RE: Unhooked15 Dec 2021 11:06
Wonderful.
In many occupations, our parent’s generation were the last to work in commonwealth countries. India for instance has no requirement for engineers anymore - they export them of course. My old man's civil engineering company had started as a branch of a British company, but by the time we left in the late 1960's had transformed itself into an Indian plc quoted on the Bombay Exchange, at which time he was the last European employed. I think it was a common path for British engineers whose services were no longer required in India to move over to the middle east, which had just become flush with oil money. In our case the move was via London for 6 months and then Singapore/Malaysia for 5 years.
I once spent a couple of months traveling around India trying to visit his old projects. It was a fairly thankless task, many structures were no more. And that’s the way it is in India – heavy, heavy usage! In the middle east, his projects included an airport at Sharjah, UAE; a desalination plant at Jebel Ali, UAE; and, biggest of all, a town with school & hospital outside Nasiriyah, Iraq, for Saddam Hussein, which was also never to be completed, lol! Complete disaster - within months the Iraq-Iran war had started, payments from the Iraqi govt. stopped, and my old man spent a very stressful year and quite a bit of his own money closing down the site and getting Indian workers out and safely back home. A submarine facility for Gaddafi? Certainly our parents had adventurous careers!
I know (or knew) the old Taj very well. It used to be such a welcoming, special place. Now, like much of Bombay that I knew, it's become very glitzy and international (and expensive). Btw, I love Calcutta, I've been lucky enough to spend time there as an adult, a truly wonderful city! When we left India we also boated it from Bombay to Southampton, then later Southampton to Singapore (via Bombay) on the P&O mail boat SS Cathay. I learnt to play chess on that tub!
Generally, I feel lucky to have had that childhood, notwithstanding the privations of an English boarding school. It does however, quite rightly, feel completely like another era!
Anyway, I'd better stop as others on this board wouldn't want to read all this personal guff, but I am amazed at the commonalities and I wonder if our fathers might have known each other.
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