Overcoming the birthday overload

I don’t mind wishing the odd fellow Happy Birthday occasionally, but the wretched day arrives every year for everyone, including Eskimos, coastal Maharashtrians and my extended family. Every member of this group – in typical disregard for my convenience – was born on a different day and expects to receive a thoughtful greeting card from me every year. The list is long and requires careful prioritization. First, of course, is my wife; she is followed by my son and daughter; then my mother and mother-in-law. Next are my sister, brother-in-law, nephew and sister’s brother-in-law. After this my sense of order collapses because, creeping out of the woodwork, come a bevy of uncles and aunts and, due to the power of reproduction, countless cousins who, thanks to the power of modern-day transportation, are spread across the globe. The result is a staggering pile-up of birthdays every year.

Handling this annual workload requires a management system. Luckily I’ve studied management. So, by explaining the principles of strategic planning, workflow optimization and cognitive dissonance to my wife, I suggested to her the following method of dividing the work between the two of us: I would take care of her birthday card and she would handle the others’. To my surprise, she refused. Having encountered this problem before, I dealt with it in my usual way: I abandoned the scientific approach and resorted to abject begging. It worked.

Flying faster than time

Time flies. We’ve heard that cliché at least 562 times. But nowadays we fly faster than time and end up with jet lag, another peculiar disease created by man.

My first experience with jet lag was a few years ago on a business trip to the United States from Singapore. I was bright and chirpy on the morning of day one and actually made two meaningful observations during the meeting. But after lunch, I felt relaxed; the speaker’s voice – droning on about budget planning – was soothing. I tilted my head back…

The next moment everyone was pushing their chairs back for the tea-break.

Realizing I had nodded off briefly, I cunningly approached the speaker.

“Hey, Phil, amazing presentation – you brought a fresh perspective to budget planning.”

He looked at me oddly. “But I finished that long ago. This session was about training.”

“I know,” I said, recovering quickly from the shock, “The training speaker was also impressive. What’s his name, by the way? I missed it.”

“Her name is Sarah.”

“That’s right – Sarah,” I said, recovering quickly again, “I’m going to speak to her.”

A city of character

London is fresh on all our minds today after we’ve been forced to follow the recent royal wedding so closely. For two weeks it has been featured on every television channel, even the thirty devoted exclusively to food. It has made the cover of most magazines. Much discussion has taken place about Kate’s wedding dress and its designer Sarah Burton – including where she lives, works and takes her dog for a walk. (Frankly I was disappointed that, after all that build-up, Kate turned up in something white). The actual event was telecast for seven hours non-stop and reported in detail in local newspapers and the International Herald Tribune... on the front page of course.

But after this heady media immersion, it is useful to remind ourselves that, apart from the royal family, there are other interesting aspects about London, many of which I discovered on a recent trip.

On my first day – a beautiful morning with clear skies and a crisp breeze – I asked the hotel concierge to recommend a running route. Based on my previous experience, I expected to be pointed to a nearby park with shady trees, velvet lawns and paths cushioned with fallen leaves. Or perhaps she would suggest a quaint path along the majestic Thames, with the gently flowing river on one side and stately buildings on the other.

“There’s a cemetery nearby, Sir,” she said.

From icons to relics

Imagine we were back in the 1980s and you asked me to offer odds if you bet that the Ambassador would disappear from India’s roads.

“A hundred to one,” I would have said, laughing heartily.

At that time, one couldn’t think of India without the Ambassador, a vehicle that had ruled our roads for half a century. If owning a car itself was a luxury, owning an Ambassador – the vehicle used by ministers and secretaries, commissioners and generals, executives and tycoons – was an unabashed statement of wealth and prestige. If you were lucky to be born into an Ambassador-owning family, you probably rode the same car to kindergarten, high school and college. Thrift, that majestic Indian virtue, did not reduce with wealth. If anything, the rich had more possessions to practise frugality, using their toothbrush even after its bristles were puffed out like broccoli and employing the same refrigerator for two decades (hopefully changing the food inside more frequently). The Ambassador, with a sturdy engine sitting in a bulbous body of steel, was built for endurance (if for little else). Repairs were cheaply carried out by hundreds of roadside mechanics using inexpensive – if somewhat dubious – spare parts.

But you’d have won the bet. Today the Ambassador is a non-entity. 7,500 Ambassadors were sold in 2009, less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million car market (Honda sells 5,000 City cars every month).

Finding Church Bollywood

I was surprised to read in The New York Times recently that many Indian tourists are visiting Switzerland, accounting for 325,000 hotel nights annually. The article opened with the story of a couple from Mumbai travelling there for their honeymoon.

Switzerland is of course an age-old tourist destination. People flock there to breathe the clear cold air, soak in the beauty of its pristine mountains and gaze at the majestic banks holding much of the world’s not-so-pristine money. Skiing enthusiasts zoom down Switzerland’s snow-laden hills for a week and rave about it for a year. Food lovers dig into popular Swiss dishes like sauerkraut and fondue.

But these don’t appear to be attractions that would attract Indians. The prospect of a cold holiday – rendered colder by sliding down mountains at high speed – leaves us cold. If we want to see buildings that are stacked with cold, hard cash, we can walk along Juhu in Mumbai or Raj Path in Delhi. As far as food is concerned, we’re unlikely to be enticed by sauerkraut and fondue; when we travel abroad, we carry our own food (along with utensils to cook it). And we can simply appreciate the beauty of Switzerland’s mountains and gardens by watching a Bollywood movie.