I was contrasting the public reaction to the news that Jet Airways and Kingfisher were to lay off hundreds of employees to the stony indifference (at best) that greeted the news of the sackings in the financial sector. When people heard about the dismissed airline employees, saw photos of young girls in tears, there was a general outpouring of sympathy. Editors commissioned sympathetic pieces on the air hostess training schools that have sprung up all over the country and the newspapers asked, “What will become of these poor girls now? Their dream has died”. Eventually, the uproar forced Naresh Goyal to take back the Jet employees.
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In this era of easy money, private planes and conspicuous consumption, we sometimes forget what industrialists were like in the days before the economy opened up and every second businessmen became a millionaire. Younger people have been told that they were all crooks who survived by manipulating the licence-quota raj and bribing bureaucrats and politicians. Only after 1991, or so it is said, did the true entrepreneurial energy of India get unleashed and a new class of savvy, globally conscious businessmen emerge.
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  Ihave not seen, but have read about a recent programme on British television, which made the point that the American presidential election closely mirrors the last season of The West Wing. For those of you who are not West Wing fans, here’s what happens in Season 7: a decent, experienced but old Republican senator is nominated as his party’s candidate. His opponent is an ethnic (Latino) Democratic Congressman with much less experience but who therefore holds out the promise of change. The two candidates are evenly matched and their one debate is a draw with neither managing to convert the other’s supporters.
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There was a time when Indians — even very rich ones — travelling to the West would routinely complain about casual racism. This racism would take many forms. They would be harassed by white officers at immigration desks at airports. They would be the last to be served at shops. At hotels, they would be given the worst rooms, at restaurants, the worst tables.
People like you: You’re a prime target for Asians at an international airport.
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If you’ve seen Never Say Never Again, the 1980s movie that marked the return of Sean Connery to the role of James Bond, then you’ll remember the sequence where Bond gets sent to a health farm. The film opens with Bond failing a training exercise and being told by the new M (Edward Fox) that he must seek a naturopathic cure (this M is a health nut).
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The suggestions in this column, a couple of weeks ago, that I could easily imagine Danny Denzongpa playing Gabbar Singh or that Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi would have been a better movie had Naseeruddin Shah, and not Ben Kingsley, played the title role, have caused some consternation among my friends. They are, of course, entitled to disagree with me but what their responses tell me is this: All too often, an actor becomes so closely identified with a role that we refuse to accept anybody else in his or her place.
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