Our visit to Infosys

Infosys Technologies Ltd is one of the biggest names in the Indian IT industry. It offers many services such as IT services, engineering services, consulting services, BPO services, and finacle solution for banking industry. This multinational IT services company with offices in 22 countries and development centers in India, Japan, China, Australia, UK and Canada, is headquartered in Bangalore, India. Infosys has close to 125,000 employees. Infosys Technologies Ltd. has come up a long way to become a global leader with revenues of more than US$ 4 billion.
Seven people have started this company back in1981 as a software development company, called "Infosys Consultants Pvt. Ltd.", with a capital of only US$250. In 1993 Infosys has become a public company and changed the name to Infosys Technologies Ltd. Infosys Technologies Ltd. was also the only Indian company to win the prestigious Global MAKE award for the three consecutive years in 2003, 2004 and 2005. In 2009 Infosys was rated amongst the "50 Most Innovative Companies" by Business Week.

Fireflies ashram, Dinnepalya village, India

Fireflies is a fabulous place that is located in Dinnepalya village right outside of Bangalore; it is so quiet and peaceful place that draws many people from all over the world. It is surrounded by trees and overlooks a beautiful lake. It has a meditation hall, conference hall, amphitheatre, dining room, library, and a yoga and massage centre. We went around the village and checked out the small stores and the old houses; also found many ant hills that are humongous. We had a great time there; it was actually the best place that we stayed in during our entire trip in India. The only drawback was the slow Internet connection that drove us nuts. It was so difficult to get online to check our e-mails. However, the people at the fireflies are very nice and open minded, they acknowledge and learn from many religions such as Buddha, Kabir, Christ, Basava, Mahatma Gandhi, Ramana Maharishi, Krishnamurthi. They believe that no religious teaching should be the property of any single community, but belong to any seeker who can draw meaning from it. They also believe that the sacred and the secular have to meet in order to solve the serious personal, social and environmental problems facing humanity today.

The long journey to Bangalore

Sunday, January 2, 2011
My thirty hours of traveling started at 7 am, Sunday, January 2, 2011, when my wife and I left the house and headed to Bridgewater state university to meet our group members and Dr. Grossman and start our journey to India. We took our university’s van to Newark airport, New Jersey. It took us about five hours to get there since we had to go back to Quincy, MA to pick up an important travel document for one of our group member that she forgot at home. Luckily, we got to the airport just in time; our flight departed from Newark at 4:25 pm Sunday afternoon to arrive the next day at 5:35 pm local time at Bombay airport. After we got our luggage and went through the customs we had to go to a domestic airport to take another flight to Bangalore which took us approximately another five hours to get there. At the airport we met Dr. Rao and two drivers who took us to the fireflies ashram which it was about an hour away from the airport where we stayed for five days.