AK in Amrika - I

“AK, you are travelling to Mumbai for 2 weeks, please book tickets and accommodation” says my manager, interrupting my crucial daily team meeting that decides on our venue for lunch. I wanted to tell him that we are in the 21^st century where we use a wonderful tool called email, but I let it pass. “But why should I do all that? We have a travel dept!” I retorted, this being my first tryst with the dreaded bureaucracies that my company’s support departments are.

Between roars of laughter, my team explained to me that the travel department has more important tasks on hand like making employees run around getting copies of documents, attending parties at the rooftop cafeteria, ignoring telephone calls and such. Three days were spent planning for travel, an entire evening was spent getting my dusty suitcase down from the attic, packing stuff and telling my folks that I will be gone for 2-3 weeks.

“AK, please cancel the trip and return the advance” said my manager, two days before I was supposed to leave. “Things like this happen”, I told myself as I painfully undid three days of hectic planning. This was in November 2007. Then Delhi happened, Hyderabad happened, Chennai happened, then Singapore and USA. Soon, my travel became a joke. “Folks, I am leaving for Singapore this Friday” used to evoke sympathetic smiles from my parents, a wink from my wife and smirks from neighbors! All the while, the packed suitcase lay on the floor and I was literally living out of a suitcase in my own house!

I wasn’t doing much in office either, other than locating good travel deals on www.travelguru.com and www.yatra.com and waiting for my manager to announce the next exciting destination. Finally, after six months of preparation, I got the email – “6 weeks, consulting assignment at Phoenix”. I completed the paperwork in a record time of 3 weeks (yes, that’s a record for my company); postponed my travel for three more weeks, one week at a time and kept my plan under wraps at home. On the day of travel, I announced “I am flying to Arizona tonight”. I guess the happy feeling that my suitcase would finally get on a plane slightly overtook the fear that I was going to land in a desert in peak summer, 48 degree centigrade for a Bangalorean is pretty much death sentence.

(to be continued)