The sartorially conservative city of Chennai will soon inaugurate its first, internationally benchmarked fashion institute. The Pearl Academy of Fashion (PAF), which has built itself a reputation in fashion and textile education for over 12 years since the promotion of its first New Delhi campus in 1993 and its second campus in Jaipur last year, is all set to admit its first batch of 125 students at its Nungambakkam institute on August 1. Promoted by Pearl Global Ltd (estb: 1992) one of India’s leading garment export houses (annual sales: Rs 1,500 crore), PAF boasts collaborations with several national and international institutes including Nottingham Trent University, UK; LDT Nagold, Germany; and the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, Netherlands, for student, faculty and information exchange. PAF, Chennai will offer a globally recognised BA (Hons) degree and postgraduate diploma programmes validated by the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

“The choice of Chennai for our third campus was dictated by Tamil Nadu’s traditional strength as a textiles manufacturing base and its proximity to garment industry centres like Tirupur, Salem and Erode. Our industry-oriented study programmes will help bridge the wide gap between skill-sets required by the textile industry and what fashion institutes deliver,” says S. Ramalingam, director, Pearl Academy of Fashion, Chennai.

A textile engineering graduate and industrial engineering postgrad of Anna University, Ramalingam has wide experience of this booming industry. He was the first chairperson of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT: estb 1986), where he served for five years before joining Indonesia’s textiles and engineering giant, Texmaco, as vice-president for four years. He returned to India in 1996 and became an entrepreneur, sourcing garments for European markets, before assuming charge of PAF, Chennai last December.

Starting August, PAF Chennai will offer four-year BA (Hons) degree programmes in fashion design and fashion merchandising and production, apart from two-year postgraduate diploma programmes in fashion merchandising, garment manufacturing and textile design (home fashion). Tuition fees range from Rs.60,000-70,000 per semester. Admission is based on performance in an all-India entrance test to be held on June 4, 2006. The first batch of students (25 per course) will be instructed by a permanent, highly qualified faculty of 10-12 and visiting professionals.

Housed in the heart of the city in a modish building, PAF, Chennai boasts state-of-the-art textile labs, design and drawing studios, seminar rooms, pattern making, sewing, knitting and cutting labs, computer centre with CAD/CAM software, visual merchandising, fabric testing labs, and a large library with audio visual and photography facilities. “We want to establish the PAF brand in the south, build a rapport with industry and introduce internationally benchmarked study programmes. We are confident we can attain all these objectives in record time,” says Ramalingam.

Wind in your sails!

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

Confident confidence builder

Come admissions season and every institution of professional education irrespective of lineage or reputation promises prospective students “guaranteed job placement”. But after completion, most of them suffer acute amnesia on this score. Certainly very few institutional managements offer compensation for failure to deliver the placement promise.

The Goa-based Ann Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology (est. 1999) distinguishes itself as the only private sector institution of professional education which refunds the entire tuition fee (Rs.1.35 lakh) of students who don’t land a job within six months of graduation. “This is a serious unequivocal offer. If a graduate of Ann Institute is without a job six months after completion of the study programme, I am committed to reimbursing his/ her tuition fee as he will not be a good ambassador of the institute. But it’s an indicator of the industry-readiness of our graduates that thus far no student has come forward to claim a refund,” says the soft-spoken Anandrao Narayanrao Nagvenkar, founder director of Ann Institute at Porvorim, Goa — India’s #1 tourism enclave.

Promoted in 1999, Ann Institute has an aggregate enrollment of 165 students pursuing its three-year advanced diploma in hotel management taught by a permanent faculty of 10, and a large visiting faculty comprising professionals from the hospitality industry. The three-year course open to class XII graduates is priced at Rs.1.35 lakh for three years. The institute also offers an 18-month postgraduate diploma in hotel management (Rs.45,000), a two-year international hospitality management diploma (Rs.75,000) and a one-year diploma in hotel management and catering (Rs.35,000).

“The objective of Ann Institute is to produce well-trained personnel for the fast-track hospitality and services industry,” says Nagvenkar who has named the institute after the first letters of his name. “I’ve done this because I am confident of myself. Therefore I am confident that our graduates will believe in their self worth, and become winners in life.” In 1989 Nagvenkar quit a well-remunerated job in West Asia to return to Goa to tend his ailing mother.

“My experience of Goa’s booming hospitality industry opened my eyes to the trained manpower needs of this business. In 1995 I quit my hotel job and became a full-time hospitality consultant. Soon Tony Fernandes, proprietor of Falcon Resorts at Calangute beach asked me to hire 200 staff for his hotel. When I couldn’t find staff, I suggested that we launch a training institute. Thus Falcon Institute of Hotel Management was promoted. But after two years, it closed down for various reasons. However I was determined to enter the human resource development business. I rented a closed hotel and launched Ann Institute in 1999,” recounts Nagvenkar.

Currently in its seventh year, Ann Institute which has firmly established its reputation in India’s #1 tourist destination, has ambitious plans to diversify into business management education. “Our future plans include moving to a five acre green campus and launching BBA and MBA study programmes,” says Nagvenkar.

Michael Gonsalves (Goa)

Gifted conductor

New York-based George Mathew is only the second Indian, (after Zubin Mehta), to achieve fame as a classical music conductor in the US. In January he led a specially designed orchestra and chorus in a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at Carnegie Hall as a fund-raiser for survivors of the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and India, which rendered three million people homeless. Proceeds from the concert were donated to the Paris-based relief organisation Medecines Sans Frontiers, engaged in relief work in both countries.

The special Carnegie Hall performance featured renowned veterans, rising stars and principal players of the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia and St. Louis Symphony and the Brooklyn Philharmonic orchestras plus a chorus of 200 assembled from several choral ensembles.

Born in Singapore and schooled in India, UK and the US, Mathew graduated from the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) with a conductor’s postgraduate diploma in 2003. This was followed by a magna cum laude from Amherst College and further studies at the University of Minnesota and Duke University. Though he has yet to perform in India, in recent seasons George Mathew has led several orchestras and opera companies in the US and Europe, including the Orchestra Sinfonica di Pescara in Italy, and the Silesian State Opera in Opava, Czech Republic.

Although he turned professional relatively recently, Mathew brings considerable experience to the conductor’s podium. In 2003 he was awarded a Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic. In March 2004, he was a selected participant in the first Kurt Masur International Conducting Seminar at MSM and served on the conducting staff at his alma mater since September 2003. Moreover he has conducted orchestras and ensembles at Columbia University, Wellesley College, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke College, the University of Minnesota, Duke, Susquehanna, Brandeis, and Massachusetts univer-sities. An accomplished pianist, Mathew has been active in promoting the works of contemporary composers.

“My guest conducting this season includes the season finale of the High Mountain Symphony Orchestra at William Paterson University and the premiere of a new work at Tufts. And yes, I’d love to conduct in India!” he says.

Ronita Torcato (Mumbai)

Father film producer

Fr. Francis Dominic Emmanuel of the Delhi Catholic Church Archdiocese is hardly the archetypal parish priest. In fact having recently produced a mainstream Bollywood movie — complete with a rain-drenched item number — Emmanuel is cast more in the mould of a Bollywood movie mogul. But beneath this veneer is a committed soldier of Christ who combines creativity with God’s work.

“This is perhaps the first time worldwide that a pastor of the church has produced a full-fledged feature film,” says Emmanuel. “But a commercial film doesn’t have to be a sleazy product. We’ve used cinema to communicate caution about two of the most serious issues confronting Indian society — communal polarisation and the scourge of HIV/ AIDS.” According to Emmanuel, AIDS is the single largest killer in the world and 5.13 million Indians are infected. “After South Africa India has the second largest number of HIV positive citizens. My film is a wake-up call,” he says.

The 90-minute feature film titled Aisa Kyon Hota Hai (AKHH) was released in six Indian metros in February this year. The film features Emmanuel himself in a professor’s role. Targeting the nation’s youth, AKHH unspools a message about the AIDS epidemic, the pitfalls of promiscuity and need for secularism in a pluralistic society. Financed by UNICEF and several human rights/ health organisations, the film cost Rs.2 crore to produce.

“Our shoestring budget was one of the reasons for the lukewarm reception to AKHH at the box-office, as we didn’t have mega bucks to promote it adequately,” states Emmanuel. However, the nation’s youth whom it targeted, “simply loved it”. So to widen the film’s pan-India reach, it is being re-released in a dozen more Indian cities this month.

Nor is AKHH Emmanuel’s first creative effort. Currently director of the communication/ information bureau of Delhi’s Catholic Archdiocese, he has also written 14 books, including Pathways to Better Living which is a prescribed text in some of Delhi’s schools. Another book Towards Building Bridges advocates religious harmony and tolerance.

A graduate in four disciplines (theology, philosophy, English and education), Emmanuel was awarded a Masters degree in theology and a Ph D in communication by Westminster University, London and has worked as a journalist with BBC World, a radio broadcaster with Radio Manila and Vatican Radio.

Neeta Lal (Delhi)

Persistent educationist

“Since its inception in 1986, the Union HRD ministry has lacked the vision, financial wisdom and perhaps leadership quality to advance the education agenda of the nation.” This indictment comes from none other than J. Veera Raghavan, who as the first secretary of the then newly designated HRD ministry oversaw the implementation of the New Education Policy 1986 until he retired from government service in 1990.

According to Raghavan, the renamed (from education) ministry got off to a flying start with action plans, programmes, goals, and a detailed vision document. “But as it turned out later, our biggest and most crucial error was that we didn’t make detailed financial estimates. It proved to be the greatest handicap to the implementation of NEP,” recalls Raghavan.

Looking back over the past 20 years, Raghavan says the purpose behind the redesignation of the ministry was to link health and nutrition, women and child welfare, sports and culture with education, with the HRD ministry acting as the coordinating nodal agency, but that didn’t happen. “Now they are very difficult to coordinate,” he laments.

NEP, 1986 was also flawed because it was silent on private-public partnerships even though the Kothari Commission of 1966 had clearly called for active private participation in education. “The structural inability of the system has not been addressed since. With elementary education nearly universal, the pressure on secondary and higher education has intensified. At present only 8 percent of youth in the age group 18-24 make it into institutions of higher education. If this intake doubles, there will be great capacity constraints in higher education,” says Raghavan, who started his career in the Indian Audit and Accounts Service following postgraduation in economics from Vivekananda College, Madras. In 1979 Raghavan was appointed executive director of NIEPA (National Institute of Education Planning and Administration) and subsequently moved to the Planning Commission as education advisor for three years (1983-86).

In 1994, Raghavan signed up with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Delhi branch as its director, where he has stayed put since. “We are planning to introduce a full-time two year postgrad diploma in business management for which we are expecting AICTE approval soon. It will be a new chapter in the Bhavan’s journey towards providing affordable education relevant to life and jobs,” he says.

Autar Nehru (New Delhi)