London Diary

Tata To The World

What do they feed the Tatas for breakfast? Whatever it is, it breeds amazing individuals. When UK minister Oliver Letwin presented the Asia House Business Leaders award to Ratan Tata in London recently, he said that Tata “confers an honour on the prize by receiving it”. Amidst a gathering of the great and the good, and the not-so-good, at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, deputy PM Nick Clegg praised Tata for being “a force for good, not just in India but all over the world”. Ratan Tata employs over 2,50,000 workers in Britain, an indicator of the economic shift from the West to the rest, but he has criticised the UK for its work ethic and the need to be more competitive. Chairman of the Tata group for 20 years now, his leadership has increased group revenues 40-fold. Is it in his DNA? Are there Tataisms we can share? For starters, he set up a competition in his group for the Best Failed Idea! And to think they say the China dragon is breathing down India’s back. Or is it?

The company takes corporate social responsibility seriously: the Tata trust gives away about $100 million every year to charity. He is only now, with retirement staring him in the face, building a house for himself. He feels frustrated at the disparities in India; “people should be conscious of not flaunting disparity”. Who could he mean? He is modest, even humble, and was embarrassed by the compliments, declaring he was more used to “having mud on my face”. The most endearing thing about him is that he adopts street dogs. The super-wealthy, invariably, want exclusivity: monstrous homes, super-yachts, the loneliest beach, the rarest dog...and here’s Ratan Tata, head of an empire, choosing as pets 4-5 desi street dogs.

One Long Walkabout

My dinner companion at the British Museum trustees dinner was the MP Rory Stewart. He’s a slight, wiry man who smiles a lot and is very good company. His grandfather was stationed in India, he was born in Hong Kong. For two years, 2000-03, he walked alone through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India, including my birthplace of Amritsar, Jalandhar, Anandpursahib and Shimla. Walking meant literally that—no hitch-hiking on cars or trucks. Going step by step, he practised walking meditation and read Persian poetry and the Bhagavad Gita. He walked through Afghanistan through the dead of winter and in the middle of the war. Soldiers with Kalashnikovs stopped him for questioning and children threw stones at him, but people opened up their homes to him because there were no hotels. He covered about 6,000 miles on foot and slept in people’s homes in about 500 villages. Places in Between, his bestselling book about his travels, has been translated into several languages. He also briefly served in the British army and British foreign service, was Iraqi governor of a province of 3 million people, and lived in Kabul for two years, where he set up the Turquoise Mountain charity. And he’s not yet 40! He follows in the footsteps of great British adventurers like Sir Richard Burton, who translated the Kama Sutra into English, shocking his fellow Victorians no end when it was published.

Crack That Hunter

My grandmother had told me about a hunterwali who had, if I remember rightly, married a maharaja of Kapurthala long ago. A feisty woman, a European, she went horse-riding with a whip, and had the maharaja nicely house-trained. Until, that is, she went too far and slapped him, which caused him to change his will and she was out on her ear. Only recently did I learn that another hunterwali was Fearless Nadia, the biggest Bollywood box-office draw of the 1930s. She was a white woman who fearlessly beat up men onscreen. Rose Thomas, from the University of Westminster, gave an enjoyable lecture at the School of Oriental & African Studies, with plenty of old footage of Nadia smashing her way in and kicking the men about. She was also known as ‘Frontier Mail’, and Punjabi men must have loved the white mem. Many Indian screen heroines of that era were either Australian or European. The lecture series on ‘Devi: The Goddess & the Modern Indian Woman’ was sponsored by Alka Bagri and the Bagri Foundation. Indian women have either Durga as a role model, a woman who succeeded where the males had failed. Or Sati, consigned alive to the flames because she’s not permitted to live on alone minus hubby. Incidentally, Miss World 2011 was crowned in Earls Court, London, a few days ago, with Miss Venezuela taking the crown. It no longer draws such ire from feminists, perhaps because the scantily-clad contestants all seem to express the wish to become corporate lawyers.

Who Wants Curry?

I had dinner with five peers of the realm the other night. What did they eat? Curry, of course. Lamb biriyani, chicken lababdar, spinach chaat, aloo tikki...and rasmalai. Curry has become a British national obsession.