Ajit Balakrishnan: Field notes from an evening out

PEOPLETECH

"This is Naushad. Can we meet this evening?" I was truly happy to get this phone call from Naushad after so long. I'd met him on my first day at work when I arrived in Bombay in the 70s. When, with my small-town, middle class prejudices, I was wary of the well-turned out girls we went out with in Bombay; it was Naushad who taught me to see past the mini-skirts and see how nice they really were. When I was intimidated by the luxury of the restaurants at the Taj Mahal Hotel, it was he who hand-held me for my first visit there.

Here I was now, on a Friday evening, at the subtly lit, wood-panelled bar at The Prestigious Club nursing a glass of wine.

Naushad finally extricated himself from his friends and sat down at our table.

"We have an Admissions Committee meeting next week; so we were exchanging some notes on the candidates," he said. "We meet once a month; we try and weed out people who do not fit in here."

"Why did you want to meet so urgently today?"

"I have a favour to ask of you. My son, who is doing his undergraduate course in the United States, is here for a break. He says an internship with a major international financial services company will look good on his resume when he finishes his course and applies to Wall Street firms. You know these people at places like Goldman Sachs and Merrill, can you please get him an internship?"

I murmured that though I did a lot of business with firms like these and knew many of their leaders, I doubted if they would oblige with a mere "word" from me. They probably had strict, formal processes for such recruitment. Why did his son not apply directly to these firms?

"He says that the only way to get in is through contacts. Many of his friends' fathers have already done it for them."

"Aren't any of them here, waiting for you to admit them to this club?" I asked.

"Someday, hopefully, they will be," he said.

"Look at that man," he said, pointing to a man in a slightly faded suit sitting by him in the corner. "He is a senior Customs official--if you have any problems with Customs please tell me and I'll speak to him."

"I didn't know that Government officials were part of your club," I said.

"We invite the top ones to join us; it smoothens things out when members have problems," said Naushad. "In any case, the land this club is on is leased from the government at very low rates. We have to be on the right side of these people."

As Naushad kept prattling about the difficult times at the company he worked for, my thoughts wandered to Pranabh Bardhan's 1984 book The Political Economy of India.

In the 1980s, said Bardhan, Indian policy making was dominated by three interest groups: owners of industrial groups, well-to-do landlords and white collar workers in the state sector (civil servants, military and the public sector). They "used the state as their private property. The state ... is their material base. These three classes ... are ... in ... various types of co-operation and conflicts with each other, resulting in economic stagnation."

Naushad and his friends at the Prestigious Club had weathered that era by co-opting the powerful players of that era--newly minted Indian industrialists and senior people in the state sector.

Things changed again with the era of economic reforms. When Bardhan had a re-look at post-reform India in 1998, he said: "these classes are now losing their control over state power in the face of the emerging hordes of lower castes and thus opting for greener pastures in the private sector (and abroad)."

The white collar group is now splitting into two. The higher levels by carefully controlling access to elite schools in the big cities find their way to universities in the US and then enter the new multinationals setting up base in India and ardently support economic reform. The lower levels, whose jobs are threatened by the reform process, increasingly turn to left-oriented parties and trade unions for protection against reform.

"Hello, come back from wherever you are," said Naushad, playfully punching my arm and bringing me back to the bar at the Prestigious Club.

"I should be off," I said.

"It's raining hard outside and you will not find a cab easily. I'll drop you home," said Naushad.

It was raining so hard that you could barely see a few yards ahead on the deserted streets. The gothic building of VT station glowed through the rain like a giant castle.

"Look how they change things," said Naushad. "What's the point of changing the name 'Victoria Terminus' to 'Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus'?"

When I got off at home, I apologised for the detour to drop me that must have added an hour to his trip home.

He brushed off my thanks.

"Anything for an old friend," he said.

As I watched the tail-lights of his car recede into the dark, rain-swept night I could not help but marvel at the agility with which people like Naushad using the levers of control at clubs and elite schools have weathered so many waves of change.

Comments welcome at ajitb@rediffmail.com