Peel the Onion

Posture

2010-11-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

My physiotherapist and orthopaedist keep telling me to improve my posture by squaring my shoulders, sticking out my chest and holding my stomach tight. How can one wipe out years of conditioning my predisposition of being the secondary race in Indian society with medical advice? Even the miniature paintings in the National museum have Indian women over the ages that hold their stances in a demure manner, shoulders slightly hunched and chin at an acute angle to the neck.

Let us step back into what psychologist’s term as the gentle years of female puberty. In India, this is usually an event which is fraught with anxiety and shame. The mother will hug the bemused young lass and tell her with shimmering eyes that she must discard the frocks and don a sari or salwar. The father will look at her with a grim face and tell her that under no circumstances must a man be let anywhere close to her for she may get pregnant. If one has a forthright male friend or brother around one’s age, one may get to know that the best method of self defence is to kick a man’s balls which will remain most woman’s fantasy till the day she dies. In many a village, town and city the girl is ostracised and sent to the unclean outhouse for the period of her being under the weather. She is not allowed to pray or sit in front of a deity. These notions are not restricted to the uneducated or economically underprivileged but exist in apparently progressive people in the cities.

In such an environment expenses such as sanitary napkins and brassieres are deemed as unnecessary and the bewildered girl child usually embraces her puberty not with a sense of pride at being at the thresh hold of womanhood but with a sense of shame. The family wants to get her married at the earliest since her functionality of being a child bearing adult has been achieved and the looming question of dowry remains to be resolved. Her physical posture is reflective of her status in society.

It is a scientific fact that the incidence of lower back problems in women in regressive societies and particularly India is much higher than other countries due to a hunched or stooped posture. One can mitigate such an outcome in a girl child by enrolling her into a dance class before her pubescent years. She will learn to stand perfectly although the conservative relatives will term it as arrogance. God help the lass if she is paraded in front of the potential groom’s family when they visit to check out the bride for what the doctor recommended will definitely not appeal to the in-laws.

The Photograph

2010-10-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

He didn’t let anyone tell me about it when they visited me in hospital for he knew it would spoil the effect. It was waiting for me in the living room sofa as I entered my home after a four day recovery from Dengue fever. I felt like I had stepped into a machine and travelled twenty four years back in time. In front of me was a photograph so beautiful, haunting and personal that it took my breath away.

The photograph had been taken by none other than Sunil Gupta (www.sunilgupta.net ) and it had a twenty five year old man sitting on a bench in a cold winter afternoon at the central park at Connaught place. The photographer had captured the bench in perfect symmetry which gave the scene a three dimensional feel. The boy was sitting in tracksuit top, tight jeans flared at the boot and low heeled boots. A mop of curly hair and thin moustache adorned his intense intelligent face. His profile showed angst, passion, confusion and all that one usually experiences at the juncture when one steps into adulthood and makes choices that determine one’s life. In contrast there were two Caucasian girls lying on the grass at a distance without a care in the world and three older men slouching in the sun gazing into the horizon. At the forefront was a barren tree with its limbs stretching out and in the background the sky was a clear blue with a spattering of white clouds. One can almost smell the slight Delhi fog in the air when one looks at the photograph and one can imagine the smell of roasted peanuts and sweet potatoes emanating from the vendors standing in the park.

The young man in the photograph is my brother who was asked to pose twenty four years ago, in the year 1986. He had just finished his engineering and was going through the motions of working in a job he found rather boring. He had heard through mutual friends that his photograph had become famous, had featured in a book and had been exhibited in London. Being the relaxed, unassuming and non vain individual that he is, he never tried to seek the photograph. He heard that his friend in Washington, a Jewish professor, had recognized him when he saw it exhibited in London and had bought the photograph for a large amount of money.

What my brother did not know was that the person who had introduced him to Sunil had insisted on a copy to be made for him. He had since then shifted his base to Lucknow and had carefully kept the piece of art wrapped in his attic. Little did my brother know when he decided to go to Lucknow to meet his friend after ten years that such a gift awaited him. To receive a work of art that represents friendship, memories and beautiful transient inspiring youth at the thresh hold of turning half a century is truly a blessing from forces that guide destiny.

Dealing with Designers

2010-10-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

“You may want to consider muted earthy shades for the wedding apparel to offset your daughter’s dusky complexion. Did you see Anoushka Shankar’s nuptial photographs? She looks fantastic in Green. Vermillion red is so passé and middle class. You may also want to consider her joining the spa; they would plan her diet, change her skin tone, make her exercise and also do some non invasive liposuction. ” The designer gave her monologue while sipping her green tea and purred in satisfaction since she had managed to get all her concerns off her chest without the bride to be snarling at her. She found these confident young educated girls very difficult as customers. They truly seemed to believe that men were attracted to their brains and their talents. Being the most highly regarded designer in India and having dressed the powerful and wealthy she knew the laws of attraction very well.

Mrs.Mehta quickly diffused the tension in the air before her daughter could react. “We see your point my dear but the groom and his family are old school. They like the lovely curves the bride possesses and the colour red.” She matched the tinkle of her fake laugh to the designers smirk. There was no better way to silence everyone in north India than to bring in the groom’s family. They represented all the deities rolled into one during the wedding season. The designer sighed and said “I suppose you will now be ordering shiny gold jewellery and not giving it an antique finish as I has suggested? Well, Lara Dutta looks good in the D’damas advertisement so it can’t be too bad.” Sneaking a look at the bride’s purple face which looked like she was going to have a coronary, the designer beat a hasty retreat after giving Mrs.Mehta two air kisses.

“Mom, why do you pay people so much money and listen to their insults? I find this woman abominable. Let’s buy a Kanjeevaram from Nalli’s. My medical school friends will be disgusted at this horrendous display. Do you know the furniture designer has refused to incorporate a bookcase into the living room? She says the multiple colours of the books will clash in the colour scheme! She refuses to look at natural cotton fabrics and wants only beige silk with zariwala cushions! I refuse to have dry flowers in the room and please do not buy the art she recommends. She insists on either sad people with large eyes or cows outside a temple, all in shades of brown and black to match the colour scheme!!! I want a home not a hotel.”

Mrs.Mehta sighed and rubbed her temples. She had worked hard and saved money to give her daughter a designer wedding to remember but she found that spending money seemed to make life tougher rather than easier. Wedding consultants worked well if the customer was convinced about their inadequacies and handed over the mantle of their decision making which could not be considered with her tempestuous daughter. She picked up her cutlery and sat down to eat her unappetising salad lunch since she was attempting to lose her love handles for the occasion. She looked at the fork and knife which was a Diwali gift from her best friend. It was from the Africa series of a very elite design establishment but to her eyes they strong resembled tongs that should be inserted in her hair to keep her bun in place. A long bamboo stick ended with a tiny appendage from a Barbie kitchen.

Weren’t designers supposed to incorporate aesthetics with utility? Why did they most often work at cross purposes? Mrs. Mehta stared at her refrigerator as a case in point. The freezer which is opened to retrieve non vegetarian raw material twice a day is at the most convenient location at eye level. The water shelf and the vegetable/ fruit tray which is used multiple times by everyone is at the bottom of the fridge which made most people with back problems go into an absurd squat position. Why are name plates in office complexes placed at the end of the corridor, after the lifts? Her office designer would rather have her take anti allergy pills than take out the carpet in her room. Every designer hated storage place for accounts books, box beds for storing the quilts and bookshelves in the house.

As a doctor Mrs.Mehta was aware that putting the young girls through a crash diet and a slimming centre was the worst curse that a mother could give to her nuptial bliss for all physiologists know that absence of fat in the body would necessitate artificial lubricants. Yet the slimming industry thrived on the marriage market. Her daughter wanted a real Shehnai player to play at the entrance to greet the guests while the wedding planner wanted Vijay’s band along with a few nautch girls splashing Ittar on the guests. The bride wanted marigold decorations and the florist wanted white lilies Hollywood style. And here she was ignoring her patients and playing referee to trivial conflicts with a perennial migraine and a hollow stomach.

Mrs.Mehta decided that she should think positive and document her experiences so that she may consider an alternate career by writing a book on “Dealing with Designers”.

The Games

2010-10-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Commonwealth Games held at Delhi this year was very reflective of the way in which our government functions. Great Macroeconomic planning by erudite people educated in the best colleges internationally, large outlays of funds, a complete lacklustre execution with the objective of the plan being out of focus and yet a 9% GDP growth rate which exists alongside abject poverty, lack of health, water, sanitation and education. We ended the games with a result that is praiseworthy and the event passed without any major glitch which was evident to the international media. As a person who has witnessed the games with participation from family and friends let me narrate a few observations about the games.

The participants of the opening and closing ceremony and the volunteers need to be truly applauded. They needed to take leave of absence from jobs and their education to practise for up to 12 hours a day for over two months for the event. The support from the organising committee in providing good food, medical and transport for these people were rather lacking but the opportunity that these youngsters faced made them overlook all encumbrances.

Having met the mother of a member of the Indian shooting team I was told that the residential facilities and amenities given to the athletes was one of the best in the world. We pampered the visitors and any negative reporting to the contrary should be ignored.

The tickets for the games events and passes for all the cultural events was a nightmare. My daughter visited the CWG booth at Dilli Haat and Qutub Minar on three occasions and my driver visited them on two occasions and no one had any idea about the passes for the cultural programs. We had booked tickets for the sports events on the internet using the credit card and faced no issue. The stadium was virtually empty for the athletics day during which both the 100 meters and 200 meters finals were being held. Tennis and hockey attracted full stadiums while other events had large pockets of empty seats, especially in the reserved category. The food at the stadia was awful, limited and very difficult to access. Drinking water and toilets remained an issue. Being a spectator needs resilience and courage.

Mr.Kalmadi was booed when he spoke at the opening and closing ceremony and many people felt it was in poor taste. However it is undeniable that the CWG officials were not a polite and cooperative bunch of people to deal with as a participant, spectator or vendor. They were arrogant and patronising. The government lost enormous revenue by not managing to get stocks of memorabilia and souvenirs available at the venues or CWG stands. One enquired for T shirts and caps at many venues and was turned away.

The excitement of the games has permeated sports into the masses. My physiotherapist has a sister who was spotted in a government school in Haldwani and is now part of the national team in steeplechase running. He tells me that the government made her athletics career possible and offered her a job in the railways when she was eighteen and now the Police force at twenty one has permitted her to train and run for her country. Krishna Poonia and Saina Nehwal are both within the top five in the world in their sports. Let’s hope this impacts the status of the girl child in Indian society.

The nation salutes all our sportsmen and women who have done us proud in the past two weeks. You have changed the way our future generations will evolve in the years to come with your success stories.

Tongue Lashing

2010-09-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

Manmohan Singh hasn’t forgotten his skills as a Professor in Delhi School of Economics for his tongue lashing to the powers organizing CWG and the Chief Minister of Delhi has obviously met its mark. As I traversed the twenty five kilometers to office today morning, I found that my city had transformed in the past twenty four hours.

The mounds of mud lying on the roads like landslides in the Himalayas have amazingly disappeared. Each and every bus stop now has a rain shelter and has been decorated with splendid photographs of beautiful women dancing, shopping or posing in skimpy outfits to slogans of “Shopaholic Delhi”, “Amazing Delhi” and other similar corny captions. It’s a good time to buy scripts of companies that manufacture paint and road signs as the roads have received a new coat of paint, zebra crossings have appeared and the cement tiles at the edge of the road are painted in red, yellow and white. Road signs like “Stop”, ”Pedestrian Crossing” that I had only read about in Automobile Association of India manual in my youth to acquire my first driving license are now visible on the road. Each and every government office has large blue and white signs in English and Hindi. Leafy plants have been planted in the dividers between the road lanes. Every monument has a red signage and the multitude of informative road signs makes one feel like one is in the pedestrian tourist district of Rome.

Hundreds of traffic police seem to have appeared out of thin air as every signal now has both a man and woman cop. They have obviously been given new uniforms which all of them have inaugurated today. The sleeves are rolled down to the cuff and buttoned up. Belts hold up the perfectly pleated trousers. The slums on the way have either disappeared or been pushed back from the periphery of the road.

This transformation has taken twenty four hours. The city is once again buzzing as every hotel lobby is streaming with visitors for the games. The area around Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium looks rather spectacular with the stadiums rising into the well lit sky like space ships. Apparently the army has been called in to repair the fallen pedestrian bridge in record time.

I know, one is shaking ones head and wondering that if we have the potential to transform in such a short time why did we have to face such international disgrace. However, it’s not a good idea for “Delhiwallahs” to pack their bags and depart for holidays at this juncture. Even visitors who are planning to cancel their trips to India due to bad press coverage and mismanagement of the preparedness should rethink their move. I told the kid in the morning that she did not need to put the regular mosquito repellent for her practice at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium for as a veteran in the Rajdhani one knows when the last straw is about to be placed on the camel’s back and when the government will get its act together.

I propose that all cabinet ministers are put through teacher’s training to augment their disciplinary skills, what say thou?

CWG

2010-09-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

Thousands of people picked up the morning paper in disbelief and I was one of those parents who incredulously thanked destiny. The Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was supposed to host the first complete rehearsal of the opening ceremony today morning and my daughter was among the thousand youngsters who would have walked over the ill-fated pedestrian bridge after disembarking from the buses provided by the CWG organising committee. I picked up the paper with trembling hands and read about how this large pedestrian bridge connecting the parking area and the stadium had collapsed yesterday, critically injuring 27 workers and one engineer.

I have really tried to embrace the upcoming CWG with graciousness and joy. I have bought tickets for many of the events. To get into the spirit of things I ask all young MBAs who apply to my firm to name three Commonwealth countries. Sadly, the five girls I have interviewed last week could only name India! I have sponsored and organised police verification for all my staff. I have watched the maid and worker populace diminish as the migrant workforce has been banished from the vicinity of the Rajdhani. The kid is perennially tired with practice and the newly scheduled opening ceremony practice will now make her miss her fresher’s party where too she had a part in a play. Cest a vie....

Remember the time we hosted the Asian Games? We were a country that had humility and graciousness and not the arrogance that we now possess. Lalit Bhanot, the OC secretary general says westerners have a different standard of hygiene than Indians and refuses to admit lapses in the preparedness of the athlete’s village even as the Embassies of various countries send squads to clean up the premises. Twenty years ago I had to postpone my engagement for over six months and compromise on the ring since my fiancée had sheepishly spent the money he had saved on a colour television to watch the Asian Games.

People are angry and ashamed at the disgrace we are facing on the international arena with our state of preparedness. Indians are gracious hosts and the organisers should have to face the repercussions of such lapses in preparedness. I recently met a lady who used to be a neighbour and has now moved to a farm house; the family has built a few of the stadia for the games. It is nice to know that not everyone is suffering due to the CWG.

MRI

2010-09-20T03:14:00.000-07:00

My friend blames my Columbian dance instructor in the fitness DVD, Ma blames the hours hunched in front of the computer while I take turns in blaming my "naseeb" and MCD for the pain in my back. My orthopedist grimly asked me why I was ignoring his repeated requests for a MRI.

In my worst moments of claustrophobia my behavior would knock Scarlett O Hara over as I swoon in the darkened auspices of lifts which grind to a halt during power failure. Even the gods cannot protect any gloomy zealot who at such junctures prophesies the worst for I would make Mathilda’s school principal look like a timid mouse. I marvel at people who pay money to climb up stairs located between the upper and lower domes of cathedrals and wriggle on their bellies to go through a cave to reach the Vaishnav Devi mandir. Ever since a friend mentioned in conversation that he thought the pyramids in Egypt should have ventilation in its inner sanctums I have dreaded visiting the venue. When I visit the Vatican and gaze at Michelangelo’s frescoes, the dizziness I feel with the heat and the crowds is often mistaken as a profound spiritual experience.

To ask me to spend good money and crawl into the tiny aperture of a MRI machine is therefore an act of sadism. To expect to leave a claustrophobic’s survival tools such as the mobile phone and IPod in a locker during the episode is cruel. To add to my misery I have witnessed someone dear to me being stuck inside a MRI machine for an hour due to power failure. The logical part of my brain however decides that this is ridiculous behavior and I dial the radiologist. I ask about duration of the procedure, size of aperture and cavity, distance of machine to face, if one’s position could be reversed with the feet entering the machine first, if one could lie on one’s belly, why does the machine make such a lot of noise and sadly the result of my study is not a very happy one. The radiologist says he can give me anesthesia to put me to sleep and the orthopedist says he can stay inside the room to give me moral courage.

I have decided that my errant vertebra will soon get frustrated with its Attention Deficiency Syndrome (ADS) and realize it will have to settle down with its brethren in the line set down by creation for in its battle with the non logical paranoid section of my brain, there is no way it can possibly win.

Murky waters of Delhi

2010-09-06T01:08:00.000-07:00

As I was returning from a physiotherapy session yesterday morning in an endeavor to alleviate the effects of the roller coaster rides over the roads of Delhi on my back, I was greeted by two distraught faces. My daughter and her friend were set to depart for their regular marathon dance practice session for the opening ceremony of the commonwealth games. The dear friend had slipped in the muck outside the metro station, hurt her back and had to be rushed for an X-ray. My daughter had to catch the metro and go to Ghaziabad since a friend and colleague from her college had expired due to Dengue.

The boy was twenty years old, a star in a prestigious college in Delhi, his school and hometown. He had gifted his beloved mother a gold chain a few years ago with the money he had accumulated from various scholarships and prizes from extra-curricular events he had won in school and college. He was in a good and expensive hospital in Delhi but complications prevented his recovery.

When my daughter went to school and one read of Dengue, one wasn’t worried since the school also tutored the children and grandchildren of the super powers of the country. The authorities promptly fumigated the school at regular intervals. However University is a melting pot which does not warrant the same attention.

The citizens of the capital are beyond reprimanding the current government for its apathy. The recent elections in Delhi University ousted the congress backed NSUI and voted for the BJP backed ABVP. The students have been unceremoniously thrown out of their hostels to board the CWG officials without alternate arrangements as the owners of neighborhood PG accommodations are making hay while the sun shines. The Professors are on indeterminate strike over the semester system as dengue, malaria and typhoid are rampant. My fifteen year old niece has just recovered from viral meningitis.

The Congress seems to be taking the anger of the citizens rather lightly for CWG may well be exactly what the opposition needs to win the next election.

Cars over the years

2010-09-03T02:34:00.000-07:00

Despite living in a bungalow and having two gardeners who watered the plants in shifts, Baba pledged his Provident fund at the age of fifty to buy our first car in India. The old faithful was a second hand voluptuous turquoise colored Ambassador with the number plate MXT 8153. She spent most of the time parked in our garage and had an acute attention deficiency syndrome (ADS) for unless she was started every alternate day, she would throw a tantrum and refuse to work. In cold weather she needed the engine to be flooded with warm petrol and would splutter to a start in an intoxicated manner. When she went on long journeys, she got unbearably hot and her radiator would start to steam in fury until we gingerly opened her radiator’s cap at the roadside and fed it cool distilled water. I bought a fan and installed it in the car since Ma would get very hot trying to maneuver the lady into the narrow confines of double parking outside our flat in Kolkata. However one had to chose between the fan functioning or the car since the batteries could not handled two prima donnas at the same time.

My boyfriend’s father was one among a few hundred thousand Indians who had booked a Maruti 800 in 1982 and was one of the fortunate ones to be awarded a bright red Maruti in 1985. The family resisted all offers to make a huge profit by selling the booking and it was the car of my youth. Those were the heady days when one drove the car at a speed of close to 100 kmph, the windows down and the breeze blowing one’s hair amuck. As built in music systems were not a regular feature, one would have conversations and sing in the car. Our lovely red did get a trifle giddy when climbing the circuitous routes of the Himalayan roads but faithfully let us traverse to all corners of the country since holidays were usually planned at the spur of the moment with the number of passengers always being an unknown figure.

With progress and a child, our organizations asked us to choose a fancy air-conditioned car which in our case was the Premier Padmini Deluxe. Since we were “bal bachchewala dilliwallahs”, we decided to take this car - the first in our name, to the mohalla mandir for blessings. By the time the pujari located his sindoor dani and followed us to draw the mandatory swastika on the white bonnet, a friendly Dilliwallah had deflated all our tyres since our shiny new car was parked in an inconvenient position. Hanging lemons and chillies at the rear of the car, reversing over eggs and the puja had no impact on the destiny of the car. The white elephant refused to budge on most occasions and was a perennial source of frustration.

When Maruti announced that it was going to launch the luxury car - Esteem, every self respecting yuppie who could get financing scurried to book the car. Being part of the banking system which was financing the booking certainly helped in getting a preferential allotment and we were thrilled to be in a car where the air-conditioning worked, it had no ADS and had a built in music system for casettes. Our elation was short-lived as the economy opened up and a multitude of cars arrived on the scene, each bigger than the other, making the task of one-upmanship impossible.

As I reach middle age and now posses a mammoth petrol guzzling machine that has been primarily bought to boost my ego and ensure that people in snooty establishments open the door and smile a greeting, my life has taken an about turn. My elegant car is nowadays parked in the university precincts and ferries my daughter’s nukkad group buddies. I am contemplating a new car and the only thing that interests me now is high fuel efficiency, a sturdy body and low cost of maintenance. The kid mutters that such parameters are surely an indication of a complete lack luster approach to life while I argue that being green and conserving fuel is the correct and fashionable attitude today.

Monsoon Mania

2010-08-21T04:08:00.000-07:00

We Dilli-wallahs are very confused nowadays. As the rains pour down on the streets causing puddles, streams, ponds, lakes and rivulets; we cringe in disbelief and shudder at the "keechad" in our midst. The rains are for farmers with agricultural lands in the country and as all of us have gardeners with designer sprinklers for our farm houses and gardens; we want to be spared this misery. We look into our wardrobes and stare at our chiffons, "mulmul chikankari" and woolens and realize we do not have umbrellas, ugly raincoats and gumboots. We therefore decide to skip work and college and pick up the phone to order in food since kantabai has absconded as she too does not possess an umbrella. We are informed by Dominoes that there are no sureties about delivery time during the rains and we get extremely grumpy.

The Municipal Corporation is equally piqued at nature’s incessant showers. They have dug up every road, bus stop, gutter, theatre, stadium with the intention of filling it up before the Commonwealth games and lo behold the trenches have now filled up with paani and started to breed tadpoles in abundance. We watch the ministers, socialites and aam aadmi daintily skip over the rubble hoping that they will not skid through the mud and splash into a nearby pond.

The newbie college students are facing reality with a thud. They wade through muddy water till their knees to reach the metro station. They unfold their pants and climb into their designer Hawaii chappals to enter the trains. They embrace their foray into adulthood through the mud and grime and wonder why Unilever and P & G have to show children rescuing kittens from gutters to make the mothers buy detergent. They throw away the cream shower gels of Body Shop and pick up bars of Dettol, Lifebuoy and Cinthol as their new grooming companions. They decide that individuality paves the way as they no longer iron or gel their hair and prefer to leave it au naturalle.

The Yamuna which is usually nonexistent is apparently rising to danger levels and we read that the Bhakra Nangal is threatening to give way. Reports of Mud slides and cloud bursts causing huge losses face us every morning. Maybe it’s time we all did something about the phenomenon known as global warming as our summers get hotter, winters colder and natural disasters more frequent.

Perils of Perfectionism

2010-08-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

One of the critical skills needed for achievement is a need for perfectionism ingrained into one’s psyche in the subject of pursuit. While super achievers usually learn to channel their energy into a few areas and switch off in most other avenues, others fall into the common trap of trying to excel in every facet of their life which may be possible in one’s youth but can become a counterproductive trait as one progresses in age, draining one of both energy and zest for life.

Perhaps this occurs due to the carrot and stick upbringing that is incorporated into both our parenting and teaching which most people cannot shake off over the years. One watches individuals who want to be the perfect child, parent, supervisor, peer, subordinate, worker and of course a creative genius in their spare time. We are harsh on ourselves for the way we look, what we eat, what we read, the music we hear and even the company we keep. The house must be immaculate; the food will be gourmet, the plants green and the flowers in the right bloom. It would be nice to have the napkins steam pressed and never to have chipped nail polish.

As the years pass, one wonders at the purpose of this quest for perfection which may result in a few admiring glances and murmurs of appreciation at the cost of a mind which is cluttered with useless reminders of tasks to be done which impediment one’s health. Will it matter if the plant holds a few dry leaves in the living room just as we do as our life progresses? Can one smile at the cobweb when one is being tutored in yoga on the carpet? Even if one can accommodate the slipping away of one’s drive for perfection, will people around be able to get used to a new relaxed person or will they constantly lament at how one has slipped up and reprimand one to get back to the person they admired. Does it really matter if the pedestal is not as high as it used to be for perhaps it was not a place one ever desired to stand on and the basic premise on which it stood was shallow and not reflective of one’s true strengths.

As one looks around and watches relatively young and healthy people pass away ahead of their time we recognise that it is the stress that we create within ourselves in the pursuit of the trivial which is to blame. We need to consciously make way for new avenues with age and graciously let go of our preoccupations of youth in a manner and pace that is driven solely by the individual. This may not be easy in the initial stages but essential for the long term. We also need to recognise this need in people around us and accommodate their change in priorities instead of deputing ourselves as the angels who pull up the socks of all and sundry for a better world.

Delhi University Agitation

2010-07-29T03:23:00.000-07:00

Justice Aruna Suresh of the Delhi High court spoke the minds of thousands of parents in New Delhi when she ticked off the teachers of Delhi University for their prolonged agitation against the implementation of the semester system. Justice Suresh admonished the teacher’s union and said that they had no right to “play with the life and careers of the students” over an internal matter which needed to be resolved with urgency.

Any parent with a child over the age of seventeen in the capital will inform you about college admissions in DU being the most taxing exercise in operations research with parameters such as marks, extracurricular achievements, sporting abilities and “jugaad” competing for the few seats available in these citadels of excellence. The school student transitions to college with a feeling of exhilaration and achievement. They are used to a certain discipline in school and most of them want to adhere to the same in college. Classes usually begin at 8.45 am in most colleges and the students leave their homes as early as 7 am to take local transport to the university only to twiddle their fingers since the teachers are abstaining from class due to the agitation.

I recall my days at Presidency College Kolkata which at that time was the hub of student politics in the leftist state. Our student’s federation of India union would call for a strike at the drop of a hat to protest for things that did not affect our life. In the initial period we were glad to comply and drink tea and do “adda” in the canteen. Within a month, both the conversation and tea started to lose its charm and so we informed the union leaders that we would attend class when we pleased and could not be dictated. Things came to a head when the union closed our college gates and refused to let us enter. A major altercation ensued and we decided to climb over the gate to attend class. A fiery lady in the union lay down in front of the gate and said we would have to step over her to enter the college. A young lad from my class was glad to comply as he stepped over the shocked prostrate woman, climbed over the gate which he then opened to let in the crowd.

That year, an independent party with no political affiliation was formed in Presidency college to contest elections which won by an overwhelming majority. The Student Federation chiefs were ticked off by the Politburo and told to get their act together. The Independent party wasn’t as interested in student politics as much as they were keen to teach the union a lesson and lost the election in the subsequent year. However it created a major buzz in the city and our college attracted a whole bunch of attractive fashionable juniors who until then thought of our establishment as erudite and boring.

I sincerely hope that the teachers will get back to the classrooms for I am sure the "chole baturas" and "tandoori chicken momos" of Kamala Nagar Market will very soon lose their charm. Let’s not complain of our kids losing focus in their life if our generation sets such an example.

Clothes maketh a woman

2010-07-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

I dreaded the days when my daughter was young and wanted to be my stylist before I went to work. She would bring out the most binding outfits and the highest heels. No amount of convincing could drive home the point that work life on earth wasn’t similar to that in the Idiot box. One has never seen a lawyer in any part of the world dress like Calista Flockhart or heard of doctors wearing stilletoes to hospital and making out in laundry closets. I could not bear her sulking before I left for work and so spent the day in maternal agony as the waist band of my skirt progressively tightened into my duodenum and I had to bend at the knees in a dainty manner to pick up a pencil from the floor.

The tables turned when she went to intern at an office during her summer holidays at the age of sixteen and within five minutes of trying to look like what the women’s magazines today term as “the corporate look”, she decided that perhaps her school uniform wasn’t as ugly as she believed. As the years have gone by she has decided not to renew the subscriptions of the fashion magazines and resolutely refused to wear the spikey heels on the pretext that her feet are hurting from Bharatnatyam. I suspect that if her fancy school parties did not require most young girls to squeeze into miracle latex sub attire meant to transform the silhouette and tiptoe around in heels, she would attend more of them.

The papers this week announced that a Delhi based surgeon can insert cushions into the ball of one’s foot at a cost of sixty to eighty thousand rupees which would make wearing heel shoes less painful. It would be like having all those sticky Scholl comfort appendages inside one’s foot. The doctor should seriously consider a tie up with Reebok to incorporate “stability balls under the heels and forefoot to create a natural instability to force muscles to adapt and encourage toning", which is the logic behind the Easytone footwear that promises the user a fabulous derrière.

Much as the corporate sponsored media parrots the line that clothes maketh the man or woman, the only women I have seen in “corporate attire” have been in beauty salons, five star kitty parties or below twenty years of age. When I was young, naive and vain, I wore stilettos in the Mumbai suburban trains to work. I am glad that my daughter is more confident and knows that despite what she reads it’s unlikely that a person will first look at her feet before speaking to her. It also makes life easier as we now share the same comfortable shoes.

Protecting the Minor

2010-07-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Three different events this week indicate that our country is increasing efforts to protect the dignity and rights of our youth.

On June 14th the spokesperson for the Ministry of Women and Child Development said that it was proposing to amend the Domestic Violence Act along the lines of the US model of the “Safe DC” program. A two day workshop was conducted by the ministry with representatives from the states. An important fall out of this could be minors having the right to appeal in courts against violence or inadequate parenting. The victims can approach a domestic violence intake centre or a police station and the victim is assisted in getting an ex-parte temporary protection order within two hours which is valid for 14 days. During the period the victim is provided with shelter, transport, legal assistance, custody of children depending on her needs.(source: indialawyers.wordpress.com)

On the same day it was reported that two sisters from Ludhiana, Punjab challenged their father’s decision in the Supreme Court to halt their education on the premise that they were girls. Their father who is a shopkeeper refused to let them pursue their dreams of a post graduate degree in management and threatened to pull them out of college. Justice P. Sathasivam has advised the family to go for counselling to resolve the situation and has instructed the police to protect the girls from harassment from the family.

The movie “Udaan” which was released yesterday dwells on the dreams and talent of a boy and how he battles against the forces that threaten to obliterate them. The sensitively made film handles domestic violence through the eyes of children. The characters in the film are realistic and have shades of grey and even the person with the vile temper is shown to have redeeming features. However the final message in the film is loud and clear that violence in any relationship is immensely detrimental to the psyche of an individual and no amount of remorse or anguished affection later should be permitted as an excuse for pardon. The only way one can build a new beginning is by starting afresh.

The Shobhaa Punit War

2010-07-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

Punit Malhotra should have listened to his mother and not swooped to this level. It is true that Shobhaa De started the whole episode by rubbishing his directorial debut film “I don’t believe in Love Stories” and she wrote in her blog that Punit deserved to be spanked in public. Shobhaa is courageous to trifle with the sentiments of a brash young man. Punit promptly tweeted that Shobhaa was a fossilized menopausal woman who wasn’t getting enough to which Sonam Kapoor apparently replied “Ha ha”!!!

Everyone knows that insults do not have a level of gradation but have a progressive order of obnoxiousness in retaliation, a fact that has been proved by his interlude. However it takes courage for anyone, be one brilliant or ordinary, to create something unique and put one’s signature on it. One knows that brickbats and sniggers await one, but personal attacks are in poor taste. I know this from experience since I was at one time brave enough not to have comment moderation on this blog. I discovered the hard way what intense issues people have which are manifested by love notes in the form of comments.

However the big “M” word and the issue of “not getting any” is a comment that would obliterate the debutant director from the affections of most women. Punit should realize that one does not need to be fossilized or menopausal not to get any and this is a rather sensitive subject with most people, in relationships across age groups or otherwise. The M word is a very touchy subject with most women since sociologically and biologically, a woman is seldom appreciated after her eggs are depleted. Mommy and her kitty party sahelies will definitely not give Punit beta any laddoos for such behavior.

Quirky Fate

2010-07-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

It is strange when three women from the same family, spread over three generations, coincidentally happen to take up their first earning jobs in the same profession and at the same age. Call it destiny or a quirky game of fate but that is exactly what happened in my family today.

My eighteen year old daughter received a call from her school principal yesterday, asking if she could work, until her college started, and substitute for a teacher who needed to undergo surgery. She started her first full time paid job today,teaching chemistry to classes seven to nine at the same school where she had completed fourteen years of education, just a few months back. I too, started my first part time job to earn pocket money at the age of eighteen, during my first year of college. I taught mathematics to senior school girls who lived in a building across the road from my flat. My mother needed to support a large family when her father met with an early demise. She passed out of high school at eighteen and taught mathematics to class nine and ten students in a co-educational school through the reference of her school principal.

As I sit sandwiched in the middle generation and watch the two ladies, I must admit I had the easiest assignment for facing a large classroom of children between fourteen and seventeen can be extremely daunting. While the students in my mother’s classroom pulled her leg, they also touched her feet to pay their respects to their teacher, a habit which is till date followed in Bengal. My daughter will be taking up to eight classes a day in a privileged school in the most aggressive city of India and I wish her all the best.

It is remarkable when such strange coincidences strike a family. It makes one smile and sets one’s faith soaring for I feel privileged to be in a similar boat with two such amazing ladies.

Credit Card Analytics

2010-06-29T04:08:00.000-07:00

My bank has just sent me an analysis of my credit card spending habits. They have taken my expenses over a year, broken them into categories and provided me with an excel spreadsheet. My banker is obviously suffering from a delusion of mistaken identity and is behaving like an ill mannered husband. It may well be possible that my bank has hired too many specialists in esoteric areas like data-mining and data-warehousing who have been let loose in the realm of customer communication.

I hated the sight of the spreadsheet. It is the kind of thing a woman would look at in a masochistic mood, just after a breakup or an intense bout of depression. I threw the offensive paper into the dustbin which was unfortunately retrieved by my daughter in a rare moment of orderliness. She thought I had mistakenly thrown away the bank document and kept the envelope in my bag, something that I have been known to do.

She gave a loud hoot of laughter and said my bankers understood my psychology so well. She started to read the expenses under the various headings and wanted to know the difference between expenses on apparel, “department store” and “accessories”. I explained in Venn diagrams that the department store was the union set of apparel and accessories with cosmetics thrown in. She was happy about the low spend on car and healthcare both of which are irritant expenses which are normally handled by cash. She happily noted that our travel expenses had not reduced since the last year despite the recessionary condition.

A credit card is still used in our country for travel and leisure activities and not essentials. A woman primarily uses it for those instances of impulse buying when we shut down logic and give in to the mood of the moment. In a culture where the seven deadly sins are droned into our minds, only the tax man and marketing analytics experts want to learn about such decadent consumer behavior.

The Metro

2010-06-17T20:18:00.001-07:00

The metro will be operational in Gurgaon - the suburb of New Delhi where I reside, from Monday the twenty first of June. I have been anticipating this day with unabashed glee. I can see the overhead metro trains from most of the windows in my flat and the station is ten meters from the gate of my condominium. It is so empowering to have comfortable, fast and safe public transport at one’s door step. If a person like me, who has a car and driver, can feel so joyous, I wonder what kind of celebration one shall be watching in the days to come.

I have watched the metro line being built for over three years. I have navigated my car through the debris on the way to work and on the way back. The journey that used to take forty minutes started to stretch to twice that time. I have seen swimming pools being created in beautifully cordoned off roads where the metro workers forgot to leave gaps for water drainage. The walls of the mighty farmhouses on both sides of the tracks were pushed back to widen the roads, some trees were uprooted and transplanted and others remained so that we could zigzag our cars through them. The metro workmen built many a divider between the two sides of the road which would be broken down by the Delhi wallah who had to be true to his pugnacious reputation. Unlike the stations in Delhi, we watched escalators being installed in Gurgaon which made Ma extremely happy. In a few stray cases of site accidents during construction, a few died and others survived as the columns and cranes crashed onto the road.

I was holidaying this summer when I chanced upon a full page article in the International Herald Tribune which described the Delhi Metro as being one of the best maintained and most profitable metros in the world. It charges the lowest fares internationally, transports the largest number of people, is clean and operates punctually. In my mind, the Connaught Place or Rajiv Chowk station is a great architectural conception and the best metro station I have seen. Judge it not by the artwork or glossiness but the size of the station and its ability of not making one feel claustrophobic despite the number of people in it. The Delhi metro has managed to simplify what could have been a rather complex transportation system by speaking the language of the people. The security at the stations is exemplary and there are no bottlenecks in the process. www.delhimetrorail.com

Thanks to you Mr.Sreedharan and your team for making this dream possible. I will be watching the trains go by with pride as I stand in my balcony and will be saluting you.

Caste System

2010-06-15T03:19:00.001-07:00

My parents had an “inter-caste “marriage in 1959 which caused quite a furore. Rumour has it that my snobbish Brahmin grandparents refused to drink even the water served by Ma at the initial stages. Soon enough, my Ma’s grace and cooking had them literally eating out of her hands. Forty years later, I went a stage further to marry not only someone from another caste but also another region of the country who did not speak my language. I was amazed to see a multitude of people from relatives to savvy family friends ask me “What caste is the boy?” I had no idea and neither did he. I accused everyone of being a hypocrite and suggested we burn all the intellectual books in the library in a gust of youthful bravado.

It is the same bravery that is beginning to set women free in our country where the national newspapers carry coverage of at least one case of “honour killing” a day. Today’s paper described how the daughter of a whole-sale vegetable dealer and her “cabbie” boyfriend were electrocuted and beaten to death in Delhi last night. The locality could hear the kids who were only 19 years old, screaming for help for three hours. People who tried to intervene were beaten and the good cops arrived in the morning to pick up the corpses and feed the news to the media. We even had a chief minister of an Indian state defend “khap” or “gotra” in the context of marriage. For those who are uninitiated these are sub sects within a caste.

I learnt about this concept when I was a child. The marriage of my beautiful, refined, gentle and rich grandmother to my grandfather did not make logical sense in an arranged marriage context. I asked my father why such an alliance was made. In a moment of weakness and exasperation he explained that if a daughter is married into a family whose sub-caste or "gotra" is higher than her parental home, the parents earn lots of brownie points from heaven and their chances of their souls gaining salvation rise. Such was the barter of my grandmother.

I am constantly asked by foreigners both at work and as a tourist whether the caste system is alive in India. The answer is complex and cannot be answered in the negative or affirmative. Lots of people don’t care and aren’t aware of their caste and yet there are so many who will kill their children or sisters with their bare hands for the sake of it. Aren’t we an amazing country where same sex alliances are legally permissible, unlike many a developed country of the west, and yet the caste system is alive and defended by the powerful?

MotherTongue

2010-06-05T00:29:00.000-07:00

She looked up from the form she was filling and asked me, “Ma, what is my mother tongue? I need to fill it in the college form.” I told her that since her mother was a Bengali, she should write that as her mother tongue. She thought that a surname which definitely originated from Uttar Pradesh did not add up to Bengali being her mother tongue, so shouldn’t she write Hindi? I told her that was her father tongue and not mother tongue to which she exasperatedly said there was no such word in the dictionary or the form.

The term mother tongue was devised to enable sociologists determine the language in which the person is most comfortable. Certain Bengali poets say that the language in which a person dreams is the true mother tongue of the individual. I have never recollected any speech in my dreams, they are usually driven by imagery, but perhaps I am a less evolved being. If one has had a childhood romance in one’s “para” (locality), school or college, the romantic duo will probably speak the local language prevalent in the environment at that time. However, if one ends up choosing a partner in an environment like a professional program or work place where everyone spoke English, and one is too old to learn a new language for the sake of love, the subsequent progeny of such couples grow up in a predominantly English speaking environment at home. The children communicate with their grandparents and imported maids from the family village through a medium of broken native language and signs until the latter adapt and learn the language chosen by the child.

My Hindi is passable but despite six text books during the West Bengal Higher Secondary Board, which also included a book on Sahitya ka Itihaas, I mix up genders when I speak. This is not very good when I am trying to tick off a person with high speed diction because the person usually takes umbrage to gender changes at each sentence and misses the point of the lecture. At the same time, while we can speak Bengali well, my brother and I cannot read or write the language. This kind of situation arises when the family moves to multiple locations to meet challenges at the work place. The children learn the language of the state in which they study which in our case was Marathi.

While some kids like mine suffer on mother tongue issues due to inter racial genes, other kids in India speak a sad medley of local languages because they scarcely spend time with grandparents and relatives and are brought up in locations far away from where the family originated. Sociologists who may examine such forms should understand that the data captured isn’t very accurate.

Perfection

2010-05-25T01:43:00.000-07:00

We wondered if seeing one statue was worth an entire afternoon at Venice. We had been standing in a line to the Uffizi gallery since 8 am and it was lunch time. If we joined the line outside the Accademia, we would have to let go of the one pm train and catch the four pm train from Florence to Venice. We decided to stay and I witnessed my greatest reaction to an inanimate creation.

It was nine years ago that I stepped into the Accademia and first saw the statue of David by Michelangelo. It was the first time I actually had a strong physical reaction to a work of art, something that I always thought was an exaggeration. I had read about the creation of David by Michelangelo in Irving Stone’s fictional biography of the artist when I was a teenager but nothing prepared me for the sheer magnitude of its genius. The statue rose in white alabaster marble, towering at a height of seventeen feet at a specially created place in the Accademia. Sunlight streamed onto the limbs of the young man who personified youth, virility, nobility and above all beautiful grace. The body showed strength, the stance had dignity while his eyes held pride and a warning to keep a distance. It appeared that the artist had captured everything perfect in a man in one piece of work.

Nine years later, this summer, I experienced another moment of complete enrapture when I reacted to the same way to the most unlikely partner to Michelangelo’s work. I was at the Neues museum at Berlin at my assigned time of half an hour past noon. We meandered through the labyrinth of rooms amazed at the vast collection when I suddenly stood in front of the bust of Nefertiti. I gasped at the beauty of the work and everything it represented. I wondered why I found it so captivating and majestic. Made in 1345 BC by the court sculptor Thutmose, the bust was of the Royal Queen Nefertiti of the Pharaoh Akhenaton. The queen was obviously in her late thirties or forties when she posed for the piece and her age had only lent a fragility and maturity to her beauty. Her head and chin were captured in an incline that indicated a fine balance between pride and humility for the queen was said to have been the daughter of a person in the Pharaoh’s army. Her chocolate brown skin, fabulous cheekbones, nose line , perfect ears, full lips , long neck and widely set almond eyes – one of which had been damaged irrevocably during excavation signified the ultimate beauty of womankind. The sculptors in ancient Egyptian times used to extend the head gear of female sculptures to give a certain symmetry to the head and extend the neck. The stance of the bust is not completely erect and flamboyant, but more feminine, almost coy. It is said that the queen ruled as Pharaoh after her husband’s death, for a short time, which seems believable by the elegance and quiet confidence the face exudes.

I was privileged to feel this way about two highly disparate objects of art which in my individual subjectivity signifies perfection in man and woman. You may however get Freudian and wonder why I found the perfect woman in a bust while ........

Air India Express

2010-05-24T02:40:00.000-07:00

I first boarded a flight to Dubai in 1997 and have subsequently flown to the destination every year. My travel agent recommended we travel business class since the price differential was only rupees five thousand. We chose not to listen to him and were amazed to see the multitude of people who travelled to the Middle East. Many preferred to squat on the carpet of the airport waiting area. They represented the labour from India that supports to Middle East economy in all their industries. People who supported families in India and made their dreams come true.

The journey wasn’t very comfortable and we listened to the travel agent from the next year. Over the years we watched the business class prices rise and the seats shrink. When Etihad airlines launched its India operations in 2004 at a fraction of the fare offered by the lead players in the sector, it changed the rules of the game. Etihad Airlines is the national airline of Abu Dhabi and they offered a free pick up and drop shuttle service to and from Abu Dhabi to Dubai. A huge chunk of the price sensitive market moved to their counters forcing Air India to re-launch its price sensitive segment to the Air India Express. The consumer profile of the economy passenger changed and we once again constituted the segment.

The recent Air India crash is in this budget sector. It has taken the lives of people who may not appear on the pages of Fortune or Financial papers but comprise the individual on whom many a person in South India depend on for financial support. While everyone blames someone else for the cause of the crash, as someone who has commuted to Mangalore in a Air India flight, who has friends in Mangalore, who knows people who were planning a journey on this flight and who has interacted with people who migrate to distant lands to lead a lonely harsh life only to make the lives of people back home better, this is a tragedy that is heartfelt.

However one doesn’t really think Air India will really learn or do anything after this catastrophe. In a country of one billion people the life of a common man has rarely been of much consequence. It just makes for wonderful TRP ratings in news channels.

Allianz Arena

2010-05-22T00:38:00.000-07:00

The tour guide gave us a big smile. He imagined we were two chiquititas from South America whose team was going to face his home team in South Africa. When he later heard we were Indian he looked very perplexed and wondered why we were taking a tour of the Allianz Arena.

I am not a major football fan but when I saw the Allianz Football Arena rising like an egg shaped space shuttle on top of the hill, I was intrigued. I was also spurred on by my daughter who is a fan of nearly every sport on the planet. It was a cold dreary day with a high wind chill factor and stringy rain. Like vain desi women we were hopelessly under clad and shivered as we trudged the kilometre from the metro station. We just made it in time for an English tour of the Arena. Everyone in the tour was around half my age and had twice my fitness level. After a film of fifteen minutes on the making of the stadium which bored everyone but me, we had to climb 181 steps in a minute because the six and half feet giant guide had very long legs. I concentrated on yogic breathing and tried not to wheeze or turn into an embarrassing shade of purple. The guide asked us very seriously if anyone suffered vertigo for we were being ushered into one of the higher seats of the stadium which had a view close to seventy degree of the field to the horizontal. The architects had managed to construct a stadium to seat 66000 people plus 4000 standing seats without a single beam to obstruct the view. To ensure proximity to the field the seats were placed an alarmingly increasing angle to the horizontal.

We moved on to the locker room where the local F C Bayern fans apparently swoon, faint and get delirious. The guide was dismayed at the lack of reaction of English speaking junta. We saw the exercise rooms, massage rooms, pool, VIP enclave, sponsor gallery and Fan club area. We moved to the press conference room and were allowed to pretend while friends and family took corny photographs. We moved on to the place where the players step down from their coaches and first meet the press before a match. We even walked down the path to the point where the teams enter the field but we were not allowed to step onto the grass which is apparently laid out and changed every year.

The two football clubs of Munich used to practise and play in the 1972 Olympic stadium in the city. They requested the original architect of the Olympic stadium to make modifications to modernise it, which he refused. The people of Munich went on to a referendum and by an overwhelming majority it was decided to build a new stadium, the foundation of which was laid in 2001 and completed in 2005. The stadium was built at a cost of Euro 340 million and used only funds from the clubs and corporate sponsorships.

As we walked away exhilarated from the stadium after one and half hours we realised what made football such an all encompassing game for the masses. My Tennis crazy child grumbled that she could not tour the Wimbledon club or Flushing Meadows. We had visited a golf museum close to the lovely St. Andrews links but there is no tour of the facility. Such an inclusion can only increase revenue, brand equity and popularity which eventually translates into heavier purses for the players and their sponsors.

The power of a brand

2010-05-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

One had never seen such motley of well heeled people jostling and waiting in a line. You know, the kind that wears Prada and Dior, whizzes past into chauffeured cars leaving behind a whiff of their perfume. I was naturally very intrigued as I walked across to the concierge to ask what was causing this flurry. The man peered at me over his reading glasses and said “Madam, Hermes is having a sale.” Not being the kind to be easily intimidated I asked the tacky question of the discount percentage they were offering. He frostily told me that he understood it was forty to eighty percent. At hearing the latter figure I enthusiastically said I would visit the event. I was informed that one needed to be invited to gain entry but since I was staying with the hotel for a while they would be glad to acquire an invitation for me.

The next morning we were surprised to see that the crowd in the venue was not the regular mayhem one had viewed as it was Father’s Day in the country. We grabbed our card which was written in a language that we could not comprehend and made our way to the gate. We were redirected to a reception table where a pretty lady in tiny attire asked us for our invitation. She peered at the card and stated that what we possessed was not an invite. She gave a long sigh and gave us a form which we were required to fill up to gain entry. We were thereafter given two huge orange bags, the size of potato sacks in subzi mandi, in which we were instructed to keep all our purchases till we reached the cash counter.

The event was very enlightening. Some of the male consultants were wearing pink and canary yellow pants and advising people on what they were trying. I was educated on the existence of infant booties and sweaters that equaled one’s monthly salary. People had stuffed their large orange bags and were running out of space. Lots of folks were very stressed about their purchases. The stocks on the hangers kept flying off at an alarming rate. Only a pre-determined number of people were allowed to enter at a given time like a visit to the Alhambra or the treasury containing the Queen’s jewels and the crowd outside the venue was building up. We soon realized that scarves and ties were the best options to consider. Well heeled women would come up and ask if I really intended to buy the scarf I was holding for they wanted to include it in their booty. This suddenly seemed like a sari sale at Vichitra in South Extension market where Auntyji and I would grab the same sari at different ends and play tug of war. Even men would grab any tie that one put down for a moment.

Now nothing gets one’s heckles up better than other people coveting what one is undecided about buying. I held on to the objects which I had originally no intention of buying. I slowly began to listen to the male consultant who insisted that color of my hair matched the specks in the scarf, a line that I seemed to remember from some old romantic novel of yester years. The power of needs being created where none exist by the hands of marketing was casting its spell on me. The two of us who had stepped in for a lark were suddenly feeling bad about how little our bag contained. We stepped into a line to make a payment.

My daughter asked for a tax refund after the purchase. The man disdainfully said “Sorry, you should have told me before the transaction and not after its completion.” He underestimated my daughter who just stood there and refused to budge until the distraught guy had to manually write down the refund voucher with a pen. She tried to humor him by saying this was her present to her mom and dad for Mother and Father’s day to which she received a cold stony gaze. The last event dispersed the magic spell that had been cast over us in a Poof!

As we returned to saddi Dilli and handed over the ties as gifts we hoped people recognized the brand and the effort behind the purchase. And as for my tiny scarf – I shrieked in dismay when Kantabai asked me whether she should wash the “Roomaal” (handkerchief) in the washing machine or hand wash it with the sweaters.

Willpower

2010-04-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

At a time when most celebrities are letting us down with their shades of grey in the IPL debacle, the news of Lisa Ray’s battle with cancer and truly delightful reappearance into our life is a breath of fresh air. Lisa looks as beautiful as ever. One look into her guileless eyes and eternally sweet smile seems to indicate that she has not let this set back take away her true essence. Most people in her place would have been bitter, patronizing or preachy. She just says she is lucky to be reborn.

The power of the human spirit to battle setbacks is seldom appreciated until one has gone through similar life experiences. The inner strength of a person may not always be manifested in the individual’s external demeanor. For instance, my mother in law has always been an excitable person with a short fuse. When she was to be operated eighteen years ago for colon cancer, everyone thought it best to tell her it was a tumor until the biopsy results confirmed malignancy. The resident doctor at the hospital, who was quite a “style bhai” had other plans. He paid her a visit on the eve of the operation, sat on her bed, held her hand, and told her that she should be prepared for the worst since she probably had stage two cancers and would not survive beyond six months. He did not know that the attractive woman was also made of steel. Next morning, the senior surgeon met us after a five hour surgery and applauded her fighting spirit which was evident during the operation.

Just a few months before this incident, I had waltzed into my caesarean operation imagining it would be a picnic, an end to the ordeal of pregnancy and a new beginning. What followed was a complete shocker. The infant in the womb has to be protected from the anesthesia in the mother’s blood stream and therefore extricated as soon as the anesthesia kicks in. This translates to the wide awake mother being strapped down, listening to gruesome doctor language while the abdomen is being marked for the incision. I was as relaxed as a Chinese gymnast performing in front of the high command. At the end of the operation, the frantic anesthetic wasn’t able to extricate the tube that he had inserted through my wind pipe until my mature gynecologist gave me a slap on my groggily awake face and ordered me to relax.

Are we born with this strength or do we acquire calmness by meditation, faith or experience? For many of us, a very strong bond with a person we love keeps our spirit fighting and kicking for survival. One has seen that while women tend to be more excitable and prone to despair in youth which is perhaps an excessive affinity for high drama, they tend to become rocks as they get older, for they will battle every disaster to take care of their children. Men on the other hand tend to give up easily as they get older for often in their pursuit of the material and frivolous, they tend to weaken the bond with people around them.

Brazilian Butt

2010-04-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

At this time of the year, as summer approaches, all women get deluged with emails giving us the ultimate quick fix solution to achieving a bikini body. What exactly is a bikini body since the adorable cartoon character Maxine created by John Wagner wears a bikini with more panache than our beauty contestants? I inform the marketeer that I have given up swimming since I am allergic to chlorine. They exasperatedly explain that firstly, to aspire to be like Maxine is ridiculous and secondly, the bikini is not a garment in which one swims. It is the ultimate garment to display the most beautiful of god creations without actually breaking the law.

Aha! This explains why I was the only fool swimming the crystal clear Caribbean waters in a fancy corporate program while others were sunning themselves and sipping bubbly. The bikini ensures an even tan all over the body which is fantastic if you are as pale as Nicole Kidman and aspire to turn into a golden Gisele Bundchen. I inform the marketing company that the amount of melanin that is produced by my skin at direct exposure to the sun will make me look like an “Aam Papad” rather than a golden croissant. Our country in all likelihood consumes more fairness cream than toothpaste.

I received an email today asking me if I wanted a “Brazilian Butt”. Now that sounded like an interesting proposition except for the fact that I had recently heard of a South American beauty queen and mother of two children who had died trying to surgically implant one. Also all healthy Indian women already have a Brazilian butt. It’s just that we politely call it the Khajuraho endowment. I sent a request to the marketeer asking if I can get a combination of French shoulders, a Thai waistline, Scandinavian legs, Japanese hair, Indian eyes and a Russian chest. Needless to say they did not reply.

If the media is to be believed, the importance given to the shape of the body has today surpassed the significance of the face and the twinkle in one’s eyes. It’s like people meet each other and instead of making make eye contact have a shifty gaze which roves all over the territory. I seem to be the only Bengali in my family who still eats Bhaat while others have turned to the Punjabi roti. A recent study in Delhi indicated that Punjabis now spend ten percent of their budget on milk products with cereals trailing far behind. A gentleman told me yesterday that much to his chagrin, his studious and bright seventeen year old daughter was constantly hounded by scouts from the glitterati since she was five feet eleven inches tall. They couldn’t believe she wanted to study with her height!

It is summer and all of us women want to shed a few kilos to meet our realistic and sweet expectations of being able to don a thin T shirt over our jeans without being asked the terrible question by strangers, “Madam, when is the baby due?”.

Eyjafjallajokull

2010-04-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

You think you are really smart when you carefully buy tickets from frequent flyer points way ahead of time, you use the credit card points to buy another ticket, advance purchase hotels on internet to avail of low rates, manage to spot the ballet and concert before others to get vantage seats. Then all of a sudden an unpronounceable volcano erupts and one starts to open geography books and search the internet to understand what is happening. We cannot understand what volcano ash means since we grew up learning that volcanoes spew lava, rocks and gases. We find that the volcano ash at thirty thousand feet in the sky can cut off a continent from the rest of the world and we realize how dependent we have become on a means of transportation which was not available to all a century ago. It is perhaps a good time to remember that the first commercial airline was the German Zeppelin Corporation in 1909

We take roller-coaster rides in amusement parks for a sudden rush and watch horror movies to get scared but the moments that most of us recall as being the most frightening are those when we have been faced with the incomprehensible and mammoth powers of nature. I have faced such moments when I have been underwater in the sea faced with a fish baring it teeth and looking aggressive and when I had underestimated the labyrinth, maze and heights of the corals in the seas of Puerto Rico between me and the boat. Other moments were when one was scared one would not be able to trek back from the glacier in Jungfrau to catch the last train down to civilization when my daughter was very young and yet I do not claim to have an affinity for hazardous sports and nature exploration as some of my friends. We tend to transfer our virtual personas created from success through the internet and technology world to real life which does not prepare us for reality.

The world cannot imagine how Europe, the citadel of progressive civilization for centuries can possibly be paralyzed from Volcano Ash. While my flight was cancelled and I have incurred losses, gained permanent frown lines and loss of hair from the episode, one cannot imagine the plight of people stranded in airports with little money or education. There may be others who have examinations, interviews or operations that were scheduled. Elderly people will probably let the stress and physical inconvenience affect their health.

In India, the IPL, minister, an attractive lady and IT raids have taken up most of the newspapers. However the impact of the European disaster has affected many people at both the business and personal level. The damage to perishable products exported has been the highest. The impact on world economy will be felt after issues are sorted out since currently most people are reading the words “Don’t Panic” very loudly, as was prescribed in the Hitch hiker’s guide to the Galaxy.

A few suggestions to those affected from one who is experiencing the situation is that most airlines, hotels and tour operators are being very co-operative in refunding money and readjusting bookings. If a flight is cancelled one has to do a rebooking. In certain cases like mine it is easier to cancel the ticket and do a fresh booking. If the booking is through a travel agent, the cancellation, refund or re-booking is done through the agent. Cancellations of flights due to weather conditions do not automatically translate to being accommodated on the next plane to the destination. And of course as Douglas Adams said – Don’t Panic!

Turning eighteen

2010-04-13T02:54:00.000-07:00

When a girl reaches the age of eighteen in India, she is perceived by the Visa officers in Embassies as a potential illegal immigrant who is very keen to get married to the first chap who is earning “moolah” in a developed country. Why else would parents in India let their daughters study in the best schools, teach them to think independently and empower them unless it was to be a cute worm dangling on the fishing hook, warmly enticing the big NRI fish that are swimming past, in the waters beyond our land.

Like any normal person from Bengal one of the favorite past times of my family was to take vacations. At the age of two, when Baba was posted in USA, we visited half the countries in Europe and Middle East on our way to the destination. Ma says I was a natural who moved from the pacifier to eating with a spoon at restaurants without a fuss. We drove all over America and covered a bunch of countries when we returned three years later. Since I recollect none of this early education, I insist on dragging my progeny along to some distant part of the world every year.

As a result, our passports have lots of immigration stamps. Some of the countries we visit hate each other but gladly let us enter. This year, to my amazement, my daughter was asked to go for a face to face interview for a two week Schenegen tourist visa when she was a veteran traveler. I was informed that since she had turned eighteen she was being assessed as to whether I was likely to dump her in Europe with a potential husband or if she was likely to run away to pursue the career option of a waitress in a cafe. However such assumptions are not made of a young Indian man who is eighteen.

The daughter asked me in the morning what she should wear for the interview. I didn’t have an answer. If she looked too westernized, she would look like someone who would adapt easily to being a non resident bride. If she dressed in ethnic clothes she may look like a character from a Deepa Mehta or Mira Nair movie. I finally asked her to be her natural self which is biological age eighteen and age of independence from pampering Indian parent…..ha ha. She mugged up our itinerary and the names of the Hotels booked. I asked her to tell the visa officer that all the bookings were discounted and therefore paid upfront and non refundable and if she was refused a visa ….Grrrrr!

She assumed it would be a cakewalk and she would stroll into an air conditioned set up for the interview. There were a few cement benches under the trees in front of the gate of the Embassy. The temperature was a scalding forty two degrees Celsius with a breeze that could bake cookies from dough. The car park was a kilometer away and mobile phones were not allowed inside. After forty five minutes on the bench and another forty five minutes inside the Embassy we hope that they realize that she has a long way to go before she will ever aspire to be a non-resident bride and will be given the great tourist visa.

Infidelity

2010-04-12T03:30:00.000-07:00

Jim Carrey, the American actor made an interesting comment which was splashed in newspapers across the world. He said that if a husband is philandering to the extent that Tiger Woods appeared to have been, any wife would guess something was amiss and know about it. Bring home the same logic to our drama at home and it appears impossible that our tennis super star Sania Mirza is unaware of her husband’s character flaws which seem to be so glaring and evident.

The entire Sania Shoaib saga reads like a third rated soap opera and has been watched sadly by her ardent admirers. A marriage over the phone, consummated and denied, a “maili chaddar” being produced by the first wife’s family (!!!!), dumped for obesity, police cases and a hurried divorce settlement hours before the second engagement. It makes one wonder at the institution of marriage and its sanctity. In most cases, the person marrying the philanderer takes the risk of tying the knot due to an enhanced status or financial prowess after the wedding. However in this case, the celebrity with the prize money is our lady so one wonders at the necessity for this rushed marriage when her career is still going strong.

One can only logically deduct social pressures being the predominant factor for putting the girl’s sporting career on a back burner and taking such a hurried decision. If the Mirza family has invested and supported their daughter’s decision to pursue a non- conformist career, faced the religious pressures levied on them by fundamentalists on the attire that she has worn, one wonders at why they would not ask their daughter to give the relationship some time before succumbing to the legal tangles of marriage, especially with a person of a different nationality.

The “izzat of the family” and the “honor of the household” very often takes precedence over the happiness of the child. Sania could have lived her life like Steffi Graff who gave herself time to see if Agassi and she could live together before tying the knot. If the two of them are in love, Shoaib being a sportsman would understand the limited life span of a sports person and how difficult it is to tour, be disciplined, practice and play tennis. India has such a limited talent pool of great sports persons and especially women sports icons that one feels sad that love has to equal marriage which will equal compromise in excellence even for someone of the stature of Sania Mirza.

Tuesday Saga

2010-04-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hindus worship “Hanuman-ji”, the God born in the avatar of an Ape on Tuesdays. They show their devotion by feeding endless streams of bananas to the monkeys in the country. During the pleasant winter weather, people stop their cars and bikes near gardens or forest areas where a man selling the fruit will be making hay while the sun shines and sell bananas at twice the normal rate. When the weather gets hot, the same people will surreptitiously keep bananas outside their widows which are fortified with grills or dump them on the terrace of the building. Thereafter the monkeys will arrive by the hoards from the nearby forests into the inhabited colonies of the city and gobble the bananas. Once in a while they will bite the humans that inadvertently pass by who have to be rushed to the hospital for the painful and long drawn anti rabies injection. At other times little children get bitten while playing. Strong petitions appear in newspapers about the Municipality’s callousness regarding our safety.

Two days back, Ma suddenly let out an animated cry from her room. She was standing near her bay window and showing us the sight of a dozen “Hanumans” who were swaying and jumping around our posh colony. She educated me that a Bandar (monkey) was a small animal with a pink face while a hanuman (ape) had a dark face and a pink bum. I requested her to refrain from her desire for fresh air ventilating the house, to latch the doors and windows and use the air-conditioning since it was forty degrees Celsius. She looked at me skeptically and I did not think she would listen to my warning.

When I returned home from work, I found all the blinds and curtains of the flat had been drawn. She informed me that a family of three apes had decided to settle down in the small balcony adjoining my drawing room. She said the larger one was perched on top of the air-conditioner and the other two were lying down on the floor. I wanted to take a look which she forbade me for apparently they had snarled and hit the glass panes when she looked at them. Ma said the apes were large and could easily break the glass panes and enter if they saw the light inside the living room.

We switched on all the air conditioners hoping that the hot air would make them go away. They instead got angry and made noises. We called the security personnel for assistance and they wanted to open the door to the balcony to shoo them away. “What if the apes instead entered the house?” I asked them. They said that was a risk I would have to take. I informed them that they could try their antics from the terrace and attempt to scare away the apes.

Next morning the apes were still sleeping on the balcony. However we were less scared in the sunlight and managed to shoo them away. They left behind all the undigested bananas from their system which had to be cleaned. I was informed by many that perhaps “Hanuman-ji” had decided to bless me in this manner and I should be grateful for their visit. However I strongly suggest that it would be prudent for all of us to make our offerings at the closest Temple so that the bananas could be fed to the many mal-nourished children who live near these temples. Monkeys can fend for themselves in the forest while these human children need our help.

People and Movies

2010-04-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

If there was a word association with India it would not be software, outsourcing, Gandhi or Buddha. Across the world, people see an Indian and think of Bollywood just as we assume every Parisian man speaks like Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther and every French girl dresses like Coco Chanel. We think women in Los Angeles jog on the beach like the Bay Watch girls and Australian men walk around bare chested with Boomerangs in their pockets. The root of this behaviour lies in the way we were taught the alphabets of the language in our childhood with pictorial analogies. We remember people from different countries with the movies or pictures we have seen of them.

Around fifteen years back, I was waiting at the lobby of a hotel with a gentleman who was visiting India for the first time as an adult, although he was born in Hyderabad. As we waited for my friend to join us, the gypsy socialite Livleen Sharma and her daughter entered the premise. He couldn’t believe his eyes as they swayed past him with the chum chum of their payals, ten kilograms of silver jewellery, nose ring as large as my bangle, swirling skirts and diaphanous dupattas barely concealing their skimpy gypsy blouses. He looked at me and asked for an explanation. I informed him with a poker face that Indian women normally dressed in such a manner and I had toned down my dress to a demure sari for his benefit. As most people tend to judge a country by what they see in an airport, hotel and movies, he thought it was a plausible answer but looked very bemused. He was enlightened to the truth by my friend who did not find my education of foreigners very funny.

Twelve years ago, an elderly gentleman of Sudanese origin visited our office. He said he was very fond of Hindi movies. He declared at lunch time that he wanted to visit Bharatpur (a town near Delhi which has a bird sanctuary). My friend looked rather perplexed at this request since the gentleman did not appear to be remotely interested in any sort of flying creature. Now I have a brain that accumulates a lot of useless trivia which at that juncture had a “Eureka” moment. I told my friend that the gentleman most probably wanted to go to Bharatpur because a popular raunchy Hindi film song of that time had the word Bharatpur in the opening lines of the lyrics. The choreography had Sonali Bendre suggestively jumping on a Khatiya, singing to Shah Rukh Khan. My friend officially declared me a raving lunatic but had to eat his words by the evening when he was asked rather directly where one could go and watch girls dancing to Hindi film songs in Delhi. He suggested that the concierge of his opulent hotel may be of assistance.

When the taxi drivers of countries like Malaysia or Singapore learn of our Indian origin, they excitedly start monologues about their favourite Indian films, the shootings they have watched, their ratings of our heroines and point out the shooting locations of each film as they drive. In places like Russia and China they are still stuck on the old 1960s movies of Raj Kapoor and Nargis. Even in the island of Santorini in Greece, a drummer in a restaurant knew the tune and lyrics of a song “Noorie” which was a 1970s hit.

However my most amusing experience was in Seville, Spain where we were waiting to catch the late night Flamenco show. As we had reached the venue early, we decided to venture into a bar to eat the famous tapas. The bar tender spoke only Spanish and dismissed us with a weird sound and a wave of his hand. We sat down and waited patiently to be rescued from the language barrier. A German hotelier, who was present in the bar with his Phillipino wife and elderly mother, heard the exchange and ordered on our behalf. His mother, the German lady, was a major Amitabh Bachchan fan and kept blowing kisses in the air and declared how much she adored the star. We informed her that a few million women in India felt the same way. She started to rattle off the names of all the Hindi movies she had watched starring Amitabh and then attempted to sing what only she thought was a Hindi film song. It was a very entertaining evening.

Movies are a great way to understand people across the world and their culture. The manner in which a local language movie represents a place and the manner in which Hollywood represents it is very dissimilar just as the manner in which Bollywood represents each of our states is warped. Some of the best international films can be watched in the world cinema channels in India at a very low cost and advertisement interruption since they are not commercially popular.

Gaga over Lady Gaga

2010-04-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard her name was when an international fashion magazine sent me an email asking me to vote for which of her myriad hairstyles one preferred. They all looked rather outlandish and so I asked my daughter who was Lady Gaga. She said she was a major Pop star who was making waves for her music and eclectic style. Was she actually royalty? Who on earth has a name like Gaga? My daughter laughed and said it was a stage name.

Last week I read that her videos on Youtube had received one billion hits. I decided to join the bandwagon and watched her video. The result was such an entertaining revelation that I had to disturb the kid from her study of Economics to show her the clip. We then went on to watch all her videos and even downloaded them into our I-pods.

Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta in New York and is of Italian, German and French origin. Despite her raunchy image she was a diligent, disciplined and studious child in a private convent school. She was a popular girl with many friends but loved to sing from an early age. She gained an early admission at 17 into New York’s Tisch School of Arts and signed up with Def Jam recordings at the age of 19. She adapted the stage name Lady Gaga because she is a major fan of Queen and the song “Radio Gaga”. She wrote songs for Britney Spears, Pussycat Dolls and Fergie at Famous Music Publishing which was acquired by Sony/ATV. Her vocal ability was spotted by Akon who convinced the label to launch her as a solo star and history was created.

Lady Gaga has managed to create entertaining music videos which reminds one of MJ. Her vocals can be appreciated in songs like Bad Romance which also has a good video if you can get past the lack of apparel on her. Her new video “Telephone” with Beyonce is more like the “Thriller” and is like a mini movie with the song appearing at intervals. The girl changes her persona like a chameleon and one is struck at the number of Avatars she can introduce within a few minutes of a song. Her intelligence at an extremely young age is evident and one hopes that she keeps that very pretty head on her shoulders and provides us entertainment for a long time for she has introduced a cutting edge in her videos that has outdone even the superlative ones of groups like Black Eyed Peas.

Whether one likes the music or not, Lady Gaga reads like a case study in Marketing for Pop music is more dynamic than Women’s wear in its shelf life. To identify a niche audience, to create something unique in such a short time, at such a young age and shock people into noticing in an already crowded space is creditable. Don’t just look at the thongs and the body for this young girl had a lot of chutzpah and intellect hidden behind the cute demeanour.

Alone at last

2010-03-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

In the past six months, two of my friends have chosen to spend their last moments alone, in a country away from where they were born, without contacting any of their friends or relatives. They embraced death in solitude knowing that their time had come. What shocked most of us who knew them is why they did not think our affections worthy of a call for many would have gladly gone across to be with them during the final hours.

Both the individuals were star achievers and very bright men. One of them informed the hospital authorities who must be contacted at his demise and the other person was found only after his sister asked the police to knock down his door. Since I was closer to the second individual who was a very popular and amicable person, all of us friends are very upset about the matter. Maybe it’s a cultural difference between the land they chose to work and reside in and the country of their birth. In India, we are always surrounded by people who care about us to the point of being annoyingly inquisitive. We talk to people who may be selling wares or assisting us in domesticity. In a popular advertisement of Matrix calling cards, they show the protagonist chatting endlessly with a tele-sales executive since he is feeling lonely on an overseas trip. It hit a chord among many of us who feel bewildered at the lack of human contact while travelling.

Another question that arises is why does everyone believe that one must always be at one’s best mood, behaviour and performance whenever they meet friends? The definition of a friend is someone who accepts you for what you are. It is a person with whom you may have all the qualities of Shrek and still be regarded as adorable. Is an email or phone call stating that one is feeling depressed so repulsive? Two of my girl friends started to cry when they heard about a difficult patch I was going through for their illusions of a perfect life had been shattered. However my down turn turned a lot of my good friends into great friends and made me realise that we spend a lot of time with people who don’t really care for us.

The only thing that gets in the way of people reaching out for each other is one’s ego and illusions of grandeur. However one must realise that these two factors also get in the way of happiness.

O2

2010-03-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

I initially thought she was suffering from an overdose of her Chemistry textbook when she asked me to check O2. When she gave me a disgusted look I Googled the word and was rather impressed that my daughter wanted to discuss Telephonica – the European mobility company that owned the brand O2. She exasperatedly informed me that the only O2 she was interested in was the great indoor arena in Berlin which was built in 2008 and could seat 17000 people during an event.

I did another search and found the home page but like every German site, it assumed that all readers were fluent with their language. I scanned all over the page with my reading glasses and finally located a tiny flag which microscopically looked like that of UK or USA. Voila! The first page translated into English. I clicked on upcoming events and nonchalantly exclaimed that I could recognize one of the artists that were going to perform during our visit. My daughter perked up for her mom usually recognized Angrezi music stars only after they had won a few Grammy awards. I told her it was Rihanna.

She sprang up like a spring chicken and started doing the bunny hop around me, asking me to buy tickets. I looked at the dark circles under her eyes from excessive cramming for her boards and my heart melted. “’I will see what I can do.” I assured her. She gaped at me for she couldn’t believe she had won the battle so easily. Easier said than done for I soon discovered that only the first page could be translated and the Germans seriously did not expect you to go further than that without knowing the language. They under estimated the obstinacy of a teenager’s mother in India. I spent the next twenty four hours staring at the forms in German and finally decided I could fill it up with guess work.

I picked her up from the exam hall and declared that “doing the form together” would be a great way to celebrate the end of the Mathematics paper. A password and id was created and it was loads of fun until one had to type in the digits behind the credit card, at which juncture we both muttered a prayer and hit the enter button. A message popped up in German which we did not understand. I told her that my powers of deduction said that the tickets would be couriered to us but where was the order number under my id? We both sat down to chew our cuticles and pondered on the next step. The daughter looked deflated and assumed all the tickets would be sold before mom figured out what to do.

I have never waited for my credit card to be debited with such anticipation. After forty eight hours I gave up and decided to make a call. I now understand the plight of many a soul who makes a call to our umpteen call centers in India. After several phone calls to O2, speaking to multiple operators who spoke with me in German while I kept parroting ”No comprehend – English, English”, I discovered that our great experiment had failed and I had to book again. I decided to interact with a human being instead of a form and found that the tickets were still available at a location four o clock to the stage. The tickets will be couriered. Anything else I would like to know, she politely asked me. “Yes”, I said. “Is it rowdy, can one get a taxi after the show? Is there a metro station close by?” She laughed and told me that she had never visited Berlin and was located in another town in Germany. She wished me luck.

I am trying to listen to Rihanna on my I-pod so that I may look well informed and fit in.

Technology & Me

2010-03-23T04:27:00.000-07:00

My attitude to high end technology is a paradox. On one hand I research every purchase meticulously on the internet, progress to get utterly confused by opinions and suggestions from friends and then buy what appeals to my aesthetics and comfort. Once a high end gizmo is acquired and brought home, I will proceed to eye it with all the affection of a rabbit looking at a boa constrictor while logically it should be the other way round.

I have finally bought a digital SLR after two years of agonizing debates and indecision. It sits on my desk and I dance around it like a matador with a bull for my tryst with technology is that I have to conquer it before the fear of it conquers me. I know that like the old projects that I had to submit in college, once I pick up the object, I will have to read all the manuals, figure the settings and learn how to use it. My old habits of procrastinating before every exam and course work shows its ugly head as I reach out for the camera.

Just as college days were fraught with the deadline of an examination, my mastery over my camera is essential before the summer vacation. Like lots of normal people the only time the photographs are clicked are birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. For this we try to lose weight, wear the nicest clothes, color our hair and generally ruin the view of all monuments with our dazzling smiles and corny poses. I will have to step up from my rudimentary aim and click photography to the finer nuances of SLR photography in a matter of weeks. I will also have to build stronger shoulders to carry the not so light object along with me.

In due course of time, I guess the usual path will transpire. I will once again have dished out money for some state of the art gadget and use only half its potential features. It’s not such a bad thing for I continuously get pleasantly surprised at the hidden potential of gizmos around the house and delight in them. This way, it takes me a longer time than most people to get bored of them!

Showcasing the new India

2010-03-22T03:56:00.000-07:00

A school in Delhi is offering a five day trip to a space research centre in USA at a cost of one hundred and seventy five thousand rupees. I have no doubt that this will be an excellent opportunity for those selected and they will benefit from the program but this brought me to write about a point of contention that I have had with educators for a while.

Why can’t we showcase our educational institutions, research facilities and government to the general public the way it is done in western countries? My daughter went for an exchange program to a grammar school in U.K. where she was not only shown around Cambridge where she and her friends attended a class, but also shown the houses of Parliament by an ex student of the school who was s senior person in the government. When the girls from that school travelled to India, we showed them all the wonderful sights of Delhi, Jaipur, Agra and an orphanage. How can we blame people for not recognising the enormous strides that India has taken in development if we are not willing to let it be seen?

I have frequently had debates on this subject with senior administrators and professors of IIT where I have suggested they keep a tour of the campus on a given day of the week for anyone who is interested in seeing the facility. This would be a boon to students, corporates and even ex students who want to take their family. The tour could be outsourced and people would pay for it. Most students like my daughter are introduced to IIT through an orientation lecture given by an impassioned coaching class representative in school who only talks about the immense sacrifice and study involved in getting admission. The international universities and private colleges are constantly visiting schools and giving presentations. The premier government financed educational institutions are smug because they feel that since the demand for seats far outweighs supply they need not worry. With government having cleared the path for foreign universities to enter the country, they may find that while demand for the seats will still be very high, they may lose the cream to other universities in India and internationally.

I recall visiting National Defence Academy from school at the initiative of my English teacher who was an Army man’s wife. We found it amazing and of course most of us fourteen year olds wanted to marry the dashing cadets. I have visited the Parliaments of foreign countries as a tourist. Any Indian can take a NASA tour in USA but will find it difficult to enter ISRO – Indian Space Research Organisation.

It’s high time we admit that it’s not security that is a barricade in transparency but complacency. Let’s open the doors so that our children do not have to visit USA to see a space research centre when Chandrayaan 1 - the Indian Lunar mission was capable of discovering 600 million metric tonnes of water on the moon.

If only.......

2010-03-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

I walked from my house to the academy with a portfolio in my hand. It comprised of sketches of my father listening to Ravi Shankar, my maid watching TV, Ma cooking dinner and my brother who had posed for half an hour only after I gave him my breakfast sausages. They were drawn on my mother’s old Art book, the one she had acquired from overseas thirteen years ago. I was bored in the new city of Kolkata and had few friends, none of who stayed close by. I had heard that the Academy of Fine Arts held classes for wannabe artists and I was going to check it out.

I met a very distinguished gentleman who did not fit into my impression of a Bengali artist. He was Rathin Maitra, the Director, and I did not know what an eminent artist he was for I was all of sixteen years of age. He smoked a pipe and looked more like a debonair Satyajit Ray. He looked at the portfolio and gave me a lecture on how I should learn to view objects from the heart and not through my eyes. I had to learn to create art which was unique, different and had a soul. He spoke of Isadora Duncan and how she had re-interpreted dance. After a while he looked at my poker faced adolescent enthusiasm, sighed, and said he would take me to class.

The class room was a big hall with sun light streaming through the glass paned roof. Students sat with their legs straddling a small plank of wood which had two feet and another plank connected to it at a right angle on which rested their easels. In the middle of the class, on a platform, stood a beautiful tribal girl with her hands extended upwards holding on to a metal bar, her hair flowing down her back and adorned only by her jewellery. The sketching class was of the nude human form and everyone was drawing her with charcoal in pin drop silence. Rathin babu kept telling me about how I should discover my talent when he chanced to glance at me. He saw my flushed face, eyes popping out like gold fish and my gawking mouth. He curtly asked me my age. When he heard it was sixteen, he told me I should attend the junior class on Sunday evenings instead of the senior class and dismissed me.

The junior class was fun but definitely not soul searching serious. It was held between four and six pm on Sundays and was usually a meeting ground for romancing couples. Those who did not have a partner were frequently propositioned. I have good memories and friends from the class and created some average work.

Two days ago I requested Paresh Maity, the eminent artist, to autograph a book on his works which has been recently released at Lalit Kala Academy. Since it was my birthday, I asked him to write Happy Birthday on the book. Being the amiable and wonderful person he is, he drew a sketch on the book for me. We got talking and we realised that in 1981, the year that I was gawking like a gold fish, he was sitting in the same class as a student. His talent was soon appreciated and he started to teach the class from 1982 onwards for several years. His teacher was Rathin Babu. He recollected the beautiful tribal girl, laughed and said she used to pose for the academy for several years.

If only I had kept my mouth shut and looked suave instead of stupid, if only I hadn’t turned the colour of beetroot, if only I had been placed in the senior class as was planned.........

Hilla

2010-03-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

My aunt Hilla is eighty four years old. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics, hates housework and cooking, is unmarried and has been working since her early twenties. She still goes to work every day in a BEST bus and we tease her that she spends more on her transport than she earns and only visits her office to surf the internet on a computer which is virus free and under a maintenance contract. Hilla is fiercely independent and refuses to let her soul and body compromise to comfort. Like a lot of elderly people in Mumbai, her share portfolio and extravagance are inversely proportional.

Last Friday, Hilla was crossing the road at the pedestrian zebra crossing in front of Asiatic Library, near Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai. She waited till the traffic light turned red, the pedestrian light turned green and trudged across the road. A driver in a fancy car was impervious to her and decided to accelerate before the signal changed. He hit Hilla with his car and thirty five kilograms of my frail aunt fell down on the road. The driver stepped out of his car, picked her up, plonked her on the pavement and drove away. Hundreds of Mumbaiwallahs passed her by and did not admonish the driver or help her. Her head was buzzing; she felt dizzy and was trembling. She just sat on the pavement for a while. A woman who is worth a fortune but is under estimated because of her unpretentious demeanour.

A driver in the BEST bus that she frequently took saw her on the pavement. The driver stopped the bus on the road and asked the conductor to assist her and bring her up. They asked her what had happened and told her that they would ensure that she reached home safely. The driver stopped the bus near her south Mumbai flat. The proud lady had recovered slightly and said that she would be able to walk to her flat. She luckily did not break any bones but is in pain and is on bed rest.

Face it dear Mumbaiwallahs, it is this apathy to the environment that is taking the city downwards. The last quarter of 2009 was the first time ever that the number of new companies incorporated in Delhi was higher than Mumbai.

Empowerment

2010-03-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1982, I took up my first job at the age of seventeen as a sales promotion assistant to sell twin razor blades. It was organised by a friend from Art school and ten girls reported to work in front of Flury’s restaurant on Park Street at ten am. We waited in the scorching summer sun for twenty minutes and then the gang leader in me proposed that we wait inside the air-conditioned Flury’s restaurant for surely we were mistaken in comprehending the instructions. We sat down comfortably and drank the iced water which the kind waiters provided in non-commercial Kolkata. After another twenty minutes I was concerned and decided to check if the sales man from the company was standing outside, on the road. I saw him glowering on the street, red as a beetroot and fuming like a steam engine. He yelled and asked whose dumb idea it was to go into the restaurant. Nine fingers pointed at me. I was subjected to the worst possible high pitched Bihari Hinglish berating and also sprayed with copious amounts of sputum during his agitated monologue. I turned red in the face and stared at my shoes as I thought of my options. I could either quit and walk off like a diva or recognise that when removed from my status as my dad and mom’s daughter, I was worth nothing and could be treated like this in public. I decided to stay on and promised myself that I would never be dependent on another individual for the respect that I commanded.

Two years later, in 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated and the nation was covered in gloom. On the evening of her death, as we were eating dinner at home with a guest, the discussion moved to the potential candidates for the new Prime Minister. My parents and the guest had unanimously decided on Pranab Mukherjee being the choice when I suddenly perked up and said that I thought Rajiv Gandhi would be given the portfolio. After a long silence at the table I was told to speak when spoken to and not give my two penny opinion on matters that I did not comprehend.

Empowerment to me is the intangible quality that gives one the freedom to make choices that are close to one’s heart. It lends one a voice which translates to freedom and equality. To me and a large number of people in society, this translates to financial independence for dependence confines one’s freedom. Be it a choice in career, partner, sexuality, lifestyle or religion; one can chose an independent path and be respected for it if one is not an encumbrance on another. Financial independence enables one to stand up for one’s rights and move on when things are wrong. People choose to live miserable compromised lives not for the sake of the children, for kids would be much happier in a positive environment, but because of financial dependence. We accept injustice in society because it appears in the garb of financial power.

Knowledge alone cannot drive change for we watch among us, many an educated person with awful moral aptitude. One will see a change in mind set in gender equality only when women start to work and earn. With a sufficiently large work force, the laws will change to have child care centres near the work place equipped with professionally competent supervisors. If, both the child and one’s financial freedom are important, one will build symbiotic relationships with parents and in laws who will assist in times of need.

Empowerment is an addictive phenomenon, once it is tasted and savoured; one is unlikely to forget the feeling and will strive to maintain it in one’s life.

Devdas Reversed

2010-03-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, a young lad working in a call centre in Delhi, drowned his colleague in a lake because she did not reciprocate his affections. A few weeks ago a young man studying in IIT Roorkee killed a fellow student because she wanted to move on from their relationship. These children grew up with the same stimuli of poetry, music, films and literature that we did which describes the thwarted forlorn lover worthy of our sympathy, who tortures himself or herself with self pity and in extreme circumstances does himself or herself physical harm. Only in psychological chillers does the tormented turn into the tormentor to destroy the object of their affection.

Why should this phenomenon disturb us? In my post of Jan 26 on Personal Religion I had written about how the lyrics of a popular song portrayed a man demanding that God make the lady of his affection return his love, like a tantrum throwing child. If we cannot have what we covet, we will destroy it – like a child eyeing the neighbour’s toy and breaking it with envy. Isn’t this what constituted the successful Onida campaign of “Neighbour’s envy, Owner’s pride”.......crash.... the TV screen breaking to smithereens?

Most women who step out of home to work or study in a co-educational environment face situations where they may not reciprocate the amorous feelings of another person. It is a basic matter of demand and supply mismatch since women are still a minority in such environments. The usual intelligent thing to do is to reason with the person, explain the situation and let him down gently without bruising his ego. Girls are aware that they are physically weaker than men and trod this path very carefully. This is precisely what these two girls were doing when they were attacked brutally. A man seldom lets down a woman admirer who he does not care for with such sensitivity since she cannot physically harm him.

I studied in a premier MBA school in India where I had the misfortune of being the only girl in my batch. I received a glowing letter of commendation signed by a doyen of industry while working as a summer intern. The letter was stolen from me while on campus and mailed back to me after being mutilated with scrawling of what someone would like to do to me. Rather graphic stuff that had to be translated to me. The Director, Dean and senior faculty summoned me and I was instructed never to walk in campus, in the city or travel home alone during my education.

Let’s take a moment to sympathise with the families of Pooja Bhatia, Pragati Tibrewal, Priyadarshini Mattoo and other such women who met with a pointless end to their young lives. Their only fault was that they possessed a personality that was attractive.

The Women's Bill

2010-03-10T01:49:00.000-08:00

It is wonderful to see the Women’s bill which necessitates thirty three percent reservations of all legislative seats being ratified by the Rajya Sabha.

It is abysmal that despite constituting half the population of the country it is necessary to implement such a measure to ensure that gender equality rises in our nation. The reality is that the Economist magazine has chosen India in its editorial to demonstrate female infanticide and the challenges the world faces this year on International women’s day. As the UN points out, our country faces the challenge of the female child constantly fighting for her right to be born, to be healthy, survive beyond the first year and to be educated. She thereafter fights for her dignity against both sexual and physical exploitation. This blog was among the earliest to write on the Gender Gap rising in India and how our present system does not seem to work in improving the plight of women.

When a narrow band of people represent a major mass it can translate to elitism. We do have competent women parliamentarians but a large percentage of them have had the benefit of a background of either the civil services or politicians in their family. It is a difficult battle for women to establish themselves as politicians in the national arena and it has usually been at the cost of them being married or bearing children. We need women in the legislative who are from the normal strata of society. Women who understand the issues faced in marriage, social systems and parenting. With the numbers required to meet the number in the reservation, our politicians will have no choice but to search for such women. The male politicians do not become “Bramhacharies” when they enter the political arena, why then do these rules apply to the women?

The political battlefield is no different from the private sector where the representation of women in senior positions is few. People go through the motions of wanting to hire women but while it is not mentioned it is understood that single women with low “encumbrances” will be preferred. Men are not asked during interviews about their children, support systems at home to take care of them, ability to travel and commitment to work. The only way for corporations to increase gender diversity is to hire and retain the average woman in the work force and understand the multiple roles they have to juggle every day.

A large fresh infusion of women in the political arena is welcome for we hope they will not only bring about more sensitivity, less corruption and hopefully less hooliganism in the parliament. It has been proven without doubt that having both the sexes in an environment actually brings down animosity, increases good behavior, improves language used and also improves the appearance of both the sexes.

Expletives

2010-03-06T00:08:00.001-08:00

The current showdown between producer Vidu Vinod Chopra and singer Sonu Nigam which apparently had the former ask the later to F… off reminded me of certain events in my life which I must share with you.

It was ten years ago when my eight year old daughter returned from school, red faced and bursting to tell me the events of the day. A child in her class had used the F…word. As she looked at me expectantly, with an indignant expression, I suddenly realized my cue and composed my face into a mask of amazement and disgust. I begged her to go on and tell me what else had transpired. She said that the person was questioned by the Principal of the school and asked if she knew what the word meant and she said she did not. She disclosed that she has heard her parents say it many times and thought it sounded good and had therefore used it. The entire class was called in, the students were handed paper and asked to write down if their parents ever used “Bad Words” at home. The children were torn in their guts with the dilemma this presented. Should they be honest and snitch on their parents or tell the truth. My daughter lied to spare me and was looking the picture of guilt with her face flushed, pigtails on each side and teary eyed. I embraced her, thanked her and promised her that I would never use any bad word in the house and muttered to myself-at least till she reached senior school where they did not deploy such psychological testing tools of judging parenting.

I was brought up in a home where stupid, idiot, and gadha (donkey) were banned as bad language. When I went for post graduation, I met men from the heartland of North India and was first exposed to Hindi curse words. Like the eight year old girl I picked up a popularly used word starting with the alphabet C and spent an entire day using it in my speech. Being the only girl in class, everyone was stumped and a major debate ensued to determine whether I was a foul mouthed creature or an idiot. My friends decided the later and asked me if I knew what I was saying since I was using the word in the wrong places in the sentence, without any expression and meaning. Like the eight year old I said I didn’t and swore not to use swear words ever again.

People don’t realize the complications that arise in using such lingo. For instance, I can never take my Ma to a Vishal Bharadwaj movie in a theatre since twenty five percent of the dialogue will have her prodding me and asking ”Ki bolche??” (What are they saying?). She watches such movies with English sub titles which set me into peals of laughter. If you don’t get the drift, please watch a sub-titled version of the song “Beedi”. I was driving home one evening with Ma, when a bunch of drunken bike-wallahs were upset that I had dared to overtake them. They banged on Ma’s window and she lowered the glass. They yelled lots of Hindi curse words and she kept saying “Pardon? Samaj mein nahin aata. Please repeat.” which they gleefully did. It’s only when I lost my patience and used some words that she understood that she agreed to keep the window up and looked aggrieved at my language.

Swear words make people feel macho and earthy. Just like blowing cigar smoke into faces and pushing weaker people in a line. They very effectively shut up people around them who want to speak, not because we are over awed by their virility but out of sheer disgust.

Aging Gracefully

2010-03-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

If there ever was an oxymoron that sounded like an aspiration, this would have to be it. We all want to age like Grace Kelly in appearance, Bill Gates in the bank balance and philanthropy, Armstrong in the physique and Gandhi in the soul. The truth is that we walk into old age with as much happiness as the nobility would tread towards the guillotine during the French revolution.

The journey during the forties is perhaps the most difficult for women and the early fifties for men. All of a sudden the lunge towards the ball in tennis, a dashing pirouette in dance or an extended yoga position sends one scurrying to the medicine cabinet in search for the ultimate pain relief ointment. One can sit endlessly with the parent and discuss the merits of physiotherapy, balms and painkillers for only older people can understand the trauma of the body giving way. At a duty free outlet one spends as much time at the pharmacy looking at local supplements and miracle pain cures as one used to gaze in the Perfumery section during one’s youth.

It was rather appropriate that I picked up Andre Agassi’s autobiography (Open) after a session with my physiotherapist. What distinguishes this book from many others in the same genre is the detail to the sweat and grime behind the game of tennis. Sports lovers will love to read about the manner in which the racquet is strung, the grip created, the feet prepared for a professional sports person. The cramps during the game, the hydration required before a match, the mental build up before a major tournament and handling the depression after a loss. The loneliness of playing a match for three or four hours without any conversation and the toil it can take on one’s body. The reality behind Nick Bollettieri’s tennis academy and the hours of toil from a pre nursery age makes one understand the tears behind the greatness. The book reads like an extended tabloid, lots of expletives, opinions, descriptions of a wild lifestyle and confessions.

Not everyone can lead a life like Lance Armstrong or Agassi for most of us sit at our desks during the day to earn the wage which takes its toll on the body. However the strongest muscle in our body is the brain and whenever one starts to feel the time bomb of age ticking, reading a book by a superstar sports person is bound to be inspirational and make one feel better.

A Woman of Substance

2010-03-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

She sat in the reception waiting to be called for the interview, a picture of demureness. Her hair was in a plait and her cotton sari was pinned to her blouse. Her intelligent eyes behind horn rimmed spectacles looked at the opulent decor of the Managing Agency and its atmosphere. She wasn’t nervous about the interview but was concerned about how she would handle her conservative mother if she got the job.

When the employment agency had asked her if she would be interested in the job of an accounts assistant at the Swiss firm at a salary of four hundred and fifty rupees a month plus benefits and overtime she couldn’t believe her luck. Her mother wanted her to accept the government job at hand which would pay rupees one hundred and fifty a month for she felt that girls who worked in private companies acquired a “bad character”. They couldn’t afford the luxury of accommodating what people would think, for the untimely death of her father two years ago had left her responsible for the welfare of the family of nine younger siblings, the smallest of who was still an infant in her mother’s arms. She was the brightest girl in her prestigious school and she had wanted to become a doctor. She had instead started teaching mathematics in senior school while simultaneously continuing her education. She smiled as she recalled how the teenage children would hassle her with the toughest problems seeing such a young teacher. She put her plans of being a doctor aside and was completing her graduation in Mathematics Honours. Her mother had permitted her to look for a full time job since she had recently turned nineteen.

Her name was called out and she entered the room of the chief accountant. She had to suppress a grin when she encountered the first visage of Mr.Deb. He wore a starched white dhoti and a white shirt over which he had a black coat. He wore black shoes and socks. He was a perfect blend of a Bengali babu and a British accountant. He peered at her over his spectacles and said that they did not have any women in his department and he had decided to hire either two women or two men during the interviews. She squared her shoulders and sat straight for unknown to the man in front she was the president of the students union in college and not made of mild stuff. Mr.Deb started to take her interview and asked her complicated questions in mental mathematics for the next half an hour which she answered confidently.

He looked at her, sighed, and informed her that she was the only woman who had qualified in the interview and so he faced a dilemma. Her capabilities were better than the other candidates but his entire team was male and the only women in the company were the secretaries. He said he could not hire her because she would not have anyone to speak with and would feel isolated. She was getting very exasperated with this man’s attitude. She looked at him in the eye, her face flushed and said “Sir, I need this job. My family needs the money. I am the best candidate. If you do not hire me because of my gender I will sue this organisation.” There was a pin drop silence in the room as Mr.Deb looked at her with astonishment. He finally shook his head and said “You have a very fiery disposition and fire in your belly. I guess it is because of your youth. In due course of time you will mature and tone down. Please leave now.” One week later she received a letter stating her appointment. She asked her brother to assist her in convincing her mother to let her take up the assignment.

The year was 1955 when my mother joined Volkart Brothers as an accounts assistant. The company later became Voltas. She continued to work there until I was born for beneath the fiery disposition lay a very loving mother who could not bear to be parted from her children. The four hundred and fifty rupees and further increments educated all my uncles and aunts to accomplished positions.

However Mr.Deb’s predicament did not come true for she still retains the fire in the belly and determination that she had at the age of nineteen.

The Social sector

2010-02-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

The marginal utility of money reduces as we earn more and get older. The happiness derived in our youth from the purchase of our first washing machine or microwave will perhaps be equalled by the purchase of a Ferrari or a diamond solitaire later in life. On the other hand the marginal debilitating effect of all calorific consumption and wild revelry increases as one gets older. The net outcome is disgruntled middle aged people who wonder why exactly they are slogging their butts off since they don’t know how to spend their hard earned money.

Under such strenuous circumstances the soul awakens and people want to give back to society for they realise that helping the underprivileged will definitely make them feel happy and content. Somehow the rules of marginal utility are defied in the pursuit of goodness for the marginal happiness experienced when one does a good turn does not reduce over time. One constantly meets people who are well settled in life who ask if they could possibly get alternate employment in the humanitarian sector. One has also reviewed responses to advertisements placed for employment in such sectors and found a plenitude of people who want to make the transition from the private to the social sector.

While some of the applicants have unrealistic ambitions of increasing their salaries, having a cushy desk job with predetermined timings and a tax free salary with international travel; others have no preconceived notions and are willing to do any kind of useful work and be of assistance. People apply for positions based on their value systems and take the time and make the effort to write about their lack of experience being compensated by their will and commitment to the cause.

One has realised that while there is so much disparity and pain in the world, there is also an enormous amount of untapped goodwill and desire to help which if channelized into the correct direction may alleviate suffering. One may argue that not everyone who wants to assist realises that the social sector needs commitment, specialised degrees, working against beliefs and backwardness created over long periods of history. People in this sector may be sceptical to hand over responsibility to folks who maybe flitting through for the social acceptability it provides. One of the greatest obstacles for a person to change the course of one’s career is the denial to accept that one may be an expert in one field but a novice in another. However if there is humility, passion and an urge to learn, a winner can be transported against industries. People in senior positions in the private sector want to breeze in as CEOs in the social sector with direct operational responsibility instead of partnering in areas of their expertise.

How can we channelize this energy? Perhaps by creating portals where needs can be advertised as fragmented achievable tasks and people can apply and deliver against them. Assignments that can be done from the comfort of one’s office or home may be offered against no payment. In field assignments, actual costs can be borne. Most NGOs have large departments with support functions that can easily be outsourced or handled by part time involvement. Even in field projects, there is a need for resources which may be seasonal and project based. These portals could be set up by large corporations, social institutions or as an independent charitable enterprise.

There may be other methods that could be as effective. Even if we can channelize the latent desire to help one another by twenty five per cent we would be facilitating a productive output of latent energy which is today very often manifested as disgruntled behaviour.

Shankars International

2010-02-25T09:09:00.000-08:00

She was too young to recognise the significance of the award. She did not realise the enormity of receiving a medal from President Abdul Kalam. She was eleven years old and was quite irritated at being woken up at seven am on a holiday. She wondered why her mother had prepared her favourite breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup and had insisted on shampooing her long curly hair. A few days ago she had been taken to a boutique to buy a fancy salwar kameez and was forced to wear it with panchratna earrings and bangles. Young girls did not dress in such a manner but her mother felt that the occasion warranted such adornment. She was taken to a beauty parlour at ten am where they fussed over her and blow dried her mass of curls into shimmering long tresses till her waist.

It was only when she reached the venue that she began to mildly comprehend that perhaps winning a silver medal for her poem in the Shankar’s International competition may, after all, be a big deal. The venue was filled with embassy cars from which stepped out the Ambassadors of various countries. She was separated from her mother and made to sit in a seat close to the stage. There were other children around her, both foreign and Indian, who had travelled from all over India and overseas to get prizes in other categories. She looked up and waved at her mother who was sitting in the balcony. Her mother had been behaving rather strangely and she suspected that she may start crying at any moment. Despite being assured that the tears were of joy, she couldn’t fathom adult reactions and this emotionalism.

She had heard that the President of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam was a wonderful human being, a great scientist and very affectionate with children. Meeting him and listening to him speak was very inspiring. He spoke straight from the heart, in simple language and managed to reach out to every child. He had sadly injured his right arm which was in a cast. The children had been told to do a Namaste since he would be unable to shake hands. The ambassadors of various countries were present to collect the prizes on behalf of the children who were not able to make it to the occasion.

All at once her name was announced and she was called to the stage. Like most of the other kids, she forgot about the Namaste and the President reached out to bless her and congratulate her. She couldn’t believe the spotlight, the cheering and the recognition. She muttered her thanks to her mother for her irrepressible joie-de-vivre and for ensuring that she was prepared for this special moment in her life. She smiled as the moment was captured by the photographer and was thereafter placed at a position of honour on the fireplace in our house.

Today my daughter realises what she didn’t when she was so young. It’s not every day that a person from a democracy of a billion people gets recognised by the President of the country. She was lucky to have had a conscientious English teacher submit a poem she had written in class for a competition. She was fortunate to have had this special moment to cherish forever when she was only eleven years old.

Beating the redundancy blues

2010-02-24T19:21:00.000-08:00

With the economy growing at close to eight per cent it is rather painful to be part of the pink slip brigade. It is difficult to explain to everyone who looks sceptical that multinational organisations with roots in the western hemisphere, which had the most coveted jobs, are still sharing the pain of their parent economies. Since one’s job was part of the top tier bandwagon, finding a new assignment which will pay and give one the same responsibility and empowerment is difficult but not impossible.

Sitting down and writing a resume is not an easy task, for your resume advertises you in absentia and has to have the punch of a winner, be visually attractive, succinct, state goals and measure achievements in quantifiable units of profits, sales, quality, productivity or cost saving. One also needs to mention the accolades received, training programs attended, indicate leadership qualities and examples of team management ability. Add a dash of one’s hobbies and interests to indicate a balanced personality.

The next step is to accept the fact that one needs to search for a job in earnest and be able to speak about the fact that one has been retrenched. One will be pleasantly surprised to find that most people will admire your confidence and humility. One should ask the current organisation for assistance. Many international organisations have an outplacement policy. If your organisation doesn’t have one, perhaps one should get dispassionate and suggest one to them. If your management consultant has recommended this restructuring perhaps they should also assist in executing an outplacement plan. Strike when the iron is hot and ask for references, leads and meetings to be lined up. The Head of Human Resources could request the search partners to look into your case and take a special interest in you.

At this juncture one is merely a product in the job market place and one needs to determine one’s Unique Selling Proposition. One has to think beyond erstwhile products and consumers to segments, lifestyles, economies, technology and skills to position one’s talent. One also has to determine the parameters that are essential and cannot be compromised which may be security, ethics, empowerment, team management, location, designation, brand equity and the peer environment.

The above introspection would yield greater results if combined with reading and updating oneself on current market trends. This would help one examine the market beyond the narrow confines of one’s last assignment. Making a comprehensive spreadsheet of companies and checking them against the necessary parameters would be a good start. This would involve reading the company website, news articles, tracking share prices and competitor trends. Try and imagine why the organisation should hire you and what need of theirs can one fulfil. If one is confident of the answer one can contact the company directly, arrange for a meeting through a reference or contact the search partner that works with them.

When things are tough one ought to take control of one’s own destiny rather than only wait passively for interview calls through search consultants for it is imperative to avoid the usual pitfalls of redundancy and become antisocial, inactive and depressed. One has to force oneself to stay on ones toes, meet people, keep fit, upgrade and learn new skills and discover an old hobby. One could use the opportunity to do some social work and give back to society. If this time is handled well, it could lead one to a better rejuvenated version and redundancy could well be a blessing in disguise.

Handling Depression

2010-02-20T01:12:00.000-08:00

Two of my friends living miles apart are presently going through a similar harrowing situation. Their young children have witnessed a close friend commit suicide for no apparent reason. The kids are in a state of shock, cry incessantly, need to be sedated and even faint in school/college. The school authorities, parents, relatives and friends like us have absolutely no idea how we can assist them face this situation.

This is a common story in our country where the large population, poverty levels and social backwardness has so many horror stories that the new urban issues and the help that is needed to face them are largely ignored. Many of us have gone to government hospitals to meet doctors and felt embarrassed at our injury as when one walks through the large number of critically ill, poor patients. However this does not mean a person who has gone through a terrible injury, an accident, a mastectomy, a bereavement, separation, and retrenchment does not have emotional despair that should be ignored. In insulated, nuclear families where everyone is busy one cannot find people with whom one can share one’s sorrow and who can be the crutch to one’s recovery.

One can treat this as the ranting of a self indulgent person or recognize that there are moments in most people’s life when one walks on a tightrope between giving up and succumbing to despair and fighting back. A person can either turn bitter, hard and distrust society or retain faith. Not everyone can recover singularly but most often people do not know who they can speak to for help, even if one is ready to pay for it. The only people who remarkably surface in such situations are religious sects who want you to join their society. Even internet search does not yield obvious results.

We are still a reticent race and do not speak easily to strangers about our inner thoughts and feelings. Our elders feel uncomfortable discussing delicate subjects and prefer to disappear from the horizon rather than take the bull by the horn. In social situations people don’t really want to have morose people in their parties, they want successful beautiful people who are full of mirth. One needs strength to listen to a person who is low, for like the “Dementors” in the Harry Potter series, they tend to absorb happiness and strength.

This is where social networking has played a very important role. Childhood friends are usually the ones who lend an ear to pain. Sometimes strangers with similar emotional quotients help each other. What an individual needs at such a juncture is not to be isolated but to be able to reach out to at least one other being on a daily basis to recover.

Akhtar versus Khan

2010-02-19T09:08:00.000-08:00

The verbal altercation between the actor Aamir Khan and the lyricist Javed Akhtar is a welcome debate. Aamir Khan had claimed that the success of a movie and the actor plays an important role in the popularity of a song. Mr. Akhtar claims it is only the melody, the singer and the lyrics that constitute the essence of the song.

Both parties have a valid point. We cannot deny that Grease lightning is remembered more for John Travolta’s pelvic thrusts, dimpled cleft and mischievous eyes; Kajra Re for Aishwarya biting her lips and giving come hither looks to AB; and Chaiya Chaiya for a young SRK on top of a train with Malaika sensuously waking from her overnight slumber. There are many movie tracks in India that did not get the audience they deserved since the movie flopped at the box office such as Yuvraaj, Raincoat and Yuva to name a few. The fact is that we are a passive audience that waits for the promotions in the radio and television to inform us what we should hear and the advertising budget for music is determined by the saleability of the star and how much of a success the movie is at the box office. Despite the fact that the music is released months before the movie and is available for listening pleasure through various mediums, it becomes popular, recognizable and desirable when associated with the star.

A song is a product of the lyricist, composer and singer and the movie and star is a mere vehicle of promotion. The utter dependence of our music industry on films is a result of convenience rather than necessity. It is similar to our attitude of the only sport in India being cricket and our advertisers not trying other options. Great mainstream popular music can and should be created independently. In the Sonu Nigam concert, the track that the audience screamed for the most was “Bijuriya” – an independent pop song by the singer. Songs such as “Janam Samjha Karo” by Asha Bhonsle, “Made in India” by Alisha Chinoi, “Seekho Na” by Shubha Mudgal, “Sa Ni Dha Pa” by Colonial Cousins still ring a chord in the audience. In each of these cases struggling music directors who were not yet discovered by Bollywood created the music and assisted in making the album. Shantanu Moitra created all the popular music for Shubha Mudgal and Leslie Lewis for Asha Bhonsle.

One blames it to an extent to the manner in which our vocalists are trained in India. The discipline required for rigorous classical training very often takes away the spontaneity required to create popular music. Most vocalists learn in isolation at home and are not exposed to other nuances of music creation. Rehman learnt music at the Trinity College at London and he writes music in the western structured manner with the tempo which can be read by international musicians accompanying him. He is extremely technology friendly and uses percussion and synthesisers well. The vocalist in India usually has an ambition to become a playback singer. In talent shows people vote for the traditional singers not unique or original voices. However it is the difference in the voice of a Sukhwinder Singh, Kailash Kher, Richa Sharma, Alisha Chinoi and Anoushka Manchanda that made them popular overnight.

If Javed Akhtar and other musicians are upset about Aamir Khan’s statements they should create independent music, away from the movies. One sincerely hopes that this battle of egos results in great news for Indian music fans.

German Bakery

2010-02-14T21:57:00.000-08:00

Carrot juice with ginger and honey – that’s what I had last ordered at the German bakery which was a natural extension of the Osho ashram at Pune. It was filled with inmates of the ashram, students and locals and looked more like a successful Dhaba that had become a restaurant. It was the kind of place that one would expect to find among the shacks of Goa or Kovalam but was instead half a kilometer from the Taj Blue Diamond hotel.

Pune is such a remarkably peaceful city that one is extremely grieved to see such a violent attack on its citizens. It hosts the erudite Maharashtrians, the musically inclined, a huge student population, engineering industries and recently software engineers and outsourcing industries. Unlike what the Shiv Sena would like us to believe, the actual “Maratha Manoos” is a very nice, non-controversial and non-violent person. They make wonderful teachers and friends. I would know since I grew up among them.

Pune is a tightly knit community and within minutes of the blast there was panic amongst all people who had ventured out of home. A Shreya Ghoshal concert was abandoned by the citizens and the artist too left the venue. A leading daily carried the photographs of the youngsters who died in the blast and our sympathy and condolence goes out to their loved ones as we realize how each of us has the Damocles sword of death over us in this violent world.

Plethora of food

2010-02-13T08:20:00.000-08:00

When we were young we had an Assamese friend who originated from a zamindar family. He would regale us with stories of his summer holidays in his erstwhile family fiefdom. He would describe how the rice was piled up like a huge mountain on his enormous silver plate. The cook would press the tip of the mound with his spatula and form a small crater into which he poured the various courses of fish, vegetable and meat curry. He ate from the top of the mountain of rice until he was full and the left over rice was distributed to the poor of the village. My brother and I listened to this story with as much glee as when we read a Hitchcock horror story for we could not fathom such practises existed in the 1970s. However our friend also had a pet monkey from Assam who lived in their flat in Marine Drive who was spoon fed pastries from The Oberoi Hotel so anything was possible in his life.

In countries where abject poverty and disparity of income levels exist, wasting food is a status symbol. Making a huge fuss over food and cooking multiple courses is another practise. Feeding a guest is the ultimate courtesy and can be a regular song and dance routine which I sadly discovered at the age of sixteen when I was asked to serve guests at a sit down lunch during a family wedding. My mother was very upset as I was relieved of my duty within five minutes. Apparently all the young men were going hungry since when I asked them if they wanted seconds and if they replied in the negative, I moved on. I was instead supposed to cajole them with the food and while they would loudly say “Na! Na!” and spread their hands protectively over the banana leaf plate like frog’s feet, I was supposed to coyly insist on serving seconds. This would be followed by my wrist which was holding the serving spoon playing “hide and seek” with the banana leaf with the hands of the guest getting in the way until the person feigned a loud dramatic defeat and accepted the food. Since I have never been a good song and dance kind of person, I have been a disastrous traditional hostess. I have instead at times had chunky fish curry splayed on my wrist during such ceremonies due to an error of judgement of the host.

I was surprised to find that Middle Eastern countries also had similar habits of ordering lots of food at restaurants, half of which is wasted. The waiters in these locations look quite disgusted when I munch through all the salad, the pita bread, hummus and kebabs leaving behind only a few stems to differentiate my plate from the washed ones. Eating in USA is also a problem because sharing food is unacceptable in restaurants and the helpings are usually large enough to feed a family of four. The only solution is to either visit upper end salad bars where ladies munch lettuce without the dressing or have the good old hot dog or burger and ignore the person at the counter who insists on combo meals.

If only people would be happy with a few great dishes being served fresh and hot like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson do in their programs instead of insisting in judging a hostess by the number of tasteless dishes plonked in a buffet, we would all look forward to dinner parties. We instead let quantity drive perceived value. Of course let us not forget that the surplus wasted food is a very precious commodity in a country as ours where people still die of malnutrition every hour.

Lukin 4 Luv?

2010-02-12T23:25:00.000-08:00

This was the corny caption of an advertisement for a “Singles Valentine’s Day Party” at suburban Gurgaon. The Valentine vultures have made our life miserable. Their torture procedures are segmented into two categories. They will ask you if anyone loves you and desires you. If the answer is no, they will ignore you or suggest a party of the kind that has been described. If the answer is yes - one has a person who adores and loves one, they will subject you to a quiz to measure love. Do you get a Happy Valentine’s Day card, flowers, lingerie wrapped in perfumed tissue paper, red roses with flamboyant ribbons delivered at doorstep, candle light dinner with champagne? Most normal human beings who are not in the courtship phase answer in the negative and we are duly informed that the love that we feel is an illusion for true love should manifest itself in such a manner. We start Valentine’s Day with not too gentle reminders to the person who will be unshaven, reading the Sunday paper in distasteful pajamas and demanding his healthy high calorie brunch to maintain the blubber around the middle. The reminders will soon transform to glares and then sniffles. The perplexed spouse will stomp out of the house and return with three roses in cellophane since the demand supply mismatch has turned the flower into an expensive rare commodity. He also returns with a tub of ice cream, fiction and movie DVDs. He gives the three wilting flowers with flourish, gives you a hug and suggests that since it is Valentine’s Day one should order Biryani or Pizza and watch the latest movie in bed with the whole family. That’s his idea of romance.

You wonder for a moment whether one should continue the ranting and then shrug and smile. Why should the media spoil your beautiful un-spoilt blissful life? He may not know the meaning of Valentine’s Day but as long as you are the only lady in his life, the rest does not matter.

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!

Loving the customer

2010-02-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

A huge dilemma that most businesses face is that they often find that they don’t like the customer who generates the maximum revenue but they love to chase the customer who is indifferent to them. How can one blame a business enterprise for despite all the pontificating of our management gurus, organisations will reflect human behaviour in everyday life. If people were to reciprocally love the hand that feeds and the heart that cares, we would not have so much heart burn in daily life.

The most obvious manifestation of this behaviour can be seen in the service industry and let’s illustrate it first with the international airline industry which as we know is perennially trying to swim out of the red into the black. Certain international carriers have always viewed the sector of the Asian sub-continent as a dreary necessity to build revenues and the disgruntled staff allocated to this sector has always viewed it as a punishment. The work load in this sector is high, there may be a language barrier and many a person may be a first time traveller. However most of us have gritted our teeth and practised deep breathing while we have been treated as cattle with a single digit IQ during our journey. First and business class passengers usually have to battle their way through a crowd to embark onto the flight and baggage handling is seldom differentiated. If one is using the airline for a long distance flight one can see the miraculous transformation in hygiene, food, service and aircraft when the sector changes. When the corridors suddenly open to competition and the private Indian carrier steps in, they sweep the cream of the revenue by allocating their best staff and resources to these sectors who give the best customers the recognition they deserve.

Other industries which get criticised and face a dilemma on how they should treat their most rewarding customer is fashion and food. Certain restaurants in five star hotels in Delhi have consciously wooed the ostentatious but no so fashionable crowds to generate huge profits. In these establishments one can see parents wining and dining while a nearby table is occupied by their noisy children and their indifferent nannies. Other hotels would rather build brand equity with internationally acceptable norms of fine dining than succumb to such temptations. There are fashion designers who would prefer to die than create a dress for a size sixteen woman and there are other prominent ones in India who specialise in trousseaus for the bride or groom and their healthy family members.

Banking is of course the industry where one can actually measure and quantify the inverse relationship between love and financial expertise. The banker maximises targets and incentives by either charging high interest rates on asset products or selling low yield investment products. Even if one has deposits in millions but is financially savvy, one is not likely to receive a decent level of service from the bank if one does not partake of either of these two products. One’s account will be lucrative to the bank on a macro level but will be an irritant to the relationship manager at the micro level.

We are constantly driven home the premise that the solitary goal of a business enterprise is to maximise shareholder wealth. Loving and caring for one’s customer would appear to be a logical extension to such a goal. As the organisation grows large and mature, incorporating the larger goal of the organisation into the individual goals of employees and departments is a challenge which is often delegated to the external hour-billing consultant than tackled in-house, for no one wants to bell the cat and get unpopular.

Village belle

2010-02-05T08:06:00.000-08:00

If the movie Ishqiya is to be believed, the damsels in our villages have more fun than the city bred girls. The heroine of the movie is Krishna who is a widow living in Gorakhpur, a small village in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. She lives alone and thinks nothing of inviting a ruffian uncle-nephew duo, who pose as her husband’s friends, to live with her. She flirts with them outrageously and uses language that would turn a watermelon purple with embarrassment. The villagers love her and call her bhabiji when they watch her up to her antics in broad daylight. I have asked my masterji to try to copy the pattern of the blouses she wears at home for any fancy soirée I may attend.

I recollect my days in Chennai nearly twenty years ago when the pristine Dravidian culture had not been contaminated by the North Indians. I encountered my first day time discotheque in a five star hotel which started at four pm. The college girls were dancing with jasmine garlands twined in their oiled braids and soon the dance floor looked like the nuptial bed in a Karan Johar movie. My school friend recently took me out in Kolkata where the ladies room had lots of small bags piled up in a corner. The girls apparently came in long skirts, salwar kameezes and saries and transformed for the evening. They went back to moms and mom in laws in original apparel. The capital city of Delhi will have the best groomed women, not a single ironed hair out of place, always accompanied by a possessive man. It could be bhaiyaji, jijaji or Tinku the neighbour, but a homosapien male is a necessary escort. Mumbai, which is regarded as the hottest destination actually hosts the most independent women in India. They travel to a destination alone, usually in a non ac taxi or auto rickshaw and don the least make up on a regular day.

The middle class is bursting at the seams in India. Larger towns have the spending power and aspirations of the cities. We create shopping malls and multiplexes that give them the latest in international fashion and movies. The entertainment is sure to follow. Next time you look at a lady from a smaller town of India, don’t patronise her because she is likely to more street smart that the metropolitan ladies.

Fury of a mother

2010-02-03T23:38:00.000-08:00

In our country a majority of the people pray to the mother goddess. We like to vote for matriarchal politicians and the ultimate role of a woman in society is to procreate and bring up her children. In such a scenario making digs at the frustration levels of the prince of India is an attempt at Hara-kiri and I am sure that lots of people in Mumbai are barely being able to keep their smirks in abeyance.

A fairly clichéd question that I never tire of asking freshers is that who they believe to be the youth icon of India. One could paraphrase it by asking them to choose the most suitable model for a youth product’s advertisement that would sway the masses. Until three years ago the favorite answer was SRK but since the past eighteen months it has always been Rahul Gandhi. Depending on the sexual orientation of the individual, the answer is also given with a blush. When asked the reason why he is the icon, the youngsters look aghast and state what they think is the obvious, as they perceive him as young, energetic, enthusiastic, handsome and clean.

Whatever be the language, religion or country, there is no fury stronger than that of a mother when her child is harmed. Even the National Geographic channel shows us films about wild life that prove it. The current developments should be interesting to watch.

Embracing the foreign returned student

2010-02-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

A college in India is like a melting pot, a large cauldron of soup with ingredients and spices from across the country which make it a fascinating place to grow up. It is our first exposure of meritocracy determining the selection process. We make friends from different cultural, economic and language backgrounds. In a sense it is the first time we begin to comprehend our country and its complexity. We watched elections being fought on campus with a fervour that paled against anything we imagined. Some of us watched buses being torched, gun shots fired, strikes and morchas. We suddenly grew up pushing our way through public transport and realised that one could actually eat a wholesome meal in our country for an amount of money hitherto thought to be minor change.

It is therefore very saddening to watch students travelling overseas to complete their graduation immediately after the protected cocoons of their school habitats when the whole world is trying to focus on and learn about the emerging markets of India and China. Most of these students are the progeny of successful executives and business people from metropolitan cities who will tomorrow aspire to handle the mantle of industry in India. When will they learn about the grass root levels in the country if they zoom into management cadre immediately after business schools?

I often meet such youngsters at the insistence of my friends and associates. They are bright, well spoken, confident and aggressive. However, suddenly being thrown into the open market corporate milieu is a very harsh and confusing experience. They have friends with whom they are networked overseas but have no network in India. If they are lucky Daddy or Mommy will assist in getting a job but very often the parents have retired, been in the public sector or are in an industry which the child does not want to consider.

We may mitigate the issue if we anticipate it and work together with the student to bridge the gap. As we are aware not every student in school reads the boring and necessary parts of the newspaper. When the person moves overseas they know less about the Indian context. One must make sure that the student reads the paper and is aware of news and if not, incorporate it into daily conversation. Summer internships and part time jobs are an absolute necessity to get realistic about expectations and develop some humility. Their friends in developed countries do it when they return home but our youngsters quickly get back to lots of rest and relaxation. It is necessary for them to get used to the routine of waking up and moving to work, however bad the hangover or boring it may be, for it will compel him or her into making choices and decisions. We do not let our under graduate privileged children work since we know they will not get high end work but will have to do routine drudgery which we believe they will be wasted on. Despite being in a country where supply exceeds demand in the labour market, giving up our hang-ups and appreciating the dignity of every job would be a wonderful message to pass on.

The usual problem faced is that while older folks may understand and have the patience of this integration process, junior and middle management has no patience for the foreign returned student. There may not be a perfect solution to the situation but recognition and working towards resolving it will be the first step, or we will lose some of our brightest to other countries.

The tale two remarkable women

2010-02-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

Two women born 327 years apart shared a common thread of destiny in India. They both reached the pinnacle of their success after the age of thirty and have perhaps not been adequately praised in the annals of our history.

I was first acquainted to the story of Nurjehan in Indu Sundaresan’s romantic fictional account “The Twentieth Wife” and its sequel “The Feast of Roses”. Nurjehan was born in 1577 and married Emperor Jehangir at the age of thirty six, when she was a widow and a mother of a child, amidst severe opposition from everyone close to the emperor. She was Jehangir’s twentieth wife and the most powerful woman in the history of Mughal India who had coins minted in her name. She held court next to the emperor without purdah and even signed official dictates. She was overshadowed in history by her own niece Mumtaz who has been immortalized by the Taj Mahal. She wanted her daughter Ladli to marry Prince Shahjahan so as to wield power over the next generation but Mumtaz had been trained well by her wily aunt and as a result never left the side of her husband, even when he went on battle. Nurjehan died at the age of sixty eight in Lahore where she is buried at a tomb that she designed for herself and Jehangir. Her own brother, who was brought into power and prestige by her, sided with his son in law and captured Jehangir and Nurjehan causing the former’s untimely death.

Every student of classical Indian dance knows the name of Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904 – 1986) who has single handed laid the foundations of classical dance in India in its present avatar. A recently released Biography (Rukmini Devi: A Life) written by her student, the noted danseuse Leela Samson relates her eighty two year old story. Rukmini devi was born into a conservative Tamil Brahmin family that was influenced by their eldest son joining the Theosophical Society under Annie Besant. Her marriage to Dr. Besant’s nephew– George Arundale at the age of sixteen when he was forty six was condemned by both the British and Indian society. Her husband went on to become the president of the Theosophical society of India and she played an active role in building the schools within its precincts and fund-raising for the society. She started to learn dance after the age of twenty nine and gave her first public performance at the age of thirty one. She was instrumental in giving Indian classical dance respectability since till then it was only practiced by Devdasis – women married to deities in the temple who performed in front of the idols. She learnt dance from Gowri Ammal and other Devdasis for whom she battled, she studied the Natya Shastra, adapted and developed the dance to give Bharatanatyam its present form. She built Kalakshretra which till date produces some of our greatest artists from South India. Unknown to many, she created the costume in which the present day dancers perform and was part of the forum that developed the seven forms of Indian classical dance that was given national recognition. She gave the musicians and accompanists an equal status as the performer on the stage. Rukmini devi was part of the Rajya Sabha for two terms and was instrumental in the legislation of prevention of cruelty to animals in 1960.

Both the ladies have not received the attention they deserved as independent women who achieved their glory without the support of affluent parents but carved out their own destinies during a time when women rarely stepped out of the home. Their stories are fascinating in a country where a lady is perceived to wilt by the time they touch thirty and should be an inspiration to many of us who lament that our best days have passed us.

All is well?

2010-01-31T22:21:00.000-08:00

I think the movie “3 Idiots” deserves an Adults certification from the Censor Board that states it is unsuitable for children under eighteen. There is a growing movement that supports my belief and we are all planning to have a press conference with our views. It is very well for the three protagonists in Imperial engineering college to be screaming and singing “All is Well” and but the problem is that all kids in schools are beginning to chant the song and it is severely affecting the concentration levels of students appearing the class ten and twelve board exams in March.

The anti 3 Idiots movement started in the gymnasium of a certain school where parents had gathered with their children to collect the pre board mark sheets. One had never seen such a festive lot of children being accompanied by such a glum and dismal bunch of adults. For a change several fathers had appeared during a day of work and were mopping their brows despite the low Delhi temperature. As we stood in a serpentine line waiting to collect the report card for hopefully the last time, we began to trade in our woes. I complimented a mother for the largesse of her heart since she was permitting her daughter to take a break year from her studies after her twelfth. From the stricken look on her face and the long silence that ensued I realised that this was the first time she was hearing about it. Another mother lamented that since the National Law school exams needed only a 59 per cent for admission,the board exams had lost their relevance for her child. A parent guffawed and said that foreign universities had already given provisional admission and the board exam was being treated as a necessary evil at home. I asked a boy what he intended to study and he told me what he was clear that he did not want to study mathematics or anything quantitative. He was considering philosophy or history while his industrialist dad standing next to him was trying not to cry.

All is definitely well after one crosses the hurdle of the class twelve boards and lands in some spot in the sun. But as most of us recall, we spent the prime of our adolescence worrying about what was to happen to us and it may be a while before this legacy will disappear. If one lives in the Rajdhani, one just wishes for a college where “Tezaab” is not thrown at young girls instead of “Abeer” during Holi.

Old faithful

2010-01-28T08:18:00.000-08:00

My friend has a Sony Television which is celebrating its twentieth birthday. He recollects the day the TV entered the household to be very joyous, it was his most extravagant acquisition bought with a bank loan at the cost of one hundred thousand rupees. It has stood by his family through Doordarshan, the initial days of cable television and just as he thought the channels were inadequate, destiny closed in with satellite transmission and removed all inadequacies. The old faithful could then show him as many channels in prime condition. Even the furniture that houses his prized possession has been ordered to specific dimensions and rests in the middle of the room, surrounded by couches for mindless viewing. Everyone tells him to acquire one of those flat, sleek snazzy versions which can be slapped onto the wall but he says that would leave a large hollow empty space both in his heart and in the furniture.

He understandably gets rather upset when he calls the Sony Service Manager when a tiny fuse in the TV blows due to voltage fluctuations and the guy roars with laughter when he hears the date of birth of the gadget. My friend is not a person who people should laugh at because the next thing the engineer has to do is fly in components from across South-east Asia for repairs. The peeved service manager now looks forward to his call and says he shows all his trainees the television like children are taken to the dinosaur museum.

This behaviour does not amuse my friend. He says that people pay more for antique silk carpets which most probably have dog poo and soup spilt on it. Others pay a premium for old jewellery just because a sagacious snooty gentleman assures them that it was once worn by royalty. How could one possibly know that since there is no way to scientifically measure aging of a piece of jewellery unlike a fossil? For all one knows a courtesan at Sonar Gachi could have fallen into bad times.

I try to pacify him by saying old is gold and just hope that I age like the carpet rather than the doomed television.

Mom's cooking

2010-01-27T08:37:00.000-08:00

Finally a cola major has created an advertisement that tugs at the heart strings of the matriarch of the household who usually decides the expense allocation of the grocery budget. I was pursuing my favourite late evening occupation of channel surfing when the daughter asked me to stop at a particular channel to watch an advertisement. The models appeared to be rotund folks gorging on food and I told her we could well be looking into a mirror when the catch line about no food being as good as one’s mothers grub appeared. She looked at me like a cat that has licked cream and said that was precisely the purpose of the advertisement - most people felt the same way as she did, there was nothing like her mamma’s cooking. I couldn’t believe a company whose products I think are unhealthy actually got the two of us mushy as we gave each other a big sloppy hug.

The not so hidden obvious ingredient in a mother’s cooking; clichéd as it may sound is unmitigated love. Also a lot of greed for mothers live to see their kids faces light up with joy, look at one with a content smile, burp and give one a big thank you hug. It’s what makes every labour pain, growling teacher, errant tutors and endless shopping expeditions worth its while. A mom does not cook a dish; she creates one tailor made for her offspring. She makes it as spicy, sweet, salty as one desires it. She manipulates recipes to add and subtract condiments to the child’s likes and dislikes. She adds visual colour to the creation by scouring the market for ingredients that juxtapose well with each other. She reduces the fat component if weight is an issue and increases fibre magically when one needs it for she is as concerned about your pimples as you are. All this is done in a subtle magical manner while she is pretending to cook only for husband or mother-in-law. It’s a silent pact that neither one talks about. Mothers also like have energy to make food at odd times when one is hungry. When a child studies snacks appear at odd hours to keep one awake, return from college or school and a hot dish appears, even if one brings a load of friends home there is enough to go around.

Why does mommy not feel the same way when she cooks for daddy or other adults? Beta, once upon a time mommy did feel that way and daddy felt like Shahajahan in front of what he thought was an endless bounty of love. Then he started to show his gussa on the food that she laboured on and refused to eat when he was angry. Then mommy slowly got fed up and daddy started eating left over’s from the kid’s party or ordered in from chick fish or pappu da dhaba. The moral of the story is, never do gussa on mom’s khana, the natija is not very good.

Personal religion

2010-01-26T05:45:00.000-08:00

“Have you heard the song Aj Din Chadheya in the movie Love Aaj Kal?” my friend animatedly asked me. “The lyrics of the song capture my relationship with god.” I quickly downloaded the lyrics that go like this:

Maanga jo mera hai Jaata kya tera hai
Maine kaun si tujhse jannat maang li
Kaisa khuda hai tu Bas naam ka hai tu
Rabba jo teri itni si bhi na chali

My friend views God as a parent and being the precocious kid she has always been, she apparently throws tantrums in her prayers when she wants something. Most faiths propose god as the parent figure but also teach us to be obedient, obsequious children who are grateful and not demanding. However in daily life we watch offsprings who grab and take from the paws of their parents with no remorse. Is it unlikely that it their prayers they will not reflect the same attitude with God?

This got me thinking about whether people ever define their relationship with God. In Hinduism we seem to call every Goddess mother in prayer but we never address the male Gods as father. We referred to the male Gods with reverence and added a “ji” at the end of the name but not "pita" which is the word for father. There must be some deep rooted sociological reason for this.

God as a lover is a very unique interpretation and one has seen it prominently in MeeraBai’s (Rajasthan 1498 – 1547) works. She interpreted her soul as the eternal bride to Lord Krishna being the eternal bridegroom. Other saints who have followed Bridal mysticism are Akka Mahadevi,a saint in Karnataka in the twelfth century who took Shiva to be her mystical husband and Andal from Tamil Nadu, who in her first work, Tiruppavai, imagines herself as a cowherd serving Krishna and in her second work, Naciyar Tirumoli, yearns for Vishnu. Each of these ladies has written vast volumes of work and has devout followings. There seems to be no parallel with any man having perceived God as being a woman in a similar manner which seems rather strange. I suspect that there must have been censorship prevalent from ancient times.

What seems to work in today’s society is perceiving God as a genderless friend who can understand one’s despair, feelings and emotions. Giving a profound belief, a name of a relationship, which is a function of society is limiting. Even if society has religious fractions that disseminate it, the manner in which each one of us perceive our faith is a truly personal matter and cannot be defined. Once in a while a song, poem, a monument or inspiration will just remind us of it but not limit us in our vision.

Sabbaticals

2010-01-22T08:54:00.000-08:00

The original meaning of the word sabbatical has its roots in Judaism and Christianity and it means the once in seven years period when the lands were kept fallow to give it rest, to introspect, forgive debts and grant freedom to slaves. In modern times the word conjures the image of a “break year” from one’s given line of activity.

A sabbatical year is considered quite acceptable in certain professions like education, sports, religion, computer programming and the creative arts. The origin of the concept lay in education where educators were sponsored by the university to upgrade their skills and take new courses. Creative people are also encouraged to take a break so that they do not get “stuck in a rut”. Sportspersons sometimes physically need to recover and as we can see from Justine Henin’s current performance at the Australian open it may just be what is needed to get the edge to excel. Well known individuals who are currently on self imposed sabbaticals include Beyonce, Kimi Raikkonen- the Ferrari formula one champion and Tiger Woods. Others who have just returned from sabbaticals include Sean Penn and Nelly Furtado.

Performance in all the disciplines cited above are driven by individual talent and do not require team work. Is it then possible to take a sabbatical in the corporate world without jeopardizing one’s career? Europeans have traditionally been more tolerant towards the notion of a sabbatical but it appears to be viewed as a suicidal act in most other parts of the world where a person not taking leave and working over the weekend is venerated and treated like a saint Lots of individuals who took a sabbatical before the economic crisis found their jobs restructured out when they returned. Organisations view granting a sabbatical more as a desperate concession for retaining individuals who would otherwise resign. However it is likely that personnel will always view it as a lack of commitment to one’s career.

Amazingly I know a few people who have taken a year off and it does not appear to have had any negative impact on their career. I admit most of them have been women working in multinationals which have gender diversity targets and only two of the ladies do not have children. In a country like India, parents admit children to school as early as possible so that they can acquire early combative skills for the rat race. Children here never seem to take time off to travel, learn a new skill or contemplate their future. It’s a mad rush to get somewhere….or just any place where the money bags glitter and makes the parents happy.

One often hears senior managers groan and moan about the drudgery in their life and how they look forward to an early retirement. It is incredible to see how options in new age companies and risky ventures are perceived favourably, as if the unknown will bring back the zing into one’s life. It is not easy to retire early for one realizes the tickets to the concerts, the invitations to the parties and your golf buddies are most often a function of the seat of power and not the niceness of one’s soul. Wouldn’t a sabbatical do wonders for such an individual and the corporation? Instead of a peeved, grouchy boss who hates the smiles on the faces of his young subordinates we may actually see more positivity at the work force. Of course there remains the issue of what the dude who does not have any friends, interests or family will do with a year off but what the heck, it’s a beginning.

Saraswati Puja

2010-01-19T04:16:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is Saraswati Puja or Basant Panchami which is as important to my intellectual Bengali brethren as Laxmi Puja is to the Gujjubhais and Baniyas. In Kolkata and other places where there exists a critical mass of Bengalis this will be a community affair in which the dhoti clad bhadrolok and their wives clad in yellow saris will be supervising the pundits and celebrating the advent of spring.

I grew up in a colony of a Box-wallah company where Bengali engineers dominated senior management. Saraswati Puja was celebrated on the stage of the club and the badminton court was the venue for bhog which consisted of Khichdi, Labda (mushy mixed vegetable) and the piece de résistance which was “kuler” chutney which is sweet and sour accompaniment made of the wild bor (a desi cherry). Since we now live in nuclear families and sadly neither the Bengali or box-wallahs have a major say, I had to make my way to Chittaranjan Park to prepare myself for a home puja for one does not mess around with the goddess of education when the kid is trying to get admission in Delhi University.

There were multiple statues of the deity in the market, all made of clay with a gauzy sari, a shiny tiara and long black wavy hair which looked straight out of a Bengal Chemicals Jabakusum hair oil advertisement. I strolled across to the Puja shop and asked the man for the essentials for the ceremony. He handed me a photocopied check list of the items required written in beautiful Bengali calligraphy. The only glitch was that I can’t read Bengali to which he gave me a look that suggested I should scoot from the market. I am a weathered veteran of such conduct and I explained that I wanted a simple puja and he had to ensure Ma did not give me the third degree when I returned home. I went home with a ink pot made of clay, a pen made of bamboo which Valmiki must have used to write the Ramayan, various tiny pouches of items the names of which I do not know, mud from the Ganges in a sealed packet (!!), a tiny sari, gamcha (checked red piece of cloth eastern Indians use after a bath), Joynagarer moa (a sweet), some unique fruits that Saraswati likes, five piece of supari, betel leaf, two triphala and so on. It was very organized and painless. The market association must have been inspired by Rocket Singh for such innovation.

The deity will be placed on the floor amidst alpana made of ground rice. We will surround her with books, musical instruments and the natya shastra for blessings. A brief Puja will be done in the morning and the daughter will dash off to write her Chemistry pre-boards exam paper while her grand mom will grumble about how children in Kolkata are never permitted to study on such an auspicious day.

Basant Panchami welcomes spring in our country although this year Delhi is still shivering in foggy cold climate sans central heating. Enthusiasts could join a group which will be meeting at Lodhi Garden for a walk to the Nizamuddin dargah at 1 pm. They will all be wearing yellow garments, carrying lots of genda phool (marigold) and giving each other small gifts. One could also sing or listen to the notes of Raag Basant to get into the spirit of spring.

Confidence

2010-01-17T06:12:00.000-08:00

It’s amazing how confidence in a man and woman are so disparate. I have tried to apply all my knowledge of economics, life experiences and business and not come to a definite conclusion on the parameters that make a woman confident. If one were to plot confidence on the y axis and age on the x axis, the curve for a man would be a steadily increasing one, its slope being a function of his delusions of grandeur or ego. In the case of a woman it would be like the share price of mid-cap script in the stock market or the heart beat of a dying hero in a Hindi film on the hospital monitor.

A man is a simple being and his confidence takes a hammering at only certain times in his life. These situations may encompass rejection by girls at adolescence, teachers driving home a certain lack of intellectual capability, examination marks, failure to get a job or admission into an institution. Other low points may be the moment the man’s voice breaks, realisation that one’s height, chest size, stamina and strength are actually finite numbers and not a function of one’s fantasy. However men circumvent these obstacles and their confidence increases as they get on in life, get their first girl, marry, procreate, and earn higher salaries, good bonuses and stock options. Further confidence boosters are pretty secretaries and personal trainers, club memberships, portfolio of assets and so on.

Women on the other hand are more complex. A citadel in industry may turn into a nervous bundle at the Parents Teachers meeting, at her in-laws house or when she goes shopping. I am amazed at how easily a sales person in an apparel shop can crumble a woman when she goes to buy clothes- especially jeans. Even if one earns in millions one grovels before the kids, mom in law, husband, maid, nanny, teachers and tutors. Pampering and caring for oneself is a crime to be hidden. There is always scope for improvement and there is always room for doubt. If one were to ask women to name the point of time that they have been the most confident they will probably state the age between forty five and fifty and then comes the great Menopause with its hormonal malfunctions which sends their confidence plummeting down to the eye of a tornado. If an economist were to measure the parameters for happiness in a woman it would be found that many of the parameters contradict each other.

Social psychologists and marketers have seen this as an immense opportunity for successfully milking millions. If one recalls rudimentary marketing class one looked at a tube of lipstick and the professor smugly asked “Are we selling colour or aspiration?” The French conglomerate Loreal has become the world leader in cosmetics using the same catch line since 1973 to sell its products to women “Because I’m worth it”. The line works well because it appeals to women’s low self esteem. Try dear sisters to find a parallel campaign for men!

A fresh perspective

2010-01-15T09:24:00.000-08:00

When Europeans discuss food one must listen to the subject carefully since they do not joke about what they partake. A French chief executive once told me that he thought the farm and vegetable produce of India was par excellence. He said the pork, mutton and chicken tasted better than what he bought back home. His logic was that rudimentary unorganised animal husbandry ensured that most animals in India generally spent their life feeling happy, feeding on grass, garbage residues and whatever, meandered around in the sun until one day.....the guillotine. He said the poor counterparts of these animals in developed countries were force fed, lived in claustrophobic environments and were always sad since they knew their fate. This is the reason the French preferred wild game produce because in their flesh was the taste of freedom. Trust a Frenchman to come up with such a unique point of view!

A lady who is a fashion designer in UK told my friend who is a garment exporter that while the vegetables in India did not look pretty, they tasted far better than the ones back home. She said perhaps it was because there was little genetic engineering and most things were organic due to the financial situation of the farmers. I suspect Hannibal Hector would say the same of the people of India if he ever visited our country.

I knew a British Human Resources Manager who was temporarily based in India. When I visited her in drizzling, cold London she kept talking about the “smells of India”. She said she had never felt so alive in her life as when she was living here. She said her sensory organs were always on an overdose. There was so much noise, colour, the smell of people and food with different palates to savour that she was planning a long vacation with her boyfriend all over India.

I recently accompanied a bunch of my French friends to the spice and vegetable market at INA after a lecture at IIT Delhi. A group of four geoscientists were rubbing spices, masalas, curry patta in their palms and deciding if they liked the aroma. They took home tarkas (seasoning) and discussed the merits of saffron. They tasted the dry fruits, the gajak and rewri. They said the Kashmir pine nuts were tastier than those from Canada and USA.

It’s fascinating to watch and hear people from other countries discuss their experiences when they encounter our food. Nothing can bring people closer to each other than sharing a meal and appreciating each other’s palate. It also gives us a fresh perspective on what we take for granted on our plates every day.

Roxxxy the Robot

2010-01-11T01:29:00.000-08:00

The picture and news on Roxxxy, the first sex robot, which was unveiled yesterday in the Las Vegas convention, sent Ma into hysterics. My daughter gulped and had a million questions on its operating procedure which have been left unanswered. Apparently Roxxxy has siblings named Frigid Farah (why buy one?) and mature Martha (Oedipus complex?), Wild Wendy and an S & M Susan (the pervs need practice?). The robot will cost seven to nine thousand dollars and can be totally customised for individual tastes and needs. True Companion which is the German manufacturer says it is a “life partner” and not a sex toy.

Simson Garfinkel in MIT Technology review May 2004 had predicted that machines need to simulate emotional responses and empathize to appeal and co-exist with humans who are essentially emotionally hard wired beings. David Levy, a British national who is an acclaimed chess player and expert in artificial intelligence had predicted in his book “Love and Sex with the Robots” in 2007 that robots will increasingly become sexual partners for humans.

The scary part is that I actually know some people who I suspect would prefer such a companion over a flesh and blood one but may deny it due to social pressures. A friend of mine is rather perturbed about the kind of person who would risk using a robot since even German high end technology may have mal-functions. However the good news is that the robot can have conversation about topics like sports and news and will be constantly updated in its information bank through wireless technology. That may pose a slight problem since most people like partners who are intellectually dumber and need them.

Douglas Hines who is the creator says he was inspired by a friend that he lost in the 9/11 attacks in New York and that he was the inspiration behind the robot. Hines tried to capture his friend’s personality in his creation. Who would believe that there is a human love story behind this whacky robotics creation!

Plus sizes

2010-01-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

For the first time I read a nutritionist in a leading daily state that ayurveda approves of a fried egg and protein (interpreted by me as bacon or sausage) for breakfast to keep us warm instead of melon, sprouts and unsweetened porridge. “V” Magazine, in its latest issue has done a fashion spread with plus size models which would qualify as pornography to traditional Indian tastes of the 1960s. Dr. Vito Franco from Palermo University states in his research that Mona Lisa had high cholesterol since there is undeniable evidence of fatty deposits on her face called xanthelasma. She also had lipoma or a benign fatty tumour over her right eye.

Is this an aberration by divinity to give me a pleasant Sunday or are we maturing from a race which is obsessed in creating new avenues of being unhappy to one that seeks contentment? Tiny sizes in women come with its share of problems. Silicon enhancements, wanting to substitute edible food with inedible satisfiers like biting off everyone’s brain, reduced libido and a propensity towards non calorific mood enhancers that may be addictive. The funny part is that the pressures are created by women on each other and only a small percentage of men like us hyper skinny. Those who do are looking for temporary arm candy since in the long term it can be a strain living with such peacock like perfection. I know certain couples who never eat a meal together since thin people eat only small quantities when the body physically craves for food unlike most people who let their emotions determine eating habits.

I will not question the reason for this aberration by fashionistas and will seize the moment in this cold weather to ignore the treadmill in the morning and snooze for an extra thirty minutes.

Yaaba Daaba – Music n Movies

2010-01-07T23:35:00.000-08:00

If you thought only Fred Flintstone thumped his ample hairy torso to utter these words of joy, move over because it’s the latest foot tapping song in India which will have you moving your hips to a hula hoop. It’s a khichdi of Footloose, Twist and Shout and Blue Suede shoes composed by Ken Ghosh, Adnan Sami and Sandeep Shirodkar for their movie Dance pe chance. Kunal Ganjawalla sounds like he is truly inspired by his name and belts out the song with all the passion of an eighteen year old in a college band. Ghosh –dada has not yet released the video on You Tube for us to watch eye candy Shahid jive to the number.

Another Bengali babumoshai who has recreated himself successfully from only romantic melodies is Shantanu Moitra in 3 Idiots. However the songs in this film are endearing because the lyrics are outstanding. For once I do not have to open my Urdu dictionary to understand a film song. Another song that was sponsored by the Beer Bar dancers union and has assisted them majorly in revenue generation is the song “Paisa” from De Dhana Dhan composed by RDB. I fail to understand why Kuly, Manjeet and Surjeet Singh would call themselves RDB instead of KMS. A jewel in the midst of average music in the same movie is “Rishtey Naatey” sung by Raahat Fateh Ali Khan with lovely lyrics

It’s very difficult for a woman to sing songs from contemporary movies since today’s music depicts the way our leading heroines are projected. All the female songs are item numbers which have come-hither lewd lyrics with hip thrusting beats and lots of intermittent nonsensical rap which one cannot possibly sing in front of mashimas and peeshimas. All soulful songs with great words are bagged by the heroes. This is good news for Anoushka Manchanda, Suzanne Demello, Sunidhi Chauhan, Richa Sharma and all the “gala phad ke gaanewali” singers. I usually do a search on movies which have Konkana Sen, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Sen to find good female playback songs. I just hope these arty movies have a few moments where the heroine is happy and not all the songs are plaintive heart wrenching numbers.

Tughlaqabad Fort – a hidden jewel in Delhi

2010-01-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

Everyone morning and evening I looked forward to my first glimpse of the impressive view of the Fort on one side of the road and the tomb on the other side as the road to my office cut between the two structures. It seemed so large and yet so desolate, uncared for and imposing. I wanted to stop the car and enter the fort but I wasn’t sure how safe it would be. There seemed to be a village inside a certain part of the fort and monkeys swinging on trees and yet there was a small boxlike structure that proclaimed it was a protected monument of the Archaeological Society of India.

I took advantage of the cold wave that had paralysed Delhi and the New Year festivities to convince my colleague to visit the fort with me. The entrance fee for Indians was rupees five. We asked for a guide since the fort seemed enormous. The guy at the counter smiled and climbed up to the fort with us to hand us over to Gian Chand who was part cleaner and part guide of the monument. Gian Chand spoke well with a fine crisp dialect and guided us into the fort which was built by Ghias-uddin-Tughlaq of the Delhi Sultanate in 1321 and abandoned in 1327. A six and half square kilometre fort, the largest in Delhi, was occupied for only six years by a temperamental Sultan who apparently was so passionate about the construction of his fort that he stopped work at the well of Saint Nizamuddin Auliya who cursed him and said that his fort would either be “Banjar” – barren or be occupied by “Gujjars” – a local tribe or “Bandars”- monkeys. One third of the fort today houses the Tughlaqabad village in which the Gujjar tribes live, there are approximately 5000 monkeys who peacefully reside in the area and one third of the fort is available for public view. The interiors of the fort are surprisingly clean and one feels transported to a place far away from the metropolis. We saw the treasury, a mosque for the Sultan’s wives, an underground shopping centre, ruins of the palace, rooms for the soldiers, stables and a place where mortar was ground with the use of animal power. We also saw an underground tunnel which was one kilometre long and led to the nearby Adilabad fort. This tunnel is still open but the road is dark and infested with snakes. The fort is on top of a hill and gives one a magnificent view of Delhi. One can see the village, a school, boys playing cricket within the fort premises and of course the tomb of Ghias-uddin Tughlaq, his begum and his elder son. The fort was surrounded by a large lake and the tomb was built on water. There was a tunnel with archways which connected the fort to the tomb. This is however closed and one walks across the road to the bridge that runs on top of the tunnel. The fort is a beautiful place for photography and sketching with the few cleaning women meandering around who were very friendly and were quite amused that they has mistaken us for “cross border” people instead of locals.

The tomb structure is octagonal and is surrounded by a beautiful, clean, manicured lawn. This tomb was strangely built by Ghias-uddin for himself while he was alive. It is the first monument that uses the white Makrana marble of Jaipur which has been made famous by its use in the Taj Mahal. There also exists a tomb of a dog which is unusual since the Muslim faith does not permit it, however our guide in the tomb - Mr. Chunnilal told us that the dog had saved the Sultan’s life during a hunt and was thus honoured. There remains an incomplete unused structure which was the provisional tomb of Ghias-uddin’s second son.

The Delhi government is attempting to renovate, restore and recreate the grandeur of the fort before the Commonwealth games. The work is moving at an abysmally slow pace. The fort does not form part of the regular tour operator itineraries as the route is through traffic prone office areas and there are no shopping arcades and eateries in the vicinity. However there is a beautiful charm in visiting such a grand monument when it is undiscovered and empty. One begins to play make believe games in one’s head as one stands on top of the fort, the gentle cold breeze ruffling one’s hair and gazes down at the grand Rajdhani of India.

Children need help

2010-01-05T01:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a eleven year old girl committed suicide at Mumbai and the common belief appears to be that it is a result of her parents asking her to stop attending dance class, participating in reality television shows and to concentrate on her studies at school. Another twelve year old in Mumbai hung himself in his school premises after failing his mid-term test, apparently being inspired by the movie “3 Idiots”, which he watched two times. The parents of both the kids were caring and involved with the children and did not put undue pressure on them. The boy’s parents were aware that he was poor in his studies and that the boy had tried to commit suicide a few days ago by slitting his wrists at home.

We are aware that in our country the elementary education system is still in its infancy stage with inadequate facilities. However instances such as these bring to light the need for trained psychologists being a necessity for schools catering to the new generation. Parents very often struggle to make ends meet and in cities like Mumbai scarcely get to spend quality time with their children. Who does the child turn to for a conversation when in need for guidance? All of us have also encountered extremely talented children being subject to unrealistic pressures of performance by their parents.

I once had the opportunity to watch a children’s reality television show very closely and the experience was distasteful for both my daughter and me. She was thirteen years old when a particular channel, it’s well known sponsors and organizers managed to convince prestigious schools across the country to send students who were all-rounder’s to participate in an inter-school competition which was to be aired on TV. The school gave us a detailed form to be filled which had to be submitted with mark-sheets and certificates. The regional try outs were fun as the students had to say something for a minute in Hindi in front of an audience of two thousand booing and cheering kids. A bunch of kids made it to the regional knockout round which was recorded at Mumbai.

As the parents and kids resided in the same hotel for two nights we were witness at close quarters to the dynamics involved in creating “star kids”. The children were between eleven and fourteen years of age and while a few played games at an international level and others painted or wrote creatively, the ones who stood out in their confidence, maturity and aggression were those who were child models and actors. The parents of the stage performers were very pushy and competitive and two fathers actually targeted and played mind games with children who were potential competition. The parents were not allowed to accompany the kids to the studio but one father smuggled into the bus and threw a tantrum until he was permitted into the recording room. The children who did not qualify kept crying for hours and to add to their woes their parents kept berating them. My daughter did not qualify to the next round and we were very happy to step out of this environment.

Reality television does give opportunities for people from far flung places with undiscovered talent but it creates pressures which need professional assistance. The schools and sponsors should have asked the participating children for their feedback after the show to conduct a quality check. I feel that such anonymous feedback should be mandatory by the government and should be reviewed by professional agencies. Policing is necessary to prevent exploitation of children for monetary gains and children harming themselves.

First monday of 2010

2010-01-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

It’s the first Monday of the New Year and everyone’s had two three day weekends. It’s the time of the year that everyone is painfully reminding each other of concepts like New Year’s resolutions and amazingly all the edible hedonism one has indulged in has settled on parts of one’s anatomy which are button and zip unfriendly. The low outdoor temperature, the fog and drizzle makes one want to hibernate like a Raccoon.

Rains, a cold breeze, temperatures near zero degrees are least of my favourite things when combined with bunking maids and a diet plan. One inevitably tears up the New Year’s resolution of eating healthy food since fruit salads just do not have the same warming effect as a pizza in bed or “moong dal halwa” drooling in ghee. However layered clothing only looks good on stick insects while most “healthy” folks look like stuffed teddy bears walking like penguins in their multitude of thermal innerwear. One leaves the house snug and warm and then god forbid one enters those centrally heated buildings that provokes the mind to engage in behaviour that one could get arrested for in India. One has to tolerate the excess heat, turn red in the face and pray that one does not faint due to excess body temperature.

Waking up in the morning is a nightmare and no amount of fluffy shoes near the bed or flannel dressing gowns can motivate one to leave the quilt. It is only the prospect of a cold shower if one does not switch on the geyser that drags one out. Thankfully we now have the new high technology cars but remember the good old days when the engine wouldn’t start in the cold and one had to pull the choke? Pull the choke a few times and the engine flooded with petrol and then one had to push the car until it decided to wake up from it's slumber and start.

Well it’s only two weeks of this chilly cold in Delhi after which the temperatures start to zoom up like the energy levels of men when they see Angelina Jolie on screen. Delhi is very beautiful from mid January till April with flowers blooming at every junction, roses in the gardens and peacocks dancing in the multitude of beautiful parks. Go and take a stroll in the garden while it’s still possible to do it in this weather!

New Year Celebrations

2010-01-01T23:24:00.000-08:00

Page 3 carried news reports about SRK earning five crores for a ten minute performance at a new year’s party at Gurgaon – yeah, the suburbia that I reside in. The photographs of the party looked more like a Filmfare award ceremony with the number of Bollywood celebrities performing at the function.

The papers also gave us reports on how thousands of people watched firework displays on the beaches of Brazil, at Times Square New York, Japan, Sydney harbor, Los Angeles and so on. Why are our celebrations so private and exclusive in India and why is it a matter of public celebration in other countries? Apparently people have always braved the freezing Delhi cold and gathered at Connaught Place at the stroke of midnight but this year MCD decided to dig up the pavements of Connaught Place to make the celebrations for the revelers more exciting as they danced and tripped over the many potholes. I went to Barcelona as a tourist and watched the most amazing musical display of fireworks at a location near my hotel since my trip had coincided with one of Spain’s innumerable festivals, at Dubai I could watch the display of fireworks from my hotel room every evening during the shopping festival.

Why can’t advertisers and event managers ride on the festive spirit and get some goodwill at New Year? Telecom companies, mobile phone manufacturers, FMCG giants, satellite television companies spend so much time trying to reach the “aam junta”. Try distributing red heart shaped balloons to every kid on the road with your company logo and Happy New Year printed on it, display fireworks near the waterfront in a country with the largest peninsula, at Connaught Place, India Gate and other places with open promenades. Alcohol manufacturers who do roaring business at this time of the year and keep telling us not to drink and drive could perhaps sponsor public buses to transport people home after their celebrations.

Let us join the developed world in the ways we celebrate since folks in India are quite tired of watching television to herald in the New Year!

Too much of a good thing

2010-01-01T22:10:00.000-08:00

The tricky part of being on a winning spree is to know when the trajectory of success is going to turn to a downwards slope and time your departure from the spotlight. Many a person who is not used to the limelight tends to drag their moment of glory until journalists and public tire of them. Public waves of gratitude, sympathy and adulation turn into apathy.

Two glaring examples of this are hitting us today. Firstly, the Ruchika Girohtra case is being milked by the media into a circus. It’s time for the Anands and Girohtras to step back before things turns sour. The media is now beginning to report news about Mrs. Anand’s views on Ruchika’s stepmom and her relationship with her and before one knows it Ruchika will be forgotten and a soap opera based at Chandigarh will be at the forefront.

The second case is that of the squabble between the author of a book, producer, director and actor of the major hit film “3 Idiots”. Initially the drama seemed so implausible that one thought it was a ploy for publicity designed by the movie makers and now it has turned into a sad public battle. Chetan has managed to turn his moment of glory into what we as his well wishers pray is not his debacle for we know how unforgiving the film fraternity is from the way Vivek Oberoi was ostracized after his press conference in which he berated Salman Khan.

In my first job everyone had an adage that “When shit hits the ceiling, it hits everyone”. This something all of us management trainees learnt the hard and painful way.

Happy New Year

2009-12-30T23:14:00.000-08:00

I will miss and remember 2009 as a year when people were the nicest they have been for a long time. I have realized that a pink slip and the Damocles sword are far more effective in reminding everyone of the teachings of the holy book than any moral science class. This was the year that most adults had adequate time to reach out to people on face book, twitter and LinkedIn. We realized that these tools that appear to be for networking actually opens up a plethora of information and content on the internet which is difficult to sieve through without assistance. Folks connected with each other on their emotional quotients rather than their financials, degrees or arenas of work. Some of us wrote blogs and others were nice enough to read them. There were so many excuses for reunions and people attending them that I was even inspired to write about it. The wonderful part of social networking and the net is that the more one reaches out to people the less illusions one has of personal grandeur for one is a mere speck in the copious information available.

We enter the new decade bidding adieu to recession in India. The friendly boutiques, restaurants, airlines who wanted your money will once again raise their prices and the tilt of their jaw line. The bonus figures will rise and our creative juices will decline. However there will be some among us who will hopefully have transformed some aberrations into habits and will continue to use the opportunities the downturn presented

This blog promises to be one of them. Here’s wishing you a fabulous new year!

Marketing to the eighteen year old

2009-12-30T04:41:00.000-08:00

Today’s Economic Times supplement “Brand Equity” has a lead article on how they had a focus group with ten eighteen year old children at Mumbai with two strategic planners, one youth marketer and one creative head. After the discussion the characteristics they have listed about the generation are happy, individualistic, money minded, “jugaddo”, fame-centric, the shortcut generation and stressed. Other adjectives include catchy phrases like “Google & God in that order”, “If you don’t hang out you lose out” and “togetherness over power”.

Amazingly I saw a presentation on You tube yesterday called Digital Strangelove by David Gillespie on how the advent of the digital media requires us to stop compartmentalizing and living in silos.He tells us to focus on intent and tell the consumer stories. I buy David’s point of view and not the one propounded by ET which makes it appear like the new generation is frivolous and flighty.

What one has observed in today’s eighteen year olds is their confidence, independent thought process and ability to juggle various mediums of communication. They are less judgmental about people and the choices they make than their parents. They aspire for expensive things but if they cannot afford it they will step out early, work and buy them in installments. They do not judge and shun people for lack of money or perceive great unhappiness if their own income levels were to fall. They believe in immediate gratification, a sub –conscious fall out of the uncertainties in their world – be it terror, money in the family or their parent’s marriage. They are not as detached and unemotional as they appear. They are not intimidated by power and money as generations before them.

Let us pass off the article as yet another example of how marketing gurus think they know their consumers without listening to them.

Millennium Trilogy

2009-12-27T05:58:00.000-08:00

There is nothing nicer in winter than to crawl into bed sipping “adrak chai” and reading a good crime novel. A few months back I discovered an author with a unique style of writing crime stories – Stieg Larsson who was a liberal and crusading Swedish journalist and has written the Millennium Trilogy. Stieg suddenly died at the age of fifty and the manuscript for his novels was delivered to his publisher and his books published posthumously. Some characters of his novels are loosely based on his life and the lead character has seventeen tattoos on her body including a dragon on her back. Writing anything more about her will ruin the book for you but let me just say she is an extremely fascinating, quirky personality and unlike anyone that one may have imagined let alone encounter.

I was initially sceptical about buying a book which was translated from Swedish into English but trusted the recommendation of my friend Mirza who owns Midland book shop. He claimed I would be back for the next two books within a week and his prophecy was true. Larsson’s enormous knowledge of varied topics as a journalist is what lends substance to his writing. The cultural backdrop and characters are quintessentially Swedish - strong,independent and successful. The protagonists are very modern in their behaviour and thought process.

Larsson was the world’s second largest selling author in 2008 after Khaled Hosseini. His main character Lisbeth Salander is apparently his mental image of a grown up Pippi Longstocking who many may recall is a children’s book character by Swedish novelist Astrid Lindgren. The first book has also been made into a Swedish movie which was released in March 2009. Apparently English subtitled DVDs are also available and I am oh so searching for it!

Sonia Gandhi

2009-12-26T04:01:00.000-08:00

Rajiv Deshpande has written a wonderful article in today’s paper about a woman that I have always admired from a distance – Sonia Gandhi. She has been declared the Crest person of the decade and it’s a pity that the newspaper relegated the article to a supplement rather than the main paper.

Sonia Gandhi epitomises a person who has played every role as a woman to perfection. None of us can doubt her rock solid relationship with her husband with every photograph together being the picture of contentment. All of us can recognise the traits of pampered, well brought up children in Priyanka and Rahul. Wonder of wonders she even managed a great relationship with her formidable mother –in-law which stemmed from mutual respect. She has managed to present a no-nonsense iron lady persona without mitigating her feminity and poise. The first time I bumped into her she was celebrating her fiftieth birthday at the restaurant at which I was dining and I was struck by how incredibly straight, beautiful and approachable she was with her dimpled quick to smile demeanour. None of us can dispute how effective a political leader she has been and her relationship with our PM is remarkable. The manner in which she is grooming Rahul into leadership is also worth a case study. He has been given the challenge of winning over the most difficult and critical state into the fold of the congress by 2012. She has let Priyanka and Rahul lead independent personal lives despite having political ambitions. They participate in page 3 events, have celebrity friends and dress as they please.

When a woman is in power as she is, few have the nerve to write anything about her since they are scared of repercussions. I am a woman who doesn’t move in her circles, has no political ambitions and write a blog which I don’t market.............Soniaji, I think you are the most remarkable Indian of today.

Best friends

2009-12-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

Let us spend a moment on Boxing Day thinking of Aradhana Gupta who epitomises the best gift a person can possibly have – a fantastic friend. Aradhana and her parents spent nineteen years fighting for justice for Ruchika Girotra and were harassed in their fight incessantly. She gave up the game that she loved passionately since she never recovered from the scar of losing Ruchika. As a young girl she stood by her testimony through the years and did not succumb to severe intimidation.

I would define a best friend as a person from a gender where there is no physical attraction and who accepts, respects and loves one for what one is worth. Someone who will listen to your tales of woe and will probably have arsenal to blackmail you for several life times. A person one can have a vacation with and even share a room. One can discuss silly crushes, infatuations and revel in being an imperfect person.

One very often finds such friends early on in life, in the realms of school for it is at that time that we are the least judgemental. We spend a lot of time together and watch each other grow up through the rollercoaster years. Both my dear friends in school shared the same name – Soma – how weird is that? At our twenty fifth reunion we got together as if we has pressed a pause button on time.

A cardinal rule among best friends is to never let boyfriends or girlfriends interfere in the relationship. It is a recipe for disaster when two people of different genders squabble for the attention of the same individual, it makes a perfect setting for a Shakespearean tragedy. I drifted from my closest friend in college because the well meaning girl strived to find me a boyfriend. Many a woman very effectively gets weaned away from her friends after marriage, a situation which is highly dangerous for it leaves one isolated.

Close friends do not need nurturing like most relationships. They can be called on like guardian angels at any juncture in one’s life. I hadn’t met a dear friend for four years and last week I chanced upon a collection of twenty five Tintin DVDs which I had to buy for this Tintin crazy diva. I went across to her house with the gift and the entire family was so thrilled to meet me that I am still wearing a silly grin on my face.

Vithal C Nadkarni educated me today in his article in TOI that Boxing Day is a day to spread a little love. Let me start with my dear friends over the years......thank you for being around!

Sports for girls in India

2009-12-23T23:56:00.000-08:00

While the case of Ruchika Girotra and ex DCP Rathore hold national interest for various reasons let us ponder for a moment on the opportunities and facilities for women sports persons in India.

I was fourteen years old when my district chose me to represent them in the selection process for the Maharashtra girls Table Tennis team. I played the game well and participated in open tournaments but had never trained formally and used a racquet that cost ten rupees. A young teacher who was training in my school was selected to accompany me to Ahmednagar. We left at six am in a state bus and after a few changes reached our destination after fourteen hours. We went to the venue that had been stated in the communication which was also to provide us a place to stay. The government girl’s school had thread bare mattresses strewn all over the hot dusty class rooms with no pillows, sheets or fans overhead. The toilets were in a condition that would make any scene in Slumdog Millionaire look like a holiday at the Ritz. My sweet teacher actually threw up her meager meal at the sight of the loo and declared she couldn’t possibly live in such squalor. We found an extremely basic room in a hotel for forty rupees for the night. We arrived at the venue next morning in time for breakfast which was the typical Maharashtrian “Poha”. I was dreadfully hungry and ignoring my teacher’s skeptical look I ate a plate of it. Within fifteen minutes I was retching with food poisoning. I managed to recover to play my match. The girls around couldn’t believe the racquet I was using and someone lent me their fancy Japanese imported piece. I didn’t make it to the team and leant from the girls that the south Mumbai girls who were in the team had driven in with their parents and made their own arrangements.

A year later I was to participate in an inter school match in Kolkata. I was livid since, being a “lateral” new girl in the school, I was delegated to only play in the doubles team despite being a superior player. The girls from the other schools advised me to enter the open tournament which I did. As luck would have it, my first round was against the defending champion and state ranked number one player. I realized that I was no match against her training and talent and would be smashed to pieces in front of everyone. I decided to change the match from a game of skill and talent to a game of concentration. I kept the ball very low, close to the net and pushed it to minimum momentum. With the ball having such a low velocity she could neither spin the ball or smash it. We were reduced to playing enormously long rallies which continued for several minutes. The defending champion started to crack up and the State coach kept counseling her. A large crowd had gathered to watch. We played a set of three games of which the first game took forty minutes with several deuces. I lost the game eventually and the match. The champion started crying and came up to me and asked me who I was and that no one had ever seen me play in West Bengal. I felt like I had gone through a mathematics Olympiad and TT balls were dancing in my brain. The State coach asked me to report for practice from the next day since he thought I could play for the team and would be ready to start the tour from next month. I stared at the wonderful prospect of playing in the beautiful government schools of Chandannagore, Durgapur, Bankura and suddenly my Chemistry and Physics text books looked appealing. That was the end of my sports aspirations.

What I am trying to say is hats off to the kids who manage to represent our country without monetary support from their parents. Conditions in most sports haven’t improved since 1979 which is when I went for the selection. Imagine the number of people who quit for the same reasons that I did.

School admission

2009-12-23T02:41:00.000-08:00

Delhi schools have opened their doors for admission to the nursery grade for a period of one month. While some of us are reading the newspapers under our snug quilts, parents of three year olds are freezing in temperatures around six degrees centigrade from six am in serpentine queues to grab admission forms. The huge supply and demand mismatch in the availability of seats has given rise to a lucrative industry. Internet search engines will inform you about home tutors who will teach and “prepare” families for the admission process, coaching classes, sms alert services, blogs, forums and portals dedicated to the admission process.

We were rather paranoid about our daughter’s admission fourteen years ago since we were not dilliwallahs and knew not a single person of power and influence. We procreated young, had restricted revenue streams and positions of authority. In hindsight these characteristics were what made us succeed. We had nothing to be arrogant about, personified humility and we did not question authority but stood meekly in acquiescence during the interview. Our mothers were energetic and since there were no malls and minimal domestic help, the kid was taken to the zoo, galleries, taught nursery rhymes, read stories at bed time and even broke eggs which she stirred in the flour while I baked.

We very often blame the process and seek external help instead of focusing on what is easy. The school’s application form comprises of what appears to be simple questions but if one reads it carefully it measures ones involvement with the child. Think carefully and understand the child before filling the form, write from your heart, frame your answers positively and be honest. Take a photocopy of the form to read before the interview. Meanwhile, teach the child a few basic things that cannot be taught in a preparatory school. Some examples are where do you live, what work do you do, describe their grandparents, friends and parents. Spend more time with them before the interview so that they are confident and form a bond with you

The most difficult part is for parents to leave behind their ego, authority and arrogance which are by products of being successful. In India, it is normal for the father of the child to always try to answer questions addressed to both the parents while the mother is usually closer to the child. A mother’s love has no formal language and cannot be measured by diction or abilities of oratory. Educators do not evaluate parents as individuals; they look for people who care for their children.

It would help if the parents know each other well and agree on their strengths. Filling up the admission form could work wonders for a marriage since one may discover aspects of a spouse hitherto unknown. I have seen a cousin look incredulously at his spouse when he realized that the lady used to be proficient in theatre, writing and painting in school. Identify your key strengths in three sentences and do try to introduce them during the interview process. This is the time to understand the social and community service of your parents and grandparents that you discounted as a waste of time. You may well realize your Gandhian grand-father who always scolded you for your conspicuous consumption is your ultimate trump card.

Treat the interview as a joyous adventure rather than an ordeal. The panel will comprise of individuals such as you, maybe a little older. Dress well, be polite, speak when spoke to, do not interrupt, listen carefully, do not prattle, keep eye contact and sit straight. Doesn’t this sound a lot like what mamma told you before you stepped into the arranged marriage arena, when you went for your first interview, or perhaps when you first met your boyfriend/girlfriend’s family? If you can retrieve those butterflies in your stomach which kept you on the edge and had adrenalin pumping in your veins, you have clichéd the interview.

There is no greater gift one can give a child than a great school education.

Suggestions for festivities

2009-12-21T22:58:00.000-08:00

Nine days for the year 2009 to come to an end and then we move into the new decade. For the next few days we will watch and read about the best and worst of this decade in various media. For many people the advent of a new year is just another passing phase in time and for others it is a major cause of trauma for they believe that unless one ushers it in with aplomb one is doomed to a dreary year. Here are a few suggestions for those affected with such a quandary.

If one is romantic and thinks one can spend twenty four hours with an individual and not squabble there is many a champagne, spa, dancing and breakfast deal going around in the city. The usual disconnect during such sojourns is that usually one's partner tends to treat the spa and champagne as a de-stressor and one may just welcome the new year snoring in between the comfortable sheets of a five star bed while the partner may be sobbing or glaring angrily in a Little Black Dress with her hair piled up in romantic tendrils over her head. The next morning may require big time groveling.

There is always safety in numbers and so one could gather a bunch of friends and travel to an exotic sunny destination. Resorts in south-east Asia are always a preferred option where the propensity of love for the dollar throwing obnoxious tourist is very high. Countries like Cambodia and Thailand are favorites and of course there is always our beautiful Goa which continues to be a very good destination to drop into a conversation for social acceptability.

If one has dreary commitments in one’s local place of residence and has to get back to work one could always play out the waiting game with a tight bunch of friends hoping that someone will eventually succumb and host a party for all to partake. Just ensure the folks who are being subjected to your mental vibes of persuasion live at a close distance from your house which is not intercepted by traffic policemen with breath analyzers. Also the person should be adequately wealthy and generous to pick up the tab and have minions for delegation of necessary mundane tasks like cleaning up, re-heating the food and lifting unconscious people.

If one prefers a professionally managed affair there are many options. If one wants to take all the generations along for the party there is always one being hosted in one’s condominium or colony as we like to call it. For the privileged there is the club party where the parents are frantically trying to keep their teenage children in their vicinity and away from the lawns and bushes. The teenagers prefer the “farm house” private parties over accompanying their parents and succumb to emotional blackmail only till the clock strikes twelve and run away to greener pastures. If one prefers anonymity then one can always go to the local restaurant, hotel, pub or lounge bar which will have cleared some tables, hired a local DJ and have a medley of people in all shapes, sizes, age groups gyrating wildly in a wavelength which is completely different to the beat in the music.

Whatever be the choice of destination the ladies all want to look drop dead gorgeous and sexy on New Year’s Eve. The jiggling belts of the slimming centers are working overtime and detox pill sales are soaring. Black and bling with the hair piled up high combined with smoky eyes and red pouty lips are always a winner. One is amazed at the number of girls who wash their hair in freezing water since heating systems in parlors fail to keep up with the rush. How the PYTs survive in tiny body suits in the low single digit temperatures of Delhi in outdoor venues defies my imagination.

Whatever be your choice of celebration just be sure to surround yourself with the people who really care for you, give you a tight hug and wish you a wonderful year ahead!

Aruna Shanbaug

2009-12-17T03:47:00.000-08:00

The Supreme Court has admitted a plea to end the life of Aruna Shanbaug and sparked off a debate about euthanasia in this country. However Aruna’s saga highlights issues and laws that need to be revisited in the India that we see today.

Aruna was a twenty five year old in nurse in Mumbai’s KEM hospital who was good at her work, a forthright and outspoken individual and was engaged to be married to a doctor. She was assigned a duty in the dog research laboratory in the basement of the hospital where she berated her rapist, cleaner Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki for ill treating the dogs. The man was irked at a mere woman speaking to him in this manner and took advantage of the fact that Aruna used to ignore the matron’s orders and changed her clothes after duty in the deserted laboratory instead of the nurses changing room to save time. His attack was so brutal that Aruna lost her eye sight, her ability to speak and lay paralyzed in a foetal position in her bed since his attack. She screams whenever she hears a male voice and has to be force fed. (Source Pinki Virani’s book “Aruna’s story”). Sohanlal was arrested and let off with only a seven year imprisonment for theft (since the police found Aruna’s earrings in his possession) and attempt to murder. Amazingly a case of rape was not registered by the police since Aruna was sodomised! This happened in November 1973 exactly 36 years ago and still manages to make people cringe. Aruna has been tended to by the determined staff of KEM hospital that has resisted pressures to shift her outside the premise.

Aruna’s story is that of a bully getting away after brutalizing a person who despite being physically weaker has dared to speak up. This does not extend only to the realms of feminism. We see students being abused during ragging sessions in educational campuses that lead to deaths and suicides every year. We watch people wielding power change natural justice and corporations bury news that will not show them in good light. What makes this case unique is that the rapist was a bully who was economically weaker but sociologically viewed as superior as a man in the India of 1973. The police refusing to register a case of rape also reflect their apathy.

I recollect a summer holiday with a large extended family at a beach resort where I was accosted by a man in the sea and being enraged I reacted by slapping him hard. My family was aghast and everyone berated me, apologized to the bunch of men and thereafter spent the rest of the holiday “protecting” me with a tight vigil. It was a very confusing message to give a seventeen year old and I kept asking what I had done wrong. I imagine things would not have changed very much till date in many an Indian family.

Tapan Sinha’s “Adalat o ekti meye” was a Bengali movie based on a similar theme. This is the kind of titillating news that makes for good copy and movies but like many a woman in the world we would like to know what we are supposed to learn from the story and tell our daughters – can they speak up?

De-stress trip

2009-12-15T02:31:00.000-08:00

My daughter has gone for a “de-stress” trip from her school. One hundred and twenty teenagers and twelve teachers have descended on a wild life sanctuary created for the Panthera Tigris. In case you are wondering what on earth could stress these pampered children of Delhi in a collective group to warrant such a trip, let me explain.

In India we have two board examinations – one in class 10 and the other in class 12. Unlike other countries in the world the marks we get in these exams or “aggregate percentage” as it is lovingly spoken of, is branded on one’s forehead a lot like the Nazi sign that Brad Pitt was designing in the latest Tarantino film –Inglorious Bastards. Poker faced men and women will ask a person through one’s lifetime during admissions, job interviews and marriage discussions why the person’s aggregate was low in an exam conducted years ago. We have all designed novel synonyms for “I was generally goofing around and did not study” to slime past such situations while what we really want to say is “What is the relevance of my marks in Physics at the age of fifteen to selling your silly brand of toothpaste, credit card or lipstick?”

The schools take the board exam very seriously since their general ranking and public perception is determined to a large extent by the amount their students can cram and translate into marks. All year round in class 10 and 12, the kids and parents see rounds of examinations hit them like waves in a Tsunami. This is apparently to make the kids study hard, practice their exam writing skills and dispel all fears before D-day.

Now all of us adults know that till the age of fifteen kids sort of listen to parents and want to be perceived as good children. They want mommy around while they study, drink the hot cocoa she gives them with a smile and consume the vitamin tablet with freshly squeezed juice. By the time they are seventeen the balance of power has shifted. They are in their rooms while the mommy dear is fervently praying outside that they are studying. They have to watch the calories and will only eat substances that make them concentrate which broadly constitutes products of fmcg food giants which the dietician hates. Most often this is chocolate but I know a boy who apparently drinks five litres of his favourite aerated drink every day during his examinations. Mommies in India look very harassed at this phase of their life and age considerably. They practice yoga to improve their patience levels and stamina to stay awake.

My daughter will be giving her class 12 board exams and her class has gone to de-stress after the final exams and before the pre-boards. A DJ will be conjured from thin air who will have to produce around twelve tracks to be repeated incessantly. The kids are full of camaraderie and bonhomie since they are all jointly suffering this fate in the hands of the horrible examination system. The teachers with the class twelve kids are sentimental and everyone realizes school days are soon to be over. It’s thirty six hours of tears and laughter with lots of photographs thrown in.

Golf Widow

2009-12-13T00:54:00.000-08:00

Google news analytics indicates that there is three times the number of articles on Tiger Wood’s sex life versus the UN summit at Copenhagen on climate change. Women are lamenting at Tiger’s indiscretions, the clergy is asking Elin to forgive and forget, the sports enthusiasts are critical of his decision to withdraw from golf temporarily, the men smoking cigars at the club are shaking their heads in disbelief at his naivety and I have raised eyebrows and a smirk on my lips at this salacious uproar. How the mighty living in the rarefied stratospheres of the golf circuit have had to be dragged into this hoi polloi hotchpotch.

Most women know that nothing usually comes between a man’s obsession for golf and a game. Many a lady has attempted seduction, cajoling, temper tantrums, emotional blackmail with the kids without any success. Men who find the task of reaching for a can of soup a major aerobic activity manage to wake up at the crack of dawn at temperatures ranging from forty to zero degrees and weather conditions ranging from drizzles to fogs to play golf. The Public Relations malarkey about Tiger giving up the game for his love is thereby viewed by experienced folk with more than a wee bit of salt.

Eight years ago I decided to learn golf from a pro after paying a huge fee and even buying a ladies golf set in a red bag. The Pro who introduced the term Golf Widow to me had said that while I had a decent swing he didn’t quite see me as the prototype. Women who have tried to wean their husbands away from the game and have failed eventually join the band wagon of those who have learnt to play hoping that it will give them four hours of quality time with the hubby who once in a while condescends to play with his wife when he can’t find a partner. This will eventually ensure more golfing holidays at places like Bali and Hawaii where spas and good shopping co-exist with golf courses. High performers in the corporate world always have wives who play golf. Can one imagine how Tiger’s sponsors must be feeling with his attempted role reversal?

The Koreans love golf and their wives also play the game dutifully. Korean women are also very particular about their fair flawless skin. In sunny climates like Delhi the women wear full sleeved shirts, gloves, full pants, a hat and a gauzy material wrapped around their hat, face and neck so that only their eyes are visible. I have always marvelled at their passion for the game under what I perceive to be very uncomfortable conditions at 45 degrees Celsius.

After news of Tiger’s escapades women are beginning to look at their golfer husbands with a puzzled look and immense expectations. We all know the adage that men play football in their twenties, tennis in their thirties and golf in their forties since the size of the ball is directly proportional to their testosterone propelled needs. How does Tiger run through so many uncomplaining ladies when my dear.......?

Sister Elin, all of us women sympathise with your condition but you surely didn’t expect a cute, rich and handsome celebrity to toe the line? Ordinary women know that husbands find the effort and work needed to perform with a wife too cumbersome while such power driven encounters shall we say is far less tiring. Stay with Tiger if you love him and he loves you, not for the kids or money since in this entire mess even you have become an international celebrity in your own right. Perhaps you should get a counsellor from your liberal home country Sweden rather than USA. Most people are rather impressed at your demonstration of alternate uses of a golf club. You must insist on royalty on Internet games that you have inspired like Break Media's Tiger Hunting and Break.com that has you chasing Tiger and mistress in his Cadillac while he tries to avoid babies, golf sticks, golf bags and trees.

I on the other hand may not even be allowed to enter the hallowed auspices of my golf club after this post:(

International Human Rights Day

2009-12-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

Sixty one years ago the United Nations invited all its members and organizations to observe Dec 10 as International Human Rights day. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared that Respect for human rights and human dignity "is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world".

This was a world reaction at a time that people were both aghast and guilty of permitting the genocide and atrocities of World War 1 and 2. It was a period when many imperialist colonies of Asia and Africa were getting their independence. People thought they would build a compassionate world. As time has gone by the subject of Human Rights is viewed by many with cynicism as we today read about Lindsay Lohan rescuing victims of human trafficking in India along with the BBC! There are celebrities, politicians and activists who support causes and make impassioned speeches but ordinary people feel that they cannot make a difference.

Eleanor Roosevelt had said "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works." If you were to hear the speech of Sunitha Krishnan on http://www.ted.com/talks/sunitha_krishnan_tedindia.html she begs everyone to stop the perpetrators of human trafficking by identifying them at a grass root level. Trouble makers exist and grow amidst us and we often watch them start as attention seekers who we dismiss as a temporary phenomenon. Within a short space of time they institutionalize their beliefs and become too powerful to be handled by individuals. If we looked within ourselves honestly we will acknowledge that each of us have often watched crimes and not reacted to avoid confrontation and because it works to our advantage.

Basic economics teach us that supply meets demand. If the rich did not demand organs for transplant the poor would not be duped or lured into organ trading. If housework was not so distasteful, maids would not be “recruited” through agencies that are obviously exploitative. We ignore child labour and despite knowing the fact that the underbelly of crime controls begging we give them money pretending it is good “karma”. Only a demand creates the USD 9 Billion Human Trafficking industry. One of our highest rated TV programs in India is “Balika Vadhu” which has child marriage as a backdrop. Wimbledon saw men and women have equal prize money only in 2007. Most people still discriminate based on sexual preferences, religion and caste in India. The UN is expected to ratify that the Indian Caste system represents Human Rights discrimination while Nepal has at least acknowledged it and sought international assistance to eliminate caste system in its country. One of the most prevalent forms of human rights abuse comes from governments in power where people are victimized for their political ideology and demands under the guise of national security.

Organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights watch, The International Centre for Transitional Justice, The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, The Crimes of War Project, Physicians for Human Rights and the United Nations High Commission for Human rights play an immense role in their fight for human rights internationally. Developed countries have anonymous help lines that actually work where human rights abuse can be reported.

The first step is to be aware of these issues and secondly act upon them in our little spheres of life. While human vices will always encourage such corruption we hope this century will see a major advancement in the way we treat fellow human beings.

The object of my envy

2009-12-07T08:37:00.000-08:00

My daughter bought a mobile phone for her eighteenth birthday which I have been looking at with the green eye. It’s a beautiful and self indulgent lifestyle gadget. The screen is three times that of my I-pod and the acoustic is better than my laptop. She takes out a stick contraption from a hidden compartment to type and looks like Bridgette Bardot with a long cigarette holder in Cannes, without the ill effects of tobacco. When she wants to switch off the alarm she just flips the phone downwards unlike me who has to switch on the lamp, rub my eyes, put on reading glasses and fumble. She also has a plectrum to play a guitar on the phone which defies my imagination. She can click a photograph of herself while looking at her own image which as you may imagine can really knock off the monotony of any situation.

I want to join the segment of cool people who carry such multi-coloured clever instruments but I disqualify on three counts. Firstly when I approach a mobile phone shop they do a demographic and psychographic assessment the moment I step in. The sales man will look at my current instrument and history will repeat itself once again with only business phones with high battery power, large memory, big bold letters on the screen, a scratch resistant body being shown. I usually get beaten into submission with yet another black functional phone since they do not make such pieces in Technicolor. No demonstration is needed and the purchase is done in five minutes. When my eighteen year old buys a phone it’s an event with multiple shops visited, demonstrations willingly being given for hours by youngsters who really understand appreciate and empathise with her consumer needs. The sales guy in this case had to be stopped from playing the guitar on the cell phone screen since Ma was fainting with luncheon hunger pangs at 3 pm.

Secondly my phone is my life line to juggling all the roles I play as mom, parent of school kid, work person, woman, housekeeper, hostess, guest, friend and daughter. I have managed to transform the art of most necessities into a remote processing operation. This translates to thousands of numbers that need to be stored which multiply at an alarming rate. Apparently people who use sexy phones do not actually store numbers and call people, they only receive calls. In some cases the photograph of the person calling will flash with ring tones specially allocated to them.

Thirdly my work associates do not trust me with such a gizmo. They have visions of me watching a Robbie Williams video while waiting at a client office or making goofy faces and clicking self portraits in a vacant meeting room which would not be very good for our business image. I had once installed a Guns and Roses song as my ring tone which was not shall we say well received. Apparently black gadgets are good for ones brand equity, just as black shoes, black jacket, black skirt and white shirt. They make a person look smart and intelligent.

Parental aspirations

2009-12-05T01:19:00.000-08:00

Most parents ascribe the contentment and achievements of their children as being the primary factor for long term happiness. While economists and psychologists may argue about this being the foremost parameter in their measurement of happiness in their laboratory and statistical analysis, I speak as a layman from what I know and observe.

When the child incubates in a mother’s womb the parents only pray for a strong and healthy child. After spending forty five days as a slot machine for food, diapers and cleaning one is blessed when the child finally recognizes the parent with a fixed momentary stare. It is a while before the child smiles, grasps one fingers and then looks at one with unmitigated adulation and love. At this juncture the parent only desires that the child always be happy and tries to ensure there are no obstacles in the way to his or her aspirations. The choice of primary school is based on the same belief and institutions are scoured to find one with the highest teacher to student ratio, lowest work load and an emphasis on extra curricular activity. One wants to give opportunity because one believes that only by trial and error will children discover their potential and what makes them happy.

Somewhere along the line the parents who are now no longer enthusiastic and idealist youngsters tend to forget the basic factor that drove them for the initial fourteen years and begin to get competitive about their children. By this time parents too have reached middle age and are victims of unfulfilled dreams and sociological pressures in their measure of achievement. Parents tend to blur the distinction between happiness and monetary achievement and push the child towards the later. What we term as the difficult adolescence period is perhaps only a break down in communication. The parent no longer understands the thoughts, peer pressures, music, the language and the aspirations of the child.

This leads to a painful period where the child who has been encouraged to lead life in a manner to encourage independent thought and judgment is forced to make choices based on parental pressures. Parents perceive careers in the same context of their own generation and do not want to take the risk of the unknown. This is why we rarely see students with a creative mind and a high IQ score wander into unknown territories. It takes a great parent to produce a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, to believe in them and let them dream. It is perhaps this reason that drives a nation of over one billion people to produce great doctors, engineers and statisticians but few great athletes, Nobel laureates or path breakers in any field.

Look around and ask a child what they want to do in life when they are seventeen years old. They will state careers based on perceptions of social success rather than end objectives Even if one asks then what they would like to study they will name institutions rather than subjects. My school Principal Mr. S. R. N. Rao who was a visionary educationist always stated much to the disgust of parents in the 1970s that it was okay for the kids to select subjects and careers and experiment with them. He urged students to change their subject of education midstream if it did not sustain their interest. He stated that it would be better to take a few extra years in one’s education rather than later lament in life that one was stuck in a rut doing something that does not hold ones interest.

The Twilight series

2009-11-30T08:14:00.000-08:00

Eighteen months ago my daughter said she wanted to buy a novel which had created such a buzz that it was expected to surpass Harry Potter in its popularity. “Twilight” is a teenage romance written by debut novelist Stephanie Meyer which was apparently rejected by 14 agents before being published in 2005. The book has sold 17 million copies and has been translated to 37 languages. The author has written a series of four books in the Twilight series. While the first movie adaptation has been released in India last week to packed houses the second movie is currently the number one international grosser.

I decided to read the book first since my daughter had an exam. She asked me at the breakfast table how the novel was progressing. I peered at her over my cereal and asked her if she knew that the book was about the love affair between a 17 year old girl and a vampire. She gave me a cheesy grin and nodded a yes. I sarcastically told her it was fascinating to read of the vampire’s self control when he was amorous with the heroine since his soul (?) desired love but his vitals wanted to drink her blood. The storyline has a vampire family of six which drinks animal blood which they say satiates but does not satisfy their hunger and compares it to a human eating tofu at every meal. They are ice cold to the touch, don’t eat or sleep, sparkle like diamonds in the sun and play baseball for amusement!

The narration is a drag and the language average. I understood why the book so successful only after I watched the first movie. The dashing Robert Pattinson whom some may recall as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter movies plays the lead vampire. He is lusting for the heroine Kristen Stewart who is projected as quite a passive uninspiring young lady who keeps pleading with him to convert her to a vampire. The movie addresses two fantasies of the audience. Firstly a young man’s desire to remain a perennial youthful and immortal seventeen years of age in appearance and have the maturity, knowledge and riches of one who is four hundred years old. Secondly it addresses a young girl’s dream for a boyfriend who despite being rich and handsome is zero maintenance, protects the girl against all danger, can read everyone’s mind but hers and has amazing self restraint despite all provocation. Stephanie Meyers has unveiled a fool proof stupendous formula to keep them coming. Robert Pattinson is in such demand that he is being proclaimed as the next Leonardo Di Caprio. While I may completely disagree to such comparisons I have seen tweens, teens and even the late twenty year olds in office gushing over him! I also don't think the audience segment in my age group determines the box office success of any film :(

Airbrushing Celebrities

2009-11-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

In the past week there has been a big hullaballoo about the Demi Moore’s cover photograph in the woman’s magazine “W”. Photographers and people in the media and industry have claimed that she has used a body double and even identified the model that they claim was used. One well known photographer has even offered a prize of USD 5000 to anyone who can prove that the picture has not been tampered with. I have seen the cover of the magazine in which beautiful Demi is wearing a metallic grey dress which covers as much as a small swimsuit and I am afraid to state what I feel lest it be misinterpreted as sour grapes.

If I were to translate the writings of a brilliant Portuguese writer in Brazil and write it as my own in this post you would call me a plagiarist. Students submitting reports have marks deducted for copying even a sentence from another published work. Lots of people use software to check the extent to which a certain creation of writing has in common to another on the internet. Every fashion show has designers crying foul about their works being copied by another. There are laws covering this entire ambit which falls under the purview intellectual property rights.

The media and photographers have openly been giving interviews about how they have to constantly “airbrush” images of celebrities. They have to check all photographs with a celebrity’s publicist before printing it. Magazines like Hello and OK have carved out an audience by promising to deliver the real side of their favourite celebrities.

Why should there be one set of rules for the written word and another for images? By digitally enhancing an image reality is being misrepresented. However these images form the basis of many a person’s goals, ambitions and self esteem. With matters which are so unreal being the driver people turn to anorexia, surgery and a depleted self esteem. If Demi after three childbirths at the age of 47 can have the body of a teenager why aren’t we even close to the image represented?

I created my company’s website a decade ago when there were minimal rules in place for infringement on the internet. Matters have progressed very rapidly on IPR on the internet which leads me to wonder why law enforcement on digital photography is so lax in the glamour world. It’s a ridiculous situation to let imaging software drive young people to unrealistic goals and deliver huge pay checks to celebrities who don’t deserve it.

My personal ode to Mumbai 26/11/08

2009-11-26T02:29:00.000-08:00

“Mamu, do you think I should go to the Marriott tomorrow morning? There seems to be some "Gadar" near Leopold café.” Sixteen bankers were flying into Mumbai on 26th Nov to attend an interview with an overseas client and my colleague’s young niece had offered to coordinate the event. The television reported that there were loud noises outside Leopold café in Colaba but no one was sure of the cause. The next hour slowly developed into our worst nightmare. We called our client who was at the Dubai airport and advised him to cancel his trip. My efficient colleague Vaishali Sharma spent most of the evening and night canceling tickets and assuaging people that they would not lose money.

I called my brother who is a journalist at Mumbai which translates into a lifestyle ranging from hobnobbing with celebrities at upscale venues, commuting by trains and the occasional drink at Leopold cafe. Luckily he had missed the Victoria Terminus shooting by an hour but he had interviewed someone at Trident that very morning and attended a party at Taj the previous evening.

I had tears in my eyes as I watched the dome of the Taj burning. For anyone who has grown up in Mumbai the Taj epitomized elegance and achievement. My mother in law spent fourteen years working in the housekeeping department of the Taj. A Masters in Sanskrit from Allahabad University, this was a career chosen by a spunky lady married to a railway officer in Badhwar Park to supplement their income. I remember giggling with her and visiting all the suites in the old wing of the Taj with her master key when her son courted me. His education at IIT was paid by a Taj scholarship. My brother in law’s first job before he emigrated was as a management trainee of the Taj.

I realized that my daughter and Ma were looking very stricken sitting next to me. Only then did I remember that I was supposed to be staying in the hotel seven days to the event. In fact I had made a big deal about it because I had never stayed at the Taj. My daughter used to tell me to remember to wave at tourists from my window when they looked up to see this landmark building. I recalled at that moment that my eight year old daughter had started to cry after the 9/11 bombing of the Twin Towers and said “Mom there must be kids in New York whose parents were working in that building.”

Psychologists state that one of the biggest influencers of generation Y and Z is the violence that prevails in society. The children know from a young age that senseless terrorism can affect them and their loved ones. We can only hope that they emerge stronger to combat this violence in society rather than accept it as a norm.

Reunions

2009-11-23T23:30:00.000-08:00

One realises that one is approaching middle age when one looks forward to school and college reunions with as much excitement as Kate Winslet to the Oscar nominations. People transform into regressed versions of themselves trying to replay their persona of yester years. Mates are tracked down from all parts of the world and it’s a heady feeling to be serenaded by so many classmates who claim that your presence will make all the difference to the event. When one is over forty years of age it’s not common to feel such a thrill.

People quickly start to focus on the D-day with the vigour of a Punjabi socialite bride going for her nuptials. One joins a gym, starts to diet and keeps the coveted dress in one’s line of vision like the mother preparing for the TV show in “Requiem for a Dream”. People learn the lines of corny ghazals in case they are asked to sing and dig out the best family photographs to carry in the purse. The chief organiser is getting mushy memorabilia manufactured that one will tearfully carry home.

The only reunion I have attended was the twenty fifth one of my school at Mumbai which was very enjoyable. In my generation most kids ended up as engineers or doctors and emigarted for the magical green card. My NRI school buddies flew in from overseas for the reunion. It was perhaps the only time all the boys of the class spoke to all the girls of the class and vice versa.

I bumped into a junior from MBA School who had just attended her twentieth reunion. She wistfully sighed and stated that she had discovered twenty years too late that her husband wasn’t the only cute and funny guy in campus.

A close friend is planning to attend his twenty fifth IIT Mumbai reunion. He says he and his friends are planning to relive memories with local brew at Ratna Liquor Centre (RLC) and eat special “dry dinner” of cucumber sandwiches with lots of Amul butter and strawberry milkshake!! We do hope these doyens of industry will let better sense prevail before D-day and realise their single malt first class constitutions may not survive such masochism. Another friend is presently attending a reunion of his batch of management trainees in an organisation on the sunny beaches of Thailand!

The best part of a reunion is planning it and getting everyone hooked on email in a pleasant preliminary banter which has all the excitement of a courtship. The final event is much like a marriage- lots of smiles and photographs in a blur. After one meets, renews contacts and promises to stay in touch, life inevitably reverts to the routine humdrum.

Abrar Alvi

2009-11-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

It’s very creepy when one reads a book on a man’s life only to hear that he expired on the very day that one finished reading the book. One almost feels guilty at not having appreciated him during his life.

I had bought Satya Saran’s book on Abrar Alvi’s life with Guru Dutt four months back. I finished reading it last week on Wednesday Nov 18th and learnt that he passed away at Mumbai the same day. The book is not a major literary masterpiece but its narrative is light and it gave a layperson like me an insight into an era of film making which saw strong convictions, friendships and a delivery of beautiful cinema against all odds. Abrar Alvi was Guru Dutt’s closest friend who wrote the stories and screenplay for his films for ten years. He also directed “Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam”. Abrar was the last person to spend the evening with Guru Dutt before he killed himself. The movie Pyaasa which Time magazine included as the top 100 films of the century was written by Abraarsaab and was based on his relationship with a prostitute named Gulabo. In an era of pristine hindi and urdu being the dialect of films he was the first person to introduce the language spoken by the common man in his script. He wrote the screenplay for twenty two films and directed only one. He was eighty two years old when he expired of a prolonged illness.

My exposure to Guru Dutt films was through Doordarshan in the 1970s and 1980s. When there were options like Dharamji, AB and Rajeshbabu one did not fancy Guru Dutt’s sob stories. Everyone seemed to be rather sad in his movies which always had spectacular music. With age I began to question my rash judgement which led me to revisit his films. I began to appreciate the reason why he was called such a master and also realised that one needed maturity to understand the sensitivity of his work.

I wonder what I may discover in the Pandora’s Box if I ever had the time and inclination to go down memory lane to uncover masters that I may not have noticed in the callowness of my youth.

IITF 2009 at Delhi

2009-11-23T03:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday 125000 people showed up for the 29th International Trade Fair at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. This is a 14 day fair with 29 countries participating and 7500 exhibitors some of which are from India. The first 5 days are open only for business visitors after which the public can visit it for 9 days. The media has been whipping up the enthusiasm levels with reports ranging from the Thai pavilion giving good massages, Burma pavilion selling rubies, Cuba taking orders for cigars, Turkey selling exquisite trinkets, Afghanistan selling almonds and dry fruits. The city is snarling with traffic jams and the Metro authorities are cracking up at the crowds in the underground.

People go to the fair to get a general exposure to the world, the culture and wares from different countries, to shop and to eat at an entry fee of Rs.30 which is less than half a Euro. They even queue up to sample food from various countries and states in India. They watch some free entertainment sponsored by the Delhi government. The states adjoining Delhi have had people commuting into the city to go to the International fair.

The organizers have done a superlative job of synchronizing all the needs of the consumer under one umbrella and also managing to increase the traffic in tandem with the metro and the Delhi Transport. They have provided food, entertainment, shopping and information at a pleasant outdoor temperature of 14 degrees centigrade. While most of Delhi’s upscale malls and markets go empty, people are jostling to buy non essentials commodities at the Trade fair.

Consumer marketers have to watch this closely. There is obviously a huge latent need that is not being fulfilled which is the need for intelligent entertainment at a reasonable cost. There is a curiosity for the culture and produce of different lands. There is also an appreciation of the authenticity of the product if it is sold under the aegis of a government sponsored event. Very often a luxury product from the international market will only be available at snobbish high margin outlets away from the grasp of the average consumer. The crowds buying luxury products at the fair indicates that there is a market for high quality international merchandise at acceptable price levels.

International consumer marketers have always slapped their heads in frustration trying to understand the Indian consumer who despite showing such initial enthusiasm levels for the new and unknown product slip back into the comfort zone of “Indianness”. Be it our apparel, our difficult to cook food, our language or customs – while we may look submissive we may perhaps be the most obstinate race in changing our habits.

Diversity

2009-11-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

We were sitting at the dining table when Ma said the food was very bland. I assumed that since we don’t entertain very often and have lacklustre healthy meals we would probably bore a good cook to tears. Ma however disagreed because the wages of the cook was on par with better talent available in the market.

Isn’t it the same story in the corporate world? We test for creativity, energy,”out of the box thinking” and fire in the belly. During the interview we ask about favourite authors, role models in life, what kind of discussion you would have with god over dinner and opinions on topics as varied as Iraq, global warming and the Hadron Collider. Human Resources will inform everyone of how they cherry picked the best and brightest from the schools. After that lots of money will be spent during induction training trying to wipe out the wondrous curiosity of the youngsters to make them obedient clones. Our management school entrance exams also assist in creating the prototype of the future manager. With all entrance exams in India still associating the measurement of IQ with the ability to do elementary mathematics at break neck speeds, most of the MBAs are engineers and most engineers who qualify do not want an engineering job and want a MBA at all costs.

Performance management tools such as the 360 degree appraisal shall further ensure that we are one happy family. For in this tool we measure ourselves, our junior’s measure us, our vendors measure us and the boss measures us. No guesses as to what happens if one tries to break this symbiotic relationship. In a particular organisation in which I had worked everyone smoked the same brand of cigarette as the number one honcho.

Where does industry seek creativity when absolutely necessary? In the variable pay consultant. The logic generally used is that creative people do not like to fit into the mould and therefore are self employed. It’s also true that most creative people are terrible at administration and book-keeping which is essential to entrepreneurship. This makes one wonder if the myth was started by people who found the management challenge of creative people too tedious to keep them on a permanent payroll.

I had commented a month ago to my brother’s article in the Economic Times that Diversity today means far more than gender, religion, ethnicity etc. We need to include diversity in creativity and education, diversity in EQ and IQ in our industry. Our psychological tools need to measure how much we can evolve from disparity and tolerate it as much as how popular we are with everyone. As an article in a recent issue of the economist points out, we have too many nice boring people at the helm, let’s bring in some colour. After all the nice clones were instrumental in creating the current depression so we may as well have some fun at work.

Dastkar Nature Bazaar

2009-11-16T03:54:00.000-08:00

The ninth Dastkar Nature Bazaar concluded in Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, Janpath on Saturday November 14th, 2009. Dastkar is a NGO which was started by six like minded women in 1981 and is currently headed by Laila Tyabji in Delhi. The uniqueness of Dastkar is that it trains the artisans through workshops, teaches them about consumer tastes and trends and helps them market the produce both nationally and internationally.

A stroll through the Dastkar Bazaar is quite an experience because one can actually speak to the craftsmen or their family members who sell their wares. On enquiry they will tell you that they do not have retail establishments. Yet one feels like one has stepped into a design house catering for the elite. In a country like India, while an artisan has the talent they don’t have the negotiating power or ability to source the best raw material. Also in our value conscious buying behavior we tend to expect an object of desire to look as or more expensive than the cost. This is where Dastkar scores over the merchandise in the state emporiums providing understated elegance at reasonable prices. One encountered a lady who had actually painted Madhubani art all over a Tussar sari that I purchased, another person who ran an establishment in a household in Shantiniketan to make Katha work, and a household from MP supplying the elusive Maheshwari saris.

Imagine walking by a stall in Delhi and encountering smiling quirky animal figurines in ceramic that look like miniature Gaudi sculptures. The stall indicated that it was a produce from Orchha in Gujarat. On chatting with the gentleman at the counter he explained that his wife was the creator of the work and she was a graduate from the National Institute of Design (NID). She had her studio in Anand and only retailed through Dastkar.

A couple was selling natural products from Uttaranchal made in a state of the art factory by the locals of the village through the NGO Aarohi and they invited us to visit them in their village Satoli. I bought sculpture from the son of an artisan at Konarak, Orissa who had been given a national award by the President of India. He had translated a six inch Krishna figurine from the National gallery to a one foot statue in the green stone from Orissa- Kendumundi. They too assured me passes if I ever were to visit them during the Konarak Odissi dance festival.

The atmosphere in the Bazaar is very pleasant. The visitors are non aggressive, very relaxed and a lot of them just admire the works and chat with the artisans. A large food court caters to the hungry, tired or bored. For those who run out of cash like I did, a centralized point accepts credit card payments and settles the money to the artisans overnight.

Dastkar rarely advertises or promotes its exhibitions. Their success and approach is worthy of a case study. Dastkar has exhibitions in every major city in India and also exports. In Delhi, they will hold a Basant Bazaar in a few months. I look forward to another interesting and leisurely visit.

Domestic Wildlife

2009-11-13T02:30:00.000-08:00

Most of us prefer to wake up in the morning and see a clear blue sky, hear birds chirping on the branches of green foliage and feel a gentle breeze while having the morning cuppa of wake up brew. This aspiration has led to the growth of high priced suburban townships around cities swarming with money making machines in skyscrapers. We however tend to forget that in shifting our abode we may have displaced creatures from their natural habitat when we build our pretty condominiums. We like to hear the birds chirp as long as they build their nests and lay their eggs in another environment. We like the greenery and hate the insects and other reptiles that zip past in the lobby. We would prefer to watch a peacock do a little dance on the verandah during the morning brew and thereafter not have to bother about their mundane existence.

Nine years ago I had telephoned my maid in the afternoon from my work station to check if my daughter had returned safely from school. She grunted a per-functionary affirmative statement and then suddenly let out an ear piercing shriek. Apparently she had left the main door ajar and a monkey had strolled into the apartment. I kept trying to scream louder than her to make her realize that monkeys bite little girls and my daughter should not be let out of the bedroom to make friends with the mammal. She was distraught and kept weeping because the monkey was running amuck in the kitchen and after breaking some crockery was eating the “Gajar ka Halwa” – an Indian dessert that she had lovingly made that morning. I was very happy at this development and urged her to let the monkey continue eating. Under no circumstance was the animal to stroll near my daughter's bedroom or break the crystal in the drawing room. During this telephonic drama my colleague had the presence of mind to ring his “man-friday” and instruct him to go over to my residence to assist the maid. The good man went across to my house brandishing a stick and shooed away the monkey.

I pity the service engineers who take care of my air-conditioners whose primary job description is to remove twigs placed by birds into the crevices of my air-con. We remove the nests and twigs regularly from the top of the AC and sometimes even nurture the baby pigeons until they can fly. If the domestic help are trying to conceive a baby then they refuse to help because the gods will frown and punish them for tampering with a nest. The cleaning task is then upwardly delegated to a person who already procreated. My “dhobi” or ironing man offered to help me in this exercise. I was suspicious and questioned him on his intentions. I realized that his tastes were similar to the French and he thought pigeon meat constituted gourmet cuisine.

Recently I had fourteen girls from Kent visit my daughter’s school on an exchange program. I asked a young nervous lady if she found India to be what she had imagined. She said that she had expected better roads (Delhi is the best we have!) and was appalled at the number of cows, dogs and monkeys that she had seen. My daughter’s friend who was sprawled on the sofa looked at the memsahib and said “I saw a Fox in your back yard when I lived with you that freaked me out as much as our monkeys. My only encounter with a fox till date has been in the pages of Red Riding hood. When in Rome, live like the Romans.” I looked at the girl with admiration – we have to learn how to be non apologetic from the younger generation.

Elitist Education

2009-11-11T03:04:00.000-08:00

Can a country like India where demand for good quality education outweighs the supply for it afford to have elitist institutions? Thirty one percent of our population is less than fourteen years of age and our literacy rate is 61 % which gives one an idea of the challenges at hand. The government outlay for education was a whooping 13,100 crores in 2009 but a large part of it remains un-utilized.

The travails of the pressure of our education system begin at an early age. There are waitlists and interviews at play schools that promise to “groom” toddlers to be more acceptable to elementary schools. High achiever parents feel like failures as they are interviewed by a panel including psychologists and declined admission for their children. Teenagers give up years of their adolescence attending coaching classes for areas as disparate as law, medicine, design and engineering. Parents mortgage houses and take loans to fulfill the dreams of their progeny and send them overseas or to private institutions.

If this is what is faced by families with resources one can imagine the plight of those who have the dreams and not the means. Government schools have blips of brilliance but on a generic level need revamping and closer monitoring. The Delhi government announced a five percent quota in private schools in 2008 which they intend to increase to twenty seven per cent by 2013. I used to learn Bharatnatyam from a professional dancer whose sons were admitted to DPS through this scheme. Despite the waiver of fees he still found it difficult to meet the extra tuition, uniforms and books that the teenage boys required. Some schools like DPS and St.Xavier’s utilize their premises, buses and faculty to run a parallel school in the afternoons and evenings. Despite subsidies, the average cost that a parent incurs per student could run from Rs.600/- in elementary school to Rs.1200/- per month in senior school. This would include uniforms, books, tiffin, supplementary tuitions and extra curricular activities. In a country where the minimum wage ranges from Rs.2000/- to Rs.3500/- per month in various states one can imagine the pressure on the family. When the child graduates or passes high school he or she frequently gets a job similar to what their parents did since during the period of the generation the minimum criteria for same job may have risen. The services sector which has been growing at the highest rate in the country needs youngsters who speak English fluently, a skill not stressed in elementary state funded education.

Certain college like HR College Mumbai, St.Xavier’s Kolkata and Mumbai have degree courses in two or three shifts in their premises which lessens the pressure on admissions. This should be extended by other colleges until we build new institutions. The government announced 8 new IITs and 7 new IIMs in 2008 much to the dismay of the academicians. The institutes have opened under the aegis of established mother IITs and IIMs in temporary premises. The Directors and Deans have advertised and met aspiring professors in India and internationally and made several offers this year. To attract academicians from the private sector and overseas, compensation levels fixed by the Human Resources Ministry are topped up by grants given by the private sector. In certain cases corporates release their employees for short term courses or evening courses.

In market economics supply usually meets demand which is why we have seen private colleges cropping up with exorbitant fees. Some of these institutions who have had the patience have managed to build centers of excellence in contained educational townships where they have organically grown from one area of specialization to another. Others have grown their bank balances by succumbing to the temptations of mediocrity that lucre so easily provides.

Maoist Terrain

2009-11-07T03:20:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I drove from Dhanbad to Kharagpur. The recently repaired National Highway 60 meanders through the Sal Bon or the Forest of the Shorea Robusta trees past Raniganj, Bankura and Salboni through small villages of West Bengal. As one passed the villages and stopped for chai, one marveled at the resilience of the thatched mud huts which withstand the monsoon rains. The central pond appeared to be the focal point of the village where cattle and children bathe, women wash clothes and collect water in mud pots. Once in a while our vehicle got stuck behind a herd of cattle and goats which ignored the loud honks of our Innova and had to be gently prodded to let us pass. We even saw an Elephant carrying logs of the Sal tree on the Highway much to the delight of my expatriate friends.

This trip had been planned well in advance and I had been reading the news on the Maoist movement in this terrain with trepidation. As we passed the railway “level crossing” very close to where the Rajdhani express had been temporarily hijacked by the Maoists, I could not contain myself and decided to strike conversation with my driver who appeared to be the complete antithesis of Adiga’s hero in White Tiger. The man chuckled to himself and started to give me his view on the subject. He believed that the politicians had used the people as vote banks and had neglected them. The common man was fed up with promises and no action. He said that the Maoists would never harm the common man and only hated the establishment and the police. He praised them for releasing twenty three poor village women who were in custody in lieu of a single policeman, he admired them for not harming a single person in the Rajdhani express. He however also said that there was more to it than meets the eye because how can the third lieutenant of the Maoist movement have an AK 47 while our policemen who are sent to find them have only lathies? The driver earned a salary of Rupees six thousand and had the aptitude of a politician! After a while he meandered from the subject to explain how the Maoist Adivasis (politically incorrect terminology) made liquor from the Mohua flowers and captured nectar from the Palmyra palm to make potent “Taadi”.

Over dinner that evening I casually asked a senior Professor his views on the matter. He said that he had not seen any change or development in the lifestyle and education levels in the “jungle folk” who lived five kilometers from the campus from the time that he was a student forty years ago till date. The only two additions to their life were the mobile phone and television. He said the later had only increased their angst since this tiny window to the world clearly showed them the economic disparity between them and others in the country. He also argued that no one had denied them opportunities available to every citizen of India. However since they lacked the initiative for self improvement, society should have perhaps lent a stronger helping hand to bridge the gap.

Another Professor who regularly takes his students on field excursions to gather data for analysis said that since 2005 the Maoists in the region frequently mistook the students for undercover agents and the police thought they were Maoists. Thereafter, the students had to register themselves at the local police station which stipulated rules for such field trips. The students could not meander beyond 50 meters of the main road, they had to be accompanied by a local person approved by the police, had to wear their student id cards and had to return to base camp by 4 pm.

Everyone seems to have a view and explanation for this social issue. However the fundamental question that haunts me is that how are the Maoists getting so many sophisticated weapons in a country where there is arms control and who is funding this movement?

Right to dignity

2009-10-29T05:12:00.000-07:00

I am seriously considering the prospect of wearing adult diapers during my visit to some key technical education institutes in Jharkhand and West Bengal next week. I will be driving in to visit them with a team of international delegates who fund, hire from and collaborate with these institutes. The topography on our route is scattered with low lying paddy fields and does not have natural barriers of vision if you get the drift.

Most girls who attend free elementary education in India drop out by puberty because schools do not have toilets. Fifty percent of the population of the country does not have access to such facilities which led to the “No Toilet no Bride” movement across rural India where brides refuse grooms until they build a toilet in their home.

This would be just another economic statistic to be discussed in the drawing room. Imagine my plight as I stand in my business suit, stockinged feet in leather pumps and much to the amusement of my fellow delegates peer into the environment for the sight of a bush!

It is myopic for the government to build institutes in locations which have such low infrastructure on basics like hotels, air strips, car rentals and sanitation. They run the risk of not being embraced into the international community if visiting them is such an event.

India Gender Gap

2009-10-28T03:57:00.000-07:00

The World Economic Forum has reported its 2009 finding of the Global Gender Gap index. Out of 134 countries measured India has ranked 114th falling from the 98th position in 2006. Other nations sharing a similar status are Korea (115), Iran (128) and Pakistan (132). China which used to be at the 57th position is now at the 60th position and not surprisingly the Scandinavian countries top the list in the top 4 positions.

WEP measures the Gap by distribution of resources and opportunities between males and females in a country. It is based on four factors – economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, health and survival. Given the fact that India is a democracy we measure extremely poorly on the other factors. Female infanticide has been on the rise since Independence with the female male ratio being 93 to 100 on a national average and being as low as 70 in Punjab. Our last census showed a literacy rate of close to 50% for women. India accounts for 22% of the maternal deaths in the world.

India is a strange land of duplicity. This is a country where a major part of the population worships “Devi Mata” – the female goddess. A place where the leader of the ruling party is a woman and whose displeasure can shake up the lives of stalwart politicians and governments. Yet the achievements of the woman child are always secondary to the male child even in the most educated families. My mother in law who is a very smart and spunky lady had also insisted that the baby had been “swapped” by mistake in the operation theatre when my daughter was born until she was scolded by her son. I watch the mothers of my dear friends who are very successful in their profession constantly lamenting abut how their daughters are failures since they have not married or had children.

Strangely it is the woman who frequently reinforces the social inequality.Ekta Kapoor created an entire genre of sitcoms which encapsulates every demonic characteristic of humanity in its portrayal of women. Most young ladies that one interviews either state their mothers as role models for their sacrificing nature or well known male personalities. Unless educated women start taking pride in their identity and support other women rather than take the easy path of being popular with those in power we will continue to lag behind.

The duplicity on the economic development has produced the cracks for the existence of the Maoist movement. Let us hope that the gender gap does not lead to such significant social ramifications.