Chennai

"The first thing I should do on my arrival in India, my colleague from Chennai advised me quite insistently, is to get myself an Indian telephone card." The way led Ralf Mielke not to the next phone-shop...

The first thing I should do on my arrival in India, my colleague from Chennai advised me quite insistently, is to get myself an Indian telephone card. Anything else would bankrupt me because here people telephone at any suitable or even unsuitable opportunity. That would, of course, be pretty expensive with a German SIM card.

I landed in the middle of the night, reached the hotel in a centrally located district of the southeast Indian metropolis at about two in the morning, and was in bed at about three. Hardly ten hours later, my colleague stood in the lobby of my hotel waiting to take me to buy the phone card. We drove to a shopping mall on Chennai’s principle street, Anna Salai Road, not far from Kuvam River. There we walked through a labyrinth of narrow passageways over a number of floors to finally end up at Umus’s.

Umus comes from Cashmere and only has a few friendly words to say about India. He prefers all the more to do business with Indians, selling jewellery and pashmina. The scarves are piled to the ceiling in his little shop. My colleague said I should give Umus my passport; he would take care of the rest. Umus had a copy made and a few minutes later, I was holding my new Indian SIM card. Now, all I had to do was top it up, preferably with between 700 and 800 rupees or about eleven euros, said Umus and sent me to the shop next door, a jeans shop.

I looked at my colleague questioningly. Connections, she signified to me. In India everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone. Otherwise, the chaos could never function properly.

The friendly jeans shop owner rummaged through a drawer, pulled out a form, asked me to sign it and hand him the required sum of money and promised I would be able to use the phone in twenty minutes. He kept his promise. The next day, I had yet another lesson in the matter of India and connections. A restaurant owner, a well-connected entrepreneur, told me how he pulled strings to quickly obtain a license to sell alcohol. He was so successful that he had the license within only a few weeks. His new bar is not yet ready, though. How long will it take to install it? It all depends on his connections.