Of Course We Have, and Here’s to Much More
India My Land

Of Course We Have, and Here’s to Much More

At least on Independence day, we can give ourselves the liberty of thinking about the past decade. And give ourselves a break from the flagellation to look at some of the useful things that got done in India. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, started in 2000-01, has been a success. Now, 90% of children have access to a school close to home, literacy rates in rural India have risen by 10% in the last decade and the literacy gap between urban and rural has narrowed. When you get cynical, drive into the interiors of most states and see droves of children chattering and laughing and on their way to school. The right to education has birth defects but it moves the agenda from mere access to a right to free education. The right to information is a noncaste-based liberal move, whose impact is widespread, and goes all the way to the […]

August 15, 2013 0 Comments
Tai-Pan or Fry Pan
C'est La Vie

Tai-Pan or Fry Pan

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR GOES TO BUY A PACKET OF BUTTERFLY TEA AND A BOTTLE OF WELL WATER A FAVOURITE STORY told by the sales manager of what was in the old days known as Lipton Tea went thus: an elderly lady walks into a kirana shop in Chandigarh and asks, “Lipton di chaah haigi (Do you have Lipton tea)?” The shopkeeper grins broadly and say, “Behenji, lipatna hai to lipto. Mainu ki frank painda (Lady, if you want to hug, then do so. What difference does it make to me)?” Lipton, when pronounced as it is sometimes in north India as “Lipaton”, sounds like lipatna, or hugging. And chai when pronounced as it often is as “chaah” is the word for desire. I thought of that story, because now we have the very English brand name Tetley in our midst. And when I went to a shop in Delhi […]

April 12, 2013 0 Comments
Confessions of a Part-time Teacher
C'est La Vie

Confessions of a Part-time Teacher

On the memories and anxieties of a convocation ceremony IT’S CONVOCATION time again and as the invitations start coming in, I feel that familiar lump in my throat. At the institute that I am associated with, the convocation takes place on the weather-beaten but majestic, red-brick Louis Kahn Plaza that has seen over 60 batches of bright-eyed young men and women “walk the ramp”, so to speak, in their fancy dress robes, on top of the world, even if just for today — because tomorrow they will be at the bottom of the heap of the real world! Their mixed emotions of anticipation and trepidation are so palpable, it makes me nervous just to breathe in their vicinity. And I really empathise with the bemusement on their parents’ faces, laced with pride, at this new avatar of the offspring that they are yet to get to know. My heart goes […]

March 30, 2013 0 Comments
Rock-cut Realities
India My Land

Rock-cut Realities

A visit to Ajanta Ellora leaves one overwhelmed for many reasons. Stressed out by recent happenings, I thought a retreat into the past would bring some calm and balm. That’s how last weekend found me at Ajanta Ellora. It wasn’t all calm and balm though. In fact it was overwhelming to see what people did thousands of years ago in supposed pre-modern times, and to see that Indians did have the ideas, the planning, the patience, the team work and the money to do things that were at the cutting-edge the world over. I felt wrung out each evening from the déjà vu that hits you hard at such places. The same gods, the same stories, Mahabharata on stone instead of on TV! I once saw lots of gold jewellery on display at the British Museum from the Oxus treasures, dating to the 4th and 5th century BC, and there […]

March 24, 2013 0 Comments
Coming out of the Water Closet
India My Land

Coming out of the Water Closet

Women’s toilets are climbing the corporate ladder I am obsessed with office toilets. I thought that was something I should not talk about ever, but a recent opinion piece in a business newspaper has given me the courage to come out of the water closet. It was called “India needs a latrine policy”, written by a friend who has also authored a book on game theory. My obsession goes back three decades. After my course at IIM-A, during placements, many employers said they didn’t want women because of many reasons; one was that they didn’t have ladies toilets and would have to build them. Of course, she who must not be named (for fear of royalty payment being extracted), would say that the real reason for my obsession is that I never progressed beyond the anal stage of my personality. But as any working woman of my vintage will tell […]

December 2, 2012 0 Comments
A Home With a View
C'est La Vie

A Home With a View

What’s it like for a city person to live closer to the real jungle I DESPERATELY wanted a place of my own that opens out to the outdoors. I lived most of my life as a “concrete jungli”, a phrase coined by my armyman brother after witnessing a command mother-daughter performance, when my one-year-old and I visited him in small town Assam. For the better part of the trip, every night my daughter would look at the sky and say “ite”, and we had no clue what it meant. Until it hit me one day that she was saying “light” whenever she looked at the moon, because the Mumbai child had not seen the moon thus far, and worse, her parents had not realised it either. It wasn’t visible from our window (only other buildings were), the car park was indoors, and exhausted Mumbaikar working parents never took the one-year-old […]

March 12, 2013 0 Comments
The Lamplit Sales Graph
Consumer Trends

The Lamplit Sales Graph

Festivals, the world over, are usually boom consumption time-when people know they have to spend, they are in a mood to want to spend, and they do plan ahead for the expenditure. Festival sales are therefore a barometer of how good or bad consumers are feeling about the size of their wallets and about spending. In consumption-driven economies, that is a critical determinant of economic growth. If spending doesn’t happen even at festival time, it is pretty bad news and a barometer of how good or bad the consumer economy is, the same way the prices of bellwether stocks tell a story. Last year, the world watched with bated breath to see what retail sales in America would be during the holiday season of Christmas and New Year. It was this indicator that would reflect exactly how bad things really were. If people decided to economise on that most sacred […]

March 12, 2013 0 Comments
Elastic @ Work
Corporate Governance

Elastic @ Work

My 27-year-old niece works flexi time at a big business technology consulting firm. “I don’t see why I need to go into office at all, except once in a while when it is really necessary,” she reasoned, shrugging her shoulders. “In any case, my boss comes into work once a quarter, I have a colleague in another office who is rated to be a top performer who hardly ever gets to work, and there is the hot-desking system in my office, so I don’t even have a permanent place.” (Hot desking is an office organisation system which involves multiple workers using a single physical work station or surface during different time periods. ) SMART OFFICES How do you connect with other people and work collaboratively, I asked her. With state-of-the-art communication systems, it turned out. “The other day, my boss asked me if I got what she was trying to […]

March 9, 2013 0 Comments
An Open Plan
C'est La Vie

An Open Plan

When the husband and the contractor renovated the house. My husband has a home renovation fetish. He itches to break down walls, paint them, alter window heights and enclose balconies. I am not enthused by the whole process. I have a theory that painters take as long as they do because our homes are more comfortable than theirs and there is a dis-incentive for them to finish their work. They get paid on a daily rate, and they certainly enjoy a nice afternoon snooze alone in the room that is being painted, get tea and cold water twice a day, or more if they ingratiate themselves with the household help. I walked into the house yesterday to find all the pictures taken down, and a happy husband telling me that the painters would arrive tomorrow. I protested violently that I hadn’t been consulted, to which he said I had been, […]

February 3, 2013 0 Comments
Time to Share the Pain
Policy Perspective

Time to Share the Pain

As prices rise and subsidies are cut, India needs some more socialism to keep markets working Recent economic policies may give stock market investors reason to cheer, but many Indian households are in pain and it is about to get worse. The ‘there-is-no-choice’ discourse propagated by analysts and business leaders is that the price rise of cooking gas, telecom, diesel and train fares is good for aam aadmi because it will make industry more profitable, reduce the fiscal deficit, cut interest rates, inspire more confidence for investment and individuals to borrow to spend, and lead to a higher GDP growth rate number. As a result, many Indians will have opportunities to earn more, spend more and live better. India will become a more attractive FDI destination and that will, in turn, lead to more benefit for aam aadmi. Maybe we will understand the human consequences of economic reform better and […]

January 28, 2013 0 Comments
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