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GOING NATIVE
In love with Chennai’s spirit
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He wondered if he could stay here for a year. Five years later, Sebastian Galvez seems in no hurry to get back
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Photo: S. R. Raghunathan
enjoying the affection Sebastian Galvez
In spite of determined English classes, Sebastian Galvez (“with a Z for Zorro”) Bunge retains his charming European accent, part Spanish, part Italian.
“When I came I spoke English — but the accent here is quite different. A little difficult,” he says. “I tried to talk as much as possible to absorb the accent — the twists with which people here talk.”
Sebastian, who is probably already a well-known figure to all those of you addicted to Zara’s tall, cool jugs of sangria, arrived in Chennai in March 2003 to help open the Spanish Tapas Bar, and take over as its manager.
“I’m from Argentina, and was born in Buenos Aires,” he says, adding that he has an Italian grandmother.
Sebastian left Argentina in 1999 to travel by working his way around Europe.
“The best way to know a culture is to work there,” he says, “So I lived in Southern Spain, Scotland, and Barcelona, where I was working in a cocktail bar.”After two years, he got restless again.
“I was thinking about where I can go. Maybe, Italy or East Europe.” Then he got the offer from Zara. “I thought why not … It will be more interesting than anything in Europe – for sure. Quite different from anything I knew.”
So he got on a plane, with nothing but a few books on India to prepare him.
“It was a shock,” he says, “The first impression when I landed in Chennai was like I had travelled in time — not just distance.”
Yet, he was at work just a few hours later. He says he started meeting people immediately, first staff, then customers. “And very fast, I knew a lot of people. That’s why I say it’s good to work in someplace to really understand it.”
When Zara’s owner M. Mahadevan asked him to stay for a year, he was very unsure.
“I really liked it, but I wasn’t sure I could live for one year in a place that was so different.”
He ended up staying. And, it’s been five years and counting.
“Mahadevan’s the most important reason,” says Sebastian, “Because of the way he runs his company, the way that he treats me. That’s very different from anything I knew before.”
“I also stay because of the people here. I really enjoy the way they are ... very open, very friendly, and very curious, in a nice way,” he laughs.
“Everybody wants to know about me all the time — my family, where I’m coming from … They say, ‘What do you eat?’ ‘What do you wear?’ ‘What do you speak?’”
Sebastian’s other anchor to Chennai is it’s laidback attitude and cosy small-town atmosphere.
“People don’t get so stressed here, at the levels you can see in any other places in Europe,” he says.
“Buenos Aires is a frenzied capital city. Chennai is huge — 10 times bigger than Buenos Aires — but it has that feeling of a small city, where people relax. There is a lot go of ‘Go with the flow. Don’t push thing beyond boundaries. Everything is going to fall into place if you just go with it.’
SHONALI MUTHALALY
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Puducherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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