Uhh Yes!

I was extremely fortunate on Saturday to attend a panel discussion organised by the Brookings Institution: a leading policy think tank based out of the US. The discussion happened to be on health care in India and related interventions to make decent quality health care available to larger sections of India's populace. In addition to the fact that I was representing my organisation there, I was pretty excited because one of the panellists was Nachiket Mor. Mr. Mor happens to lead ICICI Foundation prior to his role as a board member of ICICI Bank, India's 2nd largest financial entity. His clarity of thought, articulation and vision were, simply put awe inspiring. It's brushes with folks like him that really drive me on.

But that was just the half of it. Being a guest at the event, I was being introduced by our host from Brookings to various people in the room until she told me "Oh I also want Strobe to meet with you" and before I knew it I was shaking Strobe Talbott's hand and telling him about my organisation. It was a little overwhelming to meet with someone who's shaped policy the way he probably has done and I managed to gasp out somewhere in our 2 minute conversation that it was indeed a great honour to have met him. Mr. Talbott now heads the Brookings Institution and they were here on a visit to meet with Industry and Government. Their subsequent stop (after Bangalore) was to meet with Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Hmm :-) As far as building aspirations go, such interactions are very special and being in a small discussion group with folks like Mr. Mor and Mr. Talbott pretty much is the icing on any cake. What was embarrasingly disappointing to see was when Mr. Talbott was being interviewed by NDTV, instead of ascertaining his reasons for being in India and the work Brookings is doing here, among the half dozen other childish questions he was asked "Are General Musharraf's days numbered?" to which he answered a very sarcastic "uhh...yes!"

Bluster

An article in the IHT today talks about the Tata Steel takeover of Corus Steel. However, the article doesn't concentrate on the details of the acquisition but reflects more on the surrounding sentiment and the general ''euphoria'' in India today, mainly by certain sections of the media.

I quote from the article

"It's as if the civilization was always born to be a front-running civilization," said Rahul Kansal, chief brand manager of The Times of India, an English-language daily that has eagerly stoked the takeover euphoria.

"We were eclipsed for a while, overtaken by foreigners and foreign rule for a few centuries, and this is a comeuppance that is deserved — the need for some retribution," Kansal said."

As ever more Indian acquisition deals were announced, most of them smaller and less controversial, a kind of takeover nationalism emerged. This has hit its zenith, perhaps, with a new marketing campaign by The Times of India called "India Poised," which unabashedly uses patriotism to sell newspapers.''

The campaign in question here is something I noticed a while ago and have since tried studiously to avoid any further knowledge of. This article has obviously failed to tread the same path. I find it absurd that this journalist has spoken to the chief brand manager (no less) of the newspaper and gone on to publish the nonsense this guy has spewed. ''Retribution'' apparently seems a valued objective for this brand manager. My advice to him would be to not worry as we have enough leftist elements in our country who will ensure foreigners will never be allowed to conduct business freely here or will be barred altogether. And we have enough smart businessmen to continue the takeovers and mergers to feed the patriotic fervour his newspaper is trying to whip up. So success assured sir.

But I digress. The campaign in question at least to me, seems so pathetic, so out of sync with reality and even borders on the obscene. What are we supposed to be poised over? World domination? Forget that we are nowhere close to that reality but is that even something we want? What great inflexion point are we talking about that we feel the need to brag about?

What we are poised over is an AIDS epidemic, we are poised over half of the children in the country not having access to proper primary education, we are poised over great mounds of garbage laced with pollution we call cities, we are poised over corruption in most aspects of public life...we are poised over many things but I don't think we are poised over too many that we would want to make an advertising campaign out of. If we were being honest that is. Here the objective was to sell more of the product. That the objective of the product is to provide an objective & balanced opinion of affairs is secondary and has already been sacrificed on the altar of revenue and don't you talk about all that ''watch dog of the people'' nonsense.

So in essence, this campaign is akin to any other celebrity endorsement campaign we see on TV, only here patriotism itself has become the unwilling endorser. Ramachandra Guha sums it up well, "There's a deep inferiority complex. Sometimes it manifests itself in excessive deference. At the same time we exalt in cases of success over the white man."

And at other times we just make campaigns like ''India Poised''. Famous words come to mind from yes, what else but one of my favourite songs:

"All lies and jest, still the man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest....''