The Economic Times - December 2006
This is an exciting strategy because it is both holistic and flexible, and because it is extendable with easy to make changes, for different employer requests and different community constraints, says Rama Bijapurkar It’s always nice to begin a new year with a note of real hope and inspiration, and here’s the story I have to tell of the Rural Retail Academy, a vocational training initiative from Andhra Pradesh. The first batch of 700 rural youth have “graduated” from three academies, with 90% placement in large and well known retail companies like Future Group, McDonald, Food World, Spencer’s and Reliance, at salaries of Rs 3,000 plus per month. What is even nicer is that this is a government initiative, which is built around the mantras of “being totally market driven” and “private sector partnership”. And nicest of all is the gender ratio of the graduating class – 40% women! Three […]
Read on
The Economic Times - August 2006
I had a set of questions posed to me by the ET team: Why do career women in India struggle so hard with their work – life balance? Are lessons from Nooyi’s experience relevant to Indian career women? Who needs to change first, India Inc or the women? They requested that I write a “sharp piece” – which I think means cut out the politically correct BS and get straight to the heart of the matter as you see it. And so I shall, based on the many exchanges I have had with career women around the world, and from my own experience with five “proper” jobs in big and small organizations and then working for myself, while doing the maa, bahu, biwi, beti roles in the forever soap opera that is the typical Indian extended family. First, Indian women are not more beleaguered or less evolved than their counterparts […]
Read on
1 May 2006
The block buster success of the movie Rang De Basanti forces us to re-examine the picture that media and social commentators have been drawing about India’s urban, educated gen next – that of a bunch detached and disengaged from their national context and interested only in maximizing material well being. My nephew who goes to a snooty Mumbai school where the latest on Nike attracts more discussion than the latest on Narmada, says that his friends loved it and discussed it a lot. A young lady who went abroad at 17 says that she and her Indian friends in college saw it and wanted to head back home. Kamlesh Pande the writer of Rang De Basanti (RDB), says that he was surprised at the way he was cheered at a college convocation and had loads of young people who said “thank you for opening our eyes with RDB”. Several young […]
Read on
The Economic Times - 08 - March 2006
The two of us, writing this piece, are battle hardened though somewhat exhausted sufferers of a debilitating physical and mental condition. It is called “trying to be super woman-itis”. Some symptoms of this are “muthering heights”, and “we are just like men in the work place”. But we are now going through treatment for all these, and what better timing than International Women’s Day to tell it like it is and bring relief to millions of other sufferers like us, professional women who are also home makers and family nurturers, and for whom life is a giant balancing act. We spent most of our working lives believing that we were doomed to disaster if we were to even admit to ourselves that there were special, gender specific issues that affected us working women cum home makers; and that even if we admitted it to ourselves, it was professional harakiri to […]
Read on
December 26, 2005
So, what did I learn in the past year? Other than the fact that the problem of traffic in any given city is inversely proportional to the quality of shopping in that city; or that the MPs seem to work on a cost plus basis to price their questions, rather than on a perceived value basis – hopefully! I learnt yet again, that India changes so insidiously that you can never see the change that you are watching out for, until it comes and bites you in the butt in some other form. Over the years, whenever I have shown the income distribution and income growth pattern of post-1992 to foreigners, they invariably ask, “so will there be a lot of social tension, as some get more visibly prosperous than others”? I have always dismissed this idea as a typical, materialistic “western mind” conceptualisation of life, that says everyone must […]
Read on
