India Trip

Early this morning, I came back from India. Everything went pretty good. There is nothing much to complain. Here are just some unconnected points that come to my mind:

• Indian cuisine is fabulous and affordable, thus it was a bad week for my waistline. However, according to Toño, my armpits remained curry free.
• Sachin Tendulkar (think cricket) is not cream of the crop anymore. He is not only not participating in the West Indies tour due to recovering from a shoulder surgery, far worse, Rahul Dravid (think cricket again) overtrumped him at the advertising front. TV spends for Sachin ads are down to Rs 1.46 crore* a month, while spends for Dravid reached Rs 2.91 crore a month.
• Last year, I spent more than a week in the air on planes, mostly with South Asian airlines. This time, we had Swiss International Air Lines for the long haul leg of the trip. I was shocked how far Swiss has fallen behind. Almost everything from service quality, refreshments and the entertainment system could not keep up.
• The domestic legs however, operated by Indian's Jet Airways, offered a flabbergasting experience in form of the best airplane refreshment in years. It consisted of marinated chicken pieces barbecued on a skewer in a clay oven, a mix of green peas, chilies, coriander and spices, and basil flavoured chicken filled in a pastry case and baked.
• The hotel turned out far better than expected. It was recently turned from three to four stars. The hotel stuff did not care for the seniority order of our expedition and gave me a huge room with 2 tellies, 2 toilets and 4 telephones. My colleague Hugo had 2 tellies, 1 toilet and 3 telephones and my caring boss 1 telly, 1 toilet and 2 telephones.
• Although I was in Bangalore, I did not touch the Internet for a week. There will be a lot to catch up...

*Ten millions; as, a crore of rupees (which is nearly $5,000,000).