relaxing as I had expected. I might just try this again sometime soon. 

Altough our minds and bodies were all "Zen" after the Yog-class (nah, bullsh*t), we were in for another surprise. Kho-Kho is one of India's national games and we had the opportunity to try it, together with LPU's team, which happened to be one of India's top university teams. Even though we looked like we had no idea what we were doing (and some of us actually didn't have a clue of what they were doing), we made a good impression among the spectators who loved seeing "white folks playing their game". After the game we were shaking hands and posing for pictures with pretty much everyone on campus and found out that sports are really important at university. I even met the Silver-medal light-weight champion of India, who wanted to take a picture with me. However, I still have to figure out why he wanted a picture with me, and not the other way around...

After a well-deserved shower, we had dinner (again the same Indian!) and wen to bed as the following day was going to be a tourist-style day in Incredible India!

Yog-class

Kho-Kho