Month: September 2022

Diaspora Literature – A Testimony of Realism

Diaspora Literature involves an idea of a homeland, a place from where the displacement occurs and narratives of harsh journeys undertaken on account of economic compulsions. Basically Diaspora is a minority community living in exile. The Oxford English Dictionary 1989 Edition (second) traces the etymology of the word ‘Diaspora’ back to its Greek root and to its appearance in the Old Testament (Deut: 28:25) as such it references. God’s intentions for the people of Israel to be dispersed across the world. The Oxford English Dictionary here commences with the Judic History, mentioning only two types of dispersal: The “Jews living dispersed among the gentiles after the captivity” and The Jewish Christians residing outside the Palestine. The dispersal (initially) signifies the location of a fluid human autonomous space involving a complex set of negotiation and exchange between the nostalgia and desire for the Homeland and the making of a new home, adapting to the power, relationships between the minority and majority, being spokes persons for minority rights and their people back home and significantly transacting the Contact Zone – a space changed with the possibility of multiple challenges.

People migrating to another country in exile home

Living peacefully immaterially but losing home

Birth of Diaspora Literature

However, the 1993 Edition of Shorter Oxford’s definition of Diaspora can be found. While still insisting on capitalization of the first letter, ‘Diaspora’ now also refers to ‘anybody of people living outside their traditional homeland.

In the tradition of indo-Christian the fall of Satan from the heaven and humankind’s separation from the Garden of Eden, metaphorically the separation from God constitute diasporic situations. Etymologically, ‘Diaspora’ with its connotative political weight is drawn from Greek meaning to disperse and signifies a voluntary or forcible movement of the people from the homeland into new regions.” (Pp.68-69)

Under Colonialism, ‘Diaspora’ is a multifarious movement which involves-

oThe temporary of permanent movement of Europeans all over the world, leading to Colonial settlement. Consequen’s, consequently the ensuing economic exploitation of the settled areas necessitated large amount of labor that could not be fulfilled by local populace. This leads to:

oThe Diaspora resulting from the enslavement of Africans and their relocation to places like the British colonies. After slavery was out lawed the continued demand for workers created indenturement labor. This produces:

oLarge bodies of the people from poor areas of India, China and other to the West Indies, Malaya Fiji. Eastern and Southern Africa, etc. (see-http://www.postcolonialweb.com)

William Sarfan points out that the term Diaspora can be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share some of the common characteristics given hereunder:

1.They or their ancestor have been dispersed from a special original ‘centre’ or two or more ‘peripheral’ of foreign regions;

2.They retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland-its physical location, history and achievements;

3.They believe they are not- and perhaps cannot be- fully accepted by their lost society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulted from it;

4.They regard their ancestral homeland as their, true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendents would (or should) eventually return- when conditions are appropriate;

5.They believe they should collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their homeland and its safety and prosperity; and

6.They continue to relate, personally and vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethno- communal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship ;( Safren Willam cited in Satendra Nandan: ‘Diasporic Consciousness’ Interrogative Post-Colonial: Column Theory, Text and Context, Editors: Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee; Indian Institute of Advanced Studies 1996, p.53)

There lies a difficulty in coming to terms with diaspora, and as such it introduces conceptual categories to display the variety of meanings the word invokes. Robin Cohen classifies Diaspora as:

1. Victim Diasporas

2. Labour Diasporas

3. Imperial Diasporas

4. Trade Diasporas

5. Homeland Diasporas

6. Cultural Diasporas

The author finds a common element in all forms of Diaspora; these are people who live outside their ‘natal (or imagined natal) territories’ (ix) and recognize that their traditional homelands are reflected deeply in the languages they speak, religion they adopt, and cultures they produce. Each of the categories of Diasporas underline a particular cause of migration usually associated with particular groups of people. So for example, the Africans through their experience of slavery have been noted to be victims of extremely aggressive transmigrational policies. (Cohen)

Though in the age of technological advancement which has made the traveling easier and the distance shorter so the term Diaspora has lost its original connotation, yet simultaneously it has also emerged in another form healthier than the former. At first, it is concerned with human beings attached to the homelands. Their sense of yearning for the homeland, a curious attachment to its traditions, religions and languages give birth to diasporic literature which is primarily concerned with the individual’s or community’s attachment to the homeland. The migrant arrives ‘unstuck from more than land’ (Rushdie). he runs from pillar to post crossing the boundries of time, memory and History carrying ‘bundles and boxes’ always with them with the vision and dreams of returning homeland as and when likes and finds fit to return. Although, it is an axiomatic truth that his dreams are futile and it wouldn’t be possible to return to the homeland is ‘metaphorical’ (Hall). the longing for the homeland is countered by the desire to belong to the new home, so the migrant remains a creature of the edge, ‘the peripheral man’ (Rushdie). According to Naipaul the Indians are well aware that their journey to Trinidad ‘had been final’ (Andse Dentseh,) but these tensions and throes remain a recurring theme in the Diasporic Literature.

Diaspora

1.Forced 2.Voluntary

Indian Diaspora can be classified into two kinds:

1. Forced Migration to Africa, Fiji or the Caribbean on account of slavery or indentured labour in the 18th or 19th century.

2.Voluntary Migration to U.S.A., U.K., Germany, France or other European countries for the sake of professional or academic purposes.

According to Amitava Ghose-‘the Indian Diaspora is one of the most important demographic dislocation of Modern Times'(Ghosh,) and each day is growing and assuming the form of representative of a significant force in global culture. If we take the Markand Paranjpe, we will find two distinct phases of Diaspora, these are called the visitor Diaspora and Settler Diaspora much similar to Maxwell’s ‘Invader’ and ‘Settler’ Colonialist.

The first Diaspora consisted of dispriveledged and subaltern classes forced alienation was a one way ticket to a distant diasporic settlement. As, in the days of yore, the return to Homeland was next to impossible due to lack of proper means of transportation, economic deficiency, and vast distances so the physical distance became a psychological alienation, and the homeland became the sacred icon in the diasporic imagination of the authors also.

But the second Diaspora was the result of man’s choice and inclination towards the material gains, professional and business interests. It is particularly the representation of privilege and access to contemporary advanced technology and communication. Here, no dearth of money or means is visible rather economic and life style advantages are facilitated by the multiple visas and frequent flyer utilities. Therefore, Vijay Mishra is correct when he finds V S Naipaul as the founding father of old diaspora but it is also not wrong to see Salman Rushdie as the representative of Modern (second) Diaspora V S Naipaul remarkably portrays the search for the roots in his ‘A House for Mr. Biswas:

“to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and accommodated.(Naipaul,14) similarly Mohan Biswas’s peregrination over the next 35 years, he was to be a wanderer with no place to call his own'(ibid. 40)

In the same manner, Rushdie’s Midnight Children and Shame are the novels of leave taking… from the country of his birth (India) and from that second country (Pakistan) where he tried, half-heartedly to settle and couldn’t.” (Aizaz Ahmad, 135)

Here the critique of Paranjape generates the debate of competing forms of writing: Diaspora or domiciled -those who stayed back home and importantly a competitive space for the right to construct the homeland, so he points out the possibility of harm by ‘usurping the space which native self- representations are striving to find in the International Literary Market place and that they may ‘contribute to the Colonization of the Indian psyche by pondering to Western tastes which prefer to see India in a negative light.’ The works of various authors like Kuketu Mehta, Amitava Ghosh, Tabish, Khair, Agha Shahid Ali, Sonali Bose, Salman Rushdie confirm a hybridity between diasporic and domiciled consciousness. They are National, not Nationalistic inclusive not parochial, respecting the local while being ecumenical, celebrating human values and Indian pluralism as a vital ‘worldliness’. (Ashcraft, 31-56)

The diasporian authors engage in cultural transmission that is equitably exchanged in the manner of translating a map of reality for multiple readerships. Besides, they are equipped with bundles of memories and articulate an amalgam of global and national strands that embody real and imagined experience. Suketu Mehta is advocate of idea of home is not a consumable entity. He says:

You cannot go home by eating certain foods, by replaying its films on your T.V. screens. At some point you have to live there again.”(Mehta, 13)

So his novel Maximum City is the delineation of real lives, habits, cares, customs, traditions, dreams and gloominess of Metro life on the edge, in an act of morphing Mumbai through the unmaking of Bombay. It is also true, therefore, that diasporic writing is full of feelings of alienation, loving for homeland dispersed and dejection, a double identification with original homeland and adopted country, crisis of identity, mythnic memory and the protest against discrimination is the adopted country. An Autonomous space becomes permanent which non- Diasporas fail to fill. M K Gandhi, the first one to realize the value of syncretic solutions’ hence he never asked for a pure homeland for Indians in South Socio-cultural space and so Sudhir Kumar confirms Gandhi as the first practitioner of diasporic hybridity. Gandhi considered all discriminations of high and low, small or great, Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Sikh but found them ‘All were alike the children of Mother India.’

Diasporic writings are to some extent about the business of finding new Angles to enter reality; the distance, geographical and cultural enables new structures of feeling. The hybridity is subversive. It resists cultural authoritarianism and challenges official truths.”(Ahmad Aizaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures; OUP, 1992,p.126) one of the most relevant aspect of diasporic writing is that it forces, interrogates and challenges the authoritative voices of time (History). The Shadow Line of Amitav Ghosh has the impulse when the Indian States were complicit in the programmes after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The author elaborates the truth in the book when he says:

“In India there is a drill associated with civil disturbances, a curfew is declared, paramilitary units are deployed; in extreme cares, the army monarchs to the stricken areas. No city in India is better equipped to perform this drill than New Delhi, with its high security apparatus.”(Amitava Ghosh, 51)

The writers of Diaspora are the global paradigm shift, since the challenges of Postmodernism to overreaching narratives of power relations to silence the voices of the dispossessed; these marginal voices have gained ascendance and even found a current status of privilege. These shifts suggest:

“That it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history-subjugation, domination, Diaspora, displacement- that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.”(Bhabha, 172)

The novels of Amitav Ghosh especially the hungry tide in which the character Kanai Dutt is cast together “with chance circumstance with a Cetologist from the US, Priya Roy studying fresh water Dalphines, The Oracaella Brebirostris. The multiple histories of the Sunderbans became alive when the diaries of Marxist school teacher Nirmal came to light. He withdraws from the romance of political activism and came to settle with his wife Nilima in Lucibari and the relation between them is exemplified in the pragmatism of Nilima:

“You live in a dream world- a haze of poetry

Such passages of the novel points towards the metaphorical distinctions between the centre and margins, made narrative and little histories the well knows gods and the gods of small things. In the novels of Ghosh an assault of unarmed settlers Morich Jhapi, in order to evict them forcively is carried out by gangsters hired by states. They had been “assembling around the island… they burnt the settlers, hearts, they sank their boats, they lay waste their fields.”(ibid)

Similarly there are a number of novels by South Asian and British Writers on the theme of partition a blatant reality in the global history. Partition was the most traumatic experience of division of hearts and communities. Similarly, Ice Candy Man comprises 32 chapters and provides a peep into the cataclysmic events in turmoil on the sub continent during partition, the spread of communal riots between the Hindu and Sikhs on the one side and the Muslim on the other. The Muslims were attached at a village Pirpindo and the Hindus were massacred at Lahore. It was partition only that became the cause of the biggest bloodshed and brutal holocaust in annals of mankind. Lenny on eight years child narrates the chain of events on the basis of her memory. How she learns from her elders and how she beholds the picture of divided India by her own eyes in the warp and woof of the novel. There is a fine blend of longing and belonging of multiplicity of perspectives and pointed nostalgia of mirth and sadness and of Sufism and Bhakti is epitomized in the work of Aga Shahid Ali. Similarly the novels of Rahi Masoom Raja (in Hindi) narrate woeful tale of partition, the foul play of politicians, the devastated form of the nation and its people after partition and longing for the home that has been:

“Jinse hum choot gaye Aab vo jahan kaise hai

Shakh-e-gulkaise hai, khushbu ke mahak kaise hai

Ay saba too to udhar hi se gujarti hai

Pattaron vale vo insane, vo behis dar-o-bam

Vo makee kaise hai, sheeshe ke makan kaise hai.

(Sheeshe Ke Maka Vale ,173)

(“To which we hav’een left adrift how are those worlds

How the branch of flower is, how the mansion of fragrance is.

O,wind! You do pass from there

How are my foot-prints in that lane

Those stony people, those tedious houses

How are those residents and how are those glass houses.)

Most of the major novels of South Asia are replete with the diasporic consciousness which is nothing but the witness of the all the happenings of social realities, longings and feeling of belonging. Train To Pakistan, The Dark Dancer, Azadi, Ice Candy Man, A Bend In The Ganges, Twice Born, Midnight’s Children, Sunlight on A Broken Column, Twice Dead, The Rope and Ashes and Petals all these novels abound in the same tragic tale of woe and strife from different angles. Most of the fictions of South Asian Countries are written in the background of post- colonial times and the same South Asian countries were under the colonial rules of the English. After a long battle of independence when those countries were liberated, other bolt from the blue of partition happened. This theme became whys and wherefores of the most of South Asian novels and the popularity of it will prognosticate its golden future.

References:

1.(Cohen Robin, Global Diasporas- An Introduction. London: UC L Press, 1997)

2.Rushdie: Picador, Rupa, 1983.

3.Safren Willam cited in Satendra Nandan: ‘Diasporic Consciousness’ Interrogative Post-Colonial: Column Theory, Text and Context, Editors: Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee; Indian Institute of Advanced Studies 1996, p.53)

4.Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora in Patric White and Laura Christmas, eds, Colonial Discourses and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994,p.401)

5.(Rushdie: Shame Picader, Rupa, 1983, p.283).

6.(An Area of Darkness London: Andse Dentseh, 1964,p. 31)

7.(Ghosh, Amitava : ‘The Diaspora in Indian Culture’ in The Imam and The Indian Ravi Dayal and Permanent Books, Delhi : 2002,p.243)

8.(Naipaul, V S, A House for Mr. Biswas Penguin, 1969,p.14)

9.Aizaz Ahmad ‘In Theory: Classes Nations, Literatures, O.U.P.1992, and p.135)

10.(Ashcraft. Bill. And Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity Routledge,London & New York 1999,p.31-56 )

11.(Mehta, Suketu, Maximum City Viking, Penguin, 2004, p. 13)

12.(Amitava Ghosh, The Ghost of Mrs. Gandhi in The Imam and The Indian , Ravi Dayal, New Delhi, 2002,p.51

13.(Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, Lodon, 1994,)

14.(Ghosh, Amitav,The Hungry Tide Delhi:Ravi Dayal Pub.2004)

15.Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza, Sheeshe Ke Maka Vale. ed. Kunvar Pal Singh, Delhi: Vani Pub.2001,)

The Memory of Love, Part 1

For the entire period of my association with Satyam as an employee, I had never – not even for a day – missed sticking my pen into the front pocket of my shirt. My romantic crush Preeti gifted me a pen – a silver Parker – and since then it became a much-loved, well-cared for badge of love that I had, admittedly, loved to show off.

Preeti Ranautra worked for a financial company dealing with credits, foreign exchange, accounts and sales and the lot. By virtue of her being a management graduate in Finance, her job necessarily entailed her to keep browsing loads of forex and securities files daily; deal with money coming in and going out; files of individual account holders and small and medium enterprises/businesses (SMEs) and the whole nine yards.

1998: A Personal History

My name is Arpan… Arpan Monalic and my courtship with Preeti literally began on the telephone. The romantic year of 1998 bears testimony to that fact. Preeti used to call our office to speak with Papita InTears, who was one of her mutual friends, on the direct line. On several occasions, when Papita was not in office yet, I got to informing her:

“Papita hasn’t come in yet and she’d be fashionably late again to office! But as soon as she pops in I promise that I shall entreat her to call you first thing… and by the way my name is Arpan”.

She’d at first laugh at the breathlessness with which I blurt out on the phone and say “and my name is Preeti”. And before hanging up, she’d say “thanks”.

Papita joined Satyam at TSR Towers along with me and Manpreet Jogi. I, Manpreet and Papita shared an enlarged cabin with three computers inside it – two at the front and one at the back. Most often, whenever someone called on the phone, Manpreet’s hands always rose first to get it. His quick reflexes were seen to be believed! If his ‘Hello’ is quickly boomed into the phone it only meant the conversation from the other side of the line better be clear and to the point! Everybody knew Manpreet’s hard-boiled booming yowl very well compared to my yell or Papita’s foxy howl. On occasions when he passed on the phone to me smiling his trademark cheesy smile it only implied that Preeti Ranuatra, my chui-mui (shy princess) girl, was on line for me. Manpreet, a blue-blooded sophisticate that he is, would never eavesdrop on our coochie-cooing, nope! And this way began one of the loveliest chapters being written on the storybook of my life.

Ms. InTears was also believed to be friends with the great Pommy Candel Fishsketcher (a.k.a. Pom), who worked with Preeti at her financial securities company situated on SD Road. Both Pom and Preeti were thick-as-thieves, always together, conjoined colleagues; only Papita (with her self-centered American dreams) was like a detached feather of the same flock, who, I presume, couldn’t possibly dare to handle a ‘Finance’ job and so scampered off to join a desi IT company instead. To me this very fact was no less than a God’s blessing (actually Papita’s accidental irony!) as it bequeathed in me my close companionship with Preeti. But, thankfully, that blessing stops there.

Strangely, my office colleague Papita, a tall and ghostly predator, flinched outright at the idea of Preeti and me getting romantically involved, and now this was completely unlike her chubbier and far more cheerful friend Pom who was absolutely cool about it. To me, Pom came across as a frank, candid and an amazingly fun-loving human being; I admired her. Her self-esteem was pretty impressive to get appreciative about. She had an exuberant beehive of a soul in her that basically throbbed with fun and lively humour; she’s delightfully pompous, solipsistic, socially gregarious, well-cushioned in appearance, forcefully animated, follows what her conscience says, and a little too chirpy in nature. At other times, Pom seemed like a plus-size Mother Superiorwho took it all on herself to throw in pieces of good-humoured “advice” at our way – never mind whether really required or not! Her voice had a tonal groan that carries into your ears an echoing, squirming intensity that can easily make you feel as if someone is orating away in all glory at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds. Such was this original Delhi belle’s prodigious reputation. Undoubtedly, such select cognoscenti go on to become true friends, opposite to what Papita had been to anyone ever.

When Papita happened to know the previous day that Preeti and I are meeting up, she turned a beetroot red in her face and reprised her at once over the phone with her ill-bred caution. She chided Preeti: “Kya karr rahi hai tu… !”, only to be met with a bemused laughter. I never knew Papita being so wary of my friendship with Preeti until her clandestine phone call that ominous evening when I came in to relieve her from her shift ending at 3pm. She had made it all so rudely obvious for me to figure. It seemed that Papita had acute attitudinal malfunction that was most akin to the sly characteristics of a well-known, modern-dayLalita Pawar.

Ever since that day, I couldn’t help but think of her as a wretched human being. I distanced myself from her – just in case it pricks me to a needless confrontation with her, which I wanted to avoid by all means (because she wasn’t worth to be dealing with in the first place). Her droopy left eye-lid, which flutters ominously at you, surely is indicative of a mindset typically Machiavellian in nature. If one ruminates further on her aforementioned personality one would evidently find that she is an undisputed drama-queen of chugalkhori (sycophancy). Not having anything to do with questions of morality even when sometimes finding herself in judgmental positions is crushingly depressing of her. One finds her a crafty old slithering eel, and bitterly distasteful is her cunning appetite for indulging in unabashed sycophancy.

Why was she hell-bent on misunderstanding me on some headless account or the other? Why was it so inordinately necessary for her to be so fiercely vampish about my affair? Is it in her nature to live her life the way she lived – in accordance to her kind of social class and background she happens to represent? Is it her disheveled upbringing that kicked in? I never have got around to answering these ugly questions in my limited feel of things. At first, it was not quite apparent why she was being vainly jealous of me – she gradually was beginning to come across as a little cantankerous individual – but what I figured is that it triggered a vapid botheration in me with regard to her crude conduct. Afterwards, when I was still none the wiser as to what her “issues” were with me, I dropped it like a hot coal and drew comfort from the age-old premonition that: Time will take its own course. Foxy Papitas of the world do not bring luxury of friendly encouragement nor do they appreciate the thought of love and its reassuring finality inProvidence. They simply have villainous appetites for sycophancy – may be a genetic defect carried on from millions of years of evolution – that makes one cringe in revulsion. To think of such people as mind-numbing pain and a big turn-off definitely rings true. I got wizened a bit and conclusively realized that it’s none of my business to put it all out with this tall and snaky colleague of mine, when, on that ominous evening, she was, in her own touchy-feely way, striving hard to forbid Preeti to have anything to do with me. But that day, it could have been a day of frank pejorative outburst in full discourse for her to see had she wanted to get candid with me then and there.

In fact, only after almost a month and a half of our dilly-dallying did we meet in person. We often postponed our first meeting because we didn’t want to break the charming spell we were enjoying while talking on phone or do away with the fine sense of ignominy which was worth its while. Preeti once told me she found my voice sweet or am I trying to impress her? I had said “both” and cackled indulgently. I understand that, Pom, her fast friend, supposed to have constantly mused on behalf of Preeti as she remarked: “voice toh sweet hai, dekhne mein kaisa hoga?” I did not meet Pom until I had met Preeti. When Preeti used to call me, Pom liked to barge into our phone conversation and share a word or two. I got to know her first this way.

Those days were the happy days of my life. It made me realize that Preeti was probably the one true reason why my life was being led to a world full of delightful anticipation and happiness. Our phone calls were so frequent and engaging that we felt like keeping our ‘on-phone’ relationship agreeably prolonged. Before making up our minds to see each other in person, we gave our relationship a little more time to mature. I guess we decided to make the best for last.

I remember oh so well watching Falguni Pathak’s chartbuster love songs on MTV: “yaad piya ki ane lagi” and “maine payal hai chankayi… “ and thinking about Preeti all day and night. Humming Pankaj Sarawgi’s beautifully picturized song: “Mujhe pyaar hai tumse… “ brings back those memories again. I’ll never forget this song.

“Mujhe pyaar hai tumse..

Ke jab bhi koi..

Aahat hue toh lage…

Ke tum aaye…

…

Sawala salona haye chehra yeh tera…

Aankhiyon mein basa hai yeh palko ki tarah… “

My days were literally filled with the tender fragrance of my jaanu (beloved) and her sweet voice on the phone. Life was so much worth living. Consequently, our telephonic tête-à-têtes started to gain on a hue of assurance and expectation and we decided upon a date in September to meet. I grew restless and jumpy and so did she. I went home early on the day when our rendezvous was setup. In fact, after I have had my share of toiling in office, I was almost a spent-force to be game for a date with whom I had regarded as ‘someone special’. I was obviously impressed with her because my apprehensions got the better of me and I felt freshly energized to meet her. The joy of meeting a person whom you’ve never met before is something to be experienced to be believed. I had all kinds of ticklish butterflies in my stomach fluttering about. Time just flies by in such an event of delectable expectations. Small fears and trepidation in the form of what will happen if… ? what will she… ? will she… ? is it OK to… ? are enough to make you go tizzy. And likewise, one finds oneself spending copious amounts of time on one’s toiletries and dressing than otherwise would have done in other ‘normal’ circumstances. That was our first ‘blind date’ and I wanted to make it count for both of us.

This is how I made it count: I finished my harrowing scheduled shift at 3 o’clock and headed straight home to give myself someshringaar. I knew the day will come when I would meet her. I had bought an assortment of personal care products. First on my list was Denim perfume (my favourite, but they don’t make that perfume anymore) and I reckoned that it’s perfectly okay to indulge a little now that I’m going on a date – an important event of my life no less. I ensured that my new shirt (maroon checks) was ironed well and had just the right creases for the sophistication I had intended to exude! (I still have that old shirt and I wear it sometimes to office; sentimental value you see.) I had a slow dream-like shave and dappled my cheeks with Denim after-shave lotion and felt fresh and manly. When I was tip-top ready, I rode all the way to the venue humming “aye kaash ke hum hosh mein ab aane na paye… “ a delightful song from the Hindi movie Kabhie Han, Kabhie Na.

I drove at a speed of 50-55kph (nothing great about the speed, I know!), reached early, parked my bike, combed my hair and took my position! I sat on a sit-out parapet railing and looked down the road I thought she would come riding astride her bike. For over three quarters an hour I waited like a Majnu, but when Her Highness was still not turning up I decided to call her from a nearby telephone booth. She got my call after the first ring and when I said “Hello” she knew from my voice I was on the line.

“Hello… ? Arpan… ? Give me just 10 minutes na please and I’ll be there”, said she.

I said laughing: “Sure. Come soon Mademoiselle. Um waiting… see ya byee”

At last, come she did and the song I was humming “kab se kare hain tera intezar, kab ayegi meri jaane bahaar… ” froze, as if set automatically on a pause button. One nice glance at her… whoa! and I knew she was the one, my ‘special someone’ with whom I had shared almost every little detail of my life on our endless telephonic conversations is right there. By all accounts a blind date it was, with someone I already knew telephonically but never had up till now seen her face. So now I know who I was talking to all during the enchanting season of August and September months of our eager courtship. Preeti wore a pastel-hued virgin pink (her favourite colour) Salwaar and I instantly noticed that she had an exquisite stance about her which was really so attention-grabbing. She was riding a Kinetic Honda. The spike holding the right-hand side mirror was wrapped with a red perforated holy scarf (laced with shiny golden borders); apparently, it was tugged there as a remainder for her to drive safe. A nice thing to do really. She was splendid and incredibly pretty lady, just like her name. I was stunned into thinking that she looked no less than apariyon ki rani (Angel Princess!); certainly not of this mortal world. Quite evidently, Preeti has a strong closeness in appearance to an actress by name Preeti Jhangiani (her namesake), and it never goes unnoticed even at the first glimpse.

Now, people should have laughed watching me doing what I could, yeah, to the best of my knowledge, trying to put up some sort of a brave front to meet her.

I descended down the short marble-tiled steps (for a moment I thought I would trip and fall on the pavement and break my teeth! but I didn’t) and stood confidently in the parking lot in front of the Aditya coffee shop. A ready glee frolicked on my face and an almost absent will-power to meet ‘a girl’ had muddled my mind into self-consciousness. I don’t know how but I just about managed to be up and about. I didn’t know how I could muster up that kind of insouciant confidence to go on a blind date. But I did it, you know. Basically, I was happy about the fact that Preeti turned out to be what I had imagined her to be. She looked up tossing her coy tresses tending them back in place; she clutched her bag and dashed a meaningful glance at me smiling warmly and then our evening rendezvous was well set to roll.

After we got a corner table, I ordered a couple of coffees with house-special cupcakes. Our conversation took off on a free note which really surprised us at first. I mean, normally, meeting someone whom you haven’t seen or met before – except of course one might have talked endlessly with the same person over the phone day in and day out – how is one supposed to react or interact without getting self-conscious or nervous? I didn’t know, neither did she I believe. In contrast, what I did sense in Preeti’s cool appearance is her easy-going, well-honed confident persona; her subtle countenances were at once very pleasing to behold. Not only was I bowled clean but also it made me feel uncomfortably conscious of my humble self.

Thankfully though, it came as a big relief to me when she coolly began talking without much ado or gumption as she sat across me with a smile on her lips that I bet was like that of Angels I read in the books or saw in the movies. What had actually assailed me up to the brim of my soul is the fragrance of her floral beauty. She was a woman of substance. I marvelled at her art of conversation which struck me as deeply fascinating. Her conversational subjects knew no bounds. She indulged in it copiously. One naturally expects a finance graduate to somehow come round talking about “finance” not bothering to see whether the person in front of you likes it or dislikes it, but luckily she was far removed from such a mercy-killing.

Her compelling allure of beauty combined with her intricate artwork of a smile frolicking all over her lipstick-lined thin lips and her face lighting up the whole corner of the room – all this had kept me possessively enchanted throughout the course of that thoroughly dreamy evening I spent with her at the coffee shop.

Ever since our first blind date going all-good, we always met over coffee at Aditya Coffee Shop, an exclusive underground coffee shop meant for lovers or soon-to-be-lovers, and had exchanged quite a few pleasantries. Time and again she found me marveling at her eyes! Preeti’s elegant black eyes were naturally a good conversation-starter for me. I gaped in wonder at those luminous black eyes and have written copious poetry in my mind and sang romantic songs in my heart – all for her. (I dabbled in poetry in those days and my muse was right in front of me.) Let God be in heaven, she was a great looker.

The reason, apparently, why she thought of gifting me a Parker is that she sensed what better gift but a pen for a scorching pen-pusher cum first-time lover like me!

[Personal disclaimer: I, Arpan, am not one of all-seasons jholawalla brigade. Never could be one, alas! It’s a different story that these days the jholawallas turn up in smart prêt-à-porter lines and are more technologically savvier than usual pen-wielding fella like me. No, I don’t mean to say this in an unkind way, for… er… journalists/writers are far more intellectually advanced to anyone who thinks can wield his/her pen (or even hammer away on the keyboard) and write as effortlessly as the way the journalists do. Journalists are conscience keepers of the world; a superior species of life-changing opinion-makers and pre-eminent writers. I, who can only aspire to be a lowly poetaster at best, lay my pen down to that because it is so goddamn true.]

In fact, prior to our first meeting, we had been exchanging emails profusely and chatting away on the phone as if mesmerized to the point of no return! No amount of office work could make me refrain from writing her emails and likewise, no amount of office work could stop her from reading my emails. I loved writing to her every single day, before I had logged off my computer and called it a day. She would call me back the next day and talk about the things I wrote to her and her plans to meet me at the coffee place we frequented. Preeti once quipped about my writing that it is so “detailed”. I very well remember writing about the movie I liked very much; it was Dr. DoLittle. Writing about the story of the film gave me such joy that for the simple love of sharing it with Preeti I ended up writing a huge email of several bytes in length which ultimately reached her erratic office email box in two or three installments! There was another movie by name Patch Adams (one of my favourite movies) that had greatly moved me. A couple of days later when I wrote about Patch Adams she replied back saying that she saw the movie solely on account of my florid descriptions of the movie in my email! Carrying me on the wings of her appeasing compliment, I had soared high to the heavens and back!

Sweet girl; she liked to agree with everything I said or opinionated on in my emails, and I adored her – almost obsessively and self-centeredly – for everything she was and what she used to talk about while sipping coffee. Our ‘feelings’ for each other were deepening, slowly and naturally. I confess I never knew how to hold an approving girl’s hand or look in the eyes and say the three magic words. But all that changed instantly, as if by some magic! Cuddling her hands in mine for a long while – sometimes almost to the point of breaking sweat – till the closing-hours of the coffee shop, was my way of obsessing about my perfect meetings with her. Coming home every day with an ‘expression’ dancing upon my face and keeping awake till the small hours of the morning thereafter was my daily routine. I had no way of knowing if anybody used to notice (except Papita) when I danced to Preeti’s love – I was pretty curious to know. The ‘expression’ on my face said: “Oui ma… I am in love… so totally in love… yeah yeaah yeaaah!”

I, Arpan Monalic, do hereby affirm that I have totally fallen in love, so deeply, with a manchali Himachali, Preeti Ranautra.

Pompous Pom

Ms. Pommy Candel Fishsketcher joined Preeti and me at Adiyta Coffee Shop once and talked about wanting to see the film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Apparently, they had been planning to make it to Manju theatre, and one fine day they went and saw the mushy film. It was the festival month of October when the film was released and Navratri and Dussehra were not far behind. Finally, I went to see it with one of my university buddies Praveen at Manju. I liked the film so very much that it led me to think Rani as Preeti! At one point during the interval, swinging his share of plastic bag of chips and a bottle of Thums Up, he urged me not to criticize Hindi flicks like this one, especially with Rani Mukherjee in it, and I should take it easy.

Oh well, I wasn’t overly critical of the film; I simply opinionated that I liked Rani Mukherjee’s serene beauty (Praveen didn’t know that I was actually thinking of my doe-eyed girlfriend Preeti) in the song “tum pass aye yun muskuraye… “. The song “ladki badi anjani hai… ” picturized on pugly Kajol and Shah Rukh was another chartbuster song that had us hooked. Lo and behold, he warns me at once from doing so. Yeah… yeah… you got it right, his heart went aflutter on his sweet Rani and so I have no business in her whatsoever! Even as harmless as appreciating Rani was objectionable to him! Kya zamana ah gaya, bhai! (What has the world come to, oh brother?)

In fact, on account of Pom’s standard break-ins during my lovey-dovey phone calls to Preeti, she got to know that my favourite curry is Fish curry and the more jhaal jhaal (spicy spicy!) it is the better. So she sketched a big torpedo-shaped fish (with prominently drawn fish scales, pectoral fins, pelvic fins and all – probably macher raja (King of Fish), a Rohu variety! on a wonderful paper cutting shaped like a big fleshy scrumptious fish and gave it to me. (Ah! Hah! I didn’t have to cast a line or hook a worm to catch it! I told my Ma to cook it but she laughed!)

The free-hand sketch was so endearingly good to look at, as though of a lovely presentation from a friend to another friend. Preeti appreciated Pom and her delicate paper Fish sketch, profusely. I was so damn pleased with Pom’s gift sitting on my lap that it made me agape in deep certitude. That evening Preeti kept smiling her million-dollar smile even as Pom got to her evening best in the coffee shop with such jovial aplomb that as if all the Lilies and Roses and Lotuses of the natural world were dilly-dallying on her lively round face.

End of Part 1

How I Built The Satyam Brand

A brand guru said that it takes years of hard work to build a brand but just one moment of madness to kill it. The Satyam case is a live example of this adage.

Late July 1996 I got a call on a Saturday morning from one of the largest head hunting companies in the country asking me whether I wanted a change of job. Their Hyderabad manager would not tell me the name of the client company as he was afraid I would refuse the chance on the phone itself as the company was small and relatively unknown compared to the one I was working in.

However, I did go to meet him and I was rather disappointed when he told me the company’s name though the company was Hyderabad based and I was in the same city, too. He persuaded me to at least meet the company management. The same afternoon I met Ramalinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Services. I had no clue what the company did as IT was not even in my radar being more from the engineering and automotive industry. In fact, I even had a stray thought that they assembled grey market PCs.

The meeting with Raju lasted more than an hour and was very pleasant. He came across as a gentle person and very polite. Very soon I got an offer of appointment from Satyam. My wife referred to a few people in Bangalore in the IT field before I accepted it. Of course, the financial offer was very attractive,too

I joined Satyam as head of corporate communications on August 16.The next day I got a call from Economic Times asking me for a comment on a story that they were running about a check bouncing case against Satyam. This troubled me as I had never experienced anything like that in the past. I just mumbled that there was no truth in that story.

About ten days later we had to print some invitation cards for inaugurating our spanking new technology centre. It surprised me when the printer asked me for 100% advance. He was the same printer who used to give my earlier company thirty days credit without questions. I began to worry whether I had made a major error of judgment in joining Satyam. I now remembered that some of my friends in Hyderabad expressed surprise when I told them that I was leaving a leading multi-national company to join Satyam.

Anyway, it was too late to do anything about it. And in 1996 driving a brand new Maruti Suzuki Esteem around Hyderabad was a balm on a hurt ego. I put all negative thoughts aside and decided I would carve a positive role for myself and do what was right for the company.

The Company Negatives:

1) Nobody knew who ran the company, including investors. This was surprising as Raju was in the office regularly from 9am to 9pm.

2) The public and investors still associated the name Satyam with construction and textile spinning and not IT.

3) The promoters, based on the flavor of the season had entered all kinds of businesses in the past and failed, including such diverse fields as aquaculture and shoe uppers.

4) Satyam was still perceived as a small Hyderabad based company.

5) In the Dataquest ranking of Indian IT companies, Satyam stood a lowly 13.

6) Publications were reluctant to interview Raju as he was not really forthcoming with comments or with his plans for the company. Further, his speaking style at that time was not very fluent. The face of the company at that time was the head of sales & marketing.

7) People perceived Satyam more as a body shopping company than a serious IT player (this was actually an unfair charge as at that time most Indian IT companies were actually just that).

The Company Positives:

1. The company made profits

2. The client list was quite impressive

3. Working ambience was friendly

4. The urge to grow was there

5. Raju gave a lot of freedom to the senior staff (though this itself created fiefdoms)

My Negatives:

1. In my career till then I had never handled the editorial or news media. I was always in to advertising, marketing and sales promotion.

2. PR was something absolutely new to me. In a way I had joined Satyam under false pretences, because when Raju asked me at my interview whether I knew anyone in the media the only name I could tell him was that of a good friend who handled the advertising function for the biggest media group in AP.

3. When I joined Satyam I had never sent an email in my life nor knew anything about something called the internet. IT was an alien subject to me. I was basically a Mechanical Engineer.

The Beginning

I found that the Bangalore based advertising and PR agency handling the Satyam account was not really contributing much though they charged a high fee. We sacked them and through a professional selection process appointed one of the top advertising agencies in the country to handle our paid communication business. The first collaboration effort was to bring out the corporate identity manual, called the Satyam Covenant.This was to make sure that all corporate branding effort across the world would be cohesive.

Knowing that an advertising agency is generally not clued in to public relations, I decided to handle the media myself instead of incurring further expenditure in hiring a PR agency. My first effort was a disaster. I prepared a press release for our annual result without a headline. The next day each publication interpreted the results in its own way. It was rather embarrassing seeing some of the headlines early the next morning.

It was time to start earning my salary. I wrote out a pretty decent brand strategy plan. On top of the list was something I titled “Brand building the CEO”. I made a slide presentation to Raju defining various brand positioning attributes for his image building.

1. Entrepreneur

2. Innovator

3. Technocrat

4. Leader

We debated all the positioning points and I explained to him why each one was not right for him. His previous enterprises were not really successful so the first one was out. As he was not technically qualified, the second and third points would be difficult to push through. The fourth one too would have been a far cry from reality. Luckily, Raju was not an egoist so he accepted my role as a Devil’s advocate with some amount of amusement.

Finally, I showed him the crucial slide. Through the months of interaction with Raju one thought that hit me was that he rarely got in to the details of the running of an enterprise. All his statements were a bit philosophical and holistic. He also tended to go off on a tangent sometimes. To give him a branding that he would be comfortable donning I recommended that he be positioned as a Visionary.

“Raju is a visionary who has a global view of the industry and where Satyam would head in the future. To make his vision a reality he hires the right people and empowers them to find ways to take the enterprise forward.”

Raju immediately accepted this hypothesis. Subsequently, in all internal and external communication, I would create statements on his behalf that would match the new brand positioning. For any media interviews he would speak holistically and one of the other senior managers would get in to the detailing.

I travelled to all the offices after that to meet the Business Heads and get ‘masala’ from them for any newsworthy story that could be highlighted in the media. I visited various media offices across the metros and got to know the business correspondents. I found them all pretty professional and knowledgeable about the sunrise industry. Many of them still remain my personal friends after so many years.

Every Monday I would release a story to the media highlighting some aspect of our business. The third paragraph of all of them would have a quote from Raju. I took a big risk with my job as I wrote and released these statements without getting his prior approval. However, I knew his thought process well and also the kind of words he used regularly so there was nothing controversial about any statement.

In fact once Raju and I were traveling together in his car to a function when a senior correspondent of a weekly news magazine rang me and asked me which business leader was Raju’s role model. I covered the mouth piece of my phone and asked Raju. He said Jack Welch. He was a bit taken aback when in front of him I gave a detailed statement on why he admired Jack Welch of GE. The magazine quoted Raju verbatim in the next issue.

The turning point came when in late 1997 or early 1998 BusinessWorld magazine called me and wanted to interview Raju for a story on IT in India. The original concept was to have Narayanmurthy of Infosys, Premji of Wipro, Nadar of HCL and Raju on the cover. I picked up the correspondent and photographer of BusinessWorld from Hyderabad airport and was driving them to the Satyam Technology Center, about a 45 minutes drive. The photographer asked me whether there was something interesting about Raju which he could shoot. I told him that Raju was comparatively an understated person but recently he had received a Mercedes- Benz car as a birthday gift from the family. But I was not sure whether he would agree to pose with it.

After the interview the photographer requested Raju whether he could photograph him along with the car. Surprisingly, Raju agreed. The next issue of BusinessWorld had only Raju on the cover with a laptop on the bonnet of his Benz.

Raju and Satyam had arrived!

The Growth Years

By the second half of 1997, Satyam’s media coverage had increased manifold. We made plenty of press releases and media would also call us for a quote for including in any IT related article.

Communications professionals tend to work out elaborate strategies on how to handle press releases. They generally work out a twelve-month calendar of releases and try to space of stories at the rate of one release a month. For example, October will see the release of an article on Quality. December, on HR practices. And so on. In the beginning, to work on a schedule like that. The explanation given to me was that the media will get bored of receiving too many stories from the same company. All rubbish.

Newspapers release every day. Magazines – weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Their very existence depends on news coverage. I decided that whatever I thought was worthy of a press release I would go ahead and send it off. After all, if publications do not see it fit then they wouldn’t publish it any way. Even if sixty-five percent of my releases saw the light of day it would more than suffice.

At the risk of hurting some of my media friends, I ranked the publications where I wanted to see Satyam featured regularly: Economic Times, Business Standard, Business Line, Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Hindu. Owing to local sentiments, the Hyderabad publications were a vital cog in our media activity. News covered by all other publications was a bonus.

We made releases on practically any activity of the company. New client wins, office inaugurations, technology innovation, senior management recruits, visits by VIPs. Stories and pictures of the animals in our menagerie in our technology center.In fact; we made a song and dance about the increase in the deer population at our center. Implying that they were well fed and happy. All good human interest stories that added to our brand image.

Then, of course were the news releases about the awards. The 1999 E&Y award which was of course a prestigious one. The other one was the World Economic Forum award (the biggest humbug of them all, in my view!). But all worthy news stories that had to be exploited. What did all this cost my company. Zilch. You treat journalists with respect and honesty; they will trust you, too. Bad eggs could be ignored.

But all this did not mean that all press coverage was positive. There were two occasions when explanations had to be given.

1. When a subsidiary, Satyam Enterprise Solutions merged with the parent company the share swap ratio of 1:1 came in to a lot of criticism and there were rumors of some underhand deal. The media was after me for a clarification, which obviously was beyond my scope to reply and I had to discuss the subject with Raju and the CFO. Unfortunately,the management decided to ride out the storm.

Strangely enough, at a later stage after the Y2K business thinned out, it was the competencies built up by Satyam Enterprise Solutions that actually took the company forward, including the money spinning SAP business.

2. When we started to use the web extensively one benchmark we had set was on how quickly the results could be posted on our website. The finance department would give us dummy figures which my department’s desktop publishing operator would put in a template and upload it on a test site. Once the official result was cleared by the Board, the official figures would be given to the operator for uploading on the company website. By a comedy of errors that particular year someone in the finance department gave the official figures which the operator by mistake uploaded on the live site. He immediately realized his mistake and blocked that page. But the damage was done. Some of the wire services were monitoring the site and immediately called me. I was clueless at first but got the full story later.

This became a big media story with all kinds of motives attributed to the management. It took months to overcome the negative impact. In fact when Raju and I had gone to Singapore and Sydney some of the TV news channels there would ask him a question about that controversy during live interviews. He used to get upset and later ask me why I could not stop the interviewer from asking such questions. Unfortunately, he did not realize that professional journalists do not always ask what you want them to ask.

Apart from editorial releases when it came to paid advertising, I felt that the time was not right for any general media corporate campaign. However, we put more creativity in our recruitment ads and used them for corporate brand-building, too.

Internal Communication

Side by side with external communications it was critical that the company paid attention to internal communication during the growth years.

The purpose:

1. Ensure that all employees are kept informed about the activities of the company.

2. Reassure the existing employees that they have not taken a bad decision by joining the wrong organization

3. Use the existing employees to encourage their friends and relatives to join Satyam.

One day in early 1997, I was walking along the aisle near the CFO’s cabin. On his secretary’s table I saw a copy of the Memorandum of Association that showed that Satyam began operations on June 24, 1987. Something about that date kept whirring in my head over the next several days. While driving to work one morning it hit me that we were in the tenth year of our existence. I discussed it with a few colleagues. Thus was born an intensive internal communications program under the banner of “A Decade of Excellence”.

We printed posters and stickers. The major activities were the inter-office competitions like Quiz and Dumb Charade, culminating in a gala entertainment program in Hyderabad. At that time the company strength was still only around 5000.

One activity left me embarrassed. We made T-shirts for the winners of competitions. In my eagerness to get things made at the lowest cost I placed an order with an unknown entity. Phone calls and emails were plenty after that – one wash and the T-shirts had shrunk to an embarrassingly short length.

By 1998, I had a good team working with me. I made it a point to recruit young business graduates with a western orientation as I was clear that the future would be in building a brand for overseas markets. Luckily, IT is a people-centric industry and so no one questioned me on why I needed more staff for a support department like corporate communications. I added copy writers and graphic artists, too.

By now, it was clear that web-related communication was the way forward. An internet corporate site was a given. Raju told me that it was imperative that as a global organization information dissemination across offices was very critical. Every employee of Satyam, wherever in the world he or she was located should have access to the same information in realtime as compared to someone in Hyderabad.

A couple of departments were working on a corporate Intranet at that time. I managed to hijack it from them and assigned a team in my department to handle it. We branded it SatyamWorld and made it the global internal communication platform for the company. SatyamWorld later won the prestigious CIO magazine award for being one of the top intranet sites in the world.

I told my team members to think out of the box and that they should come up with a new idea every day, however crazy it may sound. Most times, all my ideas would pop out early in the morning or while driving to work. Somehow, I always felt that techies were a humorless lot and in Satyam people would be a bit too serious. One day while having breakfast I suddenly thought of having a Smile Day. I briefed my team about my idea. Within a day they came out with a campaign. A week later, every employee entering any of the campuses was given a small packet that contained items with a smile logo for use on their desktops, including a small thingee that could be placed on your thumb and be wagged at colleagues. We made a press release and The Hindu carried a big box item on the activity and how it helped staff morale.

After that was the “Power of One” campaign and how we discovered a young music director duo that composed our anthem and today are names reckoned with in Bollywood.

But that’s another story…

Going Global

Thanks to the early exploitation of the Y2K business opportunity, Satyam grew faster than many of its peers. This directly led to the growth in people numbers, that too across geographies. The mandate to my department was to make sure that Satyamites across the world felt one with the organization.

My team had a strategy session with our ad agency, R K Swamy /BBDO. They soon came out with a campaign proposal that I presented to our senior management team at a strategy conference. The theme of the campaign was “The Power of One” with a tagline: One World. One Team. One Goal. I implemented the concept across various goodies that could be used by the employees at home and in the office.I designed a large pouch to hold the items. The masterpiece was a music cassette that contained popular Hindi and English songs. Interspersed after every four songs was the Satyam Anthem. My department distributed the goody bag across the world to every employee.

I had asked the agency to work out an anthem for the company. The brief was that the song should sound young, vibrant and contemporary. A few weeks later the agency asked me to come to Mumbai to approve the tune. I met two brothers who were in their early twenties and had composed the song. I had never heard of them. But each of the three tunes they presented was outstanding. The agency and I finally selected one of the tunes, a duet with a male and female singer providing the vocals. An instrumental version was also produced that would be used as the call hold music on all Satyam’s telephone switchboard.

Today, the duo are extremely famous in Bollywood having provided background scores to various hits and also being the music directors to such films as Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, Chak de India, Krrish and Fashion. Their name: Salim and Sulaiman.

Based on this campaign I received invitations to several advertising and marketing conferences to speak on the effectiveness of internal communication programs. In fact, when the campaign broke Raju told me that he never expected that there were so many things possible in communications.

Global Challenge

It was all well to feel happy about the news coverage in India, but the real challenge was in brand building overseas, specifically the US,which was our biggest market. Paid media over there was very expensive.

Around this time I discovered the benefits of news dissemination through global wire services. I regularly kept in touch with senior people in Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones Newswires. The challenge was that these organizations hire hard-nosed professionals who were not interested in irrelevant talk. Plus, they wanted to be the first with the news, counted in seconds! I tailor-made press releases specifically catering to a global audience. Our visibility increased considerably after that in international media. We also distributed our news releases through PRNewswire in the USA.

But global visibility also happens through unexpected quarters. Mid 1999, the head of our subsidiary, Satyam Infoway requested me to handle the PR for their ADS listing on NASDAQ. This gave me a major opportunity to work at a global level and also to deal with the big guns in the financial sector-Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, and KPMG and, of course, the top management at NASDAQ.

We did everything in style. All of us stayed at the Trump hotel near Central Park and on October 18, 1999 we were in a fleet of black Lincoln limos heading towards NASDAQ. The night before, I tweaked the brand positioning a bit. Instead of the news appearing that we were the second Indian company after Infosys being listed on NASDAQ, I changed it to the FIRST Indian internet company listing on that bourse. The ceremony itself was comparatively business-like. The symbol SIFY went active at a premium on listing. After that we had a live press conference from there with journalists waiting in India. I then accompanied the CEO of Satyam Infoway for live interviews at CNBC and CNN studios.

A fall out of this was a bit of brand cannibalization. Even at the parent company press interviews a lot of question would ask about Sify, particularly as it was now a global entity. This was particularly galling as all complaints about Sify’s internet service had a negative impact on the parent company’s brand image.

The next major media event was also connected with Sify. On November 28, 1999 the CEO of Satyam Infoway requested me to come to Mumbai to handle an important announcement. He would not give me the details over the phone. The next morning I went directly from the Mumbai airport to the office of DSP Merrill Lynch. There the investment bank gave a brief about the Indiaworld deal. Merrill had alerted the media about a press meet that evening without revealing the subject. I soon started getting calls from reporters wanting to know the details. I could not reveal anything to them though I felt a bit guilty not being straight forward with some of the reporters who had become good personal friends by then.

It was a great feeling going through the process of an acquisition during that day. E&Y had done the valuation and were explaining the details.DSP Merrill Lynch was working out all the finer points of the M&A.I am not too sure how many communications professionals have gone through this kind of experience. The press conference was scheduled for 6.00 pm at the Oberoi Hotel. I went to the venue early. The conference hall was bursting at the seams with the media.

The proceeding was getting delayed for a very simple procedural bottleneck. The copies of the contract had to be signed by all parties concerned and because the documents were voluminous the deal was taking time. The owners of Indiaworld were getting emotional as they felt they were giving away their baby for adoption. Finally, the press meet started about an hour late. Boy, did it create a sensation. $115 million for a few web portals! The next morning at the Mumbai airport I bought copies of all the dailies and reveled in seeing the large banner headlines about the deal.

By now my department was on auto pilot. I had a great team that knew exactly what needed to be done. In fact, I found they worked more efficiently when I was away on tour.

Our front end sales team usually took our help for any client pitches. After the Y2K boom was over, we had to look at more value added business and the challenges in pitching for business. My team evolved a unique style of client presentation. We decided that every client pitch would be tailor-made to the client. We pitched for a health insurance client from Kansas City, Missouri. My team studied everything required about the city and the state. When the client walked in to the conference room we welcomed him with Count Basie’s jazz music; the walls had posters featuring tourist spots in Kansas City; the flower vase had a Blue Iris sticking out; and, most interestingly there were posters of famous players from Kansas City Chiefs football team.

We did a similar arrangement for a client in Dallas, where we played “Yellow Rose of Texas” as he walked in. Our hit rate with client acquisition went up after that.I am not saying it was because of corporate communications alone, but because the client felt that we were a company that would walk that extra mile for them.

My team started thinking more creative ideas for presentations. I had some very good graphic artists who were experts in Macromedia Flash. We actually started creating movies for client presentations. We would shoot some stock shots in sections highlighting corporate information, quality standards, HR initiatives, Infrastructure. Depending on the client’s industry we had a segment on how Satyam and they “were made for each other”. If the client was in Manufacturing we would get one of our business unit guys to talk about Satyam’s competency in Manufacturing and fit it in to the movie at a suitable place. And so on for Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom and so on.

These kinds of movies cost a lot in the US so when the clients saw our stuff they thought we had put in a lot of effort just for their pitch. At a Bear Stearns presentation in New York, one of the client’s senior officials jocularly commented that they knew whom to come to if they needed a movie produced!

One of the dangers of going global and earning in dollars but thinking in rupees is in the expenditure incurred on publicity material. In the early days our marketing office in the US would propose buying some ball pens for distribution at a trade show. They told us that it would ‘just’ cost a dollar a piece. Sitting in Hyderabad we would convert it in to rupees and exclaim, “What, Rs 40 for an ordinary ball pen! Forget it, we will send it from India where it costs only Rs 3”. Unfortunately, our ball pens were no match to the Chinese ones available there in a nice packing and qualitatively superior to ours. It was the same thing with T-shirts, stickers, leaflets and exhibition panels. Soon, better sense prevailed and we bought material in the local markets overseas.

The next major event that catapulted us to the big league was Satyam’s ADR listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Procedure wise this was more elaborate than what we had done for Sify’s NASDAQ listing. Our finance department asked me to think of a suitable symbol for the ticker. Of the cuff I suggested SAY and also coined the slogan “Say Satyam” as part of the brand promotion. This was approved by everyone concerned.

The morning of May 15, 2001 started with a ceremonial breakfast in the NYSE dining hall. Following this was a group photograph of the senior management and the bell ringing and cap throwing ceremony. Because another company was listing at the same time we were in a different room. The stock listed well at $11.16. We had arranged for business correspondents in Mumbai to assemble at a hotel conference room. Soon after the listing we had a live video conference with Raju addressing the media. After that we did the rounds of TV studios in New York for live interviews. After this listing one journalist told me that I held a unique world record of being the only communications person to have handled public issues for two group companies in both NYSE and NASDAQ

By early 2002 I had become bored with my role in corporate communications and moved on to another role.

Booming: Television News Channels in India

News programmes have suddenly become hot property and are vying for attention with other popular programmes telecast in different channels. All major television broadcasters are including at least one news channel to their bouquet. The biggest headache for launching a satellite channel is programme software for round the clock. In this juncture, newsgathering is a major task for the 24-hour news channels. To cater this task, the emerging electronic channels have always made an attempt to cover all the incidents irrespective of position, location and time. These channels not only revolutionized the concept of news on Indian television but also changed the news formats. Before 1990s, Doordarshan had monopolized newscast on Indian television and also turned the news programs into a dowdy exercise. Now the private channels made the news an essential commodity like food, cloth and shelter. The strong point of all today’s news bulletins is their topicality, objectivity, glossy editing and high-quality visuals. News has traveled a long way from the DD era. From Local events to International events, breaking news to news analysis, television soap to page3 news, every happening comes under purview of news. In this article, we have covered some significant changes in news broadcasting in India before and after the Gulf War.

Indian Television – Flash Back

Television in India is undergoing significant changes in the current liberalized environment. To understand these changes, one needs to have some brief idea of the road covered by the television channels so far. The journey started as an experimental basis with a financial grant from UNESCO in 15th September 1959. The makeshift studio at Akashvani Bhavan in New Delhi was chosen for location of the experiment. The experiment started with one-hour program, broadcast twice a week, on community health, citizen rights, education and traffic sense etc. As far as news is concerned, it was launched exactly six years after the inception of television broadcasting. Daily one-hour program with a news bulletin was served to the Indian viewers. But one major drawback of television was that you could not enjoy the original colour of the objects because of black and white transmission. First multi-color programme was the Prime Minister’s address to the nation from Red Fort in Delhi on India’s 35th Independence Day. In the same day, DD National channel was launched. The aim of launching the National channel is nurturing national integration, and inculcating a sense of pride in Indians. Indian viewers also enjoyed the colored version of the Asian Games hosted by New Delhi in their drawing room. The coverage of major events and different occasions lend a big hand behind the infiltration of television signals to the nook and corners of the subcontinent. Indian Government had taken all possible steps to expand the television broadcasting demographically and geographically. In 1983 television signals were available to just 28% of the population, this had doubled by the end of 1985 and by 1990 over 90% of the population had access to television signals. In 1984, DD Metro channel was added to provide an exclusive entertainment for the urban viewers. In the beginning, this channel was confined to metropolitan cities.

As a public broadcaster, Doordarshan presented the news in naturalized manner. All controversial issues were pushed under the carpet. The ruling government had a strong hold on the television broadcasting. Doordarshan news bulletins were unable to provide the international news to the national viewers. Objectivity had been the first casualty as news was invariably slanted to suit the party in power. The news was liberated from the confines of the DD newsroom and gained in objectivity and credibility when New Delhi Television (NDTV) produced ‘The World This Week’ in 1988. Everyone was waiting for the Friday night to watch ‘The World This Week’. This was the only India-based programme, which looked out at the rest of the world. The World This Week was the best current affairs programme on the international scenario and carried good stuff of news, which the regular DD news was failed to carry out. This program is ranked as one of the country’s finest and most popular television shows. In 1989, NDTV produces India’s first live televised coverage of the country’s general elections. The critical and commercial success of the coverage sets a new standard for Indian television. After the Gulf War the media panorama has changed forever.

Golf War – The Catalyst

Post-1990 satellite television in India has become transnational in nature. It coincided with the entry of multinational companies in the Indian markets under the Government policy of privatization. International satellite television was introduced in India by CNN through its coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. In August 1991, Richard Li launched Star Plus, the first satellite channel beamed the signal to Indian subcontinent. Subhash Chandra’s Zee TV appeared in October 1992. It is India’s first privately owned Hindi channel to cater the interest of Indian viewers. This ignition followed by Sony and a little later by domestic channels such as Eenadu, Asianet and Sun TV. Entertainment programs had begun to occupy center stage in the organization’s programming strategies and advertising had come to be main source of funding. Doordarshan’s earlier mandate to aid in the process of social and economic development had clearly been diluted. Doordarshan had faced a stiff competition in news and public affairs programming with international channels like BBC and CNN. Doordarshan planned to sell some slots for news programme under sponsored category. In February 1995, NDTV becomes the country’s first private producer of the national news ‘News Tonight’, which aired on the country’s government-owned Doordarshan set a new landmark for Indian television because of its on-the-spot reporting with pertinent visuals. In the same year, TV Today Network occupied a 20 minutes slot in DD Metro channel and aired a Hindi and current affairs programme ‘Aaj Tak’. This programme became popular for its comprehensive coverage and unique style presentation by Late S. P. Singh. Still we remembered the sign-up message “Ye Thi Khabar Aaj Tak, Intizar. Kijiye Kal Tak”. Large number of viewers across India had been watching Aaj Tak as a daily habit because of its innovative style of news presentation. Besides that Nalini Singh’s five-minute fast paced, condensed daily news capsule Ankhon Dekhi, TV Today Network’s Business Aaj Tak and Newstrack was aired on the Metro channel of Doordarshan. This is the period when satellite channels concentrated on entertainment programmes for their respective channels. Doordarshan was still ruled the most wanted area ‘news’.

Major Players

Doordarshan’s monopoly was broken in 1992, when private television channels infiltrated into the Indian boundaries and entertain the viewers as much as possible. In the beginning of 1990s, the private channels offered only entertainment programmes. The entertainment programs include family drama, comedy serials, children programmes, cartoons, movies, talk shows, recipe shows, musical concerts, non-fiction programmes etc. Private entertainment channels added some infortainment programmes to their Fixed Point Charts (FPC). Keeping the demand of infotainment programmes in mind, the media houses started to produce news magazines, entertainment magazines and news programmes for different channels. India’s premier business and consumer news broadcaster and a leading media content provider, Television Eighteen India Limited (TV18) started India’s first ever entertainment magazine ‘The India Show’ on Star Plus in 1993. This emerging media powerhouse provided prime time television content to almost all leading satellite channels in India including BBC, Star Plus, Sony Entertainment Television, Zee, MTV and Discovery. After The India Show, TV18 produced a weekly business news program India Business Report for BBC World. Indian viewers had very limited options (like public service broadcaster Doordarshan, BBC and CNN) for watching the television news. For televised news, the viewers had to watch Dordarshan and some international news channels like BBC or CNN. In this race to provide more news, more information, Zee Television jumped into the battlefield by launching the news channel Zee News in 1995. This News and current affairs channel revolutionized the way news was delivered to the viewers. Since its inception Zee News has endeavoured to be the fastest to provide news, working towards a single goal of Sabse Pahle (Always First). The other round-the-clock news channel, the Murdoch-owned Star TV beamed its exclusively 24-hour news channels, Star News in 1998. Star made a contract of five year with Prannoy Roy-owned NDTV (New Delhi Television Company) to provide news content for this news channel.

The untiring exhaustive coverage of the Kargil war between India and Pakistan gained more publicity and attracted more viewers towards the electronic channel. This televised conflict also sets a news benchmark for wartime journalism. During the Kargil war, common citizens witnessed how their brave Jawans fought despite in hostile conditions and watched the war front live by the exclusively news channels, Star-TV and Zee-News. The live coverage of the battlefield helped to create a euphoria of patriotism among the Indian masses, which later facilitated into collecting huge funds for the welfare of the families of Kargil martyrs. Every news programme draws the attention of large number of viewers but Kargil war attracts private broadcasters to invest more money in the broadcasting business by launching a news channel. In November 1999, TV18 entered into a 49:51 joint venture with CNBC Asia to launch CNBC India. TV18 is the sole program provider to CNBC India, and produces 12 hours of local content per day on this 24-hour satellite channel.

After the huge success of news programme ‘Aaj Tak’, TV Today group launched a 24-hour Hindi news channel with the same name ‘Aaj Tak’, in December 2000, which covers India with insight, courage and plenty of local flavour. Within 11 months of its launch, Aaj Tak emerged as India’s number one news channel and was awarded Best News Channel award from Indian Television Academy Awards. Some mega events apart from regular interesting items (such as Kandhahar hijack, September 11 attacks, Afghanistan war, attack on Parliament, Iraq war, Godhra carnage and riots) have driven up the viewership. As time passed, NDTV’s five years contract with Star group for outsourcing of news and related programming expired on March 2003. With the expiry NDTV forayed into broadcasting business by simultaneously launching two 24-hour news channels; NDTV 24X7 – English news channel and NDTV India – Hindi news channel, which targets the Indian diaspora across the world. News crazy Indians received more news at faster speed from different channels. Any unusual happening can be caught by the television camera anywhere form Rastrapati Bhawan to bedroom. The power of TV journalism was become more visible by the major sting operations like Operation West End and Shakti Kapoor Case. This style of investigative journalism has brought about a change in the way we look at news, amidst new notions of editorial freedom. The world’s largest family ‘Sahara India Parivar’ launched a 24-hour national Hindi news channel, Sahara Samay, in March 28, 2003. It is the first ever city-centric satellite news channels covering 31 cities in India with their own city news bulletins. Keeping the demand of news in mind, the Union cabinet approved the proposal to convert the DD Metro to DD news in a meeting held on 3 October 2003. Consequent to these decisions, DD-News channel was launched on 3 November 2003. You might have noticed that the news channels are language specific. But DD’s news channel contains the round the clock news bulletins in Hindi/ English are also telecast twice a day on the National Network of DD National.

‘Aap Ki Adalat’ fame Rajat Sharma, Sohaib Ilyasi, the man behind the highly successful ‘India’s Most Wanted’ and Taun Tejpal, editor-in-chief of Tehelka roped together and launched a free-to-air Hindi news and current affairs channel India TV on May 20, 2004. Indian viewers had more expectations from this channel. The much-awaited news channel hopes to set itself apart from the existing ones by setting new benchmarks of responsible journalism. Speaking on the occasion of the launch, Rajat Sharma, chairman, India TV, said, “We aim to change the way broadcast news reporting is being conducted in the country. India TV will set new benchmarks by maintaining international standards of responsible and credible news reporting. We will stay away from graphic depictions of violence and sensationalism of news. We will uphold the viewer’s right to correct information and their right to truth and verity. India TV is not just a news channel, it is a movement.” NDTV as a pioneer in Indian television news, set to create a fresh revolution in high-quality business news with the launch of NDTV Profit. NDTV launched this 24-hour business channel on January 17th, 2005.

There is no saturation point in launching of news channel, just booming like sky as the limit. Entertainment channel to infotainment channel, infotainment channel to news channel, news channels to business channel and Business channel to lots more. Now the satellite channels become more topicality with international standard. When we are talking about topicality, CNBC TV18, the only business channel, continues to be the medium of choice for India’s decision makers, affluent audiences across the country since 1999. It has set the pace for the growth in number of television channels by launching a 24-hour consumer channel in Hindi called ‘ Awaaz’. This news channel focusses on empowering consumers on decision-making related to investment, saving and spending. All the programmes are catering to consumers across different walks of life, which included personal finance; variety of markets including commodity, stocks, savings etc.; small businesses; education & career guidance; and verticals like health, shopping etc.

Another news channel was finally launched into the already cluttered news space in Indian television. Jagran TV Pvt Limited’s news channel, Channel 7 up-linked to the air on 27 March 2005. The channel has been set up to cater to the vast Hindi-speaking audiences, already being targeted by a slew of news channels. Channel 7 developed every programme with a bid to cater to all types of audiences and not just pre-dominantly male audiences who get attracted towards news channels.

Regional Leaders

To cater the interest among the Indians, Doordarshan televises programmes in Hindi and associate Official languages. It has launched a number of Regional Language Satellite Channels (DD – 4 to DD – 11 and DD – 13) and telecast programmes in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Kashmiri, Oriya and Tamil. The Regional channels relayed by all terrestrial transmitters in the state and additional programmes in the Regional Language in prime time and non-prime time available only through cable operators. The Doordarshan regional satellite channels telecast major news programme with some entertainment programmes.

If you think about the private regional channels, they have followed the path of the Big brother (i.e Doordarshan). They are neither completely entertainment channel nor exclusively news channel. They are following the middle path and claiming themselves an infotainment channels. The private channels televise through the state dominant languages. Rising advertising revenues and increasing numbers of viewers have provided the impetus for many big players to enter into the business. Some regional media leaders like ETV, Sun TV, Asianet have a strong grip over the regional market. Some major players tried their luck in different states. Zee television has three regional channels; Zee Marathi, Zee Punjabi and Zee Bangla. Star Network entered into Tamilnadu by launching Star Vijay, one of the most popular entertainment channels in India broadcasting in Tamil. Besides that ETV Network is a part of the well-established Ramoji Group, has created 12 dedicated infotainment regional channels. ETV network is the source of rich entertainment of eight different languages. Those are: Telugu, Bangla, Marathi, Kannada, Oriya, Gujarati, Urdu; and Hindi to viewers in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Every ETV Network channel focuses exclusively on its audience’s unique cultural identity, its aspirations and its distinct socio-political character. Let us think about the south Indian language Telugu, there are around twelve satellite channels are roaming around the sky with different taste and different flavour. These channels include three news channels, one song-based channels and rest are infotainment channels. When we confine ourselves into news, three channels (ETV2, TV 9 and Teja News) exclusively devoted to news programmes.

Sahara India Pariwar is proud to have five news channels as the bouquet of Sahara Samay. These channels are: Sahara Samay NCR, Sahara Samay Mumbai, Sahara Samay Bihar & Jharkhand, Sahara Samay Madhya Pradesh & Chattisgarh, and Sahara Samay Uttar Pradesh & Uttranchal. Sahara Samay has already managed to gain a loyal audience in India through a bouquet of National & Regional News Channels since its launch. These channels are youthful and vibrant channels targeting students and women, besides that hardcore news stuff. The regional news channels covers the entire spectrum of genre with specific programs on lifestyle, fashion, food, shopping, health and fitness, sports, education, career and city issues, besides giving user-friendly information on traffic updates, city events, train and air timings, etc. Now national news channels cannot confine its boundary to national level. They cannot ignore the regional news because of the stiff competition form the regional cannels. Regional news channels are entering into the competition with a strong will power and also with an aim to portrait regional issues in national and international level.

Conclusion

Now the television industry becomes more specific. In this competitive market, channels are targeting specific viewers. News channels attract more viewers beyond their target by producing interactive and interesting programmes. Every channel needs to do an extensive research on different concepts and different themes to attract more viewers and in the same time more advertisers. After all, advertisements are the bread and butter for the channels. With increased consumer preference for news programmes, television news channels have grown faster than other niche channels. News channels are booming just like sky as the limit. Those days are not far away, when we will get satellite news channel for every major city in India. Staying in abroad, we can update ourselves about all the happening of our hometown. Now news is not restricted to political happenings. It will be extended its limit to every unwanted and hided corners of the society. At last we can reach in the conclusion that anything, which is strange or disgusting, is news. There are no rigid rules, which defines news.

Source:

[http://www.audiovisualcat.net/publicationsing/Q14india.pdf]

http://www.equitymaster.com/research-it/ipo/ndtv.asp

http://www.mouthshut.com/index.php?url=#&image=http://www.mouthshut.com/imagefiles/logo-ms.gif

http://www.screenindia.com/jul25/tele2.htm

http://www.indianembassy.org/indiainfo

http://www.india-today.com/itgroup/

[http://www.studio-systems.com/broadfeatures/JFMA98/NDTV/63.htm]

[http://www.ndtvtravels.com/aboutus.asp]

[http://cnbc-tv18.moneycontrol.com/cnbctv18/about_tv18.php]

[http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0],13673,501030818-474534,00.html

[http://www.chennaionline.com/musicnew/Channels/05indiatv.asp]

http://www.prdomain.com/companies/s/sahara_india_pariwar/news_releases/200303mar/pr_sahara_india_nr_20030326.htm

[http://www.scatmag.com/tamreach_sept05.pdf]

[http://www.agencyfaqs.com/media/media_newslets/Media/4899.html].

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/26/business/indianews27.php

How to Get Cheap Health Insurance?

Cheap health insurance may look like a bargain, but what happens if you have a major medical problem? You don’t want to be caught off-guard if an unexpected major medical problem arises. Cheap health insurance means one thing to one person and something else to another. While the idea of getting cheap health insurance is very appealing, no one wants to deal with the repercussions of bad or inadequate health insurance. Cheap health insurance has become the issue of the moment in South Carolina and across the country. More small businesses are increasingly unable to provide cheap health insurance plans to their employees because of the rising cost and the lack of federal and state legislation that would allow small businesses to purchase cheap medical insurance in pools.

Cheap health insurance is your access to the best options in the market. This is because you no longer have to spend so much time searching for the product that will suit your health care needs. Cheap health insurance rates work so much better when you know what you are supposed to be looking for. Get some tips on what you should look for when dealing with a health insurance plan. Cheap health insurance quotes can help you to find the best and the most inexpensive coverage that is available. You will be covered, and relieved to know that if anything happened to you, you will not have that major financial stress of paying full price for your injuries or illnesses.

Medicare supplemental insurance offers senior coverage for health care costs that are not covered by a traditional Medicare plan. By having Medicare supplemental insurance, seniors can rely on consistent, constant and comprehensive coverage when they need it. Medicare supplemental insurance is designed for people on Medicare, who wish to have more comprehensive coverage. These supplemental plans may include Managed Care HMO plans or Medigap PPO plans that provide you with greater access to participating physicians. Medicare and Medicaid are both excellent programs for those individuals who qualify, but they are no substitute for a system which allows us all to access basic private medical insurance cover at a cost which we can afford.

Medical Insurance also known as health insurance is a protection to individuals and their families against unforeseen expenses. In the process, there are two parties namely the insurer and the insured. Medicaid is for people who come under the low income’s bracket. Every person is eligible for it and having a job does not affect one’s eligibility. Medical terms can be confusing, and before speaking with an insurance agent, you should make sure you understated his or her language. Make sure you read our overview of health insurance companies to get a better idea of each provider’s identity.

Individual companies are free to evaluate the risks to insure you in whatever manner they see fit. Each health insurance company employs people (actuaries) that try to calculate the statistical risks involved in insuring you, and not surprisingly, has a slightly different view of the statistics. Individual health insurance works differently. It generally can’t be terminated just because you use it, but you can be turned down in the first place if you do not pass health underwriting; you can be rated up if you have a history of illness or obesity; and your premiums can be and often are increased if you suddenly have a major illness. Individual health insurance covers different types of injuries as well. An active lifestyle increases the risk of accidental injuries and repairing broken bones can become very expensive.

Individual health insurance is State specific. Each state has slightly different laws and regulations governing the implementation of private individual health insurance.

Hospitalization, medicines, doctor fees can be very high and if the patient cannot get a suitable insurance cover, it is very difficult. Health insurance can be a tough battle for cancer patients. Hospitals have an extraordinary ability to save life and without health insurance you could be medically saved but financially ruined. Hospital cash plans are a form of medical insurance that takes care of everyday medical costs. Many will pay for dental or optical treatment up to a set limit every year; physiotherapy; specialist consultations etc.

Comparison of your options: To be able to find an affordable health insurance you must have an idea of all. What is available in the market? After you have shopped enough get hold of a broker who can help you in comparing the policies. Comparing health insurance is a case of finding the right health insurance provider to cover your particular circumstances as well as comparing the types of policy provided by each health insurer.

Comparing Medical Insurance isn’t just a case of finding a handful of brand names and trusting they have everything covered in their policies. The cover varies wildly, as will your medical insurance quotes. Compare several plans from top rated medical insurance companies and apply online.

COBRA, short of Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, came into being in 1985, and it is also a low cost health insurance option for short-term coverage up to 18 months. It’s great for transition periods such as school age children, widowed spouses, divorced couples, and other situations where you may have been covered by employee programs previously. COBRA has an 18 month limit, or 36 months if you’re permanently disabled. Most people are under the impression that COBRA is expensive, or that it’s better to stay with a plan they know.

Again, depending on where you live, requirements may be stringent. However, it wouldn’t hurt to see if you or your family qualifies. Ask around to find out about the different agents and their policies. Many agents will work very hard to get you an affordable health insurance plan for your family at a cost you can live with. Ask if the agent will be available for phone calls and if he or she will make phone calls on your behalf if you have questions in the future. Ask your agent to be sure.

Ask for a quote from several sources, and see what kind of a deal, they can get for you. Make sure they are also licensed in your state, because it does no good getting insurance if they can’t operate in your state. Ask about policy rates, terms, services, co-pays, and claim procedures. If the representative has a difficult time answering your questions, or you just don’t think the company is legit, consider visiting your state’s Department of Insurance website to read through reviews and financial information of the company.

Thank you for taking your time to read this article. Your comments on this article will be highly appreciated. To access Hundred of Gurmit’s articles, please visit websites.

Information shared here does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, and no advisor-client or confidential relationship is or should be formed by use of the site. This article is intended to provide general information only and does not give advice, which relates to your specific individual circumstances. Information in this document is subject to change without notice. Any link-listing or ad-listing on this site does not constitute any type of endorsement.

Gurmit loves traveling; he has been over 70 countries. He speaks fluent Cantonese, Polish, Hindi, Punjabi and English. Gurmit is an author, writer, insurance and mortgage expert. He frequently writes on various topics of interest to his readers. Gurmit Singh is a licensed mortgage expert with Dominion Lending Centres Mortgage Villa.

The Twelve Most Useful Second Languages For English Speakers

When the world talks about science, culture, economy or politics, it speaks English. English speakers don’t really need a second language at all. So, what’s the use of a second language when the first one is enough? English speakers can look for the luxury items: cultural and linguistic enrichment. In this article, I will evaluate the world’s major languages for their usefulness to English speakers, according to three different criteria:

  1. Demographics: Opportunity to use the language actively: the number of native and second language speakers, and the chances of communicating with them in this language: use as a lingua franca. It’s not simply a matter of numbers. Mandarin is by far the most spoken language but it is concentrated in one country, China, and that reduces the impact. In the case of Hindi, educated speakers will very likely also speak English, so the opportunity to speak to people in Hindi is greatly reduced.
  2. Personal Impact: This subjective criterion looks at the impact on the learner. How does this language study increase the learner’s own sophistication regarding languages, whether English or another, third language? How does this language make the learner a more culturally literate person?
  3. Business factors: How will this language open new business and commercial opportunities?

Criterion I. Demographics: I begin with demographics because this is the criterion that first comes to mind in such a discussion. However, this factor only weighs 40 percent in the ratings, and certain entries here, such as Italian, Swahili and Turkish, will only become understandable when one sees the tables that follow.

  1. Spanish: Approx. 350 million native speakers, with many second language speakers in the Americas, North Africa and elsewhere. It is the official language of about 20 countries. (6 points). It is an important lingua franca in the Western Hemisphere and the Mediterranean, (3 points). (Total: 9 points).
  2. French: Despite a relatively small native language base of 130 million, French has a major presence internationally, with a large second language population all over the world and official language status in over 25 countries. It is the working language of many international organizations (4 points). It is also the most recognized lingua franca, after English. (4 points). (Total: 8 points).
  3. Arabic: Arabic speakers are hard to quantify. Modern Standard Arabic is a second dialect for 250 million people worldwide, but it is quite difference from the spoken Arabic in each of the 20 countries where it is official. It is an official language of the United Nations and of many international organizations. It is also the language of Islam. (4.5 points). Arabic is a major lingua franca. (2 points). (Total: 6.5 points).
  4. Russian: Estimates are as high as 185 million for the native speaking population, and it is the second language in all the nations of the former Soviet Union (3 points). Russia spent much of the Twentieth Century securing the position of its language as the lingua franca in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and it continues to serve in that capacity, in a greatly diminished way. (2 points). (Total: 5 points).
  5. Mandarin: It’s the native language of 875 million people, however, they are concentrated in one country, China. It is a second language for the rest of China, Taiwan, and for Chinese community world-wide. It has little currency beyond its ethnic boundaries and serves as lingua franca only in this context. (Total: 3 points).
  6. German: It has approx. 120 million native speakers and many second language speakers throughout Europe. (2 points). It has had moderate success re-establishing itself as the lingua franca of Central Europe, after the disastrous history of the past century, however, this role has been taken up in the meantime by Russian and English (1 point). (Total: 3 points).
  7. Hindustani: It includes Urdu at one end and Hindi at the other, with approx. 185 million native speakers in India, and 50 million in Pakistan. It is a second language for another 180 million people in these country. It has not had success as a lingua franca outside of this context, as that purpose is served by English. It has also been burdened by the reluctance of the Dravidian speaking people of South India to adopt it. (Total: 2.5 points).
  8. Swahili: It is spoken natively by 5 million people and by another 50 million as a second language along the East African coast. It’s the official language of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (1 point). Swahili is the accepted lingua franca in that area, having achieved nearly neutral “tribal” status on a continent where language is politics, but for dealings with the world beyond, it is normally eclipsed by Arabic, English and French (1.5 points). (Total: 2.5 points).
  9. Portuguese: Spoken by approx. 190 million people, it is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola and other states. It has not as yet been able to establish itself as a widely used lingua franca. (Total: 2 points).
  10. Turkish: It is spoken by 70 million people in Turkey and Cyprus (1 point). It provides an alternative lingua franca throughout the Turkic speaking lands of Central Asia, replacing the more alien Russian (1 point). (Total: 2 points).
  11. Japanese: It is spoken by 125 million people in Japan, but has little currency as a second language or a lingua franca. (Total: 1 point).
  12. Italian: It is spoken by 60 million people in Italy, it is also the official language of the Vatican. It has little or no significance as a second language or a lingua franca. (1 point).

Criterion II: Personal Impact: This is the major consideration for the English speaker. It weighs 40 percent in my ratings. How will the learning of this language help one’s understanding of English? How will knowledge of this language open up a portal to other related languages? For the first question, Latin languages hold a distinct advantage, since the prestige, erudite forms of English are all constructed out of a Latin vocabulary. The second question favors languages which are seen as leading languages in particular linguistic families, wherever they may be located in the world.

  1. French: It holds a particular position among Latin languages, in that it has been the major conduit of Latin vocabulary into English for the past one thousand years. Fully 30 percent of English words come from French, (6 points). In cultural terms, the centrality of France to European civilization cannot be overestimated, adding 6 more points. (Total: 12 points)
  2. Spanish: This Latin language has enormous influence on the English of the Americas. It has, in turn, been influenced by Arabic and the indigenous languages of pre-Columbian America, giving insight into those languages. (4 points). Spanish culture continues to move into the forefront of Western civilization, ironically, often because of the patronage of its greatest rival, North American English (4 points). (Total: 8 points).
  3. Italian: It is the direct descendant of Latin. Thus, a knowledge of Italian gives the learner an exceptionally clear idea of the classical language. By the same token, it is the central romance language, and the study of a second or third romance language is greatly facilitated when the first one learned is Italian. (4 points). Italian also opens up a store of cultural knowledge dating back two thousand years, and representing, with the Roman Empire, the Catholic tradition and the Italian Renaissance, some of the very highest achievements of European civilization. (4 points). (Total: 8 points).
  4. German: The linguistic significance for English speakers is great. German provides a clear presentation of the Germanic roots of English, and of the syntactic and grammatical logic of the basic English language. As the major Germanic language it can also be considered a portal to other Germanic languages such as Dutch and Yiddish. (4 points). German culture is also greatly appreciated in Western culture, and its philosophers and artists are key figures. (2 points). (Total: 6 points).
  5. Arabic: Although the immediate linguistic impact of the study of Arabic may be hard to discern for the English speaker, the benefits of Arabic in the study of other languages is high. Arabic has greatly influenced other languages of the Middle East and the Muslim world in religion, politics, and social life. Also, the study of the Arabic alphabet opens the way to many other languages, such as Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, etc. (3 points). Arabic culture has had major influence on western civilization but it remains largely unknown in the English speaking world. Knowledge of the language also leads to a greater understanding of Islam. (2 points). (Total: 5 points).
  6. Hindustani: In its Hindi form, it is a window on the origins of the larger Indo-European language family with its Sanskrit vocabulary. As Urdu, it gives a significant introduction to many Persian and Arabic terms. Urdu also uses the Persian form of Arabic script, opening the way to wider studies. It is a starting point for the study of other languages of the subcontinent, an area rich in languages. (3 points). India’s rich culture has become more familiar in the English speaking world, in large part due to India’s ability to project its image through English. However, Hindustani language and Hindi culture are also spread through the Bollywood film industry. Pakistan has yet to make its presence felt, but the potential is there. (2 point). (Total: 5 points).
  7. Russian: It has not had major influence in the west, given its geographical isolation. It is, however, the major Slavic language, and as such, opens the way to many other Eastern European languages. The Cyrillic alphabet, moreover, is a tremendous asset for reading many of those languages. (2 points). Russian high culture thrived under both tsarism and communism, and it has a significant place in European civilization. (2 points). (Total: 4 points).
  8. Portuguese: As a Latin language, Portuguese has a built-in significance for English speakers, even without a direct relationship with English. (3 points). The cultural significance of Brazil, one of the largest nations of the Americas, is continually growing. (1 point). (Total: 4 points).
  9. Mandarin: The official Chinese language has had very little influence on English. It has influenced other national languages of the areas, such as Korean and Japanese, and the other “dialects” of China. The Chinese written characters are the same for all of these dialects, and many of these characters are used in Japanese as well. (2 points). Chinese culture, with over two thousand years of history, is quite significant, if not directly applicable to English speaking civilization. (1.5 point). (Total: 3.5 points).
  10. Swahili: As the only sub-Saharan language in the group, it serves to introduce the learner to one of the richest linguistic areas of the Earth. It is from the Bantu family of languages, but it incorporates many words from Arabic, Persian, English and French. (1.5 points). It is the language of trade along the East African coast, and as such, is richly descriptive of the culture there. The West African diaspora into the Americas is one of the great mass migrations of the past 500 years, but because of its tragic social dynamics, it has left many millions of people cut off from African culture. Swahili, although it is East African and not West African, can help to fill that gap. (1.5 points). (Total: 3 points).
  11. Turkish: Though it has little direct relationship to English, it is the major language of a family of languages that extend eastward to the Chinese interior. It has been influenced by Persian, Kurdish and Arabic, and thus gives some introduction to those languages. (1.5 points). It also represents the culture of the Ottoman traditions, and of modern Turkey and Central Asian Turkistan. (1 point). (Total: 2.5 points).
  12. Japanese: This language has had little impact on English and it provides little insight into other languages. It does, however, include many words from Chinese, and uses numerous Chinese characters. (0.5 points). This island nation has been one of the most successful exporters of culture of the Far East during the past century. (1.5 points). (Total: 2 points).

Criterion III. Economic Impact. Is this language useful in the world of commerce and business? Certainly English is by far the most useful language for business, but a knowledge of other key languages can be a distinct advantage. Twenty percent in the ratings:

  1. French: has a long history as a language of commerce and trade. It is extremely important in the developing world, especially Africa. France itself is the world’s sixth largest economy. (4 points).
  2. Spanish: the language of commerce and trade in Latin America. Spain is the world’s ninth largest economy and Mexico is its fourteenth largest. (4 points).
  3. German: often used for business in Central Europe. Germany is the world’s third largest economy. (3 points).
  4. Japanese: can be extremely helpful in dealing with Japanese business. Japan is the world’s second largest economy. (3 points).
  5. Mandarin: China has recently become the world’s fourth largest economy, and it continues to grow. (3 points).
  6. Russian: Used in a part of the world where English is not well-known. Russia is the eleventh largest economy and is moving up in the rankings. (2 points).
  7. Portuguese: Brazil is the tenth largest economy, and continues to grow. (2 points).
  8. Arabic: the language of commerce and trade for the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. (2 points).
  9. Hindustani: is used in the world’s twelfth largest economy, however, English is often the language of business in this area. (2 points).
  10. Italian: is the language of commerce in Italy, the world’s seventh largest economy. (1.5 points).
  11. Swahili: is the language of business along the east coast of Africa. (1 point).
  12. Turkish: is used in the world’s seventeenth largest economy, and to some extent in Central Asia. (1 point).

By these criteria we can come up with a ranking of the 12 most useful languages for an English speaker to learn:

  1. French: 24 points
  2. Spanish: 21 points
  3. Arabic: 13.5 points
  4. German: 12 points
  5. Russian: 11 points
  6. Italian: 10.5 points
  7. Hindustani 9.5 points
  8. Mandarin: 9.5 points
  9. Portuguese: 8 points
  10. Swahili: 6.5 points
  11. Japanese: 5.5 points
  12. Turkish: 5.5 points

Some readers may be familiar with George Weber’s well-known piece entitled, Top Languages, which first appeared in the journal Languages Today in 1997. His study rated languages according to their influence in world affairs and world culture. It is interesting, at this point to compare them. Here are Weber’s results:

  1. English: 37 points
  2. French: 23
  3. Spanish: 20
  4. Russian: 16
  5. Arabic: 14
  6. Chinese: 13
  7. German: 12
  8. Japanese: 10
  9. Portuguese: 10
  10. Hindi/Urdu: 9 pts.

The rankings are similar, with some major differences. My criteria are based on tangible and intangible benefits for the English speaker which are not heavily weighed in Weber’s paradigm. Thus, this subjective focus skewers my results in favor of European languages due to the cultural affinity of English for the languages of Western civilization.

Heritage Languages: The most striking example of a difference is my ranking of Italian as number 6, whereas it does not figure in Weber’s top ten. My justification for Italian is the phenomenon of the “heritage language”, i.e., a language that has usefulness in our understanding and appreciation of the past, rather than in the future. Italian is the vehicle for our understanding of ancient history, the development of Latin languages, Renaissance Art and classical music. It is also the ancestral language of over 100 million people strategically placed in both North and South America. For these reasons, it is the heritage language par excellence. Other languages that benefit from this heritage factor in my listings are German and Swahili.

Point values for English? French, with 24 points, is number one in my listing. Where does English stand in relation? If rating it for usefulness for speakers of other languages, I would give it 10 points in each category, for a total of 50 points. I think that the extraordinary position of English in today’s world is indisputable, and considering it to be twice as useful as its closest competition, French, is not a great stretch of the imagination.

The only English point assignment that may require explanation is ten points for linguistic value. The value of English in this area for world speakers is quite wide reaching and significant. English is the vehicle for the spread of the classical Latin vocabulary for abstract concepts, for the Greco-Roman terms for government, science, philosophy, etc. It absorbs world vocabulary without major spelling changes, effectively spreading new terminology from a variety of sources. As the official language of international organizations, it serves as a showplace for each nation and organization to present itself to the world. Like the other “empire” languages of Western Europe, French and Spanish, English is propagated by native speakers worldwide with no ethnic, social or political relationship to its motherland. But English goes one step further, English is capable of evolving and developing completely independently of its native speakers. Second language users of English drive the introduction of new words like “informatics” and “ufology” which gain currency first among these speakers. Foreign governments keep close control of their English language nomenclature, and make changes through the United Nations and non-government organizations. These changes are therefore immediate in English, with no consultation with native speakers necessary. While some European languages are still calling the capital of China “Peking”, English made the switch to “Beijing” during the late 1980s (for proof, look at contemporary reports regarding the Tian an Men Square events of June, 1989). Recently, the switch from Bombay to Mumbai has happened before most English speakers have even noticed.

Conclusion – The status of English in world affairs puts its native speakers in a unique position. We have the opportunity of living in a provincial English-only environment in which the world comes to us, or we can take advantage of this favored position to become acquainted with other cultures right within our own language. So, is any second language really useful for English speakers? No study can ever really measure the personal importance of second language learning. That is something we have to discover for ourselves. The fact is that every language is well worth the effort to learn, as every language is a complete way of describing the universe of human achievement, and thus it’s significance is as wide and as deep as we personally make it.

Note on Statistics: The statistics that I have used (population, economic ranking, etc.) come from diverse sources: world almanacs, encyclopedias, US government studies. I make no claims about their accuracy, as they are general estimates. Their importance is in relationship to each other.

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