Those are the GPS co-ordinates of the Blessed Mother Teresa of CalcuttaChurch in Boston’s historic Dorchester district, a working class neighborhood which the locals call “Dot.” Thing about Dot is that is this is the district where Boston Police have paid special attention with a view to combating crime. Among other initiatives, they have implemented a project called CAT, combating auto theft. Dot is not exactly on the tourist map but the church is lovely, well worth a visit. It has the first sculpture I’ve ever seen of Mother Theresa.
We were at the church on November 6 to celebrate the wedding of my favorite guy, my nephew Nikhil, a member of the Pereira family into which I married many years ago. The reason why the ceremony was held there, I think, is because Mother Theresa visited the Pereira home in Ahmedabad, India in 1983, when I was a mere child of a few…never mind! Just let’s say I was younger then than the groom, in his wedding regalia in 2010.
At that hallowed venue, Nikhil pledged his troth to Jillian, whose Sherlock family is like the Pereiras, large and fun loving. Slightly hung over from the party the previous evening, we filed into the church and took our appointed places. As the ceremony proceeded, I couldn’t help but marvel at the idea of a Goan-Irish wedding. Nikhil is Goan and Jillian comes from strong Irish stock. And it clicked as it did naturally; Goa stands in the same relationship to India as Ireland does to mainland Britain: similar culture, different lifestyles.
India usurped Goa from the Portuguese in 1961 without much fuss; Britain could only hold the northern part of Ireland and still faces problems. But the Sherlocks are from the Jersey shore; they’re as American as apple pie. Our family, which includes my wife, the sister of Nikhil’s dad, and our daughters, well-known fun lovers, certainly understands how to melt into the American pot. We lived in Chicago, where the Irish have held sway for decades; we even dye our river green, drink green beer and march in an embarassing parade on St Paddy’s Day.
So there we were at the church, absorbed in the solemn ceremony that affirmed the Nik and Jill union. There was no choir but a priest, who sang in the voice divine. (Didn’t get your name, reverend, but if you ever give up your day job, you could be on the opera circuit.) It was all too beautiful, as the anthem to getting high sang in the sixties. Mind you, nobody, as far I could tell, had done spliffs; but then what do I know!
Not to digress …so the ceremony came to an end and I walked out the church door, there to be confronted by a battery of television crews, still photographers, reporters, cops and a general array of bystanders.
“Huh!” I said to myself. “I never notified the media. But how cool is this!” For the record, I run a public relations business and write columns for newspapers and magazines and Res Gestae, my blog, from whence this comes to you.
Anyway, so there I was, confronted by all the television cameras and what have you. My first instinct, honed from years in the media business, was to go up to them and say, “At this time, we have no comment.”
Actually, I didn’t say that because I had no idea what was going on until someone told me that a crazed psycho, brandishing a gun, had hijacked the bridesmaids’ limo. (So much for the Boston Police’s anti-auto theft program CAT.) For all my training as a journalist and my standing as veteran public relations professional, all I could say was: “Say what? Really, really, really?” So much for smooth articulation!
Crisis communications is for what I charge clients substantial sums of money; I train them to respond with gravitas and assuredness. And “Say what? Really, really, really?” is not among the responses I recommend. Also not “Jeez!” Or “What the **ck!” (That’s “heck.” Don’t want this piece to be “Banned in Boston.”)
The wedding made all the channels on the evening news and featured in all the major newspapers in Boston the next day; it even made the Daily Mail in London and, I’m told, the Guatemala media. I googled it to see if my smooth and suave response was quoted; mercifully the media had not picked up on my insightful comments.
Her email was cryptic. “We are going to bring in my sister's birthday at the Hearth restaurant in the EastVillage on November 2 and then observe the occasion on November 3 at En Japanese Brasserie in the WestVillage,” my younger daughter wrote. We read her message as we packed our bags to take an ungodly hour flight to New York from Delhi.
Our older daughter's birthday was a seminal rite of passage and her younger sister had chosen the restaurants with care. Our entire family including two daughters, our son-in-law, my wife and I were in the city in a rare togetherness. Several of my daughters’ friends also joined the party; to say the very least, the two events were hugely fun.
The Hearth is a special place because its executive chef Marco Canora describes the offering as “food rooted in the modern American kitchen with influences of our Italian heritage.” A celebrated chef, who has appeared on major television shows, Canora offers an “unpretentious, seasonally inspired” menu, not to mention a dry Martini that elevates the soul. All his ingredients are sourced from within a 150 miles of the city, from upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
My veal was from LebanonCounty, the heart of Pennsylvania’s Dutch region; it was “vegetarian fed with no hormones, no antibiotics and no animal products.” Best of all, it tasted great: mellow, creamy and delicately flavorful. Washed down with a red wine from nearby Long Island, it made for a perfect meal. What a super way to bring in a seminal birthday. It is a measure of the contwixted ties between India and America that our family celebration was in New City’s fabulous Lower East Side. Both countries are intimately bound by family ties that soar above diplomacy and geopolitics.
After dinner, we parted as the young people chose to hit the bars that light up the Lower East Side; my wife and I repaired to a quiet restaurant to listen to live Jazz over an after dinner drink. And we both left the thing unsaid, how fortunate to have a family celebration in the city that never sleeps. “I’m glad be part of it, New York, New York,” the edited refrain from the famous song kept buzzing in my head.
Next day at the Japanese brasserie was just as much fun. The restaurant features comfort food served in “Izakayas,” neighborhood pubs. But En is hardly a local diner. Housed in what was once an industrial warehouse, it a huge cavernous place where Japanese chefs have elevated simple food into a Michelin type dining experience.
Not being a huge fan of Japanese food, I sought safety in the crispy friend chicken that was totally excellent but my younger brat dissed on my “Kentucky fried chicken” and insisted I taste her pork belly dish; others plied me with helpings from the clay rice pot with salmon roe. OMG, I said to my daughters and the young people assembled there, this is fab, using my sixties idiom as a counter to their 21st century texting language.
And so we ate and talked and drank sake into the wee hours (11 pm not 3 am). For dessert, we shared some sort of an ice cream and also a cheesecake that I relished until I realized it was tofu and was forced to take a huge gulp from Siddharth's sake shot.My wife looked at me; she didn’t have to say a word for me to know she was saying, “Any excuse for booze!” But it’s Japanese, I told her, “That’s got to count for something!”
As we walked back to our hotel, my mind strayed to my seminal birthday many years ago. We had just closed on a condo in a 100-year-old building in Oak Park, a suburb that abuts Chicago’s West Side. It was indeed a happy birthday for me as we had dinner with friends and talked excitedly of our new home. A year later, our first daughter was born and the joy was unbounded. In New York on November 3 2010, our pleasure stretched from sea to shining sea. To be together as a family in the southern tip of Manhattan is a happiness that soars as high as the EmpireStateBuilding.
When our older daughter began to attend elementary school in the United States, I was struck by two things: first, the school day for all students began, hand over heart, with the Pledge of Allegiance, which was effectively a solemn declaration of loyalty to the republic. Second, on the very first day, the teacher taught them “the golden rules:” think before you speak and treat others the same way in which you would expect them to treat you.
Thus, the first lesson learned in the school was a civic one: respect for the constitution and a rule-based way of dealing with fellow citizens of the republic. In fact, the American community-led public education system started out as a citizenship training program; the idea was to enable and empower citizens in the discharge of their civic obligations and in their quest for economic opportunity. It was a simple idea that drove elementary public education in America: an informed citizenry, compliant with the laws, is the best guarantor of liberty and justice.
Some years later, I was dropping my daughters off at one of Delhi’s better schools to which they had been admitted after we moved from the US. The picture couldn’t have been more radically different. First, it was a school for girls only; students wore a hideous uniform and the ambience was chaotic, with girls running around, pushing and shoving, unmindful of the safety or convenience of others. Later, we discovered that it was a tyrannical place, subject to the Victorian whims of the nuns who ran it.
Our daughters were traumatized; on the academic front as well the school was a zero. The curriculum as dictated by the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Education Research and Training was lame. The faculty did very little but race through a rote method of teaching; it was clear our daughters were not learning much and that added to their misery. We withdrew them from the school to the disbelief of many; the school was among the most sought after in the city.
Far from teaching students the virtues of citizenship, all that the school did was to prepare their students to take board examinations in which only very high scores can ensure admission to an even more dysfunctional university system. The psychological costs that students have to pay are never addressed, simply dismissed by teachers and parents alike as collateral damage in the race to succeed at examinations. We pulled them out of the twisted system and enrolled them in an international school, where they blossomed.
In the current debates over education policy, the focus has centered on reforms at every level: elementary schools, institutes of higher education, vocational training. Issues of private ownership versus government control, entry of global education providers, certification and accreditation are among others that have been raised. What seems to have been missed completely is the civic aspects of education. Respect for your neighborhood, your city, your state, your country needs to be instilled at a very early age without crossing the line to become chauvinism.
Sadly, most political parties, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party, have fallen into the trap of jingoism. The Congress, for its part, has a version; let's call it patriotism in which there is still a chip on the shoulder that prevents a realistic assessment of the Indian situation. Chest thumping or moaning and groaning about “inclusive growth” is hardly the way to instill civic values in the citizenry. The so-called “youth dividend” can only succeed if the education system instills a sense of civic values in the populace, beginning right from primary school.
The proposition is not that difficult to grasp. Civic authorites cannot prevent people from urinating, defecating or spitting paan on the streets; they cannot keep people from driving like lunatics, blowing their horns or jumping a line or being smelly because they have never heard about deodorants. But they can teach their children to respect public spaces.
In Delhi, for example, the Metro is a big hit as are the new low-floor sleek buses; new flyovers, expressways and underpasses, even parks and landscaped streets and slick new bus stops. In the next decade, a whole generation will grow up used to these public goods. What schools need to teach them is how to use these and not be vandals.
Amazingly, none of this is part of the academic agenda. On the right, people talk about India shining with its economic growth. On the left, people talk about hunger, poverty and disease. Smack dab in the middle, we need to teach young people, increasingly more exposed to the world through the Internet, television, and mobile phones, that the default position in India need not be a poverty, filth and disease. That in fact India with its new and shiny economy could be an example of a new 21st century civic culture in which an egalitarian and efficient ethic prevails.
Instead of moaning on about its ancient culture or the glaring disparities in its society, India should showcase itself as the new shining country that can in the words of the 1960s anthem: “change the world, rearrange the world.” That dream of the sixties that was held out tantalizingly in the West can come true in the world’s largest democracy and its second fastest growing economy.
An edited version of this article appeared in Education World, November 2010.
When our older daughter began to attend elementary school in the United States, I was struck by the fact that the school day for all students began, hand over heart, with the Pledge of Allegiance, which was effectively a solemn declaration of loyalty to the republic. Secondly, on the very first day, the teacher taught them ‘the golden rules’: think before you speak, and treat others the same way as you would expect them to treat you.
Thus, the first lesson learned in school was a civic one: respect for the Constitution and a rule-based way of transacting with fellow citizens of the republic. In fact, the American community-led public education system started out as a citizenship training programme. The objective was to enable and empower citizens in the discharge of their civic obligations and in their quest for economic opportunity. It was a simple idea that drove elementary public education in America: an informed citizenry, compliant with the law is the best guarantor of liberty and justice.
Some years later, I was dropping my daughters off at one of Delhi’s better schools into which they had been adm-itted after we moved from the US. The picture couldn’t have been more radically different. First, it was an all-girls school. Students wore a hideous uniform and the ambience was chaotic, with girls running around, push-ing and shoving, unmindful of the safety or convenience of others. Later, we discov-ered that it was a tyrannical institution, subject to the whims of Victorian nuns who ran it.
Our daughters were traumatised because on the academic front as well, the school was a zero. The curriculum prescribed by the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Educational Research and Training was lame. The faculty did very little except race through a rote method of teaching; it was clear our daughters were not learning much and that added to their misery. We withdrew them from the school to the disbelief of many, as the school was among the most sought-after in the city.
Far from teaching students the virtues of citizenship, all that the school did was to prepare them to write board examinations to attain high scores, which ensured admission into an even more dysfunctional university system. The psychological costs that students have to pay are never addressed — simply dismissed by teachers and parents alike as collateral damage in the race to succeed in examinations. We pulled them out of this twisted system and enroled them in an international school, where they blossomed.
In the current debates over education policy, the focus has centred on reform at every level: elementary schools, institutes of higher education, vocational training. Issues of private ownership versus govern-ment control, entry of global education providers, certification and accreditation are routinely raised. What seems to have been missed completely is the civic aspects of education. Respect for the neighbourhood, city, state and country needs to be instilled at a very early age without crossing the line into chauvinism.
Sadly, most political parties, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party, have fallen into the trap of jingoism. The Congress, for its part, has a version; let’s call it patriotism in which there’s still a chip on the shoulder which prevents a realistic assessment of the Indian situation. Chest thumping or moaning and groaning about “inclusive growth” is hardly the way to instill civic values in the citizenry. The so-called ‘youth dividend’ can only be banked if the education system instills a sense of civic conscious-ness in the populace, beginning right from primary school.
The proposition is not so difficult to grasp. Civic authorities cannot prevent people from urinating, or spitting paan in the streets; from driving like lunatics, blowing car horns or jumping queues or being malodorous because they have never heard of deodorants. But schools can teach their children to respect public spaces. In Delhi, for example, the Metro is a big hit as are the new low-floor sleek buses, flyovers, expressways and underpasses, parks and landscaped streets. In the next decade, a whole generation will grow up using these public goods. What schools need to teach students is how to use these facilities respectfully.
Amazingly, none of this is part of the academic agenda. On the right, people talk about India shining with its economic growth. On the left, people talk about hunger, poverty and disease. Smack dab in the middle, we need to teach young people, increasingly more exposed to the wider world through the internet, television, and mobile phones, that the default position in India need not be poverty, filth and disease. That in fact India with its red-hot economy, could become a byword for a progressive civic culture in which egalitarianism and efficiency prevail.
Instead of going on about our ancient culture or the glaring disparities in society, India should showcase itself as the proud new country that can in the words of the 1960s anthem: “change the world, rearrange the world”. That dream of the 60s that was held out tantalisingly in the West can come true in the world’s largest democracy and second fastest growing economy.
(An edited version of this post will appear in http://www.educationworld.in, November 6, 2010.)
Several spectators who came to the 102-acre Indira Gandhi stadium to watch wrestling, cycling and gymnastics treated the stadium as a big, open dustbin and threw around cola bottles, burger wraps and poly-bags wherever they could find space.
They chose to ignore the dustbins that were placed at every five metres.
Some people even trampled on the grass within the showpiece tree guards. The sanitation staff was seen cleaning the mess every half an hour.
"We are not allowed to take any kind of food items and water bottles inside the competition venue. I have children with me, so they cannot sit empty stomach till the events are over. We decided to buy food from the counter and eat here," said Ramesh Kumar, who had come from Rohini with his family of seven.
When asked why they were littering the area when there were plenty of dustbins around and one right next to him, Kumar said, "Well, there are people around who have been hired to clean this place, it's not a big deal."
A sanitation staff deployed at the stadium complained that despite dustbins being placed, the people chose to throw the waste around.
"We work here in eight hour shifts. Every half an hour we have to collect the garbage that is all over the stadium. The dustbins are almost empty," said Harish Kumar, a sanitations staff of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD).
The Fast Trax counters that sold food and beverages saw huge queues as people grabbed knick-knacks before they entered the competition areas.
A day after the opening ceremony at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the MCD had collected 20,000 kg garbage that was generated in eight hours.
The authorities have place 500 bins all over the stadium.
You’ve got to be a hardy soul to come to Goa in the Monsoon. It rains incessantly and does drumbeats on the roof; the percussion is as good as anything Max Roach did, especially on his album, Money Jungle, with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Still, as Credence Clearwater Revival sang, the rain keeps falling. And I don’t really wonder, amid the sophisticated Roach-style beat of the rain on my roof, who’ll stop the rain.
Goa in the rains is a sight for sore eyes and a balm for troubled minds. It has a calming effect: nothing really matters, except the drain of stress. We start from the chaotic airport. You can deal with it because in minutes you can get in the car and leave India behind. Goa is our foreign destination where people are civilized, traffic is orderly and everyone looks out for others. The skies open up with huge rainfall and all you want to do is stop the car, jump out and let yourself be drenched in the Monsoon rains.
We arrived in Goa on an afternoon in July and later that evening drove to Chicalim in the north to celebrate a friend’s birthday. His place is approximately in the middle of nowhere. I may be wrong but even the Portuguese didn’t venture there. And so we’re in our car, negotiating the twist and turns to get there. Once we reach his people-friendly house with its inviting “come, hang out” charm, we forget the world. The only bummer was Germany destroyed Argentina in South Africa; the South Americans were the team I picked to win the Cup.
Goa in the rains is a magical mystery tour. Green is the operative color; moss is your ground cover and the world stands still. Here, you add years to your life. Time is stretched out. Read a book, listen to music, and drench yourself in the rain: you can do stuff you wish you could do in the stressed out reality of India.
In the rain-lashed season, Goa can also be an adventure. There are few places open for lunch or dinner; all the beach shacks are closed; in fact, even the beaches are run over by the sea. You have to be resourceful and find spots that are open. You may have to travel a fair distance or experiment with all manner of local places. But the best thing is to eat at home and then find a rock on a beach, sit on it and watch the thunderous majesty of the sea in the rains.
We’ve had a place here since the turn of the century. More important, this is my sasural; my wife’s family is from Goa and our place is just 15 minutes away from her family home. Also, we have other family here in Chicalim and Aldona and good friends in Panjim, Anjuna and Colvale. For us, this emerald haven is not a vacation spot; it is our second home. We feel we belong here.
Plus Goa is full of random surprises. At dinner one evening at a local diner, a bunch of people showed up. There was this handsome guy sitting in a chair right next to me. He pulled out a bottle of scotch and offered to share it. We demurred but he was insistent. So we had a drink from his bottle. He said his name was Kumar Gaurav, son of the famous Bollywood tragedy king, Rajendra Kumar. He said he was married to Namrata Dutt, daughter of Sunil Dutt and Nargis. As such he is the brother-in-law of Priya Dutt, the Congress MP and Sanjay Dutt, the actor of Munnabhai fame.
We struck up a conversation in this diner called Starlight and he was insistent to take us to his house in Parra, a suburb of Mapuca. It turned out to be a gorgeous place, slick and breathing of wealth. He showed us around and when we left after 15 minutes, we drove away impressed. In the end, we marvelled that something like this could happen in such an impromptu fashion. But that’s Goa for you. You meet some guy in a restaurant or in a market or a grocery store and you become friends.
That’s the social part of Goa. And it’s wonderful. What is equally spectacular is the majesty of nature here, especially in the Monsoon. As I sit in my verandah, surrounded by a cathedral of coconut trees and watch and hear the rain falling, I am struck by the bounty of nature. As the rain stops, the garden is awash with fireflies everywhere, lighting up, for a brief moment, the darkness of the clouds.
My friend Aasif, an architect, who lives here, having come from 30-plus years in London, tells me that the glow in the fireflies is about sex. “It’s their penis that lights up with a view to attract to females,” he says. He also added that fireflies are rapidly becoming extinct with growing urbanization. Because of city lights, their glow doesn’t show and they cannot mate.
Aasif can identify bird calls, butterflies and constellations in the sky. He lived for 30 years a busy life in London but now he is a connoisseur of Nature. What a wonderful way to spend the rest of your life.
So you live and you learn. When all’s said and done, you can be alone in Goa in the rains and have the soothing and disturbing sounds of the falling water to keep you company. Soothing because it lulls; disturbing because in a 250-year-old house, you never know where water will drip. You simply feel at the mercy of nature. So we look at the bounteous aspect: green, blue and grey.
We all know from the news media that Goan politics is all about rent money; corruption is rampant and crime starts in the cabinet. And so it is everywhere else in India. In Goa, though, our local primary health care center has doctors, nurses, ambulances, medicines and diagnostic equipment. The schools have teachers; the roads are well paved and the traffic is orderly.
Sometimes, I think we should just move here and be done with the chaos of the rest of India.
We crossed the street to join them and to begin what turned out to be five rollicking and fulfilling days. Gautam has served as the senior most editor in The Times of India and is the founding editor of Bombay’s newest daily, DNA. Above all, he is a rock star whose rendition of Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog can get even a lead-footed person to do gyrations on the dance floor. In his days in India, he was a regular at our house; all our friends took to him and he became part of our family.
So there we were on the brink of a raucous evening in Manhattan. We went to a blues bar and ate dinner in a French bistro before traipsing home with a song let out of our heart. It was a memorable evening, even if we had too much wine. When good friends get together in a happening place like the West Village, you can be sure it will be a highlight (dare I be unsubtle and say: yes there were lights and yes we were high).
So after an evening in the Village, Sunday morning we hit I-95 en route to Washington DC. For all the 229 miles of the way, I luxuriated in the company of Gautam and Rita. I was excited to be going to DC after too many years. The plan was to arrive at their place in Chevy Chase in the early afternoon and then head out to the home of their friends for dinner and singsong with guitars. These are friends whom we’d met last summer at the wedding in Vermont where Brinda and Peter took their vows in a gorgeous farm in Vermont.
Can people talk to each other for five straight days and never once be bored? With Gautam and Rita, it’s not only easy but enjoyable. We talked about the whole world, about rock’n roll, The Beatles, Indo-US relations, and what have you. The most amazing thing about being with them is you can talk about foreign policy, international relations, and world economics but also about music, going back to the good old days of Hindi film music and classic rock.
A friend christened Rita “chopdi (book) aunty,” given her voluminous knowledge of just about everything under the sun, starting from education to Bollywood. You want to know about the latest issues on education? About the lives of Bollywood stars? About the story behind the Oscar awards? About the buzz in DC, New York, Boston, Bombay or Delhi? Rita’s got it all down pat. She is the source: wire service, book of quotations, thesaurus and encyclopedia, all rolled into one. What she doesn’t know is not worth knowing.
Coming into Washington after a long gap was an immensely interesting prospect for a public affairs junkie like me. This is the capital of the world, where leaders from all nations come to get things done. It’s also the first time I came to DC where Martin Luther King’s dream had come true in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Obama is from my hometown, Chicago.
“There’s John Podesta,” said Gautam as we drove around the downtown area, close to the White House. He was crossing the street. Podesta, another Chicago boy, served as White House Chief of Staff for three years under Bill Clinton. As you drive around the stressful streets of Delhi, you are not likely to see any person of any consequence, surrounded as they are by security and minions. And walking? What a contrast!
There is an understated elegance about Washington. The city seems to know it is the center of the world. It doesn’t have to pretend. Economic upturns and dips have little impact on it. Everyone seems to be confident about their jobs and income. True, there are neighborhoods in the city where America’s recession-hit economy is playing havoc. But to walk the streets, you feel the sense of power and stability.
While it seems not to have the buzz of New York or the vitality of Chicago or the laid back sophistication of San Francisco or the in-your-face character of Los Angeles, Washington stands for stability. It reminded me Kipling’s poem If:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
In the middle of the storm of terrorism, financial malfeasance and natural and other disasters, Washington is the focal point of stability-seeking billions in the world. Yes, there’s Iraq and Afghanistan, the oil spill and Katrina, bailouts and joblessness. But if we didn’t have Washington, we would have to invent it.
We need Washington. In this capital, a click of computer keys can change the fate of global business; can challenge ruthless dictators; can hold multinationals accountable; can take on terrorism; can boost the world economy. All the misbegotten activists, who blame Washington for all the ills in the world, should know there are institutions in this city that successfully fight against child labor, dowry deaths, communicable diseases, sweatshops, hunger and poverty.
I spent most of the week in Washington, meeting friends in government, lobbying firms and multilateral organizations. What struck me was that in the interim, I came away more informed about global issues and to understand that the power people in Washington are as skeptical of multinational firms as the activists, who make a fetish of being anti-American.
Another revelation was that India is not a hot button in the media or public debate. The only people who seem to care about our benighted country are the people in the White House, the State Department and the Defense Department; also people in the arts and culture, which is not a bad list. But in the general milieu, India may as well be the Central African Republic. India has to struggle to get noticed. Since George W Bush, it has been helped along by these various arms of the US government.
In the end, the nicest thing about my visit to the capital was to know that it is one more city I can call my home. There’s Chicago, of course; New York City, where my daughter holds sway; Boston, the home of my favorite nephew. But now there’s Washington, where Gautam, my soul mate, enjoys his life.
On a bright beautiful spring morning, I landed in Chicago, where I have a family of friends. The airport, the city, the drive to River Forest is full of fond memories. This is the town that I’ve come back to, over and over again. It’s just gotten better and better. What more can I say: I love Chicago.
As I lug my bag across the street and wait in the vestibule for my friend Prakash to pick me up, I wonder about my past life in this city of broad shoulders. Usually, it was my wife and two excited kids, who would welcome me back from wherever. “Love ya, Dad,” my daughters would trill as I kissed my wife. What a warm comforting feeling it was!
In the event, Prakash pulls up to the sidewalk and gives me a hug. I am back home, I think to myself as I snap the seatbelt on, en route the familiar way to the Oak Park-River Forest area, where we lived. As we drive to Prakash’s house in River Forest, I look out the window and go into a reverie of my happy days in Chicago.
It’s my town, the toddlin’ town; I ask myself: why did you ever leave here? The existential question was in my mind as we drove through the familiar streets. What I looked forward to was a wonderful week with friends and the sheer joy of being there. This is the city where I got my first job, bought my first house; where my daughters were born. I lived here in the heady days, when my fellow columnist in the Chicago Tribune newspaper invented the word “yuppie.” It is the city of jazz and blues but also the Chicago Symphony, one of the finest orchestras in the world.
Chicago is where I grew up and learned the lesson of self sustenance. It wasn’t easy but the city permeated me with a sense of optimism: tomorrow will always be better than today. You can do anything, do what you want: that was the city’s ethic. And it has become better and better, leaving me breathless with wonder. This is a city that has transformed itself from the Rust Belt blues into a shining example of urban renewal. On hindsight, it seems to be obvious that Chicago would throw up a Barack Obama.
The reveries came to an end as Prakash pulled into his driveway. We got my bag out and I settled myself into the bedroom that his wife Alice reserves for me. Then I came down and waited over a beer for our fiends to show for the traditional pizza party when I arrive.
We had the pizzas and the beer and talked late into the night. My family of friends was keen to know about India and its ways. They wanted to talk to me about politics, the economy and every other aspect of India; they had many questions. For my part, I was just grateful to be there in the city that I love and the friends whom I miss fiercely.
Clearly though, there was no escaping the questions. I had to answer. But my message was clear: I’m here to escape from the loud ineptitude of India. Nevertheless, development issues like jobs, equity, education and health care are important to my friends. This goes back many decades to the 1970s when we had formed India Forum to discuss and debate the issues.
Among the members of India Forum in Chicago was Satu “Sam” Pitroda, in whose office we held our Sunday morning meetings. In the early 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi appeared on the scene; many of us, including Sam, moved to India in the hope of changing things. What we did not reckon for was the strange ways of politicians and the slimy ways of bureaucracy. They opposed us tooth and nail. Our optimism was singed by the relentless cynicism of the bureaucracy and the political establishment.
In the end though, we succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. From being a basket case, India is now regarded as an engine of global growth. We have “development” in India now but it is subverted into mediocrity by the knot of ignorant politicians and venal bureaucrats. The Indian system is simply unable to deal with growth and the concomitant demands for fairness and transparency.
That evening in Chicago over pizza and beer, old friends met and talked about the issues. As the evening wore on and I was steeped in being there; it was almost as if I had never left. Dreamy as I was, I felt it was late and I had to go home. Our house was barely a mile away from where my friends live. It may have been the beer. I lost track and thought I had to go home to my wife and daughters.
It is so easy within hours of arriving in Chicago to believe I had never left. I know how to get around, driving myself. I know where to shop, where to eat, where to drink. I know the city like the back of my hand. It is a city I proudly call my home. It’s a place where the ordinary citizen can enjoy music, plays, festivals…all free; all in celebration of the citizen.
Back in Delhi, I find the city only works for VIPs. Ordinary citizens have to fend for themselves. Nevertheless, citizens do not cover themselves in glory either. They drive like lunatics, make general nuisances of themselves including urinating on the street and defecating in public view.
One of the issues that never came up for discussion that night was India’s quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But it weighed on my mind. If the various local and state governments and the federal government cannot stop people from peeing or defecating on the streets, never mind the Naxalites or a rational policy governing foreign investors, why would anyone back India for a seat as a permanent member?
A permanent member of the Security Council is expected to have a foreign policy that includes a broad commitment to international community that your policies will enhance the world’s security. For that you need a strategic vision, which is nowhere in evidence.
Which is why India will never have a city like Chicago: aesthetically pleasing, citizen friendly and forever innovative.
When the government steered the Right to Education bill through Parliament, those of us who had fought for it through two decades were pleased. The important thing, however, is how the act would be notified. The language of the bill leaves a lot of gray areas. And well it might because bureaucrats wrote it and they will fully exploit the obfuscation. For example, they will come down heavily on private schools that cater to the poor in urban slums and rural areas and impose impossible conditions that such enterprises simply cannot fulfill.
There are too many vested interests: the government school system; the high-end private schools that have bribed their way into existence and above all, the alternative NGO schools that survive on government subsidies. With such firepower arraigned against it, the RTE bill will go the way of every well-meaning initiative of the government such the NREGA or the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. The net outcome will be zero. And so everything will come to naught.
If this sounds cynical, then you should listen to my story about a small community on the outskirts of Delhi. This is an upscale community of successful professionals that includes about 30 houses. It is an oasis in the chaos of Delhi, with trees and birdsong. It’s a wonderful community where neighbors meet frequently to have a drink or dinner and to discuss issues of India’s development. The people who live there are respected professionals whose interests span public health, wildlife conservation, media, law and what have you.
The community came into being in the early 1990s. Because it was part of rural Delhi, it was offered no municipal services like water, sanitation or roads, never mind street lighting. Like pioneers, residents made their own arrangements: people built septic tanks, drilled bore wells and got their own garbage collection. Power was an issue until distribution was privatized, when the resident association petitioned the distribution company. Realizing these were high-end customers, the company quickly ensured that power cuts and fluctuations were minimized.
On the roads issue, the resident association petitioned the Delhi government arguing from a taxpayer viewpoint; so the road was built: badly but still motorable. It took several years including the fact that the first allotment of several crores was swallowed by the pirates of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Now this community faces water a problem because the bore wells have dried up. This is precious real estate but more important it represents the single major investment for most of the residents. Without water, their homes are worth nothing.
The association applied to the Delhi government for permission to drill a community bore well. It seemed a logical and eco-friendly thing to do. But between the local water authority, the local police and several residents who had bribed their way into deepening their bore wells, the application has been kicked around from pillar to post.
So here you have this huge Indian-style standoff: members of the community paid bribes to the water authority and the police to deepen their wells. As a result, other residents found their bore wells running dry. When the association sought to build a community well, some residents and recipients of their bribes in the water authority and the local police struck a dissonant note.
Between corrupt citizens, bureaucrats, police officials and local politicians, this pleasant community is caught in a cleft. It needs the rule of law to be enforced but the local government: the municipality and the police, are locked in various corrupt projects. Residents of the community are not without influence but stand divided because several members, who own houses there, are compromised because the deals they did to buy their houses don’t stand up to scrutiny.
This is a small localized community problem, to be sure. But its implications have a larger footprint. Even though the union government has introduced various enlightened policies, local governance is caught in a medieval time warp. In the matter of schools as well: a sweeping and enlightened law stands to be subverted on the rocks of bad governance. In notifying the RTE act, many activists fear the education bureaucracy will not let private schools for the poor flourish.
Then there is the issue of the RTE-mandated 25 percent quota for poor children in private schools. The vast majority of private schools, however, cater to the poor. So how will the quota be enforced? Clearly, framers of the bill were thinking of the elite private schools with no acknowledgment of the private schools for the poor.
Whether it is the private schools for the poor or the community bore well for the upscale Delhi community, governance is still held hostage to the ideology of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy lords it over the poor and is prejudiced against the affluent (not rich). In the event, private schools for the poor will be held hostage to the bureaucracy’s prejudice against education as commerce; likewise the South Delhi community must suffer because the bureaucrats of the water authority dismiss it as an “affluent colony” that deserves nothing from the government.
In the end, the admirable RTE bill stands to be subverted by bureaucrats, who oppose all change. Residents of the affluent community will have to fight for their water against the very forces in charge of governance.
An edited version of this article appeared in Education World, June 2010.
When the government steered the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2009 through Parliament, those of us who had fought for it for two decades were pleased. The important thing, however, is how the Act has been notified. The language of the newly enacted RTE Act leaves a lot of grey areas. And well it might because bureaucrats wrote it and they will fully exploit the obfuscation. For example, they will come down heavily on private schools that cater to the poor in urban slums and rural areas and impose impossible conditions that such enterprises simply cannot fulfill.
Having delayed the universalisation of primary and upper primary education for six decades, now there are too many vested interests. The government school system; high-end private schools that have bribed their way into existence and above all, the alternative NGO schools that survive on government subsidies. With such firepower arraigned against it, the RTE Act will go the way of every well-meaning initiative of the government such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) or Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. The net outcome will be zero or near zero.
If this sounds cynical, then you should pay heed to my story about a small comm-unity on the outskirts of Delhi. It’s an upscale community of successful professionals which includes about 30 households. The community came into being in the early 1990s. But because it was part of rural Delhi, it was deprived of municipal services such as water, sanitation and roads, never mind street lighting. Like pioneers, residents made their own arrangements: they built septic tanks, drilled borewells and arranged for the collection of garbage. Power was an issue until distribution was privatised, when the resident association petitioned the distribution company. Realising these were high-end customers, the company quickly ensured that power cuts and fluctuations were minimised.
These endeavours took several years and unearthed the fact that their first allotment of several crores was swallowed by the pirates of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Now this community faces a water problem because its borewells have dried up. This is precious real estate which represents a lifetime investment for most residents. Without water, their charming homes are worth nothing.
The residents’ association applied tothe stategovern-ment for permission to drill a community borewell. It seemed a logical and eco-friendly thing to do. But between the local water authority, the local police and several residents who had bribed their way into deepening their private borewells, the application was kicked around from pillar to post.
Consequently there’s a huge Indian-style standoff. As some members of the community paid bribes to the water authority andthe policeto deepen their wells, as a result other residents found their borewells running dry. When the associa-tion sought to build a community well, some residents and recipients of bribes in the water authority and the local police refused permission.
Between corrupt citizens, bureaucrats, police officials and local politicians, this pleasant community is caught in a bind. It needs the rule of law to be enforced but the local government, municipality andthe policeare locked in a conspiracy of corruption. Residents of the community are not without political influence but stand divided because several members who own houses there, are compromised because the deals they did to buy their houses don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Admittedly, this is a small localised community problem. But its implications have a larger footprint. Even though the Union government has introduced various enlightened policies, local governance is caught in a medieval time warp. In the matter of schools as well, a sweeping and enlightened law seems likely to be wrecked on the rocks of bad last mile governance. In notifying the RTE Act, many activists fear the education bureaucracy will invoke the provisions of the Act to eliminate the option that the poor fleeing indifferent government school education have to attend low cost private schools.
Then there is the issue of the RTE-mandated 25 percent quota for poor children in private schools. The vast majority of private schools, however, already cater to the poor. So how will the quota be enforced? Clearly, framers of the Act were thinking of the elite private schools with no acknowledgment of the private schools for the poor.
Whether it is private schools for the poor or the community borewell for upscale citizens, governance is still hostage to the ideology of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy lords it over the poor and is prejudiced against the affluent (though not the super-rich). In the event, private schools for the poor will be trampled under the bureaucracy’s prejudice against education as commerce. Likewise the South Delhi community must suffer because bureaucrats of the water authority dismiss it as an “affluent colony” that deserves nothing from government.
In the end, the admirable RTE Act will be subverted by bureaucrats, who oppose all change. Similarly residents of the affluent South Delhi community will have to fight for their water against the forces in charge of local last mile governance.
(An edited version of this post will appear in http://www.educationworld.in, June 4, 2010.)
So here I am back again in the city that never sleeps. The airline has a limo waiting to take me to Gramercy, where my gorgeous daughter has an apartment. Her timing was perfect. By 6 pm, when I got to her place, she pulled up in a cab right behind me and helped me lug my bag upstairs to her apartment. What happened in between was a huge hug and kisses and the limo guy looked on indulgently
I’m back in Manhattan to spend the weekend with my very clued-in daughter. The weekend was a rediscovery of the Lower East Side with its great bars and amazing restaurants. She spent the time showing me her life in this wannabe piece of real estate in Lower Manhattan, where most people, especially twenty-somethings like her, would give their right arm to live. She lives there and knows it in a way that appeals to my sense of hedonism and aesthetics.
Can you be jealous of your own daughter? Difficult question: but I have no hesitation in saying I am envious of her lifestyle. Plus she is so Manhattan; she buys milk with no hormones, grass-fed meat, nuts, berries, dates and also cheese, wine, figs, dates, strawberries and the occasional champagne.
I’ve been visiting Manhattan since the early 1970s. I had a friend who introduced me to the genteel pleasures of the Upper East Side. I also came into the city for work and lived in fabulous hotels like The Plaza. But knowing the city through my daughter’s eyes is completely different. Clearly, she belongs there and makes me feel I too belong. And I can’t even begin to say how good it feels to have New York City as a second home.
So what is it about New York City, especially the Lower East Side that attracts bright young kids from all over the world to stay there? Chicago, where I virtually grew up, is a superb city. Its downtown Lakefront is seminally brilliant. Yet my daughter’s Lower East Side has character that is part gentrified but nevertheless is a neighborhood with ethnic diversity and post-modern slick.
I spent several weekends with her in the very recent past and she always managed to amaze me. We walked all over the place, went to great bars and ate in superb restaurants. When I was with her and drinking all these great cocktails and eating all this fabulous food, I thought to myself: my baby daughter is a New York girl: king of the hill; top of the pops.
Can a father be jealous of his daughter? No. I wish her well as one of the most fortunate members of the human race: not just to live in Manhattan but in the happening Lower East Side. I always tell my wife: if I ever had the chance to live and work there, I may have never relocated to India. In the event, nearly two decades since I moved to Delhi from the US, I have never regretted the relocation. But if I had been the suave sophisticate that my daughter is, India would never have featured in my life.
So I spent time with her in the city, walking the streets and in small parks that are things of beauty with gorgeous spring flowers; eating in wonderful restaurants and generally luxuriating in the ultimate urban experience. Between my warm and lovable daughter and the adventurous pleasure of Lower Manhattan, I was in heaven.
On the Monday, I took the flight to Chicago, comforted in the knowledge that I would be back within the week. I used always to spend more time in my hometown Chicago, than anywhere else in the US. For the past seven years, I seem to be spending more time in New York City, thanks to my daughter.
Manhattan may not be about blue skies and trees of green; it’s my daughter’s favorite song: Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” Truly, it is a wonderful world she lives in.
Keynote Speech at the Exchange4Media PR Summit The Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi May 21, 2010
Good morning,
Thank you, Anurag and your team, for organizing this PR Summit. I hope that over the years it grows and becomes a major platform for dialog within our profession.
I have titled my remarks: “We Are Also Part of India’s Democracy.”
I have stated my SOCO up front. As PR professionals, we are as much a part of India’s democracy as we are of its economy.
But PR is also about telling stories. So I’m going to tell you a story that I hope will give you a perspective on how our business has grown and developed and the challenges it faces.
Many years ago, when I came to India to set up IPAN, I used to tell the story of how PR became the world’s second oldest profession. We all know what the oldest profession is.
It has to do with Moses, who led the chosen people out of Egypt with the Pharaoh hot in pursuit. They found themselves stranded on the banks of the Red Sea. This was a huge problem. So Moses got his core strategy team together to look at the options.
There seemed to be none. His defense guy said they should stand and fight. His finance guy, who understood the salubrious impact of money, suggested the possibility of buying them out. But in their heart of hearts, his key advisers knew only a miracle could save them.
“Don’t worry,” said Moses, “I will part the sea and we will walk across to liberty. At that point, his PR guy spoke up, “Sir, if you can do that that I will get you ten pages in the Old Testament.”
So Moses performed the miracle and got his ten pages in the Old Testament.
I told this story 20 years ago, when PR consulting was a little known business. Times were simpler but mindsets were rigid. The press (and it was just the print media those days) did not entertain any releases or information from the corporate sector. For its part, the corporate sector saw PR as a free advertising.
Meanwhile clever operators like the public sector and some private sector firms managed to play the press like a fine-tuned fiddle. Just think, the public sector delivered very little but no questions were asked. It was the holy cow. I can remember the PR strategy of a Calcutta-based public sector firm: “Kill the story and I’ll get you two tickets on the Rajdhani.”
Some private entrepreneurs also cultivated friends in the press to oppose liberalization and reform. The notorious Bombay Club fought tooth and nail against foreign investment and against any changes in the license-permit raj.
Fast forward two decades and we find that the media are friendlier; our profession is recognized in its own right and is a significant player in the fast growing economy.
Recent developments have however cast a shadow that could affect our standing. I am referring to the current media attention on the role of PR firms in influencing choices in public policy. It is not at all surprising that the telecom sector is the source of stories about corporate sleaze and government corruption.
Why do I say it is not surprising? Let me digress a little: to the early 1980s, when I lived in the US. We had formed a group called India Forum that met weekly to consider developments in India. All of us were struck by the emergence of Rajiv Gandhi. In the event, many of us including my good friend Sam Pitroda took our first tentative steps to engage with India.
Our focus was on telecom because that was Sam’s field. At the time, the sector was in a primitive state. There were not enough phones and existent phones rarely worked. It was a project to make long distance calls, impossible to get connections. In fact, it was said that the entire telecom bureaucracy made money from providing out-of-turn connections.
We took the matter up with Rajiv Gandhi. The task was to convince him that the sector was vital to economic growth and to change political mindsets that held telephones to be a luxury. As such, Rajiv put his heft behind our recommendation that India should go in for digital rather than analog technology.
The rest is history. But the baggage is still there. The telecom sector seems to be a magnet for sleaze and murkiness as the recent controversy shows. And our profession risks being stigmatized unless we make some forceful interventions.
In a recent email interview to a leading financial paper, I was asked about lobbying and what the reporter saw as concomitant sleaze. She did highlight my responses in her front-page story and I believe I may have even helped her re-look at the lobbying controversy in which it was alleged that a PR firm tried to influence the choice of telecom minister and subsequently telecom policy.
There is nothing wrong in trying to influence public policy. Indeed, in a democracy, everyone has the right, nay the duty, to challenge wrong-headed legislation or to advocate for new policies to deal with changing situations. Over the years, I have chalked up many, many case studies in which we actively influenced government decisions in areas as diverse as consumer products; financial services; cable and satellite television; power generation; water management; public health and primary education.
Our strategy was to win media support, raise the debate in various public forums and to seek out articulate spokesmen and credible third-party endorsements.
To ensure that our profession does not get besmirched by the dirt and corruption of illegal methods, we need to make the following assertions:
1. Lobbying is a legitimate activity. It does not mean the exchange of money and favors to achieve a desired outcome. Bribery and corruption are illegal.
2. Lobbying is not relevant in India because of the sheer lack of transparency in government and politics. Legislators do not have backup policy staff; bureaucrats are too control-minded to be open to legitimate suggestions.
3. An advocacy strategy may be the most effective way to influence public policy. This involves working with the media and other influentials to advocate our views to policymakers.
4. The claims in the media are wildly exaggerated. I find it difficult to believe that a PR executive can influence the selection of cabinet ministers.
5. The gratuitous remarks by civil society activists about the pernicious impact of lobbying should be dismissed out of hand. They are themselves power brokers and fixers. Their prescriptions have crippled the economy, especially in the areas of infrastructure and agriculture.
On the other hand, the media also have much to answer for. You would think triviality is the first as in the sad spectacle of Sania Mirza; Shashi Tharoor; Lalit Modi; the IPL. Obsessed with trivialities, the media and their concomitant sources, the pr guys, tend to hijack the public debate.
There are other issues such as the nexus between the marketing people of corporations and the “brand managers” in the media. Just recently, The New York Times ran a story about how the major media are selling editorial space and time.
What’s happening is a travesty. If you undermine Indian democracy, you take away a major advantage we enjoy in the world.
On the economy, while I lament the Leftist thinking that still dominates intellectual life in India; I have to say that rampant commercialism is a bad thing. If we acquiesce in “treaties” and “packages,” we are selling our profession short, making it the equivalent of advertising.
It’s not just these subversive agreements, we are all called upon to measure our contribution in terms of advertising spends.
Our profession has its roots in Mahatma Gandhi. He used an advocacy strategy in which he staged events to influence the press and the government and petitioned the courts to in order to assert his rights under the law. That defeated first, the racist government in South Africa and then the colonial British government in India.
His SOCO: it is possible to change things.
I know there is a deep-rooted cynicism in the public debate that the only way to get things done in India is to bend rules, pay bribes or resort to blackmail.
Of course, these things happen. But if we are ever going build our profession as a legitimate part, not just of the economy but of India’s loud and raucous democracy, we have to stand for skepticism not cynicism; debate and negotiation, not surrender and compromise. Above all, we must stand for transparency.
This may sound impractical given the fact that media are willing to sell editorial space for a consideration. But then, I for one did not come to India to spark the PR consulting business only to see it flounder in murk and opacity.
I repeat: our business is squarely rooted in the Gandhian tradition. This sounds so idealistic that many of you would be blameless if you think I am naïve. Thank whatever Gods there be, our founding fathers who wrote our Constitution were not cynical. Else, we would have been like Pakistan, or Iran or any of the multifarious countries who are called the developing nations.
Remember the SOCO; our profession is as much a part of our democracy as it is of the economy.
And by the way, the term SOCO was invented by my team at Hill & Knowlton in Chicago in the early 1980s.
