On the Indian art of speaking at the United Nations without the United Nations being present.
There is a gentleman at every Indian wedding who has “spoken at the United Nations.” There is also, somewhere in Manhattan, a hotel concierge that knows exactly how. That hall, like your favorite hotel ballroom, can be hired.
Welcome to the Great Indian Overclaim, our fastest-growing service industry. It’s fairly simple, really, for you to adopt: prepositions are the secret sauce. The overclaimer speaks at the Norwegian Parliament, never to it. He holds a meeting in the European Parliament, never with it. Parliaments, and most public institutions, it turns out, rent rooms. A visiting dignitary may therefore address three sleepy interns and a sound technician, and their family WhatsApp group will be informed that all of Europe listened.
The marketing copy never lies, which is the elegance of it. The more recent innovation is to skip the overclaimer entirely and sell directly to his parents, frightful of university acceptance rates. “Your child will speak at the United Nations” is a sentence that survives legal scrutiny and parental credulity simultaneously. It declines to specify that the United Nations will not be in session, that the room is booked like any corporate offsite, and that every other child in the hall paid the same registration fee.
The CV arms race, it turns out, has a junior division. India is now producing overclaimers in training.
The young are inducted early. Enterprising operators charge lakhs to fly schoolchildren to “a conference at the United Nations,”, a hired room and a gavel of uncertain jurisdiction. The child returns with a CV line before he has a CV. The mechanics are published and bookable, for anyone who cares to check.
The House of Lords rents its principal function room for evening events from £1,500. Oxford University colleges rent their dormitories every summer to private operators who charge parents a different number entirely. One such programme bills up to £7,500 for two weeks in rooms the college itself would rent for perhaps £1,400. The word “Oxford” is the most legible line in the invoice.
The certificate, in most arrangements, is the actual product. The learning is incidental, occasionally inconvenient, and in the shorter programmes, structurally impossible. What parents are buying is a line of text, and the operators understand this better than we do.
Education, naturally, yields a richer harvest at every age. A remarkable generation has “attended Harvard,” by which is meant a one-week management development programme or, in more athletic cases, a two-hour seminar with certificates and group photographs by the HBS signage.
At this rate Harvard attends more Indian CVs than Indians attend Harvard. NASA suffers the same fate: legions that “trained” there were, on closer inspection, holding freeze-dried ice cream on the visitors’ tour and calling it astronaut training.
The same economy retails honorary doctorates to businessmen, after which “Dr” blooms on the visiting card and the wedding invitation.
The overclaimer never learns the only useful lesson the game offers. Audiences can smell inflation from across the room, and downscaling is the only reliable upgrade. The man who says “I did speak in the parliament building, to ten people, two of whom were awake” is instantly believed on everything else.
In twenty years he will be at the wedding. His daughter’s application to a different hired room in a slightly more prestigious building is under review. The operator, we are told, is very selective.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
