You can go back again

I'm visiting Hong Kong after 14 years.

The last time I was here the airport was a primitive shambles. My suitcase wouldn't fit into the x-ray machine so I was asked to open it while the thoola pawed through it in a bored fashion. Thoola is not a Hong Kong word. My suitcase hasn't gotten any smaller, but Hong Kong airport is now a self-described "world-class facility". World-class is somewhere above first-class but below heavenly. My suitcase no longer needs to fit into an x-ray machine: it stayed un-x-rayed as I walked out. That's the first time I've used two hyphens in one word. Hong Kong will do that to you.

When I go back to Mumbai in 5 days I will be greeted by Sahar airport that will still be a primitive shambles. Thank god for continuity.

My suitcase stayed virgo intacta but my temperature was taken as I headed for Immigration. It was done with great panache and non-intrusively. We were merely herded through a narrow corridor, three or four abreast, while infrared cameras kept a wary eye out for someone who registered Vesuvius on the red scale. I had encountered a similar camera at Shanghai airport. This seems to be a Chinese tradition since no other airport seems to care about your temperature. I feel loved and honored.

Immigration formalities at Hong Kong airport have to be the most boring in the world. The officer takes your passport and landing card, scans the first page, waits for his computer to beep, looks you in the eye searchingly, glances down at your passport photo, recognizes you, stamps your passport and hands it back to you. Some remarkable things about this exercise:
1. This is the first landing card I've seen that is in triplicate but with self-carbonized paper. Way cool.
2. No words are exchanged, not even a cursory good morning. Completely unlike, say, the US authorities who want to know if you're having a good day, how long you plan to stay around and where, why the devil you've landed up there anyway and whether you're wearing chartreuse underwear.
3. The Hong Kong Immigration officers are obviously chosen for their artistic eye and their ability to make intuitive leaps of accurate judgement. There is no other way that they could compare your face with your passport photograph and let you in to the country. It is an acknowledged fact that if people actually looked like their passport photographs, humanity would have celibated its way into extinction more than a few generations ago and we would never have needed to invent the camera. (Webster thought: Can celibate be a verb considering it refers to a lack of action?)
4. Indians do not need a visa to visit Hong Kong. This has to be the only place in the world where this is so. Let's hear it for Hong Kong! (Does this however mean that Hong Kong is not world-class, after all?)
5. The Immigration counter has a bowl of complimentary lemon mints. Never saw that at Newark.

A sign of a truly civilized airport greeted us as we sauntered nonchalantly out of Immigration: Starbucks. The force is with us. I am not one of those who turn their noses up at the concept of overpriced coffee in absurd cup sizes. I have drunk too many cups of terrible coffee in too many places to sniff at the Starbucks phenomenon.

It represents, along with MacDonald's, the triumph of standardized mediocrity over individual genius.

The Starbucks coffee may not be the best in the world - my maid at home has been trained by my wife to whip up a cup of coffee that leaves Starbucks in the dust of coffee grounds. Calling a small cup of coffee Tall is pretentious, while it may be accurate considering it holds about a liter; and calling a larger size Grande, with an "e", no less, smacks of the silliness of the local kirana shop re-christening itself "shoppe" (or worse, "shoppee").

Nonetheless, when you are 2763 miles from home as the 767 flies, it is reassuring to know what you are letting yourself in for when you part with a small fortune for a cup of java: a standard cup of coffee that tastes the same in New Jersey, Minnesota, London, Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong - no mean feat, that. And let's not forget the comfortable sofas, the stay-as-long-as-you-like ambience and the cheesecake.

I have just returned from a breakfast of a small cappucino and a medium apple turnout at the Starbucks that is next to my hotel, so that may explain some of my enthusiasm.

There has been much made of late of how Mumbai needs to transform itself into Shanghai. I think we should reset our sights and aim for Hong Kong instead. We have a lot more in common with Hong Kong, I think. For one, our shared (till recently) history of democracy. For another, narrow crowded streets. For a third, shabby rundown buildings cheek-by-jowl with tony malls and ugly residential skyscrapers that resemble concrete anthills. I could go on, but it seems that Hong Kong has all the problems that we have. Yet, they've managed to transform it into a world-class (that word again!) city without the ruthless upheaval and sweeping under the carpet that Shanghai has undergone. The city works and is clean, unlike Mumbai which today merely stutters along and is filthy.

I blog about Hong Kong but end up back in Mumbai. Maybe that's where my heart lies.