Jet polishes Brand India image

Many Indian and Chinese businessmen in Hong Kong who travel frequently to India have at least one horror story to narrate about their experience of travelling on Air-India. Until recently, options for direct flights between Hong Kong and Indian cities were fairly limited. Travellers who couldn’t get a seat on other airlines felt compelled to fly the national carrier. After some typical rotten experience, they resolve never to fly it again, until the next time when, in the rush of things, they’re forced to do so.

The past couple of months have brought tremendous relief for weary travellers on this circuit and made their passage to India a delight. Following a recent air services agreement between India and Hong Kong, the number of flights to and from India has doubled. More importantly, the advent of new service providers has raised the bar on service standards. In particular, Jet Airways, arguably India’s best airline, which now offers direct daily flights between Hong Kong and Mumbai, has radically spruced up the Brand India image with the quality of its service.

Travellers stepping off Jet’s flights in Hong Kong bear a beatific expression on their face before breaking into a rapturous narration of the in-flight service standards and comfort levels. And the airline is getting huge traction with its ad line: Change the way you fly to India. On Thursday, Hong Kong’s premier English-language newspaper had a four-page ‘Special Report’ supplement to mark the 15th anniversary of the commencement of the airline’s commercial operations. Way to go...  

The Indian community in Hong Kong isn’t numerically large, but what it lacks in numbers, it makes up by its visibility and contribution to Hong Kong society and economy. And then there are the scions of illustrious families of Baghdadi Jews and Armenian merchants who lived in India in an earlier time, and to that extent can be counted as genealogical descendants of India.   

Last fortnight, at an event hosted by the Forum of Indian Professionals in Hong Kong, I was invited to moderate a discussion with one such “grandson of India”: Leonard Apcar, the Deputy Managing Editor for Asia of the International Herald Tribune. Apcar hails from a family of Armenian businessmen who fled persecution in Persia and arrived in India in 1795. There, many strands of the family flourished as traders and owners of a shipping line that ferried cargo and coolies to large parts of South East Asia and the world. Although later generations of the Apcar family left India for Japan, Leonard recalls that growing up in California, he himself was conscious of his Asian (including Indian) heritage  . “For years my parents used to buy Indian condiments from an Indian store in New York; there was a mango pickle that everybody loved, which came in tall cylindrical glass bottles. And my great-grandmother had her own curry recipe that’s still handed down in the family.”

The Hong Kong Indian community has been in the forefront in donating and raising funds for the relief effort following the Sichuan earthquake. On Tuesday, Council of Hong Kong Indian Associations president, Raj Sital, handed over an initial donation of HK$700,000 (about Rs 38 lakh) to the mainland Chinese government representative in Hong Kong.