 "Lunch with BS: Onno Ruhl")
Ignore the two dots on top of the ‘u’,” Onno Ruhl tells me kindly as we scrutinise each other’s business cards. They are a phonetic indicator, suggesting the vowel is pronounced something approximating “er” (as in oeuvre), but he’s okay with “rule” for my Anglo-Saxon-influenced inflections.
Ruhl, a Dutchman, took over as World Bank’s India Country Director from Roberto Zagha in September last year. He does not wear striking local outfits like his predecessor, but a ponytail and a face that would fit right into a Dutch Masters painting lend him a presence that prompts the waiter at Baci to unilaterally upgrade our table from near the service entrance to one by the window, writes Kanika Datta.
Ten months into his stint, he’s enjoying life in India after his posting as Country Director in Nigeria where he says the capital Abuja, artificially created in the eighties, lacks the personality of Delhi with its parks and ruins and, yes, Khan Market! and places like the upscale European-food restaurant at which we were lunching.
He’s discovered fresh lime soda, the ubiquitous Indian hot-weather drink, and opts for one before putting on a pair of John Lennon glasses to scan the menu. He chooses Carpaccio di Manzo, thin slices of beef (“real beef, not buffalo” the waiter assures us) dressed with lemon and olive oil, as a starter and Penne alla Matriciana, a standard Italian pasta dish with tomato, red chilli and parmesan cheese. I choose the Famous Felix, a many-leaved salad exquisitely dressed, and Spaghetti Alla Carbonara, spaghetti in egg sauce and garnished with bacon and herbs. The waiter suggests we have ordered too much food but we confidently dismiss his warning — indeed, he grossly underestimates our appetites.
Ruhl has not confined himself to the tonier parts of Delhi. He’s survived an Indian summer, having travelled mostly to the “Bimaru states and the north-east”. That’s in keeping with the Bank’s strategy of focusing on to the low-income states, “where you don’t always get the best hotels, except in Rajasthan”. He’d met Nitish Kumar the day before our lunch and describes the 62-year-old Bihar chief minister affectionately as “grandfatherly”. He was “rather fond of him”, because where other chief ministers usually ask for help with building roads or bridges, Kumar asked how the Bank could help him get girls into schools. “He’s completely focused on the human development angle,” says Ruhl approvingly.
Bimaru India is a world away from his first remit at the World Bank, which he left his Dutch foreign-service job to join. That was around the time the Berlin Wall came down and the Bank was looking for economists to work on the former Soviet states. He is full of stories of his work in Moldova, Armenia and Ukraine, especially of “the most fantastic project ever” in the latter.
This was a commercial space satellite launch involving companies in Ukraine, Russia, Norway and the US. Hardly a typical World Bank project and Ruhl admits that he and a colleague considered it only because they were “adventurous”. It involved guarantee agreements with the commercial banks funding the project. The development angle may not have been obvious but it was “actually quite compelling”. The Ukraine facility was the world’s largest intercontinental ballistic factory, and employed 70,000 engineers. “Remember, this was the mid-nineties and there were many reasons you wanted these engineers to work — partly for development but also so that they didn’t go to Iran or North Korea.”
The upshot was that to vet the project Ruhl got do all the “little-boy stuff” — go to the ground control station of the space station Mir, to the intercontinental ballistic missile factory, to the secretive Star City, Russia’s cosmonaut training centre (“I had my picture taken in a Soyuz”). Eventually, he brought the project to the World Bank board and “everybody loved it”.
The point being, he adds, that when he came to India and was asked (as I did) how World Bank could be relevant, he related this story “to show you can do anything — I actually worked on a space launch, I told them and they said, like, yeah, right! But I said it is all documented, you can look it up” (I did, it is).
He enjoyed a James Bond moment in Moldova too, he tells me as the starters are served. The early nineties were also the early days of email and in Moldova, sending a message involved cumbersome process of unscrewing the phone and attaching two leads tipped with serrated pincers to a wire inside. “So I was in this hotel and I unscrew one of those 1950s phones – and a microphone falls out. I really felt I was in an unreal world – a great experience!”
My Famous Felix is exquisitely dressed and we make short work of the starters. As we wait for the main course, I ask about the chaos of the early buccaneering capitalism in those regions. That was, he points out, not just because states fell apart – in the smaller countries, the wherewithal didn’t really exist – but also because everybody wanted the change to be irreversible and the way to do that was to put the assets in the hands of the private sector.
“That created the cowboy thing because they did it so quickly that some people really benefitted and lessons were learnt too late. So now, they own football clubs – that too ones I don’t like!” He’s referring, of course, to Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea, deadly London rivals to Arsenal, the club he supports. I tell him I follow Liverpool, which he politely describes as “respectable”. “Only red [official colours of both teams] can be acceptable just like my hometown club of Ajax Amsterdam,” he says with the illogical finality typical of a committed fan.
Ruhl has this knack of being in happening places and his 12-year stint in Africa was no exception. He believes deeply in the rise of Africa, and makes a point hugely relevant to India: that IT has been transformational for Africa. “The most advanced country in terms of banking for the poor is Kenya because there the central bank allowed the cell phone companies to effectively operate as a bank. So, if you go to a low-level market in Kenya, the payment is by cell phone. Many central banks have the same notion as India of not treating non-banks as banks — but Kenya is a spectacular counterpoint to it.”
He also thinks India has a better chance of doing business successfully in Africa than the Chinese because of cultural affinities. First, there’s the prominent presence of an Indian community in east Africa. Second, “the Chinese operate on the command-and-control system but Africans would be more comfortable in India because the context is much more relevant — chaotic, democratic, pluralistic.”
The rivalry, he tells me with a grin, is manifest in the motorcycle wars in Nigeria between Bajaj and the Chinese brands. “The latter are cheaper but Nigerians know Bajaj is better.” So in the richer parts of Nigeria, the motorcycle taxis are Bajaj; in the poorer parts, they’re Chinese. The Indian High Commissioner, is “always excited about how they managed to beat the Chinese, which is obviously an important preoccupation”.
The main courses are served and I note that the chef has not smothered the spaghetti in egg sauce. Inevitably, I ask Ruhl about the food security ordinance that has fiercely polarised the public discourse. He answers hesitantly, partly, he tells me, not to sound preachy. He prefaces his remarks by saying India is “a middle income country — just about”, but with a huge poverty problem. “I am a social democrat so the programme sounds right to me. But can you afford it and will it work?”
“We hear people in India say if we give poor people money they might buy maybe liquor and not food. I have a hard time believing that because they would die if they didn’t buy food. So as an economist, I am a declared supporter of cash benefits. But it’s super controversial and if you come from the World Bank and say cash is better than food, people get very upset. I never met a person in my life who didn’t prefer cash over anything else. But apparently that doesn’t matter in the argument.”
He declines the pepper mill and warms to the subject of India’s development agenda and refers to visiting Gujarat to see some SEWA projects. I eagerly ask whether he’s met Narendra Modi, the state’s headline-grabbing chief minister. No, he replies, suddenly cryptic. Okay, he’d been on field visits so did he subscribe to the pro-business view of Modi or the one that suggests Gujarat’s human development indicators could do with some attention? He embarks on a circuitous answer, then laughs: “I’m going to plead the fifth on that one!”
I change the subject to his wide knowledge of languages, one of which is Lingala, spoken in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He explains he picked it up as a means of re-establishing the World Bank’s credibility with the people after the fall of the long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, with whom the Bank came to be closely associated.
As a non-Indo-European language it was slightly tough to learn but the grammar was easy. Which brings me to his Hindi lessons. “Hindi bahut asaan hai,” he jokes. Even the gender inflections? But his dilemma is not the common one of deciding which gender to assign various objects. Instead, he finds the fact that “ladka is boy and ladki is girl confusing because in Romance languages anything ending with ‘a’ denotes a feminine gender.” I have to give Ruhl time to finish his penne and we end this splendid meal with coffee, a palpitation-inducing single espresso shot for him, Cappucino for me, and chat about his other interests. He tells me he used to play classical trumpet, including in orchestras, until work and a dental problem required him to give it up. I am sure there’s much more to him than that, but we’ve already spent over two hours at lunch and the embarrassingly loud click of the ancient recorder reminds me that, really, we should wind up.
(A shorter version of this article appeared in the print edition on July 20, 2013)
Ruhl, a Dutchman, took over as World Bank’s India Country Director from Roberto Zagha in September last year. He does not wear striking local outfits like his predecessor, but a ponytail and a face that would fit right into a Dutch Masters painting lend him a presence that prompts the waiter at Baci to unilaterally upgrade our table from near the service entrance to one by the window, writes Kanika Datta.
Ten months into his stint, he’s enjoying life in India after his posting as Country Director in Nigeria where he says the capital Abuja, artificially created in the eighties, lacks the personality of Delhi with its parks and ruins and, yes, Khan Market! and places like the upscale European-food restaurant at which we were lunching.
He’s discovered fresh lime soda, the ubiquitous Indian hot-weather drink, and opts for one before putting on a pair of John Lennon glasses to scan the menu. He chooses Carpaccio di Manzo, thin slices of beef (“real beef, not buffalo” the waiter assures us) dressed with lemon and olive oil, as a starter and Penne alla Matriciana, a standard Italian pasta dish with tomato, red chilli and parmesan cheese. I choose the Famous Felix, a many-leaved salad exquisitely dressed, and Spaghetti Alla Carbonara, spaghetti in egg sauce and garnished with bacon and herbs. The waiter suggests we have ordered too much food but we confidently dismiss his warning — indeed, he grossly underestimates our appetites.
Ruhl has not confined himself to the tonier parts of Delhi. He’s survived an Indian summer, having travelled mostly to the “Bimaru states and the north-east”. That’s in keeping with the Bank’s strategy of focusing on to the low-income states, “where you don’t always get the best hotels, except in Rajasthan”. He’d met Nitish Kumar the day before our lunch and describes the 62-year-old Bihar chief minister affectionately as “grandfatherly”. He was “rather fond of him”, because where other chief ministers usually ask for help with building roads or bridges, Kumar asked how the Bank could help him get girls into schools. “He’s completely focused on the human development angle,” says Ruhl approvingly.
Bimaru India is a world away from his first remit at the World Bank, which he left his Dutch foreign-service job to join. That was around the time the Berlin Wall came down and the Bank was looking for economists to work on the former Soviet states. He is full of stories of his work in Moldova, Armenia and Ukraine, especially of “the most fantastic project ever” in the latter.
This was a commercial space satellite launch involving companies in Ukraine, Russia, Norway and the US. Hardly a typical World Bank project and Ruhl admits that he and a colleague considered it only because they were “adventurous”. It involved guarantee agreements with the commercial banks funding the project. The development angle may not have been obvious but it was “actually quite compelling”. The Ukraine facility was the world’s largest intercontinental ballistic factory, and employed 70,000 engineers. “Remember, this was the mid-nineties and there were many reasons you wanted these engineers to work — partly for development but also so that they didn’t go to Iran or North Korea.”
The upshot was that to vet the project Ruhl got do all the “little-boy stuff” — go to the ground control station of the space station Mir, to the intercontinental ballistic missile factory, to the secretive Star City, Russia’s cosmonaut training centre (“I had my picture taken in a Soyuz”). Eventually, he brought the project to the World Bank board and “everybody loved it”.
The point being, he adds, that when he came to India and was asked (as I did) how World Bank could be relevant, he related this story “to show you can do anything — I actually worked on a space launch, I told them and they said, like, yeah, right! But I said it is all documented, you can look it up” (I did, it is).
He enjoyed a James Bond moment in Moldova too, he tells me as the starters are served. The early nineties were also the early days of email and in Moldova, sending a message involved cumbersome process of unscrewing the phone and attaching two leads tipped with serrated pincers to a wire inside. “So I was in this hotel and I unscrew one of those 1950s phones – and a microphone falls out. I really felt I was in an unreal world – a great experience!”
My Famous Felix is exquisitely dressed and we make short work of the starters. As we wait for the main course, I ask about the chaos of the early buccaneering capitalism in those regions. That was, he points out, not just because states fell apart – in the smaller countries, the wherewithal didn’t really exist – but also because everybody wanted the change to be irreversible and the way to do that was to put the assets in the hands of the private sector.
“That created the cowboy thing because they did it so quickly that some people really benefitted and lessons were learnt too late. So now, they own football clubs – that too ones I don’t like!” He’s referring, of course, to Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea, deadly London rivals to Arsenal, the club he supports. I tell him I follow Liverpool, which he politely describes as “respectable”. “Only red [official colours of both teams] can be acceptable just like my hometown club of Ajax Amsterdam,” he says with the illogical finality typical of a committed fan.
Ruhl has this knack of being in happening places and his 12-year stint in Africa was no exception. He believes deeply in the rise of Africa, and makes a point hugely relevant to India: that IT has been transformational for Africa. “The most advanced country in terms of banking for the poor is Kenya because there the central bank allowed the cell phone companies to effectively operate as a bank. So, if you go to a low-level market in Kenya, the payment is by cell phone. Many central banks have the same notion as India of not treating non-banks as banks — but Kenya is a spectacular counterpoint to it.”
He also thinks India has a better chance of doing business successfully in Africa than the Chinese because of cultural affinities. First, there’s the prominent presence of an Indian community in east Africa. Second, “the Chinese operate on the command-and-control system but Africans would be more comfortable in India because the context is much more relevant — chaotic, democratic, pluralistic.”
The rivalry, he tells me with a grin, is manifest in the motorcycle wars in Nigeria between Bajaj and the Chinese brands. “The latter are cheaper but Nigerians know Bajaj is better.” So in the richer parts of Nigeria, the motorcycle taxis are Bajaj; in the poorer parts, they’re Chinese. The Indian High Commissioner, is “always excited about how they managed to beat the Chinese, which is obviously an important preoccupation”.
The main courses are served and I note that the chef has not smothered the spaghetti in egg sauce. Inevitably, I ask Ruhl about the food security ordinance that has fiercely polarised the public discourse. He answers hesitantly, partly, he tells me, not to sound preachy. He prefaces his remarks by saying India is “a middle income country — just about”, but with a huge poverty problem. “I am a social democrat so the programme sounds right to me. But can you afford it and will it work?”
“We hear people in India say if we give poor people money they might buy maybe liquor and not food. I have a hard time believing that because they would die if they didn’t buy food. So as an economist, I am a declared supporter of cash benefits. But it’s super controversial and if you come from the World Bank and say cash is better than food, people get very upset. I never met a person in my life who didn’t prefer cash over anything else. But apparently that doesn’t matter in the argument.”
He declines the pepper mill and warms to the subject of India’s development agenda and refers to visiting Gujarat to see some SEWA projects. I eagerly ask whether he’s met Narendra Modi, the state’s headline-grabbing chief minister. No, he replies, suddenly cryptic. Okay, he’d been on field visits so did he subscribe to the pro-business view of Modi or the one that suggests Gujarat’s human development indicators could do with some attention? He embarks on a circuitous answer, then laughs: “I’m going to plead the fifth on that one!”
I change the subject to his wide knowledge of languages, one of which is Lingala, spoken in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He explains he picked it up as a means of re-establishing the World Bank’s credibility with the people after the fall of the long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, with whom the Bank came to be closely associated.
As a non-Indo-European language it was slightly tough to learn but the grammar was easy. Which brings me to his Hindi lessons. “Hindi bahut asaan hai,” he jokes. Even the gender inflections? But his dilemma is not the common one of deciding which gender to assign various objects. Instead, he finds the fact that “ladka is boy and ladki is girl confusing because in Romance languages anything ending with ‘a’ denotes a feminine gender.” I have to give Ruhl time to finish his penne and we end this splendid meal with coffee, a palpitation-inducing single espresso shot for him, Cappucino for me, and chat about his other interests. He tells me he used to play classical trumpet, including in orchestras, until work and a dental problem required him to give it up. I am sure there’s much more to him than that, but we’ve already spent over two hours at lunch and the embarrassingly loud click of the ancient recorder reminds me that, really, we should wind up.
(A shorter version of this article appeared in the print edition on July 20, 2013)