For everyone who thought
1) The guy you've been dreaming about is going to come find you while you dance away singing in the rain
2) He'll fall instantly in love with you and respect you even though you acted like a snotty brat
3) Men have honorable intentions
4) He's actually going to show up at your village during your arranged marriage and win your family's heart
5) You'll meet him on a trip to europe
6) He'll actually realize he loves you
7) I love you = i want to spend my life with you
8) He'll leave his family empire to be with you
9) He fell in love while he saw you happily dancing at your friends wedding dreaming of your own weddding
10) He has any intentions of keeping those promises he told you the first day
11) He'll fight for you
12) He won't look at another woman because he thinks your beautiful
13) He thinks your beautiful
14) He put the dupatta over your head to show you that he respects you
15) He feeds you the line..."worship 3 women, ek. durga ma, do. appne mae...aur...aur"
16) He will remain celibate if you die because he loved you just THAT much...and you also think he never checked out or thought of other women while you were alive.
17) Committment is a real word and can be applied between two people of the opposite gender
18) He cares if you cry
19) Every desi party/wedding you go to you expect to meet the love of your life
20) Every time you go out with your girlfriends, you think the desi guy who's been staring at you all night across the club is picturing taking you home to meet his mom and not his erm
21) You think the desi guy is going to jump in there and beat up a guy who insults you for dressin skanky and dancing in the rain
22) You think you actually look hot when your drenching wet in the rain and it makes your hair look sexy and he likes it
23) He's dying to spend the rest of his life honoring you as his wife
24) You guys are going to go to switzerland during your honeymoon and you'll get to walk in the meadow in a skanky sari even though it's snowing
25) Your mother in law is actually going to like you
26) Your going to be a cherished "bohu"
27) For the bachelor party he'll be telling his friends how amazing you are instead of hooking up with a hooker
28) At your sister's wedding, her husbands younger brother is going to be ridiculously hot and fall madly in love with you
29) The hot desi guy who sits behind you in class actually noticed you walking in with your long flowing black hair and not the blond in the mini skirt who winked at him before leaning over to retreive the pencil she "accidentally" dropped
30) He's a virgin...he's been waiting his whole life to "make love" to you on your wedding night just like you have been waiting for him...
31) He'll still think your hot after you've had three kids and you spend your day wearing pretty sari's with your hair in a braid cooking with your mother in law
32) In regards to number 31, you think he's not cheating on you
33) Your idea of a great weekend is going to be taking your kids to an amusement park, and you think he's going to be happy doing family things instead of seeing you in a halter top and mini skirt dancing on stage
34) You think you'll make a great balance between respectable mom and wife vs. sexy wife in bed and he'll let you get away with it.
35) The love of your life is your ridiculously hot best friend (male) who was there through all your girlish dreams but you just never realized he was the one....however, once you did he already found the "love of his life" in the form of a mini skirt wearing, desi song singing, foreigner who has "traditional" values....
36) Your heart skips a beat and you gaze down at your lap demurely at the talk of your "dholi"
37) Your heart goes mad when a guy in a shalwani approaches and grabs your dupatta before letting you slip away before any aunties catch you...
38) Your idea of flirting is smiling shyly and running away.
39) You get all choked up when you hear old songs like khabhi khabhi and start imaginging your "sohag raat" when the man of your dreams (who you happened date and then marry with your parents permission..yea rite) is going to lift your ghoonghaat and then lift your face and you'll blush and look down because you know whats going to happen but ur shy because you've never done anything with him before? right?
40) When you reject him...... he will be in tears and tell his friend 'zindegi mein PEHLI hum ne keise ko DIL se chaha' and you think its a true LOVE and except it
41) When you get mad and walk away, he grabs your hand and doesnt let go
42) Out of NO WHERE, an EXTREMELY good looking guy will appear and tell you how he has been in love with you for years and has to come to sweep you off your feet
43: Losing your anklet at a wedding:
Bollywood version:
You lose your anklet while running and then you realize you lost it and when you turn around, a hot desi guy is on his knee, slowly holding it up and look at you. Then you're allowed to put your foot on his knee (its like the ultimate mutual agreement) and he puts it on for you. Your thanks to him is to push his knee so he falls unbalanced and you run away into a song where you flirt with each other the rest of the night.
Real version:
You purposely lose your anklet in front of a hot desi guy and 1. he doesn't notice. 2. he looks at it and walks away 3. he bends down and picks it up, hands it to you and walks away
Reality is tough :P
Nishat that was amazing! i love that one)
44) It's raining and ur wearing a hot saree. ur umbrella blows away with the wind. a HOTTT guy comes and picks it up for u and offers u a ride home or walks u home
45) You both get trapped in bad weather and are unable to make it to your own homes, so you spend a night in a run-down cottage for safety, maintaining a good distance form each other. When you two get home, your parents will slander you and threaten to disown you because they think you did something with him. To protect your honor in society and from hatred from your parents, he will marry you and settle everything.
46) Walking down the library aisle,
and hoping to find him on teh other side as you find your book, and head to take it off the shelf,.. you see your prince JUST on the other side peaking at you
47) Everytime when you walked in the cold, with the wind blowing everywhere..u imagined being in a hot saari and a ridiculously hott desi would come over and give u his jacket. even though he probably willl catch a cold himself, he is enough of a gentleman to not let u freeze..then u realize he loves u, and ur parents let u see him.....
48. You'll go on an Europe tour and miss your train and fall in love with someone exactly like Raj Malhotra who will steal you away from the worst fiance ever and you'll live happily ever after with the approval of the marriage from your parents of man they've never met.
49. Ok think modern day Veer Zaara. He's Sikh and your Muslim. You meet and fall in love. You actually think religion doesn't matter and that all the rishtas your throwing away is worth the guy because he would do anything to be with you. Wrong! He'll go for the first beautiful girl from his own religion.
50. You think now a days, religion doesn't matter. You actually believe he'll love you enough that he won't hold it against you that your a different religion when it comes to marraige..
51. He won't tell another girl that you were just some random girl he met and that she's actually the one he's been waiting for.
52. He won't be double crossing you with another girl for months.
53. You think he wants to be with you when he gets jealous months after you guys break up and he finds out other men are interested. You think thats a sign that everything is going to be ok...
54. I love you actually means I love you, not I love you, but I think I love this other girl, and I'm really confused between you two, and I'm lying to you both about each other and who ever finds out first about teh other and then I'm damned, I'll break her heart.
55. You think that when you guys say good night he isn't calling his next girl.
56. You think he put his cell phone on silent because he wants undisturbed time with you and not because he doesn't want you to see the other girl calling him.
57. He's Punjabi sikh...haha and you thought he was decent.
58. He respects his mother. He respects his sister. Therefore you assume he respects women. WRONG. He just respects his own blood.
59. You think he keeps saying he wants to convert to Islam because he likes the religion and not because he likes teh idea of four wives.
60. He cries when he holds your hand at the hospital and keeps saying "i'll never let you go" and you assume it means he'll never let you go...in actuality it means...i'll let you go once your out of the hospital...cause i have a new chic waiting for me.
61....SO HE WATCHED DDLJ when he was like 17? Then he decided he wanted to just like Raj. The movie spoke to him apparently. He can play the guitar and he wants a Simran. So then you guys meet and he is JUST like Raj. He's romantic, he wants marriage, he is persistent and your slightly standoffish intially...and he keeps playing "Tuhjhe dehka toi yeh jaana Sanam" around you. To top it all off, your parents ARE looking for guys for you, and you know HE isn't going to cut it for them for various social and religious reasons or whatever reasons....So you secretly fall in love and promise to love each other forever ect..ect...He's your Raj. If there were trains in teh states you would definately have caught them for him! But since there aren't, you drove your car alot to be with him. Well...anyways...He thinks he's Raj...teh only problem is...every couple of years he finds a new Simran.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Sex in the boardroom!
Especially love the part of the article about the asshole who would like to get abused by his female boss. Indian men, keep it up !!! So PREDICTABLE that it is neither shocking or for that matter surprising. Need a movement in India, "RESPECT WOMEN, if you want to reach the next level as a country and a set of people"
Sex in the boardroom!
“When a man talks dirty to a woman, its sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 per minute”
The famous Steven Wright quote seems to be quite paradoxical, especially in the light of a recent Australian survey. According to the survey, it’s not only women who face sexual harassment at work places; men also have to go through the unwanted office vixenry. Remember Michael Douglas in Disclosure or Akshay Kumar in the desi version Aitraaz? The study also states that many men are sexually harassed by women at work but are afraid to complain to their bosses. And even if they complain about their bosses, they are more likely to be told they are actually lucky to be ogled and hassled!
This couldn’t be closer to the truth, at least where India Inc is concerned. We spoke to a cross-section of people on the issue and the reactions were, well, surprising, to say the least! Read on...
What’s going on in that cubicle?
“Yes. I agree that sex has entered the boardroom big time. Males are actually facing sexual pestering by female bosses and colleagues.” says ex. lieutenant Rita Gangwani, carefully avoiding the words harassment and exploitation.
“Since time immemorial, man has been the ruler and female just a follower. But with changing times, the new age women are getting much empowered. They are rubbing shoulders with men and doing much better in most of the fields. So, such sexual advances can be about flaunting, exercising power and not actually about sex, “she further exemplifies.
Supports producer of a leading sports channel, “Behind the scenes of every male life, there are instances (though very few) when they come across such a boss. But, to be very honest, if it exists then it’s a win-win situation for him.”
For most people, however, sexual harassment of a man by a woman is inane, to say the least. “A hidden world of sexual harassment, with female managers exploiting their power over men in the office, seems very unreal. See, especially in the desi context, sex is a very hush-hush thing and not something easily available. So, in such situation even if a man gets such a proposition, he can just not mind it. This stands true even if he doesn’t get any materialistic favours from his female boss in return. Where is the issue?” questions COO of a renowned Internet-solution company.
Pallavi Shekhar, sales manager, Idea Cellular Ltd, shares a similar opinion, “We all know how grapevines work at workplace. She would gain instant fame in and out the office. Why would a female herself opt for a situation in which everyone in the office and even in the industry think of her as a bimbo? No matter how modern a woman is - image matters a lot.”
Can a female actually exploit a man?
Can a female actually exploit a man?
“Not really,” says Rita Gangwani, making us understand why she avoided the word harassment, “I would call it sexual convenience for both. A female at a top notch position might be looking for some emotional backing. Women get emotionally involved the minute they enter a physical alliance; for them, ‘No-strings-attached’ also comes with a thin, white strand. In such cases, women get the much needed emotional refuge, flattering compliments and a dedicated escort and men get promotions/raises along with casual sex. It’s just a pact.”
“If there is Sex & Sum (money) then it will be total 'advantage men’. The reason for this is that sex is not open in our country,” asserts the sports channel producer.
So, does that mean men see such proposals as just another opportunity to carve a notch on the bedpost and get some “perks”? When, Pratish Aggrawal, a software developer working with Infosys, was asked if he has ever been harassed a female boss, colleague, he replied, "No, but I'd like to be”. Oops point taken! However, Pratish is quick to cover up, “Look men are not that sensitive. They do not consider mockery, sexual jokes, and lewd suggestions from female co-workers as harassment. Also, we have been taught from childhood that real men aren't victims – so we can surely find a way out.”
According to psychologist Dr Sanjay Chugh: “Men usually are more causal about sex but that has nothing to do with exploitation. A female boss asking for sexual favours may be a pleasant thing if the man finds that sex is worth the gain that he might get, or if he finds the boss sexually attractive. But if one doesn’t find the boss attractive, if one's value systems are different, it can be pure torture to even contemplate such a proposition. Sex with anyone can be casual and fun if it comes out of free choice. In this situation, it no longer remains casual.”
Legally speaking!
ACP Sanjay Tyagi says that in his entire carrier span he hasn’t “even heard of” any case wherein a male has registered a FIR against a female colleague or boss for sexual assault.
Anukul Raj, advocate, Supreme Court, explains, “There are no detailed and specific laws to deal with male harassment. We just have sections like Section 377 and Section 375 that deal with offence like sodomy and forced sexual acts.”
Highlighting the prejudice a male may face in harassment cases, he says: “In case a woman complains of a sexual assault, her word of mouth is considered as the proof and the onus of establishing that the convict is innocent is on the defense. However, if a male makes such a complaint, the onus of proving the assault is on the prosecution.” The lawyer further adds that he hasn’t heard of or fought any such case yet.
Exploring the reason for inhibitions on the part of a male sufferer, Dr Chugh explains, “We have to understand here that for a male it can be very difficult to come up with such a complaint because of the shame or embarrassment associated with it (just as it would be tough for a female). What makes it more difficult is the mindset (result of years of conditioning) that man is superior and more powerful. Men are still getting used to having women as bosses...accepting that they are sexually dominant too is something more difficult.”
Sex in the boardroom!
“When a man talks dirty to a woman, its sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 per minute”
The famous Steven Wright quote seems to be quite paradoxical, especially in the light of a recent Australian survey. According to the survey, it’s not only women who face sexual harassment at work places; men also have to go through the unwanted office vixenry. Remember Michael Douglas in Disclosure or Akshay Kumar in the desi version Aitraaz? The study also states that many men are sexually harassed by women at work but are afraid to complain to their bosses. And even if they complain about their bosses, they are more likely to be told they are actually lucky to be ogled and hassled!
This couldn’t be closer to the truth, at least where India Inc is concerned. We spoke to a cross-section of people on the issue and the reactions were, well, surprising, to say the least! Read on...
What’s going on in that cubicle?
“Yes. I agree that sex has entered the boardroom big time. Males are actually facing sexual pestering by female bosses and colleagues.” says ex. lieutenant Rita Gangwani, carefully avoiding the words harassment and exploitation.
“Since time immemorial, man has been the ruler and female just a follower. But with changing times, the new age women are getting much empowered. They are rubbing shoulders with men and doing much better in most of the fields. So, such sexual advances can be about flaunting, exercising power and not actually about sex, “she further exemplifies.
Supports producer of a leading sports channel, “Behind the scenes of every male life, there are instances (though very few) when they come across such a boss. But, to be very honest, if it exists then it’s a win-win situation for him.”
For most people, however, sexual harassment of a man by a woman is inane, to say the least. “A hidden world of sexual harassment, with female managers exploiting their power over men in the office, seems very unreal. See, especially in the desi context, sex is a very hush-hush thing and not something easily available. So, in such situation even if a man gets such a proposition, he can just not mind it. This stands true even if he doesn’t get any materialistic favours from his female boss in return. Where is the issue?” questions COO of a renowned Internet-solution company.
Pallavi Shekhar, sales manager, Idea Cellular Ltd, shares a similar opinion, “We all know how grapevines work at workplace. She would gain instant fame in and out the office. Why would a female herself opt for a situation in which everyone in the office and even in the industry think of her as a bimbo? No matter how modern a woman is - image matters a lot.”
Can a female actually exploit a man?
Can a female actually exploit a man?
“Not really,” says Rita Gangwani, making us understand why she avoided the word harassment, “I would call it sexual convenience for both. A female at a top notch position might be looking for some emotional backing. Women get emotionally involved the minute they enter a physical alliance; for them, ‘No-strings-attached’ also comes with a thin, white strand. In such cases, women get the much needed emotional refuge, flattering compliments and a dedicated escort and men get promotions/raises along with casual sex. It’s just a pact.”
“If there is Sex & Sum (money) then it will be total 'advantage men’. The reason for this is that sex is not open in our country,” asserts the sports channel producer.
So, does that mean men see such proposals as just another opportunity to carve a notch on the bedpost and get some “perks”? When, Pratish Aggrawal, a software developer working with Infosys, was asked if he has ever been harassed a female boss, colleague, he replied, "No, but I'd like to be”. Oops point taken! However, Pratish is quick to cover up, “Look men are not that sensitive. They do not consider mockery, sexual jokes, and lewd suggestions from female co-workers as harassment. Also, we have been taught from childhood that real men aren't victims – so we can surely find a way out.”
According to psychologist Dr Sanjay Chugh: “Men usually are more causal about sex but that has nothing to do with exploitation. A female boss asking for sexual favours may be a pleasant thing if the man finds that sex is worth the gain that he might get, or if he finds the boss sexually attractive. But if one doesn’t find the boss attractive, if one's value systems are different, it can be pure torture to even contemplate such a proposition. Sex with anyone can be casual and fun if it comes out of free choice. In this situation, it no longer remains casual.”
Legally speaking!
ACP Sanjay Tyagi says that in his entire carrier span he hasn’t “even heard of” any case wherein a male has registered a FIR against a female colleague or boss for sexual assault.
Anukul Raj, advocate, Supreme Court, explains, “There are no detailed and specific laws to deal with male harassment. We just have sections like Section 377 and Section 375 that deal with offence like sodomy and forced sexual acts.”
Highlighting the prejudice a male may face in harassment cases, he says: “In case a woman complains of a sexual assault, her word of mouth is considered as the proof and the onus of establishing that the convict is innocent is on the defense. However, if a male makes such a complaint, the onus of proving the assault is on the prosecution.” The lawyer further adds that he hasn’t heard of or fought any such case yet.
Exploring the reason for inhibitions on the part of a male sufferer, Dr Chugh explains, “We have to understand here that for a male it can be very difficult to come up with such a complaint because of the shame or embarrassment associated with it (just as it would be tough for a female). What makes it more difficult is the mindset (result of years of conditioning) that man is superior and more powerful. Men are still getting used to having women as bosses...accepting that they are sexually dominant too is something more difficult.”
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Battle of Evermore
Queen of Light took her bow, And then she turned to go, The Prince of Peace embraced the gloom, And walked the night alone.
Oh, dance in the dark of night, Sing to the morning light. The dark Lord rides in force tonight, And time will tell us all.
Oh, throw down your plow and hoe, Rest not to lock your homes.
Side by side we wait the might of the darkest of them all.
I hear the horses' thunder down in the valley below, I'm waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow.
The apples of the valley hold, The seeds of happiness, The ground is rich from tender care, Repay, do not forget, no, no. Dance in the dark of night, sing to the morning light.
The apples turn to brown and black, The tyrant's face is red.
Oh war is the common cry, Pick up your swords and fly. The sky is filled with good and bad that mortals never know.
Oh, well, the night is long, the beads of time pass slow, Tired eyes on the sunrise, waiting for the eastern glow.
The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath, The drums will shake the castle wall, the ringwraiths ride in black, Ride on.
Sing as you raise your bow, shoot straighter than before. No comfort has the fire at night that lights the face so cold.
Oh dance in the dark of night, Sing to the morning light. The magic runes are writ in gold to bring the balance back. Bring it back.
At last the sun is shining, The clouds of blue roll by, With flames from the dragon of darkness, the sunlight blinds his eyes.
Ooh, Bring it back, Bring it back...
Oh, dance in the dark of night, Sing to the morning light. The dark Lord rides in force tonight, And time will tell us all.
Oh, throw down your plow and hoe, Rest not to lock your homes.
Side by side we wait the might of the darkest of them all.
I hear the horses' thunder down in the valley below, I'm waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow.
The apples of the valley hold, The seeds of happiness, The ground is rich from tender care, Repay, do not forget, no, no. Dance in the dark of night, sing to the morning light.
The apples turn to brown and black, The tyrant's face is red.
Oh war is the common cry, Pick up your swords and fly. The sky is filled with good and bad that mortals never know.
Oh, well, the night is long, the beads of time pass slow, Tired eyes on the sunrise, waiting for the eastern glow.
The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath, The drums will shake the castle wall, the ringwraiths ride in black, Ride on.
Sing as you raise your bow, shoot straighter than before. No comfort has the fire at night that lights the face so cold.
Oh dance in the dark of night, Sing to the morning light. The magic runes are writ in gold to bring the balance back. Bring it back.
At last the sun is shining, The clouds of blue roll by, With flames from the dragon of darkness, the sunlight blinds his eyes.
Ooh, Bring it back, Bring it back...
Monday, April 27, 2009
Lessons on Fatherhood...
Raising Bill Gates
By ROBERT A. GUTH
SEATTLE -- Spend time with the family of Bill Gates, and eventually someone will mention the water incident.
The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table. Fed up, his father threw a glass of cold water in the boy's face.
"Thanks for the shower," the young Mr. Gates snapped.
The incident lives in Gates family lore not just for its drama but also because it was a rare time that Bill Gates Sr., father of his famous namesake, lost his cool. The argument presaged a turning point in the life of a tempestuous boy that would set him on course to become the Bill Gates whom the public knows as co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the world's richest man.
Behind the Bill Gates success story is the other William Gates. The senior Mr. Gates balanced a family thrown off kilter by a boy who appeared to gain the intellect of an adult almost overnight. He served as a quiet counsel as his son jumped into and thrived in the cutthroat business world. When huge wealth put new pressure on the son, the elder Gates stepped in to start what is now the world's largest private philanthropy.
Bill Gates Sr., 83 years old, is now co-chair of his son's $30 billion philanthropy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has avoided the spotlight. The public details of his life include little beyond his official biography at the foundation, which says he was a Seattle lawyer, World War II veteran, nonprofit volunteer and father of three. He has compiled his thoughts on life in a short book to be published next week.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates and their family shared many details of the family's story for the first time, including Bill Gates Jr.'s experience in counseling and how his early interest in computers came about partly as a result of a family crisis. The sometimes colliding forces of discipline and freedom within the clan shaped the entrepreneur's character.
The relationship between father and son entered a new phase when the software mogul began working full-time seven months ago at the Gates Foundation. For the past 13 years, the father has been the sole Gates family member with a daily presence at the foundation, starting it from the basement of his home and minding it while his son finished up his final decade running Microsoft. They now work directly together for the first time.
At six-foot-six, Bill Gates Sr. is nearly a full head taller than his son. He's known to be more social than the younger Bill Gates, but they share a sharp intellect and a bluntness that can come across to some as curt. He isn't prone to introspection and he plays down his role in his son's life.
"As a father, I never imagined that the argumentative, young boy who grew up in my house, eating my food and using my name would be my future employer," Mr. Gates Sr. told a group of nonprofit leaders in a 2005 speech. "But that's what happened."
The first stage -- argumentative young boy -- "started about the time he was 11," Mr. Gates Sr. says in one of a series of interviews. That's about when young Bill became an adult, says Bill Sr., and an increasing headache for the family.
Until that time, the Gates home had been peaceful. Bill Sr. and his wife, Mary, had three children: Kristi; then Bill, born in 1955; and Libby. It was a close family that thrived on competitions -- board games, cards, ping-pong. And on rituals: Sunday dinners at the same time every week, and at Christmas, matching pajamas for every family member.
While very involved in his kids' lives, Mr. Gates Sr. was somewhat distant emotionally, which his children say probably reflects his generation. His stature, combined with a lawyerly bent for carefully choosing his words, also made him intimidating at times. "He'd come home and he'd sit in a chair and eat dinner, but there was never any kind of warm, give-me-a-hug kind of thing," says Kristi Blake, his oldest daughter.
WSJ's Rob Guth speaks to Stacey Delo about his profile of the relationship between Bill Gates Sr. and his son, Bill Gates Jr.Mr. Gates Sr. left much of the day-to-day parenting to his wife while he was building his career at a Seattle law firm. Daughter of a Seattle banker, Ms. Gates had been an athlete and top student in high school and college, where she met Bill Sr. She became a full-time volunteer and served on corporate boards.
Ms. Gates encouraged her kids to study hard, play sports and take music lessons. (Bill Gates tried the trombone with little success.) And she imparted a discipline that reflected her upbringing in a well-to-do family. She expected her kids to dress neatly, be punctual and socialize with the many adults who visited their home. For the most part, young Bill dutifully abided.
"She was the most engaged parent and she had high expectations of all of us," says Libby Armintrout, Bill's younger sister. "Not just grades and that sort of thing, but how we behaved in public, how we would be socially."
A Battle of WillsBill Gates at an early age became a diligent learner. He read the World Book Encyclopedia series start to finish. His parents encouraged his appetite for reading by paying for any book he wanted.
Still, they worried that he seemed to prefer books to people. They tried to temper that streak by forcing him to be a greeter at their parties and a waiter at his father's professional functions.
Then, at age 11, Bill Sr. says, the son blossomed intellectually, peppering his parents with questions about international affairs, business and the nature of life.
"It was interesting and I thought it was great," Mr. Gates Sr. says. "Now, I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it. It bothered her."
The son pushed against his mother's instinct to control him, sparking a battle of wills. All those things that she had expected of him -- a clean room, being at the dinner table on time, not biting his pencils -- suddenly turned into a big source of friction. The two fell into explosive arguments.
DiscussWhat will be Bill Gates's most lasting legacy?"He was nasty," Ms. Armintrout says of her brother.
Mr. Gates Sr. played the role of peacemaker. "He'd sort of break them apart and calm things down," says Ms. Blake, the eldest sibling.
The battles reached a climax at dinner one night when Bill Gates was around 12. Over the table, he shouted at his mother, in what today he describes as "utter, total sarcastic, smart-ass kid rudeness."
That's when Mr. Gates Sr., in a rare blast of temper, threw the glass of water in his son's face.
He and Mary brought their son to a therapist. "I'm at war with my parents over who is in control," Bill Gates recalls telling the counselor. Reporting back, the counselor told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him.
Mr. Gates Sr. understood that counsel because of his own childhood, an hour's ferry ride from Seattle in the working-class town of Bremerton. "There wasn't a lot of structure to my growing up," he says. "I had an awful lot of discretion about where I went, what I did, who I did it with."
His mother was doting and easygoing. His sister, his only sibling, was seven years older. And his father was a workaholic who sacrificed child-rearing to work at a furniture store he owned with a partner. "His complete focus was on the store," Bill Sr. says.
Mr. Gates Sr. early on built a life outside of his home. Next door, the Braman family had two boys for him to play with and a father who would become his most important role model.
That man, Dorm Braman, had built his business and would later become a Naval officer, mayor of Seattle and a U.S. assistant secretary of transportation. In the late 1930s, Mr. Braman brought Bill Sr. on family road trips across the country. He was scoutmaster of Bill Sr.'s Boy Scout troop, leading the boys on hikes through the Olympic Mountains and driving them in a beat-up bus to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The troop spent two years building a log house from Douglas firs they felled themselves. Mr. Braman had "no sense of personal limitations whatsoever," says Mr. Gates Sr.
Bill Sr. and Mary ultimately took a page from that upbringing: They backed off. They enrolled their son in a school that they thought would give him more freedom. That was the private Lakeside School, now known as the place where Bill Gates discovered computers.
Mr. Gates says he began to realize, "'Hey, I don't have to prove my position relative to my parents. I just have to figure out what I'm doing relative to the world.'"
A Rare IndependenceFrom age 13, he was given rare independence. He took off some nights to enjoy free use of the computers at the University of Washington. He spent chunks of time away from home -- much as his dad had done as a kid. He lived for a time in Olympia, where he was a page in the state legislature, and in Washington, D.C. as a Congressional page. During his senior year, he took a break from school to work as a programmer at a power plant in southern Washington. And in what would become his first major collaboration with Paul Allen, his future Microsoft cofounder, Mr. Gates designed the "Traf-O-Data", a device for counting cars traveling over a section of road.
His parents played supporting roles. They acquiesced when Bill quit Harvard and then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to start Microsoft. It was a tough decision to back.
"Mary and I were both concerned about it -- I think she a bit more than I," Bill Sr. says. "Her expectations and mine were very ordinary expectations of people who have kids in college -- that they get a degree."
The family support was one reason Mr. Gates decided to move Microsoft to Seattle, where he settled into a house not far from his parents. Ms. Gates arranged to have a maid clean her son's house, and made sure he had clean shirts for his big meetings. She also insisted he kept observing the family traditions, including the weekly Sunday dinner at his parents' house.
Mr. Gates Sr., drawing from his own experience as a lawyer guiding small companies, helped find Seattle businesspeople to serve on the Microsoft board. In 1980, Bill Gates brought his father along to dinner to help persuade college friend Steve Ballmer -- now Microsoft's chief executive -- to quit graduate school and join Microsoft. The father's law firm would also end up representing Microsoft, which became the firm's biggest client.
Bill Sr. eased his son's worries about taking Microsoft public when Bill fretted that it would be a distraction for employees. The offering would turn Bill Gates into a billionaire. It also spawned the next challenge for the family.
The Philanthropy PushAfter the windfall, Ms. Gates pressed her son to get into philanthropy. At his father's law office late one night, someone present recalls, Bill quarreled with his mother as she urged him to give money away.
"I'm just trying to run my company!" he snapped, says the person in the office at the time. Mr. Gates says that at the time he wasn't opposed to philanthropic work, he just didn't want to be distracted from his duties at Microsoft.
Eventually, she got her son to start a program at Microsoft to raise money for the United Way. He also followed his mother onto the national United Way board in the 1980s.
But as Bill Gates's wealth grew, letters from Seattle-area nonprofits asking for donations piled up. He says he planned to get serious about philanthropy after retiring from Microsoft, or at about 60 years old.
That plan would be fast-tracked after Ms. Gates was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer. As she battled the disease, she continued to urge her son to do more philanthropy. Ms. Gates passed away in June 1994.
The day of her funeral, the Gates family had dinner at home. Bill Sr. told his children not to worry about him, saying that he had about 10 good years left in him. He was 70 at the time. Still, after his wife died he was listless.
About six months later, standing in a line for a movie with his son and daughter-in-law, Melinda, the elder Mr. Gates again broached the idea of philanthropy. He suggested he could start sifting through the requests for money and give some out.
A week later, the software mogul set aside about $100 million to create a foundation that his father could run. Bill Gates Sr. later sat at his kitchen table and wrote the first check, $80,000 to a local cancer program.
In the early days, Mr. Gates Sr., who soon remarried, would scribble a few notes on the most-promising requests for donations. He would then put them in a cardboard wine box that he periodically sent to his son's house. The box would come back with Bill Jr.'s responses. Mr. Gates Sr. would then reply to all the grant seekers, sometimes including a $1 million check with little more than a single-page letter of congratulations.
Bill Sr. and a former Microsoft executive managed the foundation, doling out money, overseeing a staff of hundreds and expanding its purview to areas like education and vaccines.
Mr. Gates Sr. says he hasn't lost sight of the fact that he was playing the role of caretaker until his son and daughter-in-law took the helm. And after 53 years, he knows to give his son space.
"He has very fixed ideas of some things," says Mr. Gates Sr. "The dynamic of the family is that you don't cross him on those things, because it's a waste of time."
By ROBERT A. GUTH
SEATTLE -- Spend time with the family of Bill Gates, and eventually someone will mention the water incident.
The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table. Fed up, his father threw a glass of cold water in the boy's face.
"Thanks for the shower," the young Mr. Gates snapped.
The incident lives in Gates family lore not just for its drama but also because it was a rare time that Bill Gates Sr., father of his famous namesake, lost his cool. The argument presaged a turning point in the life of a tempestuous boy that would set him on course to become the Bill Gates whom the public knows as co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the world's richest man.
Behind the Bill Gates success story is the other William Gates. The senior Mr. Gates balanced a family thrown off kilter by a boy who appeared to gain the intellect of an adult almost overnight. He served as a quiet counsel as his son jumped into and thrived in the cutthroat business world. When huge wealth put new pressure on the son, the elder Gates stepped in to start what is now the world's largest private philanthropy.
Bill Gates Sr., 83 years old, is now co-chair of his son's $30 billion philanthropy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has avoided the spotlight. The public details of his life include little beyond his official biography at the foundation, which says he was a Seattle lawyer, World War II veteran, nonprofit volunteer and father of three. He has compiled his thoughts on life in a short book to be published next week.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Gates and their family shared many details of the family's story for the first time, including Bill Gates Jr.'s experience in counseling and how his early interest in computers came about partly as a result of a family crisis. The sometimes colliding forces of discipline and freedom within the clan shaped the entrepreneur's character.
The relationship between father and son entered a new phase when the software mogul began working full-time seven months ago at the Gates Foundation. For the past 13 years, the father has been the sole Gates family member with a daily presence at the foundation, starting it from the basement of his home and minding it while his son finished up his final decade running Microsoft. They now work directly together for the first time.
At six-foot-six, Bill Gates Sr. is nearly a full head taller than his son. He's known to be more social than the younger Bill Gates, but they share a sharp intellect and a bluntness that can come across to some as curt. He isn't prone to introspection and he plays down his role in his son's life.
"As a father, I never imagined that the argumentative, young boy who grew up in my house, eating my food and using my name would be my future employer," Mr. Gates Sr. told a group of nonprofit leaders in a 2005 speech. "But that's what happened."
The first stage -- argumentative young boy -- "started about the time he was 11," Mr. Gates Sr. says in one of a series of interviews. That's about when young Bill became an adult, says Bill Sr., and an increasing headache for the family.
Until that time, the Gates home had been peaceful. Bill Sr. and his wife, Mary, had three children: Kristi; then Bill, born in 1955; and Libby. It was a close family that thrived on competitions -- board games, cards, ping-pong. And on rituals: Sunday dinners at the same time every week, and at Christmas, matching pajamas for every family member.
While very involved in his kids' lives, Mr. Gates Sr. was somewhat distant emotionally, which his children say probably reflects his generation. His stature, combined with a lawyerly bent for carefully choosing his words, also made him intimidating at times. "He'd come home and he'd sit in a chair and eat dinner, but there was never any kind of warm, give-me-a-hug kind of thing," says Kristi Blake, his oldest daughter.
WSJ's Rob Guth speaks to Stacey Delo about his profile of the relationship between Bill Gates Sr. and his son, Bill Gates Jr.Mr. Gates Sr. left much of the day-to-day parenting to his wife while he was building his career at a Seattle law firm. Daughter of a Seattle banker, Ms. Gates had been an athlete and top student in high school and college, where she met Bill Sr. She became a full-time volunteer and served on corporate boards.
Ms. Gates encouraged her kids to study hard, play sports and take music lessons. (Bill Gates tried the trombone with little success.) And she imparted a discipline that reflected her upbringing in a well-to-do family. She expected her kids to dress neatly, be punctual and socialize with the many adults who visited their home. For the most part, young Bill dutifully abided.
"She was the most engaged parent and she had high expectations of all of us," says Libby Armintrout, Bill's younger sister. "Not just grades and that sort of thing, but how we behaved in public, how we would be socially."
A Battle of WillsBill Gates at an early age became a diligent learner. He read the World Book Encyclopedia series start to finish. His parents encouraged his appetite for reading by paying for any book he wanted.
Still, they worried that he seemed to prefer books to people. They tried to temper that streak by forcing him to be a greeter at their parties and a waiter at his father's professional functions.
Then, at age 11, Bill Sr. says, the son blossomed intellectually, peppering his parents with questions about international affairs, business and the nature of life.
"It was interesting and I thought it was great," Mr. Gates Sr. says. "Now, I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it. It bothered her."
The son pushed against his mother's instinct to control him, sparking a battle of wills. All those things that she had expected of him -- a clean room, being at the dinner table on time, not biting his pencils -- suddenly turned into a big source of friction. The two fell into explosive arguments.
DiscussWhat will be Bill Gates's most lasting legacy?"He was nasty," Ms. Armintrout says of her brother.
Mr. Gates Sr. played the role of peacemaker. "He'd sort of break them apart and calm things down," says Ms. Blake, the eldest sibling.
The battles reached a climax at dinner one night when Bill Gates was around 12. Over the table, he shouted at his mother, in what today he describes as "utter, total sarcastic, smart-ass kid rudeness."
That's when Mr. Gates Sr., in a rare blast of temper, threw the glass of water in his son's face.
He and Mary brought their son to a therapist. "I'm at war with my parents over who is in control," Bill Gates recalls telling the counselor. Reporting back, the counselor told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him.
Mr. Gates Sr. understood that counsel because of his own childhood, an hour's ferry ride from Seattle in the working-class town of Bremerton. "There wasn't a lot of structure to my growing up," he says. "I had an awful lot of discretion about where I went, what I did, who I did it with."
His mother was doting and easygoing. His sister, his only sibling, was seven years older. And his father was a workaholic who sacrificed child-rearing to work at a furniture store he owned with a partner. "His complete focus was on the store," Bill Sr. says.
Mr. Gates Sr. early on built a life outside of his home. Next door, the Braman family had two boys for him to play with and a father who would become his most important role model.
That man, Dorm Braman, had built his business and would later become a Naval officer, mayor of Seattle and a U.S. assistant secretary of transportation. In the late 1930s, Mr. Braman brought Bill Sr. on family road trips across the country. He was scoutmaster of Bill Sr.'s Boy Scout troop, leading the boys on hikes through the Olympic Mountains and driving them in a beat-up bus to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. The troop spent two years building a log house from Douglas firs they felled themselves. Mr. Braman had "no sense of personal limitations whatsoever," says Mr. Gates Sr.
Bill Sr. and Mary ultimately took a page from that upbringing: They backed off. They enrolled their son in a school that they thought would give him more freedom. That was the private Lakeside School, now known as the place where Bill Gates discovered computers.
Mr. Gates says he began to realize, "'Hey, I don't have to prove my position relative to my parents. I just have to figure out what I'm doing relative to the world.'"
A Rare IndependenceFrom age 13, he was given rare independence. He took off some nights to enjoy free use of the computers at the University of Washington. He spent chunks of time away from home -- much as his dad had done as a kid. He lived for a time in Olympia, where he was a page in the state legislature, and in Washington, D.C. as a Congressional page. During his senior year, he took a break from school to work as a programmer at a power plant in southern Washington. And in what would become his first major collaboration with Paul Allen, his future Microsoft cofounder, Mr. Gates designed the "Traf-O-Data", a device for counting cars traveling over a section of road.
His parents played supporting roles. They acquiesced when Bill quit Harvard and then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to start Microsoft. It was a tough decision to back.
"Mary and I were both concerned about it -- I think she a bit more than I," Bill Sr. says. "Her expectations and mine were very ordinary expectations of people who have kids in college -- that they get a degree."
The family support was one reason Mr. Gates decided to move Microsoft to Seattle, where he settled into a house not far from his parents. Ms. Gates arranged to have a maid clean her son's house, and made sure he had clean shirts for his big meetings. She also insisted he kept observing the family traditions, including the weekly Sunday dinner at his parents' house.
Mr. Gates Sr., drawing from his own experience as a lawyer guiding small companies, helped find Seattle businesspeople to serve on the Microsoft board. In 1980, Bill Gates brought his father along to dinner to help persuade college friend Steve Ballmer -- now Microsoft's chief executive -- to quit graduate school and join Microsoft. The father's law firm would also end up representing Microsoft, which became the firm's biggest client.
Bill Sr. eased his son's worries about taking Microsoft public when Bill fretted that it would be a distraction for employees. The offering would turn Bill Gates into a billionaire. It also spawned the next challenge for the family.
The Philanthropy PushAfter the windfall, Ms. Gates pressed her son to get into philanthropy. At his father's law office late one night, someone present recalls, Bill quarreled with his mother as she urged him to give money away.
"I'm just trying to run my company!" he snapped, says the person in the office at the time. Mr. Gates says that at the time he wasn't opposed to philanthropic work, he just didn't want to be distracted from his duties at Microsoft.
Eventually, she got her son to start a program at Microsoft to raise money for the United Way. He also followed his mother onto the national United Way board in the 1980s.
But as Bill Gates's wealth grew, letters from Seattle-area nonprofits asking for donations piled up. He says he planned to get serious about philanthropy after retiring from Microsoft, or at about 60 years old.
That plan would be fast-tracked after Ms. Gates was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer. As she battled the disease, she continued to urge her son to do more philanthropy. Ms. Gates passed away in June 1994.
The day of her funeral, the Gates family had dinner at home. Bill Sr. told his children not to worry about him, saying that he had about 10 good years left in him. He was 70 at the time. Still, after his wife died he was listless.
About six months later, standing in a line for a movie with his son and daughter-in-law, Melinda, the elder Mr. Gates again broached the idea of philanthropy. He suggested he could start sifting through the requests for money and give some out.
A week later, the software mogul set aside about $100 million to create a foundation that his father could run. Bill Gates Sr. later sat at his kitchen table and wrote the first check, $80,000 to a local cancer program.
In the early days, Mr. Gates Sr., who soon remarried, would scribble a few notes on the most-promising requests for donations. He would then put them in a cardboard wine box that he periodically sent to his son's house. The box would come back with Bill Jr.'s responses. Mr. Gates Sr. would then reply to all the grant seekers, sometimes including a $1 million check with little more than a single-page letter of congratulations.
Bill Sr. and a former Microsoft executive managed the foundation, doling out money, overseeing a staff of hundreds and expanding its purview to areas like education and vaccines.
Mr. Gates Sr. says he hasn't lost sight of the fact that he was playing the role of caretaker until his son and daughter-in-law took the helm. And after 53 years, he knows to give his son space.
"He has very fixed ideas of some things," says Mr. Gates Sr. "The dynamic of the family is that you don't cross him on those things, because it's a waste of time."
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Keep it up, India!!!
Only a reckless banker or a client-less astrologer will be willing to gamble their money and reputation on the outcome of the General Election. But one thing is certain: if Congress performs poorly in urban India and fails to reap the harvest of youth votes it is banking on, a large share of the blame will go to the ‘munshis and managers’ who forced the T-20 IPL tournament out of India.
In the course of just one successful season, IPL had become one of the biggest global brands, comparable to Wimbledon and the football World Cup. The Central government chose to deal with this Indian achievement with the same bloody-mindedness it displayed in the allocation of 2G and 3G spectrum for the telecom sector. An outpouring of meanness drove the Nano plant out of West Bengal. Last week, P Chidambaram donned the mantle of Mamata Banerjee and forced IPL out of India. Like Mamata, who felt that Ratan Tata could be browbeaten because he was a hostage to money already invested in Singur, North Block proceeded on the assumption that the IPL was a helpless captive. And just as Tata had to cut his losses and resist blackmail politics, Lalit Modi inveigled IPL out of a desperate situation with a daredevil flight to South Africa.
The implications of IPL’s exile from India are awesome. There is, of course, the colossal loss of income for all those directly or indirectly involved in the cricket extravaganza — from humble vendors at the venues to the hospitality and travel industry. This, in turn, will have a bearing on government revenues which are already feeling the pinch of the slowdown.
But there is a more horrifying dimension which goes beyond accountancy. Chidambaram was being more than a little disingenuous when he argued that the IPL organisers were being unreasonable in putting entertainment above democracy. If it had been a case of adjusting the dates of a few matches to accommodate the policing arrangements for five different phases of polling, no one in the BCCI would have contemplated taking such an extreme step. The organisers agreed to add new venues such as Ahmedabad, Dharamsala and Raipur so as not to over-burden the administration of the metros. Gujarat, for example, accepted the offer of six games without any reservations; it had a problem with the date of a seventh match.
It is more than a little curious that the IPL faced resistance only from the Congress-ruled states. It was the firm no from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Delhi that finally clinched the issue in favour of South Africa. In Delhi, where policing is under the direct purview of the Centre, even chief minister Sheila Dikshit was in favour of hosting matches. Yet, the police chief informed her and Delhi Cricket Association president Arun Jaitley that no permission would be forthcoming before, during and after the polling. As far as the Centre was concerned, IPL could go to hell.
The Government, it would seem, was intent on teaching the IPL organisers a lesson. Whether this was because of Lalit Modi’s proximity to Vasundhara Raje or prompted by a desire to deflate BCCI president Sharad Pawar is a matter of conjecture. Also, worth considering is the Congress Party pressure on the IPL to lift the total ban on political advertising at the venue and during the official telecast. Whatever the real story, there is compelling evidence to indicate that the government hostility was not prompted by national security imperatives. It can hardly be the case that terrorists were intent on targeting only Congress-ruled states.
The global message of the IPL flight to Africa is stark. India has sent out a loud and clear signal that the country is unsafe for any major event that involves international participation and crowds. The simple message: India is as dangerous as Pakistan. India can only hope and pray that the world of global finance is mystified by cricket and fails to gauge the significance of the IPL fiasco.
If this self-inflicted ignominy is shameful, consider the other implication. India has proclaimed that it will respond to the terrorist challenge by running away from it. If terrorists target cricket, ban cricket; if terrorists frown upon a Rakhi Sawant Nite, deny permission to item numbers; and if zealots in Azamgarh want to impose an ideological veto on a political rally, meekly acquiesce. In an age of vote banks, this is called prudent politics.
No wonder, the latest batch of Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists trying to cross the border carried T-shirts proclaiming ‘Jihad is my life.’ The army took them on frontally and did India proud. The vote-banker in the Home ministry would have responded differently. He would have banned T-shirts.
In the course of just one successful season, IPL had become one of the biggest global brands, comparable to Wimbledon and the football World Cup. The Central government chose to deal with this Indian achievement with the same bloody-mindedness it displayed in the allocation of 2G and 3G spectrum for the telecom sector. An outpouring of meanness drove the Nano plant out of West Bengal. Last week, P Chidambaram donned the mantle of Mamata Banerjee and forced IPL out of India. Like Mamata, who felt that Ratan Tata could be browbeaten because he was a hostage to money already invested in Singur, North Block proceeded on the assumption that the IPL was a helpless captive. And just as Tata had to cut his losses and resist blackmail politics, Lalit Modi inveigled IPL out of a desperate situation with a daredevil flight to South Africa.
The implications of IPL’s exile from India are awesome. There is, of course, the colossal loss of income for all those directly or indirectly involved in the cricket extravaganza — from humble vendors at the venues to the hospitality and travel industry. This, in turn, will have a bearing on government revenues which are already feeling the pinch of the slowdown.
But there is a more horrifying dimension which goes beyond accountancy. Chidambaram was being more than a little disingenuous when he argued that the IPL organisers were being unreasonable in putting entertainment above democracy. If it had been a case of adjusting the dates of a few matches to accommodate the policing arrangements for five different phases of polling, no one in the BCCI would have contemplated taking such an extreme step. The organisers agreed to add new venues such as Ahmedabad, Dharamsala and Raipur so as not to over-burden the administration of the metros. Gujarat, for example, accepted the offer of six games without any reservations; it had a problem with the date of a seventh match.
It is more than a little curious that the IPL faced resistance only from the Congress-ruled states. It was the firm no from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Delhi that finally clinched the issue in favour of South Africa. In Delhi, where policing is under the direct purview of the Centre, even chief minister Sheila Dikshit was in favour of hosting matches. Yet, the police chief informed her and Delhi Cricket Association president Arun Jaitley that no permission would be forthcoming before, during and after the polling. As far as the Centre was concerned, IPL could go to hell.
The Government, it would seem, was intent on teaching the IPL organisers a lesson. Whether this was because of Lalit Modi’s proximity to Vasundhara Raje or prompted by a desire to deflate BCCI president Sharad Pawar is a matter of conjecture. Also, worth considering is the Congress Party pressure on the IPL to lift the total ban on political advertising at the venue and during the official telecast. Whatever the real story, there is compelling evidence to indicate that the government hostility was not prompted by national security imperatives. It can hardly be the case that terrorists were intent on targeting only Congress-ruled states.
The global message of the IPL flight to Africa is stark. India has sent out a loud and clear signal that the country is unsafe for any major event that involves international participation and crowds. The simple message: India is as dangerous as Pakistan. India can only hope and pray that the world of global finance is mystified by cricket and fails to gauge the significance of the IPL fiasco.
If this self-inflicted ignominy is shameful, consider the other implication. India has proclaimed that it will respond to the terrorist challenge by running away from it. If terrorists target cricket, ban cricket; if terrorists frown upon a Rakhi Sawant Nite, deny permission to item numbers; and if zealots in Azamgarh want to impose an ideological veto on a political rally, meekly acquiesce. In an age of vote banks, this is called prudent politics.
No wonder, the latest batch of Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists trying to cross the border carried T-shirts proclaiming ‘Jihad is my life.’ The army took them on frontally and did India proud. The vote-banker in the Home ministry would have responded differently. He would have banned T-shirts.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Bhartiya Rail - Hum behatar isse banaayein...
In his boyhood, long before Lalu Yadav became India’s most unlikely management guru, he sometimes strayed from his cows and scampered barefoot to the railroad tracks. Dodging crowds and porters, he made his way to the first-class cars and, for a few glorious moments, basked in the air conditioning that blasted from the open door. Then the police would spot him and shoo him away, into the moist trackside cowflap where he belonged.
The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer—one with annual revenues in the tens of billions—from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek.
Lalu is a happy man: happy to have risen to become rich, beloved, and reviled all over India; happy that a grateful nation credits him with whipping its beleaguered rail system into profitability; and happy that he’s managed to do all this and somehow stay out of jail. Under his leadership, Indian Railways has gone from bankruptcy to billions in just a few years. When Lalu presented his latest budget to Parliament on February 13, he bragged, "Hathi ko cheetah bana diya" ("I have turned an elephant into a cheetah"). What’s his secret?
“Cow dung,” he says. “I have 350 cows, including bulls. Cow dung—no need of gas.” Everyone tells me about Lalu’s “rustic common sense,” though I’m unsure how burning manure for fuel has made Indian trains suddenly run profitably. But his point is a broad one, about systems efficiency and country wisdom and resourcefulness. “Railways is like a Jersey cow. If you do not milk it fully, it gets tenail,” a swollen and infected udder. Milk every last drop out of Indian Railways, Lalu told his subordinates, and it will prosper.
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways.
The folksiness is no pose. Lalu really did begin as a cow-boy, and he has spent (or misspent) a 40-year career in politics exploiting his bovine roots. Since he became nationally famous in the 1980s, Lalu has been known throughout India as a corrupt and unapologetic yokel, eerily canny in his political maneuvering and cleverer than he looks and sounds.
In his home state of Bihar, where he first rose to power, the common touch served him well. Bihar is India’s poorest and most backward state. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lalu knitted together a coalition of poor Biharis that elected him chief minister. The Lalu years wrecked Bihar further. When corruption allegations surfaced, critics demanded that Lalu resign on moral grounds. The scandal that brought him down, known as the “Fodder Scam,” effectively amounted to a government-wide ruse under which taxpayers paid for nonexistent hay. But Lalu held on for a long time. “I have heard of football grounds and cricket grounds, but not moral grounds,” he said. When the pressure became too great for him to stay in office, he responded with a nepotistic masterstroke, bold even by his standards, and appointed his wife, Rabri Devi, to rule in his place. (“Who do you want me to appoint?” Lalu asked. “Your wife?”)
Lalu may have been corrupt, but he was also a laugh riot. He speaks in an outrageously backwoods Hindi dialect, full of barnyard metaphor and hick wisdom. Even his detractors admit his speech is often charming. “He’s a hugely charismatic man,” says Sankarshan Thakur, a Bihari journalist and Lalu critic. “His ability to reach out beyond language barriers is amazing. He charmed the pants off the Pakistanis,” Thakur says, during government-to-government talks in 2006. On any given day on India’s flourishing array of cable channels, the chances are high of seeing Lalu’s face on a news show, or even on an entertainment show. I clicked randomly to see him guest-judging what looked like an Indian knock-off of “American Idol.” In 2005, a popular Indian film based on “A Fish Called Wanda” took Lalu’s name for its title—“Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav”—even though it had nothing to do with Lalu, other than having main characters with his names.
The rest of India chuckled at Lalu, and more often with him. But Bihar remained the most lawless state in the country. “He never tried to do serious business in Bihar regarding development,” says Sushil Kumar Modi, Bihar’s current deputy chief minister, and a Lalu acquaintance for nearly 40 years. “Lalu Yadav is not a serious man. Not a single state-sponsored scheme happened under his rule. He thought, ‘If I can rig the elections, there is no need to do any work.’” Thakur is more damning: “He arrived promising to dismantle the Establishment, an anti-hero out to snatch power from Patna’s bungalows and deliver it to the people, but he ended up a creature of the Establishment himself.” By the time Rabri—a semiliterate buffalo herder who did Lalu’s bidding, and whose name, incidentally, means “Custard Goddess”—left office in 2005, everyone in India knew Lalu, and his name was a byword for incompetence, cronyism, and the abject failure of government.
Even then, Lalu commanded enough of a following among his coalition of “extremely backward castes” (or, in the wonderful semiofficial abbreviation, “EBCs”) and desperately poor Muslims to secure a role for himself in India’s 2004 Congress Party government. He wanted the interior ministry, but the new government wasn’t ready to have a rube in charge of such a powerful portfolio. They gave him the railways ministry, and many expected the same pitiful misrule that had characterized his time in Bihar.
Indian Railways was in trouble: in 2001, a report by the BJP—a government dominated by the Brahmins who are Lalu’s permanent foes—predicted it would hemorrhage cash at a rate of $12 billion annually by 2015. (The whole budget of the Indian government, by comparison, is $128 billion.) Indian Railways was barely managing to cover its daily operating costs, to say nothing of paying for the new equipment and strengthening bridges. The report concluded: “It is very likely that Indian Railways would be a heavily-loss-making entity—in fact one well on the path toward bankruptcy, if it were not state owned.” Outsiders whispered the word “privatization” but were hushed: Indian Railways has been a source of national pride since before independence, and statist sentimentalists could never let it fail.
Lalu’s term as railways minister has been shockingly successful. Instead of turning India’s most prized national institution into a basketcase and a ruin, Lalu has led one of most spectacular economic turnarounds in a country bursting with economic miracles. Indian Railways began raking in cash and posting surpluses in the billions. And the intelligentsia and technocracy, at first shocked and dismayed that a shameless populist had seized a fragile and unwieldy national institution, have largely come around to acknowledging that India Railways has been transformed into a respected institution—and so, possibly, has Lalu.
***
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)
The cerebral cortex of the whole system is the Rail Bhavan, a pinkish monolith near Parliament in New Delhi. The Rail Bhavan is, in a way, surrounded by its own competition: its street is permanently filled with the traffic of taxis, trucks, buses, and rickshaws that for a time seemed poised to steal away the rails’ business altogether. Outside, a decommissioned green locomotive and the railways’ mascot, Bholu the Elephant, announce to the mess of traffic that the railways are not to be counted out.
Inside, the conditions do not inspire confidence. The building is big, disordered, and honeycombed with offices that bear stultifying bureaucratic titles (“Manager, Zonal Railways, Deputy”). The hallways all have torn-up ceilings. Some are so dark that I have to use a pocket flashlight to read names on the doors, and inside the offices the level of technology is shockingly low. Employees’ business cards have Yahoo! addresses. P.K. Sharma, the bright and competent director of personnel, has on his desk a foot-high pile of green folders bound together with shoelaces. From that desk, 2.5 million lives are managed, and there is not a computer in sight.
The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance.
Indian Railways is a government enterprise, and it has the dead weight characteristic of state organs. Employees live in housing provided by the Railways, send their kids to Railways schools, and visit Railways doctors when sick. Nearly a million are pensioners, and therefore provide no value to the ministry at all. Those who do work encounter predictable bureaucratic headaches: the ministry’s departments (six in total, for electrical, staff, engineering, mechanical, traffic, and financial concerns) operate in a stovepipe fashion, with minimal cross-pollination and little effort to coordinate and ensure that the railways as a whole run well. And ultimately Indian Railways has to answer to the taxpayers and citizens who support it, and who quite understandably want assurances that their train set will keep its fares low enough for them to afford.
Somehow it all works out. The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance. Delays are inevitable. But even when disaster strikes—as when terrorists bombed tracks in Mumbai in 2006—the railway heals itself quickly, usually within days, like a starfish growing back its arm. To grasp the difficulty of the operation, just imagine running a much bigger version of Wal-Mart, and then add a few wild cards, such as an employee literacy rate of 60 percent and terrorists trying to blow up your stores.
***
As chief minister of Bihar, Lalu may have been a buffoon and a grifter, but he didn’t fail entirely. And the ways in which he courted failure, but didn’t quite succumb to it, offer a clue as to how Lalu has succeeded at the railways ministry.
He plundered Bihar like every Bihari leader before him. Lalu’s great innovation was to entertain the masses, and to dignify their suffering with a show of attention. He held court at the chief minister’s residence and listened to common people’s grievances. Even if he ultimately did nothing to ease their pain, they left knowing that they had spoken to the most powerful man in the state, and he had responded in the same dialect they spoke to their own friends and family. When his children fell sick, Lalu himself stood in line with them at the public clinic. Never mind that the lines were long, and the treatment horrifying, because kleptocrats had looted the public coffers: Biharis saw their chief minister waiting like a poor, ordinary man, so they forgave him for being rich and extraordinary.
At Indian Railways, Lalu retained that popular touch and remade the passenger experience accordingly. A key feature of train travel, even in the cheap seats, is tea service. Lalu banned plastic teacups, which had been littering the countryside, and replaced them with peasant-made kullhars—earthen mugs that after a single use can be smashed on the ground, where they then return to the mud from which they are fired. He employed weavers to make bedding out of khadi (homespun cloth). And to avenge his childhood eviction from the air-conditioned cars, he introduced a new class of service: garib rath, “the poor man’s chariot,” on which the single frill is air conditioning. Despite boasting this once unimaginable luxury, garib rath is extremely cheap, within reach of even the backward castes from which Lalu himself hails.
But his single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar. Kumar, 50, is from a Gujarati family in Punjab. The family knows business: “If there is money lying around, we can smell it,” Kumar says. His father was a clothing wholesaler, and his brothers and sisters have, according to Sudhir, made a fortune in business for themselves. Sudhir takes pride in having given up the joys of free enterprise to work for the government, a calling he regards as nobler and more satisfying than work done for personal gain. He clambered over thousands of competitors to land in his current job as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), a sort of Delta Force for Indian civil servants. Every year, out of 300,000 aspirants, no more than 60 make the grade. They fan out all over India to solve the subcontinent’s most intractable problems, before heading back to New Delhi to regroup and take their next assignment.
Kumar’s first big assignment was Bihar. Bihar broke up into two smaller states in 2000: Jharkhand, which contained rich mineral and coal deposits, and Bihar, which had the larger population by far. Bihar stood to lose over half its tax revenue. (When Japanese businessmen expressed interest in the mineral wealth and promised to bring prosperity to the stricken region, a joke circulated: “Give us mineral rights,” the businessmen told Lalu, “and within six months, Bihar will be like Japan.” “That’s nothing,” Lalu said. “Give me Japan for six weeks, and it will be like Bihar.” It’s a testament to Lalu’s brazenness that this exchange seems plausible.) Kumar’s job had been to separate the two states in a way that allowed each to establish a sufficient tax base within seven years. He did it in 30 months by closing loopholes in the tax code, cutting deals with tax cheats, and in general collecting taxes with an intensity most Indians would reserve for a cricket match or a ground war.
Lalu noticed. When he ascended to the railways ministry in 2005, he requested Kumar as his deputy. Kumar had risen to an IAS position so elite that his move required parliamentary approval, which quickly arrived. The Congress Party’s coalition government, now led by the Oxford-trained economist Manmohan Singh, prized technical competence and was happy to appoint a shrewd bureaucrat to watch over its most unlettered cabinet member.
Lalu plundered Bihar like every Bihari leader before him. His great innovation was to entertain the masses, and to dignify their suffering with a show of attention.
Since then, Kumar has labored in an office immediately opposite Lalu’s, but completely unlike the minister’s opulent, wood-paneled lair. The minister lounges on his sofa, watching NDTV, a TV news network. Kumar’s two flat-screens show real-time data on the country’s main routes. Periodically, a minion walks into Kumar’s command center to present a 20-page stack of papers that represent the day’s statistics on passengers, freight, and on-time arrivals. “Like Jack keeps a daily tab, I also keep a daily tab,” Kumar says, referring to Jack Welch, one of his idols. The contrast with Lalu’s own listless inattention is jarring. When Lalu tells me about his success, mumbling vaguely about winning “the confidence of the business classes,” Kumar shouts from the back of the room, citing revenue figures from memory. And when Lalu drifts off on earthy tangents about dung or latrine systems (“urine—it fall all over the platform”), Kumar winces.
Lalu and Kumar rule the railways ministry as twin consuls, and they rule it well. Officers snap to attention and salute when they pass in the corridors. In his relatively spartan office, Kumar’s sole concessions to luxury are a private bathroom, an attendant who refreshes his tea constantly, and an unshakeable air of dry superiority that would be less tolerable, were he not the brains behind several industry-changing decisions.
***
None of the innovations was original. All sound, in retrospect, like no-brainers: make the trains faster, heavier, and longer. Kumar wrinkled his nose when I pointed this out. “A five-billion-dollar no-brainer!”Political considerations precluded hiking fares, which in any event were often so low that a huge increase would bring in only a little more revenue. (With unlimited-travel passes in Mumbai costing as little as $2 per month, it’s a mystery why Indian Railways collects passenger fares on some routes at all.) And none of the standard remedies for weak businesses—selling off under-performing assets, or laying off employees—could happen, because Lalu forbade anything that could make him look unfriendly to the poor. “People used to say about Jack that he will nuke every damn thing which is not profit-making,” Kumar complains. “But I can’t nuke anything, because of the political imperatives. I had to serve an omelet to the nation without breaking any eggs whatsoever.”
The first and most crucial change was born from the minister’s own whimsy. In his first month as railways chief, Lalu visited a railway stop in Danapur, Bihar, for a spot inspection of the freight. The demand was ridiculous: since the station lacked an in-motion weigh bridge, railwaymen had to remove every item from a train and weigh it on a small industrial scale. Lalu lounged nearby, supervising the workmen from his chair, like a zamindar in the days of the Raj. The scale pinned at just a couple hundred kilos, and the train was rated for a thousand tons of freight. “My minister was new,” Kumar says, “and no one had the courage to tell him that this wasn’t the way it could be done.” Eventually, the station manager mustered the courage to inform Lalu that he would have to sit for a full week watching the operation, and that he should give up, go home, and rest. Lalu, showing the stubbornness of a newcomer, instead demanded that the whole train re-route to Muri, roughly 250 miles away, whose station had a larger scale.
When the workers weighed the car and found it overloaded, Lalu demanded that every train in India be weighed at once, at one of the 30 weigh bridges. Overloading turned out to be rife, and the minister, incensed at the possibility that employees and customers were defrauding the railways, visited Kumar. “If you are carrying this load in any case, and I haven’t seen your tracks damaged, why are you not charging for it? If your locomotives are in any case carrying this load, why the hell you can’t increase the axle load?”
“The only disgruntled element in this exercise was the employees and customers who were part of this hanky-panky,” Kumar says. (Lalu himself is more triumphant: “Some mafias were working in this business. I caught them and punished them!”) The spot inspection served as a pivot from which Indian Railways as a whole could reform itself. The change ultimately became a billion-dollar improvement in the revenues of the railways.
The decision did entail some risk: heavier axle loads mean greater wear on tracks and bridges, and therefore greater need to replace infrastructure. If a train derailed, the public would blame heavier axle loads, and the minister would have to resign. But Kumar says Lalu’s friendly relationship with his public gave him more room to accept risk. “My mother has taught me to take the bull by the horns,” Lalu said. “If you try to take it by the tail, it will kick you in the ass.” “No other minister could summon the courage to do this,” Kumar explains.
His single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar.
The move to heavier axle loads looks like an obvious move in retrospect, but similar actions at other railways have required years of study and bureaucratic maneuvering, says Steve Ditmeyer, an American railroad expert who has studied the Indian Railways turnaround. To move to heavier loads means making sure the part of the surge in revenue from the extra freight—really the same amount of freight, just more paid freight—needs to be set aside for a faster rate of track replacement. Lalu demanded from on high that axle loads increase. Kumar studied the problem and implemented the order, coordinating with department heads and India’s independent safety commissioner.
“The Railways was struggling with this problem for the last 25 years, but they didn’t have the consensus” necessary to make the change, Kumar says. “This one small inspection brought about that consensus.”
In addition, Kumar and his team began examining the competition more closely. In the 1990s, Indian Railways had so exasperated customers that even cement manufacturers, whose dense product is perfect for rail travel, had shifted their share of the logistics market to trucking. Indian Railways’s share of their business fell from 71 percent in 1991 to 30 percent in 2004—even though Indian roads are terrible, and unlike trains, trucks must clear customs, pay taxes, and pay off tax inspectors at the borders between each of India’s 33 mainland states and union territories.
The system had been rigged to handicap trucks by imposing bureaucratic requirements at borders. But in most other respects, trucks were simpler: Indian Railways maintained a complex tariff card, which the British drafted in the 1860s and which still included a range of archaic commodities. With corrigenda, it fattened to the size of a phone book.
“If you have to hire a truck driver, he’ll just ask, ‘If you want to hire my truck, I’ll charge 40 thousand rupees,’” Kumar says. “Even if you’re carrying an empty box, you have to pay full charge. So we said, ‘Why the hell Railways are getting into this mess?’” The tariff card shrunk to the size of a postcard (even though it still specifies rates for jute and “edible salts”). With that reform Kumar and Lalu began working closely with industry to recapture market share, and to outsource the difficulty of filling freight cars efficiently to their customers. “Whatever you carry,” Kumar says, using a favorite phrase, “it’s your funeral.”
In previous regimes, Indian Railways assumed a monopoly position. “We are not in the business of railways,” Kumar says. “We are in the business of transportation. And we have competitors.” Industry members echoed the position. One told me that the previous leadership of the ministry had rationed out the railways’ services, whereas now close attention is paid to customer demand. A logistics manager at a Calcutta manufacturing giant likened the succession of business-friendly measures to the succession of record-setting pole vaults by the Soviet athlete Sergei Bubka—an endless series of efforts to outdo oneself.
At the same time, Kumar engineered a system under which inspections of trains took place after a fixed number of kilometers of service, rather than after every trip. Trains languished for shorter times in railyards. And increased freight and passenger business—in part the result of cozier relations with industry and passenger enthusiasm for innovations such as Lalu’s garib rath—meant that each train could add several extra cars, and unit cost plummeted by as much as 50 percent. Adding cars generated plenty of bottom-line revenue: the trains were already going, so the cost of adding an extra car was marginal.
Underlying all this, Kumar tells me with undisguised pride, working off a PowerPoint presentation seemingly designed to show up the BJP committee that predicted doom for Indian Railways seven years ago, is an insight borrowed from India’s telecom boom: bigger is better. “Which is a bigger play on scale or volume?” he asks. “If you were to build Indian Railways today, it would cost you not less than a trillion dollars. But once the network is laid”—like the initial outlay for India’s mobile towers—“the less one unit costs. What applies to telecom equally applies to me.”
***
Lalu’s success owes everything to Kumar, but Kumar deflects the praise back to the minister—most of it, anyway. “This is a democracy. I have only the power and clout that he gives me, and I am a big zero without him. The day he decides he does not need the services of Sudhir Kumar, within hours I am gone.”
But there’s glory in the turnaround for Kumar, too. During our conversations, a bespectacled young doctoral student from Columbia University interrupts us to show Kumar manuscript pages from a book they are coauthoring about the turnaround. And Kumar’s agenda included a meeting with a major commercial publisher. Kumar has brought in American and French experts on railway management—including Ditmeyer—and solicited reports from them that invariably mention his own role in the transformation.
‘Boys and girls from Harvard, they come to me,’ Lalu bragged, slapping the soft sole of his bare foot with a crack to stress the irony.
I asked Kumar whether the temptation of private-sector work would eventually draw him out of the IAS. His response was curt. “There is no temptation, sir. The kind of satisfaction you get there is nothing compared to the satisfaction of serving my country.” He put down his papers, and his offended expression melted into a look of pain. “My father,” the prosperous clothier, “said, ‘Go to serve the people.’ He uttered these words, and within four hours, he was no more. I am living with that every single day.” He put down his stack of papers. “When you are giving shape to the dream of your father—what better way to self-actualize?” Even in the language of Tony Robbins, the speech is affecting. At this the tears welled up, and the prince of the railways wept into his tea.
Bringing in Kumar clearly helped Lalu instill professionalism in the ministry. But it was equally vital that he did not bring the crew his critics expected. Lalu’s first acts included an outright ban on his own cronies and family members in the Rail Bhavan. In Bihar, they had lurked on the sidelines, awaiting patronage from the chief minister. The corruption reached ridiculous levels: when I visited in 2001, media murmured about malfeasance in the state’s smallpox eradication program. It was regarded as suspect that the state employed several people to guard against a disease that since the 1970s had existed only in heavily guarded vials in Atlanta, Georgia. Bandits (“dacoits,” in Indian English) plagued the countryside and kidnapped anyone with money. Sometime, they put obstacles on the train tracks, so they could plunder the cars, each a curry-scented movable feast of defenseless passengers and freight.
In 2008, I returned to see how Bihar had fared under three years of rule by Nitish Kumar, a longtime Lalu foe and, not coincidentally, the minister of railways who preceded Lalu. I mentioned to Lalu that I planned to visit Bihar. He seemed unconcerned about dirt I might dig up, and said I should greet the manager of the Maurya Patna, the city’s only international-standard hotel. “They buy my milk.” When I added that I would not fly, but would take his “poor man’s chariot,” he jerked to attention and warned me gravely, with a wag of the finger, to hold my belongings tightly and to avoid accepting food from strangers on the train, lest I be poisoned and robbed.
I arrived in Patna safely. In Lalu’s absence, everything had improved—even the railway station itself. It is still no Grand Central, and if it had an Oyster Bar I’d probably skip the raw ones. But its third-class waiting room can no longer be described (in the words of my old guidebook) as “an underground car-park for human bodies.” The city of Patna had once resembled a medieval warren. Now, in the busy streets, pissy stenches singe the nose not constantly, but only in a few informally designated areas. The hotels have sold out their rooms for wedding parties. And at night, the Mayfair Ice Cream Parlor is packed with kids, and the ice cream probably won’t give you the runs.
Years after Biharis voted him out, Lalu’s picture is still everywhere—in shops, on banners over the road, and even, I am told, on bathroom doors (in lieu of men’s and women’s stick figures, they sometimes use portraits of Lalu and Rabri). But the people who speak to me do not remember Lalu fondly. In the years since Nitish Kumar came to power, the city has flourished, and the state government has fought against the gangsterism that pervaded the countryside. Eight years ago, in Patna and the rural areas alike, murders and kidnappings were common. Now, as in most Indian cities, the greatest safety risk is the traffic. On the train back to New Delhi, a man in my railway berth offered me raisins, and I felt safe enough to try one.
***
Lalu mismanaged Patna terribly. So how has he managed a gargantuan state organ so well that students from Kellogg and Wharton are taking notice?
Part of the answer lies in India’s recent economic growth spurt: Lalu stood on the shoulders of an economy that never grew by less than 6 percent per year during his whole tenure as railways minister. (India’s economy has slowed considerably since the global downturn began.) With a boom like that to fuel demand, how could he fail? All he had to do was sit back and let the market propel him forward. Indeed, Sushil Kumar Modi, the politician who claims to be picking up after Lalu’s mess in Bihar, notes that Lalu still spends all his time in Bihar, and rarely visits his own New Delhi office. The railway turnaround began before he took over the ministry, during Nitish Kumar’s reign, although few predicted that it would continue as it has. The most cynical of his critics expect to discover after Lalu has left the ministry that safety corners have been cut, and that his successor will have to deal with a series of derailments and bridge collapses. But outsiders such as Ditmeyer say that Lalu’s management has been fundamentally sound, assuming he’s making the proper investments in maintenance.
‘If he is held responsible for failure,’ Kumar complained, ‘he should be responsible for success as well.’
The other half of the explanation, though, seems to be a simple case of democracy and markets working. One of the salutary effects of India’s recent boom is that people such as Lalu have more opportunities to be measured, and even civil servants such as Kumar are eventually subjected to the same pitiless bottom-line scrutiny that businesses face. Only recently did India really begin to shake off its penchant for state-owned enterprise. By the time Lalu took over, it was no longer possible for Indian Railways to run as if it were a monopoly in the transportation sector, or as if it were a Lalu fiefdom, as Bihar was for so long.
Sankarshan Thakur, the journalistic gadfly who wrote a caustic account of Lalu’s failure in Bihar, says Lalu is managing the railroads competently as penance for his mismanagement of Bihar. “Lalu got insecure,” Thakur says. “He was sorely wounded by defeat in Bihar, and he needed to recover.” The railways ministry is a constituency-building ministry, one that allows a politician to be observed succeeding. He had failed in Bihar, and if he hoped ever to recover the leadership he once enjoyed, he had to run the railways ministry with exemplary competence. Everyone is watching, including the peasants. Lalu’s constituents are now not only voters but customers. Biharis kicked him out once already, and he’s acting responsibly so they don't do it again.
Lalu is aware of his new publicity, and he courts it. David Blair, a railways expert from Washington, D.C., brought a delegation of students to meet Lalu and was shocked to discover that a camera crew lay waiting to record their visit. “Boys and girls from Harvard, they come to me,” Lalu bragged, slapping the soft sole of his bare foot with a crack to stress the irony.
***
After our conversation, Kumar joined me for lunch at the Shangri-La Hotel. The Shangri-La competes with Imperial and the Oberoi for New Delhi’s business visitors, and on that summer day, foreigners in navy and black suits waited with us for the buffet to open. To wear a suit in India during the summer bespeaks either total ignorance of the oppressive humidity, or—surely the case with these men—an expectation of door-to-door travel from one four-star air-conditioned paradise to the next. These men lived the life Kumar passed up when he joined the civil service, and which his brothers and sisters apparently still enjoy.
While a waiter filled our glasses with ice water, Sudhir kept making the case for his boss. Be wary of Lalu’s critics, he said. They’re a jealous bunch, and hypocrites to boot. They criticize him for his Bihar failures, but then overlook his railway success. “When Lalu presented his first budget to Parliament, everyone said Lalu had been busy campaigning in Bihar, so Dr. Manmohan Singh”—India’s current prime minister and former finance minister—“had drafted this budget. They could not internalize that it came from Lalu-ji, because he’s a shepherd or farmer or whatever.”
“If he is held responsible for failure,” Kumar complained, “he should be responsible for success as well.” Kumar was pleased with that line, and nodded across the table to the Columbia economist, as if to remind him to save it for their book. And as for Lalu’s successors, Kumar warned, they’ll be subjected to a higher standard than before. “If they revert back to two-percent growth, Parliament will not accept it. A democracy will not accept it.”
Lalu, in all his rustic ignorance, had chosen not only a shrewd businessman but a political philosopher, self-actualized equally by his business savvy and patriotic self-abnegation. Kumar stood up grandly, strode to the vegetarian entrees, inserted his shoulder firmly amid the businessmen, and triumphantly spooned out some korma.
By Graeme Wood, a staff editor at The Atlantic.
The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer—one with annual revenues in the tens of billions—from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek.
Lalu is a happy man: happy to have risen to become rich, beloved, and reviled all over India; happy that a grateful nation credits him with whipping its beleaguered rail system into profitability; and happy that he’s managed to do all this and somehow stay out of jail. Under his leadership, Indian Railways has gone from bankruptcy to billions in just a few years. When Lalu presented his latest budget to Parliament on February 13, he bragged, "Hathi ko cheetah bana diya" ("I have turned an elephant into a cheetah"). What’s his secret?
“Cow dung,” he says. “I have 350 cows, including bulls. Cow dung—no need of gas.” Everyone tells me about Lalu’s “rustic common sense,” though I’m unsure how burning manure for fuel has made Indian trains suddenly run profitably. But his point is a broad one, about systems efficiency and country wisdom and resourcefulness. “Railways is like a Jersey cow. If you do not milk it fully, it gets tenail,” a swollen and infected udder. Milk every last drop out of Indian Railways, Lalu told his subordinates, and it will prosper.
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways.
The folksiness is no pose. Lalu really did begin as a cow-boy, and he has spent (or misspent) a 40-year career in politics exploiting his bovine roots. Since he became nationally famous in the 1980s, Lalu has been known throughout India as a corrupt and unapologetic yokel, eerily canny in his political maneuvering and cleverer than he looks and sounds.
In his home state of Bihar, where he first rose to power, the common touch served him well. Bihar is India’s poorest and most backward state. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lalu knitted together a coalition of poor Biharis that elected him chief minister. The Lalu years wrecked Bihar further. When corruption allegations surfaced, critics demanded that Lalu resign on moral grounds. The scandal that brought him down, known as the “Fodder Scam,” effectively amounted to a government-wide ruse under which taxpayers paid for nonexistent hay. But Lalu held on for a long time. “I have heard of football grounds and cricket grounds, but not moral grounds,” he said. When the pressure became too great for him to stay in office, he responded with a nepotistic masterstroke, bold even by his standards, and appointed his wife, Rabri Devi, to rule in his place. (“Who do you want me to appoint?” Lalu asked. “Your wife?”)
Lalu may have been corrupt, but he was also a laugh riot. He speaks in an outrageously backwoods Hindi dialect, full of barnyard metaphor and hick wisdom. Even his detractors admit his speech is often charming. “He’s a hugely charismatic man,” says Sankarshan Thakur, a Bihari journalist and Lalu critic. “His ability to reach out beyond language barriers is amazing. He charmed the pants off the Pakistanis,” Thakur says, during government-to-government talks in 2006. On any given day on India’s flourishing array of cable channels, the chances are high of seeing Lalu’s face on a news show, or even on an entertainment show. I clicked randomly to see him guest-judging what looked like an Indian knock-off of “American Idol.” In 2005, a popular Indian film based on “A Fish Called Wanda” took Lalu’s name for its title—“Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav”—even though it had nothing to do with Lalu, other than having main characters with his names.
The rest of India chuckled at Lalu, and more often with him. But Bihar remained the most lawless state in the country. “He never tried to do serious business in Bihar regarding development,” says Sushil Kumar Modi, Bihar’s current deputy chief minister, and a Lalu acquaintance for nearly 40 years. “Lalu Yadav is not a serious man. Not a single state-sponsored scheme happened under his rule. He thought, ‘If I can rig the elections, there is no need to do any work.’” Thakur is more damning: “He arrived promising to dismantle the Establishment, an anti-hero out to snatch power from Patna’s bungalows and deliver it to the people, but he ended up a creature of the Establishment himself.” By the time Rabri—a semiliterate buffalo herder who did Lalu’s bidding, and whose name, incidentally, means “Custard Goddess”—left office in 2005, everyone in India knew Lalu, and his name was a byword for incompetence, cronyism, and the abject failure of government.
Even then, Lalu commanded enough of a following among his coalition of “extremely backward castes” (or, in the wonderful semiofficial abbreviation, “EBCs”) and desperately poor Muslims to secure a role for himself in India’s 2004 Congress Party government. He wanted the interior ministry, but the new government wasn’t ready to have a rube in charge of such a powerful portfolio. They gave him the railways ministry, and many expected the same pitiful misrule that had characterized his time in Bihar.
Indian Railways was in trouble: in 2001, a report by the BJP—a government dominated by the Brahmins who are Lalu’s permanent foes—predicted it would hemorrhage cash at a rate of $12 billion annually by 2015. (The whole budget of the Indian government, by comparison, is $128 billion.) Indian Railways was barely managing to cover its daily operating costs, to say nothing of paying for the new equipment and strengthening bridges. The report concluded: “It is very likely that Indian Railways would be a heavily-loss-making entity—in fact one well on the path toward bankruptcy, if it were not state owned.” Outsiders whispered the word “privatization” but were hushed: Indian Railways has been a source of national pride since before independence, and statist sentimentalists could never let it fail.
Lalu’s term as railways minister has been shockingly successful. Instead of turning India’s most prized national institution into a basketcase and a ruin, Lalu has led one of most spectacular economic turnarounds in a country bursting with economic miracles. Indian Railways began raking in cash and posting surpluses in the billions. And the intelligentsia and technocracy, at first shocked and dismayed that a shameless populist had seized a fragile and unwieldy national institution, have largely come around to acknowledging that India Railways has been transformed into a respected institution—and so, possibly, has Lalu.
***
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)
The cerebral cortex of the whole system is the Rail Bhavan, a pinkish monolith near Parliament in New Delhi. The Rail Bhavan is, in a way, surrounded by its own competition: its street is permanently filled with the traffic of taxis, trucks, buses, and rickshaws that for a time seemed poised to steal away the rails’ business altogether. Outside, a decommissioned green locomotive and the railways’ mascot, Bholu the Elephant, announce to the mess of traffic that the railways are not to be counted out.
Inside, the conditions do not inspire confidence. The building is big, disordered, and honeycombed with offices that bear stultifying bureaucratic titles (“Manager, Zonal Railways, Deputy”). The hallways all have torn-up ceilings. Some are so dark that I have to use a pocket flashlight to read names on the doors, and inside the offices the level of technology is shockingly low. Employees’ business cards have Yahoo! addresses. P.K. Sharma, the bright and competent director of personnel, has on his desk a foot-high pile of green folders bound together with shoelaces. From that desk, 2.5 million lives are managed, and there is not a computer in sight.
The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance.
Indian Railways is a government enterprise, and it has the dead weight characteristic of state organs. Employees live in housing provided by the Railways, send their kids to Railways schools, and visit Railways doctors when sick. Nearly a million are pensioners, and therefore provide no value to the ministry at all. Those who do work encounter predictable bureaucratic headaches: the ministry’s departments (six in total, for electrical, staff, engineering, mechanical, traffic, and financial concerns) operate in a stovepipe fashion, with minimal cross-pollination and little effort to coordinate and ensure that the railways as a whole run well. And ultimately Indian Railways has to answer to the taxpayers and citizens who support it, and who quite understandably want assurances that their train set will keep its fares low enough for them to afford.
Somehow it all works out. The world has few centrally managed organizations as large as Indian Railways, and surely none maintains the same level of performance. Delays are inevitable. But even when disaster strikes—as when terrorists bombed tracks in Mumbai in 2006—the railway heals itself quickly, usually within days, like a starfish growing back its arm. To grasp the difficulty of the operation, just imagine running a much bigger version of Wal-Mart, and then add a few wild cards, such as an employee literacy rate of 60 percent and terrorists trying to blow up your stores.
***
As chief minister of Bihar, Lalu may have been a buffoon and a grifter, but he didn’t fail entirely. And the ways in which he courted failure, but didn’t quite succumb to it, offer a clue as to how Lalu has succeeded at the railways ministry.
He plundered Bihar like every Bihari leader before him. Lalu’s great innovation was to entertain the masses, and to dignify their suffering with a show of attention. He held court at the chief minister’s residence and listened to common people’s grievances. Even if he ultimately did nothing to ease their pain, they left knowing that they had spoken to the most powerful man in the state, and he had responded in the same dialect they spoke to their own friends and family. When his children fell sick, Lalu himself stood in line with them at the public clinic. Never mind that the lines were long, and the treatment horrifying, because kleptocrats had looted the public coffers: Biharis saw their chief minister waiting like a poor, ordinary man, so they forgave him for being rich and extraordinary.
At Indian Railways, Lalu retained that popular touch and remade the passenger experience accordingly. A key feature of train travel, even in the cheap seats, is tea service. Lalu banned plastic teacups, which had been littering the countryside, and replaced them with peasant-made kullhars—earthen mugs that after a single use can be smashed on the ground, where they then return to the mud from which they are fired. He employed weavers to make bedding out of khadi (homespun cloth). And to avenge his childhood eviction from the air-conditioned cars, he introduced a new class of service: garib rath, “the poor man’s chariot,” on which the single frill is air conditioning. Despite boasting this once unimaginable luxury, garib rath is extremely cheap, within reach of even the backward castes from which Lalu himself hails.
But his single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar. Kumar, 50, is from a Gujarati family in Punjab. The family knows business: “If there is money lying around, we can smell it,” Kumar says. His father was a clothing wholesaler, and his brothers and sisters have, according to Sudhir, made a fortune in business for themselves. Sudhir takes pride in having given up the joys of free enterprise to work for the government, a calling he regards as nobler and more satisfying than work done for personal gain. He clambered over thousands of competitors to land in his current job as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), a sort of Delta Force for Indian civil servants. Every year, out of 300,000 aspirants, no more than 60 make the grade. They fan out all over India to solve the subcontinent’s most intractable problems, before heading back to New Delhi to regroup and take their next assignment.
Kumar’s first big assignment was Bihar. Bihar broke up into two smaller states in 2000: Jharkhand, which contained rich mineral and coal deposits, and Bihar, which had the larger population by far. Bihar stood to lose over half its tax revenue. (When Japanese businessmen expressed interest in the mineral wealth and promised to bring prosperity to the stricken region, a joke circulated: “Give us mineral rights,” the businessmen told Lalu, “and within six months, Bihar will be like Japan.” “That’s nothing,” Lalu said. “Give me Japan for six weeks, and it will be like Bihar.” It’s a testament to Lalu’s brazenness that this exchange seems plausible.) Kumar’s job had been to separate the two states in a way that allowed each to establish a sufficient tax base within seven years. He did it in 30 months by closing loopholes in the tax code, cutting deals with tax cheats, and in general collecting taxes with an intensity most Indians would reserve for a cricket match or a ground war.
Lalu noticed. When he ascended to the railways ministry in 2005, he requested Kumar as his deputy. Kumar had risen to an IAS position so elite that his move required parliamentary approval, which quickly arrived. The Congress Party’s coalition government, now led by the Oxford-trained economist Manmohan Singh, prized technical competence and was happy to appoint a shrewd bureaucrat to watch over its most unlettered cabinet member.
Lalu plundered Bihar like every Bihari leader before him. His great innovation was to entertain the masses, and to dignify their suffering with a show of attention.
Since then, Kumar has labored in an office immediately opposite Lalu’s, but completely unlike the minister’s opulent, wood-paneled lair. The minister lounges on his sofa, watching NDTV, a TV news network. Kumar’s two flat-screens show real-time data on the country’s main routes. Periodically, a minion walks into Kumar’s command center to present a 20-page stack of papers that represent the day’s statistics on passengers, freight, and on-time arrivals. “Like Jack keeps a daily tab, I also keep a daily tab,” Kumar says, referring to Jack Welch, one of his idols. The contrast with Lalu’s own listless inattention is jarring. When Lalu tells me about his success, mumbling vaguely about winning “the confidence of the business classes,” Kumar shouts from the back of the room, citing revenue figures from memory. And when Lalu drifts off on earthy tangents about dung or latrine systems (“urine—it fall all over the platform”), Kumar winces.
Lalu and Kumar rule the railways ministry as twin consuls, and they rule it well. Officers snap to attention and salute when they pass in the corridors. In his relatively spartan office, Kumar’s sole concessions to luxury are a private bathroom, an attendant who refreshes his tea constantly, and an unshakeable air of dry superiority that would be less tolerable, were he not the brains behind several industry-changing decisions.
***
None of the innovations was original. All sound, in retrospect, like no-brainers: make the trains faster, heavier, and longer. Kumar wrinkled his nose when I pointed this out. “A five-billion-dollar no-brainer!”Political considerations precluded hiking fares, which in any event were often so low that a huge increase would bring in only a little more revenue. (With unlimited-travel passes in Mumbai costing as little as $2 per month, it’s a mystery why Indian Railways collects passenger fares on some routes at all.) And none of the standard remedies for weak businesses—selling off under-performing assets, or laying off employees—could happen, because Lalu forbade anything that could make him look unfriendly to the poor. “People used to say about Jack that he will nuke every damn thing which is not profit-making,” Kumar complains. “But I can’t nuke anything, because of the political imperatives. I had to serve an omelet to the nation without breaking any eggs whatsoever.”
The first and most crucial change was born from the minister’s own whimsy. In his first month as railways chief, Lalu visited a railway stop in Danapur, Bihar, for a spot inspection of the freight. The demand was ridiculous: since the station lacked an in-motion weigh bridge, railwaymen had to remove every item from a train and weigh it on a small industrial scale. Lalu lounged nearby, supervising the workmen from his chair, like a zamindar in the days of the Raj. The scale pinned at just a couple hundred kilos, and the train was rated for a thousand tons of freight. “My minister was new,” Kumar says, “and no one had the courage to tell him that this wasn’t the way it could be done.” Eventually, the station manager mustered the courage to inform Lalu that he would have to sit for a full week watching the operation, and that he should give up, go home, and rest. Lalu, showing the stubbornness of a newcomer, instead demanded that the whole train re-route to Muri, roughly 250 miles away, whose station had a larger scale.
When the workers weighed the car and found it overloaded, Lalu demanded that every train in India be weighed at once, at one of the 30 weigh bridges. Overloading turned out to be rife, and the minister, incensed at the possibility that employees and customers were defrauding the railways, visited Kumar. “If you are carrying this load in any case, and I haven’t seen your tracks damaged, why are you not charging for it? If your locomotives are in any case carrying this load, why the hell you can’t increase the axle load?”
“The only disgruntled element in this exercise was the employees and customers who were part of this hanky-panky,” Kumar says. (Lalu himself is more triumphant: “Some mafias were working in this business. I caught them and punished them!”) The spot inspection served as a pivot from which Indian Railways as a whole could reform itself. The change ultimately became a billion-dollar improvement in the revenues of the railways.
The decision did entail some risk: heavier axle loads mean greater wear on tracks and bridges, and therefore greater need to replace infrastructure. If a train derailed, the public would blame heavier axle loads, and the minister would have to resign. But Kumar says Lalu’s friendly relationship with his public gave him more room to accept risk. “My mother has taught me to take the bull by the horns,” Lalu said. “If you try to take it by the tail, it will kick you in the ass.” “No other minister could summon the courage to do this,” Kumar explains.
His single most important innovation at Indian Railways was not a populist move at all. It was an elite one: the hiring of a prodigiously talented civil servant named Sudhir Kumar.
The move to heavier axle loads looks like an obvious move in retrospect, but similar actions at other railways have required years of study and bureaucratic maneuvering, says Steve Ditmeyer, an American railroad expert who has studied the Indian Railways turnaround. To move to heavier loads means making sure the part of the surge in revenue from the extra freight—really the same amount of freight, just more paid freight—needs to be set aside for a faster rate of track replacement. Lalu demanded from on high that axle loads increase. Kumar studied the problem and implemented the order, coordinating with department heads and India’s independent safety commissioner.
“The Railways was struggling with this problem for the last 25 years, but they didn’t have the consensus” necessary to make the change, Kumar says. “This one small inspection brought about that consensus.”
In addition, Kumar and his team began examining the competition more closely. In the 1990s, Indian Railways had so exasperated customers that even cement manufacturers, whose dense product is perfect for rail travel, had shifted their share of the logistics market to trucking. Indian Railways’s share of their business fell from 71 percent in 1991 to 30 percent in 2004—even though Indian roads are terrible, and unlike trains, trucks must clear customs, pay taxes, and pay off tax inspectors at the borders between each of India’s 33 mainland states and union territories.
The system had been rigged to handicap trucks by imposing bureaucratic requirements at borders. But in most other respects, trucks were simpler: Indian Railways maintained a complex tariff card, which the British drafted in the 1860s and which still included a range of archaic commodities. With corrigenda, it fattened to the size of a phone book.
“If you have to hire a truck driver, he’ll just ask, ‘If you want to hire my truck, I’ll charge 40 thousand rupees,’” Kumar says. “Even if you’re carrying an empty box, you have to pay full charge. So we said, ‘Why the hell Railways are getting into this mess?’” The tariff card shrunk to the size of a postcard (even though it still specifies rates for jute and “edible salts”). With that reform Kumar and Lalu began working closely with industry to recapture market share, and to outsource the difficulty of filling freight cars efficiently to their customers. “Whatever you carry,” Kumar says, using a favorite phrase, “it’s your funeral.”
In previous regimes, Indian Railways assumed a monopoly position. “We are not in the business of railways,” Kumar says. “We are in the business of transportation. And we have competitors.” Industry members echoed the position. One told me that the previous leadership of the ministry had rationed out the railways’ services, whereas now close attention is paid to customer demand. A logistics manager at a Calcutta manufacturing giant likened the succession of business-friendly measures to the succession of record-setting pole vaults by the Soviet athlete Sergei Bubka—an endless series of efforts to outdo oneself.
At the same time, Kumar engineered a system under which inspections of trains took place after a fixed number of kilometers of service, rather than after every trip. Trains languished for shorter times in railyards. And increased freight and passenger business—in part the result of cozier relations with industry and passenger enthusiasm for innovations such as Lalu’s garib rath—meant that each train could add several extra cars, and unit cost plummeted by as much as 50 percent. Adding cars generated plenty of bottom-line revenue: the trains were already going, so the cost of adding an extra car was marginal.
Underlying all this, Kumar tells me with undisguised pride, working off a PowerPoint presentation seemingly designed to show up the BJP committee that predicted doom for Indian Railways seven years ago, is an insight borrowed from India’s telecom boom: bigger is better. “Which is a bigger play on scale or volume?” he asks. “If you were to build Indian Railways today, it would cost you not less than a trillion dollars. But once the network is laid”—like the initial outlay for India’s mobile towers—“the less one unit costs. What applies to telecom equally applies to me.”
***
Lalu’s success owes everything to Kumar, but Kumar deflects the praise back to the minister—most of it, anyway. “This is a democracy. I have only the power and clout that he gives me, and I am a big zero without him. The day he decides he does not need the services of Sudhir Kumar, within hours I am gone.”
But there’s glory in the turnaround for Kumar, too. During our conversations, a bespectacled young doctoral student from Columbia University interrupts us to show Kumar manuscript pages from a book they are coauthoring about the turnaround. And Kumar’s agenda included a meeting with a major commercial publisher. Kumar has brought in American and French experts on railway management—including Ditmeyer—and solicited reports from them that invariably mention his own role in the transformation.
‘Boys and girls from Harvard, they come to me,’ Lalu bragged, slapping the soft sole of his bare foot with a crack to stress the irony.
I asked Kumar whether the temptation of private-sector work would eventually draw him out of the IAS. His response was curt. “There is no temptation, sir. The kind of satisfaction you get there is nothing compared to the satisfaction of serving my country.” He put down his papers, and his offended expression melted into a look of pain. “My father,” the prosperous clothier, “said, ‘Go to serve the people.’ He uttered these words, and within four hours, he was no more. I am living with that every single day.” He put down his stack of papers. “When you are giving shape to the dream of your father—what better way to self-actualize?” Even in the language of Tony Robbins, the speech is affecting. At this the tears welled up, and the prince of the railways wept into his tea.
Bringing in Kumar clearly helped Lalu instill professionalism in the ministry. But it was equally vital that he did not bring the crew his critics expected. Lalu’s first acts included an outright ban on his own cronies and family members in the Rail Bhavan. In Bihar, they had lurked on the sidelines, awaiting patronage from the chief minister. The corruption reached ridiculous levels: when I visited in 2001, media murmured about malfeasance in the state’s smallpox eradication program. It was regarded as suspect that the state employed several people to guard against a disease that since the 1970s had existed only in heavily guarded vials in Atlanta, Georgia. Bandits (“dacoits,” in Indian English) plagued the countryside and kidnapped anyone with money. Sometime, they put obstacles on the train tracks, so they could plunder the cars, each a curry-scented movable feast of defenseless passengers and freight.
In 2008, I returned to see how Bihar had fared under three years of rule by Nitish Kumar, a longtime Lalu foe and, not coincidentally, the minister of railways who preceded Lalu. I mentioned to Lalu that I planned to visit Bihar. He seemed unconcerned about dirt I might dig up, and said I should greet the manager of the Maurya Patna, the city’s only international-standard hotel. “They buy my milk.” When I added that I would not fly, but would take his “poor man’s chariot,” he jerked to attention and warned me gravely, with a wag of the finger, to hold my belongings tightly and to avoid accepting food from strangers on the train, lest I be poisoned and robbed.
I arrived in Patna safely. In Lalu’s absence, everything had improved—even the railway station itself. It is still no Grand Central, and if it had an Oyster Bar I’d probably skip the raw ones. But its third-class waiting room can no longer be described (in the words of my old guidebook) as “an underground car-park for human bodies.” The city of Patna had once resembled a medieval warren. Now, in the busy streets, pissy stenches singe the nose not constantly, but only in a few informally designated areas. The hotels have sold out their rooms for wedding parties. And at night, the Mayfair Ice Cream Parlor is packed with kids, and the ice cream probably won’t give you the runs.
Years after Biharis voted him out, Lalu’s picture is still everywhere—in shops, on banners over the road, and even, I am told, on bathroom doors (in lieu of men’s and women’s stick figures, they sometimes use portraits of Lalu and Rabri). But the people who speak to me do not remember Lalu fondly. In the years since Nitish Kumar came to power, the city has flourished, and the state government has fought against the gangsterism that pervaded the countryside. Eight years ago, in Patna and the rural areas alike, murders and kidnappings were common. Now, as in most Indian cities, the greatest safety risk is the traffic. On the train back to New Delhi, a man in my railway berth offered me raisins, and I felt safe enough to try one.
***
Lalu mismanaged Patna terribly. So how has he managed a gargantuan state organ so well that students from Kellogg and Wharton are taking notice?
Part of the answer lies in India’s recent economic growth spurt: Lalu stood on the shoulders of an economy that never grew by less than 6 percent per year during his whole tenure as railways minister. (India’s economy has slowed considerably since the global downturn began.) With a boom like that to fuel demand, how could he fail? All he had to do was sit back and let the market propel him forward. Indeed, Sushil Kumar Modi, the politician who claims to be picking up after Lalu’s mess in Bihar, notes that Lalu still spends all his time in Bihar, and rarely visits his own New Delhi office. The railway turnaround began before he took over the ministry, during Nitish Kumar’s reign, although few predicted that it would continue as it has. The most cynical of his critics expect to discover after Lalu has left the ministry that safety corners have been cut, and that his successor will have to deal with a series of derailments and bridge collapses. But outsiders such as Ditmeyer say that Lalu’s management has been fundamentally sound, assuming he’s making the proper investments in maintenance.
‘If he is held responsible for failure,’ Kumar complained, ‘he should be responsible for success as well.’
The other half of the explanation, though, seems to be a simple case of democracy and markets working. One of the salutary effects of India’s recent boom is that people such as Lalu have more opportunities to be measured, and even civil servants such as Kumar are eventually subjected to the same pitiless bottom-line scrutiny that businesses face. Only recently did India really begin to shake off its penchant for state-owned enterprise. By the time Lalu took over, it was no longer possible for Indian Railways to run as if it were a monopoly in the transportation sector, or as if it were a Lalu fiefdom, as Bihar was for so long.
Sankarshan Thakur, the journalistic gadfly who wrote a caustic account of Lalu’s failure in Bihar, says Lalu is managing the railroads competently as penance for his mismanagement of Bihar. “Lalu got insecure,” Thakur says. “He was sorely wounded by defeat in Bihar, and he needed to recover.” The railways ministry is a constituency-building ministry, one that allows a politician to be observed succeeding. He had failed in Bihar, and if he hoped ever to recover the leadership he once enjoyed, he had to run the railways ministry with exemplary competence. Everyone is watching, including the peasants. Lalu’s constituents are now not only voters but customers. Biharis kicked him out once already, and he’s acting responsibly so they don't do it again.
Lalu is aware of his new publicity, and he courts it. David Blair, a railways expert from Washington, D.C., brought a delegation of students to meet Lalu and was shocked to discover that a camera crew lay waiting to record their visit. “Boys and girls from Harvard, they come to me,” Lalu bragged, slapping the soft sole of his bare foot with a crack to stress the irony.
***
After our conversation, Kumar joined me for lunch at the Shangri-La Hotel. The Shangri-La competes with Imperial and the Oberoi for New Delhi’s business visitors, and on that summer day, foreigners in navy and black suits waited with us for the buffet to open. To wear a suit in India during the summer bespeaks either total ignorance of the oppressive humidity, or—surely the case with these men—an expectation of door-to-door travel from one four-star air-conditioned paradise to the next. These men lived the life Kumar passed up when he joined the civil service, and which his brothers and sisters apparently still enjoy.
While a waiter filled our glasses with ice water, Sudhir kept making the case for his boss. Be wary of Lalu’s critics, he said. They’re a jealous bunch, and hypocrites to boot. They criticize him for his Bihar failures, but then overlook his railway success. “When Lalu presented his first budget to Parliament, everyone said Lalu had been busy campaigning in Bihar, so Dr. Manmohan Singh”—India’s current prime minister and former finance minister—“had drafted this budget. They could not internalize that it came from Lalu-ji, because he’s a shepherd or farmer or whatever.”
“If he is held responsible for failure,” Kumar complained, “he should be responsible for success as well.” Kumar was pleased with that line, and nodded across the table to the Columbia economist, as if to remind him to save it for their book. And as for Lalu’s successors, Kumar warned, they’ll be subjected to a higher standard than before. “If they revert back to two-percent growth, Parliament will not accept it. A democracy will not accept it.”
Lalu, in all his rustic ignorance, had chosen not only a shrewd businessman but a political philosopher, self-actualized equally by his business savvy and patriotic self-abnegation. Kumar stood up grandly, strode to the vegetarian entrees, inserted his shoulder firmly amid the businessmen, and triumphantly spooned out some korma.
By Graeme Wood, a staff editor at The Atlantic.
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