Mumbai: Here's the thing about Phee Teik Yeoh — he doesn't give up easily. "The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials," he likes to say, citing Confucius.
Lots of patience — that's the one virtue anyone needs to have when dealing with Indian bureaucracy, for there are many trials and much polishing is required. That is what he has been doing over the past many months, trying to get Vistara off the ground.
Phee Teik Yeoh, 46, is chief executive officer of the airline, jointly owned by the Tata Group and Singapore Airlines. Vistara will start flights on January 9 to Mumbai and Ahmedabad from its Delhi hub. "He used to come and sit with us with the thick sheaf of application documents and ask politely but firmly to point out the mistake that was holding up a particular approval," says an aviation ministry official. Yeoh did this over and over again, whenever the paperwork got stuck, ministry officials recall.
Yeoh says his first connect with India was when he was four. Growing up in Malaysia, his father would take the family for a Sunday treat to Petaling Jaya beyond Kuala Lumpur. He loved the dosas at a Tamil food stall there — he could polish off three at one go. His parents would quip that they would get him married to the dosa maker's daughter so that he could have a steady supply of the snack.
Later, when he was working in the UK for Singapore Airlines, he would go all the way to the Indian areas of Hounslow or Southall for his food fix. In the US, it was Cerritos in California. Now he does not need to go too far as he is in India most of the time, having joined Vistara in December 2013.
05/01/15 Economic Times
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Lots of patience — that's the one virtue anyone needs to have when dealing with Indian bureaucracy, for there are many trials and much polishing is required. That is what he has been doing over the past many months, trying to get Vistara off the ground.
Phee Teik Yeoh, 46, is chief executive officer of the airline, jointly owned by the Tata Group and Singapore Airlines. Vistara will start flights on January 9 to Mumbai and Ahmedabad from its Delhi hub. "He used to come and sit with us with the thick sheaf of application documents and ask politely but firmly to point out the mistake that was holding up a particular approval," says an aviation ministry official. Yeoh did this over and over again, whenever the paperwork got stuck, ministry officials recall.
Yeoh says his first connect with India was when he was four. Growing up in Malaysia, his father would take the family for a Sunday treat to Petaling Jaya beyond Kuala Lumpur. He loved the dosas at a Tamil food stall there — he could polish off three at one go. His parents would quip that they would get him married to the dosa maker's daughter so that he could have a steady supply of the snack.
Later, when he was working in the UK for Singapore Airlines, he would go all the way to the Indian areas of Hounslow or Southall for his food fix. In the US, it was Cerritos in California. Now he does not need to go too far as he is in India most of the time, having joined Vistara in December 2013.
05/01/15 Economic Times
