Talking Point

Danny Boyle’s, eight Academy Awards winning yet controversial film Slumdog Millionaire, set and filmed in India, gave the country another name derivative – the Slumdog Land. The name tagging apart, the film also carried a deeper symbolism for India, a land of many contradictions.

As India surges forward in taking big strides of development, there are millions of slumdogs, aspiring to become millionaires all over the country in their own entrepreneurial ways. The making of new India thus needs a thoughtful blend of big ticket macro development as well as the inclusive growth of micro-small-mid sized enterprises for a sustainable growth movement.

Propelled to Familiarity, 12th Feb 2009: Having satisfactorily concluded the Kolkata leg of our assignment, we headed to Guwahati on Kingfisher Airlines’ early morning flight. The flight was announced and we got on to the transit coach that would take us to the aircraft. After a pretty long journey (at one point I jokingly wondered if Kingfisher was planning to take us all the way to Guwahati by road!) we landed in front of one of those small propeller-driven aircrafts that didn’t require the regular, mobile staircase. We just hopped onto the aircraft and settled down into the rather cramped seats. The solitary ‘no frills’ stewardess secured the doors and the propellers started whizzing and we were off! Not very confidence inspiring somehow, after one get’s used to the wide-bodied Airbuses and Boeings.  

Guwahati, the capital city of Assam, is a familiar place for me. Apart from the fact that I had studied for a while in nearby Shillong, and had a lot of friends, our family has traditionally owned tea gardens in North Assam. The Loknath Bardoloi International Airport was now quite a massive, modern structure, a far cry from my mental picture of a small, rather sparse facility. Outside stood rows upon rows of gleaming Marutis, all shades of Indigos and Indicas, Ford-Ikons and other icons of the modern-day Indian auto industry. We got ourselves and our luggage into one such vehicle and off we went to the city. After a longish drive, we landed up at the Orchid Hotel, where we had been booked to stay. The room at the Orchid was adequate, nothing fancy. The TV had a lot of channels, the bathroom had hot and cold water and the bed was reasonably comfortable with clean linen. The aircon was not tested, as the waning winter still had a bit of a bite.

Picture taken at the author's family tea gardens in North Assam

That evening I contacted Hemanta Sharma, a batch-mate of mine from BITS Pilani. Soon he landed up at the hotel and took me for a drive around the city. Finally we ended up at the Guwahati Club, where a couple of other batch-mates joined us. We had a great time reliving our days together. None of us had really changed a lot in these last twenty five years! We could have all recognized each other in a crowded railway platform. Before we agreed to call it a day, Hemanta promised to organize a larger gathering the next day.

Big Fish in Small Pond, 13th - 14th Feb: The next day, in between work, I took time off to meet another close friend Ujjal. He now runs the Ford dealership in Guwahati and I found him sitting behind his desk in his office, peering into his laptop. Initial introductions and catching up over, he contacted some other common friends on his cell phone. One of them, Subroto Sharma, was my room mate at Shillong. Subroto now runs his family business in media and publishing. They publish the Guwahati edition of the Telegraph daily newspaper apart from other local dailies and magazines. Disappointingly, he was away at Kazirangha, where he had recently set up a resort. He asked me to drive down to Kazirangha (four hours drive), but my schedule did not permit that.

I was in for better luck with the other friend that Ujjal contacted on his cell phone. This was Amiya Sharma, who was also a class mate at Shillong and now headed a NGO, a major microfinance player in the North East! “Right up my alley”, I thought and went to visit him after saying goodbye to Ujjal and agreeing to meet for dinner later in the evening. Amiya was a topper at St. Edmund’s, Shillong. He did his post graduation from the Delhi School of Economics and a Phd. from the US. He was a good athlete I remembered and we used to play football together. He is CEO of RGVN, a respected wholesaler and retailer of microfinance in the North East. RGVN also happens to be a partner of MicroSave and so I took my two colleagues with me. After a good meeting he also agreed to join our evening’s dinner meet.

Our get together at the Guwahati Club that evening was a resounding success! Even the blaring loud-speakers of the “Bhupen Hazarika Felicitation Committee”i across the street could not ‘out-sound’ us. There were seven of us and a few more said ‘hello’ over telephone. The ‘Guwahati gang’ still maintained a closeness and enthusiasm that was infectious. Subroto Sharma called once again from Kazirangha and said he still remembered the Class XII Final Board exams where his seat happened to be just behind mine and joked that without that piece of providential luck he would be more likely hawking the Telegraph rather than publishing it!

On the way back to the hotel, Hemanta, who now owns the CEAT SHOPPE in Guwahati commented “We like to be the big fish in the small pond, rather than the other way around”. I realized that I had a great set of contacts, friends and well wishers if ever I planned to do something in the North East. I got back to Kolkata the next afternoon, after completing work at Nightingale. On the way back, I flew “IndiGo”, another recent addition to India’s aviation sector spectrum. With Indigos on the roads and IndiGos on the fly, India was getting to be a colorful place indeed! IndiGo mercifully used a regular Boeing aircraft.

To be continued …

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i I don’t remember exactly why this great musician was being felicitated.