About ME

  My parents met on a train. If I believed in destiny, I could safely conclude that I was meant to travel.

When I was a baby, people used to comment on the “exotic expression” in my eyes. One day, I think I was about 18 months old at the time, my mother took me to the photographer to have my picture taken. I had dark thick hair and dark eyes. The photo was so cute that the photographer displayed it in the shop window. The whole family was proud and my grandma, out in town on her regular shopping trip, went to the photographer’s to have a look. She found two women standing in front of the shop, pointing at my portrait saying: “That’s the child of that Vietnamese man who got married here...“ You can imagine my grandmother’s shock! (She is a blonde and has blue eyes.)

Many years later, as I was about to finish university, my parents were anxious to know what I would chose to do in life. I announced that I was going to India, to work in the offshore IT-enabled services industry. There was no great shock. As a teenager, I had always been the odd one in the nest. Just before my sixteenth birthday, I decided it was time to flee that nest and go to live abroad. So this time, my mother politely enquired where I was going to store all my personal things which I had accummulated during my five year’s stay in Britain. Meanwhile, my father commented that India was a civilized country, since “they were colonized by the Brits“. And that was that.

I believe the best way to get to know a country is to go and live there. A holiday will never give you the true experience. Only by spending an extended amount of time in a foreign country, and by sharing the same everyday routine as the locals, you might start to understand that country and its people. You learn ways to pass time while you are stuck in the same traffic jams on your way to work. You have the same complaints about the cafeteria food at work, and learn to know which dishes are best avoided. You do your grocery shopping in the same supermarket and learn to distinguish between the 15 different types of lentils sold there. You sing along to the pop music while working out in the gym. You learn the true meaning of the words “bureaucracy” and “patience“, while waiting for the local telecom company to install your broadband connection. You learn how to survive hours in the darkness during endless powercuts. You and the locals have the same questions going through your head during an earthquake. “What is this? Should I run outside? Will I die?“ And just like that, bit by bit, you learn to relate to the people around you.

I called this website “sab kuch milega”. It is a Hindi phrase, which can be roughly translated as “anything is possible”. (Mostly in the context of selling and buying.)  If there is one single thing I learnt during my 7 months in Asia, in both a good sense and a bad sense, it is indeed this: Anything is possible.