The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Revisiting Amsterdam with a newfound appreciation

I went back to Amsterdam and enjoyed it far more than ever before – highlight of the trip was the journey to The Hague to see The Girl With The Pearl Earring.

I have been to Amsterdam thrice before. One was an enforced halt while I was flying from London to Delhi and, for some reason, was travelling KLM. There were problems with the connection from Amsterdam onwards, so I ended up hanging around in the land of dykes till a seat was found on a flight to Delhi.

Amsterdam is known as the city of canals, art, and history. From the Rijksmuseum to the Anne Frank House, there's so much to explore. (Pexels)

A second trip was for IIFA, the film award function that the HT used to sponsor in those days. We stayed in a very nice hotel with a French restaurant run by London’s legendary Roux brothers, so all I remember is the food.

A third trip was to speak at a global media convention, and all the harassed editors and media execs wanted to know was, ‘Why is the media flourishing in India?’

I hummed and hawed before saying that I wasn’t sure we were flourishing.

★★★

This year, fate intervened. It was my wife’s birthday, and like any dutiful husband, I asked her what she would like to do on her special day.

She would like to see Vermeer’s painting of The Girl With the Pearl Earring, she said. I knew it was a beautiful painting that had inspired a best-selling novel by Tracy Chevalier and a movie starring Scarlet Johansson. But, I was not sure where the physical painting was located.

My wife, of course, knew all about it. It’s in a museum in The Hague, she explained.

“The Hague? “I asked. “But that’s in the Netherlands.”

“Indeed it is,” she said. “But we will stop for a few days in Amsterdam because I want to go to the Van Gogh museum first. Then I need to check out the Rembrandts and Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum. And while we are there, I want to go to Anne Frank’s house.”

★★★

Long story short, I went back to Amsterdam and enjoyed it far more than ever before. I am still a bit of a Philistine, but years of marriage to an arts buff have educated me a little.

We stayed at the Hotel de L’ Europe one of the leading hotels of the world and the most famous of Amsterdam’s grand old hotels where our first-floor balcony overlooked the canal and the experience was gloriously atmospheric.

We resolved not to eat too much; we had no snacks with our drinks at the Amsterdam Soho House, ate modestly at the very good The Duchess restaurant next door and enjoyed imaginative food but badly organised service at the just-short-of-being-any-good Van Oost restaurant.

And we did the standard Amsterdamy stuff like partaking of Rijsttafel (an Indonesian rice table; the Dutch used to rule Indonesia), eating stroopwafel (don’t see the point myself) and going to a ‘coffee shop’, one of those Amsterdam institutions where coffee may or not be served but cannabis will always be consumed. My wife, who has had a sheltered childhood, had never smelled weed, so just as I discovered art on the trip, she discovered the fragrance of cannabis. But as neither of us smokes, we could not do much more than passively inhale the ambient smoke.

Hotel de L'Europe in Amsterdam is a luxurious hotel known for its grand architecture and stunning canal views. (Pic courtesy: Lartisien.com)

★★★

The highlight of our trip was the journey to The Hague to see The Girl With The Pearl Earring. It was exactly as stunning as we had expected, and though we did our rounds of the other exhibits, we kept coming back to this one again and again.

I could see why it had been my wife’s dream to see it up close and to spend hours taking in its every detail.

★★★

But there was a story about our return to Amsterdam. The Dutch have many good qualities but being able to run a transport system is not one of them.

The hotel had advised us to take a taxi or an Uber to The Hague. It would take an hour door to door, they said, and taking a train would take longer, if you factored in the cabs to the stations.

We disregarded this advice because we wanted to try the Dutch railway system. We managed (with the help of the concierge at the Hotel De L’Europe) to find a direct train to The Hague and boarded it.

When we got on, we were surprised to discover that though many Dutch people speak very good English, all the signs and announcements were only in Dutch. Fair enough, we said; it is their country. But given that they make so much money out of tourism, perhaps they should make some concessions to the visitors whose money they are pocketing.

It didn’t really matter much till we were on our way back to Amsterdam. At the first station along the way, everyone in our carriage got out. It wasn’t a very full compartment, so we thought they were catching connections.

But then we looked at the platform. The whole train had emptied. Eventually, there was a brief English announcement

The train was terminated here because there was an accident on the route.

We got out and looked at the boards. Everything was in Dutch. We went to the information kiosk. It was unattended. Finally, a kindly person who saw us staring into the empty information booth took pity on us. There had been a collision near Amsterdam, she said. The railway had not bothered to explain to stranded passengers what we should do. But she suggested another, more complex route with changes of train.

Given the absence of English signage, English announcements, or any personnel at information desks, it sounded too complicated to handle. We ordered an Uber instead and though it took ages to arrive, it did get us to Amsterdam.

Back at the hotel, I told the concierges the story. They said they were always annoyed by the refusal of the railways to use any English. As for train collisions, there seemed to be a consensus that these were not as rare as one might imagine.

“I would never travel by train in the Netherlands,” the head concierge sniffed.

★★★

Not that it’s easier travelling by plane either. I know now that most European airports are ghastly but somehow, I expected the Dutch to do a better job. I was wrong. They are completely useless at running airports.

I noticed this on my way into Amsterdam. Like many European airports, Schiphol does not offer first — and business-class passengers the option of a fast-track immigration queue.

That sounds suitably egalitarian but isn’t. I discovered that there is actually a secret fast-track counter. You just have to pay extra for it.

Seeing as it was my wife’s birthday, we splashed out on it. We were assigned to a very young immigration officer who did not know how hotel bookings worked or how to read a flight confirmation. When we explained it all to him and he was unable to find anything wrong (by which time the officer next to him had cleared four passengers), he flipped through the pages of my passport staring at the visas and stamps as though he was reading the latest Dan Brown blockbuster.

No matter, I said to myself, at least the delay will mean that our bags will have arrived by the time we get to the carousel.

No such luck. They didn’t even start delivering the first bag for another ten minutes. And when my trusted Tumi suitcase, which has been around the world with me several times, appeared on the belt, I could see that the baggage handlers had broken the handle.

The journey back to Delhi was worse. We queued up to get into the security hold, and just when our turn came, they suddenly declared that the section had closed and sent us all off to another part of the airport where there was another security area. One of the two belts for x-raying bags was not working. There were endless queues, and there was no attempt to hurry things along. When people asked questions, they were rudely rebuked. Bizarrely, the white people in security were the more polite ones. The rudeness came from the airport’s South Asian employees.

I made myself feel better by thanking God that these people had emigrated. Otherwise, we would be stuck with them!

★★★

Finally, it was time to board my Air India flight back to Delhi. I stopped criticising Air India in the aftermath of the crash because there were bigger issues to worry about.

But I think it has now been long enough, and it is time to call out the incompetence and misdirection of the top management.

Essentially, we are watching the transformation of Air India, JRD Tata’s pride and joy, into Scoot, the low-cost carrier that Campbell Wilson used to run before the Tatas, in a grotesque error of judgment, hired him to rip up the legacy of JRD and Ratan Tata.

Wilson has destroyed Air India’s domestic business class and is now in the process of repeating this vandalism in international sectors.

I could point to many instances, but let’s stick to this one flight. Business class had no dinner menus. They had not been uploaded in Delhi. Same with the wines. Passengers who had paid huge business class fares were told that there was no champagne. They had not uploaded that either in Delhi.

I don’t usually complain about airline food because I know what the catering process is like but I will say that if the Indian non-vegetarian food (Gate Gourmet I was told) had been served at the Taj or the Oberoi, the chef would have been sacked.

Whenever I am served a rubbish airline curry, I use pickles to make it edible. But they had also forgotten to load pickles. Papad improves the texture of any rice and curry dish, so I asked for that instead. They had also forgotten to load the papad.

My heart went out to the cabin supervisor who went from guest to guest apologising for failings that were not her fault. Earlier she had tried to get the Schipol team to clean the dirty aero bridge through which passengers boarded. When they said a firm no, she started cleaning it herself.

These are people who have worked for Air India for years. They feel they owe it to the airline to maintain a certain standard. And yet, even while they are trying to make things better, their bosses are doing their best to make them worse. No wonder morale is so low.

I don’t really care about the hellhole that is Schiphol or Holland’s colliding trains. The Dutch can sort out their own problems.

But I care about Air India. And it makes me desperately sad to see the damage its current management is doing to the reputation of the Tatas, for whom I have so much respect.

If they are committed to Wilson they should shift him to the low-cost Air India X which may be more his scene. Or maybe they can just ask him to scoot.

Both, the Air India legacy and the good name of the Tatas are in danger the longer this mismanagement continues.