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India 2.0- Returning to the land of opportunity
by Mick Brown
Over the decades millions of Indians have emigrated in search of a better existence. Now increasing numbers of their descendants, born in the West, are heading in the opposite direction and establishing exciting new careers in the land of their forefathers.
‘It was time for something a bit more adventurous’
The landing card for visitors arriving in India invites you to tick one of a series of boxes that are testament to the fact that for much of its short life as an independent nation the principle aim of many of its best educated and most ambitious people has been to leave, born of a conviction that life would be better elsewhere. Are you an NRI (non-resident Indian)? A PIO (person of Indian origin)? An OCI (overseas citizen of India)? Or None?
In 1951 the population of PIOs in Britain stood at 31,000. By 2006 it had risen to 1.1 million. In America the 1970 census recorded 51,000 PIOs. By 2006 the number was 1.5 million. Earlier this year on a visit to India David Cameron urged Indian students to come to Britain, assuring them that if they then found graduate-level jobs there would be ‘no limit’ on the numbers of people who could stay and work. India remains one of the world’s two largest net ‘exporters’ of migrants.
But in recent years the nation’s burgeoning economic fortunes have produced an intriguing reversal, as increasing numbers of PIOs return to India to live and work.
The category of OCI was introduced by the Indian government in 2005, in response to a growing demand from Indians living abroad, and to encourage the development of an educated and skilled workforce at home. The scheme entitles the children and grandchildren of people born in India to a lifelong visa, which enables them to live and work in the country indefinitely. The Confederation of Indian Industry in London has described the numbers of PIOs moving to India since the introduction of scheme as the greatest migration of British citizens to the country since the golden period of the British Empire.
The Mumbai suburb of Bandra is a place of tree-lined streets and colonial-style villas and bungalows. It has a large Catholic population – a place where you see as many Marian shrines as Hindu temples.
With its restaurants, coffee shops, and – a rarity in Mumbai – its relative tranquillity, it is a popular area for young Westerners living in the city. Vikas and Savita Vij, both in their 30s, live with their two children on Pali Hill in a fading mansion block, its original whitewash bleached and weathered in the local fashion to a pock-marked grey. As is the case with virtually every private apartment building in Mumbai, security guards loiter at the entrance.
This has been their home for the past five years, since they decided, as Savita put it, that ‘it was time for something a bit more adventurous in our lives’, and, having only ever lived in London, they packed their bags for Mumbai. Savita’s grandparents had migrated to Britain in the 1960s; her grandfather was a factory worker, and her father followed in his footsteps, working at Ford in Dagenham. Savita, 34, is one of four children. ‘My parents’ dream was to give us a really good education, and they did that,’ she said.
After graduating in sociology from Royal Holloway, University of London, Savita worked for the Runnymede Trust, the race equality think-tank. She and Vikas have been together since they were teenagers. In 2003 they married, and settled in a flat in a new development in Greenwich, south London.
‘We had a good life,’ Savita said. But after the birth of their son, Adi, in 2008, they began to crave a new direction. ‘Something really changed for both of us,’ Savita said. ‘We’d gone with the education, the jobs and the responsibilities. I didn’t know what was missing but we both felt we were looking for something else.’
Growing up, Savita had always felt ‘very Indian’. Her upbringing was conservative, her friends were mostly of Indian origin, like herself. ‘I didn’t listen to Western music until I went to university,’ she said.
She had visited India as a child with her parents, but ‘family politics’, she said, had soured the country in her mind. ‘When we were growing up there were a lot of demands on my parents to send money back home. It became almost like a demonised place. India was a place of no opportunity economically; no one could be trusted; everyone’s corrupt. It was associated with going backwards. So I was fearful of India.’
It was a visit that her sister made to the country in 2007 that began to change Savita’s mind. ‘She had come here and realised that the world doesn’t just revolve around you; it’s about community and other people.’ In Greenwich Savita and Vikas knew none of their neighbours. ‘And as a young mother that had a real impact on me.’
They did not have to wait long after their arrival to discover how different things would be in Mumbai. On their first day in their new apartment their neighbours appeared at their door to welcome them with food. ‘Now we have an open-door policy,’ Savita said.
Some, I suggested, might find that intrusive…
‘We felt the same way,’ she said. ‘On our wedding anniversary we were cooking a romantic meal. Our next-door neighbour is a chef, and he found out. “Oh, you’re cooking!” He just took over. It was strange at first, but we’ve come to love it. You’re not invisible here. People care about you and your life. I love that.’
Vikas, who had been working for a media company in London, has set up his own events business, the Ideas Exchange. Last year he brought Professional Beauty, Britain’s largest health and beauty trade show, to Delhi; this year it will be coming to Mumbai. Bureaucracy and inefficiency made it harder to start a business in India, he told me. ‘It takes for ever to do anything.’ But the opportunities are limitless. ‘People here are hungry for new ideas.’
Starbucks opened its first branch in Mumbai in November. ‘There were queues outside for hours.’
Vikas’s salary has dropped by two thirds, but still, he said, they are able to enjoy a better standard of living. Their four-room apartment costs them £1,000 a month – more than their mortgage in London, but they decided to pay a little more to live in a good area, and save on other things. For four years they did not have a car.
If property in Mumbai is expensive, staff are cheap. In England, Savita said, she would never have dreamt of having domestic help. Here, the family has a cook, a cleaner – ‘and they are very particular about what they will and won’t do’ – a driver and a woman who manages the home. Total monthly outlay: £400. It is something Savita found difficult at first. ‘I didn’t want to hurt their feelings so they were helping themselves to things, using my phone,’ she said. ‘I had to learn that they were employees and you have to have that relationship. But at the same time I think I have a different relationship from a lot of people in this building. I don’t treat them like servants. We talk to them. We’re very aware of what goes on in their lives.’
Their daughter, Kaiya, was born in 2011. In England Savita would have had to return to work full-time to help support the family. In Mumbai she has been able to stay at home and care for the children. Both are now in a Montessori nursery – ‘in England it would be unaffordable’ – but next year Adi will start school, which they will have to pay for, and Savita is going back to work, as a mediator in family disputes. ‘It’s the perfect place to do it,’ she said. ‘You have a lot of disputes over property and family businesses, and a judicial system where court cases can go on for 20 years. The younger generation don’t want to get involved in that.’
One of her fears was that her children would grow up ‘in a bit of a bubble’. ‘You can see India becoming more like a paradise for those with money. There are more and more luxury hotels and homes, and people wanting to enjoy the Western lifestyle. Most middle-class parents go to malls, send their children to international schools. And I think that’s sad.’
Mumbai has few public amenities; but Savita makes a point of taking her children to a local playground, and has started a group, Apples and Oranges, organising heritage and nature walks for parents and children, and volunteering to clean up public spaces. ‘I come from a working-class background,’ she said, ‘and to walk into a world of privilege… I know I’m different; I don’t share the same values about bringing up children, and I can’t sit around having coffee mornings and talking about my maids and my driver. I need to use my brain.’
It was time for Savita’s weekly shop. We set off in auto-rickshaws to an organic farmers’ market a couple of miles away. She moved along the stalls, scooping vegetables into a wicker basket: cauliflower, lettuce, garlic, broccoli, enough fruit and vegetables for a family of four for the week. Total cost: £5.
‘I didn’t come to India to find myself, but that’s what I’ve found myself doing’
Neel Shah’s father, Kishor, came from a small village in Gujarat. The eldest of seven children, after graduating from an engineering college in India, in 1966 he made his way to America, to study for a masters in automotive engineering at Oklahoma State University, and then took a job at Ford in Detroit. Five years later he returned to India to find a wife. Friends and relations had been alerted to look for a suitable candidate. Finally three were settled upon. Two were from prosperous families, highly suitable material. The third, Kishori, was a simple girl of great sweetness of character who had nursed her mother through a long and fatal illness.
Kishor and his family were unable to decide whom he should choose. Eventually his mother, Lalita, made a proposal: she would write the names of the girls on pieces of paper and put them in a hat. Kishor dutifully reached in his hand and drew out the piece bearing the name… Kishori.
Shortly after the wedding, Kishor returned to America, to prepare a home for his new bride. For seven months they came to know each other only by letter, until she was able to join him. They have now been married for 41 years, a happy union that produced two children. It would be some years after their wedding that they discovered that Lalita had written Kishori’s name on all three pieces of paper.
Shah, 33, is the director of strategy for Libero Sports, India’s first (and so far only) football consultancy. In a country with a multitude of faiths – Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh, Christian – there is only one unifying religion: cricket. But Shah told me that more than 100 million people in India regularly watch football on television, and matches in states where the following is particularly strong, such as West Bengal, draw crowds of up to 60,000.
Shah was born in California, where his family moved in 1980 when his father took a job at Nissan. Although it was common for members of the Indian community in California to go home for holidays and family visits, Shah’s family never had. Over the years, Kishor brought all his immediate family to America, sponsoring their visas, helping to set them up in businesses, running petrol stations and motels. His parents came to live with them in Long Beach.
‘My grandmother had picked the most motherly person as a wife for my father, and she took so much care of my grandparents,’ Shah told me. ‘It was like my grandmother had seen the future. It all tied up.’
By his own description, Shah grew up as an all-American boy, who developed an early passion for football and who found his dream job working as the director of fan development for Major League Soccer, the American professional football league. ‘I always knew I was Indian, I understood the language, I understood the culture,’ he said. ‘My perception of India was of this mysterious place that I was connected to but I didn’t even know what the soil looked like. But whenever anybody asked me, “What’s your ultimate dream?” the words would just come out of my mouth: “Develop soccer in India.” It was the weirdest thing. It felt like that was my purpose.’
In 2007, living in New York, he took a course at Landmark, the ‘human potential’ organisation, which involved looking back at certain moments that had dictated the course of his life. An incident that had always haunted him came to the surface: when he was a young boy a classmate had refused to pick him for the football team because of the colour of his skin. ‘I realised that from that moment the more American I became, the easier life would go for me,’ he said. ‘That just tugged at my heart. It felt like I’d been somehow running away from the country I’m so connected to for most of my life.’ The following day Shah booked a flight to Delhi, determined to visit the village where his father had grown up, while at the same time exploring the possibility of working in Indian football. ‘I got off the plane and took a beat-up taxi to Paharganj, the backpackers’ area. I remember looking around thinking, “What is this place? I’m Indian but I just don’t connect to these people.” I had a meeting with the head of the football federation the next morning, and I remember feeling so overwhelmed by everything.’
Shah spent three weeks travelling around the country, eventually making his way to his family’s ‘cowpat’ village in Gujarat. Cousins, second cousins, and the children of cousins all gathered around as, sitting on a creaking charpoy, Shah regaled them with stories of his glittering life in America; how he lived by himself in New York, 3,000 miles away from his parents in California; how he was single and free. ‘I could see their faces drop. They said, “Would you like to come and live with us?” I’d been feeling sorry for them, but I realised they were feeling sorry for me.’
The following year he returned to India to take part in a book project about the power of sport to change lives, which involved seven people being sent to developing countries with 300 items of sporting equipment. Shah travelled the length and breadth of the country playing football. The book was never published, but the experience strengthened his conviction to live and work in India, and in 2009 he moved to Delhi to take a job in the sports marketing division of an advertising agency; 18 months later he joined Libero. His job now takes him all over India, building local leagues and arranging training programmes, as well as representing a number of India’s small corps of professional players.
When Shah told his parents he was moving to India, ‘they thought I was totally insane. They couldn’t picture India in their heads any more; they couldn’t picture how could I be working there in sports and make this my life at the age of 29. My father came to America because it was the land of freedom and opportunity. He came to give our family a better life. So he was completely crazy that I was leaving a very high-paying job in New York, to earn a quarter of that in India in an industry that was not even established. He said I was basically reversing everything he’d done when he came over to America.’
It had not been easy, Shah admitted. India could be a struggle – the creaking infrastructure, the constant power cuts, the dirt, the poverty. ‘It’s still a developing country in a lot of ways,’ he said. ‘If you come here just floating around, waiting for something big to happen, it’s going to be really difficult. Because while you’re waiting you’re going to be really finding that negative part of yourself, and be angry and troubled a lot of the time. But once you get past those day-to-day challenges, you see how rich and beautiful India really is.’
Immersing himself in his new culture, in a way he had never expected, Shah had found himself drawn to Indian spirituality. He had a personal yoga teacher and had taken up meditation. ‘Living here it’s not so weird in friendship circles to say, “I’m going up to the Himalayas for the next five or six days to meditate.” I didn’t come to India to find myself, but that’s what I’ve found myself doing.’
Last year, along with his elder brother, his parents came to visit him, the first time they had been in the country since leaving for America. Shah took them back to his father’s village. ‘He’s a 70-year-old man; you could actually see him turn into a nine-year-old boy. He was showing me all the short cuts he used to take as a boy; where he used to get in trouble going to school – everything was exactly as it used to be. It was like a scene in a movie.’ After visiting the village, they returned to the town of Baroda where they were staying. ‘We were having cocktails on the roof, and with a glass of whisky in hand, my dad was saying that in his dream state he could come back to live in the village, and use his expertise to help them with technical things – because nothing has evolved since he left. But when he went back to the US, he easily slipped back into that world. So they’re in two worlds: when they’re in India they think, “We could do this.” When they’re back there they think, “Oh my God…” ’
‘Poverty here is so different from what we understand poverty to be in the West’
For many Westerners India has traditionally been a place to come in search of yourself, in search too of some antidote to the aquisitive and competitive values of Western consumer society - what the father of India, Mahatma Gandhi decried as ‘the monster-god of materialism’. But the ‘monster god’ was there wherever you looked in Mumbai. This, after all, is India’s city of dreams, the home of Bollywood and of the nation’s high-spending suprawealthy. It is also the city of poverty. It is a cruel paradox that in a city where, according to a 2011 census, more than 40 per cent of households are situated in overcrowded shantytowns that are considered ‘unfit for human habitation’, one should also find what is reportedly the world’s most expensive home.
The 27-storey tower that Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, and India’s richest man with a reported net worth of $21 billion, has built on Altamount Road, Mumbai’s most exclusive residential quarter, is a flagrant symbol of India’s new money: aggressive, thrusting, in your face. Built at a cost in excess of $1 billion, the property, which includes its own cinema, ballroom and three helipads, is the home to Ambani, his wife Nita and their three children. A staff of 600 reportedly cater to their needs - although there is some question as to whether the family actually reside in the property full-time.
‘Really, it’s disgusting,’ Mr Thakur said heatedly, as we sat talking on a bench on the seafront on Bandra’s Carter Road on a balmy Saturday evening, enjoying the passing procession of families, children and young lovers hand-in-hand. A dignified man with thick greying hair and an luxuriant moustache, Mr Thakur was a retired airline pilot who had regularly flown between India and Britain, and seemed keen to have an opportunity to brush up on his English. My mention of having been to see Mukesh Ambani’s tower was like lighting the blue touch paper.
‘I ask you, would Warren Buffett build something like that?’ Mr Thakur pointed across the road to a whitewashed colonial villa, standing behind a low wall. Now there is class. A very wealthy man lives there - I know him well. He has a collection of vintage cars. Very beautiful. But he never shows off. This is how it should be. Not this flaunting your wealth in people’s faces.’
Mr Thakur was a car enthusiast. A frustrating business in the years when the only cars you saw on Indian roads were the ubiquitous Ambassador - modelled on the British Morris Cowley and beloved by the police, civil service and taxi-drivers - and the occasional Fiat. ‘Now so many expensive cars in India - all German. Ten years ago you would never see an Audi. Now you see Audis everywhere, and you tell your friends if you see an Ambassador.’
India was in the fast lane. But not everybody was along for the ride. The Mercedes car club, he went on, had recently held their annual rally on Carter Road. ‘There was a beautiful 1930s model. And beside it there was a small boy, naked, looking at this car. His mother was asleep on the wall, a poor woman, exhausted, using a water bottle as a pillow. I wept to see this. But this is India. You learn to accommodate it.’ He made a gesture of a blinkers at his eyes. ‘It will never change.’
India has a strong tradition of charity, but it has historically tended to be local - generating good karma by supporting your temple, your village - rather than the systemised philanthropy on a national and international scale that we recognise in West. But this is slowly beginning to change.
In 2012 Azim Premji, the chairman of the technology company Wipro, whose net worth is estimated to be about $16 billion, became the first person from India to sign up for the Giving Pledge, the initiative founded by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, in which the world’s wealthiest individuals pledge to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. ‘Corporate responsibility’ has become something of a buzz-phrase. Last year the Indian government passed a bill making it mandatory for large companies to spend two per cent of their net profit on corporate social responsibility.
Mukesh Ambani’s wife, Nita, heads a foundation that supports health, education and agricultural projects across India, and was last year awarded the title of ‘Corporate Citizen of the Year’ by the All India Management Association.
According to the consultancy company Bain & Co, high net worth Indians donated an average 3.1 per cent of their income to charitable causes in 2011 - an increase from 2010 but still some distance beheind the 9.1 per cent average in America. India ranks 133rd out of 146 countries in the latest World Giving Index based on surveys of charitable behaviour around the globe - down from 91 in 2011, below Pakistan and Bangladesh. The divide between rich and poor continues to grow, and the government remains largely unable to get to grips with the nation’s most intractable problems.
‘Look at it statistically,’ Deval Sanghavi, the co-founder of Dasra, an NGO working in the field of what is known as ‘strategic philanthropy’, told me.
‘Less than three per cent of the population pay income tax, and over 95 per cent live on less than $5 a day. In the West it’s more like the inverse. So it’s clear that with these two statistics in front of them, government will never be able to bridge the poverty gap on their own.’
The child of parents who emigrated to America in the 1960s, Sanghavi was born and brought up in Houston, Texas, and worked for two years for the investment bank Morgan Stanley before deciding to give up high finance for philanthropy. ‘Growing up, I’d visit family in India, and I could see the stark differences; poverty here is so different from what we understand poverty to be in the West. I got to a point where I felt my skills would be better utilised helping individuals move themselves out of poverty rather than creating more wealth for the wealthy.’
In 2000 Sanghavi moved to Mumbai and with a partner set up Dasra, one of the first organisations of its type in India, which seeks to bring together high-net-worth individuals from both the West and India in philanthropic projects encompassing everything from child education to disaster relief. Projects have ranged from the non-profit – the first was securing funding for Magic Bus, an organisation set up in Mumbai by an Englishman, Matthew Stacie, using sport to motivate young slum-dwellers – to ‘social entrepreneurialism’ schemes where investors might expect a long-term, albeit very small return.
‘The proposition was, “Look, if you trusted me in investing your hundreds of millons of dollars in the for-profit side, let me fund maybe a million dollars in charity and let’s see what happens.” ’
A major obstacle to philanthrophy in India, according to Sanghavi, is what he describes as ‘a trust deficit’ that has historically discouraged wealthy Indians from giving money to organisations or projects they don’t know of personally. Dasra spends up to nine months researching projects, doing due diligence, to give donors the confidence that their money will be used wisely. ‘It’s a question of changing the paradigm from “How can I ensure the money I’m giving is not going to be embezzled?” to “How do I solve the problem of toilets in urban India?”
‘In the last 20 years, the acceleration of wealth creation in India has been probably one of the fastest in history; now we have to convince the newly rich of the fact that wealth brings responsibility; and that change doesn’t happen overnight.’
Sanghavi was one of half a dozen young Americans of Indian origin whom I met in the course of my stay in Mumbai who had given up high-earning jobs to work in NGOs or the field of social entrepreneurship – ‘the new panacea’ for India’s problems, as Swati Chaudhary put it. Chaudhary works for an organisation called Monitor Deloitte’s Inclusive Markets, which develops effective business models to help the poor. Her present project is devising a business plan to help an Indian entrepreneur build a million affordable housing units. ‘It’s taking a private sector approach by delivering homes at significantly cheaper prices than average,’ she said.
‘You can now buy a home for less than a million rupees, bringing it within reach of people working as maids and drivers.’ It is not, she said, a solution that is going to clear slums. ‘But it does mean that a significant number of people living in slums can move out of them.’
We were sitting in a place called the Yoga House, a studio in Bandra offering yoga and fitness classes.
‘Please leave your shoes and ego outside,’ a sign read. The small cafe selling aromatic power drinks was filled with people, browsing through the spiritual volumes on the bookshelves, or reading emails on their laptops – all Westerners. Across the road was a handsome church, St Andrew’s, where people were arriving for Sunday afternoon communion. St Andrew’s was built by an earlier generation of migrants, Portuguese Jesuits, in 1575. The congregation was all Indian.
Chaudhary, who is 28, was born in India; her father is an engineer, and the family had emigrated to Singapore when she was a child. She had studied for her masters in international business and politics in Copenhagen, lived in Canada, and worked for a year in the UN in New York, before deciding to move to Mumbai. ‘So on a happy day, I’m a global child,’ she said. ‘On a not so happy day, I’m just confused.’
Talking with Chaudhary it struck me that all the people I had met in Mumbai were the beneficiaries of a change in status of a migrant. Their parents, or grandparents, had left India for Britain, America or Asia in search of economic opportunities, a better life for themselves and, more particularly, their children. Those children in turn had reaped the benefits of an education, and a way of life, that had enlarged their intellectual and financial horizons, enabling them to fulfil themselves in a way their parents could never have dreamt of.
‘For my parents, emigrating to Singapore was definitely a case of going in search of better opportunities,’ Chaudhary said. ‘From that perspective, me moving back to India was a hard choice for them to understand. I could be making significantly more money elsewhere. But it’s a question of what I want to do with my life.’
Mumbai is a city on the threshold of change, she said. You could almost taste it in the air. ‘There’s a sense in the West of people being jaded. But there are people coming here from all over India, all over the world, who are trying to do new things in different ways. It’s like being part of a society trying to redefine itself. From a development perspective you’re seeing philanthropy happening on an individual level, which is unheard of in India. But it’s in every field. Across the board people are not afraid to try new things, knowing the difficulties they will face. India can drive you crazy. Try getting customer service to get your phone working and you discover things about yourself that you’re kind of ashamed of. But it’s exciting to be part of what’s happening here. I have no regrets.’
Even though she could be earning significantly more in finance or consulting?
She laughed. ‘I try not to think about that.’
‘In England there was no colour, no noise. In Mumbai everything felt so vibrant and alive’
In Mumbai ‘five stars’, as luxury hotels are coloquially known, serve a slightly different function than in London, Paris or New York. More than simply a place to stay, the ‘five star’ is a place to meet friends, to drink, to dine, to be seen in. At the approach road to the ‘five star’ where I had arranged to meet Sheena Morjaria, a filmmaker, a security guard passed a mirror under arriving cars to check for bombs, and at the main entrance guests were shepherded through an airport-style security gate.
In the bar a pianist was playing a lively, if somewhat incongruous, version of The Song of the Volga Boatmen. The bill for two coffees and a glass of wine would come to more than £30.
A radiantly self-assured woman in her late 20s, Morjaria runs an independent film production company called Flick the Switch. Her family had originally left India for east Africa, then come to Britain in the 1970s. Educated at private school, she had studied law and economics at Cambridge, and gone on to work in investment banking. When a friend asked for help in structuring the financing for a small independent film, Morjaria had ‘taken the plunge’ and set up her own company raising the finance for low-budget films. Come the 2008 credit crunch investors started pulling out of film financing. ‘I thought, there are two places that are still making money in film: Bollywood and Hollywood,’ she said. She had been to India only once before, as a teenager on an outward-bound trekking trip – ‘character-building stuff’. She decided on an exploratory trip to Mumbai. ‘And I instantly found this connection. It was like I’d never fitted in in London and I suddenly found this place that instantly clicked with me.’
In her first two weeks she managed to fix an appointment with a prominent Bollywood film director. ‘I walked into his office, and there was a photograph of his daughter on the wall, signed “Love you, Daddy, Sheena”. He said, “I’ve never met another Sheena before. I thought I just had to give this girl a meeting.” ’ The director offered Morjaria a job as a line producer on a film he was making in London. The film fell through, but she decided to stay. ‘There was definitely that feeling you could make a mark faster than you could in the UK or the US. And that has definitely happened for me. It’s really accelerated my career path.’
It has not been easy. Mumbai, she said, is ‘a transaction society. The first question you’re asked is, “What do you do?” And if you don’t do anything, and you don’t have a purpose, you’re put to one side. Living here is tough. If you thought about the traffic, dirt and pollution, you’d probably never stay. But for me the overwhelming sense of opportunity has kept me going through all that.’
She spends up to two hours a day in traffic, being driven to and from meetings, working on her laptop and phone. But it is paying off. She had positioned Flick the Switch as the ‘go-to’ company for international companies wanting to access India, and Indian companies wanting to make or distribute films in Europe and America. And her first production, Porchoi, a Bengali film, shot in Newcastle and starring Prosenjit Chatterjee, ‘the Indian Tom Cruise’, is being released this year.
On the day we met Morjaria was preparing to leave for America, for meetings in Los Angeles and at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. She had organised a soiree with a group of PIOs in a smart new restaurant in Bandra called Pali Bhavan.
It was styled as a fantastical evocation of old India, with carved temple pillars and fading sepia photographs on the walls, and crowded with cool, affluent young professionals – the antithesis of Bollywood bling. The group were all in their late 20s and early 30s. There was a Wall Street banker who had come to India to fulfil her dream of being a fashion designer and now had her own label; a 25-year-old woman from London who had worked in PR, moved to Mumbai three years ago, and opened a chain of bars called Sugadaddy, selling frozen yogurt; and a man who had given up his job working in finance in New York to become a film director, and who was now shooting a crime thriller in Mumbai – 60 per cent in Hindi, 40 per cent in English, with an Indian cast and ‘an A-list Hollywood actor’. The conversations were electric with optimism and a sense of boundless possibilities. There wasn’t a trace of despondency or cynicism in the air. It felt very different from London.
A question had been preoccupying me through every conversation I had had in Mumbai: did these people consider themselves to be Indian? Or were they British, American, Singaporean? And where exactly was home?
‘You’re asking whether we’re BBCD,’ Parveen Dusanj said. BBCD? ‘British Born Confused Desi [Indian].’ She laughed. ‘Actually the BBCDs tend to be less confused than the ABCDs [Americans].’
Dusanj was born in England and brought up in Chatham, Kent: she came to Mumbai five years ago to live with her partner, the well-known Indian actor Kabir Bedi, and now works in television production; her sister Suki came to visit two years ago, and within a week had been offered a job in the Mumbai record industry. She now runs her own PR company. A third sister was on her way. In an earlier life Dusanj had worked for the Racial Equality Council. Then, she joked, she had been categorised as BME – black minority ethnic. ‘Here we’re PIOs. People love to label you, don’t they?’
Growing up, she said, she had never thought of herself as English. ‘It’s only since coming to Mumbai that I realise how English I actually am. There are certain moments – Christmas, Easter – that are so monumental when you really miss home.’ On Sundays she and her partner breakfast on traditional Punjabi aloo bharta. ‘Followed by a traditional English roast.’ She laughed. ‘If you ask, where is my identity, I’d say it’s like that – I’m the best of both.’
It was 10 o’clock. Everybody had to be up early for work. The party spilled out into the warm Mumbai evening. I thought back to something that Vikas Vij had told me. He had recently been back to Britain for business and to visit his family. Driving along the M25 to Kent, he had experienced a lowering of the spirits. ‘It was England in the winter; there was no colour, no noise. You could almost feel the stress, the sense of depression about the economy, the future, everything.’ A few days later he flew back to Mumbai. ‘Just stepping out of the airport, I felt “I’m home”. Everything felt so vibrant and alive. And I thought, that is why we came here.’
India 2.0 by Mick Brown - Part two - Telegraph
Thought I`ll post something positive about India to break the tedium of real time updates of rape cases in India on this forum, which is I should add appears to be largely down to the single handed efforts of a certain member from across the border (in Scotland)
by Mick Brown
Over the decades millions of Indians have emigrated in search of a better existence. Now increasing numbers of their descendants, born in the West, are heading in the opposite direction and establishing exciting new careers in the land of their forefathers.
‘It was time for something a bit more adventurous’
The landing card for visitors arriving in India invites you to tick one of a series of boxes that are testament to the fact that for much of its short life as an independent nation the principle aim of many of its best educated and most ambitious people has been to leave, born of a conviction that life would be better elsewhere. Are you an NRI (non-resident Indian)? A PIO (person of Indian origin)? An OCI (overseas citizen of India)? Or None?
In 1951 the population of PIOs in Britain stood at 31,000. By 2006 it had risen to 1.1 million. In America the 1970 census recorded 51,000 PIOs. By 2006 the number was 1.5 million. Earlier this year on a visit to India David Cameron urged Indian students to come to Britain, assuring them that if they then found graduate-level jobs there would be ‘no limit’ on the numbers of people who could stay and work. India remains one of the world’s two largest net ‘exporters’ of migrants.
But in recent years the nation’s burgeoning economic fortunes have produced an intriguing reversal, as increasing numbers of PIOs return to India to live and work.
The category of OCI was introduced by the Indian government in 2005, in response to a growing demand from Indians living abroad, and to encourage the development of an educated and skilled workforce at home. The scheme entitles the children and grandchildren of people born in India to a lifelong visa, which enables them to live and work in the country indefinitely. The Confederation of Indian Industry in London has described the numbers of PIOs moving to India since the introduction of scheme as the greatest migration of British citizens to the country since the golden period of the British Empire.
The Mumbai suburb of Bandra is a place of tree-lined streets and colonial-style villas and bungalows. It has a large Catholic population – a place where you see as many Marian shrines as Hindu temples.
With its restaurants, coffee shops, and – a rarity in Mumbai – its relative tranquillity, it is a popular area for young Westerners living in the city. Vikas and Savita Vij, both in their 30s, live with their two children on Pali Hill in a fading mansion block, its original whitewash bleached and weathered in the local fashion to a pock-marked grey. As is the case with virtually every private apartment building in Mumbai, security guards loiter at the entrance.
This has been their home for the past five years, since they decided, as Savita put it, that ‘it was time for something a bit more adventurous in our lives’, and, having only ever lived in London, they packed their bags for Mumbai. Savita’s grandparents had migrated to Britain in the 1960s; her grandfather was a factory worker, and her father followed in his footsteps, working at Ford in Dagenham. Savita, 34, is one of four children. ‘My parents’ dream was to give us a really good education, and they did that,’ she said.
After graduating in sociology from Royal Holloway, University of London, Savita worked for the Runnymede Trust, the race equality think-tank. She and Vikas have been together since they were teenagers. In 2003 they married, and settled in a flat in a new development in Greenwich, south London.
‘We had a good life,’ Savita said. But after the birth of their son, Adi, in 2008, they began to crave a new direction. ‘Something really changed for both of us,’ Savita said. ‘We’d gone with the education, the jobs and the responsibilities. I didn’t know what was missing but we both felt we were looking for something else.’
Growing up, Savita had always felt ‘very Indian’. Her upbringing was conservative, her friends were mostly of Indian origin, like herself. ‘I didn’t listen to Western music until I went to university,’ she said.
She had visited India as a child with her parents, but ‘family politics’, she said, had soured the country in her mind. ‘When we were growing up there were a lot of demands on my parents to send money back home. It became almost like a demonised place. India was a place of no opportunity economically; no one could be trusted; everyone’s corrupt. It was associated with going backwards. So I was fearful of India.’
It was a visit that her sister made to the country in 2007 that began to change Savita’s mind. ‘She had come here and realised that the world doesn’t just revolve around you; it’s about community and other people.’ In Greenwich Savita and Vikas knew none of their neighbours. ‘And as a young mother that had a real impact on me.’
They did not have to wait long after their arrival to discover how different things would be in Mumbai. On their first day in their new apartment their neighbours appeared at their door to welcome them with food. ‘Now we have an open-door policy,’ Savita said.
Some, I suggested, might find that intrusive…
‘We felt the same way,’ she said. ‘On our wedding anniversary we were cooking a romantic meal. Our next-door neighbour is a chef, and he found out. “Oh, you’re cooking!” He just took over. It was strange at first, but we’ve come to love it. You’re not invisible here. People care about you and your life. I love that.’
Vikas, who had been working for a media company in London, has set up his own events business, the Ideas Exchange. Last year he brought Professional Beauty, Britain’s largest health and beauty trade show, to Delhi; this year it will be coming to Mumbai. Bureaucracy and inefficiency made it harder to start a business in India, he told me. ‘It takes for ever to do anything.’ But the opportunities are limitless. ‘People here are hungry for new ideas.’
Starbucks opened its first branch in Mumbai in November. ‘There were queues outside for hours.’
Vikas’s salary has dropped by two thirds, but still, he said, they are able to enjoy a better standard of living. Their four-room apartment costs them £1,000 a month – more than their mortgage in London, but they decided to pay a little more to live in a good area, and save on other things. For four years they did not have a car.
If property in Mumbai is expensive, staff are cheap. In England, Savita said, she would never have dreamt of having domestic help. Here, the family has a cook, a cleaner – ‘and they are very particular about what they will and won’t do’ – a driver and a woman who manages the home. Total monthly outlay: £400. It is something Savita found difficult at first. ‘I didn’t want to hurt their feelings so they were helping themselves to things, using my phone,’ she said. ‘I had to learn that they were employees and you have to have that relationship. But at the same time I think I have a different relationship from a lot of people in this building. I don’t treat them like servants. We talk to them. We’re very aware of what goes on in their lives.’
Their daughter, Kaiya, was born in 2011. In England Savita would have had to return to work full-time to help support the family. In Mumbai she has been able to stay at home and care for the children. Both are now in a Montessori nursery – ‘in England it would be unaffordable’ – but next year Adi will start school, which they will have to pay for, and Savita is going back to work, as a mediator in family disputes. ‘It’s the perfect place to do it,’ she said. ‘You have a lot of disputes over property and family businesses, and a judicial system where court cases can go on for 20 years. The younger generation don’t want to get involved in that.’
One of her fears was that her children would grow up ‘in a bit of a bubble’. ‘You can see India becoming more like a paradise for those with money. There are more and more luxury hotels and homes, and people wanting to enjoy the Western lifestyle. Most middle-class parents go to malls, send their children to international schools. And I think that’s sad.’
Mumbai has few public amenities; but Savita makes a point of taking her children to a local playground, and has started a group, Apples and Oranges, organising heritage and nature walks for parents and children, and volunteering to clean up public spaces. ‘I come from a working-class background,’ she said, ‘and to walk into a world of privilege… I know I’m different; I don’t share the same values about bringing up children, and I can’t sit around having coffee mornings and talking about my maids and my driver. I need to use my brain.’
It was time for Savita’s weekly shop. We set off in auto-rickshaws to an organic farmers’ market a couple of miles away. She moved along the stalls, scooping vegetables into a wicker basket: cauliflower, lettuce, garlic, broccoli, enough fruit and vegetables for a family of four for the week. Total cost: £5.
‘I didn’t come to India to find myself, but that’s what I’ve found myself doing’
Neel Shah’s father, Kishor, came from a small village in Gujarat. The eldest of seven children, after graduating from an engineering college in India, in 1966 he made his way to America, to study for a masters in automotive engineering at Oklahoma State University, and then took a job at Ford in Detroit. Five years later he returned to India to find a wife. Friends and relations had been alerted to look for a suitable candidate. Finally three were settled upon. Two were from prosperous families, highly suitable material. The third, Kishori, was a simple girl of great sweetness of character who had nursed her mother through a long and fatal illness.
Kishor and his family were unable to decide whom he should choose. Eventually his mother, Lalita, made a proposal: she would write the names of the girls on pieces of paper and put them in a hat. Kishor dutifully reached in his hand and drew out the piece bearing the name… Kishori.
Shortly after the wedding, Kishor returned to America, to prepare a home for his new bride. For seven months they came to know each other only by letter, until she was able to join him. They have now been married for 41 years, a happy union that produced two children. It would be some years after their wedding that they discovered that Lalita had written Kishori’s name on all three pieces of paper.
Shah, 33, is the director of strategy for Libero Sports, India’s first (and so far only) football consultancy. In a country with a multitude of faiths – Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh, Christian – there is only one unifying religion: cricket. But Shah told me that more than 100 million people in India regularly watch football on television, and matches in states where the following is particularly strong, such as West Bengal, draw crowds of up to 60,000.
Shah was born in California, where his family moved in 1980 when his father took a job at Nissan. Although it was common for members of the Indian community in California to go home for holidays and family visits, Shah’s family never had. Over the years, Kishor brought all his immediate family to America, sponsoring their visas, helping to set them up in businesses, running petrol stations and motels. His parents came to live with them in Long Beach.
‘My grandmother had picked the most motherly person as a wife for my father, and she took so much care of my grandparents,’ Shah told me. ‘It was like my grandmother had seen the future. It all tied up.’
By his own description, Shah grew up as an all-American boy, who developed an early passion for football and who found his dream job working as the director of fan development for Major League Soccer, the American professional football league. ‘I always knew I was Indian, I understood the language, I understood the culture,’ he said. ‘My perception of India was of this mysterious place that I was connected to but I didn’t even know what the soil looked like. But whenever anybody asked me, “What’s your ultimate dream?” the words would just come out of my mouth: “Develop soccer in India.” It was the weirdest thing. It felt like that was my purpose.’
In 2007, living in New York, he took a course at Landmark, the ‘human potential’ organisation, which involved looking back at certain moments that had dictated the course of his life. An incident that had always haunted him came to the surface: when he was a young boy a classmate had refused to pick him for the football team because of the colour of his skin. ‘I realised that from that moment the more American I became, the easier life would go for me,’ he said. ‘That just tugged at my heart. It felt like I’d been somehow running away from the country I’m so connected to for most of my life.’ The following day Shah booked a flight to Delhi, determined to visit the village where his father had grown up, while at the same time exploring the possibility of working in Indian football. ‘I got off the plane and took a beat-up taxi to Paharganj, the backpackers’ area. I remember looking around thinking, “What is this place? I’m Indian but I just don’t connect to these people.” I had a meeting with the head of the football federation the next morning, and I remember feeling so overwhelmed by everything.’
Shah spent three weeks travelling around the country, eventually making his way to his family’s ‘cowpat’ village in Gujarat. Cousins, second cousins, and the children of cousins all gathered around as, sitting on a creaking charpoy, Shah regaled them with stories of his glittering life in America; how he lived by himself in New York, 3,000 miles away from his parents in California; how he was single and free. ‘I could see their faces drop. They said, “Would you like to come and live with us?” I’d been feeling sorry for them, but I realised they were feeling sorry for me.’
The following year he returned to India to take part in a book project about the power of sport to change lives, which involved seven people being sent to developing countries with 300 items of sporting equipment. Shah travelled the length and breadth of the country playing football. The book was never published, but the experience strengthened his conviction to live and work in India, and in 2009 he moved to Delhi to take a job in the sports marketing division of an advertising agency; 18 months later he joined Libero. His job now takes him all over India, building local leagues and arranging training programmes, as well as representing a number of India’s small corps of professional players.
When Shah told his parents he was moving to India, ‘they thought I was totally insane. They couldn’t picture India in their heads any more; they couldn’t picture how could I be working there in sports and make this my life at the age of 29. My father came to America because it was the land of freedom and opportunity. He came to give our family a better life. So he was completely crazy that I was leaving a very high-paying job in New York, to earn a quarter of that in India in an industry that was not even established. He said I was basically reversing everything he’d done when he came over to America.’
It had not been easy, Shah admitted. India could be a struggle – the creaking infrastructure, the constant power cuts, the dirt, the poverty. ‘It’s still a developing country in a lot of ways,’ he said. ‘If you come here just floating around, waiting for something big to happen, it’s going to be really difficult. Because while you’re waiting you’re going to be really finding that negative part of yourself, and be angry and troubled a lot of the time. But once you get past those day-to-day challenges, you see how rich and beautiful India really is.’
Immersing himself in his new culture, in a way he had never expected, Shah had found himself drawn to Indian spirituality. He had a personal yoga teacher and had taken up meditation. ‘Living here it’s not so weird in friendship circles to say, “I’m going up to the Himalayas for the next five or six days to meditate.” I didn’t come to India to find myself, but that’s what I’ve found myself doing.’
Last year, along with his elder brother, his parents came to visit him, the first time they had been in the country since leaving for America. Shah took them back to his father’s village. ‘He’s a 70-year-old man; you could actually see him turn into a nine-year-old boy. He was showing me all the short cuts he used to take as a boy; where he used to get in trouble going to school – everything was exactly as it used to be. It was like a scene in a movie.’ After visiting the village, they returned to the town of Baroda where they were staying. ‘We were having cocktails on the roof, and with a glass of whisky in hand, my dad was saying that in his dream state he could come back to live in the village, and use his expertise to help them with technical things – because nothing has evolved since he left. But when he went back to the US, he easily slipped back into that world. So they’re in two worlds: when they’re in India they think, “We could do this.” When they’re back there they think, “Oh my God…” ’
‘Poverty here is so different from what we understand poverty to be in the West’
For many Westerners India has traditionally been a place to come in search of yourself, in search too of some antidote to the aquisitive and competitive values of Western consumer society - what the father of India, Mahatma Gandhi decried as ‘the monster-god of materialism’. But the ‘monster god’ was there wherever you looked in Mumbai. This, after all, is India’s city of dreams, the home of Bollywood and of the nation’s high-spending suprawealthy. It is also the city of poverty. It is a cruel paradox that in a city where, according to a 2011 census, more than 40 per cent of households are situated in overcrowded shantytowns that are considered ‘unfit for human habitation’, one should also find what is reportedly the world’s most expensive home.
The 27-storey tower that Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, and India’s richest man with a reported net worth of $21 billion, has built on Altamount Road, Mumbai’s most exclusive residential quarter, is a flagrant symbol of India’s new money: aggressive, thrusting, in your face. Built at a cost in excess of $1 billion, the property, which includes its own cinema, ballroom and three helipads, is the home to Ambani, his wife Nita and their three children. A staff of 600 reportedly cater to their needs - although there is some question as to whether the family actually reside in the property full-time.
‘Really, it’s disgusting,’ Mr Thakur said heatedly, as we sat talking on a bench on the seafront on Bandra’s Carter Road on a balmy Saturday evening, enjoying the passing procession of families, children and young lovers hand-in-hand. A dignified man with thick greying hair and an luxuriant moustache, Mr Thakur was a retired airline pilot who had regularly flown between India and Britain, and seemed keen to have an opportunity to brush up on his English. My mention of having been to see Mukesh Ambani’s tower was like lighting the blue touch paper.
‘I ask you, would Warren Buffett build something like that?’ Mr Thakur pointed across the road to a whitewashed colonial villa, standing behind a low wall. Now there is class. A very wealthy man lives there - I know him well. He has a collection of vintage cars. Very beautiful. But he never shows off. This is how it should be. Not this flaunting your wealth in people’s faces.’
Mr Thakur was a car enthusiast. A frustrating business in the years when the only cars you saw on Indian roads were the ubiquitous Ambassador - modelled on the British Morris Cowley and beloved by the police, civil service and taxi-drivers - and the occasional Fiat. ‘Now so many expensive cars in India - all German. Ten years ago you would never see an Audi. Now you see Audis everywhere, and you tell your friends if you see an Ambassador.’
India was in the fast lane. But not everybody was along for the ride. The Mercedes car club, he went on, had recently held their annual rally on Carter Road. ‘There was a beautiful 1930s model. And beside it there was a small boy, naked, looking at this car. His mother was asleep on the wall, a poor woman, exhausted, using a water bottle as a pillow. I wept to see this. But this is India. You learn to accommodate it.’ He made a gesture of a blinkers at his eyes. ‘It will never change.’
India has a strong tradition of charity, but it has historically tended to be local - generating good karma by supporting your temple, your village - rather than the systemised philanthropy on a national and international scale that we recognise in West. But this is slowly beginning to change.
In 2012 Azim Premji, the chairman of the technology company Wipro, whose net worth is estimated to be about $16 billion, became the first person from India to sign up for the Giving Pledge, the initiative founded by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, in which the world’s wealthiest individuals pledge to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. ‘Corporate responsibility’ has become something of a buzz-phrase. Last year the Indian government passed a bill making it mandatory for large companies to spend two per cent of their net profit on corporate social responsibility.
Mukesh Ambani’s wife, Nita, heads a foundation that supports health, education and agricultural projects across India, and was last year awarded the title of ‘Corporate Citizen of the Year’ by the All India Management Association.
According to the consultancy company Bain & Co, high net worth Indians donated an average 3.1 per cent of their income to charitable causes in 2011 - an increase from 2010 but still some distance beheind the 9.1 per cent average in America. India ranks 133rd out of 146 countries in the latest World Giving Index based on surveys of charitable behaviour around the globe - down from 91 in 2011, below Pakistan and Bangladesh. The divide between rich and poor continues to grow, and the government remains largely unable to get to grips with the nation’s most intractable problems.
‘Look at it statistically,’ Deval Sanghavi, the co-founder of Dasra, an NGO working in the field of what is known as ‘strategic philanthropy’, told me.
‘Less than three per cent of the population pay income tax, and over 95 per cent live on less than $5 a day. In the West it’s more like the inverse. So it’s clear that with these two statistics in front of them, government will never be able to bridge the poverty gap on their own.’
The child of parents who emigrated to America in the 1960s, Sanghavi was born and brought up in Houston, Texas, and worked for two years for the investment bank Morgan Stanley before deciding to give up high finance for philanthropy. ‘Growing up, I’d visit family in India, and I could see the stark differences; poverty here is so different from what we understand poverty to be in the West. I got to a point where I felt my skills would be better utilised helping individuals move themselves out of poverty rather than creating more wealth for the wealthy.’
In 2000 Sanghavi moved to Mumbai and with a partner set up Dasra, one of the first organisations of its type in India, which seeks to bring together high-net-worth individuals from both the West and India in philanthropic projects encompassing everything from child education to disaster relief. Projects have ranged from the non-profit – the first was securing funding for Magic Bus, an organisation set up in Mumbai by an Englishman, Matthew Stacie, using sport to motivate young slum-dwellers – to ‘social entrepreneurialism’ schemes where investors might expect a long-term, albeit very small return.
‘The proposition was, “Look, if you trusted me in investing your hundreds of millons of dollars in the for-profit side, let me fund maybe a million dollars in charity and let’s see what happens.” ’
A major obstacle to philanthrophy in India, according to Sanghavi, is what he describes as ‘a trust deficit’ that has historically discouraged wealthy Indians from giving money to organisations or projects they don’t know of personally. Dasra spends up to nine months researching projects, doing due diligence, to give donors the confidence that their money will be used wisely. ‘It’s a question of changing the paradigm from “How can I ensure the money I’m giving is not going to be embezzled?” to “How do I solve the problem of toilets in urban India?”
‘In the last 20 years, the acceleration of wealth creation in India has been probably one of the fastest in history; now we have to convince the newly rich of the fact that wealth brings responsibility; and that change doesn’t happen overnight.’
Sanghavi was one of half a dozen young Americans of Indian origin whom I met in the course of my stay in Mumbai who had given up high-earning jobs to work in NGOs or the field of social entrepreneurship – ‘the new panacea’ for India’s problems, as Swati Chaudhary put it. Chaudhary works for an organisation called Monitor Deloitte’s Inclusive Markets, which develops effective business models to help the poor. Her present project is devising a business plan to help an Indian entrepreneur build a million affordable housing units. ‘It’s taking a private sector approach by delivering homes at significantly cheaper prices than average,’ she said.
‘You can now buy a home for less than a million rupees, bringing it within reach of people working as maids and drivers.’ It is not, she said, a solution that is going to clear slums. ‘But it does mean that a significant number of people living in slums can move out of them.’
We were sitting in a place called the Yoga House, a studio in Bandra offering yoga and fitness classes.
‘Please leave your shoes and ego outside,’ a sign read. The small cafe selling aromatic power drinks was filled with people, browsing through the spiritual volumes on the bookshelves, or reading emails on their laptops – all Westerners. Across the road was a handsome church, St Andrew’s, where people were arriving for Sunday afternoon communion. St Andrew’s was built by an earlier generation of migrants, Portuguese Jesuits, in 1575. The congregation was all Indian.
Chaudhary, who is 28, was born in India; her father is an engineer, and the family had emigrated to Singapore when she was a child. She had studied for her masters in international business and politics in Copenhagen, lived in Canada, and worked for a year in the UN in New York, before deciding to move to Mumbai. ‘So on a happy day, I’m a global child,’ she said. ‘On a not so happy day, I’m just confused.’
Talking with Chaudhary it struck me that all the people I had met in Mumbai were the beneficiaries of a change in status of a migrant. Their parents, or grandparents, had left India for Britain, America or Asia in search of economic opportunities, a better life for themselves and, more particularly, their children. Those children in turn had reaped the benefits of an education, and a way of life, that had enlarged their intellectual and financial horizons, enabling them to fulfil themselves in a way their parents could never have dreamt of.
‘For my parents, emigrating to Singapore was definitely a case of going in search of better opportunities,’ Chaudhary said. ‘From that perspective, me moving back to India was a hard choice for them to understand. I could be making significantly more money elsewhere. But it’s a question of what I want to do with my life.’
Mumbai is a city on the threshold of change, she said. You could almost taste it in the air. ‘There’s a sense in the West of people being jaded. But there are people coming here from all over India, all over the world, who are trying to do new things in different ways. It’s like being part of a society trying to redefine itself. From a development perspective you’re seeing philanthropy happening on an individual level, which is unheard of in India. But it’s in every field. Across the board people are not afraid to try new things, knowing the difficulties they will face. India can drive you crazy. Try getting customer service to get your phone working and you discover things about yourself that you’re kind of ashamed of. But it’s exciting to be part of what’s happening here. I have no regrets.’
Even though she could be earning significantly more in finance or consulting?
She laughed. ‘I try not to think about that.’
‘In England there was no colour, no noise. In Mumbai everything felt so vibrant and alive’
In Mumbai ‘five stars’, as luxury hotels are coloquially known, serve a slightly different function than in London, Paris or New York. More than simply a place to stay, the ‘five star’ is a place to meet friends, to drink, to dine, to be seen in. At the approach road to the ‘five star’ where I had arranged to meet Sheena Morjaria, a filmmaker, a security guard passed a mirror under arriving cars to check for bombs, and at the main entrance guests were shepherded through an airport-style security gate.
In the bar a pianist was playing a lively, if somewhat incongruous, version of The Song of the Volga Boatmen. The bill for two coffees and a glass of wine would come to more than £30.
A radiantly self-assured woman in her late 20s, Morjaria runs an independent film production company called Flick the Switch. Her family had originally left India for east Africa, then come to Britain in the 1970s. Educated at private school, she had studied law and economics at Cambridge, and gone on to work in investment banking. When a friend asked for help in structuring the financing for a small independent film, Morjaria had ‘taken the plunge’ and set up her own company raising the finance for low-budget films. Come the 2008 credit crunch investors started pulling out of film financing. ‘I thought, there are two places that are still making money in film: Bollywood and Hollywood,’ she said. She had been to India only once before, as a teenager on an outward-bound trekking trip – ‘character-building stuff’. She decided on an exploratory trip to Mumbai. ‘And I instantly found this connection. It was like I’d never fitted in in London and I suddenly found this place that instantly clicked with me.’
In her first two weeks she managed to fix an appointment with a prominent Bollywood film director. ‘I walked into his office, and there was a photograph of his daughter on the wall, signed “Love you, Daddy, Sheena”. He said, “I’ve never met another Sheena before. I thought I just had to give this girl a meeting.” ’ The director offered Morjaria a job as a line producer on a film he was making in London. The film fell through, but she decided to stay. ‘There was definitely that feeling you could make a mark faster than you could in the UK or the US. And that has definitely happened for me. It’s really accelerated my career path.’
It has not been easy. Mumbai, she said, is ‘a transaction society. The first question you’re asked is, “What do you do?” And if you don’t do anything, and you don’t have a purpose, you’re put to one side. Living here is tough. If you thought about the traffic, dirt and pollution, you’d probably never stay. But for me the overwhelming sense of opportunity has kept me going through all that.’
She spends up to two hours a day in traffic, being driven to and from meetings, working on her laptop and phone. But it is paying off. She had positioned Flick the Switch as the ‘go-to’ company for international companies wanting to access India, and Indian companies wanting to make or distribute films in Europe and America. And her first production, Porchoi, a Bengali film, shot in Newcastle and starring Prosenjit Chatterjee, ‘the Indian Tom Cruise’, is being released this year.
On the day we met Morjaria was preparing to leave for America, for meetings in Los Angeles and at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. She had organised a soiree with a group of PIOs in a smart new restaurant in Bandra called Pali Bhavan.
It was styled as a fantastical evocation of old India, with carved temple pillars and fading sepia photographs on the walls, and crowded with cool, affluent young professionals – the antithesis of Bollywood bling. The group were all in their late 20s and early 30s. There was a Wall Street banker who had come to India to fulfil her dream of being a fashion designer and now had her own label; a 25-year-old woman from London who had worked in PR, moved to Mumbai three years ago, and opened a chain of bars called Sugadaddy, selling frozen yogurt; and a man who had given up his job working in finance in New York to become a film director, and who was now shooting a crime thriller in Mumbai – 60 per cent in Hindi, 40 per cent in English, with an Indian cast and ‘an A-list Hollywood actor’. The conversations were electric with optimism and a sense of boundless possibilities. There wasn’t a trace of despondency or cynicism in the air. It felt very different from London.
A question had been preoccupying me through every conversation I had had in Mumbai: did these people consider themselves to be Indian? Or were they British, American, Singaporean? And where exactly was home?
‘You’re asking whether we’re BBCD,’ Parveen Dusanj said. BBCD? ‘British Born Confused Desi [Indian].’ She laughed. ‘Actually the BBCDs tend to be less confused than the ABCDs [Americans].’
Dusanj was born in England and brought up in Chatham, Kent: she came to Mumbai five years ago to live with her partner, the well-known Indian actor Kabir Bedi, and now works in television production; her sister Suki came to visit two years ago, and within a week had been offered a job in the Mumbai record industry. She now runs her own PR company. A third sister was on her way. In an earlier life Dusanj had worked for the Racial Equality Council. Then, she joked, she had been categorised as BME – black minority ethnic. ‘Here we’re PIOs. People love to label you, don’t they?’
Growing up, she said, she had never thought of herself as English. ‘It’s only since coming to Mumbai that I realise how English I actually am. There are certain moments – Christmas, Easter – that are so monumental when you really miss home.’ On Sundays she and her partner breakfast on traditional Punjabi aloo bharta. ‘Followed by a traditional English roast.’ She laughed. ‘If you ask, where is my identity, I’d say it’s like that – I’m the best of both.’
It was 10 o’clock. Everybody had to be up early for work. The party spilled out into the warm Mumbai evening. I thought back to something that Vikas Vij had told me. He had recently been back to Britain for business and to visit his family. Driving along the M25 to Kent, he had experienced a lowering of the spirits. ‘It was England in the winter; there was no colour, no noise. You could almost feel the stress, the sense of depression about the economy, the future, everything.’ A few days later he flew back to Mumbai. ‘Just stepping out of the airport, I felt “I’m home”. Everything felt so vibrant and alive. And I thought, that is why we came here.’
India 2.0 by Mick Brown - Part two - Telegraph
Thought I`ll post something positive about India to break the tedium of real time updates of rape cases in India on this forum, which is I should add appears to be largely down to the single handed efforts of a certain member from across the border (in Scotland)
