The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : A diplomat goes down memory lane

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Monday, May 12, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

A diplomat goes down memory lane

Priscilla Jebaraj

Winds of change sweeping rural India; expectations have risen as horizons have widened

Photo: by special arrangement

Donald Camp. —

CHENNAI: Almost four decades ago, he was a 22-year-old American volunteer wearing a dhoti and speaking Tamil to farmers around Sholapuram in Thanjavur district. Today, as a senior American diplomat, Donald Camp may seem part of a different world, but he feels his early experiences have given him a unique insight into rural India and its challenges.

From 1970 to 1972, in the early years of the Green Revolution, Mr. Camp worked in a programme with the Tamil Nadu Department of Agriculture to train farmers in the use of fertilizers and to promote new improved strains of paddy. “I could have grown a good crop of paddy before I left,” he remarks.

On a recent visit to Chennai in his role as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia, the second highest US State Department diplomat for the region, Mr. Camp reminisced about the changes that had taken place in Tamil Nadu since the 1970s.

“Some things are the same. Mr. Karunanidhi was in his first stint as Chief Minister then,” he remembers.

However, in many ways, rural life has been transformed. In his scrapbook of photos from his Peace Corps days, Mr. Camp has a snapshot of a landlord sitting on a stool in front of his shop in the village bazaar. On his visit to the village three years ago, he looked up the old man again. “I found him sitting on the same stool in the same place in the bazaar. But this time, he had a cell phone in his hand.”

That small incident says a lot about the way Tamil Nadu and India itself have changed in the intervening years. Expectations have risen as horizons have widened.

“When I lived in Sholapuram, The Hindu was my only connection with the outside world,” he says. “Now people are so much more aware of what is going on in the world.” Education, economic growth, television, telecommunications and migrants working in the Gulf countries have all played a role in this change, he says.

Increased contact

There is also increased contact between the people of America and India, especially in Chennai, says Mr. Camp. While TV programmes, Hollywood and the Internet may have increased the American influence here, Indian immigrants have transplanted their culture to the U.S.

The economic links have also been increasing, with large American firms such as Ford Motors and Dell Computers making large investments here.

He feels that multinational firms and the Tamil Nadu government have made an effort at developing rural industries.

“This is a country that is transforming itself. While much of this transformation is apparent first in urban areas, I am confident this is spreading…Having lived in rural India, I have a real sensitivity to rural India and the challenges it faces,” he says.

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