A week in Chennai

I am now reaching the end of my short time here and I have some impressions to share.  Of course this is rather like spending a week in Idaho and then reaching conclusions about America but bearing that in mind, here I go…

The journey over here was strange.  I travelled Club World which meant that I was pretty comfortable but it was the thought of what was happening on the ground below that unsettled me.

Terminal Five at Heathrow - Only for British Airways

Club World

My footstool and lunch

We flew over Europe but then we passed over the Black Sea only just south of the disputed airspace around the Crimea before passing over Georgia which is still in a state of semi-war with Russia.  Then we passed across northern Syria, Northern Iraq and then over the Caspian Sea just north of Tehran.  I kept thinking that if we had a problem there was nowhere to go.  Then we entered Afghanistan, passing right over Kandahar and Camp Bastion!  I began to imagine that the Taliban had got hold of a shiny new ground-to-air missile and wanted to test it out on that bright speck in the night sky.  We turned south over Karachi where the Pakistani Taliban are battling it out with the government before reaching the relative safety of Indian airspace.  All around me people were watching the movie, drinking or sleeping but I couldn't take my eyes of the moving map.  To see Mosel, Tikrit and Baghdad pass by was an uncomfortable feeling.

I didn't know what to expect of Chennai when I arrived there at four in the morning.  The first thing I noticed was that it was very hot - around 28 degrees (80 Fahrenheit), which was odd in the dark, and very crowded.  Several people claimed to be my driver before I found the real thing - a man with a sign with my name on!  We tore through the packed streets of Chennai, taking about half an hour to reach the Radisson Blu but I was really too tired to notice much.  The hotel itself was gloriously air-conditioned and very comfortable.

Nearly photographed myself nude in the mirror!

Cool, clean and comfortable

Now for my impressions:

I like it enormously.  It is beyond the top end of my expectations.  In fact, I could live here provided I was in a middle-class occupation.  I can quite see why my forbears came here.  They came to trade in the early 1600s and many of them fell in love with both the country and the women.  Many married Indian women (often forgetting to mention this to their wives at home!) and for a hundred years or so Empire was the last thing on their mind.  They just loved the country.

The incredibly solid walls around Fort St George, the British base in the 1600s

The British homes in Fort St George

The now-empty moat around the colony

My first impression is that the women look fabulous in their flowing and brilliantly coloured fabrics.  Those early traders must have thought that they had landed in paradise.  The whole city is a blaze of brilliant colours, buzzing energy and pleasing smells.

Four on a scooter.  I saw many families like this.

The beach - too hot for me!

Pretty certain that Waitrose would not sanction this!

The extraordinarily effective salesman who relieved me of Rs35000 in one shopping foray!

Sights of Chennai - 40 degrees/105 Fahrenheit!

A shopping mall that could be anywhere in the world

My second impression is that the people are incredibly nice.  Everywhere I go they are friendly in the extreme. Everyone tries to talk to you about where you are from and why you are in India and the service in the hotel and in the various shops I have visited is attentive but not intrusive.  They seem to be an extraordinarily polite people.

I also feel very safe.  I forgot to lock my safe one day and left my passport and currency in plain view.  Although cross with myself for the oversight, I needn’t have worried.  And today, whilst visiting some astonishing ancient monuments south of the city, I needed Rs250 (Rupees) for an entrance fee and the man on the gate had no change.  To my amazement, my guide handed my Rs500 note to a postcard seller hanging around us and asked him to go and change it.  We were then nodded through and when we came out half an hour later, the postcard seller produced two 250s and handed them over with a big smile.  I bought some postcards from him with my change but I didn’t have to.  They do bargain gleefully but I would trust all the ones I have met in a way that I would not in many European countries, including my own.

My charming and amusing course participants

Their personal hygiene standards are higher than ours.  This was an eye-opener for me.  They wash incessantly and they have eliminated hand-shaking as a disease vector by pressing their hands together and bowing.  I find this charming and now do it myself.

Secondly, they always wash after defecating, using their left hand for this purpose and they only eat with their right hand to ensure no contamination, though they wash their hands most thoroughly.  Every loo I have seen has a douche on the end of a flexible hose washing.  Again, now I have seen this through their eyes, I can see their point.  You will be pleased to know I have no pictures relevant to this!  Where the West wins out is in public hygiene infrastructure.  Their water is not safe to drink and their sewage system is deficient. 

The greatest single surprise to me is body language.  I always believed that shaking your head for “no” and nodding for “yes” were universal human responses.  Not so.  In Chennai they do shake their head slowly from side to side for “no”, but they rock it rapidly from side to side for “yes”.  Imagine an axis running horizontally through the bridge of the nose and out of the back of the head.  People here rock their heads from side to side around this axis for “yes” so the forehead moves to the left as the chin moves to the right and vice versa.  The rocking is rapid and energetic.  When you first see it, you think that the individual is disagreeing with you vigorously and it takes time to recognise that this is a sign of assent.  The surprising thing for me is that I have begun to copy it.  If someone rocks their head energetically from side to side when they are agreeing with you, you tend to do it too.  At least, I do! However, when I first encountered this when running my courses here in Chennai, I thought that people were rejecting what I was saying and found it very disconcerting.

The language here is Tamil.  India has 29 states and 7 territories.  Each has its own governor and legislature and there is a federal or Union government in New Delhi.  Here in Tamil Nadu the main language is Tamil.  In the northern states it tends to be Hindi but several other states have their own languages.  English is the common language used by people from different states to speak to each other and, of course, it is the language of business everywhere.  However, English in Chennai is very difficult for me to understand and people here find me very difficult to understand.  This was a shock when I began to train and found people frowning and listening intently.  Often, I would ask a person for their opinion and get a non sequitur for an answer, such as “yes”, or an answer to a quite different question – and that is if I understood them at all.  Their English is as fluent as mine but it is bordering on becoming a different dialect and may evolve into a different language given time.  It is easily the most difficult to understand version of English that I have so far encountered.

Business life seems to be similar to our own.  The offices of Standard Chartered, where I have been working, are very impressive indeed.  They are more like a campus then offices, with several buildings spread around a tropical park and an outdoor staff restaurant.  Inside, the offices are cool and pleasant places to work with the same technology we expect at home.  The mostly graduate staff are earning around £2,000 p.a. but I suspect the purchasing power of this is much greater than the actual amount suggests.  This is presumably the reason Standard Chartered have put their global shared services centre here.  I began work in England as a graduate on less than that and I suspect the price level here is at least as low as it was back then in England.  Certainly the style of dress, use of mobile phone and wearing of jewellery and designer glasses suggest that they are not poor on these salaries.

My course participants

The entrance

My classroom

A road within the bank.  Asia is on the right.

The logo picked out in grasses

The Melting Pot - the bank's staff cafeteria

The bank's private park around which the offices stand

It might look familiar but the first mouthful nearly blew my head off!

Looking up from the Melting Pot

Impressive sign indicating the various buildings on the private campus

The Asia building

Staff enjoying lunch

Me and my lovely participants

Map of the office

Staff relaxing and communing out of doors

My participants again

The heat is not as bad as I feared.  Daytime highs are around 40 degrees (105 Fahrenheit) and night time lows around 27 degrees (80 Fahrenheit) but the heat is like a warm blanket and feels very pleasant.  Of course, I tend to move from air-conditioned hotel via air-conditioned limo to air-conditioned offices, so I am not exposed to it except when I want to be.  During my trip to the temples at Mahabalipuram I did begin to feel it a little after a few hours.

My trusty steed. I went everywhere in a hotel vehicle

Temples carved from solid granite.  The technique is to make small holes with a chisel, plug them with wood and then soak the wood so that the expansion splits the rock.  This was all done nearly two thousand years ago

This is a natural structure.  Plenty of theories about how it happened, but nobody knows

Another granite temple with my delightful guide in front

These Indian gods are SO sexy. Much more glamorous than ours!

Reputed to be one of the largest bas-reliefs in the world.  The channel in the middle is the Ganges coming down from heaven.  All the characters tell stories.  Just below the elephant tusk is the legend of the cat who pretended to meditate (you can see its paws over its head) and so the mice thought it was safe to play.  But the cleverest mouse noticed that the cat's tummy was fat whereas a true mystic always fasts!  This whole thing is thirty or forty feet high.

More of the bas-relief

This is the story of the villagers who upset the rain god.  He decided to drown them in a deluge but Lord Krishna came to the rescue, raising the mountain over his head like an umbrella.  Again, each of the characters in the village has a story.

My excellent guide

Sandstone monuments that had remained buried for centuries until the British (hooray!) detected them and excavated them

This is one incarnation of God and is female on the left of its body (god's perspective) and male on the right.  My guide assured me that this indicates that Hindus regard men and women equally.  This may be true or it may be a modern gloss on an ancient story - I can't tell.

The beach at Mahabalipuram

The subject of Empire has come up once.  A Hindu friend asked me what my view of the Empire was.  I told him, truthfully, that I was conflicted about it.  On the one hand, it is a remarkable achievement for a small island with around three million inhabitants at the time and very few natural resources to spread its influence to the four corners of the earth and it is impossible not to feel a frisson of pride when thinking about that, but on the other hand bad things were done by it and I feel uncomfortable when I think about some of those.

He replied, to my surprise, that he was conflicted too.  He said it was sixty seven years since “we” left (he didn’t have to think about that – Indians apparently know exactly how long ago we left) and that Indians were still running on the infrastructure we left behind.  By the way, I say “we” because he said “you”.  We both knew that I had never been there.  The roads, railways, power generation and hospitals and schools were largely as we had left them and for some reason, India had been unable to maintain the level of capital formation after we left.  He found this frustrating but he said that there was no doubt that India owed a lot to the British.  So we agreed to call it quits and left the subject.  For what it is worth, I suspect that India might take off now that it has a right-of-centre government committed to reducing the deficit and freeing up business.

My only gripe is food!  I can’t find anything that does not blow my head off.  They would curry their cornflakes, given the chance.  I am desperate to eat something that does not actually hurt.  I am not one of those travellers who avoids salads, fruit, ice in drinks etc. etc.  Diseases are far too clever to be thwarted by that sort of thing and I take the view that to hell with it, I shall eat what I am given and rely on Imodium and a night on the loo if necessary.  Sure enough, my third night was spent on the loo and I was a bit washed out the next day, but this would have happened however careful I had been.  The fact is that bacteria vary around the world and a digestive system will initially kick back against unfamiliar bacteria.  I can well imagine an Indian getting traveller’s tummy in London.  After that night my guts adjusted and I have been fine since.

Getting home was a bit of a nightmare.  The flight was delayed from 3:30 AM to 3:30 PM.  I was aware of this through checking online so I had a more leisurely start on Monday morning than I had originally planned but it meant that I did not get home until 1 AM on Tuesday whereas I had planned to be home in the later afternoon on Monday.  But I soon recovered and have very positive feelings about the trip as a whole.