ERNAKULAM/KOCHI : When Shibu Mathew, a 39-year-old draftsman who used to be based in Abu Dhabi until recently, walked up the air stairs of an Air India Express plane over a week ago, he thought he was entering some strange new realm: an afterlife.
After more than a dozen years in that ultimate refuge to the Malayalee mind—the Gulf—the exit was sudden. Mathew had lost his job at an oil sector-linked company on 31 March, along with about 300 other Indians, as the twin shocks of a pandemic and an oil price plunge hit simultaneously.
He says he tried—“really tried"—to find another job that would enable him to stay back in the Gulf region. “I have been working there for the last 14 years.