Between Jobs at Il Palagio

At the point between work and leisure, rote hours retain their claim in the body, and will not yet be shed: they live in the bone, as a signature of what was necessary this past year and more.

Book It!

BY DINESH DHAMIJA

Dinesh Dhamija’s company

Flightbookers had a pokey office in Holborn and a contract with Nepal Airlines, one of dozens of ‘bucket shop’ travel agents in 1980s London. He would hustle airlines for cheap seats and sell them to Australian backpackers or British students looking for adventure.

Then came the internet.

Back home, he hired a computer whizz and set up ebookers, to see if online travel might work in Europe. At first a trickle, then a stream and then –within months – a torrent of business took Dhamija into commercial orbit. ebookers went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 1999 and Dhamija immediately invested in search engines, gaining a virtual monopoly on AOL and Yahoo! flight bookings. This was a further masterstroke. Soon, ebookers had a billion-dollar valuation and Dhamija had a spreading empire of offices across Europe, with a fulfilment base in India, staffed imaginatively with gap year Europeans who explained Western culture to their Indian colleagues.

In 2003, sensing the imminent arrival of American competition, Dhamija sold ebookers for £247 million and embarked on his next careers, in politics, investment and philanthropy.

There is an adventure on almost every page: Dhamija was inches away from bankruptcy, but survived by winning a car in a raffle. As a child living in Mauritius, he was almost killed by 250 km/h winds that devastated his home. He’s a stunningly successful entrepreneur with the mindset of an explorer, always seeking new experiences.

Along the way are vignettes of Dhamija’s pet loves: his favourite British and international golf courses, the entrepreneurs he admires most, the inside story of the UK’s political relations with India and the prospects for solar energy. At the age of 72, he retains the energy, imagination and ambition of a man half his age.

This drama-filled, fascinating, inspiring account of a buccaneering business pioneer makes tremendous reading.

David Nicholson

Flip-flop-shod, without anything particular to do, I keep appointment with the vineyard path, walking the patterns of the olive shade, the ancient curves of Tuscany the best the world has come up with, my sole calendar the mountain’s tracery. Toil had this missing in its addictions. Toil took me away from…what exactly?

Now a cockerel screams, and renders me leftwards-turning, towards a portion of what I’ve needed –and which I so suddenly see, it is as if I never held a job nor will again: indiscriminate wildflower, poppy and daisy, bank-grasses –and most of all, the wind playing in all that, incarnate, and whipping the light, or the light catching it, just ever so slightly, in the gaps between the flowers, and the heart quickening its pace at something it’s seen, and knows again, having not known this in so long –that there is a kind of bell that hides in nature, which we’re meant to hear, and even obey, and I move on, a new role triggered within which shall keep me busy this side of things being tethered to the temporal.

Martin Plantinga