Grin & Bare It

"You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive." - Anonymous Well they don't know who said this, but I think there's a pretty good chance he'd driven around suburban Mumbai at one point or another. In the last 5 years, since i was unleashed upon Mumbai's traffic, I’d say we've grown to understand each other. I’ve had my share of infuriating experiences with unpredictable lunatics and also my share of tearing through rush-hour traffic at break-neck speed, cursing everyone along the way. Funny how anyone going slower than you is a moron and anyone overtaking you is a maniac. Hmm. But the real challenge in driving through Bombay is dealing with the sheer variety of vehicles and their rather, should I say, individualistic, drivers. Now what we’ve got here could be called a guide to some of the hazards and sights that one may encounter. Behind door number one, we have one of the most intriguing species one would come across, the Auto Rick...

So we reached the office on this rainy Monday morning (ironically, that was the only half hour that it rained in the whole week), all decked out in formal wear as we do back home, wary of the fact that we shouldn't appear too casual to our clients. This despite being forewarned that it's not compulsory here to wear formal clothing. So as it turned out, once we were in, we realized that t-shirts, jeans, track pants and shorts seemed to be more the order of the day. And the point i make here to all those brainiac human resource managers out there who make the rules, is that surprise surprise, work DOES get done regardless of your outfit! Now i'd like to believe that everything has a story behind it, including this mind-numbing question of why so-called responsible, working adults need to be given a set of rules about what they can and cannot wear to the office. So here's my take on it. Something, somewhere went terribly wrong. Maybe it all started as a big joke, or when s...

Well it took us the better part of 40 hours to get here, having endured all of 4 airports, 3 aircraft of tremendously varying sizes and 2 burger king outlets. Not that i was complaining, of course. Efficiently sustaining myself on burgers, onion rings, and gallons of coke, i could probably have gone another 40 hours quite comfortably. (Do note the traditional all-American diet that i was clinging to so stringently).  The thing about being within the confines of an airport is that feeling you get of being in some kind of time warp. It's always night and it's always day. Which in turn helps in getting rid of any remnants of jetlag you're expected to have by the time you reach the other side of the world. Flying westward on a 16 hour flight originating in Bombay that starts at about midnight local time, gives you this tremendously weird stretch of time where it's dark for as long you're flying, (except for an odd couple of hours of mild brightness while the aircraft fl...