The DFW Desi, Vol. 154: The Kissing Game | Ram Charan

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Vol. 154, May 1, 2007 So what’s new?The Kissing Game. In case you haven’t heard, Sanjaya is gone, the most talked about marriage (lucky L’oreal!) is over, and the Indian mangoes are here… But the big news is the kisses – first, (the old news) a warrant for the arrest of Richard Gere for kissing Shilpa Shetty…and now a lawsuit on Aishwayra Rai for a kissing scene in a recent movie… Some sane people did comment on these controversies: “It is heartening to note that it’s not the viewers alone who are exasperated with 24-hour news channels, but also the journalists who work in these organizations. V K Shashikumar of CNN-IBN news channel in his blog titled Moronic Media can’t hide his disgust, disenchantment and disillusionment on the scenario. In a comment posted on his blog on April 17, Shashikumar wrote: “We, the people working in TV news channels have made a superb opening on Monday with the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty kissing controversy. According to news channels, this is the most serious issue that the country should be debating this week. And so, like the conscientious pimp, an array of news channels in India are dressing up a ‘not-worth-a-second-look’ subject into an ecstatic TRP stimulating exercise.” Along similar lines, someone else who has been in news for running afoul of the Indian “Cultural Police” is Mandira Bedi - “First it was her now-famous noodle straps that caught the imagination of a cricket-crazy nation, then a controversial tattoo on her back and now her sari that has dishonoured the Tricolour. On the cricket World Cup live show Extraa Innings, telecast on Sony Max on Saturday night, Mandira was seen wearing a sari that had an image of the Tricolour below her waist. According to Constitution, wearing the Triclour waist down is considered a dishonour to the flag”. Much has been written about the invasion of the Indian economy by large western conglomerates – now, a new survey finds some brands are preferred by India’s youth than others - “Moreover, with high cable television penetration rates, especially among the 200 million-plus middle-class households, Goel said many more Indians are closely watching the brands worn by both American and Indian celebrities and entertainers on networks like MTV or VH1. “There’s a cultural phenomenon in India that is quite pervasive,” Goel said. He described it as “foreign envy.” If you own something that’s from abroad, it sets you apart from your peers”. Controversy continues to swirl on the murder of Bob Woolmer, the coach of the Pakistani cricket team – the latest being a fatwah angle…“Woolmer was upset that several members of the Pakistani team were followers of ‘Tabliqhy Jamaat’, a Muslim revivalist movement, Pakistan’s media manager Pervez Mir indicated last night on BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme, which focused on the coach’s murder in a Jamaican hotel six weeks ago. According to Mir, Woolmer felt players were focusing more on religion than their game. He went on to claim that Woolmer could have even invited a ‘fatwah’ had he gone public with his feelings”. Till next time… The DFW Desi The DFW Desi is a free, independent newsletter published to share current news, views and events pertaining to the South Asian American community – over 8,000 strong and growing!Please feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends. You may not be on our mailing list – to continue receiving this newsletter, please visit www.DfwDesi.com The strange existence of Ram Charan David Whitford, Fortune Magazine What he does is hard to describe. But the most powerful CEOs love it enough to keep him on the road 24/7 and make him the most influential consultant alive. Fortune’s David Whitford reports. — The Al Manzil Hotel in Dubai has been open for business all of 18 days on the Saturday night in January that I show up with Ram Charan. The lobby is strangely quiet; there doesn’t seem to be anybody else staying here. The surrounding neighborhood is called Old Town, but in fact it’s a construction site from which are rising what will one day be the world’s tallest skyscraper and the world’s biggest mall. Soulless and kind of creepy, I’m thinking, but Charan’s thoughts are elsewhere. Already he has claimed an overstuffed chair in the center of the lobby and is talking on the phone. After 12 hours of isolation on the flight from J.F.K., Charan is back in business, deep in private conversation with a client in New York City. He looks tired, and no wonder. He began his day with a 4 A.M. Friday wake-up call in Richmond (he did a Squawk Box live remote on CNBC), and he has a head cold. But he is in no hurry to go to bed. Charan doesn’t care what time it is. He doesn’t care what day of the week it is. And the last thing he cares about is where he is. As long as Charan is with a client – or can get one on the phone – he’s home. Thirty years ago this month, Ram Charan (pronounced “Rahm Scha-RON”) quit a tenured professorship at Boston University to devote himself full-time to consulting. Today he’s alone at the top of his profession – not a consultant so much as a guru, a corporate sage, with unparalleled access to boardrooms across the globe and intimate, enduring relationships with an array of powerful CEOs.         For the complete article, please click here. New Samples Now Added on www.SilkThreads.com A Pakistani in America: Two Book reviews Jai Arjun Singh, The Business Standard Reading Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I was reminded of an incident during a coach tour in Britain years ago. My dining companions—a South African couple, polite but also largely uninformed about the world outside their backyards—had made a stereotypical remark about Indians: I don’t recall the specific point (it may have been an expression of surprise that we could speak fluent English) but I remember bristling strongly. For someone who’s been dissociated from many of the important elements of “Indian-ness”—such as religion, rituals, strong family ties and the continual assertion of patriotism—it was unnerving to discover this level of cultural sensitivity beneath a “citizen of the world” facade.        …from the moment Changez begins working there, he feels like he is in a great melting pot. When he first speaks of this, while describing an induction party, his tone is uneasy. Something inside him rallies against being homogenised, and it’s interesting that he expresses this in military terms…    VIEW: Being a ‘real’ Pakistani — Rafia Zakaria The most interesting aspect of Hamid’s Changez is that he is a “hero” who is markedly un-heroic. Changez’s pursuit of “whiteness”, his pretensions and near-pathetic submissiveness to the dictates of the American moneyed class, make an interesting thesis regarding the immigrant’s quest to become white. Pakistani immigrants (and many others), influenced possibly by their own colonial past and an American culture that reifies whiteness and presents being coloured as a disadvantage, devote themselves in their choice of friends, clothes, housing, even politics, to becoming white. The tragedy of such a hollow, misguided pursuit, one illustrated by Hamid in the crisis that ultimately unravels Changez’s life, is that it creates a fake Pakistani-American identity. Prior to 9/11, this fake identity was unchallenged. After 9/11, the “otherness” of the Pakistani was suddenly highlighted. In capturing this conflict through fiction, Hamid presents an urgent question to all Pakistani-Americans who believe that they can, through Ivy League educations and high paying jobs, buy their way out of being brown. Partnership Golf Take a Swing at Ending Global Poverty! An initiative of Aga Khan Foundation U.S.A

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