Cincinnati Journal

New Beginnings, Old Friendship

The drive from Chicago to Cincinnati, Ohio, takes about five hours. Estelle and I did the round trip every fortnight when we founded, edited and designed a community newspaper called India Tribune in 1977. Thirty-two years later, I navigated the Dan Ryan Expressway to the Chicago Skyway to get to Interstate 65, the highway that cuts a southeasterly direction through Indiana into southwestern Ohio. The last time I’d driven the route was in 1987, just before we returned to India, when we drove to the East Coast and stopped at the various places we’d lived including Cincinnati.

Twenty-two years later, I still found my way into the city and crossed the bridge over the Ohio River into Kentucky. I was headed to Maysville, a pretty little town on the bank of the mighty river. My friend Yuri always says to me, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” Well this was a first. As I pulled into the steep driveway that took me down to Elisabeth’s place, I hummed an old Tin Pan Alley song made famous by Duke Ellington: I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So.

Let me explain: I’ve made it a point to look up old friends all over the world. In the process, I’ve found all of my good friends, going back all the way to the 1950s and re-established connections. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as new bonds in old friendships. Elisabeth was our dearest friend when we lived in Cincinnati in the mid-1970s. She had an elegance that could launch a thousand ships. We were smitten by her. For me personally, she was a turning point in my world view. She came from an old wealth Cincinnati family. As such, she was the object of Liberal derision in a discussion at which I was present. The majority seemed to feel Elisabeth’s views were inconsequential because she was of the Establishment. This was at the height of the liberal-conservative polarization in America. Woolly-headed leftist though I was in those days, I found myself springing to her defense.

In many ways that was my turning point. I realized that for all the free love and drugs, the Woodstock generation was not about to change the world as promised. It was then that I began to change from a Liberal to a liberal. The lower-case liberals were more inclusive; the capital-letter ones were every bit as prejudiced as the rednecks that were the targets of their ire

With the Ellington song playing on my lips and these thoughts buzzing in my head, I got out of my car into a fond and long embrace with Elisabeth. When we disengaged, she introduced me to her husband Orloff, a delightful man with varied interests. Their home is a piece of heaven, not just because of the sweeping vistas of the river but for the warmth and comfort it exudes. We sat on the porch drinking scotch and catching up. By the time, we finished dinner all of Kentucky was fast asleep; on our part we squeezed every minute for every second talking and it wasn’t just about the old days.

Among the many things we talked about, there was one distressing note. Elisabeth said that after 1995 through the turn of the century, Cincinnati became a race-troubled city. Apparently, in the period, many young black men were killed by policemen or died in police custody. Things boiled over in 2001, when a white police officer shot and killed a 19-year old black man. In April 2001, the city was paralyzed as riots broke out in the downtown and surrounding areas. The violence continued for five days.

“That’s when we decided to move out of the city,” Elisabeth said. It must have been wrenching. Her family ties to the city are well known and highly respected. In many ways, despite the piece of heaven she now lives in, Elisabeth’s story had the undertones of displacement. And I thought to myself that the uprooting of such a distinguished family from a city of grace and manners was something to regret and lament.

In the end, these turned out to be desultory thoughts. Three decades later, Elisabeth is still as pretty as a picture and as gracious and elegant as when I first met her. It is easy to love her as we did in the 1970s. For myself, I am glad to catch up with her again. The best new beginnings are of old friendship.


Copyright Rajiv Desai 2009

Corporate Social Responsibility?

The Nano Goes to Modi’s Gujarat

The decision by the Tata group to re-locate the Nano plant in Sanand is of concern to liberal Gujaratis. The logic of business is to be competitive and profitable; as such, Tata’s move makes sense. The company was right to choose the business-friendly state and get down to the task of making the revolutionary Nano car, which promises to put India on the global map of the auto industry.

Nevertheless, it just does not sit comfortably with liberal sensibilities in the communally-polarized state. What’s more, the triumphal note that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi sounded at the media event to announce the pact appeared to be a new form of propaganda. He followed it up with a series of television interviews, resplendent in new sartorial style. In these interviews, Modi positioned himself as a spokesman for the new India.

Modi is a politician and, some might even argue, a cynical one. It doesn’t take rocket science to see through his new effort to buy respectability. Like Lady Macbeth, he is seeking desperately to wash the communal bloodstains off hands in order win national acceptability. He is positioning himself to emerge as a national leader in the BJP once L K Advani is gone.

We can explain away Modi’s posturing as the way of an ambitious and ruthless politician. What is more difficult to accept is Tata’s decision-making process. The Nano is Tata’s prestige project. It is plausible that the decision was made on the rebound after the embarrassment and the financial costs of the shenanigans at Singur in Bengal. Given the formidable reputation of Tata, did no one consider the possibility that the decision could sully that standing?

Tata has sizable commitments to corporate responsibility programs. They stem from the conviction of senior management that their methods of conducting business should be ethical; as such, they must take into account the interests of society. These laudable programs have won prestigious awards and wide recognition. The Nano project is also driven by the same larger vision: to provide affordable personal transport to the emergent middle class.

While some companies like The Body Shop and others are recognized for their socially conscious practices, others are disparaged and their efforts often dismissed as hollow public relations ploys to whitewash the ethical questions raised by their operations. For example, the tobacco and oil industries simply have been unable to deal with the core ethical questions.

For all the years that such companies have fretted about corporate social responsibility, their notion is largely a putative expense to divert attention from real and serious ethical issues surrounding their business. Milton Friedman made sense when he famously argued in an article written 38 years ago that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

Friedman’s piece stirred a major controversy at the time. Not just his idea of corporate responsibility but all his work on monetary theory was dismissed as a handmaiden of powerful multinationals. It was the time of Woodstock and Viet Nam; big business in the West was viewed with glaring hostility in the media, in the academy and in the liberal mainstream. In India, given the socialist mindsets in politics and the bureaucracy of the time, business was seen a milk cow: favors and cash in exchange for licenses and permits.

With the dawn of the Reagan-Thatcher era, governments ceded space to the private sector. That was when views about corporate social responsibility began to change. If the private sector has unfettered access to markets, land, labor and capital, many scholars and analysts argued, companies must consider the larger social entity in their decision making.

In a recent example, a major infrastructure firm with far-flung projects served by casual labor included AIDS awareness and disaster management as part of its social responsibility initiative. It serves both the larger community and the company interests. Companies need to seek out areas where their operations intersect with the larger good.

Seen in that light, the Tata decision to re-locate the Nano plant in Gujarat raises many questions. Modi is like a chameleon in his relentless pursuit of power. Starting out as a fiery Muslim basher, he went on to pose as the champion of Gujarati pride; now he pushes himself as a business friendly leader. How does Tata reconcile its pact with Modi whose seven years as chief minister have been marked by overt targeting of minority groups? How can a company that has been honored by the US India Business Council sign on with a controversial politician who has been and continues to be denied a visa to the United States.

Modi’s culpability in the communal mayhem that followed the Godhra incident was clearly established; his effort to gain absolution by setting up the kangaroo Nanavati commission was clumsy. It’s in the past; he has turned a new leaf: the cheerleaders say. But who can forget that Modi built his political career by fanning the flames of religious bigotry with references to the conquest of India by the Mughals in medieval times and more recently, the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan

In the end, there is a growing belief that Tata’s move, though legitimate, helped Modi in his whitewash campaign to emerge as a national leader. As a result, this highly respected company’s commitment to social responsibility appears somewhat weaker.

an edited version of this piece appeared in the times of india, october 21, 2008

And Know They Love You

The New Generation Gap

It was the Memorial Day weekend in America. Observed in honor of those who served in the armed forces, the last weekend in May is widely considered the start of summer, though it is still weeks away. But “led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dancing beneath the brilliant canopy of spring,” you begin to anticipate summer.

Granted you can see nymphs but you don’t really see shepherds on New York’s Lower East Side nor hear the sound of bagpipes. But then we don’t write sonnets like Vivaldi; nor put them to music as concertos as Antonio did in his masterpiece, “The Four Seasons” from which the quote is taken. Regardless, it is heart warming to see young people hanging out, enjoying themselves under blue skies, starry nights and warm temperatures.

We were “cruising the hood,” my younger daughter Maya and I. She lives in and swears by the Lower East Side. My older daughter Pia says her sister never leaves her precinct if she can help it.

And so there we were, the two of us, late on a Friday afternoon, wandering the streets, stopping at bars and cafes to drink boutique beer and admire the arrondisement. We had a reservation for dinner at a wonderful restaurant, a few meters down Orchard Street where she lives. We got there a bit early and sat at the bar.

I thought to have a martini and promptly told the bartender, who was stirring the cocktail, that I preferred it “shaken not stirred.” Everyone laughed so I was tempted to introduce myself as “Bond, James Bond.” But seriously though, how do you explain to twenty-somethings that a shaken martini tastes different than the other? I let it go because our table was ready. Now there’s news that indeed there is a difference. You can Google it: just type martini, shaken, not stirred. The study clearly concludes that a martini is better shaken than stirred.

But I digress… it’s the Memorial Day weekend and I am spending it with my younger daughter at her apartment in New York’s Lower East Side. She is my shepherd through the urban meadows surrounding Delancey Street, showing me the pastures and the drinking holes. Where we stop, mostly everyone seems to know and be fond of her, including bartenders and maîtres de.

Just so everyone understands, these are crucial relationships in Manhattan. I can remember one time; she managed a table for us at short notice at a choice restaurant that takes reservations days in advance because she knew the chef. She can mostly get served anywhere she wants in her neighborhood; plus they hug and kiss her. No wonder her sister calls her “Fluffy.”

We topped off the evening at a little restaurant to have dessert. She knew everyone there and the house served me bourbon so rare that even I, an aficionado, hadn’t heard of it. “Yo Dad,” she says to me over the general ruckus, “like it?” I was almost in tears…my little girl introduced me to a rare brand of my favorite drink. In the patois of the time, I could only think, “How cool is this!”

As we walked the streets through the afternoon and evening, late into the night, my thoughts wandered back to the time of my first visit to New York. I fell in love instantly: it was human and real, very different from the orderly, manicured Midwest where I went to school. It felt more like a world city, a polyglot of cultures; eons away from the smiley-face cities I lived in, with what Ernest Hemingway memorably called “wide lawns and narrow minds.”

A generation later, my little girl has established herself in what is indisputably the coolest precinct in the world’s most vibrant city. She laughs at my Midwestern experience of America. To her, the Midwest is unreal. “Dad, people actually smiled and said hello,” she told me about her recent visit to Chicago. She was struck by its “other worldly” air. “Look, Dad, some white dude in Brooks Brothers smart casual actually offered to take a picture” of her and her older sister as they walked in downtown Chicago. Yes, it was nice and all, she admitted but he did it even “without our asking?”

Just like I did years ago with yuppies, my daughter has a problem with “hipsters,” who are gentrifying her neighborhood. This is a new species of yuppies with rich parents. “They feel they are slumming it on the Lower East Side. They spend hours and lots of money trying to look as if they’d just rolled out of bed,” my daughter said by way of explanation. “They push off to their parents’ home in the Hamptons on long weekends,” a bartender told me in affirmation of her comment.

In her perspective, I saw much of my worldview. I was a hirsute hippie, who wore oxford shirts and penny loafers. While I bristled at the inequities in the world, I also worked hard at graduate school. I thought I knew America when I lived in distant India and found when I got there that there was a difference in the image and the reality. My biggest learning was that the cutting-edge thinking in America had more to do with purpose and commitment than with lifestyle.

On the other hand, my American-born daughter lives easily, mixing lifestyle with commitment and purpose. Nothing seems to faze her in any way; she is equal to situations in a way that I simply could not conceive at her age. She deals with Manhattan and its formidable ways as though she was born to live there; not just to make a living but a life. She took me to places that most people would never find and showed me things that are off the beaten track.

Wandering the streets of the Lower East Side, we popped into establishments that were so cool I felt like I was in a Woody Allen film. We chatted mostly about her neighborhood. She sounded not so much like a tourist guide but a proud resident of the coolest “hood” in Manhattan. On the other hand, she reminded me she cooks Gujarati khichri and Goan fish curry but mostly gets by on pastas and salads.

For me the walk around the block was an education. Not just about the buzzy Lower East Side but about my younger daughter. She is a full grown young woman making her way with great aplomb in the world’s most happening city. “If you can make it here,” sang Frank Sinatra, “you can make it anywhere.” And she’s making it in her job as a production assistant in a startup venture that does stuff I don’t really understand. All I know is she “hearts” it.

To see parts of yourself in your adult children is satisfying. My older daughter, who works with me in New Delhi, is organized and incisive and can get anything done. She is the family’s chief operating officer. I am learning from her to see things in the cold light of pragmatism. Over the Memorial Day weekend with the younger one, I found her to be a sophisticate, who is humble but purposive. She is the family wit, ready with a humorous insight and a caustic turn of phrase. I am learning from both my girls that the pursuit of cool is a major behavioral pattern in the 21^st century.

This fundamental issue of cool is emerging as the new generation gap. While I admire my daughters’ state of being cool, I do feel a twinge of “been there, done that.” Poor dears: my generation defined the state of cool forever: Kerouac and Miles Davis, Dylan and Timothy Leary, The Beatles and Woodstock are the icons of cool. Deep in their hearts, they know that cool was invented by their parents’ generation. As such, they must know our cool is cooler than theirs.

But we never tell them why, instead, as the cult band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, sang, “just look at them sigh and know they love you.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008