Amber Valley bounces back

The ambitious Rs.20 crore Amber Valley Residential School promoted in the coffee heartbelt town of Chikmaglur, Karnataka by the low profile entrepreneur V.G. Siddhartha (promoter-chairman of the Bangalore-based Global Technology Ventures and the Cafe Coffee Day chain) has bounced right back from a bad start. Just when this new CISCE-affilitated school was all set to receive its inaugural batch of 102 class I-VII students on July 12, its director and headmistress designate — the husband-and-wife team of Kabir and Kamini Mustafi — put in their papers.

According to sympathisers, the Mustafis gave up high-profile jobs as headmaster and head of middle school in the blue-chip Bishop Cotton School, Shimla to take charge of the wholly-residential Amber Valley School. But the honeymoon between the school management and the Mustafis soured quickly when Kamini who was designated head of the school, protested that institutional facilities at the school which sprawls over 35 acres within Siddhartha and family’s coffee estates, were inadequate to receive the first batch of students. This provoked the school’s management to attempt to rewrite the Mustafis’ contract and re-designate Kamini as dean of academics with Kabir as headmaster of the school. Since the latter had already been appointed director of Amber Valley and a proposed vocational school, the Mustafis rejected the new arrangement. Exit the Mustafis.

But not for nothing was Siddhartha voted the most promising new entrepreneur of 2003 by the Economic Times. Plan B was ready and made operational in quick time and Dr. Roxy Pestello, a US national and hitherto headmaster of the prestigious International School, Bangkok with over 20 years experience of school and college teaching was drafted to take charge at Amber Valley which became operational on schedule.

Quite obviously despite the widely reported shortage of top-grade headmasters which is bedevilling five-star newgen schools, nobody is indispensable in the new globalised world.

Business as usual

Not without reason is worldly success regarded as illusion by India’s saints, savants and sundry ancients. The buzz in the book publishing world is that India’s best-selling author identified on this very page as business mangement guru Shiv Khera whose how-to, self-betterment book You Can Win is the largest ever Indian bestseller in recent memory (sales: 550,000 copies) is a plagiarist par excellence. Right now Khera and his publisher, the blue-chip Macmillan India are at the receiving end of legal notices issued by retired railway official Amrit Lal, who alleges that numerous sentences and entire paragraphs contained in Khera’s latest offering to the public, Freedom is Not Free have been lifted verbatim from Lal’s brave anti-corruption book India: Enough is Enough published — and forgotten — in 1995.

According to a detailed report of this scandal in the best-selling Delhi-based weekly Outlook (July 26) Khera, presumably stricken by guilt, summoned Lal to his "posh condominium in Singapore" and invited the 70-year-old "to work together" with him in future while presenting him with an autographed copy of the trendily-titled Freedom is Not Free. When Lal leafed through Khera’s new magnum opus he undoubtedly experienced a sense of déjà vu given that in 34 instances whole sentences and paragraphs had been plagiarised from Lal’s own work. Now it transpires that 73 percent of Khera’s bestselling You Can Win comprises jokes and anecdotes lifted from various sources in the public domain.

In the commotion created by Lal’s discovery, Macmillan India has maintained a deafening silence. Quite obviously there is a duty of care of publishers to take reasonable precautions to ensure that plagiarised material is not passed off as original. But Macmillan India’s top brass is unwilling to shed light on this issue.

Meanwhile management gurus don’t expect any fall in enrollments or attendance to Shiv Khera’s barnstorming inspirational lectures across the country this winter. In the collective Indian conscious developed through memorisation and rote learning, plagiarism is business as usual.

Haute cuisine in haute Stephen’s

Delhi University’s 86-plus college canteens are in the process of getting a much-need facelift. Notorious for the cheap, unappetising slop dished out in indifferent food factories, several collegiate managements are initiating menu overhauls, training and hygiene programmes for culinary personnel. Under the initiative student committees will work in sync with college staff to rework archaic menus which will now include nutritional hot and cold soups, grilled sandwiches, pastries, pasta and a smorgasbord of continental, Chinese, even piquant Mexican fare.

Unsurprisingly, the haute St. Stephen’s College is a step ahead having organised a course in kitchen and serving skills for its staff conducted by the India Tourism Development Corporation run Ashoka Institute of Hospitality and Catering. Moreover nutritionists from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences have been called in to conduct a student oriented Art and Craft of Nourishment workshop.

Given that the Stephen’s café already enjoys an enviable reputation, does this upgradation drive suggest graduation to five-star status? "The idea is to provide wholesome food to students rather than promote an upper-crust lifestyle," says principal Anil Wilson tersely.

School for Congress colts

Students are not the only ones returning to school after the summer vacation. Hundreds of Congress party activists and first-time MPs are also going back to classrooms to take lessons in subjects ranging from political science to local self-governance, minorities’ rights, secularism, and legislature-executive relationship. In particular a month-long Congress National Training School, conceived by party president Sonia Gandhi, was inaugurated by prime minister Manmohan Singh in July in Parliament’s library complex to acquaint young MPs with the nuts and bolts of parliamentary procedure and practice.

The need for a grooming school was first expressed during Congress party’s Shimla conclave following the general election in May when several first-time MPs approached Sonia and informed her about their unfamiliarity with the grammar of the great game played out in Parliament. Some of the fresh-faced MPs are new not only to Parliament but to big time politics as well. Thus, during the lectures (conducted by veterans like Jaipal Reddy, Pranab Mukherjee and P.R. Dasmunshi) Rahul Gandhi, first-time MP from Amethi, articulated the problems he faced while attempting to decipher parliamentary jargon. Others who sought clarifications included Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora and Naveen Jindal. Apart from teaching the nitty gritty of politics, the school instructed party workers on ways and means to "stay in touch with the Congress ideology and what it stands for".

Obviously following its unexpected victory in the Lok Sabha elections, the party high command is digging in for a long innings.