Week 2

So after my first week at my internship. Two of the Indian interns - Ayush and Laban - had finished their internships and left. I still have two others - Mrenali and Rukmani. So at least I am not alone.

One thing I started to notice very quickly here was that the people in my office were surprisingly not as friendly as I expected. Everyone here is really nice. They will smile, wave, say hello, and exchange pleasantries. Beyond that however, it seems that they really aren't that interested in talking to me. According to the other interns, this is normal treatment for an intern. It seems that there is a sort of social hierarchy in the law firms. At the lowest level you have interns like me, who when I ask for work, thye sometimes tell me they have plenty of work but can't give it to me. I wonder what kind of work they could possibly have that is non-delegable. I mean I can understand if they want to check my work or that the time that they would wait for me to do the assignment and then check my work might take too long. Who knows.

They take the hierarchy thing to surprising levels. For example, in the firm there is an upstairs area where everyone eats lunch. There are three tables there and they are relatively close, so its easy for others to talk from one table to another (it is a small room afterall). When we sit there with the interns, no one really speaks to us at all. If they do, it might be a small conversation like oh where are you from? Oh that's nice. Or oh what kind of work have you gotten so far? Interestingly, when I try to engage them in conversation, they answer my questions but usually my conversation will spark up a conversation between them in which I am no longer included. It's like my question is used as a basis for what made them think about it and then they talk and I usually will just listen and watch. In the weeks that come, I will try to venture out and break down these barriers a bit.

At least Rukmani and Mrenali are nice and talk to me. Mrenali's family lives in Delhi but is originally from Kashmir...so that is pretty cool. Rukmani is also from Delhi I think. She goes to school in Rajasthan (the desert state to the west of Delhi).

As far as work stuff goes, my second week just carried over from my first week. I finished my gambling assignment and on Thursday I finished my beneficial ownership assignment. I am not quite sure how good it was, but we'll see when I get comments. I feel like the lawyers here don't always give a lot of good feedback. I have no idea if I am doing a good job or not or if I am even giving them what they want. I guess if a lawyer gives me more work in the future, it means I gave them what they wanted and if not, I didn't. That's the only way I can think of to gauge.

On Thursday, the senior partner gave me a research assignment for him. He asked me to work on a paper comparing the fiduciary duty of directors in the US to the fiduciary duty in India and to identify possible holes in the law. A lot of the research projects I have received so far (beneficial ownership and the directors assignment) have been theoretical to help them with problems that will likely come up in the future. While this is all well in good, I was kind of hoping for some more practical experience. I can (and likely will) write academic papers in law school. The point of the internship is to get some hands on experience. (Luckily, by weeks 3 and 4 this does change).

On Friday, I ended up going out to dinner with Sana in Visant Vihar. Sana is a friend from Emory who did Model UN. She is originally from New Delhi and has an internship here this summer and is living with her family. She came and picked me up at the guesthouse with her driver and we drove to Visant Vihar, which was about 4km away. We went to this thai restaurant, which was really nice in the back of the shopping area.

Visant vihar is a nice little area with shops and restaurants. There is a wide range of places from a local shop on the side of the street to nicer restaurants. She had heard about this place but had never tried it. It was not disappointing. I ended up having some japanese food that they make on this special kind of grill. They allowed us to customize the ingredients kind of like they do at a mongolian barbeque place. We also had a glass of house wine (it was an Indian wine) that was pretty good too.

One thing that is irritating about Delhi is how high the taxes are. The VAT is 12.5% here! So you pay a base of that on everything you buy. Additionally, alcoholic beverages are levied at a tax of 20%. I suppose this is to discourage drinking and to raise extra revenue for the government. I have also noticed that there is a service tax when you are charged a service charge (the tip for the waiter). So generally a meal will be something like 1400 rupees for two people at a nicer restaurant (this is about 30 dollars). After all of the taxes and service charge, the bill comes out to be about 1900. So as you can see...the taxes here are quite ridiculous! My sister always complained about how high the taxes were in Chicago. I guess she would really hate Delhi.