Delhi Lifestyle & Departure (Feb. 25-26, 2007)

My last evening in Delhi was spent having dinner at the beautifully & luxurious home of an American executive for a multinational company. He and his family have been in India almost two years, and shared their wildly varied impressions. They’ve experienced the same warm Indian hospitality that makes India so special, but are bedeviled by power outages, massive traffic jams, and the general dirtiness of the city. Based on this man’s descriptions of restaurants he’s visited in connection with his work, I would hesitate to eat anything at all in India, whether in a 5-star hotel or elsewhere. Luckily, I was blissfully unaware of his perspective when I ate my way through Bangalore, Mumbai and Jaipur! (As mentioned earlier, it all caught up with me in Delhi.)

The middle and upper economic classes live well in Delhi – I was invited to two extremely luxurious homes, and spent a day with a mid-career (non-partner) lawyer about her lifestyle, including her reliance on household staff. With one child, this 35-year old married lawyer employs a household staff of three – including maid, cook and driver, and is presently thinking about adding a personal security guard to protect her young son. The home of the American executive mentioned above is protected by armed guards 24/7. Wages for a household employee such as a cook or nanny are as low as US $60 a month, and treatment of staff varies from one household to the next. For example, in a restaurant, my new lawyer-friend called my attention to a table where a young couple was sitting with their toddler and the toddler’s nanny. The couple and their child ordered and ate a meal, but the nanny was not given any food until the others had finished eating, at which point the mother took some uneaten cake from her own plate and handed it to the nanny.

My trip to India was everything I hoped it would be and more – exotic, eye-opening, and educational from both business and personal perspectives. The only black mark was the scene at the Delhi airport and the long trip back to Paris (via London) where I rested for a couple days before flying home. The throngs of people outside the Delhi airport were absolutely astonishing, probably because only ticketed passengers are allowed inside the terminal. This restriction doesn’t prevent family and friends from showing up at the airport -- it just means that all the non-travelers pack the sidewalks and walkways leading to the terminal entrance doors. Baggage trolleys, if used offensively, are mildly effective to clear a path. It took about 20 minutes to navigate the 20 yards from the taxi door to the terminal door. It’s a stressful 20 minutes, because you have to constantly protect yourself and your luggage trolley from being commandeered by the endless number of “porters” who are trying to make a few rupees by helping you navigate the sea of humanity.

Inside the terminal, the real mayhem begins. You line up for baggage scanning, although the term “line” doesn’t accurately describe the assembly of people, which is completely disorganized. I latched onto a Punjabi family returning home to the UK, and with multiple baggage trolleys as body armor, we pushed our way (about 10 yards) to the entrance to the baggage screeners in about 20 minutes. Baggage screening applies only to checked baggage – for hand carried baggage, you enter yet another screening area where men and women are segregated and their bags and bodies searched. Another 15 minutes of chaos. You can’t board the plane without the right “stamp” on your hand baggage, though.

The next step is to queue up at the ticket counter for a boarding pass. This is an exercise in insanity. After 30 minutes of total non-movement, an exasperated passenger raised a fuss that led to the removal from the line of four elderly women who were busy asking questions of the agent rather than obtaining boarding passes. Eventually I got a boarding pass and faced the last obstacle to departure, the immigration control area. On the way out of Delhi, this took only a few minutes, but my new Punjabi friends reported that it took 3 hours on the way in! Once in the boarding area, you’re adrift in a sea of people, with no shops or other amenities and toilet facilities that are unusable. My advice to anyone considering a business trip to India is to avoid the Delhi airport – even if you have to fly in and out of another city and commute to Delhi by car. (A first-class ticket – which I didn’t have -- helps avoid some of the lines in London and Heathrow, but doesn’t appear to make much difference in Delhi.) The Delhi airport authority should be ashamed to have this be the visitor's first, or last, impression of India. I recommend they go to Mumbai and see how an airport should be run.

London Heathrow is no picnic either. The new one-bag limit for this airport was very stressful for people carrying a laptop and handbag, as it had to be “one or the other” with no exceptions allowed. People with more than one bag were sent from the front of the screening line all the way back to the check-in counters to check the excess, and then they had to return to the screening lines. Luckily, I traveled with a backpack that held both laptop and my personal effects. Having gone through security hell in Delhi, I assumed I could just pass from one British Airways flight to another, but I was wrong. You have to begin the security checks all over again in London, and for the connection to Paris, I joined the back of a line of about 1,000 in-transit passengers. With no one to answer questions and a number of passengers anxious about their connections, the stress level was very high. The principal difference between the London and the Delhi airports was that the folks in Heathrow know how to form a line (and they do) and the bathrooms are functional. Eighteen hours after arriving at the airport in Delhi, I gratefully landed in Paris Charles de Gaulle.