India site (sometime in 2006)
MIDC, Taloja Industrial Area
District Raigad, Taluka Panvel
Maharashtra 410208, India
This was my first oversea stint with a MNC that is headquatered in US. Being a newcomer in the company, I was fortunate that a 'senior' from Singapore office will be there to mentor me. I remembered being happy as this was my first trip to India, but I was kinda reluctant later on because my son was just a few weeks old and I will be away for at least 2 weeks. Fortunately for me, I have found a baby sitter in PJ through a recommendation of an ex-colleague of mine in that company. This aunty and her husband takes very good care of my son when I was not around, treating him like their own grandson (still no grandchildren at that time). Wife has got a driving license but she has no confidence in driving my manual transmission car in metropolitan city like KL where there are many impatient, inconsiderate and notorious drivers on the road.
Ok, coming back to the India trip. The flight from KL to Mumbai took about 5 hours and again, this was the longest flight I've ever had, the longest being flights from KUL-KK-Tawau, which took more than 2.5 hours. One thing I took noticed about is the uniform of the steward and stewardess in the plane... and of course the 'smell', if you know what I mean. Not much of entertainment in the flight as long as I remember, but the journey back home via 777 was much better, as there is a personal LCD screen in front of my seat where I can choose a variety of entertainment, from music clips, movies and past tv shows.
I took an afternoon flight to Mumbai, and reached at the airport there quite late in the evening. I was on the lookout for Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol...but no signs of them or other bollywood actors/actresses that I know. And there wasn't any poster or signboard depicting their picture pun. At the airport, my colleague and I booked a taxi to take us to Panvel area where our hotel is located. Being on a vehicle in India for the first time can be a scary thing. I thought Malaysian drivers are notorious, obviously I have not been to India where the drivers are super notorious! Err... I don't mean all drivers are like that but the way they drive on the road i.e. swerve from one side to another, going into the lane of the opposite direction knowing that vehicles are coming over and honking practically all the way to get through busy streets.. were just too much for me... I remembered I've got a bad headache. Being on a busy street in Mumbai can be chaotic.... betul-betul kecoh because seems like every vehicle is honking... even the back of lorries it's writen "pls honk".
Hotel where I stayed was kinda comfy, but I'm not a fan of jasmine flower or its smell lar. Pity me... I can't stand the smell and yet every morning somebody will put some fresh jasmine flowers on my coffee table. The smell to me is repulsive lar...but after a few days I've kinda immune to the smell already. The hotel room was clean but the water from the toilet smells really strong...of chlorine. I guess the sanitation of water is important in India, since there could be a possibility that the source is tapped from the subsurface (groundwater).
Food was very spicy, and because I have a sensitive stomach, I couldn't help but to start each day in the morning in the toilet...getting rid of 'stuff 'my system. Roti canai was very common... but it is called paratha here in India. There are so many types of paratha, but the best I've tasted was the one with lots of onion and with some potatoes and minced meat in it... can't remember what it was called back then already... more than two years since my trip back then. Even at this time when I'm blogging about my trip to India, some things like the name of the hotel or which direction I took to my project site all seemed to have lost in my memory box. But I still remember the beer I took though... Kingfisher. There are two types of beer...the common one is the one with 4% alcohol and the other being the stronger brew i.e 8%. The stronger one was darker in colour and I remembered seeing stars after walloping the third bottle at my last day at the hotel. Eating was not much of a problem, since there is a restaurant in the hotel, and being a foreigner and barely understand the native language there (Hindi), I was not that adventurous to walk out from the hotel and look for food along the street or at the nearby town. TV was boring, as most of the channels were showing Indian programmes... nothing like the ones back home.
Going to the site and coming back to the hotel was easy, as we have a driver pre-arranged from the hotel and it wasn't that expensive to hire one, as long I can remember. For lunch, either we pack from the hotel or we ask someone to tapau for us. Eating food from stalls along the street is not recommended by another colleague of mine, who has travelled extensively to India, and being someone who has a sensitive stomach, I would rather have same lunch set (fried rice) everyday rather than batlling the pain over the toilet bowl.
The site was just like another construction site back home, but it's kinda different here because there weren't any Indonesian or Bangladehis, but mostly the lower caste Indian citizens. It is a reality here in India that people are still differentiated by the caste rankings. In general the higher 'class' of people here speaks Hindi, but the labourers on-site were speaking either in Telegu or Tamil.. sorry I can't tell the difference lar. So to get things going for us, we need a supervisor that communicates both in Hindi and Telegu/Tamil. And it was a sorry sight at the place where I was working, as I can see children as young as 2-3 years old walking around barefoot and picking up things from the construction site, something that they can play with. Older childrens and some adults were seen taking shower on-site, using piston-like pump to extract gw from the ground. Older children, perhaps in their teens were seen helping their parents (including women) carrying things like steel bars, bricks and crusher runs. Unlike back at home, construction work here is very labour-intensive and the labourers here are super underpaid, overworked and underfed.
It took us 3 days to see the first completion of the monitoring well, whereby it was the first time that I see a drilling machine is powered by human touch (using the leg to control the 'drop' speed of a metal bailer via pulley, sorry no picture to illustrate this). Cannot tahan already with the slow progress of the drilling work, we bombarded the dilling supervisor, asking him to bring in a proper drilling machine and people (some of them wearing singlets, either barefoot or wearing slipers!) to do the job. And I was being pushy and impatient towards the drilling contractor because I missed home and my newborn son so much lar... So it took a while before drilling company (based in Delhi, but sub it to another drilling contractor based in Mumbai) proposed to use a hand auger to do the drilling work. Skeptical we were, because there were so many construction refuse and hard material at the first point that we took three days to complete it using a half man-half machine to drill. We took our chances and we were suprised that the drilling was damn fast that we completed the second well in barely in a day! Wow... talking about labour power!! So barely in a week after the first point, we wrapped up our work there and headed home after about 1.5 weeks there in India.
Looking for ice or dried ice (for the cooler boxes which contained the samples) is a challenging task in India. Sorry, there's no convenience store like 7-11 or store alike, and the coffeeshops are very reluctant to sell their ice to us. Luckily our driver was very understanding and he suggested that we hunt for ice-cream man, of which we did found one and he directed us to the place where he bought blocks of ice for his own use. So after doing a bit of searching, we did manage to find one ice seller and suprisingly, he got chunks of ice on his tricycle, covering them with gunny sack! It was damn hot in the afternoon, and I can see the ice is melting away and water drips like rain. The driver became our interpreter and asked for some small chunks of ice. The ice seller took a small block, put on the kerb by the roadside and chops it into small chunks. And that was when I pondered what would happen if the coffeeshops got the ice from this man, wrapping the ice with gunny sack and chops the ice on the roadside, and later ended up in your cold drink. Eww... imagine the fibres from the gunny sack and dirt from the roadside melekat to the ice... sure sakit perut wan!!
So after 1.5 weeks in Panvel area, before we headed home the following day, we took a short ride to nearest town 'with a shopping complex', somewhere in Thane area. Bought some Punjab baju and dupatta for my wife and mom, and bought a toy train for my son. Only bought Basmati rice for myself, although I was actually eyeing on some gemstones and rock from India. Expensive they were, so I had decided not buy those but took back some 'souvenirs' from the site for remembrance (basalt and some minerals infilled within the vesicles).
Come to think of it now, I am grateful for being given the chance to travel to India, at least I can see what it is like to live & work in another country. Got diarrhea for 2-3 days after getting home, I wonder why.
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