Acclimatising to Our New Home: Week One at RBI
To acclimatise to our new unfamiliar home for the next few weeks, we (the Newcastle students) decided to arrive into Mumbai a couple of days before our internship commenced. We flew out from Heathrow airpo
rt on 23 of June at 21:30, arriving into Mumbai at 11:00 local time after a more tolerable 9-hour flight than expected thanks to Fawlty Towers and Shrek on the in-board flight entertainment system.
Just as we thought the journey was almost over, we had to travel four hours by taxi to Pune, however, a long McDonald’s stop made it more bearable. It is fair to say that the urban and rural surroundings on the journey were rather overwhelming as it was nothing like anything we had experienced before-the busy highways, wildlife, inequality in wealth and the views.
Ways we occupied spare time before the internship commenced and in the evenings in the first week included exploring the city of Pune and playing sports such as table tennis, pool, football and cricket. It didn’t take long for a group of locals to challenge us to a competitive game of cricket! As well as this, we were put to shame with our table tennis skills as we challenged some of the RBI workers.
A favourite place to visit in the evenings is a bar called Agent Jacks, the people are extremely friendly and the drinks are very cheap!
In terms of the project, we had an initial meeting with all our supervisors on the first day and we were shown around the fascinating RBI campus which is to be our home for the following six weeks. The campus library seems very useful as it has a large range of textbooks relevant to our group projects. All the Newcastle students and their respective Boston University teammates spent the first week understanding and thinking about the project. We have also been given a couple lectures enlightening us about the Indian culture and the functions of the Reserve Bank of India.
– Jack and Benjamin
