homeland insecurities

Let's talk about the cat pee

2011-03-07T02:32:00.003+05:30

Everyone knows the house we bought as the one formerly with all the cats. Each time we've been in there, the air gets clearer and clearer. BUT there is a distinct cat pee odor. We assume that sanding the floors will take care of it -- and painting AND a good scrubbing -- but worry that every now and then we might still catch a whiff. Which will seriously gross me out. Anyone know if there's anything we should do NOW, before they begin sanding etc.

Where we stand...

2011-03-06T18:47:00.003+05:30

Considering we just closed on Thursday, we've made great progress. On Friday we had contractors in and out (along with the junk-hauling guys) to give us estimates. Our priorities before move-in are paint, floors, replacement of a lead water main and demolition of a wall in the kitchen. And cleaning!

Because we had to source so many ideas from other sites, here's a breakdown to hopefully make someone's renovation in Queens a little easier. One of my biggest pet peeves of all those sites is that they tell you XYZ is good or great but they never tell you how much they spent. I know houses, sizes and scope of work vary greatly but it's the thing I still want to know most.

Water main -- The inspector found lead content of 15 parts per million - just on the cusp of acceptable. Well, it wasn't acceptable to us so we are replacing the water main. Two companies in NYC that came highly recommended were Harris Plumbing and Balkan. We're going with Balkan for $2,600.

Painting -- We got three estimates ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 to sand the walls, paint them and do all the trims. We're going with a guy named John from Forest Hills who is exclusively a painting contractor and seems to know what he's doing. He started this morning!

Floors -- This is a case where we are not going with the cheapest but the guy in the middle. Estimates to sand and rip up carpets from the floors of a 1900-square foot home ranged from $2,200 to $5,000. We went with Jan Zejia, who did our floors in the coop we just sold. He's charging $2,500.

Demo - Haven't found anyone yet. Here's hoping. Stay tuned. And am still obsessed with finding a matching wooden cabinet for the metal Lyons (thanks, Pam, for identifying)...

Metal vintage kitchen cabinets

2011-03-05T20:00:00.002+05:30

We had planned on a gut renovation but a walk-through with our architect and Nitin's good eye made us look at these orange metal cabinets from the 1950s with fresh perspective. We're now trying to figure out whether we can integrate the metal with our very old antique Indian furniture and perhaps some newer cabinetry/countertop to bridge these two worlds. If anyone has ideas, holler. I've been looking through the web site that seems the Bible on this stuff -- run by Pam Kueber -- but am not seeing a blend of the metal "mod" look with the heavy wooden antique style that Indian furniture almost forces.

A new set of insecurities

2011-03-05T19:38:00.003+05:30

In keeping with this blog's original and not-yet-ready-to die theme, we're back in our quest to create a home. This time, we're getting a bit more specific: a 1920s Tudor-style rowhouse in Jackson Heights historic landmark district. We are only the third owners of the house, and the seller lived there for 52 years so we have our work cut out for us.

Naya!

2009-03-07T22:17:00.001+05:30

Mommy: Do you know what a journalist does? Naya: Ummm... they work really hard.

And then...
Naya: You don't know how to dance. See, I am Hindi. WE know how to dance.

Naya on sleep and politics

2008-10-03T18:47:00.001+05:30

Mommy: Children need to sleep earlier. I am not a child.
Naya: You are a child. Your mom's child.

---
Mommy: I don't know which job I should take. Brand X or Brand Y.
Naya: You should just work for John McCain.

Patriotic Naya-ism

2008-08-28T22:22:00.001+05:30

Naya: I want to be Assamese president of New York. No, wait, the Hindi one of Orissa.

And then today, a heartbreaking Naya-ism

Naya: Mommy, I want to travel again.
Mommy: Where do you want to go?
Naya: To Kashmir.
Mommy: There's a lot of fighting there now.
Naya: Then let's go when it's over.

Swimming lesson/School issues again

2008-08-02T22:49:00.002+05:30

Naya has been taking swimming lessons at the Niti Bag country club. But the other day, she said this:

Are we going to the Lychee Bug Club?

As an aside, I meant to tell you about trying to get our driver's daughters into a government school. If we thought our nursery saga was nightmarish, we got our eyes opened by seeing how much harder it is for lower classes. First he asked me to get a letter from the ministry of human resource development for his daughter. I said that would be a conflict of interest given what I do but that I was happy to go with him to the school and see if I could help in some way. So on a Monday morning, we set out and put ourselves in a live of people at the principal's office. The reality is that the school actually looked clean and impressive (it is a central government school known as a Navodaya, instead of the Municipal Corp of Delhi school his daughter attends now) and the people in line looked well dressed and working class. I could see how this would be a school he and his family aspired to.

When the principal saw me and I said I was there to get the little girl beside me into school, she said: "This must be your maid's daughter."
"Driver's," I responded with a fake smile.
"Does he live in Pushp Vihar," she asked referring to the colony.
He lied and said he did. (Actually it's his uncle.)
She asked why he didn't send his daughter for the admission test held the week previous.
"I didn't know about it," he said.
After about 15 more minutes and my begging, she said there was nothing to do but said the child could appear for another test in a week's time.
Back in the car, I let the driver have it for a bunch of reasons: not taking her for the test, waiting until class 3 to get her schooling together, not considering private school even as his kids qualified to attend for free. "But ma'am, if she does well by class 8, they will give her a scholarship of Rs5,000."
"If she attends private school and does well and then goes to college, she can make that every day," I responded.
Next we drove to the offices of the Delhi BJP rep for that area. Another line and everyone seemed to be there to get a letter for school admissions.
A week later, Shruti appeared for the test.
She failed.
And her father is still being boneheaded and won't even let me pay for private school. If I can get her in on a scholarship somewhere, I think he'd agree... So that's my next course of action. Even though I think there is something to the saying that you value something if you are forced to pay for it...

Two Nayaisms

2008-07-28T20:46:00.001+05:30

Naya: H is for horse.
Mommy: So what sound does H make?
Naya: Neigh.

AND

Naya: Barack Obama is better than John McCain.
Mommy: How do you know?
Naya: Bhupen Hazarika's friends told me so.

NRI Sojourn

2008-06-29T12:38:00.004+05:30

I am back. One day soon, I will post a recap of the day-by-day, play-by play of my time in Guwahati. Until then, just take my word that it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life--between witnessing someone die and being with all of my family under one roof (which finally happened to be OUR roof). Unlike when I went to the village in my childhood, this time I appreciated the rarity of the togetherness and tried to revel in it (in between enlarging photos, hunting for the right brand of mustard oil for use in puja, sitting on the river bank at 6 a.m. for yet another offering to the gods and grandmothers, publishing memorial books, buying more and more disposable cups and plates for all the visitors--all on a diet of boiled rice and potato once a day, the food mandated by someone long ago for the bereaved.)

Because my father couldn't come for his mother's shradh on the 13th day, nor could my mother come for her brother's, I flew to them and we made up our own US version. Shockingly, it was the first formal prayer I could remember my parents having in our house, Naya's annaprasanna not counting. The picture above is courtesy of dear Stony, a friend of my grandmother too, whom he lovingly called Jumbo Jet. Ironically, the gangly white guy at the ceremony of 70 people was the one, who besides we seven Kalitas or Mukuls, had spent the most time with her.

Anyway, once I hit my 20s, I stopped crying uncontrollably when I left India/Assam because the frequency of visits made that seem silly. When I left Assam last week, I felt like I was 12 years old again only I didn't have that angry question I always posed to my parents on the LOOOONG plane ride (usually the awful Romanian Airlines, remember) back: Why did you leave? I don't understand. Why wouldn't we want to live with our grandparents?

Nope, last week, as my uncles (and I) cried more over my departure than when Aita died, I knew the answer, thanks to living here for the last 20 months in an India better off than the one my parents left. As an aside but totally related, the number of people who want me to find government jobs for them in Assam is up to four... My maternal uncle's wife's brother ... does anyone know anyone in public works and engineering in Assam?

The US was more of a blur, although I am glad I went and felt my place for the shradh was more with my nuclear family than the extended. Nitin's show sold out, my brothers took a day off and we went to the beach to relax, etc etc.

On the flight home, a packed Continental nonstop worthy of a ballad, the plane was defined by NRI kids and their weary mothers, all going back for the summer. The one seated in my row was miserable, her mother told me: She has her friends now and doesn't want to spend six weeks in Lucknow. The two boys before me in the customs line were practically bouncing off the walls, they were so excited to see their cousins. And the kids behind me, upon hearing I moved to India, promptly asked their mom: "Why don't we live in India?"

I miss that innocence, miss having a grandmother to go to, even miss fighting with my brothers on the flight.

Naya-isms to round out your life:

(She remains in the US with Nitin, his parents and mine, busy with museum visits, swimming lessons, story hour at library, dance camp and her new best friend Antonio down the street, whose mother MY mother has been having coffee and play dates with. Like I said to my parents, if you had done all this for me, I would have been the most well-adjusted, all-American gal there ever was... No wonder she doesn't want to come back.)

She knows my brothers will let her dress any way she wants so as she wore a yellow-and-blue Fab India kurta with a pink and purple skirt, she did a curtsy before me and said, "In these clothes, I look like a stepmother!"

"Ata (grandpa) eats with his hands so he belongs in India, but I eat with a fork so I will stay in America."

Her pronunciation of binoculars is the definitive Indian accent - BINO-coolers...

And she also has taken to imitating my parents now on the phone. The other day, she sat behind the couch on her play cell phone and said, in Assamese: "Yes we are all fine. Only my mother died."

On that note, I am outta here...

Column on Aita

2008-06-19T23:52:00.000+05:30

Hers was a wonderful life

MINT

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

We had a tradition, my grandmother and I. Every few years, during childhood trips to her village of Sadiya on the banks of the Brahmaputra, I would spend the last night with her. She’d scratch my head and my back and mosquito bites. Often, I sobbed, sorrowful over my impending departure.
She was stronger.
And so last week, it seemed only fitting to be there for her last night, along with about 35 other relatives huddled around a bed in my home in Guwahati.
By coincidence or calling, I was there from the beginning of her end. She saw me, who had conned her way into the intensive care unit before visiting hours, and asked if I wanted to sit, have a cup of tea.
A few hours later, she slipped into a coma.
We were told nothing could be done, so we brought her home.
Even as I write this, I feel numb at what it means to lose the only person who so represented my connection to this country in its reality. Like 40% of India, she was illiterate.
Like about half the population, she was married off before 18 (11, in her case). Like nearly two-thirds, she made her living primarily off the land.
And yet, she was one of a kind.
Over the last week, the stories have come tumbling out.
How she threatened the district’s most infamous dacoit, known as Hemen-goonda, with a kerosene lamp at night and called him a dog.
How she got around her illiteracy by lining the girls on the veranda and having them recite their studies to keep each other in check.
How she ensured the household and farm workers always toiled on a full stomach; “that way, they don’t really care if I yell at them”.
How she told my cousins to stop watching the World Wrestling Federation on TV after she learnt, on a trip to America, that it was really all fake.
Deceit, even as entertainment, had no place in her life. I mourn not as much the loss of the person—at 86, she had had a full life— but the loss of a generation that we can never get back.
Their values, however, are something I suspect to which we will, rather must, return.
Just two months ago, when my grandmother fell and broke her arm, I dropped everything and packed my husband, my daughter and a video camera.
As I wrote in a recent column, this tough-as-nails lady grew tender for the first time and thanked me for coming, told me how much my family and my alleged success mean to her.
She spent some time detailing her life’s philosophy, which—given her background and achievement, in spite of it—might hold some secrets for others.
Namely, she was thrifty. She bargained, counted her money every night, reined in extravagance.
Last week, as I rode autos and taxis to get around Guwahati, I could just hear her cringing that the Rs11 bus would have been a much better option.
She defined family broadly, forced others to think beyond their front gate, and in doing so, stirred them to action. She was often the voice called upon to represent civic concerns. In the 1980s, when a politician and singer and artist Bhupen Hazarika came to call, she chastised them for the sorry conditions of roads, schools and health care in Sadiya (as lore goes, she first fed them, then yelled).
By not being educated, she served as the ultimate example of why it matters. During family gatherings, it was often said: “What would have been if she had learnt to read?” The lack of an answer kept her children and grandchildren always reaching for more.
She was a big believer in long-term planning, even for her own death, from heavy gold bangles cut into eight pieces for each of her children to Rs10,000 she donated for the final shradh’s feast to a cream and gold mekhla chador (Assamese two-piece sari) left for my daughter.
When I contacted local newspapers to run her obituary, one editor told me he didn’t think my grandmother met standards; they preferred business leaders, politicians, “people who have made a big difference”, he told me.
“If she were alive,” I retorted, “she’d say that her life might not amount to much, but people like you will serve her dinner in her next life.”
He laughed and relented.
My obituary included these lines: “It was the end of a remarkable journey that began with her birth in the Kamrup village of Gorput to marriage in Baranghati to settlement in Sadiya, where she spent most of her life. In recent years, Mrs Kalita divided her time among her family’s homes scattered across Guwahati. Her heart—and stories—however remained in an India fast disappearing...”
As I wrote, I shed tears of regret. For so many questions and untold stories remained.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Aita - More later

2008-06-16T00:57:00.001+05:30

By S. Mitra Kalita

Jambowati Kalita, wife of late Mohan Chandra Kalita, mother to eight,
grandmother to 20, great-grandmother to four and memorable to everyone
she met, breathed her last on 9 June in her son's residence in
Panjabari, surrounded by family and friends. It was the end of a
remarkable journey that began with her birth in the Kamrup village of
Gorput to marriage in Baranghati to settlement in Sadiya, where she
spent most of her life. In recent years, Mrs Kalita divided her time
among her family's homes scattered across Guwahati. Her heart—and
stories—however remained in an India fast disappearing, where
elephants paid respects before reporting to duty, where households
grew their own food and spun their own clothes, where family was an
inclusive word that meant neighbours and extended cousins.
Despite never attending school and being married at age 11, Mrs Kalita
managed to run several enterprises from home (tamul-paan, vegetables,
eggs, pigeons, cow's milk, bamboo), handle her husband's accounts and
even travel to the US and Canada with her thumbprint image as
signature on the passport and visa. She often detailed what she
learned in the West, from the efficiency of roads and cleanliness to
the tangible loneliness ("Sometimes all you will see the whole day is
one bird," she'd say) to the culturally profound ("Wrestling is fake.
Everyone in America knows.")
During World War II, Mrs Kalita recalled, she would run into an
underground tunnel with her family as soon as she heard the planes
overhead. She lived through the earthquake of 1950, playing a role
with her husband in the rebuilding of a ravaged Sadiya. In the 1980s,
when an MLA came to visit with the singer, artist and Sadiya native Dr
Bhupen Hazarika, Mrs Kalita sat them in her drawing room and listed
all the ways they needed to improve conditions: better roads, schools,
health care. Frequently, she was the voice enlisted by the local
community to articulate their demands. Mrs Kalita feared no one, not
the frequent dacoits and thugs omnipresent in the India of then and
now; at night, if they tried to threaten her neighbours, she would go
out with a kerosene lamp and yell, "Who is this dog who has come?"
(Fittingly, she died on the day of an Asom Bandh.)
She straddled traditional values with modernity and advocacy of
progress. Her three daughters never felt their gender was an obstacle.
Because her illiteracy prevented her from supervising studies, Mrs
Kalita forced her children to shout answers from work tables on the
veranda so they could check each other. Today, each daughter—Nirupama
Mahanta, Bimala Deka, Jyosna Deka—is working professionally.
With each of her sons, too, she shared a special relationship. Her
eldest, Mohesh Chandra Kalita, retired as a vice president from
Citibank, and lives in New Jersey. Her next, Krishna Kanto Kalita,
retired as general manager, Numaligarh Refinery Ltd, and currently
works as an adviser with the ministry of health and family welfare.
Her next three sons carried on the family's businesses: transport,
cultivation, contracting. She cared deeply for her middle son, Jogen
Chandra Kalita, treating each of his three children as her own. Her
next son, Dharani Dhar Kalita, inherited Mrs Kalita's curiosity, love
of storytelling and being with people. As for the last, Mitra Ranjan
Kalita, Mrs Kalita most likened her own temper to his, although she
also passed on decency and a sense of humour.
For her grandchildren, Mrs Kalita served as the ultimate source of
inspiration and a reminder that anything is possible. Like all
grandmothers, she indulged them but, unlike many, was not
materialistic in her demonstration of love. She sought to remind each
of them of their rural roots, how lucky they were but how far they
still had to go—always with hard work and honesty. At family
gatherings, people often remarked: What would have been if she had
been given access to education?
The lack of an answer implicitly conveyed the importance of
learning—for one's entire life.
Her words and ways could be harsh and damning, yet honest. She
remained calculating, shrewd, highly observant, frugal to her last
day.
Yet Mrs Kalita never let a visitor leave without sharing a cup of
tea—and a trip down memory lane. In her final months, her own memory
failed her but she resurrected images of pre-independence Sadiya as a
British outpost and the details of each of her children's births and
temperaments as babies.
While movement to Guwahati was a necessity for the family, it was
clear Mrs Kalita preferred the days where all lived under one roof and
could be self-reliant. Ironically, in death she was granted that wish
as everyone—from seven of eight children to her American-born
granddaughter to her sister-in-law, who once lived down the road in
Sadiya—was by her side as she passed.
Her larger-than-life presence is missed but her family takes solace
and inspiration from her longevity and strength, a purposeful but
divergent path. In her children, grandchildren and the countless
people she impressed and touched, her lessons and stories will always
endure.

Mama Mia...

2008-06-02T16:58:00.005+05:30

My uncle died yesterday. He was my mother's elder brother, with a daughter exactly my age and another boy. My paternal grandmother, who could never keep track of my mother's seven brothers by name, used to call him "engineer mama". We called him Naupa Mama.
I didn't know him as well as my other mamas who used to take me to get Thums Up across the street (Bapu Mama) or bring me Gems candy regularly (Deep Mama) or stick his finger in my mouth to tell me he knew exactly what I had eaten (Bapkhan Mama). But he was definitely a fixture in our visits to India. Last week, when my aunt called and told me his kidneys had failed and the dialysis wasn't working, she told me they were pretty much just waiting for the end.
So last night, as I was at my friend Himanshu's for dinner, the call came and I knew as soon as I heard my aunt's voice. He had just died 10 minutes ago. I glanced at the wine in my hand and had a lump in my throat but didn't cry.
The calls with bad news, of course, have been coming as long as I've been alive. And I could always tell you where I was. When I was 7, it was my maternal grandfather -- and my mom was pregnant with Rahul; I was upstairs when the call came. When I was 9, it was my father's cousin, a murder detailed in the economic space of a blue aerogram; I was in the hall where we kept the crib and I started screaming. When I was 10, it was my mom's elder brother and I remember I was reading one of the Babysitter's Clubs where Claudia was the main character (was it number 2) and my mom fell down on the stair landing of our house in shock. That one, I think, hit us hardest, most unexpected, a heart attack, a scurry to the hospital, finally death in an auto rickshaw. When I was 13, my grandfather died and I remember feeling intensely sad because I had spent most of my childhood afraid of the funny way he talked, due to paralysis; it was the middle of the night and I remember my cousin was staying with us and I was embarassed to cry in front of him so I poured water into a steel glass and covered my choked-up-ness by taking sips. Six months later, my maternal grandmother died and I remember how much harder it seemed to strike my mother than when her father died. In between, there were a few baby cousins, a few close friends and neighbours from Assam. Common to all was the absolute helplessness with which we grieved and watched from afar.
I thought moving to India might have made things different but if anything it makes me ache for the family literally on both sides of me -- my maternal extended family in Assam and my mother in New Jersey. She has been counting down Nitin and Naya's upcoming visit and isn't coming here for the funeral and last rites. So I will likely go and represent for the 13th day of mourning - shradho - next week. And then the week after, I think I will go to the US for a few days. Expensive options but possibly best for the mental health, which really is beginning to wear and shouldn't be alone for a six-week stretch, I have decided.
As we did in the US, we turn to ritual to get us through-- we will be vegetarian for 13 days (or less). We will pray and light incense sticks stuck in a banana. We will call our relatives every day and ask for details and they will offer others we didn't ask but are curious to know. My aunt: They dressed him real nice. I gave him so many kisses before they took him off. Your other uncle waited till his body had entirely burned before they left. His wife was sound asleep when we got there; she then bathed and dressed in widow white and still seemed very despondent.
Today I left work early to get the details and my aunt described the day; as she told me everyone arriving by dawn to begin dressing the body and preparing it for cremation, I finally broke down. For my uncle's loss, of course. But also that I missed out on the remaining seven siblings coming together for the first time in a very long time. Two have died. And one, my mother, remained in America.

Nayaism

2008-06-01T12:15:00.001+05:30

Naya: When I grow up I want to be a painter and a Mint worker.

And then this morning...

Mommy: What colour are your eyes?
Naya: Black and white.

Iowa sounds just like India!

2008-05-31T23:50:00.003+05:30

This sounds more like a worker in Delhi than Des Moines...

“Do they have a free gym, dry cleaning, Starbucks on site?” he said. “What are they doing to make the community better? And once you’re there, companies know they have to promote you to keep you. We’re a little spoiled in our opportunities here.”

See story here.

Cricket

2008-05-31T03:08:00.003+05:30

This week's column was inspired by a trip the three of us took last week to a cricket match between the New Delhi Dare Devils and the Mumbai Indians. We were prepared to have to shove through crowds and ask 38 people which way to go but were amazed at the signage, cordoned-off areas, orderly lines and cops who actually knew where gate 6 was. I think the Republic Day parade needs to ask the cricket folks to handle their crowd control. Nitin printed out pages on "how to follow cricket" from some web site. Naya kept saying she was looking for Dhoni. I thought we might get bored halfway through but about 20 minutes into the game, thanks to our friend Seema's commentary and the hordes of people around us, we got really into it. Definitely faster than baseball--which makes me wonder what the heck people are talking about when they say it's a cross between baseball and sleeping or such nonsense. I loved it and even yelled "VIRU" for the star Sehwag... but once Delhi's fourth batter scored low, we thought our team was doomed--and we left. Big mistake. While we were in the car, some guy came to bat and scored 56 runs! Oh well, we learned a few lessons.

naya

2008-05-19T01:11:00.002+05:30

The other day in the bath:

Naya: Mommy, when you want something, you just have to ask God. Like, God, can I please have some toffees. And then he will give you toffees.

Today:
When I am on laptop...
Naya: Mommy, you should write about mommys and papas who play ball with their baby.

Nayaisms you might not like

2008-05-14T22:49:00.003+05:30

Girls only fight with girls because boys are more important.

Mommy: Naya, what should I write my column on?
Naya: Ummmm. How about "good people who eat cheese?"

Is it a happy mother's day?

2008-05-09T23:06:00.001+05:30

www.livemint.com

Is it a happy mother’s day?
Working parents in one survey spend just a half-hour a day nurturing their own kids. It's time to wake up
Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita
I know you think it’s you. But it’s not.
The award for Worst Mother of the Year goes to…me.
I turn my laptop on the minute I get home. I pretend to listen to my daughter’s stories as I frantically volley replies on BlackBerry. On weekends, I relish the chance to sleep in and let the maids deal with bath and breakfast and the most dreaded chore—brushing little teeth, especially those hard-to-reach, squirm-inducing back ones.
Two days before the world celebrates the joy and wonders of motherhood and thanks us who have dutifully filled and then emptied our wombs, I hang my head in shame and hardly think I deserve any special attention. Really, as a mother, I am a failure.
Well, sometimes.
Because that’s just the way parenthood is. Unlike our daily jobs, there are no benchmarks to success. Just when you think happy kids are the goal, a child psychologist or teacher will instruct you to let sadness occasionally wash over them, “so they can learn to deal with it on their own,” as one educator recently told me.
Nobody ever chastises working parents. We pat each other on the back, then say: “She’ll be fine. You’re doing the best you can.” Experts advise parents not to give into guilt.
I disagree. It’s time.
This week, The Times of India reported the results of a survey that find working parents spend only 30 minutes “nurturing their own children”. Not surprisingly, more than 85% of the 3,000 working couples in the study gave themselves a negative rating as bad parents. “Parents are working not only out of economic compulsion but also to cash in on their technical and professional qualification,” the study said. “Parents that work long or irregular hours are not available for children after school, and especially to help with the homework, ...and not able to do things together at weekends or eat together.”
Even on Sundays, when companies are allegedly off, working couples report being consumed with the endless tasks involved in running a household: paying bills, cleaning, going shopping.
The study illustrates the net effect of several societal shifts in the middle class. More and more couples are both working. Fewer families have the grandparents around. The demands at work are enormous: first, to sustain the growth in the economy and now to ensure all is not lost in case of a slowdown. Sadly, childcare has really not caught up; due to the sorry state of education in rural and poor India, most people’s maids have not even the nurturing instinct of one Mary Poppins bone. Creches are a fast booming business, but concerns over hygiene, safety and space persist. Parents who spend Rs5,000 on a meal quibble about spending half that to keep a good maid around.
In 10 years, will the neglect show? Is this study foreshadowing a future generation of kids who are needy, lack confidence, resent our success at their expense? Possibly.
Every now and then, when my mothering sinks to the all-time low I describe here, when my husband and I are both on deadlines and our daughter seems to crave even just a glance from us, something more powerful than the desire to achieve and excel washes over me: Mommy Guilt.
It is a most powerful and necessary warning. It inspires me to leave the laptop behind (or at least the cord so the battery dies in an hour). It forces me, no matter how pressed for time, to incorporate my daughter into my daily activities, if only to spend a few more minutes with her; we bathe, we brush, we banter. We reconnect.
This week’s findings, released by trade chamber Assocham’s Social Development Foundation, must inspire collective guilt, triggering changes at home and work. If reducing hours is not an option, children must be more effectively integrated into our lives, shopping to dining out. As parents have moved towards managing without their own parents around, so too might they learn to manage sometimes without another appendage: maids.
The rearing and nurturing of children in India is in crisis. Besides parents taking responsibility, workplaces will need to react quickly with flexible scheduling, not just to watch children but to take care of chores such as doctor appointments and car servicing. The risk of not reacting is to lose a diverse, necessary part of the workforce; according to Assocham, just 21% of mothers with young families want to work full-time, with an overwhelming majority preferring part-time work alongside raising their children.
Even as us working parents beat ourselves up, there’s some irony in what most motivates us: our children. To provide for them, to make the world a better place for them. Working mothers like me, with girls, try hard to set an example of the type of women they can be.
But in the end, our long hours and business plans really mean nothing without ensuring growth and vitality— of our most precious assets of all.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

It's all about who you know

2008-05-04T21:12:00.001+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/01230250/It8217s-about-who-you-know.html

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

All he did was “put in a word”.
That is how Union shipping, road transport and highways minister T.R. Baalu defended his move to procure gas for two companies owned by his two wives (yes, two) and sons, companies that happened to be previously headed by him.
According to news agency Press Trust of India (PTI), Baalu admitted he had spoken to petroleum and natural gas minister Murli Deora to ensure gas was allocated. “I put in a word with the petroleum minister,” Baalu told Parliament, according to a PTI report. “What is wrong with it?”
He didn’t add what he very likely also felt, what many of us realize on a day-to-day basis: That’s just the way life goes in India. Everyone uses connections or else nothing gets done.
Right?
If you’re squirming with discomfort, recognition, uncertainty, you’re not alone. For, many of us—from salaried professionals to the working poor —largely accept that bribes are wrong: Paying or gifting someone to grease the wheels is immoral, corrupt. But pulling a favour to get the job done?
It happens.
Think about it. Need to get your three-year-old into nursery school? One after another, the calls go out to principals and board members of elite schools—or their friends and family. Attached to applications are the letters vouching for your child and your character from Prominent People.
How can a retail entrepreneur secure the licences needed to stock yarn, put up signs or even play terrible background music? It’s time to make rounds among The Influential.
This deep tapping into networks is especially acute in this connection-conscious Capital, but other cities certainly suffer their share, too. By no means is India alone, but the problem worsens here because connections, often, must be relied upon to get the littlest thing done.
It is not just the government to blame. Even as the growth of the private sector has spoiled us for choice, it has created new hurdles to getting services smoothly. Well educated and intentioned they may be, but bank tellers rarely have a clue about foreign exchange or money transfers. The cashier who fields your mobile payment has little power to do much else, like print out a bill statement from six months ago. And so we seek out those second and third cousins who work at Citibank and Vodafone for rescue.
Every time I raise this issue, old-timers shrug, saying: “It used to be so much worse.” One writer on the blog, Mutiny.in, reminds, “In the ’70s, if you wanted to buy any car anywhere in India, money wasn’t the problem. The waiting period was. It ranged from a few months to a few years depending on the model and your political connections.”
But guess why he raised this point? Recently, the blogger noted that folks eager to book the Rs1 lakh Tata Nano were already in queue, buttering up dealers and plastering automobile websites with their emails and phone numbers so they could be first.
So, how much has really changed?
Are there just shades of grey between paying a bribe and invoking a connection? In many cases, the answer might lie in our professions. Politicians, journalists, government contractors should be held to higher standards because for them, a favour is rarely just a favour (for a copy of Mint’s code of conduct, visit www.livemint.com).
The more important question is why the straight and direct route is failing so many Indians. Crumbling schools, tight regulations, lack of access, crooked civil servants, all of the above? As with much of middle-class woe, if it’s tough for us, the poor and lesser connected are the real victims.
“The normal systems have collapsed in most spheres in life,” says Arvind Kejriwal, the former bureaucrat who pioneered the right to information movement. “If you normally apply for something, you wouldn’t get it, even if you deserve it, so you need connections or money. The people who have connections feel comfortable about it. But if I don’t have connections, I’ll say it’s a rotten system.”
In Baalu’s case, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, master of the art of crafting a squeaky clean image—even in India—made “certain references” on the shipping minister’s behalf to secure gas. Of course, the implication of the Prime Minister’s Office getting involved is more damning: Give this guy his gas—and whatever else he wants.
The actions in regards to Baalu and his family’s companies smack of nepotism and cronyism. If only the elected would show so much concern over the public they represent. We wouldn’t even need 10,000 cubic metres, as Baalu requested.
In fact, I think most Indian households would settle for just a letter from the Prime Minister’s Office guaranteeing steady power in these summer months.
And maybe, for good measure, he’d throw in an extra gas cylinder?
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Naya's story - verbatim

2008-04-27T18:53:00.002+05:30

One day Radha and Krishna went to the park. They went on a slide. Then they climbed up the mandir and went to see a movie--with earphones. They went to see Ratatouille. Then they came down a bridge and took off their earphones. There was a big big big party. Everyone was dancing. Even the trees were dancing. It was beautiful.

Naya-isms all in one

2008-04-26T16:42:00.002+05:30

Many funny things going on:

Yesterday, my friend Michael and his son were visiting Delhi and when we got back into the house, Naya and Ayaan greeted us.

Michael: Oh, wow, Naya, is this your friend?
Naya: No, he's my boyfriend.

Naya is surely, but very slowly, learning how to read. So she has a book of words and today she spells out: "S-O-C-K-S"
Mommy: Very good!
Naya: S-O-C-K-S spells muja!!
(Muja is the Assamese and Hindi word for socks. So if she never learns to read, at least she can serve as a translator...)

Then she saw the words C-U-P and said, "That spells cup."
Mommy: Very good.
Naya: Oh Mommy, I am so proud of you. (big hugs followed and I think she was hinting that I should have said it to her)
Mommy: Thank you.
Naya: Mommy, what does 'proud of you' mean?

The Royal Treatment

2008-04-25T00:20:00.001+05:30

So I have been holding out on where we went last weekend... Read on...

http://www.livemint.com/2008/04/25000400/A-touch-of-royal.html

Even before any probing, pressing, caressing, the new spa -- Kaya Kalp -- at the ITC Mughal in Agra invokes sensory overload
S. Mitra Kalita
New Delhi

About 99,000 sq. ft of massage and treatment rooms, workout and yoga space, gardens and fountains. Lavender wafting through the air. Stark red pomegranate motifs on floors and walls, a nod to Emperor Babur’s favourite fruit.
Spa junction: Bathe together in the couple suite. (Photograph courtesy ITC Mughal)
Spa junction: Bathe together in the couple suite. (Photograph courtesy ITC Mughal)
But being overwhelmed is not relaxing and so, the real test of the just-opened Kaya Kalp–The Royal Spa will actually be in transporting the stressed-out set to places far, far away from big and busy. Based on my recent experience, it will succeed precisely because of the attention to the little: water fragranced with cucumber and orange slices, the delicate cymbals chimed at the end of an ayurvedic treatment, decorative marble candle holders reminiscent of the behemoth ode to love nearby.
Offerings range from salon standards—haircuts, manicures, pedicures and facials—to elaborate packages known as “journeys” that can last up to three hours. The spa claims it is Asia’s largest, as well as the first in India, to offer the Turkish bath known as a hammam.
And so, I began my journey.
I lay on a marble slab, stripped of clothing, dignity and tension all at once. The steam around me blinded, suffocated, hypnotized but dozens of candles danced through the haze, their light bouncing off tiny mirrors and creating rainbows around the room. Just when fainting felt imminent, hard sprays of cold water awakened and invigorated. In life, two distinct stages force human beings to be bathed at the hands of another: childhood and old age. Thus, the hammam, a meeting of a sauna, bath and massage in one, might startle those of us in the active, independent purgatory of middle age. But it is well worth getting over such inhibitions because being cleansed, lathered, rubbed in this manner felt like the very embodiment of what a spa should be.
“Remember a spa is about water,” reminds Christine Hays, the operations head who has spent the last eight months overseeing the conversion of ITC Mughal’s gardens into this decadent space. She recounts how the spa designers sent pieces of electrical equipment for modern-day treatments and she simply stored them away, explaining: “Everything has to be so natural and hands on.”
For the unique, transcendental experience, the hammam (Rs4,400 for 100 minutes) should be tried. But, if you’re looking for a strong rub with your knots and stress in someone’s firm hands, this might not be the best option. The 30-minute tension reliever (Rs1,500) is a more affordable blend of the pointed nature of Thai massage with the longer strokes of, say, a Swedish.
The entrance to Kaya Kalp (Photograph courtesy ITC Mughal)
The entrance to Kaya Kalp (Photograph courtesy ITC Mughal)
Notably, here, I finally learnt to embrace ayurvedic massage. In massages past, I have often just wanted to get up from the oily table and yell at the well-intentioned women in sync to stop sliding and teasing, to start applying pressure already. For those who value the healing and natural elements of ayurveda, ITC’s spa offers three rituals. I tried the hot herbal poultice massage (60 minutes for Rs3,500), which relies on a ball of herbs dipped in hot oil— “You could eat it,” Hays assures—to move across the body. The pressure of the ball on the joints across my legs and arms was especially welcome. And the soft wad perfectly juggles gliding yet applying pressure; there is none of that panic-inducing feeling that someone’s fingers might fracture your spine.
Kaya Kalp also offers a chakra balancing gem stone massage (60 minutes for Rs3,000) that seemed to incorporate similar elements as the herbal ball, but with the use of stones; this is also the massage given to couples during the Taj Mahal romance journey, which, for Rs15,000, gets the two of you three hours of rubbing, bathing, feeding and loving (the masseurs give you a 5-minute knock as a warning before entering so you can go wild in the tub strewn with rose petals).
Roses and red are striking themes throughout; some massages begin with dipping feet into a bowl of water with petals. The observatory garden outback is still being worked on, and when it cools down, outdoor massages will be added. The pool, which is only for users above the age of 15, follows the sharp lines and maze-like arrangement of the garden. At night, the candles, shooting fountains and sprays of mist overhead inspire literal and metaphoric reflection.
“The Mughals were known for opulence,” explains Anil Chadha, general manager at the ITC Mughal. “They were very aspirational.” That puts them pretty much on par with the target customer here.
Like the backs it kneads, Kaya Kalp has a few kinks to work out. For a place that has promised such a Mughal experience, background music veered into the new age or elevator ambience at times. The couches and interior décor feels heavy, expected of the Mughals, but not necessarily cozy. The addition of some rituals, such as tea or healthy snacks while you wait, might help loosen the atmosphere up.
While prices are affordable by five-star spa standards, a few packages blending the works—say, manicure, pedicure, facial and massage—would likely do well, especially for the stressed who are time pressed. Unquestionably though, ITC Mughal’s spa has admirably fashioned itself into a destination in a city where most are lured by another awe-inspiring structure. So, while visitors are off seeing the fruits of one man’s devotion, stay behind, for Kaya Kalp is a divine place to pay homage to what should be your greatest love of all: you.

Have the tables turned

2008-04-24T23:48:00.002+05:30

A little preface to this week's column...

A few weeks ago, when I was in Chennai, I interviewed literally dozens of candidates.
One guy proudly told me that he already had three offers.
"From where?" I asked.
He named two companies. And then he named my employer.
"But I haven't made you an offer yet?"
"You will," he said. "My profile is something everybody's after."
I wasn't.

Here u go...

By S. Mitra Kalita

Is this the beginning of the end?
Not of incredible India or even shiny India, for that matter. Not of favourable export-import ratios or affordable food prices. After all, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, finance minister P. Chidambaram already read his prescient tea leaves and broke the bad news: The party is winding down.
He braced Indians for slower growth—and the flurry of earnings out this week point toward the same downward trend.
But, what I really wonder about is the future of another imbalance that has come to define this economy of recent good tides and fortune: between employer and employee.
For too long, Indian companies have engaged in a game where employers— strapped for great talent and strong mid-level managers—are held hostage by their workers, tiptoeing around them, resorting to better canteen food and themed office parties to impress, essentially living in fear that employees will leave and take all the pricey training and precious time invested with them. Over the last few months, that feeling has intensified as workers hold out for their year-end bonuses and increments to give notice or even make decisions about leaving.
Yet this season, unlike recent years past, is seeing a new entrant to workplace woe: layoffs.
It all started back in February when Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s largest services provider, announced that it had asked 500 underperforming staffers to leave. Through reviews and performance evaluations, employees are ranked from a scale of 1 to 5. Those who score a 2 or less are put on a plan to help them improve— and if there’s no sign of improvement, TCS “disengages” with them.
The move is not entirely new at TCS, which let 500 people go in all of the last fiscal year and already has “disengaged” 500 in the first three quarters of this year—sending a stark message to its more than 100,000 employees and the rest of the tech sector. Given weaker-than-anticipated results reported earlier this week, more such pink slips might be on the way.
On Monday, Mint reported the news of Yes Bank letting go of nearly 400 employees in the first quarter of the year, also for non-performance.
“Individuals who do not fit into the service culture and performance parameters of the bank mutually go their own ways in order to sustain the highly motivated business environment of the bank,” Deodutta Kurane, president of human capital, which is to say human resources, at Yes Bank, told Mint in an email.
Likely, a lot of young Indians have been reading the headlines and feeling panic over layoffs. In reality, though, the panic should be setting in over another word: non-performance.
That is the one thing there is no place for in a slowing economy. We who thought we were working harder than ever to keep up with the pace of double-digit growth—and triple digit in the case of many of our employers —have not seen anything yet.
The only comparison I can make is when I visited India just around the time of the dot-com bubble bursting in 2001 and a human resources manager in Chennai bluntly described the sentiment of his office: “You need to constantly run to stand where you are. Every day is a day where you deliver.”
Seven years later, the workplace is not that different—but India is. Even as the talent crunch grew more acute and workers more valued, attitudes towards layoffs have changed—everyone, after all, is dispensable; high attrition rates have taught us that much. In the rush to hire freshers, companies made offers and promises years ahead of schedule—which many are surely going to have to rethink, as TCS’ move has shown.
In the next few months, Indians will discover they will have to work doubly hard to fight from losing all they have built. They will need to prove worth and value to their employers. And, unlike the boom times, mediocrity and slack work ethic cannot be masked by growth. In many sectors of the last few years, we have moved from zero to acceleration. That is the easy part.
Now comes the hard part: to innovate, hang on to clients and customers to tap new markets. The exuberance and overconfidence of recent times will be knocked down, making way for good old-fashioned sweat equity.
Call me sadistic, but I welcome the reality check—at least when it comes to the new equilibrium it might bring about between employers and employees.
Despite the dire projections of many companies this week, a study carried out by industry chamber, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said foreign information technology firms plan to proceed with hiring 40,000 people in India by 2010.
No need to complacently cheer or gloat yet. The recent spate of layoffs and warnings to non-performers still send an important message.
It’s time to get cracking—or else.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Kajal

2008-04-22T02:25:00.003+05:30

My favourite actress has let me down... U Me Aur Hum royally sucked. You name a cliche - instant love, drunken machismo, strange Europeans of unknown origins lurking about, random disease -- and this was the movie. Oh how could she!

Accepting exile, sweet exile

2008-04-19T12:49:00.002+05:30

From Mint

The Tibetans are willing to die for it. The Americans are in a recession partly because of it. In India, we take for granted just how many we have, how complex it actually is.
Home.
Everyone, it seems, is fighting, longing, searching for a place to call their own. I don’t make light of that struggle, but this week—against the backdrop of the alternative Torch for Tibet relay and my own journey to a place that is allegedly mine—I wondered if the concept of home, as in one geographical location to which we are anchored, committed, rooted, might be inherently flawed.
The epiphany came around 1 o’clock in the morning on the Assamese new year known as Bihu. With my husband and daughter, two cousins and a friend, I sat in a cracked red plastic chair sinking into the mud made by a recent rain and watched a woman crooning into a microphone. She didn’t sound bad, but not great either. Nearby, a pack of young men smoked and I resisted the urge to ask them not to, so close to my three-and-a-half-year-old they were. It had taken us an hour to get here, an hour fighting traffic and other festival revellers. And, that was after a day spent dodging relatives’ demands that I come visit all 50 of their homes in Guwahati even as I explained that the goal of my sudden trip was to spend time with my sick grandmother and show my daughter the beauty of Assamese culture during this colourful month. She has celebrated every year, of course, but always in far-off places as church halls in New Jersey, a friend’s place in Washington, DC and an auditorium in New Delhi.
I thought going home would offer a more authentic experience.
“Where are the dancers?” my daughter asked me.
“Where is the laru-pitha?” my husband chimed in, referring to the sweet foods of Bihu. (When I was a child, my parents and their friends used to buy very all-American doughnut holes and offer them to us as a substitute, unable to find ingredients to make the real thing. Eventually, they learnt to improvise.)
“This is not New Jersey or even New Delhi,” I responded. “It’s not like you can get Bihu out of a box.”
But when a group of guys offstage started fighting each other with sticks and the police hauled a bloodied teenager away by his collar, I agreed it was time to go. In the versions of Bihu my parents regaled me and my brothers with, there was so such violent reminiscence.
Yet, why would they have tainted their picture?
For the transplant, home becomes but a nostalgic figment of the imagination, a make-believe place where you can pick and choose what to crave, to miss, to remember. It is ideal and utopian, even as the quest to recapture it impossible and dangerous.
Somehow, though, we keep trying.
In the case of the Tibetans, it is an understandable desire, an exile that has been imposed. Earlier this month, Mint reported the story of two Tibetan friends who shared a longing for a homeland, a fervour for the movement but held different passports—one Indian and another a refugee card. Explained one young activist: “If you hold an Indian passport, people think you have lost your nationalism.”
If only India did not kowtow to fears and insecurities of China by keeping the torch—a celebratory, unifying symbol of multiple lands and cultures —in a virtual police state with 20,000 officers and countless blocked roads. What a gesture it would have been if India showed the world it was possible to support both an exiled people and the goals of the Olympics. Indians, after all, have mastered the art of straddling multiple homes and loyalties.
And, if only the Chinese understood that the freedom to go back at anytime, to assert one’s place, is what keeps so many of us away. For, all too often there is no going back.
Strangely, this week’s sudden feeling of not belonging anywhere—a feeling I have fought my whole life, from lonely tables in school canteens to the navigation of office politics—was one of great relief, as though a lifetime riddle had just been solved. Like a lot of Indians from places other than the ones they live and work, I will now never have to respond to that eternal question: Where are you from?
That muggy night, we trudged back and crawled under mosquito nets to go to sleep. The next morning, I sat next to my grandmother, suffering from a broken arm, weak joints and severe dementia, as she asked me when I had arrived and when I would be going back to America. We had been through this exercise every day.
I reminded her I live in New Delhi.
“Still, you’re far away. To me, it’s all the same,” she said. “But I am so glad you came. It really means a lot to me.”
I was shocked. My tough-as-nails grandmother has never been the tender, emoting type—except when angry.
A few minutes later, I tearfully touched her feet and kissed her goodbye, realizing her confusion had left me with a lucid lesson and a pure definition of home—among many.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Naya's first day of school

2008-04-08T01:53:00.002+05:30

Report from Nitin:
She didn't cry even though a lot of other kids did. She said she played outside and sang songs. And this being a new big school, compared to the playschool where she always took a tiffin, she told Nitin: We ate in a restaurant for lunch. That would be the school canteen/cafeteria. Hah... I might have missed her first day of school but I caught the Nayaisms.

Mommy guilt

2008-04-06T01:54:00.003+05:30

I have to go on a business trip tomorrow so I will miss Naya's first day of school. I was putting her to sleep tonight (after helping her pick out outfit for said first day) and I said, "I will miss you, Naya. I don't want to go."
She said, "Don't go."
I said, "Really?"
She said, "No, you can go but you said you don't want to go so I said 'don't go'."
Then it started thundering...
Naya looks at me and smiles, "It's raining. Now you can't go to Chennai. You don't have an umbrella."

Nursery admissions opus

2008-04-05T01:43:00.001+05:30

Everything you could ever want to know about schools, India, admissions and us.

http://www.livemint.com/2008/04/05001858/Wanted-Exceptional-parents.html

Enjoy...

A question...

2008-03-30T23:26:00.003+05:30

Am hoping some RNRIs will write in. When things don't go your way in India - the gas is out, the maid doesn't show up, traffic -- what do you do? Is there a magic thing I can say or do to keep from getting so angry and cursing a whole country instead of that piece of the puzzle...

Columns

2008-03-30T22:18:00.001+05:30

Recent ones:

About government in India:

http://www.livemint.com/2008/03/28002017/Good-guys-of-government.html

About the IITs:

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/03/21002013/IIT8217s-new-social-network.html

About Indian marriages:

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/03/14001938/Saving-the-Indian-marriage.html

Naya

2008-03-23T12:12:00.002+05:30

Naya had two big firsts on Friday... She had two pieces in an art show sponsored by Red Earth. And she wrote her name for the first name, all by herself.

And today she did something else kinda cool -- she translated in Hindi for me on the phone. I am interviewing a driver and she said, "Come today please," and when he asked what time, she made it up and said, "Ummmm 4 oclock." Luckily that time works for me :)

The columns are back

2008-03-09T22:46:00.003+05:30

Some of you are not going to livemint.com - shame on you - so I am posting the columns from the last few weeks here in one swoop so you can get my thoughts on the Tata Nano $2200 car, job placements at the Indian Institutes of Management, vocation education and men... Among other themes. Have fun.

Get IIMs out of matchmaking

2008-03-09T22:43:00.001+05:30

They are supposed to be the best and the brightest, the future business leaders of this booming nation that needed them ready yesterday. They attend classes that encourage innovation, thinking outside the box, challenging convention.
Before taking on corporate India though, students at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) need to apply their lessons a little closer to home. Job placements have been unfolding this week at several elite business schools. Like years past, a sea of stress and black suits marks both sides of the table.
Indeed, interviews should force preparation and cause some palpitation. But the placement process has evolved into a scramble for a certain “A” list on “Day Zero” with the crumbs left for companies deemed second-rate in the alphabet soup of IT (information technology) and FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods). The lousy feeling, of course, extends to the students who are interviewed by these once sunrise darlings of the placement process and so, their experience goes a little something like this:
“Investment banking represents a challenge and I love working with numbers and I aspire to go overseas.”
Rejection.
“Consulting plays to my greatest strength—strategizing and problem-solving. I love working with clients and building relationships quickly.”
Rejection.
“FMCG is booming. I have had many opportunities to go overseas, but home is where the action is… Patna to start, you say? I’d go there. Tier II towns represent our future.”
You get the picture. Suddenly, a large chunk of the batch has multiple personality disorder as they very horizontally hop among “verticals”.
In many ways, the placement process represents the culmination of what’s wrong with business schools today. Students don’t know what they want. Understandably. At IIM Ahmedabad, the class of 2008 consists of 43% freshers. At Harvard Business School, the same batch has an average four-and-a-half years of work experience.
While the premier Indian School of Business (ISB) and even the IIMs increasingly encourage applying with experience, the number of MBA aspirants whose exposure to the workplace amounts to visiting parents at the office is scary. Even that other brightest of the bright group—graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—fuels the trend by applying for IIM right after graduation. Work experience? A whopping month of internship.
Besides links with the private sector and superb infrastructure, a part of the reason for ISB’s success is that students do their best learning from each other. They can swap stories about dealing with difficult bosses, wooing international clients, and the pluses and minuses of certain sectors.
Sadly, ISB’s pioneering spirit falters when it comes to placements; its campus last month, according to observers, felt as much a circus of stress, tension and inadequate interviews as its government-run counterparts this week. Business schools also need to recognize that there is nothing wrong with less than 100% placement; graduates who take time to find their passion or dream job or start a business should be celebrated.
Besides candidates, employers also jockey for prime recruitment positions and try to strong-arm candidates into taking their offers. Obviously, the integrity of the recruitment process can help determine whether or not an offer is accepted. Why then are companies bad-mouthing other employers, forcing decisions to be made right away, even refusing to participate if they don’t obtain a Day Zero entrance? A lot of top business schools, in response, now have two Day Zeroes—mere semantics to assuage ego.
The American way is not necessarily the solution either. For example, I attended a government-run college and, despite a stellar education, can’t remember a thing the place did to help me get a job. My brother, alternatively, attended one of the Top 10 universities in the US and went through 40 interviews before choosing a gig. Neither scenario is ideal.
But to the US’ credit, in good economic times and bad, employers generally give coveted candidates time and space to make a decision. They bring them back to meet more people, tour the office, dine with immediate supervisors and future colleagues. It helps ferret out the candidates who are just GOP—good on paper. Any recruiter in India can regale you with tales of the surfeit of GOPs at the IIMs.
There is little reason for institutes to play the role of meddlesome matchmaker. Career centres, information sessions, advice on interviews, resumés, even wardrobe—all of those are still needed. But IIMs can best serve applicants and the private sector by staying out of the way. If students had to fend for themselves as adults and home in on goals and desired profile, they might focus less on the brand and salary—and more on the work.

Develop skills and minds

2008-03-09T22:42:00.001+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/02/21230612/Develop-skills-and-minds.html

"Please, ba, find me a job,” begins my cousin’s whine.
“How on earth can I do that?” I ask. “Where?”
“GAIL, SAIL, Oil India—any of those would be my dream,” he says.
“You know nothing about gas…or steel…or oil,” I say, exasperated. “Besides, what was all that schooling for?”
My cousin has a bachelor’s degree in economics, a master’s degree in the same, a law degree and is pursuing a master’s in law. He is the most educated among the dozens of 20-something relatives I have—yet has struggled to find steady employment. So, we have this dialogue at least weekly.
Every time I read about India’s talent shortage—or even as I myself frame it using words such as “crunch” and “crisis”—I ponder if the countless youth scattered across the country in my cousin’s predicament would agree with the characterization. According to a report by TeamLease Services, 57% of India’s youth suffer from some degree of unemployability, while 75% of those who finish school make less than Rs75,000 annually.
This week, policymakers and labour ministry officials met in New Delhi to formulate a training policy for India. The government has announced that an area fuzzily known as “skills development” is expected to get a whopping Rs31,000 crore in the 11th Plan, the five-year blueprint that lays out its objectives. Compare that with the mere Rs350 crore spent on skills development in the 10th Plan. Inevitably, finance minister P. Chidambaram’s Budget next week will begin the big boost in spending.
For the ground reality, I headed to the small, shabby South Delhi Polytechnic for Women, which sits behind the prestigious Lady Shri Ram College. It is polytechnics such as this one that the government seeks to replicate nationwide to lift to those who need it most. Ironically, in the mid-1990s, as founder Ashima Chaudhuri discovered that being approved by the government meant limiting seats and offerings, she decided to shirk affiliation and moved to a system of vocational courses that don’t offer degrees, but the promise of jobs. Courses in jewellery design and catering, childhood development and office administration, media and fashion last anywhere from one year to four years.
What strikes Chaudhuri most is that more Indians are coming to her with actual college degrees, unable to find employment because they have no technical skill. For example, I came upon sisters Sunita and Sangeeta Yadav, 23 and 22, respectively, who already had a bachelor’s in education but were studying art so they could blend the two and become teachers.
This astounded me: Shouldn’t a liberal arts background at least instil the ability to input, analyse and produce— the very basics of a job? Especially given the alleged teacher “crunch”.
But another crisis looms—in confidence and comprehension. When I asked Sunita what she was studying, she looked at me blankly.
“Didn’t you say you were taking an art course?” I reminded.
“I don’t consider that studying,” she said. “That’s training.”
Perhaps some of the breakdown was due to my sorry Hindi and her weak English, but the disconnect foreshadows a part of what will be the government’s challenge: to ensure that skills and knowledge go hand in hand, that citizens understand one is nothing without the other.
If that does not happen, sheltered students will continue to look to the same place for employment coveted by their parents and grandparents— the government. Young women, particularly, will seek escape in another institution—marriage.
As we spoke, Chaudhuri was cutting articles out of the newspaper. She posts them on bulletin boards around the simple campus in the hope that students will stop and realize there is a world beyond them and their skill. Even as she does, she concedes that is hardly the role of vocational schools.
“It sounds strange, but we need to not think globally, but locally,” agreed vice-principal A.M. Banerji.
Isn’t it possible to do both? With its massive funding of education and vocational training, the government’s heart and purse appear to be in the right place. But massive poverty and underemployment—against the backdrop of a private sector begging for qualified applicants—force us to first revise the calculus of how we learn, what we learn and why we learn it.
After my day at the polytechnic, I headed for the labour conference, listening to a panel on how other countries have built and repaired their workforces. Envy filled me as slide after slide showed alliances among schools, the private sector and the government. The success stories offered training early, often and repeatedly. In Korea, a sound vocational policy helped per capita income double decade to decade.
Here, the 11th Plan’s spending must inspire Indians to embrace more than degrees or skills—but true lifelong learning.
(Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com)

words to live and love by

2008-03-09T22:40:00.001+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/02/14225946/Words-to-live-and-love-by.html

Dear husbands,
If you came here looking for a repeat of last year’s Valentine’s Day letter that gushed over the liberated man’s role in helping women succeed, Wider Angle is sorry to disappoint. But the results of a recent Hindustan Times survey of 500 middle-class men between the ages of 20 and 45 from six large cities have not left us feeling quite so loving — or even loved. Around 60% of those surveyed say they prefer stay-at-home wives. Only 24% of respondents said that their ideal woman should be “independent, yet a good homemaker”.
No, no, you say, that’s not me. And as proof, you might count yourself among the Indians who spent a record Rs3,000 crore on gifts yesterday. Perhaps in a moment of desperation, you even typed the phrase “what women want” into a search engine.
Here’s a thought — it’s not luxury watches or chocolates, not a fancy dinner, or even countless roses. In fact, maybe you should have been doing the letter-writing this year… Something like:
Dear wives,
Well, you know we’ve never been quite as good with emotions as you but, every now and then, we suppose we should at least try.
Valentine’s Day is filled with this four-letter word: love. And we certainly do love you. But we also wanted to take this opportunity to tell you that we cherish you, appreciate you, respect and honour you.
Whether you work, or stay home, or manage some super combo of both, we are amazed at how you manage to squeeze so many hours, chores and meetings into one day. That really puts us to shame.
There’s a lot more that makes us ashamed. That same Hindustan Times survey found that four out of five of us have made lewd comments to women. (The Hindustan Times is published by HT Media Ltd, also the publisher of Mint.) Nearly half of us surveyed felt women at a pub are “asking for trouble”.
We recognize that we have played a role in perpetuating the double standard that is making India’s streets unsafe for women. Troubling, dangerous cases of sexual harassment are euphemistically called “eve-teasing”. Somehow, we get away with many more “passes” than we should.
We are sorry. We are sorry for the results of these actions making life more difficult for you, whether it’s at a nightclub, or on your commute to work. Even as we judge and mistreat members of the opposite sex, we realize they are someone else’s wives, mothers and sisters.
Not as an excuse, but by way of explanation, many of us grew up in households where we were the centre of attention. Our mothers waited till our fathers ate, then us, before imbibing the remaining morsels. They made sure our needs were put before theirs, and so we grew up with this tendency to dismiss what women do, say, want.
Our mothers made sure our needs were put before theirs. So we grew up with this tendency to dismiss women
Despite such an upbringing, you women somehow manage to look the other way and take us in. In many cases, you have softened us, wakened us, bettered us. For that, we — and society — should be grateful.
In recognition, we are trying very hard to change. Admittedly, we’re not there as much as we should be, as involved in the rhythms of the household, from the mundane tasks such as remembering to order another gas cylinder to the more important child rearing. We understand that our lapses to you represent not mere forgetfulness, but a return to that regressive behaviour that doesn’t have a place in the new India we all are working so hard to create.
Sometimes, we wonder if you have given up on us. We ask you to hang on and hang in. Valentine’s Day seems such a frivolous continuation of typical gender roles: woman longs, man provides. The reality is that you Indian women have played a role of providing and sacrificing for centuries, modifying self as required by shifting mores and changing times.
We concede it is we men who have not been able to keep pace.
“India is not that advanced when it comes to the way many men treat women. Men here are not used to listening to women. That’s beginning to change, but it’s going to take a lot of time,” Barkha Singh, chief of the Delhi Commission for Women, which is under the social welfare ministry, was quoted as saying in a recent story by Cox News Service on the sorry treatment of women in India.
So the flowers, the chocolates, the gifts are mere things, we recognize. Actions are really what matter, you have shown us.
We are trying to change. But because we recognize some of our errors are deep-seated and institutional, perhaps it would be more meaningful if we pledged today to raise our sons and daughters as truly equal beings.
Blurred, liberalized gender roles in the next generation of Indians? Now that would be a real gift.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Does work make you sick?

2008-03-09T22:39:00.000+05:30

wider angle

Besides colds, coughs and fevers, another queasy state is making the rounds this week: the dilemma of whether or not to call in sick.
It’s a tricky thing, this sick leave concept. It ranks up there with the un-wired holiday: no laptop, no mobile, no BlackBerry.
Yeah, right. Who’s taken one of those lately?
So on the one hand, there’s your health. Your resistance has been shot by too many meals out, too much travel, long hours at the office, little sleep and lots of exposure to unsavoury elements that breed infection. (As you read this, New Delhi’s mercury has been inching ever closer to zero.)
And then…there’s your job. In this Indian economy marked by harried, hurried, haphazard growth, your presence will not only be missed, but the absence dissected and scrutinized. You are necessary and instrumental to the organization’s growth. Your scheduled presentation is key to the company’s survival. Your employer, if successful, could emerge an industry leader and mark India’s entry to the big leagues.
Suddenly, your pesky cough stands in the way of the nation’s emergence as a global superpower.
Even workers who claim to toil for the most lenient and family-friendly of employers say they feel sheepish calling in sick because their supervisors make them feel bad about it: “Sometimes they do go overboard in criticizing you, even if you’re genuinely unwell, because they are understaffed,” said one lawyer in Mumbai who requested anonymity in exchange for honesty. “Fair enough, but there are many days where you sit around doing nothing waiting for the clock to strike 7.”
But who, I wonder, is sitting around doing nothing these days? If that’s the case, perhaps the persistent requests for sick days from the same employees over and over are a sign of something else. Just what is it about their occasional sniffle that makes them call in sick? This is supposed to be the most exciting economy on the planet—aren’t workers so eager to wake up every morning and help build a new India?
Human resources consultant Jyotika Dhawan says organizations noting a lot of sick time being exhausted need to take a close look at why: “Many employees ‘take a sickie’ because their morale is low and they just don’t like or can’t do their work,” said the director of Helix-HR in New Delhi. “When a productive employee starts turning in mediocre work…lateness, leaving on the dot, leaving work early, prolonged breaks and increasing absences are the most common actions of burned-out employees.”
In this case, the younger age and relative immaturity of the Indian workforce can be a contributing factor to the lack of motivation. After all, managers here might not have yet mastered the art of inspiring people to come to work day in and day out…
“Indians,” one American chief executive of a software company pronounced to me recently, “get more tummy aches than any other nation. Why do they call out sick so much?”
There’re legitimate reasons, of course. Poor hygiene conditions and unsafe water come to mind. (Note to office managers: If you want to keep your staff healthy, maybe it’s time to revisit the stream of brown stuff coming out of the water cooler.)
Some managers I spoke with cite employees who call in sick, but try to win brownie points by checking the occasional email. Employees, of course, have their right to sick leave, but their half-hearted attempts to work might result in more harm than good; the same can be said for those heroes who try to come in and sniffle their way through client meetings—and infect the rest of us, perpetuating the cycle.
Taking a sick day also helps deepen the divide between those ever-warring factions at work: the haves and have-nots. Not in terms of money, but kids and spouses, of course.
“Sick leave is actually supposed to be taken for being ill themselves,” observed Vipul Bondal, who works in public relations. “Relatives/spouse/kids being unwell does not count as a reason.”
Counterpoint: “Most people do call in to say that they themselves are ‘sick’ because it is deemed unmanly (and hence, unprofessional) to stay away from work to look after your sick child/spouse,” says Suchismita Bhaumik, a working mother in Mumbai.
Honesty, they say, is the best policy—but seems rarely followed when it comes to illness; how else to explain the sudden spurt in time off requested towards the end of the year at companies where such leave doesn’t roll over.
One exception came in this gem forwarded to me: an employee’s text message to his team leader. “I’m not coming in to office today because I’m not well. Please don’t call me as I will be attending my sister-in-law’s wedding.”
Now that kind of honesty, I am sure, made his manager sick.

Cover thy neighbour's pay

2008-03-09T22:38:00.000+05:30

So let’s say you’re holding the lofty title of deputy senior associate manager and she’s a deputy senior associate manager. She’s in her early 30s. You’re in your early 30s. You oversee four people. She oversees four people. She went to one campus of the Indian Institutes of Management. You went to another.
Should the salaries be the same or different?
In these times of attrition, salary hikes and fast promotions, the answer is not so clear. Chances are, the last person to be hired is making quite a bit more; such is the nature and reality of pay increases in a candidates’ market.
While compensation has completely changed, one thing sadly hasn’t: People at work still talk about how much they make. So, salary looms like the big elephant in the office that everyone knows about and discusses secretly among themselves. Not exactly conducive to creating a harmonious work environment.
Workers themselves are torn on just what is fair. Consider one graphic designer in Mumbai who recently came to discover that someone with his same title—but many years senior —earns about the same.
“He is about twice more experienced than me in terms of the number of years he’s put in,” he said. “I have come to know that his salary and mine are not very different.”
Was he proud of being at the top of his industry’s game? Not really, he said, sounding rather depressed. He felt like he didn’t have a whole lot to look forward to if he stayed on in the company.
“Large companies do underpay people, which is not fair,” he said. “That’s the reason people never wait for increments and prefer to move on for better ‘jumps’.”
Indeed, even as I think young workers are doing themselves the greatest of career disservices as they jump from job to job, a look at the disparities in salary yields the fact that they often have little choice. In some ways, that’s also why the culture of discussing numbers—in addition to the one upmanship rampant in corporate India—persists.
Is equal compensation for equal work possible? No, because there’s no such thing as equal work.
In the words of one manager, “Communism and socialist view on salary does not work in India. Even employees…will want their ‘fair’ share more than others in their peer group.”
Salary is a complicated formula, or perhaps not a formula at all. Managers varied when I asked how they arrived at salaries, but cited one common parameter—what someone was earning before. And even as the guy with the most tenure at a company becomes team leader first, he’s often viewed with a certain scepticism, as though he remains because no other options exist.
“Whenever you have to go out and hire individuals, you end up providing a 30-40% increase to make the move competitive. Many individuals, irrespective of proficiency, end up landing at the higher end of the compensation band,” said Sandeep Chaudhary, a business consulting leader at Hewitt in Mumbai.
His solution is actually not to throw money at good people but reward them with perks and responsibility. “What organizations don’t do a great job of is communicating rewards. It is the least understood topic by business managers today,” he said.
The worst offenders, the managers I spoke to largely agreed, are human resources managers who gossip about the different compensation bands among employees. To combat this, employers should drive home the negative impact this can have on a workplace, even as they assure employees transparency in the areas it can be offered—opportunities, training, job postings and other incentives.
“People do compare and share notes on their packages. I am sickened by it as an employer, but employees relish in it. Smart ones know it hurts them more in the long run. Show-offs don’t last long,” said Prashanth V. Boccasam, the head of Pune-based Approva Corp., a firm that makes auditing software.
The truth is that no two workers are created the same—whether they make widgets or make software. As India becomes a major player in the global economy, two things must happen to ensure our treatment of our own workers is just. First, they need to be paid fairly to begin with. That means looking at the company’s bottom line and ensuring there’s some justifiable division of wealth, and that per employee spending remains higher than peer firms—and salary represents one part of that spending. More importantly, workers need to be given an incentive to stay beyond money, even as they understand why they earn what they do. Underperformers are not underpaid.
Offer fair salaries, responsibility and opportunities to shine—and the work ethic should rise proportionately. The stellar output alone should silence those who complain.

A people's painful progress

2008-03-09T22:36:00.001+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/01/17223947/A-people8217s-painful-progr.html

Wider Angle

On the day The People’s Car made headlines across the world, I bumped along the dirt road leading to my parents’ house in Guwahati in a rented precursor, the Tata Indica. I passed the home of a neighbour—a man hired by banks to seize and resell cars when owners cannot keep up with payments—and noted the number of vehicles parked in his yard had increased, as it does every time I visit.
With cups of tea and coconut sweets, my family and I gathered around the television to watch the coverage of the New Delhi Auto Expo on NE TV, a north-eastern television channel. Far from the detached, sophisticated airs of the major metros, the newscaster marvelled as she rendered the story. Even my illiterate paternal grandmother seemed to recognize that she had witnessed yet another historic moment in her 85 years divided between rural and urban India.
Because my connectivity tends to be limited in these parts, I missed the extensive coverage of Tata’s hyped Rs1 lakh Nano in the Western press. Upon my return to New Delhi, my inbox burst with the complete opposite of the euphoric atmosphere I had just experienced:
“It Costs Just $2,500. It’s Cute as a Bug. And It Could Mean Global Disaster.” That was a headline from an opinion piece in The Washington Post.
An excerpt from The Associated Press: “Tata Nano will lead to possibly millions more cars hitting already clogged Indian roads, adding to mounting air and noise pollution problems.”
A headline from The New York Times: “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants.” That one struck home as my family once owned four elephants, contracted to haul timber and scrap. When the last one died, my uncle took the insurance money and bought a city bus. Steady as they were, elephants had no role in the urban economy my rural relatives sought to enter.
Thus, in many ways, the North-East was the perfect place to be in the days that the world arrogantly fretted over how a cheap car might ruin everyone else’s happiness. As the Auto Expo unfolded in New Delhi, Guwahati was plastered with billboards advertising another auto fair to be held next month.
According to the R.K. Swamy BBDO Guide to Urban Markets, based on 2004 data, Assam is ranked third in car ownership per capita; Kerala holds the top spot, followed by Gujarat. Meanwhile, the nearby Nagaland capital of Kohima boasts more cars per person than any other city of India.
There are multiple, complicated reasons for these statistics, from tax breaks to ready loans to militants and civil servants flush with black money. But what has struck me in a half-dozen visits home over the last three years is that progress is actually under way, partly triggered by all the cars: wider roads, new flyovers, national highways. To compete, bus transport actually has gotten better and connects more far-flung places. As I have written before, much remains to be done and road conditions in the rural North-East remain abysmal and crumble under floods. But the frantic pace of development reflects the government’s recognition that things could no longer continue the way they were —just as my family realized when they traded contracting elephants for a bus.
It is an example worth offering to the sceptics who suddenly purport to care about the environment or our congested roadways (we also might want to add that we have seven or eight cars per 1,000 people, while the US has more than 400).
“This is a democracy,” Vishnu Mathur, executive director of the Automotive Component Manufacturing Association of India, told me. “Infrastructure responds to demand.”
India shines in crisis. The global coverage and perceptions of the new Tata Nano underscore how illogical that reality can sometimes seen
Translation: In crisis, India shines. To Westerners, including my American-born and –raised self, such is a perplexing and illogical turn of events. And the coverage and perceptions of the Tata Nano underscore this quandary: green or dream, to celebrate or condemn?
As I read the foreign reports this week, I recalled the opening lines of an essay in Time magazine last year: “…my rental car had to halt behind a long line of trucks and buses belching diesel fumes into the warm night air. The cause of the holdup: an army truck lying mangled in a roadside ditch, another victim, said one of the hundreds of onlookers, of the treacherous narrow and winding roads… The scene was chaotic. …the truth is that much of the new India is still like the old.”
He happened to be describing a road in Guwahati. The correspondent, just on the job for seven months, could be forgiven for not knowing how far the city has actually come.
But it is incumbent on us who know to occasionally remind the world of the distance we have travelled. For the Tata Nano has the potential to drive us further down the path of progress and allow more Indians to come along for the ride—an admittedly imperfect and rocky journey but one moving forward nonetheless.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

2008-03-09T22:36:00.000+05:30

On the day The People’s Car made headlines across the world, I bumped along the dirt road leading to my parents’ house in Guwahati in a rented precursor, the Tata Indica. I passed the home of a neighbour—a man hired by banks to seize and resell cars when owners cannot keep up with payments—and noted the number of vehicles parked in his yard had increased, as it does every time I visit.
With cups of tea and coconut sweets, my family and I gathered around the television to watch the coverage of the New Delhi Auto Expo on NE TV, a north-eastern television channel. Far from the detached, sophisticated airs of the major metros, the newscaster marvelled as she rendered the story. Even my illiterate paternal grandmother seemed to recognize that she had witnessed yet another historic moment in her 85 years divided between rural and urban India.
Because my connectivity tends to be limited in these parts, I missed the extensive coverage of Tata’s hyped Rs1 lakh Nano in the Western press. Upon my return to New Delhi, my inbox burst with the complete opposite of the euphoric atmosphere I had just experienced:
“It Costs Just $2,500. It’s Cute as a Bug. And It Could Mean Global Disaster.” That was a headline from an opinion piece in The Washington Post.
An excerpt from The Associated Press: “Tata Nano will lead to possibly millions more cars hitting already clogged Indian roads, adding to mounting air and noise pollution problems.”
A headline from The New York Times: “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants.” That one struck home as my family once owned four elephants, contracted to haul timber and scrap. When the last one died, my uncle took the insurance money and bought a city bus. Steady as they were, elephants had no role in the urban economy my rural relatives sought to enter.
Thus, in many ways, the North-East was the perfect place to be in the days that the world arrogantly fretted over how a cheap car might ruin everyone else’s happiness. As the Auto Expo unfolded in New Delhi, Guwahati was plastered with billboards advertising another auto fair to be held next month.
According to the R.K. Swamy BBDO Guide to Urban Markets, based on 2004 data, Assam is ranked third in car ownership per capita; Kerala holds the top spot, followed by Gujarat. Meanwhile, the nearby Nagaland capital of Kohima boasts more cars per person than any other city of India.
There are multiple, complicated reasons for these statistics, from tax breaks to ready loans to militants and civil servants flush with black money. But what has struck me in a half-dozen visits home over the last three years is that progress is actually under way, partly triggered by all the cars: wider roads, new flyovers, national highways. To compete, bus transport actually has gotten better and connects more far-flung places. As I have written before, much remains to be done and road conditions in the rural North-East remain abysmal and crumble under floods. But the frantic pace of development reflects the government’s recognition that things could no longer continue the way they were —just as my family realized when they traded contracting elephants for a bus.
It is an example worth offering to the sceptics who suddenly purport to care about the environment or our congested roadways (we also might want to add that we have seven or eight cars per 1,000 people, while the US has more than 400).
“This is a democracy,” Vishnu Mathur, executive director of the Automotive Component Manufacturing Association of India, told me. “Infrastructure responds to demand.”
India shines in crisis. The global coverage and perceptions of the new Tata Nano underscore how illogical that reality can sometimes seen
Translation: In crisis, India shines. To Westerners, including my American-born and –raised self, such is a perplexing and illogical turn of events. And the coverage and perceptions of the Tata Nano underscore this quandary: green or dream, to celebrate or condemn?
As I read the foreign reports this week, I recalled the opening lines of an essay in Time magazine last year: “…my rental car had to halt behind a long line of trucks and buses belching diesel fumes into the warm night air. The cause of the holdup: an army truck lying mangled in a roadside ditch, another victim, said one of the hundreds of onlookers, of the treacherous narrow and winding roads… The scene was chaotic. …the truth is that much of the new India is still like the old.”
He happened to be describing a road in Guwahati. The correspondent, just on the job for seven months, could be forgiven for not knowing how far the city has actually come.
But it is incumbent on us who know to occasionally remind the world of the distance we have travelled. For the Tata Nano has the potential to drive us further down the path of progress and allow more Indians to come along for the ride—an admittedly imperfect and rocky journey but one moving forward nonetheless.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

No longer kissing cousins

2008-03-09T22:34:00.002+05:30

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/01/10231952/No-longer-kissing-cousins.html

We four NRIs (non-resident Indians) sat around the table, dipping pita into hummus, sipping sangria, talking Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama.
Once our visitors grew comfortable, their real views tumbled out: “Everyone here just wants to hustle you,” said one woman in town for business.
“Nobody in this country wants to do anything for the sheer love of it,” said another, here to organize a music festival, unable to find free performers.
“Well, not really,” I retorted. “You can’t blame people for wanting to make their share if you’re coming in to profit off their labour.”
My husband nudged me. I shut up. The conversation topic changed.
That night, in the safety and honesty of bed, I said what I really meant: “NRIs can be so annoying. All they do is complain about India. Why do they even come?”
The obviously hypocritical question (my family and I moved here last year after lifetimes in the US) remained with me, especially this week as the biggest NRI jamboree unfolded yet again in New Delhi, and thousands of the diaspora were heralded for doing India proud. In panel discussion after panel discussion, delegates attempted a delicate balancing act between decrying the state of Indian poverty, bureaucracy, infrastructure and celebrating Indian culture, values, heritage.
This was my second Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, as the event is known. The first time I attended, in 2004, I was promoting a book I had just written on Indian immigration to the US. Back then, I was an NRI in every definition of the acronym: Non-Resident Indian, Not Really Indian, Non Reliable Indian, Know It All. Pictures of me ran on the front pages of Indian newspapers. I made some appearances on television. When I headed to my parents’ native Assam a few days later, I again was garlanded and applauded.
Between then and now, so much has changed—namely me and India’s attitudes towards people like me.
In a satirical essay in Outlook magazine last month, historian and writer Ramachandra Guha labelled winter the season of the “NRI puja”. He wrote, “When these family NRIs appear, we, mere permanent residents, are obliged to pay homage, altering our own lives and work schedules to do so. It is striking how naturally we slip into the role of worshippers; they, as naturally, into the role of the worshipped.”
Even The Patna Daily has gotten in on the NRI bashing: “Now, if you get a tourist visa and come to America for four months, you are an NRI. If you went to Singapore on a business trip, you immediately acquire the status of an NRI. Oh yeah, let’s not forget about your trip to Nepal.”
An excerpt from a website offering advice to someone about to move to India: “As long as you’re open and don’t show a lot of that ‘Indo-American’ attitude (trust me, a lot of NRIs do it and its [sic] annoying enough to make anyone scream)…”
This time at the conference I was thankfully barely recognized. Now feeling quite at home in India, I looked around and wondered if those gathered really pondered free trade agreements and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. (Note to next year’s organizers, most of this crowd worries more about teaching their children Bharatanatyam or setting up temples that can rival Akshardham and Tirupati.)
As the man at the dais began his talk on infrastructure with the words, “We became an independent nation in 1947,” I rolled my eyes and prepared to leave. But first, I turned to the random guy sitting next to me:
“Why did you come here?”
“This is my first time in India,” Dhurmanund Gobin said, smiling. “I am from Mauritius.”
He told me he had just turned 58 that day and pulled out his national identity card to prove it. An identity that showed him belonging elsewhere.
“Our forefathers were very poor people but they worked hard so we could get an education. And they never let us forget India. …When I landed here,” he said, “I felt like I am in my true land.”
I thought of the international arrivals terminal at the airport, especially between the 10pm and 2am. Each time, the crowds gathered to greet NRIs feels thinner and thinner. But the joy on the faces of the greeted and the greeters hasn’t changed much.
A man like Gobind, of course, wouldn’t have family waiting for him; he doesn’t know exactly where in Bihar his grandfather left. And so he showed up to this conference, hoping to belong as he heard how he too could invest in roads and bridges.
His search for identity is one I imagine many global Indians—here, there, everywhere and nowhere—share. This recent tide of NRI bashing feels like an overdue, inevitable threshold. On the other side, we might shed the useless labels and accept and embrace our global, fluid, confused identities. That would be worth celebrating.

No longer kissing cousins

2008-03-09T22:34:00.000+05:30

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/01/10231952/No-longer-kissing-cousins.html

Stop burping. Only disclose your salary to your mother. Don’t tell your colleagues they are fat, dark or have bad skin.
Finally, a book has crossed my desk —issued by a company, no less—that is actually blunt, useful and relevant, even necessary, for the modern Indian workplace.
In fact, the long list on page 33 of InCorporate: Communication etiquette for today’s workplace makes abundantly clear why such rules are needed. In a section devoted to the art of making small talk, the book advises Indians which topics to avoid.
Consider the banned: politics and religion, personal health problems or misfortune; stories and jokes of questionable taste; remarks about ethnic, racial or gender groups; gossip and hearsay; controversial issues such as abortion; intimate details about yourself or others; one’s income or the price of personal things.
If your family is anything like mine, we breeze through most of those subjects by morning tea.
And so this 103-page guide, published by Standard Chartered’s business processing unit Scope International Pvt. Ltd, offers insight into why assimilation can be so tough for new entrants to the workforce.
Over the last year, we officially became a nation obsessed with “soft skills”. Company after company decries the sorry state of the Indian education system, as well as the lack of exposure of new hires from lower-rung institutes and second-tier towns. The nature of networking and interaction —in and out of the office, the personal becoming professional—is changing rapidly. The chap who doesn’t remember which knife butters his bread warrants forgiveness—and instruction.
Scope International released the book just about one year ago, a part of its desire to give new hires “a strong foundation for stepping into the demanding lanes of corporate life,” writes Scope chief executive Sreeram Iyer in his introduction.
Noteworthy is that little of the book dwells on Scope’s internal ethos or systems. These days, far too many human resources managers seem stuck in the yesteryear of training for lifelong service to one employer or orientations about the mundane: Please download all 56 expense forms off our intranet. The canteen serves vegetarian cuisine on Tuesdays. All leave requests must be cc-ed to the new department of authorized absences.
So, Scope’s straight talk is refreshing. “…be a ‘solution provider’ rather than a ‘reason-giver’,” it advises. Do not instantly hit reply all on emails. Avoid composing emails when emotional or angry. Do not blow noses into cloth napkins; they are not handkerchiefs.
The cellphone etiquette section ought to be adopted by every office and posted as mission statement: Turn phones off during meetings. Avoid long songs as ring tones. (My addendum: Take the device with you as you roam the office or the bathroom.)
Scope spokesperson Shashi Ravichandran notes a difference among workers. “Soft skills are one such area which builds their capability and confidence and grooms potential managers and leaders,” she said. “It helps their development by enabling them to communicate effectively and adapt to multi-cultural landscapes.”
And yet as I came to certain commandments, such as “Thou shalt not eat with thy fingers” or “Thou shall respect two feet of personal space,” I began to wonder if what is becoming accepted as workplace etiquette is really a misnomer for Western etiquette.
What prevents us from dipping into the fish curry or mutton biryani with our hands because, practically speaking, that really is the best way to debone, eat and enjoy? And is it really rude to slip into mother tongues when the urge strikes? Can we see the silver lining in some elements of our unique Indian behaviours; bluntness as a plus point, perhaps?
The answer is ultimately dictated not by cultural supremacy but business. If a client is Western, then leave the Tamil behind and just bring on circuitous conversations about the weather. But if a client is Indian, is there a need to lose ourselves?
Ravichandran assured me Scope doesn’t want “change in our personal traits which make us stand apart as individuals, but change in our style of communication and an international approach to work practices.”
If 2007 wound down with a rebuffed Ratan Tata demanding respect and an apology from Orient-Express (with a name like that, sensitivity seems the last thing to expect), let this year begin as the one where office integration works both ways, or perhaps several. It’s not a bad idea for educational institutes to hand out new rules for the workplace with diplomas, and for companies to do so along with offer letters—with the caveat that exceptions must exist in a world trying to understand India as much as the reverse.
But East or West, the verdict on Kajra Re as ring tone is clear. It is globally accepted...as annoying.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Fork or fingers?

2008-03-09T22:33:00.000+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/01/03231601/To-use-a-fork-or-fingers.html

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

Stop burping. Only disclose your salary to your mother. Don’t tell your colleagues they are fat, dark or have bad skin.
Finally, a book has crossed my desk —issued by a company, no less—that is actually blunt, useful and relevant, even necessary, for the modern Indian workplace.
In fact, the long list on page 33 of InCorporate: Communication etiquette for today’s workplace makes abundantly clear why such rules are needed. In a section devoted to the art of making small talk, the book advises Indians which topics to avoid.
Consider the banned: politics and religion, personal health problems or misfortune; stories and jokes of questionable taste; remarks about ethnic, racial or gender groups; gossip and hearsay; controversial issues such as abortion; intimate details about yourself or others; one’s income or the price of personal things.
If your family is anything like mine, we breeze through most of those subjects by morning tea.
And so this 103-page guide, published by Standard Chartered’s business processing unit Scope International Pvt. Ltd, offers insight into why assimilation can be so tough for new entrants to the workforce.
Over the last year, we officially became a nation obsessed with “soft skills”. Company after company decries the sorry state of the Indian education system, as well as the lack of exposure of new hires from lower-rung institutes and second-tier towns. The nature of networking and interaction —in and out of the office, the personal becoming professional—is changing rapidly. The chap who doesn’t remember which knife butters his bread warrants forgiveness—and instruction.
Scope International released the book just about one year ago, a part of its desire to give new hires “a strong foundation for stepping into the demanding lanes of corporate life,” writes Scope chief executive Sreeram Iyer in his introduction.
Noteworthy is that little of the book dwells on Scope’s internal ethos or systems. These days, far too many human resources managers seem stuck in the yesteryear of training for lifelong service to one employer or orientations about the mundane: Please download all 56 expense forms off our intranet. The canteen serves vegetarian cuisine on Tuesdays. All leave requests must be cc-ed to the new department of authorized absences.
So, Scope’s straight talk is refreshing. “…be a ‘solution provider’ rather than a ‘reason-giver’,” it advises. Do not instantly hit reply all on emails. Avoid composing emails when emotional or angry. Do not blow noses into cloth napkins; they are not handkerchiefs.
The cellphone etiquette section ought to be adopted by every office and posted as mission statement: Turn phones off during meetings. Avoid long songs as ring tones. (My addendum: Take the device with you as you roam the office or the bathroom.)
Scope spokesperson Shashi Ravichandran notes a difference among workers. “Soft skills are one such area which builds their capability and confidence and grooms potential managers and leaders,” she said. “It helps their development by enabling them to communicate effectively and adapt to multi-cultural landscapes.”
And yet as I came to certain commandments, such as “Thou shalt not eat with thy fingers” or “Thou shall respect two feet of personal space,” I began to wonder if what is becoming accepted as workplace etiquette is really a misnomer for Western etiquette.
What prevents us from dipping into the fish curry or mutton biryani with our hands because, practically speaking, that really is the best way to debone, eat and enjoy? And is it really rude to slip into mother tongues when the urge strikes? Can we see the silver lining in some elements of our unique Indian behaviours; bluntness as a plus point, perhaps?
The answer is ultimately dictated not by cultural supremacy but business. If a client is Western, then leave the Tamil behind and just bring on circuitous conversations about the weather. But if a client is Indian, is there a need to lose ourselves?
Ravichandran assured me Scope doesn’t want “change in our personal traits which make us stand apart as individuals, but change in our style of communication and an international approach to work practices.”
If 2007 wound down with a rebuffed Ratan Tata demanding respect and an apology from Orient-Express (with a name like that, sensitivity seems the last thing to expect), let this year begin as the one where office integration works both ways, or perhaps several. It’s not a bad idea for educational institutes to hand out new rules for the workplace with diplomas, and for companies to do so along with offer letters—with the caveat that exceptions must exist in a world trying to understand India as much as the reverse.
But East or West, the verdict on Kajra Re as ring tone is clear. It is globally accepted...as annoying.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Me on NPR

2008-03-05T08:31:00.001+05:30

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87884391

Day to Day, March 4, 2008 · For second-generation Indian Americans, returning to their parents' home country can be a cultural odyssey. As the Indian economy booms, however, there are other reasons for American-born Indians to return to their roots. The country that many of their parents fled for lack of opportunity now needs their skills.
In 2006, the Indian government created a new immigration card for what it calls OCI or "Overseas Citizens of India." With it, second-generation Indians can have visa-free entry for life. Since 2006, the government has issued more than 200,000 OCI cards.
The Indian government isn't trying to lure back the second generation for sentimental reasons — it needs their skills, explains S. Mitra Kalita, the Brooklyn-born author of a book about Indian immigration.
"The irony is that India is a country of a billion people, but any manager will tell you that the labor pool that they are faced with is not as educated and experienced as they need to be. These second-generation migrants do a great job straddling both worlds."
Fulbright scholar Preetha Narayanan agrees.
"Because we can cross those cultural boundaries, there will be opportunities for us that may not exist for the person who is coming straight from a foreign culture," she says.
Though she began her violin career learning Bach and Beethoven, Narayanan now studies classical Indian music under a guru. A small bruise under her chin — a signal of constant practice — emphasizes the seriousness of her mission.
"In this country, when you take on an art, you aren't just taking on the art, but the whole background behind the art," she says.
Writer Nina McConigley, who works at a publishing house in Chennai, also sees opportunity to develop her craft in India that she didn't back home.
"I wouldn't have published a book if I had been in the U.S.," she says, referring to a children's book she authored.
Having grown up in Wyoming feeling like an outsider, she's found a sense of belonging in India, she says.
"I grew up in a place where I never saw a reflection of myself. I was the only non-white kid besides my sister in almost all my schooling. I wanted to live somewhere I wasn't in the minority. This is the first time in my life, and I'm 32 years old."
Juggling Two Worlds
Fitting in isn't a fluid process, however. Some second-generation Indians find that being American gets them in trouble.
On the stage in her heavy makeup, ankle bells and a theatrical bridal costume, Mythili Prakash looks every inch the renowned classical Indian dancer that she is. When she opens her mouth, however, questions arise.
"When I introduce my items with an American accent or if I'm saying things a little bit more American than Indian," suddenly her image changes, she says. "In a lot of articles that have been written about me, or even reviews, my American accent has been mentioned."
As in the United States, signs of being foreign can make it difficult to connect with people socially.
McConigley also recalls the moment when she realized that her American identity was inhibiting relationships.
"I became friends with someone through work who was Indian, around my age, and I was kind of excited," she says. A few days after the author invited her "friend" to Thanksgiving dinner, however, she discovered that the woman had published a blog entry making fun of the event and calling her prayers trite.
"It was strange to see me be mocked for being American on the blog when I really felt that I was, I guess, Indian."
More than just a personal attack, McConigley felt that her friend had undermined her very reasons for returning to India.
Ultimately though, she and her immigrant peers agree that India is increasingly becoming a land of possibility.
"We saw our parents migrate to the United States to follow opportunity," Kalita explains. "In the new world order, if you will, it is really hard to dispute that there is plenty of opportunity in India."

Updates

2008-03-02T19:14:00.002+05:30

Everyone wants to know what's happening -- this is rushed since we are late for a wedding BUT...

The maid is now under virtual house arrest until we figure something out. Her aunt doesn't want to take responsibility for her and I won't toss her out on the street (and I also don't have anyone until April 1) so she now sleeps in Naya's room at night. Of course, Naya is still with us...

AND in better news... Naya got into Sardar Patel! We applied to five, she had been rejected from four so this was the last... We are happy and somewhat redeemed but are worried about a few things. It is Hindi medium (although they dont read and write next year anyway so maybe that's okay) and the hours are long (8 am-2 pm, I HATE the mornings with a kid)... But I think compared to the American School, it is a better option? I just worry about her going to school in a place that looks more Dubuque than Delhi. But maybe I am misguided. We are going to check them out this week. I find it so strange that the shortage of schools here forces parents to select a place sight unseen.

Love?

2008-02-25T21:33:00.002+05:30

Every time I write about servant woes, I know I lose at least one reader - my friend Manish. But since his blog has about a million times the hits of this humble project, I will plod on...
We think our temporary maid is having an affair with the servant downstairs. A week ago, when I was in Mumbai, the maid from the ground floor (yes, the whole building is involved) rang the doorbell and told Nitin to follow her. She led Nitin to the door of the boy -- closed. Nitin knocked and our maid answered, while the boy was covered up with a sheet. Nitin said, "Is there a problem?"
She said no. Nitin came back downstairs.
AND DID NOT TELL ME TILL A WEEK LATER. And he happened to tell me on the day that she didn't report for duty until a few hours later. Before calling her aunt (who works for a friend of mine) to check on her whereabouts, I told Nitin to go check upstairs. He found her in the guy's room again. But to be fair, he said the door was open and she was just standing there...
When she came down, she seemed breathless and she had lipstick on. Again to be fair, I often look the same way (but she is half my age and much more svelte...)
I was torn between telling on her and taking her aside and saying 18-year-olds will be 18-year-olds but don't do anything stupid. I did look at her and say "If you ever let anyone in here like that guy, you are in big trouble. I will kill you if anything happens to Naya."
OK, so maybe not the most mature thing to say but I got worried... And I needed her to know that I knew but I didn't want her to run away.
She didn't respond.
A petty aside -- I have been noticing that when we make a meat dish like keema or mutton curry, it seems to go really quick... Is it just a coincidence that this male servant works for a strictly vegetarian family? (Remember I once commited the grave sin of asking the neighbours for an egg when we were baking.)
Anyway, the friend we got the maid from was very helpful. I explained that Felicia will be back in April and that the care Naya has gotten has been good and that I didnt know if I should care what the maid does in her love life -- but she is 18 and in my care so... The friend gave me good advice, saying we need to be responsible and she'd talk to the aunt... And so the aunt is supposed to come by tomorrow to give the maid a talking to. I wonder if she will take her back and if she will resent that I snitched her out...

Nitin-ism for a change

2008-02-24T01:12:00.000+05:30

Me (struggling to pay our bills and file taxes): I should have married an investment banker.

Nitin: Me too.

Positive Parenting

2008-02-17T21:57:00.000+05:30

Naya: Papa, you did a really good job painting. Mommy, you do a really good job ... working. I am so proud of you!

Moving to India?

2008-02-13T22:06:00.003+05:30

Friend of ours are considering moving to India and I just sent the couple the following tips/answers to some of their questions and thought it might help someone else out there...

1) Bring a lot of cash. It is more expensive than you think. I'd say savings of $25,000 should help take care of a car, the down payment for rent (Mumbai is a whole lot more), new furniture...

2) Secure school admissions for your child. Have your company negotiate this as they are much better at it than you ever will be.

3) Get a sense of fair-market rents and rates from over there. Sked time with a broker and hit the ground running as soon as you arrive. Ask neighbours about water and electricity outages.

4) Book a guest house. Your employer might put you up in a fancy five-star. If you have a family, skip it as guest houses will be more comfortable and you are less likely to get sick and you will have more space.

5) Find other returnee families. They are a great source of information. They also will help you find your staff from maid to driver.

6) Get on a list of expats, in Delhi, that's yuni-net or Delhinet but each of the Indian cities has one. Also try Craig's List for deals on flats and used furniture.

7) Make a trip to Costco or Sam's Club, even though I make fun of it... A lot of that packaged stuff and sauces are very expensive here. No shame in Pantene, Aunt Jemima, Annie's mac and cheese.

8) If you are being relocated, add about a month to 6 weeks to whatever they say the eta is for your goods. I have yet to meet anyone who has gotten their stuff on time. Ensure your employer does the negotiation for the release of goods and paying any related bribes etc.

9) Assess your electrical needs - laptops, toasters, video projectors, stereo systems. We came with two large converters (if you need the exact conversions, Nitty can tell you) and they were more than adequate. Buy a bunch of the 220- to 110 converters for a dollar each and sprinkle them around the house.

10) The most important thing you can bring is an open mind and a lot of patience. Nuff said.

A Mitra-ism?

2008-02-07T16:47:00.000+05:30

Me (on phone to Bengal Cafe): Ek delivery chahi ye.
Man: Huh?
Me: Delivery (my nose is really stuffed and you know my Hindi)
Man: Ahh yes, jilebi. Aur kya chahi ye?

Naya

2008-02-07T15:35:00.000+05:30

Naya: Mommy, I have a surprise. I am going to call Papa "Miss Papa"

Believing

2008-01-23T21:18:00.000+05:30

I think I finally figured out why I am so upset about this whole school admissions fiasco... Despite all that frustrates me about India, I have always hung onto belief in the economy, in the country, in its people. Education, of course, serves as the lynchpin of possibility here. A lack of it holds countless people back. Access to it transforms lives. That this key to India's future remains mired in so much muck, from corruption to connections, is deeply troubling and cause to cease believing. Everyone tells me, "No matter where she goes, she will be okay." Or else: "Look at us, we turned out fine."
But despite having strong beliefs about the type of school I want Naya to be in (open curriculum, lots of freedom, little rote learning, no tracing letters or formal instruction), I worry about sending her to a place where only people with connections can enter. At the age of 3.5, you might say she is too young to "get it" but I think it perhaps begins one of the saddest lessons of India will frame her time here -- hard work doesn't pay off. When you need something in life, just call the right person and it's yours. The same can be said of many of the elite schools of the US, for sure. But the public school system is generally strong or can be moved into (also the result of parents' hard work and ethic, presumably). I'd say the values we most want to pass onto our child are compassion for others and ethical values. So I don't feel like I can be part of something that requires currying favour just because we are who are. The moment I have to do that, it is like crossing a morale line and entering an India in which I can no longer believe. And so this whole process is about more than where Naya will go to school but more about whether this place can serve as home for our family, for the short or long term.

Line of the day

2008-01-22T14:54:00.000+05:30

Me to co-worker: So I hear you need connections to get your kid into nursery school. Do you have any?
Co-worker (without missing a beat): You think I'd be working here if I did?

School Daze again...

2008-01-17T21:24:00.000+05:30

This time we are really in a sad daze... Tonight came Naya's first rejection, which really is more a rejection of us from an elite private school in Delhi. I won't write the name because there's still a chance of a second list. Today is also the day I think that Nitin and I realize we love our kid more than ourselves. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I don't think I felt this sad even when I didn't get into Northwestern's journalism school. What's most perplexing is that the system in India still feels incredibly patriarchal, based on what accomplishments parents have made. While we consider ourselves rock stars in the creative sense, we wonder why that didn't work for admissions... I would gladly take 16 Nitin Mukul paintings over an IIT diploma... Anyway we tried to do this whole thing without connections or kissing ass but we are revisiting that policy now. It is the Indian way, perhaps.

Government schools here are a joke, private schools here are few -- education is an issue that the rich and poor are strangely united in being screwed over on. Why hasn't there been a revolt? Tonight is the first night in a long time that we have debated going home because while the opportunities here are great, the possibility that an American education allows you to dream are far greater. With just a handful of decent private schools in this capital, you wonder just how India is going to shine in 20 years. If we don't make the cut and people with connections, bribes and other means make it, then what does that say about a country? And should we even be judging children's potential on their parents' past accomplishments anyway? Isn't education the only way to level the playing field, to surmount the stigma of parents and past? If we are finding it hard to get in, what about lower middle class families or even the poor?

Today we also had an interview at one of the so-called alternative schools that we really loved. But when we sat before the four (!) interviewers, they said, "You both seem busy. Who looks after the child?"

I was momentarily stunned and said, "Nitin works from home. That is the arrangement we have."

Then from my left came another question. "Can your husband verify employment?"

"Well," I said, "there's a contract here but he works mainly as an artist."

Nitin began showing them some of his graphic design work.

"Is there anything on letterhead?" came the woman again.

I must have looked annoyed. Thankfully, Nitin pulled out a New York Times review praising his paintings and the recent TimeOut review and silenced them.

"Thank you," they said.

"That's it?" I asked, incredulous. "Don't you want to know anything else?"

"No, we're fine," she said.

I walked away, shaking my head. How can it be that they chastise us for being working parents on the one hand and then seek their so-called "professional" letters and proof on the other.

Let my melodrama continue -- this country is doomed.

PS - Nitin just called his father to let him know and Dad was his usual optimistic self, "Don't worry. You'll get in somewhere. Naya is really smart."

Too bad she is not the one being judged...

Double speak

2008-01-16T15:00:00.000+05:30

Naya (to relatives in Guwahati): My father is Punjabai. My mother is Assamese. I am Assamese.

Naya (to relatives in Delhi): My father is Punjabi. My mother is Assamese. I am Punjabi.

Happy Holidays

2007-12-29T12:03:00.000+05:30

My aunt and uncle were here last week for dinner -- from Assam. Doorbell rings. It's our friend -- a man dressed in a sari and as Santa Claus. We all had dinner together. Globalization indeed.

Pre-Madonna Material Girl

2007-12-29T01:01:00.001+05:30

We had a sangeet tonight and my mom set out to do Naya's manicure...

Naya: Only paint the nails on one hand.
Aita: Why?
Naya: Because I need the other hand to cook!

Ramayana in Effect on Christmas

2007-12-29T01:00:00.000+05:30

Mommy, I am Hanuman and you are Sita. Sita, you are such a good cooker!!

Googling a nation's pulse

2007-12-28T15:19:00.000+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/28001559/Googling-a-nation8217s-puls.html

Growing up, my brothers and I always made fun of one particular phrase my parents and relatives used: Latest.
The definition was pretty much literal—hip, cool, trendy. But its grammatical applications I questioned.
“Her saris are always different, for each occasion,” would say my mother. “She is the latest.”
“Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was too good. Ek dam latest,” would say my cousin, piling Indian-ism upon Indian-ism.
Now, the folks at Google have given us a global equivalent and new moniker for the intangible idea behind latest: zeitgeist. (Fittingly, the word that means “spirit of the times” and exudes a certain robust universality comes from the German.)
Last week, the search engine giant that made its brand a household verb released its top 10 lists of fastest growing searches worldwide. This year marked the first that India got its very own Google Zeitgeist.
By the looks of it, we are obsessed with Mahatma Gandhi and Sania Mirza, technology and Aishwarya Rai. We love our Orkut and holidays in Kerala.
But after browsing with interest the lists, divided by terms, celebrities, athletes, politicians and places, I somehow felt the latest zeitgeist really doesn’t represent the pulse of this nation. It does not capture the tier II cities or the dichotomies of New India that everyone has become obsessed with understanding lately. Every other day, I field an entrepreneur’s phone call asking for help making sense of it all (free consulting, basically). I politely decline, citing a conflict of interest as a journalist.
But the lists, coupled with the end-of-year impulse to assess progress and make projections, spurred me to delve a little deeper. I bypassed the aggregated data that makes up the Zeitgeist and looked into what we are searching for day to day, using a tool known as Google Trends, unveiled in May 2006. Google Trends essentially neatly organizes which nations search for what and which are the most popular searched terms on a given day or week.
Take, for example, the week ended 21 November: four of the 10 top trends were related to teachers recruitment board exams. One trend was a website for government staff selection, while another related to the common admission test (CAT). Another was the National Institute of Industrial Engineering.
For comparison’s sake, on the same day, the US top trends included the high-profile murder of a woman, road conditions in Iowa and how long a turkey should be cooked in the oven. (It was the day before Thanksgiving.)
The key difference, of course, is that ours is an aspirational economy. Theirs is already there. (Whether you actually want to be cooking turkeys and obsessed with the weather is another thing altogether).
On Christmas Day, Google Trends shows that the Americans wanted to know about a tiger killing a tourist at the San Francisco Zoo, the retailers and restaurants open on Christmas, and sales for the next day.
In India, we too got into the holiday spirit, asking about Christmas and New Year SMS-es and how many reindeer Santa Claus has. But we also wanted to know about the Railways Recruitment Board in Ranchi and how best to file our taxes.
The day-to-day trends strike me because they conjure an image of hordes of youth in cyber cafes hungry for opportunity, watching the clock to ensure they don’t go a minute over an hour. I picture people who still see jobs at railways and public sector undertakings as safe bets, who might not realize the possibilities that await in a private sector craving talent as it never has before.
I asked Vinay Goel, head of products for Google India, what he made of the difference. He cautioned that the Zeitgeist is intentionally aggregated and summarizes year-long trends and search terms, not the most popular day in and day out. He also notes a distinction in content sought in India and the US.
“Where is the local electrician, plumber?” he asks. “The local electrician here has never been on the Internet. …What I see happening now is a lot of people are trying to get a lot of that basic local information. …The US folks don’t necessarily use Google as much as a navigational tool.”
While he meant navigation in the technical sense, it’s an apt metaphor for what a search engine still means an India—not to bake a turkey or chance upon some grisly photos of victims of violence—but a road map for life. Really, it is an apt metaphor for the India that still is.
This economy is often framed as one facing an acute talent shortage. Google Trends tell us we need to rethink this notion. Clearly, a large segment of the population is attempting to leverage technology to gain access. For all who gripe about the dearth of talented candidates, it is a reminder that we must meet the Googlers halfway, perhaps help them become the latest, too.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Not Really Indian debate continues...

2007-12-23T11:53:00.000+05:30

Check out this article in Outlook by Ramchandra Guha on the other worship in Decmber -- of the NRI

Then check out this response.

Warning registrattion required but well worth it. Then tell me what you think.

New year, new workplace

2007-12-21T12:31:00.001+05:30

Wider Angle
livemint.com

Come next year, forget working out. First, let’s just get the working part right.
In this season of resolutions made, promptly followed by a season of resolutions broken, I think the Indian workplace is in such crisis that we actually all need to resolve—once and for all—to make 2008 the year of the liberated, balanced, empowered, integrated office.
It is easier than it sounds. And Indian managers especially have a daunting challenge ahead.
Consider the dire findings of a study Mint reported on Monday. Indian corporate leaders are far more “task-focused”, less “social” and “participative” than North Americans, according to a survey of 100 managers across India conducted by executive recruitment company Korn/Ferry International, in association with International Market Assessment (IMA) India.
Translation: Indian bosses need to get out of their offices more, get a little dirtier in the ditches alongside their workers, make clearer the mission of their companies and actually show the staff what a flat hierarchy means. And then they need to make sure middle management is doing the same.
Place that imperative against the backdrop of the hypergrowth so many companies are experiencing right now and getting in touch with our softer sides might seem either impossible or the easiest thing to put on hold.
Yet, our survival depends on it.
Cliché as it sounds, empowered workforces are the only way to spur innovation, creativity, new ideas—the stuff that keeps us all in business really. The problem in implementation thus far has been that human resources (HR) departments’ efforts tend to border on the gimmicky. Think of all those useless office worksites that result in sprained ankles from three-legged races or teetering on a wire suspended between two trees.
So, here’s a suggestion for Resolution No. 1: Stop trying to bond us with ropes and handkerchiefs. Leave the races and role-playing exercises to athletes and actors. Instead, retreats should be used to discuss mission and drive its importance home over and over again. Why do we do what we do? For whom are we doing what we are doing? If your employees don’t know the answer to these questions, no amount of agility on a tightrope is going to save them—or your company.
Resolution No. 2: Thank them for working. Feedback, or the lack of it, is often cited as the main reason people leave an employer. Indians suffer from no lack of bluntness (in this festive season, can we also spare the overweight employees asked to dress up like Santa?), but we are sparse in our praise and downright jealous when it comes to stellar performers. Force yourself to regularly see the good— and thank those responsible for it. The words of one worker this week are still ringing in my ears, “I am a simple, easy employee. If you tell me I did a good job, say, once every two weeks, it will make all the difference in my life.” Encourage bottom-to-top evaluations and ban HR jargon such as “360-degree performance measures”.
Resolution No. 3: Pay more than lip service to embrace diversity and family-friendly policies. If your office is currently under construction (these days, whose isn’t?), are you asking the designer to include space for a gym, crèche, a room to pump breast milk for new mothers, smoking lounges so the halls don’t stink? Do you offer paternity leave, too? Are you making the transition back to work easier for new parents, and making sure younger employees have role models who balance work, home and all that falls in between?
Resolution No. 4: Earn the respect you command. We are still far too obsessed with titles and pedigree. I always work harder for bosses who aren’t afraid to slog with me, whose actions implicitly mentor and warrant mimicking.
Resolution No. 5: Stop accepting the way it’s always been. The only way to be different is to, well, do things differently.
Lest you think I just lecture, here’s a glimpse into my workplace goals: In 2008, I will better manage up and down and around. I will pay more attention to star performers and hardest workers and not take them for granted. I will set specific tasks for the meetings I hold; I will show up better prepared for the meetings for which I am summoned. I will seek training or mentors to help me improve on weaknesses. I will take more time out with individual colleagues and family members to listen and learn. I will limit the nights I bring home my laptop—if I must use it, it will be preferably after my daughter has been read to and fallen asleep. I will have one day where I literally switch off, Facebook to BlackBerry.
On 2 January, when we all report back to the grind, I’m hoping to join many of you in starting anew to create new energy at work, unfurling passion beyond the paycheck. From our happiness to our country’s continued growth, much is at stake.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Add Spanish tot her list

2007-12-19T21:12:00.001+05:30

Naya (reading to herself): Come on, Dora, let's say it in Spanish. Ek, dew, teen, panch, cuatro!!

Bedtime stories

2007-12-18T14:20:00.000+05:30

Naya: I can't find my Goldilocks book.
Me: It's okay. I know the story. It's in my head.
Naya: No, Mommy, stories are in your mouth.

A clash in class, of class

2007-12-18T14:19:00.000+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/13232123/A-clash-in-class-of-class.html
By S. Mitra Kalita

The shooting has been called “American-style”, “reminiscent of American values” and “a case of violence familiar to US schools”.
In reality, it is none of the above. This week’s tragedy at the Euro International School in Gurgaon demonstrates a collision of the India we once were, the India we aspire to be and, sadly, the India we continue to accept.
At the outset, I concede not knowing how and why two class VIII students killed a 14-year-old in the sanctum of school. But a few facts and conversations with educators and residents make clear that our quest for answers might better come from examining our own behaviours than the West’s.
The day after the murder, I headed to the suburb just south of New Delhi —the outsourcing hub that can at once remind me of New Jersey’s identical housing developments and manicured landscaping, Miami Beach’s art deco towers over swimming pools and golf courses, and oddly, my ancestral village of green fields, jagged boundary walls and herds of goats and cattle.
And that is why so many people begin their description of Gurgaon by saying, “The thing about this place is it’s really a gaon.”
Because of the way Gurgaon came to be acquired and built gradually, large swathes of farmland were parcelled out even as villagers hung onto their pockets of homes, which cluster in the shadows of sleekness. Some took profits and bought into new societies clinically named “sectors”, renting out the old place to migrants or relatives.
Flush with cash or rental income, locals seek the same power—purchasing and political—as the newcomers, observes Sanjay Sharma, who runs a real estate company and the portal, Gurgaon Scoop. They shop in the same malls, attend the same resident welfare association meetings and send their children to the same schools.
But they are not the same.
“There is a struggle between people who are here and people who have come from outside,” says Sharma, a returnee from the US. His attempt to videotape a community meeting in his sector recently resulted in a brawl and seven stitches on his upper lip. “Locals here are quite bottled up. They have money but they are not well read.”
Locals concede as much, pinning their hopes on education as equalizer.
Satinder Grewal, an advocate, traces generations back to Bijwasan village on the Delhi-Haryana border. Some land has been sold, while more— about Rs50 crore, he estimates—remains in the family’s possession.
“A new awareness is coming to Gurgaon and locals, we want our kids to learn English,” says Grewal.
By virtue of shunning government schools, the families of the three boys involved in the shooting seem to hold this aspiration. Media outlets reported that the family of the victim, Abhishek Tyagi, moved into Gurgaon city from their nearby village so he and his sister could attend Euro International.
“They hoped their children would get a better education,” a neighbour told The Indian Express.
Despite its international label, the school’s website says it follows the Indian Schools Certificate Examinations. Misleading name aside, I wonder what role coveted private schools play in bridging the places such youth come from—and their methods of conflict resolution—with the global exposure they promise. School officials did not return calls, emails or text messages.
Police say the gun came from one suspect’s father, a property dealer. Why so many in Gurgaon feel they even need a gun is a question as loaded as the weapon. Status symbol, yes. A response to the general lawlessness outside gated compounds, indeed. Police also say real estate agents brandish guns because so many transactions are a combination of cheque and cash (translation: illegal).
As Katherine Newman articulated in her book Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, shootings occur only when many factors converge, all necessary, but none sufficient on its own. In the suburb these teens called home, not much more seems needed to create a hotbed of conflict and confusion.
As he heard of the shootings this week, Sharma asked himself and his neighbours: How far have we come?
“Civilization comes into the picture when you restrain yourself from violence,” he pronounces. “Gurgaon is getting worse.”
Of course, clashes—by class, caste, profession—now mark countless cities and towns developing their geographical and metaphorical fringes. On a corner of Sharma’s desk, for example, sat this week’s Outlook magazine, its cover depicting two women smoking and dancing. The headline: “Why Bangalore hates the IT culture.”
Yet, it is naïve to say India’s social ills are borrowed from the West; sex, drugs and violence have been a reality of life here for decades. We would better serve our youth by wiping the grime of corrupt, dishonest ways off the mirror. One teen’s death warrants at least one clean, hard look at ourselves.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

School Daze

2007-12-09T22:17:00.000+05:30

We went to an orientation at Naya's school today. It is the Navakriti school, founded by the people from the famous Mirambika school, next to the also-famous IIT (which has shared research on preschool education) and NCERT, which is trying tto change Indian schools from rigid to creative. The sessions started off with meditation and a flower offering to The Mother and Aurobindo. I will confess that my first thought was that this wasn't necessarily the type of place for me or my kid and that maybe we should have stuck with a more commercial school.
But then the parents were asked to line up for circle time and we had to clap our hands and sing songs like kids. I warmed up fast. When we were led down a marigold-strewn path that was decorated along the sides with children's artwork and led into the outdoor amphitheatre, I was feeling like I had bought in. Thankfully, I relaxed and nodded in approval as educators detailed the philosophy of "integrated education", combining the child-centered learning I like about Montessori with the freedom movement of Aurobindo Society schools with the focus on nature as a way to nurture of the hippie movement with quantifiable research on how these are the most important years for a human being's intellect formation. It is hard to practice not saying "DON'T" all the time to a child but I certainly would rather embrace the "DO" and "GET DIRTY" philosophy than what I see in so much of child-rearing.
I should explain why we switched Naya from her old school in the first place. It was a wonderful experience when she was 2. Her teacher Alka was loving and really helped Naya in her adjustment. One of our fondest memories in Delhi is of Naya on stage dressed like a bear, swinging her hips, telling the twins dressed as giraffes how to dance better, and singing her heart out about Jinny and Johnny.
But when she moved up to class for age 3, she started bringing homework asking her to colour a banana yellow. When we went to school for the Independence Day celebration, she didn't seem happy to be on stage at all and a representative from a bank droned on and on about the need to save for our kids' education. The same bank snapped pictures of the babies and asked us for our mobile numbers for delivery - which meant they wanted to make another sales pitch in our living rooms. The last straw came during diversity week when the representative for America was... Ronald McDonald.
It was Delhi at its worst.
I begged and pleaded all the marquis schools to let us in - Step by Step, Magic Years, Learning Tree, Ardee. No seats. Why had I not thought of this earlier?
I did what I do whenever I panic. I researched, reported, asked everyone I knew. Thankfully, a woman who randomly met at a birthday party for a colleague's daughter said she had just been to Navakriti, loved it but because of the distance, she didn't enroll her daughter.
Nitin spent one day at Navkriti, while we both observed another Montessori near our house. I don't think we were really familiar with Aurobindo method at this point but we loved all the space to play (it is about an acre, which is really really rare in Delhi) and the fact that they encourage kids to play in water and get dirty. I also liked that there weren't expat parents there (sorry, I know I am one) and that I saw a little girl with a motorcycle racing t-shirt on and I gathered one of two things a) it was a hand me down from an elder brother or b) she was very firm on what she wants to wear and her mother lets it be. I liked that. (So many of these Delhi playschools have Prada on the kids AND the parents.)
Anyway after three hours of orientation today where I heard from the most articulate teachers I have ever encountered in India about why they do this, what they learn (NOT what they teach) I felt hope about Indian education for the first time since I got here. One of the parents even stood up and asked about efforts to integrate classrooms so poor children and rich children could be educated side by side -- and that the learning methods would extend to the less fortunate. Charity by volition in Delhi!! There also is a lot of art and creativity with natural substances like twigs and stones and dyes and flowers. They teach the alphabet not through drill like A is for apple but more through stories.
We were just about to start looking for another school for Naya but alas she misses the cutoff yet again this year. After today, I think another year here -- if all goes as they preach -- is a blessing.

Wider Angle

2007-12-07T16:35:00.000+05:30

livemint.com

Do we really want little girls to grow up into damsels who need to be saved, always by wealthy and powerful men?
Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita
I wish the princesses would stay poisoned, in deep slumber, locked in towers. Really, they should just stay away.
For my daughter’s third birthday, celebrated in the US, she received a half-dozen odes to junior royalty, on T-shirts and pyjamas, tiaras and wands, even a huge pink rucksack stamped with the Disney characters who have been princesses: Ariel, Jasmine, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella.
I thought India would be safer.
Then, the other day as I bought a lehenga for a friend’s baby, the store attendant says in broken English, “Beautiful. She will look just like a princess.”
It got worse this past weekend when a Wall Street Journal story, published in Mint’s Lounge, reported all the ways Disney is innovating to keep little girls dreaming of being princesses—even until they become grown-ups (think brides dressed like Snow White prancing down the aisle). Still, I chalked the phenomenon up to the wacky ways of the West, until I came to this line:
“Disney has been trying to introduce the brand in countries like India, where it launched a search for an Indian princess.”
My heart sank. We are not safe.
Leave aside the marketing gimmicks, for a moment. What is it with this newfound aspiration to princess-hood? We cannot even blame little girls because the desire is so clearly something we are encouraging, looking for, egging on. Why?
The feminist writer Peggy Orenstein got so fed up with America’s obsession with princesses that she penned a New York Times Magazine article last year on the subject headlined, “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”
Her conclusion really summarized my frustration: “Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. …In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl…”
Despite a few progressive exceptions —namely Diana, although she got much cooler after she stopped being the prince’s prize—princesses basically connote major neediness, damsels craving saving: often with a kiss, sometimes true love, always wealth and power.
In India, many of our girls sadly require a different kind of “saving” (in the womb). Then if they make it, they still grow up against messages that undermine them as less worthy and capable, for no other reason than gender. And now we are asking them to be princesses, to dream of the days when a man will enable escape?
It seems such a step backward from all that has suddenly become possible in this economy for women.
By now, my fellow mothers are either nodding their heads in agreement or have just relegated me to the crazy stepmother category.
The Walt Disney Co. India clarified that the search for the Indian princess was a one-time event staged last year when the products were introduced in India. “Princess is one of our extremely popular franchises in India,” said K. Seshasaye, Disney’s India spokesman. “When the toys were launched, within 45 days, the licensees told us all the products were off the shelves. ...Basic family values are pretty strong here in India. And Disney stories around princesses encourage these girls to take the right values.”
What’s the harm? you ask. They’ll grow out of it. They’ll grow up to be astronauts and managing directors.
Will they? Have they?
This week, a study released by education training institute Career Launcher shows the number of women who receive coaching for the Indian Institutes of Management entrance examination is between 28% and 33%. Yet, batch profiles at the prestigious IIMs indicate that just 10-15% of students who gain admission are women.
Despite a steadily increasing female presence on campuses, the discrepancy between those who aspire and those who gain admissions stems from more men having engineering backgrounds (a popular precursor to B-school) and more men having work experience, the study found.
About one out of 10 students in the nation’s top B-schools is a woman —yet double that number wants to be there. And we still want our little girls to be princesses?
As we opened the gifts at the birthday party, I hung on to my mother’s first words to my daughter in the delivery room, minutes after she was born: “I hope you grow up to be president.”
Already, India has achieved the milestone my mother alluded to, while the US is just beginning to consider it: A female president.
Skip the marketing hype. Our girls need to move on to bigger titles—the kind they can earn and seize themselves.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Out of the closet

2007-12-07T16:34:00.001+05:30

A story I really liked working on about -- of all things -- the Indian version of the closet.

http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/07003357/Out-of-the-closet.html

Latest

2007-12-07T16:31:00.000+05:30

Mommy, your husband said to close the door.
- Naya at midnight

House of the Rising Sun exhibition studies and paintings

2007-12-05T19:18:00.000+05:30

Each photographic study is followed by the resulting painting, except the last one, in which case the painting is still in progress.
Each painting is 30"x60", oil acrylic and tea on canvas.

Subtle

2007-12-03T17:33:00.000+05:30

"You and me are girls. But who does Papa have?"

Maliciously funny

2007-11-28T22:20:00.000+05:30

Nitin put up these glow-in-the dark stickers in our bedroom. I was furious because it makes it look like a kids' room, as though Naya sleeping with us isn't enough.
Mitra: Besides Gautam (our landlord) will not like it.
Naya: That's okay. We can just kill him!

Making of an NRI Part Deaux

2007-11-27T23:33:00.000+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/princeton.htm

Hindutva or Peta...

2007-11-27T23:32:00.000+05:30

i don't eat meat. It's too hard for me -- Naya

Making of an NRI

2007-11-27T10:14:00.000+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/2007/11/26221806/Ivy-ambitions-Six-Indians-wal.html

One-year anniversary

2007-11-25T03:03:00.000+05:30

A labour of love

livemint.com

wider angle

For a change, let me quit complaining.
A few days ago, my family and I celebrated one year of living here—a journey I have largely shared with readers in this space. And yet because our transition has taken place inside the fast, bumpy ride that is India’s, reflections tend to veer towards criticism: poor infrastructure, unempowered workplaces, corruption, a lack of inclusive progress.
My husband and I expected some of these conditions when we arrived, an American-born journalist and an artist looking to find opportunity—and a bit of themselves—in the country their parents left more than three decades ago. Even before we arrived, we had been admonished to sanitize negative opinions or keep them to ourselves.
“The last person Indians want to hear about India from is an NRI,” a friend of mine, who abandoned India six months into what was to be a three-year assignment, ominously told me. (Apparently, the abbreviation I have repeatedly defined as Not Really Indian also stands for Non Reliable Indian or Not Required Indian.)
The warning partly prepared me for the feedback occasionally offered to this column, from the salutation that began, “For our dear misled author,” to the accusation, “I’ve been reading your articles for a while and most of the time its (sic) more cribbing than anything else. … all your exposure to the US makes you feel a little different from regular Indians in India.”
It’s true. Just as I was conscious of being different every day of my life spent in the US, I am conscious of being an outsider in India. So, when people here and elsewhere check in and innocently yet oversimplistically ask, “Do you like India?” I feel stumped to provide some kind of right, honest answer. To somehow encapsulate all I am doing and feeling, all India is doing and not doing, the four-steps-forward-and-two-back phenomenon, appreciating how far we have come, lamenting the distance we still have to go.
Yes, we.
After a year of trying to create and define a home, my answer actually boils down to something just as simple as the question: I want to belong and believe. I do love this country.
I love the rhythm of life, the entrepreneurial sounds of vendors in the morning and less-predictable fireworks when Team India wins at night.
I love to see colleagues at work dipping rotis into the same dish without inhibition or fear of germs. Initially when I stared, their reaction always was: “Do you want some?”
I love that even as I stress out before every function, switching from sari to black cocktail dress to jeans with high heels, I know each style will be acceptable and likely have plenty of company at the affair.
I love that Indian music no longer needs to be relegated to CDs or the iPod; I can just turn on the radio for the soundtrack to my life and mood.
I love Indians’ hunger for news and information, keeping up at once with the Sensex and global crude prices, Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee’s tantrums and the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
I love that in my house, I speak Assamese to the maid from Orissa who speaks Hindi to my Punjabi husband who speaks English to me—and somehow my daughter has learnt all of the above to complete the circle.
An anniversary may be a meaningless milestone to some. For me, the past year has been nothing short of transformative, as a manager, as a mother, as a storyteller, as a product of this soil—albeit one generation removed. I concede that, like many Westerners, I arrived thinking I had more figured out than I did; in humbling me yet guiding me, India has imparted life-altering and life-long lessons.
I am grateful for the new relationships formed with family which suddenly can afford to call my mobile or even visit, engaging in my daily life and routines. Sure, the newfound interference sometimes annoys me and my decisions are always second-guessed—but this is the welcome reality of family life, replacing the artificial and temporary adoration shown to the American cousin and her Samsonite suitcases of cheap perfume and nail polish as gift. Sometimes, when relatives fill my home in New Delhi (very often), I recall a visit to my father’s birthplace just a few years ago. A distant cousin asked if she could touch my skin to see if I felt any different.
Every now and then, it’s worth remembering, in many ways, how far I have come, and India too. I love that possibilities today, for people like me to software engineers to retail workers to rural youth like that cousin, can feel endless, at least once the link is made between opportunity and seeker. That is the feeling I try to hang on to most, the belief in a nation and its economy and its people.
Yes, I love India. And that is why the harder truths and criticisms must resume next week.
(Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com)

Love the work or the brand?

2007-11-18T19:01:00.000+05:30

http://www.livemint.com/2007/11/15185438/Love-the-work-or-brand.html?atype=tp

Wider Angle

Infosys Technologies Ltd used to be the best company to work for. Now it’s only sixth best.
So says a workplace survey released this week by Mercer Consulting and market research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres, published in the magazine Business Today. In a pool of about 100 participants, Microsoft came out tops.
Somehow, I doubt human resources managers at Infy are losing any sleep. So steeped in tech lore is founder Narayana Murthy’s commitment to his employees and an empowered workplace that an Internet hoax has been making the rounds for some years now where he says, “Love your job but never fall in love with your company—because you never know when it stops loving you.”
You can tell it’s a hoax because in some iterations, Murthy’s comments come in a memo admonishing software engineers for working so late. In other versions, he’s delivering a speech at a mentoring session. An Infosys spokeswoman Thursday simply clarified, “He did not say this.”
Still, in light of the magazine’s listing and summer placements under way, the sentiment of what our employers really mean to us warrants dissection. Have Indians finally moved beyond attaching their worth to the brand under which they toil, versus the work they are actually doing?
In the case of Generation SMS, the answer largely seems to indicate they want to. After all, it is their market. They can demand more responsibility and birthdays off. They’re willing to work like dogs—but want to bring the pooches to the office, too. Work from home once a week, off a laptop in Goa at Christmas. Say no, and another employer is happy to make the hire.
Among the elite business school set, the usual suspects such as Infosys have been replaced as employers of choice by financial services and consulting gigs. And even those with a few years of IT experience are seeing greater value and growth in smaller companies and start-ups.
They don’t need a survey. They’re in control.
Yet, unfortunately, when it comes to employment in India, bragging rights need to extend far beyond employer and employee—what will we tell the neighbours? One chief executive of a medium-sized company in Gurgaon tells me he has to inflate salaries to make up for the lack of cache he has as a brand-name employer—even though he too offers a gym, transport, free food, not to mention job growth. In the US, I hear quite the opposite: friends at large companies crib all the time that they would take a more meaningful job at a smaller company in a heartbeat—if only they could afford the pay cut.
“In India, at the entry level, the name really matters,” said Rashmi Bansal, editor and publisher of Jam, a youth magazine and website. “Status is still very important.”
Yet, it can be stifling.
If we are going to borrow western practices, such as top 10 lists and company rankings, it might be time to bridge generations and perceptions. Why not shock, then impress, Uncle-ji with his nephew’s 250-member sports marketing firm making the cut because it offers sabbaticals and 100 hours of training annually?
A Mercer spokeswoman declined to share methodology, but said companies with more than 200 white-collar workers can nominate themselves for the survey. The upcoming rankings by the Great Place to Work Institute India, to be published by The Economic Times this summer, plans to add narrower surveys on Indian companies deemed friendly to working mothers, younger workers, etc.
Especially with a workforce growing more transient, what constitutes a great place to work one year for one person does not necessarily the next. The same hire who valued a great canteen might covet a crèche later on. The woman who demanded a car service to pick her up might find, as a new mother, she wants a room to express breastmilk. And so while we can itemize our desires from employers, that list will change as we—and our economies—do.
In Fortune’s top 100 US companies to work for, divided into small, medium and large businesses, the top 10 inevitably includes a supermarket chain with tens of thousands of workers—white, blue and all collars in between—across the country. I happened to be interviewing the pastry chef at a store in New Jersey called Wegman’s a few years ago and he told me he had just returned from Europe.
“For vacation?” I asked.
“No, for training,” he said. Wegman’s is No. 3 on Fortune’s list.
No. 1 is Google, which made sense to me this week as The New York Times reported on a masseuse at the company who sold her stock options and became a multimillionaire. She now has her own masseuse, a sign—I assume—that some people will always prefer the company to the work.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Happy one-year anniversary!!

2007-11-18T12:19:00.000+05:30

So I tried and tried to get family and friends to submit guest posts for one-year anniversary with no luck (except Sanjib, good ol' reliable himself). Fittingly, it fell throughout the weekend - we left on the 16, arrived on the 17 and I started work on the 19th. One-year later, we experienced a typically Delhi weekend--crazy. Staff meeting on Friday with idlis, vadas and sambar. Dinner for my 13-year-old niece's birthday in Gurgaon. Morning meeting Saturday for work, visitor from Hong Kong. Rushed to another kid's birthday party with Naya, missed the cake but she liked her "return-gift". Picked up Nitin who was at an art exhibit and then the Habitat Centre for a meeting. Came home, put lipstick on, ran out the door for an A.R. Rahman concert. Ran to dinner afterward with Nitin's cousins. Back and edited copy, asleep at 2:30 am. Awake at 8, dealt with copy and weird notes with boss, finished queries on copy, sent it along, gave Naya a bath where every orafice is now spanking shiny and clean, fed her lunch, ordered chaat, heated lunch, took a shower. Ding dong. Cousin and sister-in-law here for lunch as they leave this city for Kolkata. They eat. Other friends came over to see them off. Back in kitchen to make tea. Take Naya to play date. Go shopping for next week's birthday party gifts. COme back and here I type. Thank god I didn't have a Sunday night dinner party as I had wanted to to celebrate...

My column this week will likely muse on India - one year later. Stay tuned...

She is her grandmother's granddaughter

2007-11-14T19:08:00.000+05:30

Lately Naya has been taking a timer we have and pretending she is on the phone with family members. While I was working on column tonight, I overheard the following. Keep in mind, it is one-sided but in her pretend, she actually waits for the responses:

Naya: Oh, Rahul, how are you?
PAUSE
Naya: Happy Diwali!
NODS AND LAUGHS
Naya: Soooo did you get married?
PAUSE
Naya: Not yet? Too bad

Then she "hangs up"

Naya: Sanjib, how are you?
NODS
Naya: Happy Diwali!
NODS AND LAUGHS
Naya: So are you coming here?
PAUSE
Naya: Ok I'll see you tomorrow. Did you marry anyone?
PAUSE
Naya: Oh too bad.

Diwali

2007-11-11T18:19:00.000+05:30

We did a Diwali/kali puja in our own madeup way. I tried to postulate in prayer but Naya kept kicking my head so I got up and just folded my hands and thanked god and asked for blessings. Naya, her usual impish self, tried to eat the mithai (sweets) I had laid out as an offering. "That's for god," I told her. "You can have from this part," showing her the box.
She obliged.
THE NEXT MORNING...
Naya comes running to me in the living room. "Mommy, God didn't eat the mithai!"
"Oh..." I said stumped. Should I say god is pretend? Like Santa Claus? That we would give it to poor people instead?
Then she went to the mandir, grabs the Ganesh idol and tries to force-feed him the sweet.
Seeing me giving no answers, she ran into Nitin's studio.
"Papa!" she said. "Ganeshji is not listening to me. He HAS to eat the mithai."
Note to self for next Diwali...

How holidays can work

2007-11-11T18:18:00.000+05:30

Wider angle by S. Mitra Kalita
livemint.com

Growing up in the US, my father’s office Christmas party was as much a part of our family tradition as the tree and presents. Every December, we took the train into New York City to admire lights and toy trains in the company’s lobby. Cartoons played for hours in the auditorium. Free lunch in the canteen was much nicer than McDonald’s to us three kids. Then came visits with Santa Claus and gifts, things such as binoculars and craft sets.
We would stop by my father’s office and I’d staple everything I possibly could, while my brothers flung rubber bands. I remember feeling proud that my dad had an office, and somehow I realized through those visits that this company made him the man he was and, in many ways, the comfortable family we were. Around the holidays, as teachers and television asked children to think of those less fortunate, my gratitude strengthened.
Long ago, in my teenage years when such affairs began losing their lustre anyway, the parties suddenly stopped. Cost-cutting, my father said.
The employer happened to be Citibank.
Chances are, readers of this newspaper have followed the departure of Citi chief executive Charles Prince this week and the turmoil at the company and, more generally, in financial services over losses related to subprime lending. Already, compensation experts are sending Wall Street a warning that bonuses might remain flat or fall this year—for the first time in five years.
In my new home that happens to be my father’s old, on this last day of business in the traditional Hindu calender, as we honour our staff with gifts and gratitude, as we pray for more prosperity often on the backs of these same workers, I remember the holiday parties as the earliest lesson I received about employer obligation to families. I remember loyalty that was a two-way street—and how that spilled over into consumer habits as we grew up. I’ll ponder how it is that Indian firms can hang on to the ethos even as loyalties change and we brace ourselves for the cold that’s been promised as the US sneezes.
This past year has been rocky for Citi, its thousands of laid-off employees and investors like me (disclosure: I dumped babysitting earnings into the stock in 1990 and my father has always managed it for me).
My life has been marked by a certain loyalty to the bank, from those parties to my first investments to my first mortgage. As Citi grew and shrunk, merged and laid off, I joined frustrated consumers in wondering if the right hand talked to the left.
Prince’s letter of resignation links the need to unite strategy in and out of the workplace: “Our strategy to operate as a real company—not a collection of acquired businesses—with a focus on our infrastructure, our clients, and a strong unified brand and employee culture—is the right one,” he wrote. “But... the rating agencies have recently downgraded significantly… I am responsible for the conduct of our businesses.”
As I read those words, I thought of the company’s role in the life of an immigrant mining engineer in 1972 with no finance background—and the ripple effect that support had on many more. Citi hired my father through a temporary staffing agency, liked him enough to give full-time work and then paid for his MBA. He retired after more than 30 years at the bank in various roles, finally as a vice-president.
My two homes this week—the US and India—are experiencing a dichotomy that makes me cling even harder to my belief that companies employ whole families, not individuals. And that it’s no coincidence that the greatest places to work better innovate and create the best choices for consumers.
Somehow over the last few decades, this sentiment in the US has been lost with the passage of time, especially as we measure time with monthly targets, quarterly earnings and fiscal calendars. Understandable, but also noteworthy is the fact that workers who stick around are motivated by more than money.
That’s why my favourite Diwali mornings in India have been spent in factories and workplaces where the big bosses bless more than their books—employees and their families.
Industry body Assocham, or the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, says corporate India’s spending on Diwali gifts likely increased by 48% to Rs2,000 crore compared with Rs1,350 last year. I’d like to think it’s about more than the gift, but about the duty we all have towards one another. And to allay some of the cold that India might catch, we must figure out ways beyond money and gifts to empower and appreciate.
As I bought gifts this week for the staff at home and my colleagues at work, my shopping companion said to me, “This is all so clichéd. Do these things really come from the heart?”
To keep the good times rolling, they must.

Deevaleee

2007-11-09T23:10:00.000+05:30

Nitin: "Umm I can't tell if this is Diwali or the apocalypse."

In these fast times

2007-11-06T19:47:00.001+05:30

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita
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I happened to be at a meeting over a five-star lunch on Karva Chauth, the day that some Hindu women fast for the protection and well being of their husbands.
“Fruit salad?”
I said no.
“Water?”
I declined, shaking my head.
The moppy-haired man sitting across from me couldn’t take it anymore. “What is this nonsense? Isn’t it the 21st century?”
“Yes,” I replied. “That’s why my husband is doing it too.”
He still acted annoyed, as did many women slightly older than me encountered throughout the day. Their sentiment reflected that judgemental strand of feminism, passed from one generation to the next: We did not work so hard so you’d throw it all away—and for a husband!
So get them to starve, too, I say.
These allegedly flat-world times are altering our Indian landscape by the minute. It should come as no surprise that religion and ritual have become security blankets and authenticity badges for many in my generation, and even more so for those behind us. In my case, I married into a Punjabi family that has been celebrating the holiday for as long as anyone can remember. But I doubt any of my husband’s ancestors, like him, saw their wives sacrificing food and decided to join in the name of mutual love, protection and equality. (Okay, so there was a little bit of cajoling from the wife, along with company from other temporarily henpecked cousin-brothers and brothers-in-law.)
I was exempt from my first two fasts as a married woman—probably among the few times being pregnant or nursing came in handy. During the festival season in the fall of 2005, I happened to be reporting in Gurgaon at the India office of Convergys Corp., the world’s largest call centre operator. Hordes of women lined up to get a look at the moon, and pulled out pictures of their husbands before touching milk and water, then something sweet, to their lips. A few days later, I was present again for the fiercest rangoli (the process of arranging flowers into shapes and patterns) competition I have ever seen. Finally came Diwali night, which was again celebrated with a puja inside and pop and punk from a deejay outside.
One could point out, as I did in a story for an American newspaper, the dichotomy of the call centre workers interacting with the US and the UK on the phones even while their “Indianness” remained intact. Now, after living in India for almost a year, I’d say the Western exposure is precisely why they are asserting their said native identity even harder.
Thus, it’s not your imagination that with each passing year, the need to get rituals in the festival season “right” strengthens; besides, the commercialism and consumerism certainly doesn’t hurt those two booming institutions of worship in the new India —religion and retail. In many ways, Indians are now experiencing what us Non Resident Indians (trying our hardest to prove we are the opposite of Not Really Indian) have known for some time: confronted with foreign influences, sometimes you seek out the little pockets of familiarity and cling, master and pontificate. And that is why your American cousins can perform Bharatanatyam and recite dialogues from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and tell you precisely when cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni broke his own record. In the US alone, more than 150 temples serve an estimated Hindu population of 1.2 million—with dozens more planned.
Sadly, the turn towards religion also can ignite unhealthy passions. This year’s Karva Chauth, named because it is celebrated four days after the full moon, also fell four days after another big news event in India: the Tehelka expose of the planning, plotting and official sanction of the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. As soon as I saw the report, I wondered if chief minister Narendra Modi’s re-election bid had just been clinched.
What does this have to do with Karva Chauth? Everything, actually.
Indians can react to their newfound place in the global world in a few ways —regardless, the source of support for a harmless holiday and a harmful politician remains the same. At one extreme is losing who we are completely, scoffing at remnants of the old. At the other is becoming so absorbed in our assertion and definition of India that we exclude everyone—and ultimately ourselves. Somewhere in between is the hope we can bow to tradition yet blend progress, as the countless couples who fasted together this past week can attest.
How and why and whether we engage religion in our daily life has come to matter more than ever. We are not grappling openly enough with gestures and philosophies we have taken for granted for centuries, touching feet to our division of labour.
After all, there’s ritual and then there’s reality.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Where's 911?

2007-10-30T21:18:00.001+05:30

I had a helpless India moment last night. We were driving back from my MIL's after a typically delectable Punjabi feast after a Punjabi holiday that required us all to fast (well required me but Nitin did too). About a kilometer into the journey home, we came upon an overturned truck. It must have just fallen because we saw a man break out through a window. About four guys tried to hoist up the red cab of the truck with no luck. Seeing our car, they gestured to our driver to go help. He did.

And then jumped back in the car and attempted to maneuver around the remains. I gasped and looked down, then looked away. And then morbid human nature took over and I stared -- a man was on the ground, covered in blood and quivering. I could hear the men nearby in Hindi saying he needed help but shouldn't be moved. I looked specifically at his head and I am cringing as I type this but I couldn't tell where it ended and the road began and there was a thicker residue oozing onto the ground. I too began shaking. I thought only enough to cover Naya's eyes.

"Shouldn't we stop or help or call someone?" I said to the driver.

"If you wish," the driver said.

But who? I don't know the 911 equivalent in India. And truthfully, while there are efforts to launch emergency services etc, they haven't quite taken off nationally yet. I scrolled through my mobile, wondering if maybe the presets had such a number. No luck.

I tried to call our health reporter, thinking she had just done a story on one such said service. She didn't answer.

We were nearly 1 kilometre away and I was feeling like the worst person in the world. Should we have just tried to fold the guy into our front seat and rush to a hospital? How could I leave a fellow human being on the ground like that? I might sound melodramatic but it's really what I was thinking.

Finally, I call my brother-in-law, who lives nearby and is resourceful. I started to tell him where we were and to ask if maybe he knew a doctor or hospital that could be dispactched when we saw it -- a police car.

Now you have to remember that the police (slogan in Delhi: with you, for you, always) have made a living in India never being there when you need them. And they are known to be among the most crooked of institutions. But I had a feeling like all my gods had planted that car there in that moment.

"Accident. Very urgent. 1 kilometre back," I yelled. The driver did the Hindi talking, while Nitin and I both made gestures to hurry and get help.

We proceeded on our way. I wonder if the man made it. I wonder what he said and thought. And sadly, I wonder hoe he felt when he saw our car veer around him.

Festivals

2007-10-29T01:04:00.000+05:30

I have decided (in case my fellow Assamese brethren care) that being an Assamese married to a Punju is the best combo. Here's why:
Durga Puja
Diwali and all its adornments
Bihu
Festivals for much of India focus on one holiday - in the east, there's puja; in the west, Ganpati; north Diwali; south Deepavalli and maybe Onam? But if you're an Assamese Punju combo, we get it all. And so our last few days have demonstrated:

Durga Puja worship in Assam in a crazy section of Guwahati with five pandals clustered together, rides, food, bazaars and an overall great vibe that makes Delhi's CR Park (Bong hood) look like Christmas in Tel Aviv or something.

Then a Navratri party in Delhi a few days later. (Those fun-loving Punjabis have adopted it and love it as their own. We are more than mere posers since Nitin's dad grew up in Ahmedabad and Nit did a fellowship there).

And these last few days have been Diwali parties - cards till 5 am the other night, melas, invitations to more, Karva Chauth is tomorrow. Not that fasting is fun but gifts and the husband joining in certainly are...

And then we Assamese are lucky enough to have two Bihus, which match Lodi and Vaisakhi... And include more dancing, revelry and food...

Read this if you like happy ending epxat tales

2007-10-24T19:20:00.000+05:30

She is staying.
I sat her down and presented four options -- stay at status quo with a major salary increase, stay with a moderate increase and I ask part-time Didi to do laundry and dishes, stay at same salary and I hire another woman part time, or go with our blessing and love. She chose a combo of option 1 and 2. I laid it on thick. I said we loved her like family and that if she had a problem, she needed to tell me. I even told her to look at how Nitin and I fight as a model for how people operate in a house (hah:). I said I worried that if she goes to another household to work, they might exploit her and make sure she doesn't get to eat meat and chocolates and hound after her to open a bank account and take English classes. She laughed and said she also worried about someone new coming to take care of Naya and that Naya wouldn't like that.
She did say she wants to be upstairs by 11 pm, which I have no problems with. I told her that when guests come, we can get the food ready and I can simply microwave. I also told her we will have fewer guests so not to worry so much.
I told her she should still go visit her mother and father, and she said no. I said we can fly you there for a week. She said no. I asked if me and Naya should come. She laughed. "There's no electricity there," she said.
"That's how my father grew up," I said. "That's where we used to stay when we came. We'd be okay."
"I know," she said. "You come from a poor family." (Not quite but I didn't correct her.)
"That is why I keep telling you to take those English classes. Maybe you can be like my father."
She laughed again. I cried, ever the brown guilty liberal expat.

Don't read this if you are sick of expats complaining of maids

2007-10-23T21:54:00.000+05:30

Felicia is leaving. I knew this would come but I thought we had until December when she said her mother wanted her home for at least a month and then maybe for the full year. But today - after reviewing her contract with the agency - she said she will be leaving November 5. I still haven't gotten a straight answer on why or where she's going and I wonder if it's because she doesn't really know. She's always been moody, that's for sure, but what's family if not moody. I suppose I am most upset because this insults my liberal expatty ways of thinking we treated her pretty well "for a servant". But if I take out my emotion--as I am sure she too must be doing--a job is a job and perhaps there are more glorious ones that burning eggplant on the stove for our weekly bharta or cleaning my kid's bum or washing my underwear (in machine, not by hand). We pay her more than most local Indians pay their maids, and also give her lots of offs. But we pay less than the expat set, partly because she doesn't speak English nor know the beauty of our Amrikan khanna like hamburgers and pasta. Felicia being a part of the now Old India, indirect communication reigns, so this decision to leave early could really be an emergency at home she is afraid to tell us about, a desire to go see if she can make more money elsewhere or maybe work less for a family that doesn't have any kids or as many guests as we do, or maybe she is in love with someone and I have been underestimating her. Maybe maybe maybe. I, of course, am giving her a dose of Indian right back and sulking and generally not speaking to her. Real mature, I know. Tomorrow I guess I will have to try to talk to her again. We stay in touch with our old nannies from the US but somehow I think it might be different here, which is the saddest part of all. I wonder if I will have these questions always.

Of latrines

2007-10-20T17:15:00.000+05:30

Just back from Assam. I shouldn't brag but everyone extolled the virtue of Naya's flexibility and easiness. While I think she did get more naughty on this trip, I agree. Case in point - when she enters a latrine bathroom now, she knows to gingerly lift up her skirt. That's my girl.

Hit the Road, Rage

2007-10-12T03:17:00.000+05:30

Stressed-out workers vent their anger and aggression in the one place they have control: the driver's seat
Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

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At 8.15 on a recent night, Viraj Kalra was driving home and a car rolled back into his Hyundai Santro.
That wasn’t the worst mistake of the evening. Honking was. Kalra says he simply pressed the horn, first as a polite warning, then with annoyance.
In response, the driver got out with a hockey stick in hand, opened Kalra’s door and took aim.
THWACK. Onto the Santro’s bonnet.
The next strike, Kalra prayed, would knock him unconscious right away. The raging driver swung back again.
And the light turned green.
Seeing the vehicles around him revving to go, the man released his grip, stayed in character enough to mutter an obscenity to Kalra, jumped back in his car and drove off.
Kalra, vice-president for new businesses at PlanMan Consulting, recounted the story in a mass email.
“The incident came as close to ripping the human fabric into shreds as any,” he wrote. “At this point words like ‘society’, ‘civilized’, ‘rules’ and ‘humane’ sound shallow.”
This week, another one where the Capital’s deadly roads made headlines, I caught up with Kalra to see if he had any perspective on why drivers—across the country, not just New Delhi—seem so angry, why driving has gotten so dangerous.
His answer inspired me to break a pledge I made when I moved to India and began writing Wider Angle: no columns complaining about traffic. Rest assured, Kalra’s response is right up our alley.
“Honestly the kind of work that all of us do now, we carry a lot of pressure even into our cars and into our driving, our spaces,” Kalra said. “You probably need an outlet, and the psychological profile is that we are more stressed than a decade ago.”
The only India-specific survey I found to address the roots of road rage was released in June by LeasePlan, a vehicle leasing and management company. In India, it says, the main causes boil down to drivers going in the wrong direction (64%), drivers who cut queues (61%), excessive honking (57%) and aggressive driving (57%). Nearly one-third of respondents ranked New Delhi the place with the “worst drivers,” followed by Bangalore (16%) and Kolkata (12%).
But that doesn’t really get into the heart of the drivers who stage verbally abusive and violent tantrums. I doubt the survey asked if they ever gave someone the finger on the road because they couldn’t give it to their boss. Or if the shouting at fellow drivers in queue stemmed from the wife threatening divorce over all the late nights at office. Indeed, we do carry our moods into our cars with us and fellow harried drivers fuel the cycle of dysfunction and destruction.
Research conducted by a psychology student at the University of South Australia found that people experiencing significant stress in the workplace develop shorter “fuses” in managing their anger, influencing their behaviour on the roads. Among workers under constant stress who feel undervalued, underpaid and under-appreciated at work, even minor situations can trigger anger and uncontrolled aggression—unleashed on the motoring public, researcher Ben Hoggan concluded.
“These people release their frustrations on the road because it is a convenient location for them. They feel invincible within their protective steel barrier,” he said. “It’s their space on the road and if people invade that space, the drivers believe they are well within their rights to attack other road users.”
Drivers who kill and throw hockey sticks can be dismissed as crazy—but what about the swearing, swerving rest? On the roads, unlike, say home or work, stores or restaurants, hierarchy becomes unclear and exudes irony. The guy driving the Mercedes likely can’t even afford a Maruti, an understandable source of rage. He perhaps can’t tell his employer to back off, so he acts out in the one place he has control: behind the wheel. The same I have seen from female drivers, who actually brag more often about being ruthless on the road.
Perhaps the fiercest rage in recent months has been over the Blueline bus fiasco, its fatal casualties approaching about 100 people this year. There have been rightful concerns over driver qualifications and whether those behind the wheel of commercial vehicles receive adequate training, testing and screening. The same questions can and should be extended to a lot of drivers on the road. Enforcing existing traffic rules is a start. So is toughening the test to get a licence in the first place. Perhaps our children’s generation needs to learn to drive in school.
But in a country defined by chaos, corruption and endless tests of patience, I am doubtful these actions will immediately cure our road rage.
Something more is causing us to lose our cool, it’s only partly about everybody else’s incompetence. Accepting that fact might be the first step to regaining control.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Guests guests guests

2007-10-11T01:09:00.000+05:30

A few of you have asked where we are -- I wrote a column on this once and I am pasting it in below. But I think I am really starting to appreciate my mother more and more after moving to this country. The first week back from the states brought my aunt, uncle and cousin's wife. Then came a few days off. Then my cousin and her husband.
Topping it off with my meeting with a publisher, the worst work pressures I have had in a while, Naya's school changing and my suitcases STILL unopened from the US, I think I am ready to collapse. Oh and there was a retreat thrown in there to strategize The Future of My Employer. And a birthday party. And the column. Felicia's toothache and indecision on staying or leaving. I am a wreck (well, more like a drama queen)...
Real bits of conversation from the last few days:
Relative: It looks like you've gained weight in these few days.
Me: Yeah, how the @#@$%@ do you expect me to get to the gym if I have to feed you breakfast every morning?

Another:
Relative: Wow you work really hard. (door open, AC on)
Me: Yeah, well, someone has to just to pay the electricity bills around here.

I love my family, I really really do. We moved here so much to reconnect with them. But it is absolutely amazing to me how history repeats itself... Off to Guwahati on Friday so I can be the guest for a change ;)

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita font size

Last week, I had nine overnight guests. The previous week brought just three.
This being India, I know that doesn’t shock you.
Atithi devo bhava. The guest is divine. We’ve all grown up hearing it. The ministry of tourism is even using the philosophy in a marketing campaign to promote Indian hospitality. And at no time do we feel it more than June and July, as families head off for holidays—some of them in our houses.
There’s irony here because one person’s relaxation becomes another’s (read: mine) added workload. And that’s on top of, of course, the wage-earning work we’re supposed to be doing 40-60 hours per week. Employees can use the guests-waiting-at-home excuse to leave office early once in a while, but nine times?
It makes me wonder if it’s time for an update to the sloka, given the constraints and stresses of modern Indian households. Should we ask guests to take pre-paid taxis from the airport, fetch their own water and wash their own underwear? Should stays be limited to three days? Should a collection bowl sit atop the fresh towels on the guest bed to offset our skyrocketing gas and electricity bills (especially in these summer months)?
Yet, each time I thought of saying something recently, I bit my tongue and remembered the refrain. I recalled images of my mother carefully matching towels from the closet. She fried fish, rolled rotis, squeezed limes. And I remembered the countless visits that I, the American cousin, made to India when others treated me as divine, making my favourite dishes, pulling threads out of my beloved pomegranate, shuttling me to zoos, forts and temples. Guest, after all, is god.
Because the people who might govern such elements of Hinduism were too busy over the last few days protesting kissing, sex education and artwork, I turned to those on the front lines of implementation: my fellow working women. They tell me they have quietly made some amendments of their own.
“I don’t compromise on my son’s time,” said Megha Nihalani, a Delhi-based travel agent with lots of family abroad and some in Mumbai.
Last year, her husband was chauffeuring an uncle and aunt to Hardwar when her nine-year-old son, staying back at home with her, developed typhoid. Distraught, she made her husband turn around and come right back, the holiness of Hardwar unseen.
In the Nihalani household, this month and next will be “100% guests”.
But volume, she said, was highest in January, when 17 relatives trickled in and out. After that experience, Nihalani said she was more than happy to offer some tips to cope. Saying no, we agreed, was really not an option.
Nihalani says she never lets her travel company take a back seat to the visiting company. A common request she makes: “Aunty, can you lay down the plates while I do my ticketing?”
Towels, I asked her. How do you manage all the towels? And laundry?
She laughed. Same philosophy—guests might be god, but they are self-sufficient ones. To understand these intricacies and instructions, arrivals are given a few minutes of orientation to Nihalani’s home in Mayur Vihar, from the towel cupboard to the jugs of water and empty glasses.
“Your clothes have been laid out, please take whatever is yours,” she’ll say. “Here’s the glass, here’s the water, please help yourself.”
This reflects an attitude shift in Indian home hospitality, said brand consultant Lulu Raghavan. Her employer, Landor Associates, counts Jet Airways and the Taj hotel chain among clients.
“As nuclear families are being set up, a lot of the attitudes are very western,” she said. “Our generation doesn’t welcome guests with open arms as much. Typically, both the husband and wife are working. When guests come, they just sort of upset everything. In Mumbai, people put up with it more than any other city because hotels are so expensive.”
As an assurance to me, she also cautioned that guests’ expectations are similarly changing. They might want to venture to sights on their own, even eat out for a few meals.
“It’s so generic—what is Indian hospitality?” she said. “If you take the worst elements of Indian hospitality, it’s overwhelming. You just want to be left alone.”
If all our vacation time is spent taking around others, then when do we get to relax?
“It’s what we need to do staying in India,” Nihalani said. “This is something we cannot avoid. But what I have started doing now is arranging them and not letting them take over my house, my time, my work.”
On our first night of freedom this week, my husband and I went to someone else’s house for a change. Around midnight, my mobile rang. It was a friend in Dubai.
“Do you mind if I stay with you for a few days in June?”
“Of course,” I said.
For the months of June and July, it looks like office will be my escape.
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

A toddler's post9/11 world

2007-09-30T23:31:00.000+05:30

Today after calling on Nitin's aunt (Guddi Masi), I went to Sarojini Nagar market with my aunt and uncle and sister-in-law (Bhanu Pehi, Peha and Rishika). I have been trying to hunt down tasteful black and silver sandals and finally spotted a pair so I took my shoes off on the carpet before the stall to try them on.

Naya, of course, also did the same and the laughing attendant told her, "Aap peheleh bara hogaya aur baad please ao" (OK my Hindi aint great so I might have dropped a few words but he basically said -- You get big and then you come back please). Anyway she, too, laughed and started to pat my legs down. My uncle asked what she was doing. Used to the weird child--and admiring my feet--I paid no attention.

Then she said in a sharp voice, "Turn around."

I did, just to humour here.

"Hands out," she barked.

I burst out laughing. Taking my shoes off triggered her to pretend we were boarding an airplane and she was patting me down and pretending to wand me!

(Postscript, when I was talking to my other sister-in-law in Hyderabad tonight, Naya kept interrupting with "what's her name" and "what's her baby's name". Then when she overheard me saying the baby had been sick, Naya said "please ask what is the doctor's name." I did and my sister-in-law also began laughing and said, "Junior reporter Naya! You are breeding another you...")

Stand by your woman

2007-09-28T15:39:00.001+05:30

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In the waiting room of the Mrs India contest, progressive men embrace their wives' dreams as their own
Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

The woman who would never be Mrs India woke at 5am to a jet-lagged child demanding cereal. She turned to her husband a few hours later and said, “What does the perfect wife and mother in India wear?”
Through his sleep, he groggily grumbled, “An Assamese outfit.”
She gave him a look. “It’s sponsored by Gladrags.”
Eyes closed, he mustered a joke: “Isn’t that soft porn? Skip the blouse.”
By now, regular readers, you surely realize the woman was me. But finding nothing in my cabinet ironed or quite glamorous enough, I grabbed jeans, a kurta and a notebook and decided to simply do what I do best—talk to those who have it more together than I.
So many reasons, I listed in the car while applying my make-up, that others should represent married womanhood in India. Besides, I left my easy-wash liquid sindoor stick at home.
Finally, I arrived to auditions in New Delhi for Mrs India, a national search staged by Gladrags magazine and under way until 20 October. Just a handful of people were there. Nobody was in Indian garb, and my choice of jeans was actually dead-on. But deferring my dream to the discovery of something or someone interesting, the reward came right away.
The waiting room of Mrs India auditions was filled with progressive men.
***
This week also happened to celebrate the girl child. In Chennai, street theatre, a film and a photo contest with the theme “We also can do” marked the day. Among New Delhi’s middle class, never keen to miss a holiday, some mothers took their daughters shopping in appreciation.
But there’s another person deserving advocacy and marketing campaigns extolling her worth: bearer of the girl child. She already knows what she can do—and usually she does too much. Somehow, her plight gets lost between the rush to save unborn female foetuses and break glass ceilings.
Modern Indian women’s role thankfully featured at this week’s India@60 meet in New York City, organized by the tourism ministry and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). Co-sponsored by Yale University, a panel of female leaders cited studies showing men actually prefer their spouse to work outside the home.
Of course, they often want her to be everywhere else, too: the kitchen, the nursery admissions office, the grocery store and produce stalls, the in-laws on the weekends, playing and cheering the golf game, and on and on. If there was ever a critical mass of superwomen, they exist in India. And like this economy, our expectations are ever-growing. Meanwhile, society, which includes us women, gives men a pass from being all things to everybody.
***
Every now and then, though, you happen upon the exceptions. Like would-be Mrs India’s husband.
Amit Kumar, a software engineer, took the day off to show his support. And Mukesh Singh travelled by train from Jammu for the same reason.
Stereotype them as stage husbands, but it was a Monday morning at a Chinese restaurant—no one was there to appreciate the food, let alone the trophy wives filling out forms downstairs. So, why did they show up?
“Before marriage, you think about beauty, family background, education,” said Kumar, a spectacled, smitten man. “But after marriage, if she really cares about her husband, she should have some activity for herself. She has her dreams.”
Implicit in his presence, and offer of moral support, is that her dream is his. This “activity”, Kumar said, gesturing around, wasn’t a bad choice. He added that he had been feeling guilty since their wedding last year. Her company asked her to move to Bangalore—a post she declined because of his higher earning job in New Delhi (Oh, the predictable post-wedding “transfer”. Don’t you just wish employers would get a spine and spell out their preference for unattached women?) Still tired after a journey from Jammu, Singh told me he lives to make his wife’s life easier, and vice versa. He works in pharmaceutical sales, she in automotive sales.
“And we are equals at home, too, so I am always supporting her by cleaning the house, cooking the food,” he said. (In case you’re as sceptical as I was, here’s the official word from his wife, Sarika: “He makes kheer, sabzi and can roll chapattis. He says he wants to see me in a high post, so he can take care of the house.”)
To be sure, the entry form for Mrs India asks about cooking, kids and in-laws. Before all that, though, comes the career question. If she has one, great, the organizer said. If she doesn’t, that’s okay too.
Perhaps there’s a lesson to draw from stage husbands and apply to other sectors, for these men in waiting seemed to share and appreciate the burden and beauty, pain and possibility of a wife’s work. As the CII summary of the global women’s panel concluded: “The agenda should now be to work on the Indian man.”
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On my first night back in India...

2007-09-24T13:08:00.001+05:30

of course my parents dragged me to a pahty. Rooftop. Jor Bagh. Single malt. I am a real diva. The only people I befriended were from Bhutan and Sikkim. I gave everyone else -- and the host -- this look...

They're here...

2007-09-23T16:12:00.000+05:30

The guard at Indira Gandhi International Airport kept saying, "Arey Madame, please, piche jao." Please madame, move back.
I was waiting right smack in the middle to catch a strain of her after a week away. And I was rewarded for that. As soon as Naya saw me from a few hundred feet away, she began laughing and running to me. It was the very bestest feeling I think I have ever had...
But followed by sadness. In the car, when I called my mom to say they were here, Naya took the phone and her lip trembled and she said, "Aita, I missed you." Then she burst into tears and wouldn't take the phone.
On the way home, she kept saying she didn't want to go home.
Nonetheless, she had a similar joyful reaction of running around when she saw Felicia. I changed her and we settled in with The Lion King book. In the middle of the story, again she started crying -- no reason.
"Did you bite your tongue?" I asked.
She shook her head.
"Then what's wrong?"
"Aita," she sobbed. "I want Aita."
"Should I call her on the phone?"
She nodded and I did. My mother happened to be at a wedding.
"Mamu!" I could hear her shriek through the phone.
Naya just cried and cried. She wouldn't say anything.
I hung up, we finished the book and she went to sleep.
Today she has been fine, excited by the stuff in her suitcases. But she reminds me more of myself than ever before - but even more sensitive and mature.

Homeland Insecurities Indeed

2007-09-22T09:18:00.001+05:30

Naya and Nitin are on their way. Naya apparently cried at the airport when she was leaving her grandparents. That sounds familiar. She said, "I want to go to India tomorrow."

Gaffe or gaffay or gaff?

2007-09-21T10:49:00.000+05:30

Customer service complaint number 456. I hate that we are always handed one menu when we go to places that are tres mehengi (expensive). I used to think it was because Nitin is a man (grrr) and waiters assumed he'd order. Last night, during a girls' night with my two P-pals (Padmini and Pavani) we were handed only one menu. Why they do that?

This Truth Shore Hurts

2007-09-21T09:14:00.002+05:30

livemint.com

Americans have largely accepted outsourcing, but have legitimate concerns over inefficiency and poor qualityWider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

In 2005, I was at a wedding in Ohio and someone seated at my table—a software tester—had nothing nice to say about offshoring. She hated the lack of control over team members in India, their hesitance to ask questions and a time difference that didn’t allow for instant communication. She quit her job in frustration.
Earlier this month, I was at a wedding again, this time in Maryland, and happened upon even more Americans who deal with India on a regular basis. After initial pleasantries about “all the changes in India” and an eventual shedding of inhibition, they largely had the same complaints.
The last few years have been filled with news of Indians moving up the value chain in contracts awarded, creating an assumption that initial “back-office” tasks were performed to relative US profit and satisfaction.
While surveys gauging productivity and client opinion might show such, the ground reality, shore to shore, team to team, worker to worker, actually yields a fair amount of discontent. My admittedly anecdotal discovery comes as Indian services providers fear a strong rupee and skyrocketing salaries will mean work lost to competitors in China and Mexico, Russia and Eastern Europe, Vietnam and the Philippines. And this is precisely why teams in India and the US separated by thousands of miles—and the more immeasurable rift of misunderstanding—need to begin a blunt dialogue.
I figured I’d get the ball rolling this week with some thoughts from The Americans, all of whom I promised anonymity in exchange for raw, no-holds-barred honesty.
“There is no entitlement with US businesses. We’ll drop India for China the same way we dropped the US for India in the first place,” one manager told me from his perch at a technology company that is a household name across the world. “Heck, it’ll be easier as there will be no internal backlash.”
He’s had mixed experiences with offshore teams, specifically praising the cost savings and access to a large labour pool. Often, though, he finds a lack of accountability. “The crappy companies come in after a horrendous project, blame my team when it was clearly their fault... and then ask to take over our entire operations,” he says. “They want the end-to-end business, but they do nothing to gain my trust that they can handle it.”
Turnover, many American managers agree, remains a significant problem. One told me that just as she learned to pronounce someone’s name, it was time for a replacement.
“It’s great for their careers and I totally understand why they do that. But it puts an added pressure on us onshore folks,” said a manager in North Carolina. “We’ve just spent time and money on technical training, only to have to start over now. I don’t know how that’s supposed to make our business more efficient.”
This particular manager said she was training three Indians offshore and one American onshore at the same time in the same task. “The person in the US was able to complete more work, which was of a better quality. I don’t think she was smarter than the others—the India team was far more educated and had more technical experience. The US person was not afraid to ask questions and used her time more wisely.”
For too long, critiques of offshoring from the US have raised the defence mechanisms and insecurities of Indian workers, who decry the westerners as bigoted and closed-minded. In these 13-odd months before US presidential election, services companies have been devising strategies to fight anticipated anti-outsourcing rhetoric from politicians. Yet most of the people I talked to in recent weeks have accepted the model and rarely begrudge Indians taking jobs. Rather, they had legitimate concerns over the quality of work and an overall lack of efficiency.
To be sure, workplaces that rest on the offshore model have been aware of and obsessed with fixing these problems for years. But the changes have not kept pace with, say, the rupee, which continued its sprint yesterday.
One strategy consultant outside Washington, DC, epitomizes why Indians should urgently address their shortcomings. His business process outsourcing unit operates in the US, India and Ukraine. “They are younger in Ukraine, a lot sharper, more dedicated, work less hours but produce the same or more, take pride in their work, no attrition problem, no 20%-every-year demands,” he said, conceding that scaling up was a problem, but would not be elsewhere.
As for that wedding guest who first raised the red flag, I tracked her down this week through Facebook. Thankfully, she told me, she no longer deals with offshore teams. But she stays in touch with the people from the old organization and had bad news: “Quality has gone down and they lost too many customers for the particular project. …They are sunsetting the product.”
Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Pics from Ang wedding

2007-09-18T12:09:00.000+05:30

Felicia and the dishes

2007-09-16T20:16:00.000+05:30

My dear friend Manish said he stopped reading this blog once I complained about servants. I don't think he was entirely right but what's accuracy to a bunch of desiwriters like us? Anyway, this isn't a complaint but a random observation. When people come over, Felicia has a hierarchy of dishes that she has devised. The woman who threads and waxes and massages gets her tea and snacks in plastic-like dishes. The driver's is in stainless steel. On a daialy basis, me and Nit get the crockery from Dilli Haat. Our guests get the imported blue plates from the US.

Before Manish flogs me, I should say that my mum has a similar system with her china for guests, ranging from VIPs to drop-ins -- but servants don't figure anywhere in that. The cleaning lady -- like us -- always got her lunch served up on Corningware. (As an aside, once my parents told the cleaning lady to help herself to orange juice and toast when she showed up in the morning. The woman (who was Polish and I say that as fact) must not have completely understood because she took the whole half-gallon container and the half-loaf home!)

US and back again

2007-09-16T20:08:00.001+05:30

Hopefully Nitin will post pics of the trip to let you know how flower fairies, burdae parties, beach trips and the eight-state soiree (yes, we even got Rhode Island and Delaware in there!) went. But I was struck on the plane ride by how I used to fly to India really excited to see all my family and then would return to the US really depressed and heavy-hearted the whole plane ride back. (It was so bad that I didn't even like to travel after Assam -- just wanted to come home and wallow until normalcy kicked in with the start of the school year). I think the answer is to be an RNRI -- you feel excitement going both ways and situations in both countries drive you to escape to the other... So it was for me on this lone journey (Nit and Naya are staying another week, and I always say I am fine without one of them but both??) back.
And the other thing is that being out of India for a few weeks and re-entering brought back that sensation and thrill of arrival -- the smell that combines dust, urine, sweat, incense, sandalwood, rosewater and all the exotica that is the script of Indian writers/homecoming queens like me.

Return of the Native

2007-09-14T12:14:00.000+05:30

Wider Angle
http://www.livemint.com/2007/09/14005444/Return-of-the-native.html

It would not have been a return home, of course, without questioning where home really should be.
My husband and I were up late one night this week at his parents’ place in Massachusetts, exhausted from shopping for socks, vitamins and macaroni and cheese, when I finally asked the big question, “So do you think we should move back?”
“Back” for us would be these United States, where we were born to Indian immigrant parents and where we happen to be visiting. He paused. “Yeah,” he said. “But not for a while. There’s still so much going on in India.”
Fundamentally I agreed with him, but reminders of our lives in the US dangled like carrots: diversity and efficiency, privacy and loving neighbours, museums and story hours at the library. So for a refresher on India’s possibility, I sent an email to the man who initially planted the seed and inspired my move to New Delhi: Prakash Grama, past president of the RNRI Association. That stands for Returned Non-Resident Indian. (I am neither a returnee nor an NRI but such abbreviations in India tend to be inclusive by their oxymoronic nature.)
Grama and I met in Bangalore in October of 2005. I was working on an article for a US newspaper on the wave of information-technology professionals returning to India and Grama was linking the recently repatriated with volunteer work. He had lived in the US from 1988 to 1998, when he moved to Bangalore to grow a software services company, Span Systems Corp., he’d founded with his brother. Back then, he recalled, the idea of moving back to India was a sign of failure. That turned with the century and, by 2005, Grama estimated up to 40,000 people had returned to Bangalore alone.
“In the IT industry, there’s significant value for people coming back,” he told me over lunch. (By “back,” he meant India.) “And here you are not just accepted into society, you’re recognized at the top.” Follow opportunity, he had told me. Although he warned me that if I did, something very strange might happen: I might feel more Indian in the US and more American in India. He also ominously told me that some NRIs return to India but get so frustrated with issues from work culture to servant politics to the in-laws dropping in that they head right back West.
I had lost regular contact with Grama so I wanted to update him on our new RNRI life and thank him for asking me to look beyond the rain and traffic that defined Bangalore that day. Imagine my shock when I received his response this week: “Coincidentally, I have relocated to Dallas with my family!” I picked up the phone, filled with curiosity. What happened to being on top? Had India let him down? How could the head of the RNRI Association pull another R?
He laughed when I began peppering him with questions. “I always seem to be in reverse tide,” he joked. “In 1998, people said, ‘You’re crazy.’ And then that became popular and now I’ve come back here.
“Maybe I’m ahead of the times...”
He added that it was “90% a business decision.” The company had been growing quickly and the only way to sustain it and snag larger clients was for one of the brothers to relocate to the US.
This week, The Indus Entrepreneurs, a networking group of South Asian business leaders, released a survey that says about 60,000 IT professionals have returned to India, encouraged by development in infrastructure and salary increases. The survey found respondents keen to return to India to “protect their kids from the Western culture,” according to a report by the Press Trust of India.
Ironically, Grama said his children’s future was one factor that actually lured him back to the US. “I was concerned about the rat race for kids there,” he said of India. His daughters, now in a public school in an affluent Dallas suburb, miss their friends but don’t miss the immense pressure to hit the 99th percentile on board exams.
I told Grama that my husband and I, along with lots of returnees, have had similar conversations about schooling—although we were hopeful after recent overtures to open up Indian education, both in curriculum and investment.
When we met in Bangalore, Grama gave me the first inkling of returnees’ identity crises: over that lunch, he laughed as he told me he used to drive 60 miles on Sunday to get to temple. In India, he rarely ever made it—even with one across the road.
This summer, Grama told me he has been to worship several times, most recently for a pooja when he bought a Honda Pilot. I never make it to temple anymore, I thought. “But I’m not where the action is,” he said, seemingly reading my mind.
“You are.” And so even as he lives in my native country and I in his, Grama and I followed the same advice: We each followed opportunity home, thankfully a fluid and fleeting place these days.
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