It was just a couple of years into the new century when AGD-Research was invited to give a two-week “gig” at one of the big-three Indian IT companies in Bangalore, at their HQ in the satellite hub of Electronic City. We were tasked with giving application training on the supply-chain software that we routinely implemented for our clients. The “we” was Marvella and me, as the consultant who was going to co-host pulled-out days before we were due to fly (welcome to running your own business!). I would do the talking and Marvella would act as my P.A. (personal-assistant).
We soon settled into a routine for the first week. We were assigned a car-and-driver to get us in-and-out of Electronic City which was still only connected by the old-road, and also as a run-around for Marvella during the day. The car was one of those Indian classics, a Hindustan Ambassador, and certainly generated the occasional piercing-stare from the tuk-tuk-drivers and humanly-overladen motor-bikers. In Bangalore I saw up to three people at a time on them, but this record was broken later in Malang in Indonesia when I counted four people on a single 250-cc; mum. dad, son on the front, and daughter on the back!
The day would start with breakfast in the hotel, followed by the trip to Electronic City. At the campus I would give a four-hour lecture, then lunch for an hour, followed by another four-hours. The car-and-driver simultaneously would take Marvella on an exploration of the city and surrounding area, connecting with the local culture. This is where cultures really differ, in people’s social lives, but not in the office where the Western model has been universally adopted. I’ve been in offices in Japan where the power is physically at the centre, and in ones where dogs are allowed, but fundamentally the same office-model is employed everywhere with only minor local variants.
My audience was approximately thirty young-and-eager consultants who had arrived from all over India for the two-weeks, so no pressure then! The room was a lecture-hall on the campus with sloping tiers of seats. I hadn’t been in a lecture-hall since college days, and certainly had never given a lecture/training in one before, but the (over?) self-confidence of a middle-aged small-business entrepreneur drove me through the curricula I had produced, with remarkable smoothness.
Marvella simultaneously would take trips to the city and near-by areas. In the cities’ crowded-market she bought five flashing Krishna and Ganesh icons to fulfil a promise to the lady boss of an Amsterdam ex-pat-shop for resale (after the first one was sold it blew-up and almost started a house-fire, so that was the end of that money making scheme). In the countryside Marvella visited the famous giant banyan tree with its troupe of monkeys, with the large male chasing the ladies in their saris. But she concentrated on the temples and religious sites, soaking-up the Hindu vibe.
In the evening Marvella would pick-me-up in the car and we would return to the city along the most crowded road I’d ever encountered. It was populated with trucks, busses, motor-bikes, tuk-tuks, sacred-cows and sadhu holy men in rags and ashes. Utter motoring-madness. Then it was sandwiches followed-by three hours preparing for the next day, then the hotel-bar, then bed. This was the pattern, and repeated five times until Friday evening when the preparation was ditched in favour of an early visit to the bar.
I had stuck to Kingfisher beer during the week, the local brew, but was tempted by the selection of Indian red-wines, which were significantly cheaper than their French equivalents. Marvella had taught me the best way to enjoy red-wines is to have them alongside a glass of sparkling-water (preferably Italian) so you could stylishly flip from one-to-the-other, and help moderate the alcohol intake. All very sensible.
I started with a glass of Cabernet-Sauvignon, always a safe opener, which went-down very well. I decided it would be selfish to restrict myself to just a mix of two grapes-types, so went for my number-two favourite red, the merlot. This again disappeared with astonishing-speed and enjoyment. Now I thought I should be more adventurous, a Shiraz just seemed to make sense. It was wonderful. Then I thought something a little riskier, a Malbec.
From what I can remember the Indian reds seemed just as good as the ones we’d get back in Amsterdam, and as the evening wore on, even perhaps a little better. Needless-to-say Marvella drank sensibly at her own, slower speed. This was the pattern; each glass a new exploration, each glass seemingly more satisfying than the previous one. I went down all the bar’s wine-list. We swopped stories of the day and the week, and Marvella said I had to come and see a specific temple in the morning that she had briefly visited. I said yes.
When I awoke on the Saturday-morning I knew I’d overdone it. I didn’t have a traditional hangover, and that was the scary part. It was more a feeling of detachment, and I’d experienced the same once before after drinking Russian Champagne late into the night during the “good old days” days of the Soviet Union. Marvella was insistent though, and after a coffee-only breakfast, the car arrived to take us to the temple. I was sure I could handle things. Some fresh-air and a brisk walk around would “blow the cobwebs away”. Just what I needed.
The temple was spectacular and not what I had expected. There were huge, modern glass extensions built on the steep sides. In front of us was a long ceremonial pathway with steps, leading up to the temple. Thousands of smiling, happy people in their Saturday best clothes were milling-around or making their way to the temple. We waved good-bye to the taxi and joined the moving throng. After a few minutes of slow-progress we were faced with a choice signalled by signs in multiple languages, including English. To the left was for visitors-and-tourists, to the right was for devotees. It was one of those split-second decisions that defined destiny, a literal fork-in-the-road. Marvella was up for the challenge; we went right and joined the local-devotees.
By now the crowd density was approaching football match levels where you were on a conveyor-belt taking you forward, with no possibility of retreat. Also, my red-wine hangover-proper was beginning to kick-in, big-time. As we got closer to the temple, I became aware of what I thought was an increasingly loud Tannoy system blasting-out religious-chants. Then everything abruptly changed. The pavement was replaced by individual squares, like the white ones on a chess-board. I saw the locals would step onto the first-one, then jump altogether onto the next-one, and so on. We did the same.
At this time the source of the chanting became clear. It was not a Tannoy system, but individuals with electronic megaphones belting-out the same chant, not of “hare Krishna”, but to my Essex/South-London ears was definitely “hairy Krishna”, or in-full: “Hairy Krishna, Hairy Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hairy Hairy, Hairy Rama, Hairy Rama, Rama Rama, Hairy Hairy”, at full volume, being injected into my ears from point-blank range. Marvella had excelled herself. She had bought me to the world-wide HQ of the hare-Krishna Hindu-cult, and we were leaping like frogs towards our fate.
This realization also seemed to phase Marvella a little, and she reached into her handbag to get the tourist guide of the temple to read more carefully. It was all there, but also more alarmingly, it mentioned the jumping stones. There were 108 of them, 108! I did a quick calculation and estimated it would take thirty-minutes to clear them. Apparently 108 is a magic-number in Hinduism. I thought “why couldn’t they have a sensible number like 12 in Christianity”? I now had to endure thirty-minutes of one of my worst-ever hangovers while jumping from stone-to-stone accompanied by ear-splitting electronically-amplified-chanting, all orchestrated by the happiest looking people I have ever seen. This was not “blowing the cobwebs away”, it was more akin to vaporizing them.
Once we had completed our “work-out” of 108 Sammy-the-Frog jumps, we were quickly intercepted and directed to the visitors-and-tourists section anyway. A swami with thick glasses and long orange-and-red-robes shepherded us to an area just inside the temple where we were sat-down on somewhat uncomfortable cushion, and the “pitch” began. First the history of the temple, then all the charitable work they did, especially in feeding the poor and bringing education to the villages. I didn’t mind that much as I expected we would be asked to contribute, and duly that point arrived.
Three thousand dollars! No; three hundred dollars? It then hit me; these were just numbers not tied to anything. He wasn’t “trying-it-on”, it was just numbers, not anchored in any way to our “real-world” of work, invoices, costs etc. I thought fifty dollars might be appropriate, converted it into rupees in my head, and asked how we could pay, perhaps cash? He then whipped-out from seemingly nowhere one of those card-imprint-machines. I filled-in the slip, he took it and Marvella’s credit-card, put them in the machine, then the moving-bit wouldn’t move. It was broken. He smiled, took the machine, slip and card, saying “back in two minutes”, and disappeared into the dimness.
Time passed. Then more time. After thirty minutes something inside-me snapped. I was off, Marvella trailing behind, hurrying through the myriad of spaces underneath the temple, frantically asking “has anyone seen a swami with a credit card machine go through here?”. It ought to have been an impossible quest with me not knowing anything of the temple layout regardless of the sheer number of devotees; thousands of them! But after ten-minutes there he was, chatting away with others, totally oblivious to him having Marvella’s credit card, and why we were so concerned. We were on different planes; his was the enduring mysteries of creation, and ours, the enduring non-mysteries of living in a capitalist-economy.
When we got back to the hotel, I let Marvella make the inevitable call to the credit-card company. Its not that we thought anything untoward had happened, it was just best-practice. Her opening lines were a classic: “you’re not going to believe me, but I gave my credit-card to the Hare Krishna sect here in Bangalore, and I’d like you to stop it and issue me a new one”. The call centre lady was very well trained, and didn’t ask the question that we and the rest-of-the-universe would have asked: “why?”. It was all actioned very quickly-and-efficiently, and it was done.
Some years later in the mid-10’s we were involved in an APAC (Asia-Pacific) implementation roll-out, taking in first Indonesia, then Japan, Australia, New Zealand and China. Jakarta was busy and booming. While I put my time in at the office of the international processed-food company, Marvella spent her time in the city, exploring the shops and malls. The shopping-malls are havens of air-conditioned luxury, where local and imported goods are sold to the emerging middle classes. We found the same later in Japan, Australia and China, prompting us to consider authoring the ultimate coffee-table-book, “The Shopping-Malls of Asia Pacific”. Perhaps a future project.
At the weekends I would join her. I was particularly impressed by the food-shops, especially the fruit sections. I vowed to try every-one of the exotic-fruits being sold; jackfruit, dragon-fruit, Java-apples, papaya, guava, many more, and of course the durian. The most exotic and expensive was, of course, raspberries which had to be imported. Andrew’s rule-of-five held true for these fruit, three-out-of-five were unpleasant, one was OK, and one was really-nice. In terms of the above the only really-nice one was papaya, but that was before I tried the king-of-fruit, the durian.
I had been warned about these. They look amazing with little bumps all-over the green, cabbage-sized fruit. I did my research: “Durian, jungle fruit attracting its dispersers by producing a rotting-flesh smell, banned on many modes of mass-transport”. There was no stopping me. On the hotel alfresco-bar open to the main-road and fumes I was ready with durian, sharp-knife from the kitchens, and pc to guide me on the dissection. Bold cuts revealed the yellow-and-whitish edible sacks inside. The smell of drains started immediately. Not deterred, my online manual suggested that once one of these sacks was in my mouth, all would be worthwhile. It wasn’t. It was like eating cold-custard laced with something very unpleasant. I wrapped all the bits up in a plastic bag and disposed of the lot. So, my durian recommendation is to think about eating it, even buy one if you’re feeling curious, but never open it, let alone eat the inside. You have been warned.
During the week it was similar to India. We’d come together in the hotel bar after work for a meal, and drinks. Me Bintang beer, and Marvella white-wine. Through the windows we could see the main road that bisected Jakarta, either side of which were giant canvas-screens onto which was projected various tv programs, adverts etc, reminding us of Blade-Runner. You could make-out the shadows of bats against the screens as they flew into the city centre at night. We actually missed the cock-up that outraged the city’s Islamic dominated sensibilities. An engineer from the contractor that maintained the city’s screens-and-systems forgot his pc was attached to the system during routine maintenance. In a snack-break he decided to watch Japanese porn, and the whole city shared his selections. Not sure what happened to him.
Towards the end of my stints in Indonesia I “engineered” myself being sent to Malang, also on the island of Java. It was nice to get away from the big city Jakarta, and visit the rural east of the island. It’s a city pushing one-million in population, which shows just how significant Indonesia is population terms, and increasingly in economic and political ones. Every day a car would take me and a co-consultant from our safe surroundings of the hotel in Malang, and deliver us to the processing-plant some fifty kilometres away, right by the coast.
The journey to-and-from the plant proved to be the highlight of my Indonesian visit. The road started-out being good quality in Malang, but as we got further towards the coast it degenerated into what eventually would be a strip of deep pot-holes that the car had to navigate around at low speed as we neared the plant. The cause of the deterioration was easy to identify; the enormous trucks carrying the crops to the various plants and elsewhere, and evidence of severe flooding that would sweep away most roads in minutes.
The floods were caused by two factors; the insanely high annual rainfall, and the fact this was volcano-country, and it was all gently downhill from Malang to the coast, which would funnel streams into torrents of mud at certain times of the year. But it was the human tsunami of different road users that fascinated me. It started with suburban car traffic in the outskirts of Malang, which slowly metamorphized into, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, and of course monster-trucks as you neared the coast.
It was amazing what was being carried on the motorcycles, scooters and bicycles. There were vast quantities of vegetables for the markets, balanced precariously on either side of them. There were cages, sometimes twenty-or-more on a bicycle, carrying chickens, ducks, and sometimes songbirds for pets, car parts, furniture, and just about everything. You could almost feel the economy surging through the various stages of growth towards being a fully developed and relatively rich nation. Perhaps a (rare?) result of controlled-capitalism actually working in improving everyone’s living standards.
Occasionally you would see poverty; those left-out from the project. A family living by the roadside, people panhandling for change, kids directing the traffic for tips who should be in school, etc. It was from these people I saw that familiar piercing stare I had first seen in India. This time I held my nerve and tried to decipher the meaning of it. There was definitely some resentment in it, which was not at all surprising considering the economic gulf between “them” on the roadside and “us” in our chauffeured-driven car. But there was something else in that stare that I couldn’t quite decipher at that time.
After Indonesia it was Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The business and consulting-side was similar to Indonesia. On the outside-of-work culture, all these three countries are already fully developed, and have large similarities and small differences. One difference was that brothels were (technically) illegal in Japan, but fully legal in Australia and New Zealand, and visible with their neon “Open” signs, sometimes with references to massages and the like.
This bought-to-mind a brothel cooperation Marvella and I had encountered back in the Netherlands. Some friends were re-visiting us from the UK, and when they rang, Marvella said “I’ve been looking through some options; we’ve done the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk, the Rembrandt house, the Anne Frank house, pretty much everywhere. Do you fancy visiting Club-Discipline in Den Haag? It’s a posh SM brothel, and they’ve got an open night on Saturday from 7:00pm onwards”. It was a classic Marvella-ism, and the answer was an unequivocal yes.
Needless-to-say we got there too early. A word of advice to the similarly minded; you can be overkeen, and it just doesn’t look cool, or as my maternal-grandmother used to say, “never dip-your-wick until the wax has melted” (no, I’m not entirely sure what this means either). Once allowed inside the swish premises, a mystery that had been bugging us for moths was immediately solved. We recognized all the working-girls (and boys). They were none other than the Wham-Bam-Fuckerettes, a bisexual contemporary-dance-troupe in their day-job. The Wham-Bams were always advertised last on the flyers of the fetish parties we went to, but we never saw them on stage. The reason was they were never on the stage, they were on the speakers throughout the night, dancing together to the music and pulling the girls, and the occasional boy, up onto the speakers to have sex with them.
Our little group was quickly intercepted by Violet, the madame and her two muscular female minders who positioned them selves either side of her, and about a metre behind, as she proudly showed us around her establishment. All the usual kit was there, St. Andrews Cross, whipping stools and the like, but installed in separate rooms. One room was dedicated to transvestites and had a full wardrobe of dresses and slips for use. Its always gratifying to see your particular fetish catered for, but the thought of sharing clothes, however well laundered, made me feel a little uneasy.
She then introduced us to her girls-and-boys, who we pretended not to know, and focused on Clare, a trans-girl from New-South-Wales in Australia. This was the brothel cooperation I mentioned earlier. Clare was on a year long exchange scheme with her own daughter who was spending a year working at an Australian brothel, learning-the-ropes (allow me one corny-old joke). I seldom agree with Margaret Thatcher, but I feel family-run businesses are the bed-rock of society, and it was good to see the next generation being given the training and work experience to take-over when that day comes.
We finished at the brothel-bar, where drinks were priced at hostess-bar levels. Violet talked about her plans, and how difficult it was to keep the high standards she demanded, especially with the important political and business people she had to cater for in the city. She then said “I have to be very selective, as unfortunately you can get the wrong-sort of people here, especially from Amsterdam. Where do you come from?”. I uttered the garbled-word “Am…Er...London”, before confidently-repeating “London”. Everyone was happy. The bar was filling-up, and she and her minders moved on to other punters who had just arrived to show them around.
Then it was the final roll-out-gig; China. Marvella and I were in Guangzhou, the old Canton, and it and the surrounding areas were fuelling China’s ascendency. Similalrly to working in the Gulf, a general cultural difference is that everyone is under state control. Its always there in the background, whether at work where many web-sites are only obtainable by using a VPN, or outside where many-a-billboard hosts the smiling faces of the police force(s). But it’s safe and predictable; from their perspective “you play-by our rules and you will be OK”. This was unlike what I experienced previously in Russia, where it seemed “entanglement” with the authorities could happen at any time, for no discernible reason(s).
During her week, while I was working, Marvella explored the city and its shopping-malls. She told me a girl-toddler, perhaps three years old, stopped her father right in front of her. Marvella bent down to say hello to the girl, as you do, and the toddler summoned all her courage, walked right up to her, touched her nose, and ran back to her father, giggling. He apologised (no need to), but we westerners do have large noses. I remember a news story when a lady blind-from-birth, who after treatment could see for the first time. The story was the same. Why hadn’t anyone warned her that everyone had one of these huge “things” in the middle of their faces?
During my week, I used to walk from the five-star hotel by the old imperial palace gardens, down to the front of the Pearl-River where the office was located. It was also very near to the old Netherlands trading enclave of Shamian-island where the buildings are all in the Dutch style of the 19th century, and so very familiar to Marvella and me. The morning walk took me through various areas, including ones where building was still occurring. It was here you could see the migrant day-workers, some of them “illegals”, who came to the big-city for work.
It was also here that I saw that stare again. I tried to fully decipher the meaning, and on top of the resentment I thought I could see another, even stronger emotion; astonishment. That was it, the stare was a mix of these two. What did it mean and what was driving it? Then I had an insight; could-it-be a superset of the Needham question: “why had the industrial-revolution with all its (eventual) economic benefits started in the West and not the East?”. Or as I put it, why did a bunch of murderous semi-literate thugs-and-pirates, from the middle-ages onwards, manage to do it? From the age of discovery, through colonialism, the enlightenment, then to the five industrial-revolutions (mechanical, chemical, electrical, electronic, and the one we are currently in the middle-of; the information revolution).
Theories there-are-a-plenty. From Marxism, through to the idea that constantly warring mini-states somehow “drove” these developments. None seem entirely satisfactory to me. I now favour a third explanation: “God just has a very perverted sense of humour”.