Business Standard, Mumbai - June 19, 2010
So for sixteen flats with probably a hundred people in them, there were twenty people involved in setting it up. Did it need that many people to do this? Well, everyone except the census people were doing this part time, each spending a tiny amount of time doing it, so it wasn’t that many man hours doing it, though it seems like it. More expensive than if it involved just one or two people? Not to the census bureau because they only paid for their person, while the rest of the activity costs were effectively shared by all of us who pay for the watchmen and the manager and our domestic staff. Cumbersome process? Not really, unless you stop to analyse it. It actually was all quite smooth and well oiled and got the job done smoothly. The fact is that we have lots and lots of people; and people […]
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Is their jingle out of place among power suits?
Anyway, she made a reasonable presentation – not a spectacular one but an adequate one and then, before she left the room, she went around the table once and shook hands with all present. She was wearing payal (anklets) which made a rather loud tinkling sound that was very hard not to notice. She wasn’t doing it for effect. She just wore what she usually wore and was quite unspoilt and oblivious of her surroundings. I, however, cringed with every jangle that happened with every step, and felt that it wasn’t the professional woman thing to do. The chairman of the meeting, known for saying it like it is, sans finesse, looked up as she left the room and muttered loudly, “Where did she come from? Bharatnatyam class?” Some folks, including me, laughed, and the meeting proceeded. But it nagged me. Why did I cringe at the sound of anklets […]
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Business Standard, Mumbai - April 17, 2010
If that was Act-I, now it’s time for Act-II, i.e. to do the same in the sphere of education and develop a vibrant education ecosystem in India. As in the case of business, this has to evolve organically and democratically, and cannot be something the government dictates or even lays down the paradigms for. It will, no doubt, take another 20 years of tapasya of a whole lot of people, in quite the same manner that it took for the model for business to evolve; but in the end, it will be well worth it, and it will be sustainable. There are no short cuts to this and we have to spend time discussing the problem, rather than jumping to implement quick-fix solutions. The most important thing, however, is to recognise that the genesis of our new and modern business ecosystem was liberalisation. Liberalisation actually meant two things – allowing […]
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However even while this angst for the new Indian identity continues in some quarters, everything else is going in the reversing direction. Television is getting more and more determinedly regional, as are the movies. In fact a look at all the serials and soaps on TV show that having distinctive sub communities in which the story is set works – some watch it because they identify with it and others like me because we are curious about how they live. Mata ki Chowki has a cast of a different kind of Indians than Baa Bahu Aur Baby. And it isn’t about religion either. Obama said that his was a country of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Moslems and non believers. Ours is an infinitely more complex fabric – the Tamilian Muslims and Tamilian Hindus have more in common than the Tamil Muslim and the Bihari Muslim. And it isn’t about community of […]
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Livemint.com - March 8, 2010
Most of the Indian women we know, even in GenNext, have grown up with subliminal messages about being a “good girl”, i.e. of behaving in a manner that conforms to society’s stereotypes and prescriptions of what success for a girl looks like. A venerable aunt used to hold up as an example worth emulating a girl who had a PhD in nuclear physics and an amazing job, but “when she walked in to the room you would never know that-she was so simple and ordinary in everything she did and said”. It took many years before we picked up the courage to ask, “But if she was so wonderful, what was the matter with her that she made no waves?” If you are from a middle class family in Tamil Nadu, as one of us is, you have probably been raised with a variety of wheedling voices asking you to […]
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