Okay, let’s get to the point. I shall act as if I haven’t been away all this while, and this post, along with the ones in the future, have been written right after the previous post.
Let me bring you up to date on the events till the date where this begins:
I started working for Schlumberger, a Paris-based oil services company, mid-September 2oo8 onwards. It is the biggest and the most respected service provider in the Oilfield business around the world (operating in over 8o countries) but, having always kept a low profile, very few have heard of it outside the industry. Currently, I am a Field Engineer, working in Mumbai High Offshore.
The job involves a lot of travel for training and business purposes. The company also believes in working in a multi-cultural environment for a more competitive workplace and to aid in the overall development of an engineer, which means that I have been to quite a few interesting places in the past ten months, and met more people from different nationalities than I have from India. Nearly half the number of engineers in our office are expats, which leads to interesting discussions and a very different work culture.
We started with an induction course at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I had just been to KL and Singapore a month before my joining, and in the second trip, I could act as a tour guide to most of the new recruits who were visiting Malaysia for the first time. It is an interesting city and worth exploring for its contradictions. At one end we have these suave, ultra-expensive malls and hotels on Bukit Bintang, which speaks of luxury and modernity. On the other, there are the burqah-clad women not allowed freedom or education. Although the predominantly Muslim population is supposed to abstain from drinking, downtown KL boasts of a Hard Rock Café and numerous nightclubs that belie the stringent cultural laws that apply to the nationals. As usual, though, good old Bollywood has its impact and everyone from a taxi-driver to a business executive is equally fond of Hindi movies and music.
Back from KL, I spent a couple of months in Mumbai, learning about this absolutely new job about which I was utterly clueless, interspersed with crazy weekends of fun. I was then sent to a small town in Andhra Pradesh that goes by the name of Rajahmundry for about ten days in early November. It is relatively close to Vishakhapatnam, and from Mumbai, we first fly to Hyderabad and then take a connecting flight to Rajahmundry. It was my first visit to the Hyderabad airport and it has truly rendered itself an international status. I have not seen the old one, but this was big and classy, by far the best amongst the ones I have seen in India, replete with bookstores and coffee houses, merchandise and gift shops. The flight to Rajahmundry is an experience in itself. Only propeller planes ply on the route and the recently operational airport at Rajahmundry is more of a makeshift option. As you fly into the outskirts of the town, you observe that it is an island in a sea of greenery. So much so, that you fly over vast fields and as the plane starts to descend, you can hardly see anything besides the vegetation. This was a moment of consternation for me, for the plane constantly kept losing altitude but I could see no stretch of tarmac or the airport in general. I was under the distinct impression that we were crash-landing in the fields and the pilot had decided not to announce it to minimize panic. Yet, it landed perfectly safely on the runway, and emerging from the cabin, I realized that in the name of an airport, it was just a room, and in the name of security, there were two, exactly two, policemen standing with lathis. There was no conveyer belt and our luggage was distributed to us by two porters right on the runway just beside the airplane. The exit door was about fifteen steps away from where the luggage was distributed and stepping out of it, you stepped into the parking lot. They sure did save a lot of space.
I shall skip the details of the stay there for now. There will be time for it later. I came back to Mumbai after a few days, and having witnessed the horrors of the Mumbai attacks, left for Livingston, Scotland for a three-month training. Livingston is a half an hour drive from Edinburgh, a pretty desolate and boring place. It used to be a big oil production center in Scotland about three decades ago which is when the training center there was set up, and by the time I left it three months later, it was housing its last batch of students. All Livingston’s shortcomings were made up by its proximity to Edinburgh which is a peach of a place. Training continued from December to February, and I stayed back for another two weeks to travel. We got about eight days off during the course of training as well, where we managed to visit some cities nearby.
It is these travels and anecdotes related to them that I will talk about in the next few posts. All it all started with our first trip to Edinburgh on December 8, 2oo8, I will start off with the two weeks at the end of the course where I set out, alone, for the trip and talk about the smaller trips earlier in subsequent posts.
Just to bring the reader up to date with the present day, I returned to India in mid-March, and after a week, was sent to Baroda, and to Barmer, in Rajasthan, thereon. We have a contract with Cairn Energy in Barmer, and working for them was a big challenge, given their very high demands of us for both efficiency and service quality. I spent just under three months there, working seven days a week for my promotion which I got on the 1st of July. I had planned to visit Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, but I was not given any time at all during my entire stay. I came back to Mumbai in June-end and after a short vacation at home, am here in Mumbai for good.
So here I am, with a little bit of time on my hands and trying to finish what I started. Let’s begin.
As much as the Scots like visitors, they like to confuse tourists and make them work hard for their pleasure. The simplest way to do it is to call everything by another name - almost always it is the Scottish Gaelic term for the word - but it does take time to sink in. On the contrary, it did give me a sense of excitement as I'd end up thinking that I'm going to see something very special!
Some of the terms that I'll be commonly using in future posts are as follows:
Loch - Lake Glen - Valley Strath - A wider valley Ben - Mountain Doune - Castle Blair - I'm not quite sure but as far as I remember, it refers to an area Trossach - Roughly translated as the bristled country
These are the ones that'll come up the most. If I think of any more, I'll add them here and also explain them wherever I mention them.
Well, I've been gone a long time and finally I've found, or rather made, some time to write here. For those who don't know (presuming that I haven't lost all my readers anyway), I've just finished a three month training in Livingston, Scotland that is situated 20 miles west of Edinburgh and now I've got about 12 days off in which I'm traveling around the UK.
During the initial 3 months, I managed a couple of visits to Edinburgh, one day trips to Stirling and Glasgow and a two day trip to London. Apart from that, we didn't really have any time to travel. After we finished our course some 4 days ago, I started my travels in earnest and first of all visited the very beautiful Scottish Highlands, and now I am in Oxford and loving it here. Plans are to go to London from here, then to Cornwall and after that, probably to Cambridge or explore more of Edinburgh. It's still undecided.
After constant reminders from mainly Amiya and Misha, I'm actually going around with a writing pad, taking notes as I go around for the benefit of everyone. I'm not yet at a stage where I can think of writing a story from the material I have, but I can definitely blog about it and keep you all happy. I've got loads of interesting stories from the locals, sprinkled with a fair bit of history that you might or might not know and there'll be pieces of pure information at places. I'll try and make it as interesting as possible and break up my trips into smaller stops and anecdotes but bear with me if you start to get bored and comment about it. I'll try and spice it up. Also, I think I can begin to write about it because I've been here for just long enough to get used to think of fries when I read 'chips' on a menu and not of 'crisps'! Other pleasures of being in the UK include pronouncing 'Z' as zed and not zee, and at the end of meal in a restaurant, asking for a bill and not for a check! So much for Americanisms. ;)
Oh and incidentally, this is my 50th blog post here, and though it was a long time coming, it's still welcome to me. :)
If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. - Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare
