Oh, bloody hell. And oh yeah!

For one, the Corporation payroll withheld 70% of my salary in taxes this month. Those masala-eating surrendermonkeys have been paying too little taxes so far, so they decided to compensate a bit now that I am leaving soon. Of course, it must be bloody difficult to get the percentage right when there are so many choices (four), and the highest one is chosen when annual income exceeds 7500 euros.

And of course I have a hugely expensive honeymoon trip to pay on top of usual living expenses this month.

On the other hand, we’re off for the said honeymoon in 12 hours. I can’t wait!

Tags: colleagues from India, holiday, it's good to be me, money, oh bugger, surprises, travel, ways of working, what is different, why I wanted a change, work

There is an expat saying, or more like a rhetorical question, that goes around. It’s used whenever anything goes wrong or works in an unexpected manner. It’s this: “Did India surprise you?” This country does surprise us, daily. Most of the time it’s nothing big, occasionally it’s even something that’s positive, working or just simply induces happiness.

As we were heading out for dinner however, the surprise was a bit on the nasty side. It’s payday today, and my sweetie gets an SMS every time the balance on his account changes. We were expecting the usual monthly sum (as is due until the end of November, the end of the contract), but somehow about 70% of the sum had been deducted. In other words, only 30% of the monthly salary landed on the account. We do not know why, but the guess is that the tax people at the Corporation have decided to do Something Radical, and they decided not to give a heads-up.

I’d say this is inconvenient, as we’re leaving tomorrow morning for Maldives and can’t reach the people at the office to find out what is going on and why. Happy honeymoon from the Corporation, or something. Sigh. Patience is wearing thin, since pretty much everything we have to sort out we also need to bitch, moan and yell at someone with the Corporation to get the sorting done.

Here’s hoping we can unscrew this screw-up. At the latest it will be sorted when we come back in a week. Expect photos, lots of photos.

Gone divin’.

Tags: oh bugger, practical stuff, surprises, what?

They usually say that no news is good news, but right now I’d like to have some. Almost anything would do, but one thing is hanging above everything else: I would very much like to have a schedule and know the terms for our move.

What I know right now is not much: we will have our honeymoon in Maldives, come back to Bangalore, repatriate to Oulu and then get going to Bali for our IDC (SCUBA instructor) internships. I will have some severance pay from the Corporation, but we still need to gather some more cash for the whole trip to be feasible. If we are going to stay in Finland for more than a few weeks, we also need a place to stay, and that will complicate things even further. Our furniture won’t reach Finland before end of this year, and getting an apartment for one or two months would anyway be far from practical.

It would be easy to fill the gap by selling some of the furniture we have, but by the time we’re supposed to head southeast, our cargo will be evading pirates somewhere in the Somalian seas. We could of course sell them in advance, but the last expat to leave Bangalore had a nasty surprise in the box when they opened it – the whole crate was sprayed with bug spray that destroyed every single piece of cargo and they had to discard it all. Claiming the insurance money after something like that would be the quick and dirty way to liquidate our assets, with significantly better prices and all, but still…

A lot of questions are still open and a lot of loose ends need to be caught, but I think we’re on top of it again. Most likely I forgot to mention hundreds of things, but if something bugs you, please leave a comment.

Tags: holiday, money, moving, planning, practical stuff, time, travel

Yesterday was the Sunday that was really a Monday. People have been celebrating Diwali all India wide, and yesterday was yet another national holiday. I must say that for three nights it has occasionally felt like we’re living in a war zone with the fireworks, minor bombs and firecrackers going off non-stop after sunset until midnight. Gracefully though, the people stop bombing pretty much after 12 am, which is nice.

We decided to make the best out of our sunday-that’s-not-a-sunday by taking a look at the Bannerghatta National Park to see what was there.

First of all, there were animals. Lots of them, and mostly in too small enclosures, especially the birds. 3 x 3 x 3 metres cage just is not roomy enough for over 30 birds, even if they’re budgies. But then again, I suppose PETA does not fare overly well in India anyway. At least they didn’t have any big primates which always make me sad (who me, anthropomorphising? nooo…) as they seem a bit too human to me. On the other hand, some of the enclosures were not only roomy, but could also be described as almost cosy for the animals with lots of shade and places to hide in, the panthers for example.

We also had an encounter with an elephant, who was being ridden apparently by its keeper. It was absolutely enormous, especially up close and personal:

We got to touch its trunk, and it got to give a 10 rupee bill to its keeper afterwards.

I later on caught the same elephant on video, eating hay or whatever it was. The elephant took a bunch of munch, waved it about so that excess would fall off, then jam the bunch between its trunk and tusk and rip the bunch in two, so that the straws would be shorter and fit better in its mouth. Quite clever, I think. We toured the hippos as well, there were a whole bunch of them, at least two calves and many grown-ups.

To top it all up, we did the “grand safari”. The safari started by us queueing behind about 60 other people. One of the first buses became full quite quickly, but we somehow got jumped in the queue, got to climb some fences and then sit next to the bus driver. And what a bus it was! Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo to prove my words, but it was close to that poisonous green also known as “British racing green”, with (mostly rusty) grilles over all of the windows. Most of the floor was the not-originally-see-through kind, which made the trip all the more exciting. Needless to say the bus was jam-packed when we set off:

First on the list there were the herbivores as shown below:

Then were the sloth bears. There were a lot of them, so we got many pictures too. Some of these were taken by the bus driver, so cheers for the pics.

Finally after much shaking and rolling (no, the ride wasn’t the smoothest one, and neither was the path the bus was taking) we hit lion and tiger country. The lions quite unsurprisingly were sleeping in the shade:

Also the white tigers chose the shade:

This one was especially cute:

When the safari was all done we set off looking for our vehicle. Happily some people had parked it into a pocket and we had to haul some ten motorbikes and scooters out of the way:

As long as we were on the south side of the city, we thought to get some food first and then find the Big Banyan Tree on Mysore road. So we hit a country club our driver was happily a member of, had lunch with very good value for money, and hit the road again.

The Banyan tree was not so much one tree in itself as a grove of trees. This is a specific kind of a tree, which first grows branches and then some more roots down from the branches creating an interesting sight:

Lots of local families had come there to have picnic and just to hang out in the shade. At times it seemed we were more interesting as photo targets than the tree in itself, which is starting to be a bit annoying. I really don’t get what is it that compels people to shout and wave at us. Strange times in a strange country. Anyhoo, the rest of the pics can be seen here, enjoy!

Still four days until Maldives, more reports coming up then.

Tags: culture, holiday, sightseeing, what?

I finally got the call.

We’re travelling back to Finland next month.

Next destination: the sea.

Tags: it's good to be me, moving, planning, surprises, time, what?

I got an e-mail from Germany:

Hi Heikki

regarding your concerns about leave days and financial situation I have some good news and will try to call you in the morning time.

It’s 07:25 in Germany right now. The anticipation is killing me.

Tags: holiday, time, work

It’s been quite a while since I’ve last written anything, so here’s a summary:

I travelled back to Finland in early September, found out that the glasses weren’t according to the prescription I got, and once again I had to extend the sick leave. While there was supposed to be a prism of 2 prd in front of the right eye and a zero lens in front of the left, the opticians in India had put 2 prd prisms on both. Needless to say, my symptoms didn’t go away with those.

At this point I might have felt a a tiny bit frustrated.

Fast forward two weeks and we’re back in Bangalore. I left the glasses to the optician shop for fixing and started the wait once more. Of course, there were again some delays, but I finally received the glasses I needed last Friday. I hoped to have at least a couple of days to try them out and adjust to using them, but the TL didn’t exactly agree. On top of demanding immediate 100 per cent work effort, he told me all my annual leave would be nullified because of the sick leave.

You see, the local policy is six days of sick leave a year, after which the employee has to use his or her annual leave days as sick leave. When annual leaves have been consumed, additional days are deducted directly from the employee’s salary. (And there’s no social security. Someone still willing to call India “civilised”?)

In my case, however, the civilised world has had its say: our global policy for expatriates grants me three months of paid sick leave, so my annual leaves should still be there. Being in India is already quite a challenge, and being here for seven months without leave would be too much to bear.

I presented the policy to the TL, who saw it best to dispute both the policy and applicable legislation, demanding a reduction to my annual leaves. This was the last straw to me.

I have stood up against his passive-aggressive bullshit for five months now, and in my opinion that’s five months more than the maximum tolerable abuse time from your manager. As I’ve written before, I have tried to talk about it with the TL and with local HR, but his attitude is still exactly the same as before. Of course I understand that he’s pissed about a bloody expensive employee being on long sick leave, but that just doesn’t justify his accusations and hostility towards me. What the hell am I supposed to do about being incapacitated to work?

I can’t do miracle cures yet, but at least I have a huge Corporation full of Big Bosses to help me do something. During last weekend I and Eve spent several hours composing a summary about what has happened since I came to India last May, along with a cover letter addressed to half a dozen managers, second level managers, department heads and so on. On Monday morning I checked my intended recipient list with one of the expat bosses in our office and sent the whole thing out.

Two and half days later there is quite a lot of debris flying around. I have had talks with local HR, European HR managers, my old line manager and a couple of other chaps. The consensus seems to be that I have a case and something needs to be done, but [your preferred higher entity here] only knows what and isn’t going to tell yet. I may get a new manager, I may carry on with the current one, or I may even get sent back home early. I expect it to take at least a week or two before there’s anything to report.

So how’s your life?

Tags: colleagues from India, oh bugger, travel, ways of working, what is different, what?, why I wanted a change, work

I’ve finally started to feel more at home here, everything is not so bloody strange anymore. Possibly the only thing that comes to mind is that the roads are fringed everywhere with high walls, and nobody knows what’s on the other side. In many places there is also a stencilled sentence on the wall in question: “Do not urine here.” I will post an Engrish picture of it one day.

But I promised to try and catch the big bird of prey on camera, and today I did:

The palm tree is obviously a big one, as the bird is about the size of a big cat.

I also managed to catch a frame of a local policeman on his on-duty bike:

Check out that funky paint job on the bike! And yes, they all ride similar ones. Too bad about the electric lines in the picture though.

I now have my working desk which is big enough to accommodate both the laptop and my sewing machine at the same time. It’s now only a matter of time that I have new clothes!

Tags: birdy, motorbikes, people in india