Working for the No.1-ranked golf course in COVID-ravaged India has had its challenges for this globetrotting Aussie
It’s late April in Bangalore. India had just hit a devastating record of 314,835 new COVID-19 cases in a single day and was well into phase two of its nation-wide lockdown to combat the spread. I was enjoying some home time on a Saturday afternoon away from my office at the Troon-managed Prestige Golfshire Club [above] when I suddenly felt the urge – and I never do this – to go upstairs to bed and lay down under the air conditioner. Six hours later, at 8pm, I woke up running a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius. I was burning. I thought, This isn’t good. So I rang a colleague and asked them whether I should get someone to come and see me, given what was going on across the country, and they replied, “Just take some paracetamol and see how you go.”
At 1am on Sunday, I was still running a temperature of 40, so I rang a doctor. He arrived at about 3:30am, gave me some other drugs and said, “You need to get tested for COVID.”
I got tested at 10am but it came back negative, but by the afternoon I was already feeling worse, so I contacted my golf course’s owners and they sent another doctor on Monday morning, who brought a coronavirus testing officer with them. By Monday afternoon I had tested positive for COVID-19.
Just as I finally got my temperature down, other symptoms kicked in. The aches and pains were excruciating. I mean, things like your teeth hurting. Just moving your mouth, your jaw, your teeth… everything was aching. You lose your taste and smell – that’s one of the things that still hasn’t come back fully to this day.
Here’s the thing. I’d had both my AstraZeneca vaccinations but was told I had likely caught the virus in hospital when I went in for my second jab. Unlucky, sure, but as a result of having had the second lot of antibodies in my system, I got only a mild case of the virus. Still, it was serious enough for me to require oxygen support in my house. I had to use what they call a concentrator because my blood oxygen levels were too low.
After two weeks I was back on the road to recovery and tested negative on my follow-up COVID test. Oh, and I am five kilograms lighter!
But make no mistake, I was one of the lucky ones. Because I’m employed by one of the biggest companies in India, my employer was pretty quick to action the delivery of a concentrator and a nurse to come to my bedside for two days, just to make sure I was OK. Sadly, it’s not like that for everyone in India. I live in a really nice villa compound here. I mean, you wouldn’t even know you’re in India, to be honest. I’ve got everything I need, including a shelf with about 30 masks on it. We are told to wear multiple layers of masks here – paper masks covered by material ones. You can’t be too careful. But I only have to get in the car and drive 300 metres from my front gate and there’s a tin shanty town with about 60 people living in these tiny, corrugated huts. There’s no such thing as social distancing when you live like that. Masks are the least of their worries.
There’s a stark reality that hits you in the face every single day, no matter where you go. What’s happening over here is bad… really sad. You’ve got two-thirds of the population living below the poverty line and they’re the ones that are being affected. The images you’re seeing on television back home are those people.
The average wage for the average worker here is about $350 per month. To get that, they’re working about 200 hours per month. At Golfshire, I manage two courses in Bangalore and across the two courses we have nearly 700 employees. Sadly, we’ve already lost 10 of those employees to COVID. It’s gut-wrenching.
The parent company – Prestige Construction – is an amazingly philanthropic company and it’s doing everything possible to help its employees. It’s even been setting up mini hospitals and food banks and that sort of thing – everything it possibly can. There’s just so much poverty in India that people don’t see or hear about so much now because of the “modern India” and the tech giant that it is.
While my ordeal hasn’t been pleasant, it’s been horrible for my family back home in Brisbane and Perth. When I tested positive to COVID-19, they were all panicking, understandably, and saying things like, “You’ve got to get out of there as soon as you get better.”
Australia is called “The Lucky Country” and if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that we really are the lucky country. As much as Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the respective state leaders might be getting hammered for some of their decisions, collectively they’ve done a great job controlling the spread.
The fact that I can’t get home and possibly won’t get home now until early next year, I accept and appreciate, although I’m not sure my family does too much. The initial plan was always that we would meet up every couple of months in Singapore. When it’s safe – and permitted – to do so, we’ll continue to do just that.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to rest up and get back to the course when the restrictions ease. Like Australia, golf is booming here in India. At Golfshire we were averaging about 820 rounds a week before we went into lockdown. It costs $160 on the weekend to play, as a daily fee player, and people don’t blink an eyelid at it. Everyone is just itching to get back out on the course.
Golfers in India are a fanatical bunch. I’ve got a couple of friends here who play four times a week, even though they’re running businesses all over the world. It’s crazy!
And while in the short term we may lose some significant revenue streams like weddings, for example, where you get upwards of 2,000 people for one function, I know the golf side of things will be business as usual when we return.
As for my personal predicament, I accept what has happened to me and take it on the chin because it was my decision to move overseas during the pandemic and it was my decision to work in a country that was very susceptible to being a high-risk population. Because of the industry I’m working in, which is a very high-wealth environment, I was very fortunate to get looked after so well.
Having lived outside Australia for as long as I have, you accept that everything comes with a risk. But I’d be lying if I said four or five days into my COVID battle I wasn’t thinking, I would love to be back home in Australia right now. I mean, the villa I live in is very luxurious and very comfortable and I’ve got everything I need, but it’s
not home.
• Declan McCollam is the general manager of Prestige Golfshire Club in Bangalore
