Sauna trouble
by Paul Miller
It's not uncommon for business men to drop into the big public saunas before meetings, but you'll also find some of Helsinki's poorest people there and every now and then, they'll get chatting. Roope describes the particular 'sauna chat' that follows strict rules, but it is independent of who you are. After all, when you're naked, there are few status symbols that money has anything to do with.
Later on we met T, who was born and raised in New Delhi and moved to Espoo (the afluent Helsinki suburbs dominated by Nokia) when her husband got a job with the mobile phone giant. For outsiders, Finland can be difficult to decipher. The sauna is often part of working culture and not something she finds easy to get into. You can assume that a two day conference will include a sauna session and a meal in a restaurant where the food for vegetarians is likely to be a bit limited. At that point T will make polite excuses and head home although, as she says, that's where the real business happens.
Finland is the envy of governments around the world. High growth, top of the international competitiveness rankings, the best education system in the world. But everybody has a diferent spin on what it is that makes Finland so successful. Alan Little's Panorama programme for the BBC tells the story very well.
You also get the sense talking to Finnish policy makers that they think they could lose it all at any moment. After all, it is only 15 years ago that Finland's economy was shrinking by 10% a month and Nokia was making rubber boots. They feel they need to build the next phase of Finnish success by building links to the new growth economies further east. But if they're to do that they'll need to understand how their own culture is viewed by Indians. It's rare for Indian students, for example, to choose Finland's universities over American or British ones.
Next stop for the project: Bangalore.