An Oilman's Story

Exploration for oil is a dirty business. The locations where people set up the rigs and equipment to explore deep down in the heart of mother earth would be an environmentalist’s nightmare. In spite of stringent standards imposed by the authorities around the globe, one would find stinky effluent pits, roar of half of dozen generators and dirty smelly chemicals being pumped in and out of the well bore.

I was in total shock when I started my career in the oil exploration business more than four decades ago. Most of the days, I returned home in dirty oily clothes raising suspicion in the mind of my family members regarding the type of job I did. They never expected a young man with an engineering degree to go to work in tattered khakis, heavy leather boots, helmets and return home with oil and grease stains all over. 

A few springs later, I fell in love with my job and I am still deeply in love. It was exciting to be in charge of a complex operation in a distant forest, away from the civilized world. Life in the camps was fascinating though one would occasionally crave for a break.  Time and career growth had since pushed me gradually away from the hot spot but I still love to get into my coveralls once in a while and spend some time at the oil rigs with the “boys”. 

One of the fringe benefits of the job has always been close interaction with people from all over the world. Even before I left the country in the early 80’s, I had the privilege of meeting people from USA, UK, France, Japan, Nigeria or even Egypt. Once I had lunch with a die-hard Texan in a camp in Arunachal Pradesh. It lasted for about forty minutes. We had a long chat and I did not understand a word he said. I responded by guessing his hand gestures. It was my first encounter with a Texan and his first trip out of USA. But he thanked me at the end of the lunch for a lively conversation. Thankfully, his assignment was complete and he boarded a helicopter on the way to the airport to get back home immediately thereafter. 

There was an interesting episode on board a drill ship off shore Orissa in 1981. It was the first offshore exploration venture of my company. I was representing the company on the drill ship. The ship belonged to an American organization. It had a multi-national crew. A German supply boat was also contracted by our company from Singapore to provide the necessary support we needed from the shore. However, the arrival of the German boat was delayed due to rough weather. In order to carry on with the operation, our company hired a  fishing trawler from the local market as an interim measure. The trawler was manned by a Tamil speaking crew who spoke no other languages. One fine afternoon, the captain of the drill ship, an incorrigible Englishman, frantically asked me to come over to his cabin. The fishing trawler had a problem and it was trying to communicate with the drill ship. The captain regretted his inability to understand the “Indian” spoken by the trawler crew. I tried a bit of Hindi, a little English but could not break the language barrier. The captain was dismayed to learn that I did not speak “Indian” either. It was an emergency situation and there was no time to explain the complexity of a multi-lingual India. I took the shortest recourse. I made an announcement on the public address system to find if anyone on board spoke Tamil. The outcome was a big surprise; a Malaysian of Chinese origin came to our rescue. He had worked in a rubber plantation in Malaysia some years ago as a supervisor and had Tamil labours working for him. He spoke Tamil fluently. Communication was established. 

The story took a twist a few days later, when a radio signal came in from the German supply boat. The boat was in the high sea and developed a mechanical trouble. The German captain and his engineer, first and second mates were all in the engine room trying to repair the fault. The radio room was being manned by a manual labour who did not speak English. The English captain on our drill ship was tearing his hair. He was convinced that this time we were in a total mess because the manual labour at the radio was from Bangladesh. This was my time to smile. “Hey wait a minute”, I said, “Let me take a shot”. “How?”, the captain was perplexed, “Do you speak Bangladeshi?”. I sure did. I blurted out in the microphone in a language I spoke all my life. There was a moment’s silence followed by an excited response from the other side. The guy on the German boat was thrilled to hear his mother tongue from a distant drill ship. He even asked me which “zillah” I belonged to. 

Many years later, I met the English captain at a pub in London and he was still trying to figure out why I had failed to communicate with a fellow Indian but had no problem with a foreigner. He was in high spirit when he raised the issue and I decided not to explain! 

I spent the last thirty years of my life in Kuwait. It has been fascinating. Switching to an oil company in the middle east, where the annual production figure was forty or fifty times more than that of my company back in India was an Alice-in-the-Wonderland like experience. Luckily, I was not alone; there was a sizable number of colleagues from India, who switched over with me in the 80’s. We blended well in the new environment. It was indeed a multi-national set up.  When we landed here, the oil exploration business was literally run by the Americans and the British at the professional level. Slowly, there was a turn around. Indians professionals started arriving in the early 80’s and earned a reputation which was unparallel. However, it continues to be a multi-national set up with a prominent presence of Indian nationals. In fact, Indians are the largest expatriate community in Kuwait today. 

By the way, I have a much better understanding of the Texan language these days! 

The most memorable and also the most devastating experience in Kuwait till date was the environmental disaster triggered by the retreating army of Saddam Hussain’s Iraq in 1991. They set fire to over seven hundred producing oil-wells. It was an inferno unprecedented in human history. The estimated loss was in the order of six million barrels of oil per day in addition to the hideous pollution it created all over the gulf region. 

All we could see in those traumatic days were belching flame and black smoke coming out of each well in sight, extending up to the distant horizon. The spiralling cloud of black smoke shrouded the mid-day sun creating an eerie feeling of “darkness at noon”. It has been eighteen years since the fiasco and the nightmarish memory is still fresh in my psyche. 

It took over a billion dollars and a global effort spreading over almost nine months to extinguish the fires. But that is another story for another day.

 

Kuwait - 1 October 2009