A visit to Africa.

"Solieeee, ticketum passport edathoe ? ... paisayooo ??? " ... Frowning to the core having heard that 200 million times on every travel ... "edathooooooooooooooooo mummy" ......." the last line you hear while geting into the cab bound for the international airport. All through out the ride to the airport, I recieved gyan about travelling to new places from my dad, "Take care of your belongings, dont leave your bags unlocked, stay away from strangers [hello I am meeting my potential customer for the first time and he is a stranger], dont drink or eat with hotel staff they will drug you and rob your belongings [they are the ones who will serve you for 6 days], Africans are thieves, they are into drug business, yesterday two got arrested near our house and they have the highest concentration of aids [ahem, ahem, dad I am married for 4 years and I am very much, you know incontrol of my .....eeeeeerr... and I have taken a concious decision not to have kids ] My wife covering her eyes with her hands, her head down in her lap laughing away to glory in silence and pinches me from the side."

So I did it. I was an IT professional going abroad to a phoren country with 9 years of experience selected to represent my company for a very important deal, my whole family inluding my 5 year old nephew came to drop me at the airport and this whole deal was happening in Kigali ........... !@^&#%&%^$&^!%$^$!@$#@!#$$#! .. where the hell is this place ?....

Africa, east central Africa, landlocked east central africa near notorius states like Congo and Burundi and Sudan with our friend Edi Amin once living as our next door neighbour in Uganda....Kigali is in Rwanda, if not any thing, then 10 years ago over 3 million people were slaughtered in a span of 100 days by the majority community that rules the land... Ashtonishingly it is Belgian colony speaking French that likes to trade in US dollars with lots of Indians doing what ???????

Mum and dad had nothing to say... Its like falling in love for the first time, even if you know you cant tell your daughter not to go ahead with that relationship... Its first love, it was first flight for me out of this country and the only solace they had was that another sensible man with a wife, kid and ageing parents back home in Bangalore was accompanying me to this forsaken land... Enter Mr K.. yes my friend from the three command escapade.

Yes I could not have faced this misfortune of an oppotunity alone, so the dynamic duo of Sol and K took Ethiopian Airlines [We expected a skeletoneous crew and UN food aid packets to be served on board the flight as airline food] flew to Kigali via Adis Ababa.

Sans the travel arrangements which are always a pain in my company, but hey we hired you because you are multitalented [yes tours and travel planning is an alternate profession] K and I were to sync up at Mumbai and then take a flight to Rwanda. So we stood in the check-in line like crusaders, chest inflated, smiling like goats going to the slaughter in front of a muiltitude of people who have never seen luggage, they prefer to carry their stuff in gunny bags :) .. Yes gunny bags that look like striped underwear cloth. Stand at any African airline counter and you will find people carry ing their belongings in gunny bags of all sizes and shapes. We felt uneasy, I asked my self "are we blending in with the people ? Are we attracting undue attention" [with every one looking at our neatly packed luggage and Laptops strung over our shoulders]

Adis Ababa, Adis as it is known was our first stop. At the immigration counter the officer looked at my virgin passport [yes this was my first forieng trip] and asked me, why am I going to this god forbidden country which does not have electricity and is infested with canibals. I told him we are carrying solar batteries as power backup and Canibals dont have a fancy for dravidian flesh, plus I can prove I am one of them by gulping down another one standing next to me if I have to save my life. Stamp, Stamp, Stamp .... my exit was marked and the officer said, "if you live to tell please come and meet me on the way back in". So much for encouragement on my first phoren trip as a software program manager.

K was cool but frustrated, given up in life and claims he has lived in airports for the better productive time of his life. So it was not interesting for him to see mixed cultures and uniformed men and women manning the airline couters and talking to you formally with a T accent. So we checked in and got our boarding passes and were waitign for our flight when suddenly people started running towards the exit gate with their tickets and in the middle of all these 6 feet tall men and 5 feet broad women was an airline executive shouting her life out for seats between rows 25 and 40, that was us and we squeezed our way through smelly armpits and gigantic bossoms. Enter Ethiopian and the first thing that excited us was the music system. Good music [12 channels]in the airplane kept our spirits high and decent food helped us pass the 5.5 hours of flying time to ADIS. However the food troubles of K had just started.

Snore, Snore, Snore......

Suddenly people were moving around, packing things collecting headphones and washing up and I realized we were landing. For the first time in my life I saw the SUN rays change the terrain from dark to light, it was like the SUN was chasing us on the flight.... OK OK OK OK... too much nature appreciation. Adis was a shock, right from the air field where we landed that was ten times the size of mumbai airport and then the airport terminal that was nothing less than a singapore or Bangakok airport according to K. To see such world class infrastructure at the port of entry of a nation that has been known for famines, civil war, labelled by UN as the centre of starvation and disease, I could not believe my eyes. It flattened my ego, crushed pride and blew the lid off my expectation of India 5 years from today. Coming from a country slated to be the IT super power I thought that operating 80 flight / hour in a airport that can handle 59 flights was an achievement. Bull shit.... Adis was reality, a hard hitting reality of how things can be better and aplified the fact that I am part of a useless bereaucratic system in India. "Hum logon ka Kuch nahi Hoga" K and I told each other sipping expresso in the obelisk cafe.

Cafes, bars, restaurants, cyber cafes, duty free shops with the quality of goods found only in five start hotel boutiques, executive lounges that look like corporate CEO cabins in India, communication / PA infrastructure that will amaze you, and airport staff that speaks fluent english and that too all Women all 24 hours looking fresh and vibrant..... Adis airport was a complete glass enclosure where I and K spent 30 mins looking a the roof trying to figure out how the place was being cooled and ventilated. I knelt down and touched my chest with my right palm in respect . Adis humbled me.

It was time to hop onto our second flight to Kigali and we had to strip down to our socks [No we didnt take off our pants but had to remove all accessories] to go through security checks. When I look beyond the metal detector I see Africans who are looking at you intensively and who infact look more suspicious than you. But turn around and they are all around. "You are the alien MR Sol... so you are the suspect, now remove your shoes and walk through quietly" said my conscience. "WHIMPER WHIMPER - kwai kwai kwai" like a hungry naked puppy kicked in his butt I gracefully walked through the metal detector with over 80 people sitting in the departure lounge look at you strip in front of the security. K followed. Any way we passed that with flying colors. Got on to another Ethiopian flight to Kigali. Again the quality of service and food matched and exceeded any airline in India and soon we were over the land of the thousand hills preparing for landing......BTW I flew over lake Victoria and as far as the eye can see it is water and is supposed to be the biggest fresh water body in the world.

We were offloaded in 5 mins, obvously as ours was the only airplane in the airport other than three military helocopters and a business jet that seemed to be the presidents official aircraft. So this was Kigali International airport in Rwanda. Genocide stories and images haunted us all through out. But Kigali was the second shock of our life. The roads are better than Delhi or any highway in India, people drive on the right side and nothing less than Japanese 4WDs and cruisers. The only thing that excited me were the abundence of TVS victor and Bajaj Pulzar motobikes from apna India. Yes those were the official bikes of the Picky Picky's [local name for motorcycle taxis].

10 years did wonders to Rwanda, people have put aside the genocide and walked on with life and aid agencies like the UN and the European union have helped construct a productive, just and resorucefull public infrastructure system. Kigali is the capital and the business centre for many organizations. There are two state owned banks, a state owned telephone company and ISP, pertroleum outlets by Shell, the Intercontinental Grand Hotel and cars ....I mean cars. Every one drives nothing less than a toyota corolla or camry in the middle class and a landcruiser, pajero in the upper class... Mercs were like bird droppings, counsulates to public taxis every thing had a merc some where and models that our rich business men drive in India. [naak katke sox mei chali gayi] Shame, ridicule and astonishment cant be any bigger than this as we stood in the lobby of Des Milles Collines. [yes the same place of the HOTEL RWANDA fame and you are supposed to pronounce it as "day mill colleeen" and nor DES Milles Collines like how we farted the name at the airport to the tourism counter and it took us 10 mins to make him understand that this place really existed in his country] Finally we got swipe cards and we checked into our shared room [thanks to over optimization by our management we must have looked like a gay couple !@$^#@] .

No AC, NO Fan in Rwanda except in data centres or medical facilities, so also was the situation in our hotel,. But before leaving for Africa I checked up to find that the temperature range was between 13 and 26 degrees C in Rwanda during our visit... A hotel staff that speaks french, serves french fries and charges in francs if you wish to pay in cash or Euros by card. K had a tough time being a vegetarian. Breakfast was the only meal where he had any option of picking up vegetarian food stuffs. Beef, pork, fish was all that you found on the menu..And Potatoes were kept aside fried bacon in the same pot.... For a mallu like me this was wonderland, I could eat any thing and I indulged like crazy remembering at times to cut down as I was on a diet under instructions from my wife.. K used to sit with a plate full of fries and some boiled vegetables cooked in some grey sauce, one time he ordered a sandwhich and we discovered that it was 1993 when the last sandwhich was ordered in the hotel. [We had to put a name tag on the dish that arrived that read "THIS IS REALLY A SANDWHICH" sandwhich making is a scarce art in Kigali]. We spotted some pieces of bread in it by the way.

We stayed for 6 days meeting Rwandans and conducting business for our company, sharing one room [every employee would give us a sweet smile when we pass by - was it invitation or a statement "I know your little secret"] and living with each other's obscene snoring through out the night, I pity our poor wives. Rwandans are warm friendly people [until you talk about the two tribes- which we did not try] but in general we found them to be very nice to deal with.

One night our hosts took us out for dinner [which we eventually paid for] and we got the third shock of our life.... IN the middle of genocide country was a fantastic Indian restaurant called Indian Khazana where Gaurav the owner of the place personally comes to take orders from Indians. Punjabi, Rajasthani, north Indian, Gujrati you name it, every thing from India was available there. K got a breather and ate like a PIG [adding BURPS & FARTS to the obscene snores later at night.] Taste of food was comparable or even better than what you would find at five star Indian restaurants in India, no jokes it was really mind blowing in taste... Priced like a 3 star... Ee were dumbfounded with the experience and came to know that he was running this business from the last 8 years. While we hogged, pigged and gulped away at desi food we noticed that there were a lot of Indians coming in with families, kids, fiances and elders. At one point I wondered am I in genocide country ?? ...

When the country was being re-constructed a lot of Indians were posted as teachers, professors and technical trainers in Rwanda and now they have settled in the country with their families, there is even a new generation that is toddling around. I dont know how much they get paid and what they save, but by the looks of it they were pretty well off. May cultures have a proverb that goes "You can judge a man by the shoes he wears and the food he eats" and truly Rwanda projected a larger than life picture to us. May be we did not go to the rural areas but as far as the eye could see there were small houses and ample infrastructure for people to utilize in comparision to their population - 9 million

The life style of Rwandans is way better as it looks on the out side. Every one was wearing expensive clothes, designer shoes, holding two mobile phones, driving phoren cars and speaking three international languages. We visited technology offices, we visited memorials we saw the UN and aid company establishments and were amazed at the developments. I give Indian 20 years to come to that level. Roads are wide and clean, you can wear roller skates and skate to work [they are that flat and smooth].There is a well organized market, there un organized hawking, there is petty theft, but there is also a sense of freedom from traffic jams, crowded trains, stinking sidewalks and an appreciation of the government. The people on the street will greet you no matter who you are and will wish you as per the time of the day in French or Kinya Rwanda. Its a matter to getting used to a foreign culture.

Kigali looked like a small time European town according to K and he too was humbled with the state of the land that was much better than the emerging super power of the IT world. We finished our business and were happy to be out of there as the system had made me start to hate my country, when our local contact said "it is good for a short time but not good for long and when you are here as long as I have been you will understand why". I chose to accept his wise words though they are half a ball of Elephantine dung. If it was so bad why had he arranged for his wife to be with him dropping her job in India from the past 8 months...Every one has his story to tell and reasons to stay. I had mine not to stay as I was visiting on Business.

Any way I and K had to come back to India to drive the country's telecom revolution integrating junk. So we packed our stories, experiences and memerobilia and were back in Mumbai. Adis was a place to relive the same moments and we caught up with a little soccer while we were snacking at a restro. We reached India on saturday morning with my wife waiting to pick me up from the Airport, its the little pleasures in life that she enjoys every time I come back from a trip. Picture perfect reception, wife at airport, executive coming out with bags, huggy huggy huggy get into a car and go to your sapno ka ghar, the saga was over. K took a cab to the domestic airport to depart for Bangalore and I came home and chatted away for the next two days to my folks who were relieved to see me back in one piece...A few hours and gifts later non one bothered to look at my face. However my dad would surely want me to do a exhaustive blood test just incase :)...