Dreaming on: Vandana Saxena Poria

From London with love

Vandana Saxena Poria became the belle of the ball when she spoke at the UK India Business Council’s first anniversary summit in London last week and disclosed that she employs 50-60 staff, “70 per cent of them women”, at Get Through Guides, the company she has set up in Koregaun Park, Pune, to help Indian students pass their CIMA and ACCA international accountancy exams.

The vivacious businesswoman revealed, to much applause, that “we have positively gone out and recruited women who have small children. They are getting a raw deal in most places. We gave them the ability to work from home, flexi-time, part time, emergency help if their kids were ill.”

She brought the house down when she added: “When we went through our interview process, they had done a lot better. We have not lost a single employee except through pregnancy.”

Vandana and her husband, both UK born and bred Indians, settled in Pune three years ago, not because they believed they would benefit hugely from a burgeoning economy but because they “wanted to give something back”.

Far from being confused desis with an identity complex, British Indians, she feels, can act as the golden thread that binds Britain and India.

Vandana, now 37, was born in south London at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, of parents with a Delhi/UP background. After qualifying as an accountant in London, she worked for 10 years in Rumania and Poland, where the number of Indian boys suitable for marriage, incidentally, was almost negligible.

She flew to Chicago and met a promising Indian she found online but “he finally refused to move to Eastern Europe”.

Then, what was meant to be a coffee and a gossip with Dipak, an old college friend of Gujarati origin, blossomed into romance and marriage. The couple emigrated to India in 2005 when their son, Jay, was 15 months and Vandana seven months pregnant with her daughter, Zara.

Her mother and mother-in-law urged Vandana to have the baby in the UK but she insisted: “India’s got a billion people, they know about child birth. I really wanted my kids to understand the Indian dream.”

“We have shifted lock, stock and barrel to India because we really believe the opportunities are out there, it’s India’s time,” Vandana told me.

She has no regrets except possibly one — “that I did not do it sooner.”

 

india rising: Sir Martin Sorrell (centre) with Sharon Bamford (right) and Karan Bilimoria

“Arrogant” India

Could the “Ugly American” be succeeded by the “Ugly Indian”? Are champions of India’s new found superpower status becoming a little too cocky?

It is worth noting the comments by Sir Martin Sorrell, 63, CEO of WPP, the advertising giant which employs 116,000 people in 2,000 offices spread across 100 countries with an annual revenue of $13.5 billion.

Delivering the keynote address at the UK India Business Council summit, Sir Martin, who has been travelling to India “for 25-30 years”, listed “10 positive points” about India.

“Our people in India are amongst the best — I would argue may be the best that we have around the world,” he emphasised.

But listing “4-5 challenges”, he warned: “India and indeed China and the other Bric countries have become much more confident in the last few years. They looked at what we were doing in the West and were in awe of it, historically. But when they saw that we were as capable as anybody else of making mistakes, they became much more confident.”

His message was clear: “There is a danger that you become a little arrogant when you become confident.”

 

Our world, their world: The Lord Mayor’s banquet at Mansion House, and (below) flood-hit children in Bihar

Sorrow of Bihar

Sir Martin Sorrell’s observation that “the polarisation between the extremes of wealth and poverty in India is getting greater” seemed particularly appropriate in a week when BBC television coverage of the flooding in Bihar has been sharply critical of the Indian government’s disgraceful failure to get speedy help to the victims. The cameras followed one man to his village where the body of his elderly father was laid out in the front porch surrounded by weeping relatives.

I thought of my late father, who always referred to the Kosi as the “Sorrow of Bihar”. Actually, the tragedy of the Kosi is an old one, for I looked up the reference to the river in my father’s 1957 memoirs, a collection of his newspaper columns in the Indian Nation, a newspaper he had edited in Patna at a young age.

Bihar’s minister for information had written a generous introduction, pointing out that my father’s “mighty championing of the worthy cause of Kosi sufferers brought him endearments and tragedy both, for, while focusing public and governmental attention to the problems of the suffering humanity he clashed with the bureaucracy headed by the then state Governor, Sir Thomas Rutherford, and ultimately he was compelled to quit the editorial gaddi of the paper to land him in wilderness.”

My father liked embellishing the story of how the not unreasonable Governor urged him to “moderate” his editorials, whereupon he had responded, “Your Excellency, I won’t take out a comma.”

Despite a previous promise of protection from the paper’s owner, the Maharajah of Darbhanga, my father invited and got the sack — which mightily irritated my long suffering and impoverished mother.

In Bihar last week, BBC television told us two million people were at the mercy of the Kosi, much as in my father’s time.

Back in London, the vital task of promoting corporate India had to go on as rich and famous Indians sipped champagne at the Lord Mayor of London’s chandelier-lit banquet at Mansion House.

 

Soccer fever: David Beckham

Shooting star

The reality television show, Cricket Star, is to be followed by its soccer sister, I learn from the brilliant UK-based businessman, Manoj Badale, who is behind the idea.

The search will be nationwide, with selection assisted by experienced folk who will be flown in from Liverpool and Arsenal football clubs in Britain.

“There are three big things that matter in terms of (television) content in India — Bollywood, cricket and soaps,” says Manoj, chairman of Emerging Media and of Rajasthan Royals.

Soccer could be the fourth.

The winner will get to train with the football academy in either Liverpool or Arsenal.

Manoj, who says everyone was staggered by the IPL’s success, asserts: “We are launching a hunt for India’s next soccer star in October this year.”

 

Tittle tattle

Finally, an uplifting tale of outsourcing. The programme for last Monday’s UK India Business Council summit was designed in London and printed in Surrey. But the couriers closed for the weekend without making the delivery and the printers were not contactable.

Sharon Bamford, the council’s chief executive, outsourced the emergency job early on Sunday to Zawares, a Pune printing firm, whose proprietor caught Jet Airways to Heathrow and handed over the package to the airline’s manager who delivered the programmes as the summit began at 9 am in London. The programmes printed in Surrey arrived late that afternoon and were “of no use”.

Sharon opened the conference by telling delegates how the crisis “was solved in a very global environment with a simple phone call to India. Our programmes could not make it from Surrey this morning, I am sad to say, but they made it from Mumbai.”