GlobalAtlanta’s publisher, Phil Bolton, fulfilled during the first week of July 2017 a long-term ambition to visit India on a trip to explore the ties binding Atlanta to the cities of New Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai, on his first visit to that country. His year-end recollections of the trip follow in a three-part series.
To say that India is a land of startling contrasts doesn’t begin to describe what I learned on a week-long visit this July with two leaders of Atlanta’s Indian communities — Ani Agnihotri and Vir Nanda.
Since both Kennesaw University and the Center for Puppetry Arts were featuring India in their “Year of…” programs this year, I thought it would be an ideal time to make this trip, which I have longed to do for if not quite a lifetime, certainly for a long time especially since Atlanta has become such a landing point for so many Indian companies as well as students, educators and families.
Our itinerary included Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai with a few focused objectives: first, to be exposed to India’s traditions of puppetry arts, secondly to visit some of the companies with Atlanta operations and thirdly to experience the country’s diversity of populations and gain insights into its history.
The trip not only exposed me to the country’s many contrasts, but also provided plenty of unexpected surprises — right from the very start. Having flown 16 hours from Atlanta to Doha, Qatar, I didn’t expect to find the mix of travelers in the modern airport bound for all corners of the world including many Africans and young American backpackers as well as Arabs wearing either traditional clothing and headwear or modern dress.
Much like some of the concourses at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport televisions were fairly ubiquitous, but at the time of my arrival, the sets were broadcasting that their Al-Jazeera news network wouldn’t be silenced as demanded by the Saudi Arabian-bloc that was boycotting the country heightening tensions in the region and throwing U.S. policy, which supports both blocs, into a quandry.
Four hours after leaving Doha, my flight arrived in Delhi in the middle of the night and happily I was met by Mr. Agnihotri who took me to a hotel in the upscale Chanakyapuri neighborhood, which is considered a diplomatic enclave because many foreign embassies are located there.
Since India’s puppetry arts was to be a highlight of the trip, we were’t going to include any diplomatic engagements and in the morning headed right to the Kathputli neighborhood, an artists colony and home of Puran Bhat, one of the country’s master puppeteers, and members of his family.
Leaving the well groomed highways of Chanakyapuri, we plunged into the neighborhoods on Delhi’s westside, creeping along as motorbikes crisscrossed their way by us and the occasional rickshaw passed us by.
At the time I was totally unaware of the drama surrounding the Kathputli community, which has been composed for more than 50 years by a wide array of artists including puppeteers, magicians, acrobats, jugglers, sword swallowers and even fire eaters. Located on prime real estate, its days as an artists colony are numbered as high-rise apartments and housing complexes are to take over their space.
Leaving our parked car, we made our way through the narrow streets lined by the rooms occupied by the thriving community to meet with Mr. Bhat, who welcomed us warmly and recounted highlights of his career which has taken him around the world and for which he has received many accolades including a highly esteemed award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
On the walls of the room where we visited there were posters of some of the puppet performances including one about the mythical life of Amer Singh Rathor, a courtier of the 17h century Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Known for his legendary bravery and ability in battle, puppets have celebrated this hero for at least eight or nine generations, Mr. Bhat told us pointing to one of the posters announcing a performance by his Aakaar Puppet Theatre.
Mr. Bhat has eight children, five boys and three girls, all of whom have learned the puppetry arts including their proper manipulation as well as the songs, dances and drumming associated with the puppet shows much as he was instructed by his father while growing up.
His family showed us their living quarters that seemed in limbo due to their upcoming displacement to new living quarters. Pointing to the packed suitcases in every room, one of the sons told me that the puppets were inside the suitcases ready to be transported to their new lives. He also showed me that their performances have been recorded on YouTube videos of which he was very proud.
Not only does the family perform with the puppets but over the generations they have made their puppets, which they can transform from inanimate objects into sentient beings displaying a full range of emotions. Originally from the state of Rajasthan where the puppetry arts usually involve string puppets, Mr. Bhat is one of many leading puppeteers from throughout the country.
While Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts has a large collection of Jim Henson’s Sesame Street creation, the Bhat family has an array of look-alike Henson puppets that are popular additions to their collection.
I recommend a visit to the Center for Puppetry Arts to learn about the full extent of India’s puppetry arts traditions. And I consider it an honor to have personally met Mr. Bhat and later in the day Dadi Pudumjee, who founded the Ishara Puppet Trust and has applied the ancient art form to communicating social messages primarily dealing with substance abuse and AIDS.
Mr. Pudumjee has underscored puppetry’s ability to provide an escape from cultural and social taboos and connect with varied audiences including street kids. For instance, in one performance dealing with AIDS, six-feet tall condoms became members of the cast performing in the streets of Delhi.
That evening, actually the evening of July 4th, we celebrated U.S. Independence Day by going to a pizza restaurant for dinner in the Khan Market where we were surrounded by posters celebrating iconic Hollywood movies. Before we had finished the meal three students wearing Georgia Tech emblazoned sweat shirts settled next to a table not far from ours.
Putting our interest in puppetry arts aside, we began to focus on the business ties linking Atlanta to India. This new focus took us the next day to Greater Noida outside of Delhi where the NIIT Group’s headquarters is located.
I had been aware of NIIT Technologies, the global IT solutions companies, since it first arrived in Atlanta in 1997. Lalit Dhingra in a Global Atlanta interview recalled that he arrived “with a two man army” to set up its office in Atlanta and has overseen its growth in the U.S. with more than 1,000 employees and offices not only in Georgia, but Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Texas as well.
Aware of its activities in the financial service, travel and airline industries, I was unaware of the role it was playing in the media world. NIIT Group’s global corporate headquarters is composed of impressive modern architecture.
In one of the buildings its media operations are located where a large staff is involved in a wide range of activities including digital implementation, analytics and cloud service. We met personnel actually formatting advertisements and composing pages for Augusta, Ga.-based Morris Communications.
And Morris Communications was far from being the only client of this NIIT division, NIIT Media Technologies LLC also was working on the digital products of the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Orlando Sentinel.
I should not have been surprised, but I was, when I learned that eight days following our on site visit, GateHouse Media Inc., a U.S. newspaper publisher headquartered in the town of Perinton, New York, purchased the majority of the local newspaper properties published by the Morris Publishing Group, a 70-year-old Georgia institution, for $120 million.
We met with NIIT executives who described their activities in many business sectors across the world including machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotic automation. But there was no mention of the upcoming sale Morris Publishing.
Sometimes journalists have to rely on extra sensory perception to get a scoop. Obviously mine wasn’t working at the time.
And Noida, which has been under development since 1976 and boasts the highest per capita income in Delhi’s national capital region, also withheld another surprise for us. Less than two weeks later a dispute between a maid from a nearby slum and her employer from an upscale condominium erupted into a full-blown riot that was reported on extensively revealing the tensions simmering under India’s explosive growth.
Our next stop was in Manesar, in the Gurgaon district about 50 miles from Noida, to visit with Mr. Agnihotri’s cousin, Gaurav Sarup, and learn about his company Marshall Machines Ltd., which has developed “Smart” technologies to help realize the government’s “Make in India” initiative.
Marshall has demonstrated the capacity of its Internet of Things ‘plug in” technologies to render legacy computer numerical control (CNC) manufacturing equipment more efficient. The technologies have been demonstrated in Germany and elsewhere, and are providing advances for manufacturing processes that are acquiring a widespread reputation for cutting-edge innovations.
From Manesar, we went to a golf resort for a good night’s rest in preparation for our more than 1,000 miles morning flight from Delhi to Bengaluru, which also goes by its historical name of Bangalore, and is the capital of India’s southern Karnataka state and the center of India’s high-tech industry.
On Feb. 3 a screening of the film “Tomorrow We Disappear,” the dramatic portrayal of the Kathputli artist colony in Delhi being torn down by urban development is to be shown at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.
For the developers’ perspective, click here.
To read Bengaluru: Exploring Ties Binding Atlanta to India, Part II, click here.
To read Mumbai: Exploring Ties Binding Atlanta to India, Part III, click here.
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