On the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Indonesia I was sitting next to a friendly collegial gentleman in a suit and we soon struck up a conversation. From the conversation I gathered this much; he was Malaysian, worked for the UN or maybe the World Bank, had a PhD, had been an associate Dean at Oxford, had a daughter my age with a PhD working for the IMF or maybe WTO in Geneva in international arbitration, thought earning $1 million a year was a pretty average amount, had a son in the US doing a Masters in Engineering, knew a lot about the politics of SE Asia countries including Cambodia and Burma, thought New Zealand was a nice country (everyone always does in Asia), had a Chinese wife who was high up in Dell, liked to read blogs, spent a lot of time flying around the world for his job, was going to Indonesia to meet with President Susilo and had meet world leaders such as George Bush and Tony Blair in his work. Now you don’t meet these sorts of people everyday, sitting next to you in economy class, so I wasn’t really sure how much of it to believe.
But whoever he was, he was someone important, because when we arrived at Jakarta airport he was greeted in the pre-immigration area by someone who he introduced to me as the Civil Director of Aviation. When we got to immigration he was led through without any processing whilst I was left to queue like the normal everyday Roman plebe I was. Although it is probably normal procedure for high ranking officials in any country to be whisked through immigration, it did remind me that I was back Asia, were there is one set of rules for the powerful, another set for Joe Asian, and yet another for foreigners. Maybe I should have got his business card, or at least his name.
