‘Gandhi’s so retrograde’

Bathed in primary colours and adorned by retro posters of early Bollywood films, the walls of his company offices radiate the signature decor of India’s new economy. Situated in midtown Bombay in a district once dominated by textile mills, most of which went bankrupt in the 1980s, Kejriwal’s surroundings remind me of Clerkenwell in London, or Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. The decor is what some call post-modern.

I spent a lot of time talking to Kejriwal and some of his sixty employees at C2W.com — contest-to-win.com, which markets brands through the internet, mobile phones, interactive TV shows and other new technology. The company’s main clients are global multinationals desperate for converts among India’s rising class of spenders. The country’s consumers, says Kejriwal, are tired of crude television commercials and other traditional marketing ploys. They want their marketing savvy and lateral. His diagnosis — which must be right because he is very rich — reminded me of Coca-Cola’s ill-fated return to India in the early 1990s (having been kicked out in the 1970s): “We’re back!” proclaimed the Americans. Indians shrugged and carried on drinking Thums Up, Coke’s local imitator, which never went away in the first place.

Kejriwal, whose start-up capital came from Citibank and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (parent company of The Times), gives an example of his methods. Garnier, the French cosmetics company, wanted to introduce Indians to hair conditioner, the use of which was confined to a tiny travelling elite. So Kejriwal created a game for Garnier’s Indian website in which contestants get a year’s free supply of L’ Oréal products if they win. It involves an interactive contest in which you try to climb up the long hair of Rapunzel, the fairytale princess locked in a tower. If her hair is too dry or too oily, you fail. Another game that C2W developed for Jockey, the underwear maker, involves removing the knickers and shorts from models. A cackle of electronic laughter greets those who succeed. In a game devised for Yamaha motorbikes you try to pick up your girlfriend by negotiating sharp turns on narrow roads. “Some curves demand attention,” reads a caption once you have collected your animated girlfriend. All of this is slightly risqué in a country where many still outwardly pay homage to Gandhi’s values.

But it is also a wild commercial success, and one that is stretching the horizons of marketing in India. I asked Kejriwal whether he was deliberately needling the Gandhian values of his elders. “I don’t really care about Gandhi; Gandhi is retrograde,” he says over an espresso in his open-plan office. “Most of these people protesting against short skirts and foreign influences are hypocrites. Half send their children to English private schools and go abroad if they need a medical operation. These people are retrograde.”

Kejriwal engages in conversation with an intensity that he presumably uses on potential clients, peppered with the terminology of a world that consists of “ecosystems”, “mindshare” and “optimum space”. When I ask for the bathroom I am directed to a door with a placard reading “gentstogo.com”. And when I ask whether this work is intellectually challenging enough for him, he replies: “Wow! That is an awesome question” — one that he never really answers.

The employment of hundreds of thousands of young engineers, scientists, economics and English graduates on pay scales that often exceeded those of their parents nearing retirement age, created a new generation of consumers with little time for India’s traditional pace of life. They were also impatient with the time-honoured verities of their parents: “Be polite to your boss”, “Work your way up the hierarchy”, “Don’t spend more than you earn.”

Kejriwal says his employees, most of whom dress in the style of their counterparts in San Francisco, never talk about money in cash terms. They measure their pay in EMIs: equal monthly instalments. These are monthly deductions from a bank account that continue for years, enabling workers to pay off the car, motorbike, microwave, air-conditioning units and flats that have not yet been earned. Employees can even take EMI holidays; most go to Thailand or the Maldives. “Holiday now, pay later,” says the commercial. The number of EMIs you have depends on what you earn, and what you want to buy in advance.

Kejriwal also provides stock options as an incentive for employees to stick around until the company is listed on the stock market. Job-hopping is another novelty for India, where a secure post was conventionally something you clung on to for life. But stock options are not much incentive for an employee who slices up his or her (almost half of Kejriwal’s employees are female) income into exact bytes of EMI. “Saving is the last thing on their minds,” says Kejriwal.

The success of India’s IT companies in attracting ever more impressive flows of offshore business from the US and Europe has reverberations way beyond the air-conditioned offices in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi or Bombay. It has convinced sceptics across India, who were raised in a culture of what economists called “export pessimism”, that Indian companies can, after all, compete and make profits in global markets. This “demonstration effect” is increasingly visible in India’s manufacturing sector and among businesses that have no connection to IT or to the service industry.

Dinesh Hinduja owns Gokaldas Exports, one of India’s most successful garmentmakers. Businessmen such as Hinduja in India and China are the reason why so many in the West fear the economic resurgence of Asia’s two giant neighbours. Situated in Bangalore, the booming capital of the south Indian state of Karnataka, Gokaldas Exports turns out two million garment pieces every month for 26 brand labels around the world. Prominent clients include Marks & Spencer, Banana Republic, Gap, Pierre Cardin and Abercrombie & Fitch. Even barcodes and price tags are affixed before the clothes leave India. Hinduja’s highly trained workforce can turn out clothes in 900 styles, switching production techniques as fast as youth fashion changes in the West. They embroider and print exclusive fabrics for the older generation, and batter and tear jeans for the young.

By the standards of other developing countries, including China, Hinduja’s outfit is defined as “complex manufacturing”. India’s garment exports are not made in the large, labour-intensive warehouses found in China, which employ millions of people, but in small units such as those of Gokaldas Exports, which employ tens of thousands. Hinduja employs 33,000 people. If he could operate in China, where there are millions of literate workers, his workforce would be closer to 200,000, he says. His factories are staffed mostly by women. There is a medical centre and a crèche. “We try not to hire men; they are less reliable,” he says. “We had one man who was a drunkard and we fired him. He appealed and it took us 15 years and huge amounts of management time before we won the appeal.”

Hinduja’s competitive edge in complex manufacturing is an excellent illustration of India’s economic paradox. He can hire any number of highly qualified graduates who will be instantly at home with fashion software, so they can design the clothes on computers. Since they are also fluent in English, they can market the designs at the big garment fairs in Paris, New York, London and Milan. As a result, Hinduja probably makes more money than his counterparts in China. But he is careful not to expand his payroll count too much, since labour in India is a sunk cost. Hiring workers there is a decision that can be reversed only if you have great patience for dharnas (a form of protest) and deep pockets for litigation. “When I expand it is always in a capital intensive, not a labour-intensive, direction,” says Hinduja.

Edited extract from In spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce, Little, Brown, £20. Available for £18, including p&p, from BooksFirst, 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksbuyfirst

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FAREWELL TO THE VILLAGE?

Devdoongri is a tiny hamlet in the drought-prone west of Rajasthan, and the home of Aruna Roy, one of India’s most admired and effective social activists. Her base is a collection of small mud huts, but on account of the heat we all slept outside in a row on charpoys — the traditional wooden beds held together by a maze of woven jute thread, on which farmers like to take their afternoon siesta.

Roy’s “left-hand man” is Nikhil Dey, an intelligent and articulate man in his early forties who comes from an equally privileged background in the city. Their group, the Organisation for the Empowerment of Workers and Peasants, agitates to secure the basic rights of ordinary villages from an often impervious bureaucracy.

Dey took me to Sohangarh, a typical Rajasthani village centred on a small and dusty public square through which the occasional sacred cow wanders on its afternoon rounds. A few of the richer peasants have electricity, but at best for only three to four hours a day. Most villagers make do with hurricane lamps to negotiate the dark. There is, of course, very little water, so people can change their clothes only every few days. The average landholding is just half an acre, barely enough to feed the family, and very rarely producing a surplus for the market. The plots will become progressively smaller as they are divided among the sons of the next generation. There is little prospect, on any commonsense assessment, that such a small area of farmland could bring material security, let alone prosperity, to the growing population of the village in the future.

Dey gathered a group of the local men to tell us about their lives: it was a roll-call of agricultural failure. The first man was a well-digger who travelled from village to village. Another was a security guard for Reliance Industries in Delhi. The next was a cloth worker who had lost his job in the city. The fourth had been trying for years without success to join the army. The next two were menial workers at a city hotel.

And so on. Barely any of the men remain in the village because farming does not allow them to make ends meet. While they are away the women and children tend to the family cow and the small plot. But very few of the men can find secure jobs and hold on to their plots because they are the best insurance they have.

I asked Dey whether he believed the village — Sohangarh or any other — could provide an economic future to all its inhabitants. “We can make the village work through better farming and cottage industries,” he said. “If people leave the villages, they also lose the rootedness that comes with living where you are from, and the strength you draw from your natural surroundings.”

Roy and Dey want India to buck the universal trend in which society urbanises as it develops. Their view of today’s world is that it consists of multinational companies exploiting India’s people and resources for hit-and-run profits. In essence, it is a world whose companies are modern versions of the East India Company, the British outfit that used its royal charter to colonise India in the 18th century, a “neo-liberal” world that profits from the entrapment and “immiseration” of the developing world’s poor — and in which moving to the city in today’s India happens not voluntarily but because people have — according to Roy and Dey — been brutally uprooted by new technology and the profit motive.