The interview was conducted in English in a wood-panelled office in Bombay, by a Scotsman who had been with the company since the war. Forty years later, much of what he said still applies — and a few things very obviously do not.
His name was Mr. Stewart, and he had a slight stoop from leaning toward people he wanted to listen to carefully. He asked me about my B.Sc. thesis, which had been on the kinetics of a particular saponification reaction; he asked, in passing, whether I read English novels and what I made of E.M. Forster. The answer to the first question I had rehearsed; the answer to the second I had not. I said something inadequate about A Passage to India and he nodded as if I had said something useful about the saponification.
That was Imperial Chemical Industries (India) in 1965 — a company that interviewed a fresh chemistry graduate from Pune on a Tuesday morning and offered him a graduate-trainee posting by Friday afternoon, on terms that included a transferable bond, a hostel allowance, and the promise of a year at the Mithapur soda ash plant once the initial training in Calcutta was done.
The country was eighteen years independent and the company was older than the country. The original ICI was a 1926 amalgamation of four British chemical concerns, and the Indian subsidiary had been operating for almost as long. Independence had not changed very much about the way the company presented itself in Bombay or Calcutta. The interviewers were British; the senior managers were British; the quarterly numbers went back to Millbank in London; and a young Indian graduate joining in 1965 understood that the structure was the structure, and that one’s job, if one accepted it, was to learn to operate inside it competently and, eventually, to inherit it.
I accepted it. My father had thought I might join the bank or the railways — both were respectable, both gave you a pension, and both had been Indianising their senior ranks since the late thirties. ICI was a less obvious choice in 1965, but it had two things in its favour for someone with a chemistry background. It actually ran chemistry: soda ash at Mithapur, paints in Bombay, fertilisers and explosives in various places, and the work, I was told, was not paper-pushing. The other thing was that the company had begun to take its Indianisation programme seriously. Not because it wanted to — the dilution of foreign holdings was already on the political horizon, and the company knew it. But the seriousness was real enough that the next twenty years would see the senior cadre shift almost entirely from British to Indian hands.
The Calcutta induction was three months. We were eight trainees in a building on Chowringhee, and our days alternated between formal sessions on company history, finance, and law, and afternoons on the floor at one or another of the local manufacturing units. The history sessions were the strangest. They were taught by an elderly Bengali gentleman who had been with ICI since the early thirties, and who spoke about the company’s founding with a personal warmth I have never encountered again in a corporate context. He had known some of the founding figures by reputation; he treated the 1926 merger as the kind of event that families pass down. It was easy, listening to him, to forget that the company was a foreign multinational operating in a newly independent country. He did not forget. He simply did not see why the two facts had to be in tension.
In the afternoons we learned what soda ash was, and where it went, and why it mattered. Soda ash is sodium carbonate; it is the basic input for glass, for soap, for several kinds of textile processing, and for a great many smaller industrial products. India in 1965 made some, imported more, and was beginning to want very much more. The Mithapur plant on the Gujarat coast was the largest indigenous source. It used the Solvay process — limestone in, brine in, ammonia in a closed loop, soda ash out — and it had been operating since the late nineteen-thirties. By the time I arrived as a trainee in early 1966, it was an enormous, weathered, slightly improvised place that worked, and that the country needed to keep working.
But that is for another column. What I want to say about the interview in Bombay is this. Mr. Stewart, who had been with the company since the war, asked me at the end whether I had any questions for him, and I asked the only question I had been told to ask: what would happen if I did not turn out to be suitable for the work?
He thought about it for a moment. He said that the company would help me find another position elsewhere if it came to that, but that he did not think it would come to that. He said the people who did not last were the people who could not be honest about what they did not know, and that I had been honest enough about Forster.
I have thought about that exchange many times in the forty years since. It was, I now think, an attempt to communicate a value the company genuinely held — that competence in a chemical company depended on a willingness to admit ignorance — wrapped in the form of an English graduate’s parlour trick. It worked on me. I went home and read Howards End that summer, in the hostel in Calcutta, between sessions on the Solvay process. I cannot say it has been useful since. But the willingness to admit ignorance has.