By Anand Giridharadas(IHT)
MUMBAI: They don't teach the waltz at this finishing school. But with its $62 tuition, this is not your typical finishing school.
Perched on the top floor of a dank building in the heart of India's commercial capital, the school is too busy teaching other lessons: Wear suits, not T-shirts, to interviews. Shake hands firmly and wipe them beforehand to avoid clamminess. Don't slouch. Banish your parents' accent from your speech. Never roll the letter "R."
These lessons may stray from the curricula of the famous Swiss finishing schools, which have taught generations of the international upper crust to bow and curtsy. But this is not Switzerland, and these students are not upper crust. This is a new kind of finishing school with a starkly different mission: to groom Indians to take part in the global economy.
With India's economy thriving, software firms, hotels and call centers are desperate for skilled, well-groomed workers. But an arthritic education system is churning out too few. And so hundreds of savvy entrepreneurs are stepping into the breach, opening street-corner finishing schools to satiate a spreading hunger to learn quickly the habits and mores necessary to get a job in India's booming services industry.
"The people of this country are sending a message that they're losing hope with the public education system," said T.V. Mohandas Pai, the director of human resources at Infosys Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company that hired more than 20,000 people last year.
India's skilled-labor shortage thwarts its great-power ambitions. And because few believe the problem can be fixed quickly, the fate of the Indian economy, and of the global corporations that outsource here, may depend to a growing extent on how well the finishing schools teach.
Pai, who recruits from universities like Harvard and Oxford, said India's hole-in-the-wall finishing schools were improbably good and noted that Infosys hires many of their graduates - not to write software, but for tasks like data entry. "It is a very good phenomenon," he said, "because it is meeting a gap in the marketplace."
The finishing schools are redrawing the cityscapes of Bangalore, Mumbai and other metropolises, popping up by the day in neighborhood markets and residential buildings. Some, like the $62 academy in Mumbai, target aspiring call-center workers, promising to neutralize accents. Others hedge their bets, peddling any skill that could possibly raise your income: Just down the road, a one-room school run by the St. Thomas Charitable and Education Trust advertises diplomas in fashion, shipping, medical transcription and Arabic.
Most schools charge between $50 and $500 for a few weeks or months of part-time instruction. Many start with vocational skills, then use that platform to polish the rough edges of their students.
The schools reflect a surging movement among India's poor to raise themselves up through education. In the cities, for example, you find ever more chauffeurs and servants who live penny to penny but send their children to private, English-language boarding schools. According to data from Google, Indians, on a per capita basis, search for "finishing school," "communication skills" and "English training" more than any other citizenry.
Some finishing schools are better than others. But interviews with students and employers suggest that even middling institutions can double or triple a student's earning potential.
Most students said that, without attending finishing school, they could expect to earn about $1,800 a year as a salesperson. The schools help their students find jobs, and those who make it to call centers and technology firms can earn $3,600 to $6,000 a year to start, with hefty raises thereafter.
Such incomes make most students richer than their parents; many become the first in their families to join India's 50 million-strong middle class. Economists typically define middle class here as $5,000 of annual household income, the threshold at which ownership of cars and air conditioners skyrockets.
In Mumbai, the midtown neighborhood of Dadar has become a center for finishing schools. A recent stroll found buildings full of them, teaching English, German, software, retailing, jewelry, animation, business, hotel management and childhood care.
English training is especially brisk business. Across India, intelligent and well-educated graduates struggle to find work simply because they were raised speaking Indian languages.
The $62 finishing school, Let's Talk, focuses on such students. It starts with spoken English, but gradually the lessons broaden, involving the very art of being middle class. In addition to subjects like grammar, the syllabus lists "personality enhancement," "attitude management" and "dress code."
On a recent afternoon, Stephen Rozario, Let's Talk's avuncular teacher, was effervescing with advice, paternal wisdom, aphorisms and anything else that might help students live the middle-class lives they seek. The students took out notebooks - many from the plastic bags they use as briefcases - and faithfully jotted down each flicker of wisdom.
"You may look very good," the teacher thundered, "but if you have bad table manners, it all goes kaput!"
"A person who does not have a sense of humor - there is something lacking," he declared.
And then a warning: "I have come across a lot of guys and dolls, beautiful dolls and handsome guys. But when they start talking, you have to run miles away."
Rozario's task is unenviable. Many students could barely speak when called upon. Most came of age in schools that stifled self-expression, and returned home each night to parents who lacked the polish they now hope to acquire.
"I wouldn't term them as socially handicapped," Rozario said, "but they do lack social skills."
The methods at the finishing schools can be unconventional. At Let's Talk, teachers prescribe jaw exercises to help students overcome what the school quaintly calls the "MTI" - the "mother tongue influence." At Veta, a school in the same building, the principal once told a student to fix a stammer by speaking with a toffee under his tongue.
By and large, said Pai, the Infosys executive, the schools are better than their folksy methods suggest. But with thousands entering loosely regulated schools, more than a few could be swindled.
At Sheetal Academy, a few floors below Let's Talk, the curriculum is English. But if the brochure is a guide, students are taught another language altogether.
"Gmrammar is the mother of any language," the brochure proclaims. "We are in 21st century. In this era educations is must. Today criteria of education is English Speaking."
The brochure promises to teach students the very Indianisms that such courses normally attack: "In ordinary English people say 'Where do you live?' In modern English we say, 'Where do you put up?' " It adds: "We want our students to speak such hi-fi English too."
To the outsider, such schools may seem quaint and their teachings trivial. But in students' eyes, the schools are revolutionary. For them, these skills are the difference between taking the swarming train or owning a car; between marrying their father's choice of a husband or earning enough to choose their own; between mustering the confidence to order at a nice restaurant or feeling too cowed even to enter.
Sachin Khanre, 24, the elegantly coiffed son of a railway mechanic, was struggling that afternoon at Let's Talk. He had rarely, if ever, addressed a group. When asked to do so, he stood, puffed out his chest and flung back his arms, like a soldier reporting to his general. But words struggled to escape him.
In an interview, he was asked about his dreams. "To be a big man," he replied. Then he froze, with fear and helplessness in his watery eyes. He could not think of what else to say.
It was only his first day. There were three weeks to go. And for those taking the leap of faith into India's finishing schools, three weeks will, with luck, be long enough.
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