Look back to go forward

Tamil Nadu’s 69% reservations have resulted in a remarkable boom in education, aspiration and possibility

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

The two boys wore glasses, faint moustaches, thick plaid shirts, clashing ties. They most certainly did not exude confidence as they walked, synchronized but tentative in step, across the campus of St Joseph’s College of Engineering on the outskirts of Chennai.

That is how I knew.

It was confirmed a few minutes into our conversation. Logesh and Srinivasan, both 20, are the first in their families to attend college.

Logesh, the son of a contractor, is a member of the most backward caste, as applicants to college label themselves without shame in these parts. Srinivasan, the son of a shopkeeper, is a member of the forward caste, which forms a minority in this and every other college in Tamil Nadu.

With Thursday’s landmark Supreme Court case bringing millions of Indians under an umbrella of possibility, the case of Tamil Nadu presents a hopeful and noteworthy model; I spent a few days in the state earlier this week and was struck time and time again by the sheer number of people who were first-time learners, who spoke perfect English even as they said their parents worked as maids or drivers.

When asked why and how that could suddenly come to be, besides citing the growth of the overall Indian economy, their answers mentioned one common denominator: Reservations.

Tamil Nadu’s liberal reservations policy—where 69% of seats in public and private colleges go to members of lower castes and classes—has resulted in an education and aspiration boom that is remarkable. While this is the case across much of India, the possibility here seems so much more palpable, as though societal upheaval is already happening, instead of simply being dissected for the thousandth time with PowerPoint presentations at a five-star hotel in New Delhi.

A part of that reason is that Tamil Nadu began this discussion early— long before independence. The non-Brahmin movement of the 1920s and then ensuing demands by backward classes spawned laws that steadily increased seats reserved for lower classes. By the early 1980s, it hit 69%.

Regular readers of this column know I support affirmative action as the only means to force the flourishing portions of the economy to let others share their prosperity; it is not a socialist stance, but one rooted in survival and fairness. Because government has failed at reforming primary education, it is not until universities (and eventually the private sector, I hope) are forced to include the downtrodden of society in their fold that someone will take note and fix the sorry conditions under which scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and other backward classes are educated.

Thus, I applauded the Supreme Court decision to add 27% seats for the lower classes, even though I know much of the government’s concern is politically motivated and an 11th hour campaign tactic. So, as the party of India’s independence celebrates its victory—along with human resourced development minister Arjun Singh, who has made implementing reservations seem more a matter of saving his own legacy—they should be aware of their own role in the disastrous state of education and inequality in India.

Yet, even here, the case of Tamil Nadu offers hope. The hunger for education has definitely trickled down into the primary years, seeing increased importance and innovation on the state’s part. Today, estimates of children in the state attending school vary between 96% and 99%.

As in India, the majority of Tamil Nadu’s residents are members of lower castes or classes. The same debates wage over displacement of mainstream students, the exclusion of the more affluent “creamy layer” of each caste and just how long such a system needs to be in place to correct historical wrongs.

Indeed, there are numerous critics of the way Tamil Nadu has implemented its reservations system and the fraud, corruption and suffering of upper castes as a result. Allegations abound that those benefiting are, indeed, the creamy layer and children of the affluent and well-connected who don’t necessarily need a leg-up.

But not all—or even most. There will be some who exploit the system, abuse it, devise ways around it. Yet, for countless millions across India, the Supreme Court’s verdict has opened the door to possibility and prosperity. As in Tamil Nadu, there will be a trickle-over and trickle-down effect so that even poorer members of upper castes will see the need for an education to compete, as Srinivasan told me happened in his case.

Nowadays, piped in Logesh, “all people want to study more. Computers are levelling us.”

“Not reservations?” I asked.

“That helps,” Logesh said, with Srinivasan agreeing.

And as they also showed me, a day might come in the rest of India where you ask two young men on a college campus what caste the other is—and each will say he doesn’t even know.

Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Accepting exile, sweet exile

The answer to those who seek desperately to belong might be to embrace the state of being a nowhere man

Wider Angle | S.Mitra Kalita

The Tibetans are willing to die for it. The Americans are in a recession partly because of it. In India, we take for granted just how many we have, how complex it actually is.

Home.
Everyone, it seems, is fighting, longing, searching for a place to call their own. I don’t make light of that struggle, but this week—against the backdrop of the alternative Torch for Tibet relay and my own journey to a place that is allegedly mine—I wondered if the concept of home, as in one geographical location to which we are anchored, committed, rooted, might be inherently flawed.

The epiphany came around 1 o’clock in the morning on the Assamese new year known as Bihu. With my husband and daughter, two cousins and a friend, I sat in a cracked red plastic chair sinking into the mud made by a recent rain and watched a woman crooning into a microphone. She didn’t sound bad, but not great either. Nearby, a pack of young men smoked and I resisted the urge to ask them not to, so close to my three-and-a-half-year-old they were. It had taken us an hour to get here, an hour fighting traffic and other festival revellers. And, that was after a day spent dodging relatives’ demands that I come visit all 50 of their homes in Guwahati even as I explained that the goal of my sudden trip was to spend time with my sick grandmother and show my daughter the beauty of Assamese culture during this colourful month. She has celebrated every year, of course, but always in far-off places as church halls in New Jersey, a friend’s place in Washington, DC and an auditorium in New Delhi.

I thought going home would offer a more authentic experience.

“Where are the dancers?” my daughter asked me.

“Where is the laru-pitha?” my husband chimed in, referring to the sweet foods of Bihu. (When I was a child, my parents and their friends used to buy very all-American doughnut holes and offer them to us as a substitute, unable to find ingredients to make the real thing. Eventually, they learnt to ­improvise.)

“This is not New Jersey or even New Delhi,” I responded. “It’s not like you can get Bihu out of a box.”

But when a group of guys offstage started fighting each other with sticks and the police hauled a bloodied ­teenager away by his collar, I agreed it was time to go. In the versions of Bihu my parents regaled me and my brothers with, there was so such violent reminiscence.

Yet, why would they have tainted their picture?

For the transplant, home becomes but a nostalgic figment of the imagination, a make-believe place where you can pick and choose what to crave, to miss, to remember. It is ideal and utopian, even as the quest to recapture it impossible and dangerous.

Somehow, though, we keep trying.

n the case of the Tibetans, it is an understandable desire, an exile that has been imposed. Earlier this month, Mint reported the story of two Tibetan friends who shared a longing for a homeland, a fervour for the movement but held different passports—one Indian and another a refugee card. Explained one young activist: “If you hold an Indian passport, people think you have lost your nationalism.”

If only India did not kowtow to fears and insecurities of China by keeping the torch—a celebratory, unifying symbol of multiple lands and cultures —in a virtual police state with 20,000 officers and countless blocked roads. What a gesture it would have been if India showed the world it was possible to support both an exiled people and the goals of the Olympics. Indians, after all, have mastered the art of straddling multiple homes and loyalties.

And, if only the Chinese understood that the freedom to go back at anytime, to assert one’s place, is what keeps so many of us away. For, all too often there is no going back.

Strangely, this week’s sudden feeling of not belonging anywhere—a feeling I have fought my whole life, from lonely tables in school canteens to the navigation of office politics—was one of great relief, as though a lifetime riddle had just been solved. Like a lot of Indians from places other than the ones they live and work, I will now never have to respond to that eternal question: Where are you from?

That muggy night, we trudged back and crawled under mosquito nets to go to sleep. The next morning, I sat next to my grandmother, suffering from a broken arm, weak joints and severe dementia, as she asked me when I had arrived and when I would be going back to America. We had been through this exercise every day.

I reminded her I live in New Delhi.

“Still, you’re far away. To me, it’s all the same,” she said. “But I am so glad you came. It really means a lot to me.”

I was shocked. My tough-as-nails grandmother has never been the tender, emoting type—except when angry.

A few minutes later, I tearfully touched her feet and kissed her goodbye, realizing her confusion had left me with a lucid lesson and a pure definition of home—among many.

Your comments are welcome at ­widerangle@livemint.com

The tables are turning

Panic is setting in over layoffs. Actually in this slowdown, we must fear another important word: non-performance

Is this the beginning of the end?

Not of incredible India or even shiny India, for that matter. Not of favourable export-import ratios or affordable food prices. After all, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, finance minister P. Chidambaram already read his prescient tea leaves and broke the bad news: The party is winding down.


He braced Indians for slower growth—and the flurry of earnings out this week point toward the same downward trend.

But, what I really wonder about is the future of another imbalance that has come to define this economy of recent good tides and fortune: between employer and employee.


For too long, Indian companies have engaged in a game where employers— strapped for great talent and strong mid-level managers—are held hostage by their workers, tiptoeing around them, resorting to better canteen food and themed office parties to impress, essentially living in fear that employees will leave and take all the pricey training and precious time invested with them. Over the last few months, that feeling has intensified as workers hold out for their year-end bonuses and increments to give notice or even make decisions about leaving.

Yet this season, unlike recent years past, is seeing a new entrant to workplace woe: layoffs.

It all started back in February when Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s largest services provider, announced that it had asked 500 underperforming staffers to leave. Through reviews and performance evaluations, employees are ranked from a scale of 1 to 5. Those who score a 2 or less are put on a plan to help them improve— and if there’s no sign of improvement, TCS “disengages” with them.

The move is not entirely new at TCS, which let 500 people go in all of the last fiscal year and already has “disengaged” 500 in the first three quarters of this year—sending a stark message to its more than 100,000 employees and the rest of the tech sector. Given weaker-than-anticipated results reported earlier this week, more such pink slips might be on the way.

On Monday, Mint reported the news of Yes Bank letting go of nearly 400 employees in the first quarter of the year, also for non-performance.

“Individuals who do not fit into the service culture and performance parameters of the bank mutually go their own ways in order to sustain the highly motivated business environment of the bank,” Deodutta Kurane, president of human capital, which is to say human resources, at Yes Bank, told Mint in an email.

Likely, a lot of young Indians have been reading the headlines and feeling panic over layoffs. In reality, though, the panic should be setting in over another
word: non-performance.

That is the one thing there is no place for in a slowing economy. We who thought we were working harder than ever to keep up with the pace of double-digit growth—and triple digit in the case of many of our employers —have not seen anything yet.

The only comparison I can make is when I visited India just around the time of the dot-com bubble bursting in 2001 and a human resources manager in Chennai bluntly described the sentiment of his office: “You need to constantly run to stand where you are. Every day is a day where you ­deliver.”

Seven years later, the workplace is not that different—but India is. Even as the talent crunch grew more acute and workers more valued, attitudes towards layoffs have changed—everyone, after all, is dispensable; high attrition rates have taught us that much. In the rush to hire freshers, companies made offers and promises years ahead of schedule—which many are surely going to have to rethink, as TCS’ move has shown.

In the next few months, Indians will discover they will have to work doubly hard to fight from losing all they have built. They will need to prove worth and value to their employers. And, unlike the boom times, mediocrity and slack work ethic cannot be masked by growth. In many sectors of the last few years, we have moved from zero to acceleration. That is the easy part.

Now comes the hard part: to innovate, hang on to clients and customers to tap new markets. The exuberance and overconfidence of recent times will be knocked down, making way for good old-fashioned sweat equity.
Call me sadistic, but I welcome the reality check—at least when it comes to the new equilibrium it might bring about between employers and employees.

Despite the dire projections of many companies this week, a study carried out by industry chamber, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said foreign information technology firms plan to proceed with hiring 40,000 people in India by 2010.

No need to complacently cheer or gloat yet. The recent spate of layoffs and warnings to non-performers still send an important message.

It’s time to get cracking—or else.

Your comments are welcome at ­widerangle@livemint.com

It’s about who you know

We accept that paying a bribe is immoral. But pulling a favour to get the job done? It happens all the time

All he did was “put in a word”.

That is how Union shipping, road transport and highways minister T.R. Baalu defended his move to procure gas for two companies owned by his two wives (yes, two) and sons, companies that happened to be previously headed by him.

According to news agency Press Trust of India (PTI), Baalu admitted he had spoken to petroleum and natural gas minister Murli Deora to ensure gas was allocated. “I put in a word with the petroleum minister,” Baalu told Parliament, according to a PTI report. “What is wrong with it?”

He didn’t add what he very likely also felt, what many of us realize on a day-to-day basis: That’s just the way life goes in India. Everyone uses connections or else nothing gets done.

Right?

If you’re squirming with discomfort, recognition, uncertainty, you’re not alone. For, many of us—from salaried professionals to the working poor —largely accept that bribes are wrong: Paying or gifting someone to grease the wheels is immoral, corrupt. But pulling a favour to get the job done?

It happens.

Think about it. Need to get your three-year-old into nursery school? One after another, the calls go out to principals and board members of elite schools—or their friends and family. Attached to applications are the letters vouching for your child and your character from Prominent People.

How can a retail entrepreneur secure the licences needed to stock yarn, put up signs or even play terrible background music? It’s time to make rounds among The Influential.

This deep tapping into networks is especially acute in this connection-conscious Capital, but other cities certainly suffer their share, too. By no means is India alone, but the problem worsens here because connections, often, must be relied upon to get the littlest thing done.

It is not just the government to blame. Even as the growth of the private sector has spoiled us for choice, it has created new hurdles to getting services smoothly. Well educated and intentioned they may be, but bank tellers rarely have a clue about foreign exchange or money transfers. The cashier who fields your mobile payment has little power to do much else, like print out a bill statement from six months ago. And so we seek out those second and third cousins who work at Citibank and Vodafone for rescue.

Every time I raise this issue, old-timers shrug, saying: “It used to be so much worse.” One writer on the blog, Mutiny.in, reminds, “In the ’70s, if you wanted to buy any car anywhere in India, money wasn’t the problem. The waiting period was. It ranged from a few months to a few years depending on the model and your political connections.”

But guess why he raised this point? Recently, the blogger noted that folks eager to book the Rs1 lakh Tata Nano were already in queue, buttering up dealers and plastering automobile websites with their emails and phone numbers so they could be first.

So, how much has really changed?

Are there just shades of grey between paying a bribe and invoking a connection? In many cases, the answer might lie in our professions. Politicians, journalists, government contractors should be held to higher standards because for them, a favour is rarely just a favour (for a copy of Mint’s code of conduct, visit www.livemint.com).

The more important question is why the straight and direct route is failing so many Indians. Crumbling schools, tight regulations, lack of access, crooked civil servants, all of the above? As with much of middle-class woe, if it’s tough for us, the poor and lesser connected are the real victims.

“The normal systems have collapsed in most spheres in life,” says Arvind Kejriwal, the former bureaucrat who pioneered the right to information movement. “If you normally apply for something, you wouldn’t get it, even if you deserve it, so you need connections or money. The people who have connections feel comfortable about it. But if I don’t have connections, I’ll say it’s a rotten system.”

In Baalu’s case, it has been revealed that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, master of the art of crafting a squeaky clean image—even in India—made “certain references” on the shipping minister’s behalf to secure gas. Of course, the implication of the Prime Minister’s Office getting involved is more damning: Give this guy his gas—and whatever else he wants.

The actions in regards to Baalu and his family’s companies smack of nepotism and cronyism. If only the elected would show so much concern over the public they represent. We wouldn’t even need 10,000 cubic metres, as Baalu requested.

In fact, I think most Indian households would settle for just a letter from the Prime Minister’s Office guaranteeing steady power in these summer months.

And maybe, for good measure, he’d throw in an extra gas cylinder?

Your comments are welcome at ­widerangle@livemint.com

Is it a happy mother’s day?

Working parents in one survey spend just a half-hour a day nurturing their own kids. It’s time to wake up

I know you think it’s you. But it’s not.

The award for Worst Mother of the Year goes to…me.

I turn my laptop on the minute I get home. I pretend to listen to my daughter’s stories as I frantically volley replies on BlackBerry. On weekends, I relish the chance to sleep in and let the maids deal with bath and breakfast and the most dreaded chore—brushing little teeth, especially those hard-to-reach, squirm-inducing back ones.

Two days before the world celebrates the joy and wonders of motherhood and thanks us who have dutifully filled and then emptied our wombs, I hang my head in shame and hardly think I deserve any special attention. Really, as a mother, I am a failure.

Well, sometimes.

Because that’s just the way parenthood is. Unlike our daily jobs, there are no benchmarks to success. Just when you think happy kids are the goal, a child psychologist or teacher will instruct you to let sadness occasionally wash over them, “so they can learn to deal with it on their own,” as one educator recently told me.

Nobody ever chastises working parents. We pat each other on the back, then say: “She’ll be fine. You’re doing the best you can.” Experts advise parents not to give into guilt.

I disagree. It’s time.

This week, The Times of India reported the results of a survey that find working parents spend only 30 minutes “nurturing their own children”. Not surprisingly, more than 85% of the 3,000 working couples in the study gave themselves a negative rating as bad parents. “Parents are working not only out of economic compulsion but also to cash in on their technical and professional qualification,” the study said. “Parents that work long or irregular hours are not available for children after school, and especially to help with the homework, ...and not able to do things together at weekends or eat together.”

Even on Sundays, when companies are allegedly off, working couples report being consumed with the endless tasks involved in running a household: paying bills, cleaning, going shopping.

The study illustrates the net effect of several societal shifts in the middle class. More and more couples are both working. Fewer families have the grandparents around. The demands at work are enormous: first, to sustain the growth in the economy and now to ensure all is not lost in case of a slowdown. Sadly, childcare has really not caught up; due to the sorry state of education in rural and poor India, most people’s maids have not even the nurturing instinct of one Mary Poppins bone. Creches are a fast booming business, but concerns over hygiene, safety and space persist. Parents who spend Rs5,000 on a meal quibble about spending half that to keep a good maid around.

In 10 years, will the neglect show? Is this study foreshadowing a future generation of kids who are needy, lack confidence, resent our success at their expense? Possibly.

Every now and then, when my mothering sinks to the all-time low I describe here, when my husband and I are both on deadlines and our daughter seems to crave even just a glance from us, something more powerful than the desire to achieve and excel washes over me: Mommy Guilt.

It is a most powerful and necessary warning. It inspires me to leave the laptop behind (or at least the cord so the battery dies in an hour). It forces me, no matter how pressed for time, to incorporate my daughter into my daily activities, if only to spend a few more minutes with her; we bathe, we brush, we banter. We reconnect.

This week’s findings, released by trade chamber Assocham’s Social Development Foundation, must inspire collective guilt, triggering changes at home and work. If reducing hours is not an option, children must be more effectively integrated into our lives, shopping to dining out. As parents have moved towards managing without their own parents around, so too might they learn to manage sometimes without another appendage: maids.

The rearing and nurturing of children in India is in crisis. Besides parents taking responsibility, workplaces will need to react quickly with flexible scheduling, not just to watch children but to take care of chores such as doctor appointments and car servicing. The risk of not reacting is to lose a diverse, necessary part of the workforce; according to Assocham, just 21% of mothers with young families want to work full-time, with an overwhelming majority preferring part-time work alongside raising their children.

Even as us working parents beat ourselves up, there’s some irony in what most motivates us: our children. To provide for them, to make the world a better place for them. Working mothers like me, with girls, try hard to set an example of the type of women they can be.

But in the end, our long hours and business plans really mean nothing without ensuring growth and vitality— of our most precious assets of all.

Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Let the mangoes be purple

The new schools that plug themselves as an alternative to the Indian rote-and- drill method really are not so

First, this aspirational economy tries to make us over with blue jeans and whitening creams, American accents and firmer handshakes. Now, it’s targeting our children.

Nothing is sacred, not even their innocent drawings. Consider an advertisement for the popular EuroKids chain of schools, which I encountered last year as the subject of discussion on one of India’s most popular parenting blogs, The Mad Momma.

With a picture of a purple mango beneath, the ad says: “While painting, children tend to mix up colours. At EuroKids, we ensure they don’t.”

And then the fine print below: “While it is normal for tiny tots to mix up one thing with the other...highly qualified and well-trained teachers keep an eye on the students to ensure that they don’t commit such mistakes — correcting them promptly whenever they do. So, if you too want to give your child the perfect learning experience, enroll him in Euro Kids...”

This mad momma almost turned purple herself with anger, but soon relaxed — until a few months later, when my then two-year-old, enrolled in another school, came home with worksheets with terse instructions to colour a banana yellow and only within the lines. I took her out of the school.

A few months later, while crossing the border into Delhi’s suburb of Noida, I noticed a massive hoarding for the Millennium School: “Our school has just one child — yours.”

Clever, I thought. Until I realized the implication. Already our kids think they are at the centre of the universe, between parents, grandparents, maids and guilty give-ins. Shouldn’t school serve as a place to humble and socialize, to mix with many different kinds?

Recently came another radio spot that made me cringe. A mother and father are discussing how hectic life has gotten, too busy even for Parent Teacher Association meetings. Their answer? Send the child off to Raffles, a new boarding school in Rajasthan.

In the layer cake of Indian geography, from the creamy tier I on down to the massive base of small-town India, there’s one constant uniting our public spaces: misleading, misguided educational advertising. Even in serene Sarnath, outside Varanasi, which I visited earlier this year, dozens of new schools have billboards tacked onto wooden poles and fences; bigger than their brand names are these words in bold: English medium. That’s often followed by another buzzword: global exposure. Browse newspaper ads and no-name institutes gush promises: Ivy League faculty, Rs1 crore salaries, laptops for all.

As I see it, there are two main problems with school advertising. One, the new schools that plug themselves as an alternative to the Indian rote-and- drill method really aren’t. Telling a child his mango can’t be purple and saying a teacher will correct artistic “mistakes” is almost as bad as the system of old where toddlers seeking nursery admissions had to explain the controversy over Pluto as a planet.

To be fair, EuroKids responded favourably to my email asking about the mango campaign; it has been dropped in favour of a new slogan: “I love Mummy, Papa and EuroKids!”

More disconcerting is the other problem: While some efforts are being made to ensure truth in advertising, exaggerations abound.

When the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) boasted, “First time ever in the world, be taught by professors from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Insead”, youth magazine Jam, which also ranks colleges, checked out the veracity of these claims. “...we asked students from IIPM’s Mumbai campus who had passed out already, AND those who are currently taking the MBA program. NONE of them have attended lecturers by professors from foreign universities. From what we gather though, the students seem satisfied with the college’s permanent teaching staff.”

IIPM has disputed the account. “Every word written in IIPM ads (is) 100% true,” head of corporate communications, Amit Saxena, wrote in a text message to Mint.

The rush to cash in on an India hungry to learn and earn should not carry an even steeper price — dignity and decency, responsibilities as parents and educators. Indeed, there is much broken in Indian education, but government, schools and advertising regulators should unite to keep new players more honest and relevant.

In the ultimate irony, our government officials have seized the words “Indian” and “national” as their own. Do they care about the misuse of brands that use international, euro, even Canadian, to dupe those who happen to embody the true definition of Indian? Does anyone check claims of 100% placements at many of these fly-by-night operators? After all, the aspirational class might not be regularly accessing blogs for mommies and business-school types, dissecting their every move and statistic. If the Centre insists on continuing its grip on the education sector, it might as well start regulating the right things.

Your comments are welcome at widerangle@livemint.com

Good help isn’t hard to give

While higher prices have hurt us, made us choose between, say, boneless chicken or a roaster, the Indian brand or the imported, the steady increases in pay have been high enough to allow us to live a comfortable life

Last month, The Economist declared: “The era of cheap food is over.”

In my house, we didn’t need the magazine to tell us what we have felt happening for some time now. But we hadn’t really intellectualized it until last week, after several thousands extra spent on groceries, mostly thanks to the shocking price of cooking oil. My husband suddenly said: “Have prices gone through the roof?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s called in-FLAY-shun.”

I said it real slow and he rolled his eyes at my sarcasm. But then he asked: “What do you think it’s like for the driver?”

“I think it’s hell for him,” I said. “I think it’s hell for most Indians.”

We soon gave raises (and loans) to those who make our home run.

Even as I type these words, I hesitate because they violate the unwritten ground rules set up in Wider Angle: no columns on heat, traffic or servants. And 18 months after moving to India from the US, a time period I have tried desperately to shed the NRI label, judging Indians for how they treat the help is a play right off the Not Really Indian golf course.

So consider today an aberration, an urgent and one-time, one-person rally triggered by this new beast called food inflation and the old reliable constant of two Indias, separate, unequal, inextricably dependent.

For if the era of cheap food is over, perhaps it’s also time to end the era of cheap labour? Not cheap labour in the outsourced jobs sense, but the heart-wrenching kind that makes it so difficult to fathom how most of this country makes ends meet. Laws of supply and demand might not warrant raises, but what about those more important laws governing decency, compassion, the right thing to do?

Of late, I wonder which number we in the privileged class have been more obsessed with: the rate of inflation or the percentage of our salary increment. My guess is the latter.

While higher prices have hurt us, made us choose between, say, boneless chicken or a roaster, the Indian brand or the imported, the steady increases in pay have been high enough to allow us to live a comfortable life, to make choices, to consume. And so we read about Rs1 crore bonuses and nod, knowing people who fit that bill, and we can almost delude ourselves when we see headlines such as “Crore becomes new standard in Indian pay.”

Indian, how loosely we use the word.

Here’s another India, broken down by Pranab Bardhan, an economist at University of California at Berkeley. Writing in YaleGlobal, he said: “In India the latest survey data suggest that the rate of decline in poverty somewhat slowed for 1993-2005, the period of intensive opening of the economy, compared to the 1970s and 1980s...some child-health indicators, already dismal, have hardly improved in recent years. For example, the percentage of underweight children in India is much larger than in sub-Saharan Africa and has not changed much in the last decade or so.”

His conclusion: “The Indian pace of poverty reduction has been slower than China’s.”

For us, it’s a question of which oil, not whither. For most, it’s a question of whether to eat or educate children.

It is not a fair choice.

Among the endless ironies of India, many of us sit in offices bemoaning the state of the Indian talent pool and education system and then go home to places where uneducated people serve us — as invisibly and unobtrusively as possible. At work, we demand more training and better pay. What happens when the workplace is our home?

According to one study, there are an estimated 20 million women, children and men in domestic work in India.

And these numbers seem on the low side, especially with the middle class estimated at 300 million.

At social gatherings a few times a week, I make small talk with total strangers. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, pretty much every time, we discover we know someone in common, a colleague or a relative.

“Small world,” they say. I nod. To myself, I think, No, it’s just that the reality is that there are so few of us in this bubble called new India.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves that someone like my driver is a member of India’s middle class just because he has a mobile phone. A more appropriate label might be the “missed call class”; they care so desperately for every rupee that they’d rather ring and hang up than pay the pittance.

And we feel like our increments this month have been a long time coming.

In One Night@the Call Centre, writer Chetan Bhagat famously likened call centres to “air-conditioned sweatshops”. We may feel helpless about poverty at large but there are a few people who make our comfort, our balance, our new Indian dreams possible. It’s time to offer them living wages. For there’s one air-conditioned sweatshop we have absolute control over — our home.

The export of trophy wives

If you’re going to marry a guy because he’s overseas and he’s looking to India to find a wife, doesn’t something signal this equation might go awry?

Applications for the much-coveted H-1B visas, exit strategy of choice for many in India’s high-technology industry, were sent off late last month and will be decided by lottery. But you can bet another group making their way to the US soon most certainly won’t be left to chance: their wives.

This being the nation where total strangers learn to love, the centuries-old game — happiness is not the measure; longevity is — has had pretty good odds. But the NRI (non-resident Indian) won’t gamble.

So this summer, the prodigal sons already overseas will descend on their hometowns, Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Kolkata, and begin putting faces to the email addresses with whom they have been dutifully corresponding. Depending on how free the young man is from Ma’s clutches, some will have the privilege of meeting at a coffee shop and pretending it’s a date night, just without the perfunctory groping. You can’t miss them: the spectacled, balding software engineers and the lip-glossed, kurti-clad brides-to-be parading into Barista. She tosses her hair flirtatiously and he looks on enviously; you wonder if he wants the confidence…or the hair. She just wants…the visa.

Only one will win his heart, wallet and immigration sponsorship. He will return again in that perpetually auspicious month of November to marry; the citizens will tell immigration officials she’s just a fiancée because it’s easier to be exported that way. Once there, she’ll join the category of visa known as “dependent”, a word which will come to define her very existence. The lucky ones go on to get working papers and green cards soonest, but those married to H-1s remain dependents until someone else — usually an employer or a college — comes along to save them with a different visa.

I’ve been writing about H-1B visas for almost a decade now, and really I feel for the holders of the “H” visas, both the workers and their wives. I also side with brides who have been abandoned by NRI husbands or duped into thinking they were marrying an engineer, when really he pumped petrol for a living. I certainly don’t condone or make light of the very serious physical and psychological torment some Indian brides are subjected to, either from husbands or in-laws.

But now that all the disclaimers are out of the way, let’s get real.

If you’re going to marry a guy because he’s overseas and he’s looking to India to find a wife, doesn’t something signal this equation might go awry?

And yet, even as the NRI has lost his lustre and our great nation does victory laps around its GDP growth rate, somehow we Indian girls and our families still hang onto these dreams of marrying our way out of the country. There are websites devoted to finding a husband overseas; articles headlined “How to marry an NRI, safely.”

The fourth question asked on Shaadi.com — after gender, age and community — is the location of the partner.

And never one to miss out on getting involved in people’s personal life, the Indian government is inserting itself in the matter. The ministry of overseas affairs has drawn up guidelines for people who want their daughters married abroad, releasing the Information Booklet on Marriages to Overseas Indians. (In an ode to the wisdom of Omkara, a better title would have been The Best Way to an NRI Man’s Heart is Below His Stomach).

If you are one who maintains that women these days really don’t see NRI as a status symbol, just spend this coming Sunday with the matrimonial section of your newspaper. Or go online and read ads such as this one: “Seeking a beautiful bride…we are open-minded and modern… We believe in horoscope matching.” Fittingly, the advertisements on the site flashed various screensavers to download, including two well-endowed blondes.

Director Nagesh Kukunoor deals with Indians desperate to find NRI grooms in the film Hyderabad Blues. In one interview in 2005, he said, “For women who want to marry US grooms, it is in the search of a prettier, better and more materially comfortable world. They think that the grass is always greener on the other side. I hope that NRI men want to get married to Indian women for some level of commonality and not because they just want a subservient wife.”

Usually, the NRIs are much more euphemistic about their intentions, saying they want someone with “Indian values” and “uncorrupted”. Barista brides, please tell me what else that means if not chaste, submissive — and svelte, of course.

But if you insist on conducting a search for the perfect groom overseas, the government advises: “Have regular and meaningful communication with the man and his family... Make sure the bride and the groom meet personally and interact freely and frankly as many times as they feel necessary. Rely on your gut.”

Most of it sounds worth heeding, here or abroad. Happy hunting.

IPL lessons for the office

Most people discounted the Rajasthan Royals before this whole thing started, a team devoid of stars, save the captain

My biggest mistake was to abstain from the selection of the team. Though I watch a lot cricket whenever possible, I am no cricket expert at the end of the day. I had a separate list of players that I wanted. But since (Rahul) Dravid is such an iconic player I trusted his judgment. …Later, when I questioned the team’s performance, poor practice facilities and the lack of infrastructure were given as reasons. It was also said that there was no bonding in the team.

—Vijay Mallya, owner of the Bangalore Royal Challengers

Right now, all of us have become part of a failed script. A bad IPL script. Let’s try and keep our chin up. ...The beauty of failure is that it brings people together. So, let’s stick this out together. I am too much of a sport myself to get beaten by defeats. I am not the kind of owner who has issues with the team because of losses. ...So, head’s up. Have a good match and let’s make 200 runs.

—Shah Rukh Khan, owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders

Well, I’m no cricket expert either. But over the last few weeks, as fans have been glued to their television screens and will be again in the coming days for the finals of the Indian Premier League (IPL), I’ve been celebrating for another reason: I think I’m finally getting the game.

Most people apply cricket analogies to their daily life and work, but this week’s column will engage in the reverse. After all, if IPL has reduced cricket to nothing more than a business, then let’s evaluate its success as a workplace.

Good teams make good companies. Most people discounted the Rajasthan Royals before this whole thing started, a team devoid of stars, save the captain. But in its ability to pull together as a true team, relying on strengths and, importantly, being able to stretch skill sets evenly, it emerged victorious. This is a major challenge of Indian workplaces trying to make employees more well-rounded and not stuck in the babu years where one person only handled one core competency for his whole career. It helps when the leader — in the Royals’ case, captain Shane Warne — is also able to execute on several levels.

Good human resources always win. Can a nice boss still be an effective one? While Kolkata didn’t advance to the semi-finals, the team endeared itself to fans and even made some new ones, thanks to the excellent public relations and down-to-earth attitudes of Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla. When the team was down, his text messages oozed the perfect blend of sincerity and pushiness. He became the boss we all love, in the trenches with us, overjoyed and generous with a pat on the back when we succeeded, ready with sympathy and advice when we failed. If more Indian managers were like this, succeeding — and even learning from our mistakes — would be so much easier. Now those middle-management captains, they’re another story...

Start-ups take time. On the other hand, Vijay Mallya looked like the sorest and biggest loser of all. Sure, he views the whole game as a business venture, is upfront about wanting to be best, win best. But he should have saved the harsher words for the locker room and avoided demeaning his employees in public. And there’s a reason these contracts are for three years — building strong teams does not happen overnight. Mallya did, however, effectively leverage his brand name and millions of Indians will never swig his whisky again without thinking of a poor, scorned Rahul Dravid and the micromanaging “I told you so” Mallya.

There’s strength in diversity. How did Chennai Superkings’ Mahendra Singh Dhoni become “Veeramani”, at least according to one Tamil radio station? At once, the beauty of IPL has been the ability of a nation to bring new blood into its fold, look beyond regionalism and parochialism and cheer for talent (such as the Delhi crowd hooting for Sachin Tendulkar last weekend), but still root for the home team. The offices and global cities we are building must be eclectic but borderless. It is possible, really, to have multiple places to which we belong and use it to our advantage.

Indeed, the first season of IPL serves as apt metaphor for the evolving Indian office. Both face similar challenges, down to the accusation that all the guys in charge care about is money. The success of the teams remaining show mastery of humanity and humility, strategy and skill. If IPL grows to more than one season per year, along with more teams and more sponsorships, it should not lose sight of what matters as much as profit. In sport, as in business, winning is great, but how you play the game matters, too.

To quote from the most benevolent boss in SRK, a crowd-pleasing, nice guy who didn’t finish quite last but far from first: “We have nothing to lose now, except our character... Let’s not lose that.”