JC in India

It’s been a while! So long in fact that one friend in the UK messaged to check everything was ok. Which was actually rather nice to be honest, knowing that someone out there was checking up on me. (Cheers Gav!)

All is well, there has just been a lot of travel this last month, and I have had little time to write. This has included a couple of weeks back in the UK for a combination of work and some time off, followed by another work trip to Dubai straight after, then a week in the office, a weekend in Almaty with a couple of guys from work, another short week in Delhi, and now I am sitting on a flight headed back to the UK again for a quick weekend [Evening of Friday 1st December].

So I have had little time to stop and reflect and continue these short updates (well, ok maybe not so short..!).

I am deliberately trying to stay away from Delhi as much as possible at the moment. The pollution is horrific and with the slight asthma that I have on occasion, I can really feel the trouble this causes my lungs at times.

So, while the UK and Dubai trips were work justified, the extra time off in the UK, plus Almaty, and this trip now back to Blighty are all completely personal – pollution avoidance plus also making the most of time with friends and family as well.

In my UK and Dubai trips I managed to take the opportunity for some running which was so welcomed. After two weeks in the UK covering around a marathon in terms of distance while there, I could already feel some fitness returning. That is encouraging as it gives me confidence that when this Indian adventure concludes, with a bit of focus I should be able to recover to potentially previous form if I work hard at it. Plus that will help me lose some of the excess pounds. Although going through the Maccys drive thru with my boy won’t have helped that…

It has also been nice to spend time with friends from work in a different environment. A ‘lads weekend’ in Almaty was a great mini break (it’s only 3 hours from Delhi and the trip involves some spectacular views over the western Himalayas).

The lads liked the views too…

While the original intention had been to ski, unfortunately we were just a little too soon in the season and the snow coverage wasn’t sufficient. But just being in the mountains enjoying the crisp fresh air, and the spectacular views was good enough.

And now this quick weekend back to London is courtesy of my third of three contractual company paid trips each year for personal use. So, I wasn’t going to waste that. I get two nights at home, and even though it will be a red eye back and straight to the office on Monday it will be worth it despite the ‘matchstick in eyes day’ that will doubtless result.

I could evolve this script into a piece on travel overall and the sentiment of such, but I have talked enough of that in the past. In truth this post is about focusing on highlights and of acceptance.

The first trip – to the UK – was primarily to attend the World Travel Market, which is basically a key event in the travel trade calendar each year held at the Excel centre in London. The exhibition hall is taken over by a huge sprawling mass of exhibition stands of epic proportions profiling countries, and businesses alike to the wider travel industry. For some it is very awe inspiring and great imagination goes into developing these stands, showing off on a large scale.

Personally though, I hate it. 

It’s absolute carnage, and in truth for my side of the business a complete waste of time and energy. The roles I engage with normally are not really present, as it is more focused on travel agents rather than route development professionals. But the Tourism Minister for Goa was attending (avec entourage) profiling Goa with a mid-size exhibition stand and was supposed to be holding a number of meetings with relevant travel industry professionals to discuss Goa. Hence, it made sense that I joined also to ensure he stayed on track and had the chance to profile our airport where chance arose.

In the main though, most of the meetings were pretty lame in terms of relevance, but so be it. The profile was raised where possible, and for me personally bolting on a week off made it a personal success. I was supposed to return to Delhi on the Wednesday evening for a Thursday morning arrival but given the air quality index in Delhi had reached record pollution levels (literally 1,000 on the AQI scale – where most indices cap out at 500 as top level of ‘severe’), I managed to change my return flight to get back on the Sunday. Thus an original one and half weeks planned, became the two weeks it was.

This also meant I literally was only back in Delhi for one night before heading to Dubai on the Monday. I had tried to just change to go straight from the UK to Dubai, but the amendment costs were not worth it, so via Delhi it was to be. That gave me the chance for a change of suitcase, laundry etc., so it actually worked out ok. And additionally, it meant that I ended up in Delhi for Diwali – which happened to be on that Sunday.

Last year I was out of the country for Diwali, so this was my first experience of the festival first hand. For India, Diwali is similarly embraced in the manner Christmas is celebrated in the rest of the world. Most people take time off and spend it with family. It is a peak travel period in India. And the evening itself is where the fireworks really do light up the sky, and smoke out the neighbourhoods. For the whole night.

I went to bed later in the evening, having witnessed from my balcony a constant barrage of bangs and flashes since the sunset. After a few hours I could literally see the smoke blowing across the balcony in dense levels. And the bangs went on all night. And I mean all night. I was woken on multiple occasions right until the sun rose around 6.30am.

In fact, similarly the following Sunday when I returned from Dubai at 3am, I managed to get to bed for 4am hoping for a few hours’ sleep before I had to rise for work at normal time. But as soon as I turned the lights off, and lay in the quiet I could hear music playing out the back and more fireworks going off. This was one full week after Diwali, and they went on until at least 5.30am when I last heard them. I mean seriously, it is a normal Sunday night, and it is literally 5 in the morning and you are letting off fireworks with loud bangs and playing music. I think that is a good way to just sum up India. The ‘I am doing what I want’ philosophy playing through. But in parallel, there is the acceptance by others that this is the norm, and the lack of argument for such. The country just cracks on and people accept the disruption and disturbance of others for what it is. Maybe you are doing the disturbing one day, maybe being disturbed the other. But in the end, it will balance out and in the main all shall live in harmony…

So, my UK trip was great, even though the travel event was not much fun in my eyes. Just being home for a while was the real highlight. It meant working on India time for a few of the days did require 4.30am starts, but it was worth it. The more I am away the more I miss the stability of home, and the peaceful presence discovered during the pandemic years of not going anywhere. There is a lot to be said for staying still.

Dubai from a professional perspective was much more positive, with the IATA slots conference being held in the same convention centre I had been at a few months prior with the Arabian Travel Market. Our stand was home for three days of meetings with multiple airlines and I was joined by a couple of colleagues for part of the event.

Plus, given old friends and colleagues from my former company attended, along with friends from other parts of the business it also made for a great social scene. Truly one of those work hard, play hard trips.

Jen flying in for the last few days and a transition to a nicer hotel in the Marina for the weekend following made it all the better.

While Dubai is obviously known for desert and heat, this time of year it is relatively pleasant and so a great time to visit. But it actually rained while we were there (a rare occurrence), and online there are plenty of videos of flooding and disruption as a result. But we missed it and did not see any of that. It did affect traffic though, and the resulting gridlock that ensued as nobody in Dubai can cope with rain it seems, actually prevented us reaching a rendezvous with some friends. We just could not get away from the marina area and actually bailed from an Uber after sitting in one spot for twenty minutes going nowhere. But we got to enjoy some beach time and got a run around the marina also, so it ended up being a great little mini break following the work event.

And then last weekend it was Almaty time. I had been a few months prior for work, and stayed less than 24 hours on that trip, but given the short flight from Delhi it made a great destination for somewhere different, and myself, Thibaut and Gordon had a mini adventure, going up to 10,500 feet above the city in the Shymbulak ski resort (without the skiing though as mentioned already), and undertaking some city walk exploring too.

It is an interesting city, being a real blend of Asia meets Europe with a distinctly soviet feel. Russian and Kazak are both spoken languages, although Kazak is the home language.

Our hotel was also playing host to delegates of the Karate world championships (or something like that), and there were plenty of nationalities in situ. For us the most notable being the Russian team, with their Russian branded attire making it pretty evident where they were from. Russians and Kazak’s have a similar trait of being fairly austere in their manner, but despite this outward approach in the main they were friendly as can be and we encountered some very pleasant folks in taxi drivers, and fellow hotel residents. While the countries leadership may be embarking on its own agenda, that does not make the normal Russians bad people at all, and we need to remember this. I regularly deal with a contact in Moscow as part of my job, and in fact I met with a team from Aeroflot while in Dubai. The world keeps turning, and I just hope the wobble in the turning currently soon sorts itself out.

And so, following those trips I have spent the last week back ‘home’ in Delhi. It has not been a completely normal office week though, as two full days were spent in business planning strategy workshops offsite in a city hotel (the Oberoi, so wasn’t too shabby to be fair). This is an annual event the company puts on where our chairman and senior leadership get together to review plans for the next five years, with each part of the business presenting in turn their priorities and receiving challenge or endorsement accordingly. The style of these meetings are very foreign to me as a British person, as they contain lots of quite vocal challenge and admonition and are very ‘fluid’ in their style to say the least. If I am here this time next year it is unlikely I will attend the session then as I would only have one month left to go, so it would be less relevant for me. I must admit to not being disappointed about the fact that this could have been my last one to attend…

There is a lot more that has happened over the last month, but the background chatter slips away from the front of mind, and memories around the periphery are removed.

Speaking of removing things, let’s talk about those zeros…

In Kazakhstan we soon learned the way to convert the currency was to remove the last three zeros and double it to get the Euro equivalent. i.e. 1,000 Tenge was equivalent to 2 Euros. It is similar to the way I convert Indian Rupees with 100 INR being 1 pound sterling or thereabouts. So I have been removing a lot of zero’s in my head last weekend, and realised while doing this, that I still do so in India. It is less conscious now as I am fully conversant with the currency and its worth, along with the very specific way of notation they use to describe amounts. What I would write as 100,000 is written in India as 1,00,000. The extra comma dividing as 1 ‘Lakh’ or one hundred thousand. 1,00,000 Rupees is equivalent to 1,000 pounds (remove the last two zeros). This makes 1 Lakh equal to 1 thousand pounds. And then the next level up is a Crore, which is 100 Lakhs, and is written as 1,00,00,000 or more usually 1 Cr. Therefore, a crore is a hundred thousand pounds (ish). When we were in our work strategy sessions this week, with P&L statements on the screens, they are written and talked about as Crores and Lakhs and written using the numerical styles above. It takes a bit of getting used to, and I still find myself converting what is written as 100 Cr to being £10m. Just removing that extra zero from a Crore gets you a million. Confused yet?

And thus, we are all different. Whether we are Indian’s talking a different numerical style, or setting off fireworks at 5am without a care in the world. Or whether we are Russians proudly showing off a countries branding to anyone who wants to see. Or whether I am a Brit immersing myself into these environments and trying my best to understand and respect the differences, we are all simply human. We are all deducting zeros, adjusting what to us are foreign customs and practices to ways which we understand.

Learning to accept these differences and understand that neither is right or wrong would see the world a much better place. We are all on this small rock together. Whether that is 8,045,311,447 of us on this planet right now or 8,04,53,11,447 of us, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just get along.