Cricket

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.

A question...

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...

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

Fork or fingers?

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