The Great Gatsby
0The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India
Reasoning for title – story is similar to Great Gatsby. He’s trying to interview the richest man in India, but his reputation is very contradicting – fraud or the truth? Tells his story about childhood and how his dad was considered a fraud, then he built up the school after his father stepped down. Originally he wanted to do things with cigars, then it went South and now he has a real cigar business, “the best cigars aren’t always the most expensive.” A lot of people thought getting the most expensive was what they wanted, not what was best. The man was describing his house but the way he was describing it was like his office, is the house really …show more content…
there? He wanted to go to college in the Us but his father convinced him to stay in.
1-
Deb took interest into a mogul by the name of Arindam Chaudhuri. Arindam Chaudhuri was of great and wealth and prominence being that he built a business empire but spite of his best efforts his reputation has given him the look of a fraud and a scammer. Before Deb met him he had seen Chaudhuri from magazines his media division published and headlines in newsstands, in buildings fronted by dark glass, and as well as a movie produced by Chaudhuri himself. It was his task to find a rich man as a subject and the making and spending money in India. Sutanu, the guy that ran the media division for Arindam, spoke to Arindam about Deb meeting up with him. Sutanu proceeds to describe Arindam as a man of times and how he started out with the business school Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) in 1996 that was founded by his father along with
Arindam expanding it into 9 branches in most major Indian cities. It was described that Arindam was also in charge of a media division that included news weekly, business magazines, a software company, and a consulting division that managed the HR component of multinationals. Lastly, he had a film division but he has not had much success in making blockbusters in the bollywood industry. At the end of this section it was asked where this money comes from and how he makes the money. Sutanu hesitates and explains that many bloggers and industrialists dislike Arindam and published negative things pertaining to his reputation and businesses. After a couple of days of waiting Sutanu had set up an appointment with Arindam for Deb.
2-
This section solely focuses on the controversial rep of Arindam Chaudhuri. Deb describes that he was a few shades darker than pictures, glossy hair tied back into a ponytail, wore a blue pinstriped suit with a white shirt under it briefly showing his smooth shaved chest. (More description on pg. 32.) They were meeting at the Delhi campus of IIPM in the boardroom. Arindam did not start from scratch like most of new India. He inherited his management institute from his father Malay Chaudhuri, who began it in 1973. The original institute turned into a family bedroom at night because in Gurgaon, where it was located, is now a modern suburb, that hosts office parks and condominiums and shopping malls. When his father ran the management institute there there was more of an underdevelopment. He explained to Deb that he wanted to go to college in the US but his father convinced him to enroll in the family institute as the first student in a new undergraduate program. He also said he was teaching a course at the institute before he even graduated.After finishing his degree he started a recruitment consulting firm. With this he was hiring people for other companies and he was helping IIPM graduates with his clients to find a job as well; however, it had been a problem. It also explains where the drive
to the campus and what the campus looked like and also how some of his family members and former classmates that work there and he referred to them as the mafia.
To summarize the chapter as a whole because i have so many sections: unlike Gatsby, Chaudhuri did not work his way up from nothing—that in India, as in Gilded Age America, there never was a truly selfmade man.
Instead he used his father's connections, taking over the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, the modest business school founded by Chaudhuri the Elder. Chaudhuri received his degrees from his father's school before eventually expanding the family's business. But he did so, Deb tells us, by falsely advertising everything from the school's rankings to its facilities to its relationships with major corporations. Professors from
Harvard and Columbia who each gave a single(pg. 107) lecture while passing through India were described as
"visiting faculty." Chaudhuri is managing organizations dependent on his charisma and dubious publicity campaigns. Moreover, as Deb explains, not only do most of his students go on to work for him, but they do so while making lower wages than they would likely have received from other business schools. Chaudhuri profits from what appears to be a convoluted pyramid scheme: the revenue that he generates from student fees pays those same students when they work for Chaudhuri after graduation.
Ghosts in the Machine: The Engineer’s Burden
All about technology.
Several people that didn’t know anything about engineering and didn’t make it to college, so he brought in people to teach English. The maid would talk with the Indian family – similar to Brazil.
Urbanizing several villages. Showed the guy around his home and the house was worth millions, “it will be much more with this and this and it’s all Italian.” – better quality can’t get in India. A lot of the chapters seem to talk about how poor India is and what everywhere else has to offer. No one is happy where he or she is.
The “Gandhi” computer – cheaper and affordable for people of India. People would have their data on one card and could use it anywhere.
1-
lives in Calcutta. talks about how little money she has. has to count coins to make sure that she can get to where she needs to go by bus. started new job. her boss was a show off- doing pushups the first day when she walked in. worked with computer instructors that wouldn’t stand up to the boss. tons of businesses in this time that offered computer lessons to people who could not become engineers. the computer classes were in regular neighborhood houses. it says the instructors were only a few levels higher than the students and …show more content…
they did not get paid well. the boss believes that his ‘students’ are not getting jobs after finishing his classes because they don’t speak english. she was hired to create a module to teach the students “spoken english”. she had no idea how to do anything he wanted but she took the job anyways for the money, 2000 rupees a month. an instructor started teaching her about computers. she still wasn't good. she left after a couple of months. when
Y2K became popular the west freaked out and started hiring people with knowledge of computers. the people she used to work with were now set. since this happened engineers have now become bosses. they were in control of tons of companies like hotmail. by 2006 India’s technology was worth 25 billion annually. in the west they were considered “model minorities”. they were not as useful to businesses anymore. in India they were more prominent. she goes into how she likes the engineers that she knows but most people have a certain bad stereotype about them. she wondered what they were really like.
2- in this section she travels to Bangalore. she stays with Samrat and Akshay. the city did not like the technology age that they were in. they had signs that said “why Bangalore Hates the IT Culture”. she was there to visit a company called A Fuller Life. she went there and met the founder and CEO Arvind. the details of what he did before becoming CEO of a company are on pages 79 and 80 if yall want to read them. she and Arvind started talking with a woman named Chatura who worked for the company. she liked talking to the girl because it was a more normal conversation. the woman wanted to show her around the business so that she could see how everything worked but Arvind said no. the companies in India hire thousands of people from around India. they referred to it as a “sticky workplace model”. Chatrura showed her some activities they do with the workers. they were crossword puzzles. there were two types of workers the call center workers and the IT workers. call center workers were all young people right out of college and IT were people who likely had engineering degrees and were from middle-class backgrounds. IT made more money.
3-
Chak was the person that helped her understand what an engineers life was really like. he was in a senior position at a well known American semiconductor company. he was a very corporate oriented man. he told her that education is very important. you can go from a labourer to the CEO just by being educated. he had trouble at first because he did not have an engineering degree. he got his degree in math. he started out with a small company where they worked on stuff for IBM and Mac. he left that company and moved to the US. he was going to Rockford Illinois. it was the “perfect place: in his mind but it had really declined. he had moved from a high context society to a low context society. high context= a place where people interact with each other in many different ways. low=america=people work on the basis of interest groups. 84-85 more detail on high/low context. he realized when he came back to India the high context bothered him because he was so used to the low context of america. a few days after their first meeting she went back to talk with him. they went to a place that reminded him of Arizona. he told her how there could be high and low context in every situation though they were in a low context society.she got to see new parts of the city that she never knew about. she got to a part of the town called HAL which was an military-industrial part of the town. there was a struggle over the land in the town but it was rarely talked about.there were riots because the technology company wanted the land from the farmers. the government set up special economic zones (SEZ) and technology parks to try and resolve this conflict.
4-
Chak took her to his house. he lived in a SEZ next to where he worked. she was confused at why there were so many hotels inside the SEZ. when they got to his house he talked about how much it was worth and how everything in there was from Italy because the quality was better than anything that he could get in India.
Red Sorghum: Farmers in the Free Market
Been urbanizing a lot of things, several farmers have commit suicide because it’s so downhill. A lot of them grew red sorghum but no one came and picked them up or paid for them, therefore no money and so many crops with nothing to do. They basically went on strike and burned people’s houses.
With all of the urbanization happening in India, many of the farmers were suffering.
Farmers were saying that farming was no longer a viable occupation.
Many farmers were killing themselves and using pesticides to do so.
Andhra Pradesh is one of the places affected especially badly and is in the top five for farmer suicides in India.
Red Sorghum is the main crop mentioned. It is something that helps animals to grow fatter.
Incident with Red Sorghum – Mahipal Reddy was the biggest of the seed dealers. He contracted a lot of farmers to grow red sorghum. He later backed out on the deal and did not buy the red sorghum from the farmers.
The farmer then gathered at Mahipal’s house, ransacked it, and burned it down. Then they burned down the house of his rival, Anand Reddy. Then they went and sat at an intersection and blocked traffic for the rest of the day.
Later the author finally meets with Mahipal to find out more about what happened. Mahipal’s rivals forced the price of red sorghum to drop, which caused the bank to refuse the loan they had promised Mahipal, which then cause Mahipal to not be able to pay the farmers. A rival also hired thugs to set fire to his house while the farmers were gathering there.
The section also discussed how the areas were being polluted. People who used to grow crops had to start doing other things because the land had become infertile, like this one farmer who grew rice and had to start rearing goats. Many people in one village caught others dumping pollutants and took them took court but lost the trials. When they asked the government to stop the pollution, they said the land was clean.
The Factory: The Permanent World of Temporary Workers
The Encounter Squad:
On the highway, a man who was looking for someone stopped Vijay and Siddhartha. He waved them down and had a gun; looked in their eyes and within seconds moved to the next motorcycle, then bus. There were police officers around and it was safe to assume the men were looking for someone, who we believe is in the back of a car (pg. 166). They then pulled up to an old vineyard which had been torn down and was now
Papyrus Port
(“India’s First Egyptian Resort”), in other word’s an Indian version of Disneyland.
Although it claimed to have several things, such as a zoo, multi-cuisine, sports, and a pool, in reality it was tiny with solely local food. It used to be popular, but now has rarely any guests.
India’s First Egyptian Resort:
In the district of Mahabubnagar is a city called Kothur renamed from Patur, new vs. old, industrializing India, just with the technology from earlier. The city is filled with mainly migrants working in factories, whereas locals seek jobs elsewhere. Factory employers prefer this because it’s as if they have nothing to lose, they don’t speak the same language (regionally), and they don’t care about the politics of the region, and have different cultures. They are usually treated very badly and the conditions are awful, such as the machinery in the factory for the
Papyrus Port
. The author describes it as the machine is working the
men rather than the other way around. The workers are usually in debt because of all the travelling they do in order to reach a destination of work (pg. 170).
The Steel Factory & Malda Labour:
With all the changes in India, the poor get the least attention.
77% of India was paid less that 20 rupees (50 cents) a day, keep in mind the government usually downplays the number as well. “They are invisible in the sense that they seem to count for nothing at all,” (pg. 173). A person known from
Malda
is usually “an underclass even in relation to […] migrants, […] so desperate that factory owners often use them as scabs during strikes,” (pg. 174). They are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who crossed the border to India. At the steel factory
, the Union asked for higher wages and when they were denied they went on strike. Police went in and talked to the workers, bribed and threatened them. When one lady claimed another worker had raped her, the police blamed the entire group and they all kept quiet and went back to work (pg. 175).
The Barracks:
The workers at the Vinayak steel factory in Kathur, “eat and sleep and shit there,” (pg. 175). If they aren’t in the work areas they are found in the barracks . There are 2 rows of concrete cubicles. When the author came to interview everyone, they all avoided him because they were afraid he was someone
checking on health codes. The teenagers and migrants were worried they’d lose their jobs, (pg. 176).
Reading Amartya Sen:
The women in Kathur in the late eighties were very independent in the way they dressed and walked in front of their husbands – front cover, (pg. 179). In
Amartya Sen
, a work by a Harvard economist on hunger, writes that famine is not necessarily because there isn’t enough food, but because the powerful take food away from the powerless. A man the author met while peeing outside a house told him that this idea was what happens in India. He was in need of a job and was the perfect example in the author’s eyes of the middle-class Indian man, (pg. 181-182).
The Girl from F&B: Women in the Big City
A woman named Esther starts working in the Food & Beverage industry but has to help her siblings. She got a new job and got in a car accident therefore she went to the hospital and where she worked didn’t pay for anything. She’s tired and exhausted. Some go into prostitution but she doesn’t want to.
She then quit her job because she was tired of the city and desired to be in the north-east
The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India
Reasoning for title – story is similar to Great Gatsby. He’s trying to interview the richest man in India, but his reputation is very contradicting – fraud or the truth? Tells his story about childhood and how his dad was considered a fraud, then he built up the school after his father stepped down. Originally he wanted to do things with cigars, then it went South and now he has a real cigar business, “the best cigars aren’t always the most expensive.” A lot of people thought getting the most expensive was what they wanted, not what was best. The man was describing his house but the way he was describing it was like his office, is the house really …show more content…
there? He wanted to go to college in the Us but his father convinced him to stay in.
1-
Deb took interest into a mogul by the name of Arindam Chaudhuri. Arindam Chaudhuri was of great and wealth and prominence being that he built a business empire but spite of his best efforts his reputation has given him the look of a fraud and a scammer. Before Deb met him he had seen Chaudhuri from magazines his media division published and headlines in newsstands, in buildings fronted by dark glass, and as well as a movie produced by Chaudhuri himself. It was his task to find a rich man as a subject and the making and spending money in India. Sutanu, the guy that ran the media division for Arindam, spoke to Arindam about Deb meeting up with him. Sutanu proceeds to describe Arindam as a man of times and how he started out with the business school Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) in 1996 that was founded by his father along with
Arindam expanding it into 9 branches in most major Indian cities. It was described that Arindam was also in charge of a media division that included news weekly, business magazines, a software company, and a consulting division that managed the HR component of multinationals. Lastly, he had a film division but he has not had much success in making blockbusters in the bollywood industry. At the end of this section it was asked where this money comes from and how he makes the money. Sutanu hesitates and explains that many bloggers and industrialists dislike Arindam and published negative things pertaining to his reputation and businesses. After a couple of days of waiting Sutanu had set up an appointment with Arindam for Deb.
2-
This section solely focuses on the controversial rep of Arindam Chaudhuri. Deb describes that he was a few shades darker than pictures, glossy hair tied back into a ponytail, wore a blue pinstriped suit with a white shirt under it briefly showing his smooth shaved chest. (More description on pg. 32.) They were meeting at the Delhi campus of IIPM in the boardroom. Arindam did not start from scratch like most of new India. He inherited his management institute from his father Malay Chaudhuri, who began it in 1973. The original institute turned into a family bedroom at night because in Gurgaon, where it was located, is now a modern suburb, that hosts office parks and condominiums and shopping malls. When his father ran the management institute there there was more of an underdevelopment. He explained to Deb that he wanted to go to college in the US but his father convinced him to enroll in the family institute as the first student in a new undergraduate program. He also said he was teaching a course at the institute before he even graduated.After finishing his degree he started a recruitment consulting firm. With this he was hiring people for other companies and he was helping IIPM graduates with his clients to find a job as well; however, it had been a problem. It also explains where the drive
to the campus and what the campus looked like and also how some of his family members and former classmates that work there and he referred to them as the mafia.
To summarize the chapter as a whole because i have so many sections: unlike Gatsby, Chaudhuri did not work his way up from nothing—that in India, as in Gilded Age America, there never was a truly selfmade man.
Instead he used his father's connections, taking over the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, the modest business school founded by Chaudhuri the Elder. Chaudhuri received his degrees from his father's school before eventually expanding the family's business. But he did so, Deb tells us, by falsely advertising everything from the school's rankings to its facilities to its relationships with major corporations. Professors from
Harvard and Columbia who each gave a single(pg. 107) lecture while passing through India were described as
"visiting faculty." Chaudhuri is managing organizations dependent on his charisma and dubious publicity campaigns. Moreover, as Deb explains, not only do most of his students go on to work for him, but they do so while making lower wages than they would likely have received from other business schools. Chaudhuri profits from what appears to be a convoluted pyramid scheme: the revenue that he generates from student fees pays those same students when they work for Chaudhuri after graduation.
Ghosts in the Machine: The Engineer’s Burden
All about technology.
Several people that didn’t know anything about engineering and didn’t make it to college, so he brought in people to teach English. The maid would talk with the Indian family – similar to Brazil.
Urbanizing several villages. Showed the guy around his home and the house was worth millions, “it will be much more with this and this and it’s all Italian.” – better quality can’t get in India. A lot of the chapters seem to talk about how poor India is and what everywhere else has to offer. No one is happy where he or she is.
The “Gandhi” computer – cheaper and affordable for people of India. People would have their data on one card and could use it anywhere.
1-
lives in Calcutta. talks about how little money she has. has to count coins to make sure that she can get to where she needs to go by bus. started new job. her boss was a show off- doing pushups the first day when she walked in. worked with computer instructors that wouldn’t stand up to the boss. tons of businesses in this time that offered computer lessons to people who could not become engineers. the computer classes were in regular neighborhood houses. it says the instructors were only a few levels higher than the students and …show more content…
they did not get paid well. the boss believes that his ‘students’ are not getting jobs after finishing his classes because they don’t speak english. she was hired to create a module to teach the students “spoken english”. she had no idea how to do anything he wanted but she took the job anyways for the money, 2000 rupees a month. an instructor started teaching her about computers. she still wasn't good. she left after a couple of months. when
Y2K became popular the west freaked out and started hiring people with knowledge of computers. the people she used to work with were now set. since this happened engineers have now become bosses. they were in control of tons of companies like hotmail. by 2006 India’s technology was worth 25 billion annually. in the west they were considered “model minorities”. they were not as useful to businesses anymore. in India they were more prominent. she goes into how she likes the engineers that she knows but most people have a certain bad stereotype about them. she wondered what they were really like.
2- in this section she travels to Bangalore. she stays with Samrat and Akshay. the city did not like the technology age that they were in. they had signs that said “why Bangalore Hates the IT Culture”. she was there to visit a company called A Fuller Life. she went there and met the founder and CEO Arvind. the details of what he did before becoming CEO of a company are on pages 79 and 80 if yall want to read them. she and Arvind started talking with a woman named Chatura who worked for the company. she liked talking to the girl because it was a more normal conversation. the woman wanted to show her around the business so that she could see how everything worked but Arvind said no. the companies in India hire thousands of people from around India. they referred to it as a “sticky workplace model”. Chatrura showed her some activities they do with the workers. they were crossword puzzles. there were two types of workers the call center workers and the IT workers. call center workers were all young people right out of college and IT were people who likely had engineering degrees and were from middle-class backgrounds. IT made more money.
3-
Chak was the person that helped her understand what an engineers life was really like. he was in a senior position at a well known American semiconductor company. he was a very corporate oriented man. he told her that education is very important. you can go from a labourer to the CEO just by being educated. he had trouble at first because he did not have an engineering degree. he got his degree in math. he started out with a small company where they worked on stuff for IBM and Mac. he left that company and moved to the US. he was going to Rockford Illinois. it was the “perfect place: in his mind but it had really declined. he had moved from a high context society to a low context society. high context= a place where people interact with each other in many different ways. low=america=people work on the basis of interest groups. 84-85 more detail on high/low context. he realized when he came back to India the high context bothered him because he was so used to the low context of america. a few days after their first meeting she went back to talk with him. they went to a place that reminded him of Arizona. he told her how there could be high and low context in every situation though they were in a low context society.she got to see new parts of the city that she never knew about. she got to a part of the town called HAL which was an military-industrial part of the town. there was a struggle over the land in the town but it was rarely talked about.there were riots because the technology company wanted the land from the farmers. the government set up special economic zones (SEZ) and technology parks to try and resolve this conflict.
4-
Chak took her to his house. he lived in a SEZ next to where he worked. she was confused at why there were so many hotels inside the SEZ. when they got to his house he talked about how much it was worth and how everything in there was from Italy because the quality was better than anything that he could get in India.
Red Sorghum: Farmers in the Free Market
Been urbanizing a lot of things, several farmers have commit suicide because it’s so downhill. A lot of them grew red sorghum but no one came and picked them up or paid for them, therefore no money and so many crops with nothing to do. They basically went on strike and burned people’s houses.
With all of the urbanization happening in India, many of the farmers were suffering.
Farmers were saying that farming was no longer a viable occupation.
Many farmers were killing themselves and using pesticides to do so.
Andhra Pradesh is one of the places affected especially badly and is in the top five for farmer suicides in India.
Red Sorghum is the main crop mentioned. It is something that helps animals to grow fatter.
Incident with Red Sorghum – Mahipal Reddy was the biggest of the seed dealers. He contracted a lot of farmers to grow red sorghum. He later backed out on the deal and did not buy the red sorghum from the farmers.
The farmer then gathered at Mahipal’s house, ransacked it, and burned it down. Then they burned down the house of his rival, Anand Reddy. Then they went and sat at an intersection and blocked traffic for the rest of the day.
Later the author finally meets with Mahipal to find out more about what happened. Mahipal’s rivals forced the price of red sorghum to drop, which caused the bank to refuse the loan they had promised Mahipal, which then cause Mahipal to not be able to pay the farmers. A rival also hired thugs to set fire to his house while the farmers were gathering there.
The section also discussed how the areas were being polluted. People who used to grow crops had to start doing other things because the land had become infertile, like this one farmer who grew rice and had to start rearing goats. Many people in one village caught others dumping pollutants and took them took court but lost the trials. When they asked the government to stop the pollution, they said the land was clean.
The Factory: The Permanent World of Temporary Workers
The Encounter Squad:
On the highway, a man who was looking for someone stopped Vijay and Siddhartha. He waved them down and had a gun; looked in their eyes and within seconds moved to the next motorcycle, then bus. There were police officers around and it was safe to assume the men were looking for someone, who we believe is in the back of a car (pg. 166). They then pulled up to an old vineyard which had been torn down and was now
Papyrus Port
(“India’s First Egyptian Resort”), in other word’s an Indian version of Disneyland.
Although it claimed to have several things, such as a zoo, multi-cuisine, sports, and a pool, in reality it was tiny with solely local food. It used to be popular, but now has rarely any guests.
India’s First Egyptian Resort:
In the district of Mahabubnagar is a city called Kothur renamed from Patur, new vs. old, industrializing India, just with the technology from earlier. The city is filled with mainly migrants working in factories, whereas locals seek jobs elsewhere. Factory employers prefer this because it’s as if they have nothing to lose, they don’t speak the same language (regionally), and they don’t care about the politics of the region, and have different cultures. They are usually treated very badly and the conditions are awful, such as the machinery in the factory for the
Papyrus Port
. The author describes it as the machine is working the
men rather than the other way around. The workers are usually in debt because of all the travelling they do in order to reach a destination of work (pg. 170).
The Steel Factory & Malda Labour:
With all the changes in India, the poor get the least attention.
77% of India was paid less that 20 rupees (50 cents) a day, keep in mind the government usually downplays the number as well. “They are invisible in the sense that they seem to count for nothing at all,” (pg. 173). A person known from
Malda
is usually “an underclass even in relation to […] migrants, […] so desperate that factory owners often use them as scabs during strikes,” (pg. 174). They are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who crossed the border to India. At the steel factory
, the Union asked for higher wages and when they were denied they went on strike. Police went in and talked to the workers, bribed and threatened them. When one lady claimed another worker had raped her, the police blamed the entire group and they all kept quiet and went back to work (pg. 175).
The Barracks:
The workers at the Vinayak steel factory in Kathur, “eat and sleep and shit there,” (pg. 175). If they aren’t in the work areas they are found in the barracks . There are 2 rows of concrete cubicles. When the author came to interview everyone, they all avoided him because they were afraid he was someone
checking on health codes. The teenagers and migrants were worried they’d lose their jobs, (pg. 176).
Reading Amartya Sen:
The women in Kathur in the late eighties were very independent in the way they dressed and walked in front of their husbands – front cover, (pg. 179). In
Amartya Sen
, a work by a Harvard economist on hunger, writes that famine is not necessarily because there isn’t enough food, but because the powerful take food away from the powerless. A man the author met while peeing outside a house told him that this idea was what happens in India. He was in need of a job and was the perfect example in the author’s eyes of the middle-class Indian man, (pg. 181-182).
The Girl from F&B: Women in the Big City
A woman named Esther starts working in the Food & Beverage industry but has to help her siblings. She got a new job and got in a car accident therefore she went to the hospital and where she worked didn’t pay for anything. She’s tired and exhausted. Some go into prostitution but she doesn’t want to.
She then quit her job because she was tired of the city and desired to be in the north-east