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| calcutta chromosome: (Top) Kevin McCole; Anthony and Sharon Bamford |
Business gets back its buzz
Sharon Bamford has been to India no fewer than eight times in the past year in her capacity as the chief executive of the UK India Business Council (UKIBC), which exists to promote bilateral trade between the UK and India.
Not content with that, when it came to picking a holiday destination to celebrate her 25th wedding anniversary, “I chose, where else, but India, again,” Sharon tells me.
She and her husband, Anthony, have just travelled around Rajasthan by “Palace on Wheels”, with a diversion to take in the Taj in Agra.
Sharon, a frequent visitor to the more famous Taj — in Mumbai — will be returning to the city next month as part of a senior business delegation led by the Business Secretary Lord (Peter) Mandelson.
UK-India business, declares Sharon, has scarcely been affected by what happened in Mumbai.
First, she will be in Calcutta for the “Tieger awards”, which aims to find “the best business plan in India” in a competition organised jointly by the Indian Institute of Management and the Calcutta chapter of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs).
“I am one of the judges,” confirms Sharon, whose visit will coincide, incidentally, with a separate one by Alison Richard, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge.
After her Calcutta trip, Bamford will rush back to London “for a few days” before joining Mandelson’s mission to Delhi, Mumbai and Pune.
There is now a buzz about the UKIBC. Its new chief operating officer is Kevin McCole, who found his three years as the number two in the British Deputy High Commission in Calcutta so fulfilling that he resigned from the diplomatic service after 19 years to take up his present India-related job.
Kevin, who, like Sharon, is also a Scot, wants to do his bit for West Bengal, partly by urging chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya to bring a UKIBC-supported trade delegation to the UK.
Kevin acknowledges that Nano has been a setback for West Bengal but argues that the time has come to move on because the fundamentals of its economy are sound. “In 10 years it will be seen as a blip.”
Perhaps Kevin’s son will apply one day for dual UK-Indian nationality — his dad is very proud that “Sam was born in Calcutta”.
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| wanderlust: (Left to right) Reena Dharmshaktu, Felicity Aston and Aparna Ray |
Poles together
Dawn is breaking over Delhi when I send a text message from London to Reena Dharmshaktu asking if I could call her.
Though Reena is about to undertake her early morning run, she immediately replies: “Sure.”
Reena, a 38-year-old mountaineering instructor who has climbed well over 6,800 metres in Ladakh, is one of two Indian women chosen by Felicity Aston, the leader of an eight-women Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole.
The other is Aparna Ray, 27, from Calcutta, a bright lawyer who has been selected for the Indian Foreign Service. She hasn’t seen snow before since there is not a lot of it about in Salt Lake where she grew up.
Depending on how they perform in a training camp in near Arctic conditions in Hardangervidda, Norway, at the end of February next year, either Reena or Aparna will make the final team that will ski to the geographic South Pole in December 2009.
On the 500 mile-journey, the expedition will encounter blizzards, deep and dangerous crevasses and temperatures below -50°C.
“I am very excited about it,” says Reena, who was born into an army family and brought up in Darjeeling.
Her husband, Loveraj Singh Dharmshaktu, who is with the BSF’s mountaineering division and has climbed Everest twice, “is very proud of me,” confides Reena.
When Felicity comes to meet me in London from her home in Kent, she tells me how delighted she was with the quality of the 130 applications from adventurous Indian women.
Reena had said on her application form: “Antarctica means a distant dream for me. A fantasy. A wonderland. A women’s expedition would be great. Like an empowerment of women.”
Aparna, too, impressed Felicity who returned from her round-the-world trip after picking two women from each of the participating countries, namely, Cyprus, Ghana, India, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand and Jamaica.
Aparna, in Delhi for her IFS training, is on a noisy bus when I call.
“My friends think this trip is amazing,” she says.
Aparna, who “studied in 14 schools and lived in five cities within India” because her late father was in the IAS, said in her application form: “I am an average girl with a serious case of wanderlust.”
On the contrary, all the women, especially Felicity, are remarkable. She has rejected a crass idea from TV companies that she should include a showbiz “celebrity”, possibly a spoilt Bollywood babe, in her expedition.
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Mohini’s choice
When “curry king” Sir Gulam Noon launched his autobiography, Noon, With A View, at a function in London last week, the focus was understandably on how he had escaped with his life from the Taj where he had been staying when the terrorists attacked.
One speaker expressed the hope that since Noon had published a book, his wife, Mohini, should also follow with another of her own.
It so happens Mohini did indeed add the finishing touches to the final draft of a novel back in September 2008. What is spooky is the remarkable foresight she showed when it came to choosing a title for her novel.
“I chose the title five years ago,” she says. “It suddenly came to me one day.”
And what title did she pick for her yet to be published novel?
“Black Taj,” she reveals.
This is not a reference to the hotel but the mausoleum in black marble that the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan was hoping to build for himself across the Jamuna from the Taj in white marble that he had constructed for Mumtaz.
Under the circumstances, Mohini’s choice of title for her novel, now with literary agents, seems prescient.
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Booker bounce
Talking of books, the one to buy this Christmas is apparently Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which, the Booker Prize judges say, “shocked and entertained in equal measure”.
In India, a book is considered a bestseller if it achieves sales of 30,000 in paperback.
But since winning the Booker, The White Tiger has “gone on to sell over 285,000 (hardback) copies in the UK and has now been sold to publishers for translation in at least 26 other countries”, according to the Man Booker organisers, who have also announced the judging panel for 2009.
Tittle tattle
On a recent visit to London, N.D. Tiwari, sprightly governor of Andhra Pradesh, baffled Indian diplomats by standing still for several minutes at a formal dinner.
“Then one of us realised that he was waiting for a flunkey to take off his coat before he could proceed to dinner,” my mole tells me.
What caused sniggers behind his back, though, is that the 85-year-old Congressman should describe himself as the “paramour” of someone else’s wife.
An English linguist whom I consulted on this weighty subject tells me: “It’s a lovely old-fashioned English word for lover that’s slipped out of usage in England. Today, The Sun would probably call him a dirty old man and position a snapper permanently outside his residence.”
