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| INDIA SHINING: Mukti Jain Campion |
Rise and rise of the new global Indians
The first thing to be said about Mukti Jain Campion, who arrived in England from India aged four, read geology at Oxford and makes excellent radio documentaries, is that she has a lovely voice — quite unlike the hard, rasping, aggressive sounds developed by so many female BBC presenters who strive for equality with men.
It makes it so much easier to follow what she is saying.
The second is that her new three-part The New Global Indians, produced and presented by Mukti on BBC Radio 4 last week, weaves together familiar but disparate elements in a holistic fashion. It has taken London-based Mukti to Santa Clara in Silicon Valley, to Chicago for a reunion of 2,000 alumni from the Indian Institutes of Technology, to IIT Kanpur where multinationals flock to recruit the brightest students and to Bangalore to meet returned Indians who reside in gated compounds with names like Laughing Waters and Golden Enclave.
She edited and polished 35 hours of interviews with tycoons, academics and IIT students into three 30-minute segments. Result: sparkling diamonds.
Indian IT success in America is represented by such personalities as Vinod Dham, who arrived with “just $8 in his pocket” and helped create Flash Memory and the Pentium chip before leaving as Intel’s vice-president for his own start ups.
I loved the way Dham, “sitting in his plush 10th floor office in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara”, answered Mukti’s question: “Can you give me some indication of your value now?”
“No,” he laughed, “I mean it’s just many, many, many zeros after the eight.”
What is encouraging is the help being given by global Indians to others who are not so well off.
Gururaj Deshpande is the entrepreneur behind Akshaya Patra which provides free rice, yoghurt and sambar daily to over one million schoolchildren throughout India.
Another example of “Indians shining” is Radha Basu, who has a “palatial hillside home, set amongst vineyards in Silicon Valley” but also “started Hewlett Packard India in my dining room in Delhi”.
Basu, a south Indian married to Dipak Basu from Calcutta, now runs a non-profit foundation which promotes IT-training as a way to address rural poverty. She hopes this will be a new era for global Indians as agents for social change not only in India but among the world’s poor.
Basu tells Mukti: “Along with status of a global Indian, comes the responsibility and the obligation of being a global Indian from a social service point of view, and that’s I think going to be the challenge, the opportunity and the gift of the new generation of Indians.”
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| DOWN MEMORY LANE: Michael Foot walking Dizzy on Hampstead Heath |
Foot’s soldiers
It so happens that Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader who died last week, aged 96, figured in a 2004 radio documentary made by Mukti Jain Campion on the Indian novelist, Mulk Raj Anand.
Foot, a literary man and a politician with a huge Indian following, knew all about the author of such novels as Untouchable and Coolie.
Interviewed for An Indian in Bloomsbury, Foot enthused about Anand: “He was teaching us and people like (George) Orwell what British imperialism was like and what it meant. When I met him, he put the Indian case better than anybody, I think. Upstairs in this house I’ve got all his books.”
It was in the same house in Hampstead that I interviewed Foot some years ago for a magazine story as one of the prominent voters in the constituency which was to be represented in parliament by the double-Oscar winner Glenda Jackson.
After a two-hour dawn walk all over the Heath with Foot and his dog, Dizzie, I returned to his house where he worked his way through a sumptuous English breakfast — bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, the works. I sat across the table from him for an hour. His wife, Jill Craigie, was so busy caring for her husband that she forgot to offer me even a cup of tea. I returned home a little baffled.
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Language, please
Are Indian executives over fond of what the Plain English Campaign in England calls “management gobbledegook”?
“Going forward”, this is a subject worth examining in depth, as BBC presenter Evan Davis did with the following exchange when Ananda Mukerji, chief executive of Firstsource in Mumbai, was one of three guests on The Bottom Line, a business programme which last week discussed outsourcing.
ED: Now, I have to ask you this, Ananda, you were the chief financial officer in Enron in India. God, what a job to have on your CV! Did you know what was going on in Enron or what?
AM: No, not really. Enron in India was really an asset heavy organisation. They were creating infrastructure in the power and energy sector. We were very remote from the creative accounting and asset light model which Enron eventually proved…so...
ED: Asset light model!
Davis could not resist poking gentle fun at Mukerji, with his two other guests joining in the laughter.
Poor Mukerji is not to be blamed. After IIT Kharagpur, he got a graduate diploma from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
Book worm
Jaswant Singh will follow Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London where he will shortly discuss his bestseller on Jinnah, which is being published in the UK by Oxford University Press.
Jaswant, 72, is to move to the US where he may be unaware that promoters tend to make authors do 45 cities in 50 days.
Writing wrongs
Why has Arundhati Roy annoyed Giles Coren, a food writer on the Times?
Discussing what books he was taking on a family holiday to India, Coren disclosed he had packed the 900-page Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, which his partner, Esther, felt was not suitably Indian.
“Her bag,” noted Coren, “brimmed with books-suitable-for-India: M.M. Kaye, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Salman Rushdie, that sort of caper (though not The God of Small Things, thank heavens, which is the worst book ever written).”
This unprovoked assault on India’s most distinguished feminist provoked another reader, who signed himself as “Scary Bigdug”, to heap further insult in a blog: “Giles, I’m with you on The God of Small Things. It is the only book in the last 20 years I have not been able to finish. It took tediousness to a level where sticking pins in my eye seemed like a happy alternative to continued reading.”
Arundhati could always get her own back by writing both men into her second novel, should she ever get round to writing one.
Tittle tattle
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After eight Oscars, someone offered to get me into the hottest party in town: “Aren’t you coming to the Slumdog party?”
“No, yaar, got to write...”
Sometimes such sacrifices have to be made.
A year has gone by with Anil Kapoor perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the Slumdog phenomenon.
For today’s Oscars, in which Indians can afford to be neutral, the main battle is between Avatar and The Hurt Locker or rather between James Cameron who directed the former and his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow who directed the latter. It could well turn out to be a case of hurt husbands.
