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| BIZ WIZ: The CII crack team with UK business secretary Vince Cable (sitting, centre). Picture courtesy Robert Chadwick |
Plea to Mamata: make money, not war
In London last week, where the economic future of India was being discussed by key decision makers from India and Britain, the overwhelming feeling was that Mamata Banerjee should stop her apparent feud against Ratan Tata and, in the wider interests of the people of West Bengal, reach an amicable out-of-court settlement over Singur.
There were two economic summits on successive days.
The first was organised by The Spectator weekly magazine: “The Anglo-Indian Summit: Investing in Each Other’s Futures”, presided over by my old editor from Sunday Times days, Andrew Neil.
“This should have been held 10 to 15 years ago,” began Andrew, always good at getting to the point.
This was followed by the summit which is held annually in London to coincide with the arrival of a senior delegation from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), led this year by its president, B. Muthuraman, the vice-chairman of Tata Steel, and the man who will succeed him next year, Adi Godrej, the chairman of the Godrej Group.
The theme this year was: “UK-India: Next Steps towards greater partnerships.”
“No comment,” responded Muthuraman, when I asked about the Tata-Mamata court battle.
In his presidential address, though, he indicated at what might have been. “Take, for example, the Nano car, it’s not simply a small car, it’s a differently thought of car, it’s a differently engineered car, and it’s a differently assembled car, and there is a lot of innovation. There are something like 34 or 37 patents in that one single car.”
I spoke to Amit Dev Mehta, vice- president, Tata Capital, at The Spectator summit, and to Subodh Bhargava, a former CII president and now chairman of Tata Communications, at a third summit, held at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, to discuss “Integrity and Transparency in Governance” (that is, bribery and corruption).
Both urged Mamata to be magnanimous and move from the problems of the past and create an investor-friendly climate in West Bengal.
The confident CII view is that despite everything, the Indian economy will continue to grow at 8-10 per cent a year for the foreseeable future. But Mamata needs to cash in on her honeymoon period before the door closes on West Bengal for another 30 years.
At The Spectator summit, someone asked about the worst states in India for investment.
“Until two months ago I would have said West Bengal,” responded one of the Indian panel members.
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| INDIA FILE: Jo Johnson with Phoebe Vela, PR organiser of The Spectator’s India summit |
Mission Mitra
Manmohan Singh, David Cameron, Shashi Tharoor, Mark Tully, Mukesh Ambani and Professor Judith Brown of Oxford are among more than 30 high profile contributors to a thoughtful book on India-UK relations which we all found on our desks after lunch at The Spectator’s Anglo-Indian summit.
Reconnecting Britain and India: Ideas for an Enhanced Partnership “has been launched at Downing Street by David Cameron”, I was told by Tory MP Jo Johnson, who used to be the Financial Times’s correspondent in India and is the book’s co-editor with Rajiv Kumar, the secretary-general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci).
The two editors thank Amit Mitra, “Rajiv Kumar’s predecessor in Ficci and now a minister in the newly-elected government in West Bengal” because he “immediately embraced the idea of producing a book of essays exploring some of the most important facets of this textured and complicated bilateral relationship. Ficci remains committed to forging stronger bilateral ties between the two countries.”
Mitra will be gratified to hear that the Marxist economist Meghnad Desai has hailed him warmly (in a chat with me) as “the most Right wing man I know” (in CII/Ficci circles).
In that case, there is hope yet for West Bengal.
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Rekha vs Jaya
Anyone reading Bollywood websites can hardly escape such rivalries, real or imagined, as “Who’s sexier — Kat or Kareena?”
In Hollywood, the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, two of the most famous actresses of their generation, was all too real. It erupted in 1962 when they co-starred in the cult classic, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Now, their enmity has provided rich material for an excellent play, Bette and Joan, with Greta Scacchi as Bette Davis and former EastEnders actress Anita Dobson as Joan Crawford, which I have just seen at the Arts Theatre near Leicester Square.
“It’s said she’d slept with everybody on the lot except Lassie (the dog),” says Bette of Joan.
In bed, one of the actresses recalls, Rock Hudson, who hadn’t publicly let on he was gay, was encouraged to think of Errol Flynn.
Bette and Joan made me wonder whether there is similar dramatic potential in the alleged rivalries of Bollywood belles such as Katrina Kaif and Kareena Kapoor or Priyanka Chopra and Kareena Kapoor or the much classier one between the divas, Rekha and Jaya Bachchan.
Since it is the men who often seem a lot bitchier, maybe we will soon have SRK and the Big B at the Arts Theatre in London — with the actors playing themselves. Personally, I’d go for Rekha and Jaya with a nail scissors at dawn duel (“act one scene one”?), with the Big B acting as third umpire.
Adieu Adi
Adi Modi, general manager of the Bombay Brasserie from the time he opened the upmarket Indian restaurant on December 10, 1982, to 2008, has died suddenly in London from a heart-related condition at the age of 60.
The Indian elite who came to London — senior politicians, tycoons, film stars and top civil servants — found themselves at the Bombay Brasserie sooner rather than later.
Adi’s achievement was to attract a loyal list of British and Hollywood A-listers. Food critics who came to the Bombay Brasserie invariably ended up writing about Adi.
He trained at the Bombay Taj before shifting as assistant general manager to the Taj Sheba in north Yemen. From there, he was moved by the Taj group’s head Ajit Kerkar in March 1982 to open London’s first upmarket Indian restaurant.
A very upset Arun Harnal, who took over from Adi having served as his deputy at the Bombay Brasserie, tells me: “There will be a memorial service for Adi at the Bombay Brasserie on Tuesday, following his funeral with Parsi rites at Golders Green cemetery on Monday.”
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Tittle tattle
A fleet of top-of-the-range Jaguar limousines was placed at the disposal of the CII bigwigs visiting London for their summit last week.
I spotted several Jags in the forecourt of Lancaster House, a magnificent palace where the CII was hosting its traditional end of summit party.
But earlier in the day, the CII bosses were forced to abandon their Jaguars and do something that Bengal’s pride and joy, Pauli Dam, would never knowingly do — resort to the underground. This is because the streets of central London were gridlocked by hundreds of thousands of public sector workers protesting over their pensions.
After the initial shock of having to use the London Underground, I found B. Muthuraman, Adi Godrej, Calcutta boy Rajive Kaul and their colleagues thoroughly enjoying the exciting experience of standing between St James’s Park and their final “stoppage”, three stations later, at Leicester Square with a change at Embankment.
