Shehla Hasan is perfectly placed to help bring business to West Bengal. She has taken over as executive director of the Manchester India Partnership, which was set up to attract inward Indian investment into Greater Manchester. Last week, she held a high-powered India summit and took guests to lunch at Old Trafford even though the fifth England-India Test was cancelled. Shehla, long recognized as one of the most successful women in corporate India, was recruited from Delhi where she was country director of the Confederation of British Industry for some nine years.
She first moved to Bengal in 1995 after marrying Zulfiquar Hasan, a state cadre of the IPS, and worked as a journalist in Calcutta, followed by stints at the Indian Chamber of Commerce and the UK Trade & Investment based at the British deputy high commission. Originally from Odisha, Shehla speaks Bengali.
“Our work is to facilitate collaborations, especially in healthcare, vaccine trials, diagnostics, sustainability, tourism and culture,” Shehla tells me. “We are very keen to engage with the SME IT companies looking for a global market, especially in e-commerce and cybersecurity.”
She says the MIP wants “to encourage the youth of Bengal to think of new ideas, creating wealth for the community and build a start-up ecosystem. We are looking for collaborations for joint research with the Manchester universities. Football would be another area of mutual interest as well as cricket. The culture paradigm, too, is very important... Calcutta is home to the Dover Lane Music Festival, Nandan and several music schools like CSM and Sangeet Research Academy. This is worth exploring. Manchester Museum is launching its South Asia gallery next year. The Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester could be a good institution for securing tie-ups.”
Bengali at heart
Lolita Chakrabarti. Twitter
Dr Bidhan Kumar Chakrabarti’s British-born daughters, Reeta and Lolita, have done exceedingly well. While the Oxford-educated Reeta is a frontline BBC TV presenter, Lolita trained to be an actress and writer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The latter is currently starring as lieutenant-commander, Erin Branning, in a gripping six-part BBC drama, Vigil, which tells of a police investigation after the suspicious death of a crew member on a British nuclear submarine while it is out patrolling the deep seas.
There is nothing “Indian” about Lolita’s character, “a high-ranking naval officer who runs legal matters for the navy”, who looks intimidating in her uniform. Lolita says her father, who qualified from R.G. Kar in Calcutta, arrived in Britain with his wife, Rumi — she passed away five years ago — as a 26-year-old doctor in 1960. The girls grew up in Birmingham, where he was an orthopaedic surgeon at Selly Oak Hospital before becoming a consultant at King’s College Hospital, London. Now retired, he never misses Lolita’s TV and theatre performances.
The family tried twice to return to Calcutta — when Lolita was three and 10, respectively — but came back to Britain. Lolita assures me that she is still Bengali: “Definitely, in terms of culture and food. Language is still there. I don’t speak it very often but I can understand it when I’m on the tube. You can’t take the Indian out of you, can you? It’s just there.”
Tiger tiger, burning bright
The artist, Chila Burman, has lit up Covent Garden, a popular tourist venue in London, with her latest work, do you see words in rainbows?, consisting of coloured neon lights. Its most dramatic feature is a tiger, fashioned from white neon tubes and positioned on a mirror table. The inspiration comes from the tiger replica her father, Bachan Singh Burman, had atop the ice cream van he had in Liverpool, after arriving from Calcutta with his wife, Kamala Vati, in 1954. They had lived in Calcutta for 16 years, when he worked for the Dunlop factory in Sahaganj. Three of their five children, including Chila, were born in Britain.
Chila says her latest tiger also owes something to the Netflix adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger.
Crime watch
Neil Basu and I have one thing in common — both of us love the detective novels by Abir Mukherjee set in India. He always speaks fondly about his late father, Pankaj Kumar Basu, who arrived from Calcutta in the 1960s, married a Welsh woman, Enid Margaret Roberts, and served as a police surgeon for nearly 40 years. I consult Neil about Afghanistan since he is assistant commissioner and head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard — and the highest-ranking ethnic minority police officer in the country.
He thinks Afghanistan will once again become a base for exporting terrorism; he also predicted “lone wolf” attacks by people based in Europe inspired by the Taliban victory “probably within two years”. He won’t be drawn into what his Indian counterparts should do. “Of course, I recommend all countries adopt the UK government’s strategy and the way that intelligence services, policing, government, business and the public pull together to create a whole society approach to counter terrorism with a real long-term focus on prevention.”
Footnote
Emma Raducanu. Fille photo
British Vogue has amazing timing — it has landed a photo shoot and interview with Emma Raducanu in its current issue. Following her victory in the US Open, the 18-year-old is in great demand. But Edward Enninful, Vogue’s first black editor, showed remarkable perspicacity in commissioning the interview in July. Raducanu’s father is Romanian but she says about her Chinese mother that “they have very good self-belief... I really respect that about the culture.”
