Speaking for successful women

Liberal councillor Zerbanoo Gifford is working on a book about inspirational women from around the world.

Looking at Zerbanoo Gifford, it's hard to believe media reports which paint Britain as a society in crisis, led by politicians who want to reverse the country's long tradition of assimilating ethnic minority groups, particularly Asians.

But then Gifford, who was born in Calcutta, emigrated to Britain in the 1950s and rose to become Britain's first non-white Liberal councillor in 1982, is a relic of older, gentler times when communal ill-will remained at the level of the subliminal. To be fair, success stories like hers are also the wrong place to look for warts.

But it was never easy to be an Asian in Britain, as Gifford, who has advised numerous politicians, notably Jack Straw and Paddy Ashdown, on race relations, readily admits.

"Unlike France, England has always been strict about letting in ethnic minorities. Anyway, it's the east Europeans who are mostly coming into the country these days. All this talk of more Asians wanting to come in is fantasy. In fact, Frances Cairncross, now rector of Exeter College, Oxford, was telling me about how anxious Oxford is over Indians increasingly choosing to study in American colleges. As I see it, more and more Indians are going to come back to India."

But race relations is not what has brought Gifford to India, and is only tangentially related to what she is doing right now.

A recipient of the prestigious NESTA fellowship, she is presently writing a book that will be a compilation of the interviews of 250 "inspirational women" from all across the world.

Over the past year, Gifford has been talking to academics and actresses, entrepreneurs and environmentalists, businesswomen, executives, politicians, activists.

Her list has had "all the usual suspects" "" Glenda Jackson (Oscar-winning actress and British MP), Zakia Hakki (first women judge in west Asia and member of the Iraqi parliament), Eve Ansler (writer of The Vagina Monolog) "" and also some unusual ones "" Lucie Aubrac (French resistance heroine), Claire Bertschinger (Red Cross nurse who inspired Live Aid) and Caroline Cassey (a partially-sighted Irishwomen who started the O2 Ability Awards for businesses that recognise the contribution of disabled persons).

Among Indians, Gifford has zeroed in on Shiela Dikshit, Leila Seth and Simone Tata among others. In fact, Gifford's business in Calcutta is to talk to two such "inspirational" women "" Rekha Mody and Rakhi Sarkar.

The testimonies of these remarkable personalities "" Asha women, Gifford calls them, after the Asha Foundation she set up "" are to be compiled into a book that will reveal the startling connections between the success strategies of these women from diverse backgrounds.

Gifford has more plans for these inspirational women "" late next year she plans to hold a conference for them, all of whom she says want to come to India.

"Everybody wants to come to India," she says, "this new economic giant, which is also the centre for world spirituality. Then there is the element of glamour, of maharanis and, Bollywood, that attracts them."

The interview format is familiar to Gifford, author of the bestselling The Golden Thread (1990), which, by telling the stories of women like Noor Inayat Khan, the last radio operator in Britain, and Cornelia Sorabji, the first female lawyer in England, exploded the myth that all Asian women were doormats.

British-Asian women may not be walkovers any longer, but surely they aren't much better off, what with revenge killings?

Gifford bristles. "Don't say just Asian women. Violence against women everywhere has increased and it is caused by a misunderstanding born of ignorance, as well as by leaders who run down their own people and use situations to promote themselves. Then there are women who perpetrate violence against other women."

Gifford's formula for making things better, which she propounds with the air of a schoolteacher laying down the law "" "Education. Men must be taught to respect women."

And, indeed, Gifford sees evidence that such education has done its work in the "immensely improved" lot of women in general, and in the confidence, dynamism and optimism of her interviewees.

But then Gifford is an optimist; anyone who describes Calcutta, on her first visit in 40 years, as "extremely clean" would have to be an optimist.