Bowling in Bangalore

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Music is the Balm

Coming back from an afternoon of bowling and tandoori gobi (cauliflower) and murgh (chicken) for lunch, Radio Indigo (91.9 FM) played these three gorgeous tunes in a row:

• Al Jareau and George Benson, covering "Summer Breeze"
  
• Sarah McLachlan, covering the Beatles' "Blackbird"
  
• A live version of "Adia," also by Sarah McClachlan
  

For the bowling-lunch fun, we met our friend and colleague, who has been on assignment here from the United States so far for 18 months, and a number of other Indian colleagues, all of whom are also gay, but not necessarily openly so; all of them were men who seemed to be in their early-late 20s.

At lunch, I asked, "What would it take to start a chapter of our [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT)] employee networking group here in India?" Already, we have 49 chapters in 27 countries.

The colleague, sitting across from me answered, "The problem here is two-fold -- societally, there's not yet the acceptance....It's still considered criminal; and then all of the men I know don't think of it as a community....They think of men, seeking men only for sex."

"What a shame."

"Yes, it is a shame."

"Do you know any [lesbian, bisexual or transgender] women at IBM in India?"

"Yes."

"Do they feel the same way?"

"Yes."

"OK. So it's not about no one, wanting to take on the responsibility for leading the chapter -- which is minimal....Basically, all you need to do is have your name as the contact-person. Rather, it's about it being too soon."

He nodded.

"I'm reminded of when I was here two years ago, and I told the managers in my section of the leadership development program I was facilitating that they needed to be ready not only to have their Indian employees contribute to global teams across the company's matrix, but rather, from now on, to be ready to manage global teams themselves. And sure enough, two years later, it is routine for Indian managers to be managing global teams, right?"

"Yes, true."

"So maybe in 2009, we'll smile about this conversation and recall when it was not yet routine to have an Indian chapter of EAGLE [the GLBT employee networking group]....You never know who will become inspired to start it up."

They didn't wait till 2009 to smile. They smiled today with what seemed to be a bit of hope in their expressions.