Namaste Mumbai!

And here we are!

8 hours and 30 minutes after leaving London we reached Mumbai, and with a relatively easy time at immigration we were here in our temporary hotel accommodation. All was very smooth.

We spent the weekend exploring and there is so much to share with you I’ll spread it over a number of blog posts.

But for now let me share that I have started my new role and had my first day in my new office. I was given such a wondrous reception, with a garland and flowers and a traditional tikka on my forehead and a gathering of new colleagues for a group photo that I will feel quite unloved on my remaining 202 days in the Navi Mumbai office when i walk into the office unheralded!

For the most part it looks like any office in any other city in the world; large, bright, airy open plan with smart meeting rooms and collaboration spaces. But you know you are in India as soon as you enter “The Pantry”. Firstly, who else uses that word for a kitchen type area in a corporate building these days?The Pantry is where everyone goes to have their lunch and on a table in there are 100s of tiffins packed with tasty home made lunches. Two microwaves labelled “veg” and “non veg” are available for reheating the tiffins contents. The lunch vibe is to bring your tiffin from home, heat it up if you want or eat it cold, and eat socially with colleagues in the pantry.

Not having a tiffin of my own I was befriended by the non-tiffin gang of two and taken to the Food Court where i purchased a Dal Makhani and Rice bowl from one of several vendors for the grand sum of £1.50 and boy was it tasty! Swati makes a tiffin for her husband and daughter every day but doesn’t like bringing a tiffin for herself and Sagar lives alone and cannot cook himself anything worthy of putting in a tiffin. I thought maybe Swati was missing a commercial opportunity of making tiffins for Sagar, and me, but realised this would mean a future of her eating all alone at the food court so didn’t suggest it.

But I fully intend to make my own tiffin as soon as I have a kitchen of my own.