An Open Letter to Ratan Tata

(This letter which has also been sent by post to Mr. Ratan Tata is written in response to the letter by Mr. Paul White, President and CEO of Oriental Express Hotel where he had rebuffed the initiatives of Indian Hotel Group to increase partnership and cooperation between these two brands as Indian Hotels own 11.5% stake in Orient Express. Mr. White had written:

"We donot believe that there is a strategic fit between your predominanty domestic Indian hotel chain and our global portfolio of luxury hotels and unique travel experiences and we donot wish to be involved in an attempt to improve the performance of your non-Indian properties. We believe any association of our luxury brands and properties with your brands and properties would result in a reduction in the value of our brands and of our business and would likely lead to erosion in the RevPar premiums currently achieved by our properties. (emphasis mine)" )

Dear Sri Ratan Tata

The racially loaded, colonially inclined and contemptuously worded letter of the President and CEO of Orient Express Hotels Mr. Paul White has stirred feelings in me the existence and intensity of which I was not aware of till now! If this expression of colonially and racially inclined business could hurt me so much as an Indian and as a proud shareholder of Indian Hotels then the pain and anguish of our business pioneers during the colonial times, whose shadows it seems still loom large on sub-continental business, can only be guessed.

Sir, everybody says that you are a nice guy. That you do not go for hostile takeover. That you are a sensitive rather than sensational businessman. That you create opportunity rather than opposition. That you are humane rather than hard boiled. And I agree with them. But your nicety should not be mistaken for your weakness. Your opposition to hostile take over should not be mistaken for lack of killer instinct. Your sensitive nature should not be mistaken for squeamishness. Your creation of opportunity should not be mistaken for your dread of opposition. And your humanism should not be taken as a sign of oesteoporotic invertebracy.

The defining moments of the world have been preceded by insults to the pioneers. The perfume and eau-de-cologne insult by Arcelor’s chief, Guy Dolle to Mittal in not too distant a past to a very historic insult to your own grand father and an iconic name Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata by Sir Frederick Upcott, the then chief commissioner of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, who promised to "eat every pound of steel rail [the Tatas] succeed in making" come to mind immediately. It is a different matter that Sir Upcott did not keep his words and ate not ‘every pound of steel rail’ but only his own words.

But after these slurs come the sweet and satisfying scent of success which only an abject surrender of an otherwise belligerent and aggressive adversary can bring. And therein lies the true worth of enterprises- silent win is better than a rhetorical defeat.

Sir, for long we have suffered these racial slurs and colonial mindsets. But no more. The time has come to tell the world in a voice ringing with the cool confidence of a resurgent India that when the US economy suffered from an anaemia of exchequer due to haemophilic subprime blues, the City Bank did not consider their brand value getting eroded when they turned to an Indian to guide it safely to the shores. Or that the Vodafone or the PepsiCo did not consider it infra dig to be stewarded by Sarin or Nooyis. Or that Ford will not consider their value eroded if it sells its Jaguar and Land Rovers to Tatas as Corus did not consider their value being eroded before marrying into Tata Empire.

There comes a time in the history of big enterprises- political or business- when defining decisions, often at variance with the cultural bequeath and heritage of that enterprise, are taken. If Sri Nusserwanji had not broken the mould and traversed the path he chose to, he would also have joined priesthood like many before him in his family. But that one decision by Nusserwanji changed the business map of India and the world. Tata Group is at one such critical point of history when a path-breaking decision needs to be taken- a decision which has the potential of defining the course of this group for the next 200 years as it has been defined by a decision of Nusserwanji to venture into business some 200 years ago. This is the time to break one more mould- of allergy to hostile takeovers. And at this historic juncture my appeal to you would be to be ruthless in your pursuit of Orient Express Hotels once an initiative has been taken so that history is served a timely reminder of the fate of arrogance at the hands of elegance. And let us disregard the judgemental trivialities about being typecast as a predatory entrepreneur when in effect it is just furthering the national causes and identity.

Sir, legend has it that Jamsetji set his mind on building The Taj in Mumbai (completed in 1903 at the cost of Rs. 4.21 Crores) after being denied entry into one of the city's hotels for being an Indian. It seems divinely ordained and appropriate that another Tata should be spurred on to build on the present insult 100 years after his grand father made the most of that incident. And this time nothing less than takeover -hostile or otherwise- of Orient Express Hotels would do. One insult 100 years back gave us The Taj in Mumbai, one insult now would give us the Orient Express Hotels!

Once the take over is done, in keeping with the great Indian tradition of compassion, we would request you to retain Mr. Paul White, president and CEO of Orient Express Hotel and writer of that libellous letter as one of the functionaries of Indian Hotels so that he understands that whiteness is in deed and not in name. And this gesture of poetic justice would indicate that the wheel had turned full circle.

Sir, take your call. History is waiting to be made. And your signature is needed. Nice guys need not finish second. Not any more.

PrideOfMatchingham

Love & Sex: Anthropological and Mathematical Perspective

(A very intense discussion with my wife on the alleged capacity (or the lack of it) of males to love resurrected my own analysis on love as a behavioral response following a mathematical formulation. I had ruminated on this topic extensively in my own heydays when I used to consider myself as a thinker and roam around bearded in University. If anybody questioned my intellect, I used to point towards my beard and spectacles as a conclusive proof of intelligence. I request the indulgence of the fellow bloggers to read this piece and offer their sincere critique.)

Anthropologically and from evolutionary perspective, mating is the most basic and important activity since time immemorial. And hence you find ‘the male of the species being more beautiful/attractive than the females’- be it the flowing mane of a majestic lion or a riot of colours of a dancing peacock’s with his feathers all aglow! A cock dances around a hen or a mast elephant fights his competitor and establishes his supremacy to win ‘his ladies’. Anthropologically, it has always been the job of the strong male who would fight and win. Only then his chances for mating were good. Or else he might as well kiss his chances good bye. The preferential treatment of a successful male has geneticised to such an extent that males are wired to think of ‘sex/mating’ and we have now come to an evolutionary perspective which seems allergic or anathema to some women. In my opinion mating is an issue which is still being reflected in the instincts of males as a reminder of their anthropological and evolutionary bequeath. Period.

However, sociologically, we are getting better and better. (I hope!) This in turn has made certain instinctive activities and impulses questionable. Afterall, a gorilla never gives any diamond rings to a female gorilla before making his instinctive behavior clear. Nor does a lion take a prospective mate to a Taj for seven course dinner before making that amorous move. This animalistic uncouthness and lack of subtlety of animal kingdom, even though bequeathed to us, would not go down well with the society these days where even an ‘Aati Kya Khandala’ can land people in jail! Afterall, it is all about marching ahead and hiding your basic instincts. Bloggers would be aware that when Lady Diana was killed in that car accident in Paris, neither Prince Charles nor her two kids were seen crying by media. Because it is all about hiding and masking your feelings in the changing social mores where betrayal of one’s own emotion is seen as a sign of weakness and crying at other’s misfortune as a sign of compassion and humaneness (remember the then President of USA, Bill Clinton when he famously cried hugging one of the relatives of the deceased in Okhalama bombing.). With socialization and humanization, an unwritten socially acceptable code of behavior (and written legal behavior) has emerged which seems to regulate our behavior to a great extent by replacing ‘might is right’ to ‘rule of law’. Hence socialization has taught us to be subtle, circumspect and use graded rather than abrupt behavior. But the basic (or baser, if one may!) instincts though pushed to the hinterlands of ones’ minds, have not been fully extirpated. They still exist.

Love, the most difficult thing (?) to define takes its entry here. Even though Plato defined Love 'as an enemy of reason', I would like to define it in my own mathematical way. As per my definition, love is not an emotion but it is a behavioral response equivalent to the output of a multi-variable function of many emotions. Love is the determinant of relationship between/among individuals. It is not that love did not exist among the animals. It is just that there were fewer shades of emotions in animalistic love- to count a few: sex, hunger, thirst, fear, pain, anger, joy, togetherness. The preponderance of these basic emotions largely defined how they related to each other. But with evolution, many more shades of emotions have come in between. One more important surmise is that love is also a function of time and the context. Love doesnot operate in vacuum but it is the response to various stimuli at that particular time.

Hence I will say that

l= f(t, x 1 ,x 2 ,x 3 ,x 4 ,x 5 ,…………..,x n, )

where l= Love, f is a function of variables t = Time, x1=sex, x2= anger, x3= jealousy, x4= hate, x5= possessiveness, x6= care, x7= responsibility, x8=comfort level, x9= interests, x10= adoration,x11= fatherly, x12= motherly, x13= siblingual, x14= hunger, x15= thirst, x16= fear, x17= pain etc upto the variable x n .

Let us take the case about a guy thinking about sex on the very first meeting and see how this formula explains it here. As guys are evolutionarily wired towards mating and sex, the initial value pertaining to x1= sex might be maximum amount whereas the value of the other variables from x2 to xn in function would be less at time t=t1. But at time t= 9 days after marriage (as per Kamalji) the overall impact of x1=sex might not be as much in l=Love due to which the sexual component of love would be less. (Also remember the Laws of Diminishing Marginal Returns which might explain the 9-day phenomenon!)

Now reverse the situation. First time when the girl meets the guy, at time t=t1, x1 =0 for the girl (this is what many girls would like us to believe) and maybe x9= interests is maximum. So the girl might not feel anything sexually, though she might be attracted due to commonality of interests. Hence, the same formulae would explain the love as felt, perceived and understood by them at the same time but in different range of emotions and intensity.

The above formulae will explain every kind of love. Where ever the value of x1=0, in common parlance it is supposed to be platonic, parental or siblingual love having no sexual component. Even a deviant’s love having sexual component can be explained. So there is no exception to this formula.

Love doesnot mean always being on the best behavior. Because, it is a response to stimuli, hence the response would also depend upon the stimuli. One might be very much in love with one’s girl, but when at time= t, one is not able to meet office deadlines, the factor x i = frustration will change the tone and tenor of his love and he might answer abruptly to an otherwise innocent question of his girl. After a few days of business outing and abstemious behaviour, maybe variable x1= sex would again be raising its head (no pun!) and the love would have a higher component of it.

So, love is not unidimensional. And it changes in context of time as per the raging emotion of the time. Sex is just one of the variables of the function defined as love. It is equally applicable to men and women as per the time. And there would be a time when the component of sex in the love of both males and females would be the same. And this will dispel certain peoples’ implicit suggestion (preposterous to me!) that only men like sex, women endure it. I think, the graph of sexual craving is largely a decreasing graph for males and an increasing graph for females upto a certain age. And where they intersect, the equilibrium has been reached. Hence sexual compatibility would be attained when the difference between these two graph should not be too much as that will leave one of the partners unsatisfied leading to strain in relationship which would be reflected in some other ways of negative emotion.

Various bloggers have talked about recent social movements and their effect on sexual liberation of women. That feature is also explained by above formula, if one considers time as one of the variables. This ‘time’ component explains the changing social mores. And what I am trying to say is that a time will come when the social dynamics will completely reverse and what seems only relevant to male behavior today will also be reflected by female behavior. Hence, may be in next 100 years, a girl who looks at a guy for the first time, she will think of sex whereas the guy will think if she would be emotionally compatible and intellectually capable or not. She might even ask him “ Have you got a pistol in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

One of the comments of my wife doubted this supposition of mine about girl thinking about sex on the very first meeting under the pretext that she was ‘evolved’ and matured. However, if the past few decades are any indications, the assertive female behavior and liberated sexual winds blowing through the femaledom are indicators that the best (or the worst, depending upon which side of sexual revolution you are on!) is yet to come. And in those times to come, I can almost visualize men hiding under the beds from the prying eyes of their female counterparts. Time, the greatest master of human drama, would then move again like a pendulum from one extreme to another extreme.

Both men and women love with the same intensity. The component of love changes in both of them as per time and context. So we should never try to look for the same feelings and reciprocation as individuals are made differently. Different strokes for different folks, isnt it? Love exists, but it need not exist in the manner which Mills & Boon would like us to believe. It can exist in the irritation of a housewife, an exasperation of a husband, the disgust of a father at his wayward children, adoration of a daughter for her father, neglect of a husband towards his wife for some innocuous domestic issue as well as animalistic passion of a husband and wife or delightful idleness of a couple in the serene and pristine mountainous terrain.

Let us not look at love from some preconceived notion. But liberate it from our own mental boundaries so that it can take the infinite shape it is capable of taking and light our lives the way it has been doing till now.

PrideOfMatchingham

A Maelstrom into Marriage

Since the time I read the email, I was sweating like a pig. One of the best kept secrets seems to have got out. However the mode of the leak was beyond comprehension. How could something like this go out in the public domain? In my opinion, nobody even had an inkling of this. Earlier I was feeling safe in my own make and believe world. But the safety cocoon seems to have suddenly given way to palpable frustration. Hysteria of Doom was imminent. Apart from making me ashamed beyond words, this exposure had also made me vulnerable, open to infinite ridicule and undue overtures. And I knew of no way to thwart all these unwanted attention. My marriage of just a few days seemed crumbling.

I tried talking to my wife, rather confiding in her. Like a nervous sheep about to get a heart attack, I bleated out something like having got an email. Waving aside all the niceties the difficult situation demanded, my wife’s response was one of cold rebuke, considering that we were newly married. She told me that I got hundreds of emails everyday so what was so special about this? ‘If at all you get a female, it might be unusual,’ she retorted. I was sure that she was hitting below the belts. I am sure somebody has sent her the same mail and she is already in the know of the things. That’s why she is being so combative and full of vengeance. I started correlating things. Just a few days back she had told me that somebody had stolen and changed the password of her yahoo email id because of which she was not able to log into her yahoo mail. Now, in retrospect, I think she was lying about identity theft. She must have changed it herself to prevent me from knowing that she already knew! I am positive, certain!

Anyway, what to do? My overtures to confess and decide the best course of action had been stonewalled. I thought I will try again in the night and offer her the freedom to walk out of the marriage, if the issue was so important. Or may be do whatever was suggested in the mail. My male ego was taking a terrible beating and dark clouds were there everywhere without a trace of the proverbial silver lining.

Having effectively shut me up, my wife asked me to accompany her to market. I don’t know if it is true or I was just imagining but I noticed a growing stridency in her voice which certainly was because of her new knowledge. Knowledge is certainly power, I thought cynically. The moment I stepped out of the house, the watchman gave a nice salute with a smile and I was taken aback with this spontaneous display of service-with-a-smile motto. “My God, he is laughing at me. Look at those smiles.” I think there was also twinkle in his eyes. I was ashen faced, embarrassed to the core. Trying to hide my hurt I turned my head and was met by a very chirpy young fellow who shook my hand a bit too warmly.

“Uncle, where are you going?” asked the hideous fellow.

“Why?” I retorted.

“No, you are going with aunty. I thought I will come over and learn painting from aunty. But now I guess I have to come afterwards.” He carried on in his nonchalant way.

I put him at considerable ease by firmly telling him that he did not need to come over and learn blasted paintings. I clarified that I had not opened a painting school at home. I am sure it would have driven the point home as the guy seemed suitably chastised and my ego shot up a few notches.

On our way to exit, we were met by the milkman who quite patronizingly told me not to worry about paying the accumulated bills in a hurry or the newspaper vendor who said he will take it all at one go! I was growing more and more uneasy by the second.

Shopping at Big Bazaar seemed to be the nightmarish experience. Almost everybody was looking at my wife, I am sure. And certainly at me with that knowing smile. I was sweating even in the aircon mall. A lot of salesmen were talking to her and I knew that they were frequenting my place in my absence as wife was asking about the status of the Big Bazaar smart card which she had applied for during the visit of one of those salesmen.

“So she must have got that mail quite sometime back. Or maybe as a wedding gift from one of her jilted lovers who had unearthed my secrets and had forwarded it to my wife.” I reasoned.

We got back home in silence. My mind in a quandary. What to do? Either do as suggested in the mail which meant a gaping hole in my purse. But that was the minimum one would pay for some respectability and buying the silence of those blackmailers who were masquerading as salesmen. Another was to try and confront my wife about all those furtive glances from the watchmen, milkmen and others of their ilk which might be a figment of my imagination or might be truth itself. The third and the most respectable, from my point of view, was to acknowledge, confess and ask her if she wanted an honourable and speedy divorce with future silence as one of the clauses.

I decided on the third. Having finished her household chores in which I was giving more help today than any other day, I accompanied her to the bedroom. She went to the washroom to change and I stood guard at the gate. She asked from inside if I wanted to help her change! I think I could make out the sarcasm in her voice. She was mocking me, I am sure.

Anyway, I had to bite the bullet. I asked her to sit and listen to me. I told her that if she wanted a speedy and honorable divorce, that would not be a problem. "But please don’t make fun of me. And don’t let out this secret to anybody else." I pleaded. Now I must tell you that her reaction could have made any budding actress proud of the histrionics skills. She bore the mien of somebody who could have been knocked down with a feather. ‘Oh, what a waste these acting skills.’ I thought and came to the res immediately.

“So you already know it.” This was more of a statement of fact than a question.

“What?” She was still trying to play with me.

“This email thing which I got today. So you are already aware.” I tried to correlate what I was saying to her in the morning.

“Which email are you talking about?” So stubborn, I thought. Why does she want to hurt my ego all the more by asking me to spell out the thing.

“See, I would much rather that this thing did not get out. As a wife either you can guide me about the future course of action or if you want a divorce with ‘gag order’ I would be OK with it.”

Now it was her turn to be wide eyed. Or was she acting again? You never know. She did not have a clue or acted as if she did not. I asked her again if she also had got the same email and clearly told her that I was not aware of my own insufficiency. I had not wished to mislead her into this marriage with any false notions. It is just that this kind of thing was not discussed earlier hence I had no idea about what is normal or abnormal.

“What email are you taking about? What did it say?” my concerned wife asked me.

“The one from Kirk Davis of Laos Pharmaceuticals. I got it today.” I replied.

“What did it say.” Asked my wife concerned that I might have contracted the worst possible disease.

“Increase Your Penis Size by 4 Inches in $500.” I quoted the subject of the mail verbatim.

The comforting ring of her laughter set the tone for the most passionate honeymoon after marriage!

PrideOfMatchingham

A Continuing Love Story

The first time I set my eyes upon her, my heart skipped a beat. A feeling hitherto unknown to me overwhelmed me. I was engulfed by a tsunami of emotions about which I had only heard but not experienced. Was it what they call the euphoria of the highest order? Was it an affair about which much has been written and little understood? Was it one of the barometers of purest emotions? Was it what would make any loving and caring human being gladly give his heart and soul without batting an eyelid? Was it what made life worth giving up for but living many times over? Was it what made a slave out of a beast? As I confessed right in the beginning, the whole gamut of emotions I underwent at the time when I had my first look at her were unknown to me. I just vaguely remember thinking that here she was and she was mine. She had to be mine. As simple as that!

I madly and unabashedly fell in love with her or rather rose in love with her. An unlikely example of love at first sight. Unlikely because I was the person smitten. That was 27th march 2003.

Plato (isn’t it him?) said that “love transmogrifies people into romantic idiocy”. And how true he was! Here I was. A person known in his peer group to be cynical almost to the extent of being branded an anti-social. A person who was widely known to be averse to display of emotions. A person who used to think it was not worth giving much ‘bhao’ (credence/attention) to girls. A person who thought that his analytical bent of mind made him impervious to any emotions. A person who thought reason alone is supreme and emotion subsidiary. And a person who thought that any relationship is a function of material and quantifiable things. That person was behaving in a sheer brilliance of lunacy just after one glance at her! Indulging in public display of emotions. Giving exaggerated importance to the fairer sex. Acknowledging the influence of love on personality. Plato almost wrote about me when he penned the above lines.

Her arrival in my life was not so much of a landmark in her life as it was in mine. Those first few glances were enough to relegate analyticism to the hinterlands of my mind where no thought processes ever traveled. When my friends ask me what made me jelly-spined and pea-brained after looking at her for the first time, I tell them, almost as a cliché, that it was her eyes and hair. After all, you don’t expect to get those searching looks from someone who has seen you for the first time or whom you are seeing for the first time. But those inquiring eyes pierced my heart through and through. As if she was wanting to get into my heart and see if I was the right sort of guy and if it was the right place to be in for all times to come. To reassure herself before she became mine. And those tufts of hair so carelessly tossed all over her head in some oily-jelly-fluid. ‘Carefully-done-for-the-careless-effect’ kind of a thing, if you know what I mean. I looked at her, she kept looking at me and then she went inside with others. Those few moments redefined my life, my perspectives and my attitudes.

I called up all my friends and relatives. I firmly believed in myself breaking news to my own people before they get to hear about it from other sources. Their reactions ranged from genuine happiness to cultivated circumspection to false euphoria to considered sympathy to abject derision. My social duty over, I set about contemplating the course of action to win my beauty to my side. Completely. Afterall, being the first time, I wasn’t aware of the social mores. And the expectations. My only advantage was that I was willing to goto any extent for her.

My efforts paid rich dividends. She started reciprocating my gestures. She even gave me a friendly smile in just a few weeks of my courtship. Or was it pursuit. May be she played hard to get in the beginning but slowly and slowly she had started liking me to the extent that her eyes used to lit up on seeing me. And mind you, this when I am no great looker! And I knew I was on the winning path when she fidgetedly started waiting for me outside when it was time for me to call it a day in office. And I knew I had done it when she started recognizing my car’s horn and come to the gate to give me that 10000 watt smile which I am sure was reserved only for me and which could have done wonders for the infrastructure sector of even developed countries. I had done it! Voila Pappu pass ho gaya!

All this was also time for me to experience new kinds of feelings and newer kinds of joys. Feelings and joys that for me had hitherto existed only in the poets’ hearts’ or writers’ imagination. A whole new ‘me’ was created which was almost antithetical to the old ‘me’. Here I was ready to worship the earth she walked on in contrast to the earlier ‘me’ who would have wanted to cleanse the earth a girl walked on!

Soulful togetherness and joyous companionship went on even higher pedestal when after fourteen months from that C-day of March the 27th, we bathed together. It was a joy which is beyond my literary skills and I wanted it to continue for eons. That soft and gentle rubbing of soap on her pristine skin and cute bums and her failed effort at trying to extricate herself from me is etched in my heart and mind for ever. The giggle which escaped her mouth whenever I tickled her during bathing and the consequent twinkle in her eyes were worth dying for many times over.

Whenever my friends ask me what made me change my attitude and perspectives so much, I always attribute it to my continuing love affair. Then, like a fool, they ask me if my love affair has given me anything tangible (as if there has to be material manifestations of sublime things)!!?

I reply that whenever I ask her,” Whose darling you are?” she always replies,” I am your darling, daddy.”

Do I or will I ever need anything more in this world or the world beyond?

PrideOfMatchingham