The dancers, chefs, actors, musicians, singers have all played their parts in the Incredible India@60 juggernaut in New York and are back home. The event was in many ways an incredible effort. To create a transitory Little India in a river of a megapolis is a tricky proposition. New York has witnessed every publicity jig under the sun — from semi-nude people wearing barrels around their middles (‘Life in the Poorhouse is no life at all’) to demonstrate against debt, to Chinese takeaways peddling the virtues of their ‘yum-yum’ fare. New Yorkers, hermeneutically sealed from the world by their cell phones and iPods as they walk like zombies through Manhattan’s streets to their chrome-and-glass offices in the sky, are satiated, self-driven and too stretched for time to register much beyond their immediate obsessions.

For the organisers of this multi-layered show it meant five unrelenting months of planning — two and a half just to get clearance for the sites needed to stage the various events. At first, Times Square, the Rockefeller Centre, the Bronx Zoo and Central Park were identified. “We had several ambitious plans, including pitching up the Taj Mahal in Central Park, and transporting two artificial elephants, conceived by Nitin Desai which weigh a thousand tonnes each. Finally, we had to settle for the Port Authority Bus Station for Sudarshan Patnaik’s sand sculpture of the Taj, and Bryant Park and South Street Seaport for the cultural events,” explained Amitabh Kant, former additional secretary, tourism. Kant saw this initiative as the “best way” to penetrate the heart of the globalised world and differentiate India from other tourist destinations by deploying resources in a focused manner and through a public-private partnership with the CII. The latter, it appears, bore a major chunk of the expenses.

... contd.