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.
Well it amazes me to see how many things in this world never cease to amaze me.
Just one tiny example. I received an email from Schlumberger HR asking me to make a dossier of 20-odd certificates which I will be required to carry during my induction program in Abu Dhabi. It included probably every certificate that I'd have obtained since class 10 (except for the birth certificate, which would be way before that) and the birth certificates of your parents, spouse and children, wherever applicable. I would like to presume I was born only after my parents were born, and how does it really matter what their dates of birth are or whatever else they are trying to gauge from those certificates.
The topper, though, was to carry a marriage certificate or a concubine certificate, if and whichever applicable.
Now, I've seen and heard of a very many things over the past few years, most more enlightening than not, but I really never imagined I'd hear of a concubine certificate! Do such things as these exist? Why would one want to be a certified concubine? Prostitutes, I can imagine, but then they wouldn't really be working in Schlumberger, or wouldn't be prostituting of they were earning in excess of $50,000 per annum. This is, of course, going with the prejudice that this is a profession borne out of necessity/depravity/force or various other such undignified reasons, and not out of choice. Even so, I can live with that certificate from countries where prostitution is legal.
The only sane explanation I can come up with is that SLB is a global company with a strong focus on the Middle East where the Islamic customs dominate, and it is allowed to keep multiple wives. The second and third and fourth wives would probably be the concubines with an official concubine status as opposed to married, though if they are wives, why so? I can't really think of anything else.
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
