Arun Veembur

I will never meet Arun Veembur – and it is very much my loss. Arun was an intrepid traveller who died earlier this week in a tragic accident while trekking near the remote city of Dali in the Yunan province of China. He was just 28.

Arun started out as a journalist with an english newspaper in Bangalore. On a trip to India’s north-east, he came across the story of the Stilwell road (Ledo road), the tough mountainous road that the british built in the backdrop of WWII. And was hooked. Soon he gave up his job and went to Kuming the chinese outpost where he spent the next few years. He was researching for a book on the Ledo road and in the years that he was there became a bit of an institution.

More on Arun:

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/35518/bangalorean-dies-china.html

http://newshyderabad.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/young-writer-and-intrepid-traveller-dies-in-china/

http://www.dalichina.info/

The post-liberalisation generation

I read recently that 2009-10 is an important year for India since all children born during the beginnings of India’s economic liberalisation of 1991-92 turn 18 years of age now.

The news brought back memories. My dad was in the civil services and during that tumultous phase was for a while one of the three secretaries (ie. a  senior bureaucrat) of the ministry of finance during Mr Manmohan Singh’s stint as India’s finance minister. I remember those days being vicariously involved in the whole liberalisation process. Dad would rush off to many meetings looking excited (a 55 year old bureaucrat getting excited is always a sight!) and would come home all agog with the news that things are changing in India.

I was a child of the cusp. My working life started in 1989 just before all this brouhaha (as a trainee software jock in TCS after qualifying as a chartered accountant, but that is another story) and in 1991 the world changed pretty definitively. The most immediate impact of India’s economic liberalisation was that my salary went from an adequate (at that time at least) Rs 2500 per month to an absurdly indecent figure of Rs 10,000 per month. What with that and my dad’s old amby, I was even able to attract girlfriends, which is of course the acme of life at that stage. So, I remain forever a commited free-marketeer and hormones are partly to blame.

Chinese accountability

On my first visit to China a couple of months ago, I realised that everything we have all heard about China is pretty much right. The main point being that it has awesome infrastructure (clean, wide roads, for god’s sake – how do they do it!).

But the real eye-opener was the undercurrent of government accountability  that one noticed. A couple of simple examples illustrates this.

At the Shanghai international airport, every immigration officer’s desk has a little widget on it (a little screen with two small buttons next to it), kept facing the traveller. Once the immigration officer processes your visa, they press a button. As soon as that button is pressed, the little screen lights up and asks you to ‘rate’ your experience with the immigration official – was the official’s work satisfactory or not? In effect, the traveller is treated as a ‘customer’ and you are being asked to rate your ‘purchase experience’. Presumably the results of this go into the relevant immigration officer’s appraisal systems and therefore is of importance to them.

Now, Roads. I went to Hangzhou, China’s 6th largets city (ie. not it Shanghai or Beijing). The roads across this city were wide and clean and the only roads in India which I can compare these to are in Lutyens’ New Delhi.How can a relatively small city in China consistently maintain all its roads at a quality comparable to the less than 0.5% of India’s best roads? The answer I thin is again, accountability. Having good roads is important for a country and its citizenry and therefore is important for its local government. Remember, city roads are made and maintained by the local government of the city and clearly they believe they need to do this job well.

Popular discourse in India & the west seems to suggest that China is ‘un-democratic’ and even ‘dictatorial’ and therefore does to represent the aspirations or needs of its people. Maybe. But there is no doubt that somewhere in the chinese system, there is a regard for the the ordinary man that one misses sorely in India.

Racism

As India’s outbound travel booms (tourists, students, family….), murmurs of racism are becoming louder. Recent events in Australia have amplified it.

On the limited data of personal experience I have noticed a trend across most parts of the ‘western’ world. Older people, usually above 50 years are more likely to operate on the basis of ‘race’. Younger people, at least in my experience, have tended to be less race-concious.

Race is the most visible aspect of difference between people. And, when there is ‘difference’, there is likely to be ignorance about each other. And in that ignorance I guess lies fear and aggression. All of which ends up as Prejudice.

These days, young people across the world are exposed to a lot more information at a much younger age. They travel much more and watch television that beams from across the world (if you have sons as I do, you will probably know how much the Japanese have invaded popular imagination among kids – this in sharp contrast to the almost exclusively anglo-saxon cultural influences in my childhood) . It is possible that these youngsters feel the ‘difference’ a lot less than the older people.

Racism as we know it will gradually go away. To me, it simply seems to be a matter of time.

Where does this grace come from?

Among the glass and concrete of Bangkok’s Suvarnmabhumi International Airport (about which there is unflattering post just below) is a massive installation of a scene from the Ramayana. It is noticeable for its size and glitter. It is even more striking for its grace.

This is something you notice in Thailand all the time – its innate sense of Grace. Whether it is in the movements of the dancers in the small temples that dot Bangkok,  in the folded hands ’sawadee’ of the Guide who comes to pick one up at the aiport, of the lines that define the overhead concrete that carries the skytrains or the clean silhoutte of the little boat that carries you into the caves of Phang Nha, this is a country of consummate Grace and Aesthetics. I love it.

Beauty of form is something I miss a lot in today’s India. Our urban environs are cess-pits of ugliness and and even the minutest of aestetics calls up cries of joy. But it was on a visit to Tanjavur some time ago that I discovered that India was not always like this. The 1000 year old Brihadeeswara temple there is an extraordinary creation of Grace embodied in a massive form. With a muti-tonne rock crowning its Gopuram, weight could easily have overcome Grace, but did not. The massive temple almost floats and this is architecture at its graceful best.

In fact, it is almost certain that India’s ancient civilisation had some influence on this grace that one notices in Thailand and in other parts of Indo-China. Of course, to give ourselves too much credit for this would be to miss out on the truth. The truth being that these people of the lands between India and China have somehow discovered and maintained a Grace that is one of the glories of human civilization.

Duty Free Scam at Bangkok airport

Since I am transiting again through Bangkok in the next few days, a friend of mine who lives in the region alerted me to a scam that has been reported from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport.

Evidently, sales people in some of the duty free shops are likely to unobtrusively slip in an item that you have not purchased, into your bag. As soon as you step out of the shop, the police are called in and you get ‘arrested’. The only way out of this apparently is to pay a hefty bribe all around.

I do not know whether this is true. But I guess it certainly pays to be watchful..

http://www.asiaone.com/Travel/Tips/Story/A1Story20090415-135496.html

http://www.travellerspoint.com/forum.cfm?thread=62493

Haiku blogwatch

Classic brevity is truly beautiful. And so I trawl the blogosphere to find little nuggets. Here is one:

Race is a constructed category, in the sense that people shape what they count as a “race” according to time, place and purpose. There is no unique and rigid concept of it the way there is a rigid concept of buoyancy, double-entry book-keeping, equilateral triangles and photosynthesis.

Incidentally, this is from one of the more eloquent contemporary political speeches that I have come across. Read the whole speech – here.

Thanks to Koko for pointing me to the speech.

It is entirely personal

Steve Jobs of Apple recently came back to work after a long break for a Liver transplant. He received a standing ovation at the annual Apple show. I wasn’t there but I rooted for him too. For he represents what I think are the two most desirable characteristics for a modern businessman – Passion & Creativity.

Jobs wasn’t standing there because that would light up Apple stock and make the bean-counters happy (which of course, it always does). He was standing there to transmit the excitement that he has for his products. And since he makes insanely great products, the excitement does get transmitted.

If you love what you do, two things are likely to happen. First, you are likely to make good stuff, because you want a lot of people to enjoy what you have made (for Hollywood directors, these people constitute an ‘audience’, for most businessmen, ‘customers’). Secondly, you are likely to make a lot of money because that is, for you personally, a vindication of your own creative efforts. Once agan, the parallels to a successful movie director are obvious.

Remember, we are transiting to the Experience Economy . And it was not by accident that Joseph Pine the creator of that phrase titled his book – ‘The Experience Economy : Work is theatre and every business a stage”

Don’t have enormous Passion & Creativity for the business you do? Move on – right away.

Hotel & Resort Chains in India

One of the problems facing travellers in India is the absence of well-known branded Hotel Chains across the country. Even though HolidayIQ has been able to find about 75 odd ‘chains’ (and I must admit, our definition of Chains is quite loose, since any organisation with 2 or more properties under its management is defined as a Chain), all of these between them control a negligible portion of the total number of leisure accommodation options there are.

Take a look at the list here.

I wish the more prominent ones such as Taj Hotels, Fortune Park Hotels, ITC Hotels, Lemon Tree, Club Mahindra etc would rapidly expand and get more Indian hotels and resorts under their wing. It is needed for India’s tourism to go to the next level.

Researching Holidays Online

 

Here is why I love the business I am in – because it piggybacks on the biggest thing in Travel since the Wheel (ok – mild exaggeration, but still…)

The Internet has become the most popular medium for Chinese travellers seeking information about their trips, according the latest Nielsen China Outbound Travel Monitor. The Nielsen survey found that travellers will search for conventional destination information ahead of their trips (61 percent of leisure trips taken), and then turn to online travel discussion forums (48 percent) to fine-tune their plans. This suggests that opinions and comments about travel experiences posted to online forums are nearly as likely to influence travellers’ decisions as the destination websites themselves. Conventional travel agents were approached on only two in five travel occasions.

The Nielsen survey also found that travellers were much more likely to recall seeing Internet advertising for travel destinations, compared to seeing travel advertising on other mediums. Close to 70 percent could recall seeing travel advertisements on the Internet, with only four in 10 recalling seeing a travel advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, at a travel agent or on TV and radio.

Read the full article here..

‘Heaty’ food

It was while having a great seafood meal with Carolynn & Wallace at the  ‘No Signboard Seafood Restaurant‘ in the Vivo City Mall in Singapore, that I first heard the word ‘heaty’. Here is the story.

The Chinese overlay the concept of yin & yang on a lot of things and Food is one of them. So all foods are divided into ‘heaty’ foods and ‘cooling’ foods. Fried Food, for example,  is considered ‘heaty’ which means it gets your body all excited and sweaty. According to Chinese grandmothers (who like all other grandmothers have a direct line to secret-stuff), to make things stable, you have to have some ‘cooling’ food along with the ‘heaty’ ones.

Interestingly, this concept is not particularly alien to me since it appears in many local Indian cultures too. The Konkan coast (ie. most of India’s western coast) for example uses Sol Kadi, a drink made from Kokum, to cool down the body after ingesting huge amounts of ‘heaty’ seafood, particularly shrimp (to experience what I am talking about, try one of the famous seafood restaurants of Mumbai such as Mahesh or Saiba). Ayurveda too makes a lot of this concept and recommends eating both hot & cold foods to balance one’s ‘kapha dosha’.

The most interesting aspect of all of this is, how two of Asia’s earliest cultures (and two of the world’s most ancient systems of health-care) both recognise the primacy of ‘balance’ in well-being.

Read all my Singapore posts here & Food Posts here.

Travelocity India

Travelocity is coming through (and not just by buying up Indian companies) – looks like they have some of the better flight deals in the region. I recently found a Bangalore – Singapore return (economy of course) on Singapore Airlines for Rs 11,200. And a Bangkok return for 13,600. Both of which are better than the normal fares offered by m0st travel Agents.

So, if you have the time (or the necessity!) to do research f0r good flight deals, I suggest Travelocity India.

From the Economist to Intelligent Life

I dimly remember it as sometime around my 13th year of life that I saw the first copy of The Economist magazine. To a boy brought up in India’s starvation-style socialism of the 60s & the 70s, the paper used looked appropriately ‘foreign’ (read : western & rich). But on glancing inside found it completely unintelligible and therefore grossly boring. Not an auspicious start.

But like most inauspicious starts of my life, this too turned out to be an enduring relationship and I read the densely printed, mostly grey magazine over an unbroken period of 25 years. In 2003, I stopped reading the Economist and took up GQ & the Conde Nast Traveller in as sure a sign of a mid-life crisis as a London stockbroker running off to Tahiti to paint nude women.

But before I stopped, The Economist taught me the following important life-lessons:

that  consistent sticking to an idealogy can result in a cogent explantion for practically everything

that it is possible to explain science in a way that is understood by well-educated and intelligent human beings and that a good Science Writer is a man of Science who can write, not a writer who knows Science.

that the British intellecutual aristocracy is worthy of admiration & respect

that quality of content can triumph extravagance of design 

So, it was with joy that I bought a copy of Intelligent Life at a bookstore at Larnaca airport about a year ago. It seemed to meet my yearning for the familiar of the Economist with my newfound libertine tendency towards Leisure & Lifestyle (incidentally, I actually named the company I founded ‘Leisure & Lifestyle Information Services’ which should give armchair Freuds enough chuckles for a week).

Intelligent Life is a quarterly magazine from the Economist group. It’s tag line is Life.Culture.Style, which presumably means that there are many Tahiti-seeking stockbrokers around to form what the bean-counters at Pearson Media would call a Market.

I liked the first issue I found so much that I subscribed for it. And I must admit. Being back in the warm embrace of an Economist sister is a nice feeling.

Another Africa story – this time in Zimbabwe

From The Dispatch:

A Zimbabwean newspaper reported that while transporting mental patients from Harare to Bulawayo, the bus driver stopped at a shebeen for a few beers. When he returned, the 20 patients had vanished. He stopped at the next bus stop and offered lifts to people waiting. At a Bulawayo mental hospital he handed over his charges, warning the nurses they were particularly excitable.

After three days the hospital staff finally became convinced of the truth by the consistency of the stories by the 20 people. The real patients have vanished, apparently blending back into Zimbabwean society.

Not that such stories don’t occur in other places (and God knows India has even crazier stuff making it to newspapers practically  every day). But somehow these Africa stories warm my cockles more.

Gaia hypothesis : human limitations : hindu philosophy

…in which I promised to tuck away all things not tourism, not travel, not food & likely not of interest…

This morning I read that scientists believe that the Sahara desert might be in retreat with water & life slowly reclaiming it.

The Mahabharata (as most other expositions of hindu thought) talks of life as an endless cycle of Cause and Effect. I remember reading in primary school that the Sahara desert was once (a few million year ago) a lush green landscape. The wheel seems to be turning.

It was in the 1970s that James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis, whereby he suggested that the Earth’s biosphere and its physical components are all so closely linked in a manner that keeps the balance on earth (‘homeostasis’) enabling Life to flourish. Effectively, he said that we needed to think of the Earth and its biosphere as one huge organism. This is not an easy thought to hold for most of us. And if you extend this idea to saying that the whole universe is actually a single organism and everything is closely linked to create the same homeostasis, then the problem of holding this in one’s head becomes bigger.

Human beings seem to have a problem of scale. Our cognition seems to be finely tuned to the scale at which we operate. Scale can be across many dimensions – the most obvious ones that cause us regular grief seem t0 be Size and Time. It seems to me that we cannot recognize and therefore cannot understand things much much larger than ourselves  or much smaller than ourselves. Modern Science, which is after all a product of human observation (‘empirical‘) was forced to take many a fall, when it was faced with the very small – and the new body of knowledge of the very small is now called Quantum Physics. It is my belief that the very same experience is likely to recur when human beings expand our horizons to be able recognize (however dimly) stuff much larger than ourselves. The same is true of things that occupy much longer or much shorter time spans in relation to human beings.

So, while I appreciate the temporary benefits that accrue to the human race from the energetic work of Mr Al Gore et al, I am unable to get terribly enthusiastic. There seems to be too much going on that we do not understand.

Here is another earlier post I did on the subject of Scale.

Swaziland’s merchant navy

Read on for some ‘news’ from Swaziland that I was pointed to recently:

The situation is absolutely under control,” Transport Minister Ephraim Magagula told the Swaziland parliament in Mbabane. “Our nation’s merchant navy is perfectly safe. We just don’t know where it is, that’s all.” Replying to an MP’s question, Minister Magagula admitted that the landlocked country had completely lost track of its only ship, the Swazimar: “We believe it is in a sea somewhere. At one time, we sent a team of men to look for it, but there was a problem with drink and they failed to find it, and so, technically, yes, we’ve lost it a bit. But I categorically reject all suggestions of incompetence on the part of this government. The Swazimar is a big ship painted in the sort of nice bright colours you can see at night. Mark my words, it will turn up. The right honourable gentleman opposite is a very naughty man, and he will laugh on  the other side of his face when my ship comes in.”

 

The real internet cometh..

As I sat down for a very late breakfast in an apartment in Gurgaon a few days ago, up came the dhobi. He wanted my help in ‘internetion’, which I eventually interpreted as Internet. A beat-up old sony-ericsson phone was brought out, the internet icon clicked and we were away. Seems his Baba’s sermons are streamed live and he wanted to watch/listen.

Yes, the internet will start to take off soon in India. With the mobile phone all the big barriers to the internet will start to fall. The cost of the access device will be low and you will not need to read and that too in English. You can watch and listen to the internet on the phone. And that I think is what most Indians will do.

Taxi musings

Talking to taxi drivers is often illuminating & almost always very interesting. And Singapore this week was no exception.

It started with Piara Singh who dropped me downtown from the budget terminal at Changi. His take on the economics of Tiger Airways (to which I have recently defected casting aside all moral and other compunctions I had about low-cost flying – a chance to get Singapore return at Rs 7.5k is no time to be queasy) flights to India was better than any commissioned Market Research I could have done.  He explained to me why the Load factors on Singapore bound flights were very high on Mondays & Tuesdays (incidentally, it was 100% on Monday last) and why the India bound flights are full on Thursdays and Fridays. Piara Singh’s ancestry was in Amritsar and he talked of how Indians from Amritsar are spending a lot of money in Singapore.  Most of all, he seemed calm & at peace with himself.

And then I got a succession of Mr Tan and Mr Tang, these names being common I understand because of the overwhelming presence of the Hokkien people in Singapore. One was particularly noteworthy. He hated Ikea – you know, the Swedish, clean-look, low-cost furniture company. He hated them with a vengeance reserved by Spanish terriers for large & woolly bears. In short, a passionate hatred that is unlikely to significantly affect the hatee. His hypothesis went so. The mastermind boss ( the way he hissed it, I was almost reminded of the evil Shaakaal in the early 80s Hindi movie Shaan – my teenage touchstone for villainy) of Ikea makes poor quality things that he very cleverly gets the stupid Singapore customer to buy by employing a combination of black-magic and European smoke & mirrors. And Since Singaporeans flock to Ikea in ever increasing numbers, Mr Tan/Tang has his view’s validated everyday!  When he found that I too had fallen into Master Ikea’s seductive trap and ended up buying a table-lamp, the bottom fell out of his respect for Indians too.

The next chap told me about Asian people. He started with the Thais since he was engaged to a Thai girl and due to get married the next year. This is what he told me about the Thais.  Be very careful around the Thais, he said – they never show their anger.  Now, this is true. I have always found the Thais to be fairly pleasant and never angry, which I had always taken to be a sign of their essential good nature. Not so, he said. Remember, if they get angry with you, they will smile at you and bam, before you know it, you will be knocked out cold from behind. I started wondering  about the likely longevity of his upcoming marriage. So, I asked him who are best & the worst people in Asia. The Japanese he said are the best. And the Malays the worst. And before he could tell me why, we reached my destination.

And then I stumbled upon Singapore’s most interesting citizen, who for the rest of this post will be called No-name. This guy had eyes that verily twinkled with villainy – late twenties, aquiline jaw, a small beard and a unique complexion that teetered between south-east asian brown and south Indian dusky.  Seems his grandfather ran away from Kerala as a boy of 10 around the first world war.  He then married a Chinese woman in Singapore and they begat a son that was no-name’s father. His father then married a Malay woman and brought No-name to the world, as the quintessential Singaporean with all 3 races well blended in. We started with the obligatory chat about how I had my beginnings in Kerala too and why he should visit it just once. But he quickly put that behind and got down to brass tacks and on to his favorite subject – Hookers. I got the most comprehensive run down on the seamy side of Singapore – incidentally, Singapore has legalised prostitution, which no-name assured me thrives in a corner of this otherwise squeaky clean city/country.  He told me all about the difference between races & the sophisticated economic calculations that went into the buying process. Although he got mildly irritated when I passed up on his offer to help me get acquainted with the situation, he was too good a sport to let that get in the way of bonhomie and we parted friends.

Immigration

Immigration officials across the world are all sent to this common, secret school (run, I suspect by particularly virulent commissars of the ex-USSR) where they are taught the essential niceties of their job – a deeply suspicious look & the ability to never ever let the slightest smile (or even a suspicion thereof) escape on to one’s face, being the most important.

Two countries I have visited stand apart in this – Cyprus & Thailand.

The gate-keepers at the Larnaca airport smiled at me (giving me the heebeejeebies, since to the best of my prior knowledge these guys smile only when about to effect a cop) and – I kid you  not – asked about the weather back home.

The guys at Phuket were the best of the lot. Their interaction was as between mature adults. A smile breaking out of a ‘yeah, we know you are here only to have a good time and as soon as your money runs out, you will go away – but we gotta do this…’ look.

I have been to Saudi Arabia too, where I met the guys who took all the prizes at the commissar’s school.

City-breaks in India

Why is that nobody in India (well, almost nobody) goes to another city in India on a holiday? In many countries, going to another city is a valid &  interesting vacation for most people. They might take in a play, do some fun shopping, eat interesting stuff on street corners, go to a bunch of attractions in and around the city and generally enjoy themselves silly.

In India, come weekends or vacations all we want to do is run away from the city we live in and hit the countryside. Which, given the conditions under which we live is understandable, I guess. But I am surprised at the lack of effort by city worthies to make our cities more tourist friendly. The reason I say that is, most of our big cities have some unique stuff to add to a vacation experience and need not be such bad options for a quick break – even with the traffic jams, a broken down power system and the bug-bear of them all, the monsoons. And of course, given the absence of business travel on weekends can actually help all businesses depending on the traveller.

Well, like everything else in Indian tourism, looks like nobody relevant has got around to thinking about it. What a poor, orphaned child Indian tourism is! Which is probably just as well, considering what could happen if our ‘leaders’ actually get into the act.