Desi vibes - Manhole covers, subway walls, foot-long dosas

Mehndi ad on a bus stop in Manhattan

Even in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, far from the Little Indias, you have ‘Ganesh Groceries’ and even a real live Moti Mahal – as in India! It’s always packed as Americans and desis dig into chicken tikka masala. And just a street away you get the most amazing foot-long dosas. There aren’t enough Indians in this area so definitely Americans are devouring these too.

Come September and New York gets even more Indian: the Indian contingent arrives at the UN for the General Assembly and you will probably see more ministers and their contingents here in New York than in New Delhi!

Art and culture are not far behind as the hugely popular Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) is finally coming to New York with  names like Alia Malek, Gauri Viswanathan, James Shapiro, Kanishk Tharoor, Kayhan Irani, Martin Puchner, Molly Emma Aitken, Namita Gokhale, Navina Haidar, Navtej Sarna, Preti Taneja, Ross Perlin, Ruchira Gupta, Sandeep Jauhar, Sharad Paul, Shashi Tharoor, Tunku Varadarajan, William Dalrymple, and Zila Khan.  After New York, JLF will also be held in Houston, Tx and Boulder, Co.

Even the modernists are coming to the Big Apple: The Progressive Revolution! Modern Art for a New India: an ambitious new exhibition opens at Asia Society. Asia Week comes to New York with auctions of South Asian modern and contemporary art at Christie’s, highlighting the work of iconic painter Akbar Padamsee, who is now 90.

You will also get to see and bid on the work of masters like Souza, Gaitonde, Nasreen Mohamedi, Husain, Raza, Manjit Bawa and Tyeb Mehta. How much more Indian can you get?

You’ve heard of Ivy League Clubs and Country Clubs – now how about an elite Do-Gooders Club? For years these Indian-Americans and the non-profit charity organisations they had created worked in isolation, each in their own lane. Each was helping the home country in health, education and welfare, yet each in their own circuit.

Consul General Sandeep Chakravorthy launching 'United for Impact' at the Indian Consulate

So it is encouraging to suddenly see over 25 of these organisations, sitting around a table together, sharing experiences, ideas and plans on working together to further enrich India. The influencers included Desh Deshpande of Akshya Patra, Sunil Wadhwani of Wish Foundation and Nishant Pandey of American India Foundation.

This chai-chat was the brainchild of consul general Sandeep Chakravorty who once again has used the Indian Consulate as a Petri dish for trying out a new idea – United for Impact – in which all these organisations were brought together to brainstorm.

“They are all working on wonderful causes in India, working very efficiently and well,” he said. “We thought that they need to know about each other, both here in New York and in India and if possible, build synergies and coordination.”

Most people extend help to big cities which they generally visit but Chakravorty presented the states where help is most needed, based on the Aspirational Districts pinpointed by the Government: “We have identified 117 such districts and my objective is to familiarise organisations with them. If they work in these districts, they make the greatest impact and are in consonance with a very effective government policy.”

So it was that major NGOs including AIF, Indiaspora, Wish Foundation, Pratham, Akshya Patra, AIA, Akanksha and Children’s Hope India came together to share their own triumphs and travails. It will be interesting to see how best these NGOs can work together and with the government to strengthen lives of the rural poor in the areas most needed.

When Sheena Iyengar went to Spain many years ago, people would sometimes come up and ask her for a lottery ticket. “Because that is what blind people do in Spain,” she explains. “They sell lottery tickets. And when I was in Japan, random people would come up to me and take my hands and start putting them on their backs or on their necks because they expect blind people to perform magical massages.”

Dr. Sheena Iyengar

Iyengar suffers from Retinis Pigmentosa, an inherited disease which has rendered her totally blind but she has redefined choices and reinvented what a blind person can do. She is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business and has a doctorate in psychology from Stanford. She is one of the foremost business researchers and her class at Columbia is highly rated.

Iyengar has shown the way to both blind and sighted about choices and her book ‘The Art of Choosing’ opens the possibilities for ordinary people as well as business and marketing students. Her documentary about choice is particularly popular in Japan and she is the guru of Ted talks.

Iyengar had no role models to follow as she reinvented her life as a young Sikh girl in New Jersey and carved out her own career in a world of sighted people – as a researcher.  She has taught courses to MBAs and Executives, including at the World Economic Forum in Geneva. As she observes, “I believe our ability to create meaningful choices remains our greatest tool for innovation.” She says a person may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains his ability to fight circumstances.