René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Driving yesterday evening though Bangalore, I wondered from  a journalistic angle what is really new, what is worth mentioning that hasn’t been covered yet. Globalization is there, it’s a done thing, in spite of critics claiming the opposite or worse some conspirational “there-will-be-a-backlash-at-some-point-in-time”-claims. Then, Bangalore City is growing like hell; driving through Cunningham Road, I almost didn’t recognize this street compared to when I was sitting in Audrey D’Souza’s office from the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce for the first time in 2003. The road, which had the typical functional look and worn down structures, nowadays boasts of shining shopping malls, one McDonald’s, a Reliance electronic store and some more. Amazing, the speed of transformation towards progress, whilst Germany as a developed country is facing backward steps with a political drift to the left. Well, true, but not too new.

When I arrived at my destination, the house of Moritz & Nadine for their farewell party, a couple who has met in Bangalore and who have become very dear friends of mine, I realized how big the expat community has emerged. How organized and at the same time scattered it is. And how luckily inevitable it is to become somehow socialized by the environment you get exposed to. Finally, what scale of magnitude the exchange into both directions has grown: This week, I got to know that on any given daily Lufthansa-flight between Frankfurt and Bangalore (LH 754) and back (LH 755) 20 seats would be occupied by staff from the software giant SAP. Indian engineers being trained in Walldorf (Germany), but in its own right German engineers being trained by the Indian practise in Bangalore. So another very good friend of mine Ingo who runs the Indian operation of Wienerberger and me, brought together some thoughts on our way back from the party what has happed over the last years.

With a pinch of nostalgia, in 2003 when I moved to Bangalore, there was one platform for Germans to meet: the first Friday evening per month in the Goethe-Institute, then still in Lavelle Road on the upper terrace-floor of Axel Schorlemmer’s German restaurant.  A tiny, little group of expats, at good days 15, at less fortunate days maybe 8, but where in fact everybody knew everybody. With Bangalore getting increasingly interesting for students for an internship, a “Bangalore Trainee Group” got started. A rather loose and fast changing mailing-list on Yahoo where stuff got posted on “where’s the next party” and “who wants to join the weekend trip to Hampi”. Needless to mention, also a good dating platform for bridging lonely evenings in the remote parallel world of South India.

The point that I want to make is the dynamics in group building with all the phenomenons that come along: group cohesion, a higher degree of organization, brand identity and the emergence of sub-groups. A good example is the Bangalore Expat Club (BEC) which was founded in 2005 by Arvind Chandra. And his story goes like this. Being an Indian (!), who had spent the last years in France, he was sent to an assignment to Bangalore. He didn’t know anybody, sat around alone in a pub and said to himself that this is an awkward situation. Hence, he founded BEC with one regular meeting once a week, same time, same place. In additional, what helped leverage the reach of his effort, his mother was in web-design and set up the BEC-website. Slowly, but steadily, this group started to build momentum, with a vast array of activities from scavenger hunt to cooking classes happening. Today, Arvind is back to France, yet the club is run with a highly active and institutionalized board who is taking their responsibility very seriously. What is more, the quantity and quality of members has grown exponentially, too, so that each member adds a lot of value by his or her network and serving as a catalyst for exciting events as well as access to companies, institutions and governmental bodies.

However, as nobody is forced to join the club, and the few hundred members of BEC by far don’t reach out to all the thousands of expats in Bangalore, sub-groups have started to emerge. You might go to one party, meet lots of Germans, go to another party and meet lots of Germans again, yet the people from the two groups might not know each other. Something which was unthinkable five years ago. Maybe for those, a social network like InterNations is taking of the concept of permanent “expatriotship”, or let’s call it “global citizenship”, to the next level. Capitalizing on the flexibility of an online platform with global reach combined with natural group-anchors in various physical destinations, it combines the best of the real and the virtual world. I am convinced, looking ahead, that this is a life-model that more and more people will embark on. It has never been as easy as today.