Making A Difference

Cor Blimey, I Levitate

Being an Indian is good. It can make you walk that bit taller, the bit that makes a difference.

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Cor Blimey, I Levitate
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Bangalore has made me the proud owner of a higher level of ignorance. Nice thing, this cleverness by association. And why not. Every Japanese doesn’t spend his Saturdays designing circuits any more than a German spends his Sunday cutting edges with steel. They can devote their life to sushi and sausages and still be considered clever. Guess it’s our turn now, it’s been a long time waiting, for someone else to do something, that is. The next best thing to being really clever is to persuade people of what you could so easily have been.

Of course, I don’t exactly walk down a London street whistling Mera Bharat mahaan. But some borrowed wrapping from India has put me in good spirit. Didn’t take much doing; the place you’re from has a way of sitting around you and not letting go. Over the last 10 years, the Indian wrapping’s got a great deal better. A changing India, a changing view of India, makes me feel good and think I look better. It’s made it possible for me to walk just that little bit taller, the bit that makes such a difference.

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Who’d have thought change rests on the kind of stuff that goes into press releases. But yes, that about 500 Indian companies make India the eighth largest investor in Britain goes into it. And that these companies offer some thousand jobs to Brits. That British universities now look to Indian centres for biotechnology. Eight or whatever per cent growth. And who knows, the Pokhran blast belongs somewhere in this pattern. I’ve never before known so many boring facts to feel so good.

At dinner after a picnic with foreign journalists, I made an offering of some of these figures; among journalists such talk is acceptable. I’d dropped a small scoop on the table. When India invests in Britain, it’s news. I suspect they half-thought what Britain is coming to, as much as where India is going. Those story angles sprouted around the table, ‘ex-colony turns the table’ sort of stuff.

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Talk inevitably turned to Indian software. I spoke of my meeting a few days earlier with Senthil Kumar, the London man for the company I-flex that’s designed software for banking transactions that is in use in much of Europe. It apparently makes it much easier for bankers to get weird with figures, as they must. Not sure how, but what mattered was that I could say it. Eight per cent growth leads to an incremental growth of talking points. The talk is a byproduct with international significance, an image solution. Every time someone finds a software solution in Bangalore, they do something for me in London.

I’ve stopped hearing much about India as a poor country any more. It’s both rich and poor, and now everyone’s looking at the rich part of it. The two legs prestige stands on have always been money and power. That’s been such a western package so long, met from India only with dubious revenge by way of spurious spiritual wealth. India now talks the prestige language, and here and there out-westerns it. It’s in the selling business now outside of itself, and that’s given it money to buy with.And ‘it’ is no other than the Indian in it, or even from it.

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How the grand flows into the little. Ten years back the NRIs were the Consumerland nationals.How those suitcases packed in London and New York demeaned those doing the packing as much as those they would be opened for. Look, foreign, see. Over the years, people have learnt to travel lighter to India. Manmohan Singh Kohli has returned the suitcase into its original standing as a container you pack things into. Santabhai is gone, or is going. At JNU, they have the precisely small percentage of Indians who can get near those bursting new shopping malls. But development does not take off like a NASA rocket. Unequally forward is better than stuck, or back.

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For too long now, NRIs have imported snobbery from access to consumer goods and developed infrastructure. They have always come to India in that flashy foreign wrapping. Over these last 10 years, India has done much to improve their appearance. By Outlook’s 20th anniversary party, this problem should have been treated for good. India would be a lot more developed, a little less developing. Already I’ve shed that feel of some third world journalist in London somehow. You get German correspondents in London, Australians in America, Indians in London...Manmohan has promoted me from migrant to correspondent.

But it has taken more than a changed relation with goods and goodies. Politics defines us, as does the politics of the world we’re seen to come from. Percentages could never take the place of a new harmony between India and Britain. Pausing a moment at this 10-year milestone, I see how much that relationship matters, not to nations out there, just to me every day. There’s an easy blending now of the outlook on the world from New Delhi and London.

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I wish Osama bin Laden could have found a less evil way of succeeding in doing in one morning what Indian diplomacy failed to do over two generations. An Indian experience got across. That western pussyfooting with the mindless and the heartless, of obliterating truth with interpretations, came to an end. Unknown to the world, it made life for an Indian in Wembley politically more comfortable.

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The dozen or so groups around Britain whose business it became to badmouth India on Kashmir began to fade away; now not a single one remains. Members of the Commons and the Lords whose mission it had become to snap Kashmir from India went quiet; not one speaks that language any more. The foreign office changed its language more subtly, but just as certainly. Peace descended on an Indian’s private war of dissatisfaction with the country he lived in.

These matters have been settled between Delhi and London. The Indian high commissioner continues to make speeches by way of free treatment for Indian insomniacs. He could skip the generosity and go home. Barring the visa chaps, so could all Indian bureaucrats in London (diplomats if you want the euphemism), and no one would notice except the chaps clearing their wine bills paid for by Indian taxpayers.

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