ACHIEVER’S NIGHT: Angad Paul with Sarah Brown

India’s rising sons & daughters

Lord Swraj Paul is delighted at the prospect of being introduced as “Angad’s father” in future.

At the awards given by the Garavi Gujarat newspaper group in London last week, Angad, the 76-year-old steel tycoon’s youngest son, was named “Entrepreneur of the year”.

The citation said that “the Hon Angad Paul, chief executive officer, Caparo plc, 37, leads one of the biggest steel firms in the country. Since he took the helm in 2004, turnover has increased by 35 per cent and the company has acquired 22 new UK businesses. His innovation has seen the launch of a Formula One-type car built and sold for the road. The group this entrepreneur heads is now worth $1.2bn and has operations in 50 countries, employing over 5,500 people.”

Another award went to a fast rising daughter of India whose existence had been unknown to Indians in the UK until just before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. Shriti Vadera, a Uganda Asian, had been considered “Gordon Brown’s gatekeeper” at the Treasury where she had apparently “terrified” civil servants who could not retaliate because she appeared to have the ear of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Although some thought the new Prime Minister would take the Oxford-educated Shriti, a former director of Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS Investment Bank), with him to Downing Street, he instead appointed her a junior minister — parliamentary under-secretary of state in the department for international development — with a seat in the Lords.

She collected the evening’s “Hammer Award”, reserved for personalities deemed to have shattered the glass ceiling.

Civil servants are probably hoping she won’t be using the said hammer as an offensive weapon against them. Only the other day, at an India House party, a senior civil servant metaphorically quaked in his brogues as he talked about “Baroness Vadera”.

Both Angad and Shriti were handed their awards by Sarah Brown, the PM’s (still very nice) wife.

It just occurs to me that should Angad and Lakshmi Mittal’s son, Aditya, 31, join hands one day to make the Indian presence felt even more forcefully in the world of steel, it will be the equivalent of Sachin and Sourav putting on 360 for the first wicket in 10 overs.

EXPLOSIVE: Naipaul spares none

Looking at Naipaul

According to a friend, who is familiar with the works of the (irascible) Nobel Prize winning author V. S. Naipaul, there is only way to read his latest book, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (Picador; £16.99).

And that is to look up the naughty bits.

It is probably unfair to quote out of context, but had Nirad C. Chaudhuri been alive, he might have responded to this observation about the author of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian on page 177: “He did nothing noteworthy in his working life.”

On page 188, Naipaul delivers the judgement: “Chaudhuri, in spite of all the great names he takes, was not a scholar. He had no idea what scholarship meant. He held on to the idea only because it was the main part of his self-esteem.”

What puzzles me is the apparently fulsome praise of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian printed on the back cover of an edition I have (Picador; published 1999): “No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West — and by extension, the penetration of one culture by another — will be or now can be written.”

It comes from Naipaul.

He finds that 60 years after independence “India has no autonomous intellectual life”.

He is not overly impressed by Indians who head for America “to make cookies and shovel snow off the pavement in winter” or with new Indian novels in English which he considers “by and large autobiographical” — “one writer, one book”.

Had Nirad Babu still been in Oxford, literary editors would almost certainly have sent him Naipaul’s book for a 1,500-word review.

White chocolate

One of the joys of being in India is being able to shop at dawn for vegetables and fish from small pavement vendors. I would not like to see them disappear. That is why I have yet to be convinced of the wisdom of allowing in western supermarket chains.

However, I might be tempted to make an exception of Waitrose, which has fewer than 200 stores in the UK, sells better quality food than either Sainsbury or Tesco and which I don’t think will behave like “Jaws” in India.

Its managing director, Mark Price, was present last week at a garden party in London to celebrate the 100th issue of the excellent glossy food monthly it publishes called Waitrose Food Illustrated.

Its editor, William Sitwell, has covered Indian cuisine in an imaginative way, taking such celebrity Indian chefs as Udit Sarkhel and Atul Kochhar back to their home cities of Calcutta and Delhi respectively.

I have a suspicion that my wife keeps Waitrose single-handedly in business by her bulk purchase of its admittedly delicious white chocolate ice cream.

Price, who disclosed he would like to expand in India, does sell some products in Mumbai, though not the white chocolate ice cream which would “take too long to get through Bombay customs, anyway”. My wife’s view is that “India doesn’t know what it’s missing”.

Culture clash

After the Lord’s one-dayer, I was catching up with an old friend, veteran cricket writer Ayaz Memon, when we were canvassed enthusiastically by a member of the “Bharat Army”.

He complained that “Lord’s is the worst place” because it keeps out Bharat Army members with their tricolour flags and wrist bands, musical instruments and others pro-India symbols as well as their general difficulty of buying tickets for the big India matches at the home of cricket.

I have some sympathy for him although Lord’s tries to maintain old English traditions which are being run down almost everywhere else — by the English.

But should UK Indians be supporting India at all when the likes of Ravi Bopara and Monty Panesar are playing for England?

Tittle tattle

TRUE INDIAN: Manish Arora and his models

Whose face can launch a thousand copies of Vogue India?

Manish Arora, who did not wish to upset any of the models and actresses that he uses regularly to promote his designs, was loath to name names when asked who he would like to see gracing the covers of Vogue India.

“I would not Bollywoodise the cover,” said the designer, shortly before his recent solo fashion show at the V&A in London. “I would like Vogue to stick to what it is internationally — which is fashion — but everything which comes to India has to Indianise itself.”

Pressed to name his personal preferences, Manish finally declared: “If I am the editor, I would take models who are really big — like Ujjwala Raut. I would put Michelle Innes who is a beautiful, beautiful model.”

Though against using Bollywood actresses, Manish would be prepared to relent in the case of Aishwarya Rai “because she has been a fabulous model before”.