Time after Time

I wonder if we could get the authorities here in India to produce an airline timetable that lists all the fights 2-3 hours earlier than currently scheduled. That way all the flights could be reliably 2-3 hours late and still get away at the times originally expected. Yes, you guessed right, dear reader – having organised to get to IGI (Indira Gandhi International) Airport at 6.30pm for the 7.25pm flight, we didn’t take off until just after 10.00pm (“due to the late arrival of the inbound flight”), which is about the usual delay one experiences around the system.

Still, it gave me the opportunity to chat for a couple of hours with Zubin, a PhD student I first met at the Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS) conference earlier this year. Zubin is doing some really interesting work in trying to link the western notion of moral development with its Indian (Karma Yoga) equivalent and getting some generally reliable results. He was presenting some more of his initial findings on the validity and reliability of the scale he has developed and we were able to explore some of the measurement concerns that have developed round his efforts at operationalising the concepts.

So I arrived at the hotel in Patna – Hotel Utsav Delux (it is actually Deluxe, but in true Fawlty Towers style, the “e” was missing from the sign out front) – at 12.05am instead of the scheduled time. It is the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel where the toilet paper is an optional extra (no, this is not a joke dear reader, through Subho, I had to ask (indeed, nearly demand, to overcome the hotel employee’s reticence) for toilet paper, a roll of which was eventually forthcoming). No time for quibbling though because it is a full day at the fair ahead.