Tata has created this brand image through years of corporate practices that have become the benchmark of Indian private industry. Others, like Reliance Industries are well on their way to achieving a similar positioning in the mind’s eye through consistent growth and corporate performance but there remains a dimension missing. A dimension to do with a company’s involvement in the larger community to become a force for change.

At another level, the strength of the brand image can smooth the way for the entire gamut of corporate dealings ranging from loans and advances to foreign collaborations. Large multinational corporations, mindful of this powerful advantage, are increasingly devoting resources and corporate time to fashioning the right kind of brand image, not as a blatant advertisement, but as a method to define what their core values are.

A shining international beacon, which illustrates my point, is the Rolex Watch Company, which has successfully harnessed the concept of excellence in any given field to enlarge its image as much more than a leading watch maker. This has in turn bestowed a lustre to both their brand equity and the bottom line. A similar feat has been pulled off gradually over the years by our old stalwarts the Tatas and the Birlas. These captains of the Indian industrial firmament have auditoria, art galleries, temples, educational establishments and scholarships, soccer teams, musical performances, hospitals and economic think tanks. Other wannabes and arrivestes need to take note and heed or ignore the point at their own peril, risk and eventual cost.

The corporation as an engine of change then, concerned not only with its own growth but also with the progress of the community, is the need of the day. In saying this, I am not being exactly startling. The old robber barons of Boston understood the value of old fashioned philanthropy. They understood that it made elaborate business sense and helped to create new images of themselves in a considerably more flattering light.

Afresh now, on the brink of the millenium, the areas that are receiving corporate attention are those which generate universal sympathy and concern. These range from helping victims of natural calamities to addressing ongoing social problems like disease, education, the arts, the environment, public housing, municipal decay and so on.

The days in which a tyre company sponsored races to build its brand image alone are being supplanted by more imaginative and broad brush efforts that look both inwards and outwards at the same time. The same blatantly thrusting tyre company may now sponsor classical music programmes while cleaning up the polluting aspects of its manufacturing process.

The times, they are a changing, sang Bob Dylan two decades ago epitomising it recently by singing this song and another composition of his called ‘knocking on heaven’s door’, both for himself, recovered from a nearly fatal heart infection, and the aging pontiff.

More and more corporations are realising the immense public relations benefits of doing something a little less selfish to keep ahead of the pack.

The trend in spiraling advertising costs has also contributed towards a rethink of the relevant strategies. It is within this context that various initiatives like corporate sponsorship for the maintenance of railway stations, public toilets and roundabouts have been gaining ground. Other moves have gone towards the preservation of fragile art forms, the protection of endangered species or the development of low cost housing and efficient public toilets.

A country like India has a rich heritage of ancient monuments that could do with considerably more by way of funding and professional inputs to help them not only survive the ravages of time but realise their full historical potential for posterity. There is a lot to do. Shoring up, restoring, finding alternative uses to provide a new lease of life, researching histories, landscaping, lighting, promoting—the list seems endless.

It should give us pause to think that a city like Delhi, 50 years after independence, can only boast of the beauty of Lutyens Delhi as an ironic reminder of the far-sighted efficacy of our former rulers. Modern Delhi in independent times is by comparison very much the ugly duckling, going the peculiarly uncaring and congested way of all Indian planning with its bizarre oversights and lack of aesthetic appeal, all in the name of a mind numbing practicality.

Why for instance are there open drains in a relatively posh colony like Defence Colony? Why has it been allowed to languish, breeding mosquitoes and disease and stinking all through the two or three decades since it was built? There are many others like it, all over Delhi, perhaps deriving legitimacy in playing follow the leader.

In Pune, the Rajneeshites found a similar open drain near their Koregaon Park ashram. Unstultified by our peculiar mindset, the ‘sanyasins’ of the free love community from various parts around the globe persuaded the municipality to let them convert it into one of the finest gardens in the country. That was 20 years ago, and the foreign disciples found the money, the gumption, the professional ability and the inspiration from amongst their own number with the now departed Acharya presiding over it all. Why can’t the NGOs and the industrialists do this to our open nullahs in the capital? And what about the many monuments of Mughal Delhi? And what about a hundred other municipal eyesores?