By Supriyo Gupta,
CEO, Torque Communications
It was August, 2012. The days were crisp and sunny and one just had to walk around Red Square to get a feel of the new Russia. We were there as part of an international group to make a presentation to Dmitry Peskov, Press Secretary of President Putin, on how to communicate Russia to the world. The team comprised a French legend, an American, a British and an Indian. A tall, Russian lady escorted us through winding corridors in the Kremlin into a conference room. As Peskov entered the room, his first statement was simple: “We are the biggest PR operation in the world. What more can you do for us?” Over the next hour, we talked about connecting people at different levels. Sometime during the session, Peskov told me, “Tell the government and business leaders of India to come and invest in Russia.” A message to take away: India needed to engage the external world by becoming investors. More importantly, there were expectations from India.
A few weeks earlier, in July, I was traversing the villages of Karnataka, trying to find ways to tell a simple story to people in the villages: That smoke in the kitchen kills. How do you reach the last mile, the last village, the last household that burns firewood, dung, coconut shells for cooking fuel? How do you fight a disease that starts from kitchens because women and children spend time over smoky chullahs? Over the last few years, developing an advocacy-based foundation for improved cook stoves in States like Karnataka, Bihar and Maharashtra provided an interesting glimpse into the changes that the Indian polity and economy is undergoing. While rural households would have a television, two-wheelers, mobile phones, pucca houses and even refrigerators, there simply wasn’t a viable alternative to choking in the kitchen, except stoves that could cut down the volume of smoke through better thermodynamics. One could well understand why electoral victories ride so neatly on promises of “free LPG” connections.
As people in communication, we are fortunate to observe some of the biggest stories that shape the world at close quarters. At one end, we have participated in the making of India’s telecom revolution by first creating market space and then chasing it as it galloped away way beyond anyone’s imagination. We have also worked with the government of Nepal from the days of the monarchy - seeing a King killed, a King fall and a new leadership take over the country. We helped brands change the landscape of the country over the decade from 1996 to 2006.
Today, we see the pyramid getting tipped over as people focus on creating entrepreneurship at the grass roots level. Many investors in all formats put their heads together to create the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are needed for India’s demographic expansion to become a dividend. It will happen not when prosperity trickles down the pyramid, but when the base of the pyramid becomes the generator of economic forces. Tip the pyramid over. Feed the wide base with enough opportunity and let entrepreneurship at the base drive job creation and livelihoods. A lot of how that will happen – with or without professional communicators – is when people evangelize a new way at the base of the pyramid.
Which brings me back to where I started. My short presentation to Peskov had a simple construct: Tip over the pyramid. Let the rest of the world know Russia not for its politics, but for its people, its culture, food and faith. And how that went, is another story.
Feedback: supriyogupta@torquemail.com
