They call her India's Miss Manners, and she is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar industry to make Indian companies more competitive globally by improving their workers' social skills. Pria Warrick has become the guru of graces for a new generation of Indians who are helping drive India's rise as a world economic power but sometimes without a certain polish.
"Backs straight! Napkins on lap. Great. Class, cut your burger neatly," Warrick told a class of young Indian professionals, methodically performing fork-and-knife surgery on a McAloo Tikka patty — a spicy potato burger from McDonald's — as practice for dining in Europe and the United States.
Warrick's school is part of a fast-growing trend in corporate India to remedy what analysts and recruiters call a serious impediment to India's global economic goals. Although many skilled Indian workers have degrees from top universities, analysts said they are often jaw-droppingly inept at the basics of international workplace etiquette: dressing properly, hosting a meeting, making inoffensive small talk and even using cutlery.
Fearing that such deficiencies are hurting India's leadership potential, companies are spending millions of dollars on corporate finishing school for tens of thousands of workers. In many cases, those workers are products of India's bourgeoning middle classes who are the first generation in their families to enter the nation's booming and globally minded economy.
The outsourcing giant Infosys built a Global Education Center in the southern city of Mysore, teaching more than 50,000 graduates leadership and corporate manners, or "soft skills". The company has also partnered with 400 engineering schools to train 4,400 faculty members to teach more than 80,000 students how to be "industry-ready" when they graduate.
"Before my training, I actually lost a client because I barely talked during a presentation," said Srikantan Moorty, vice-president of education and research at Infosys, who has helped design the company's soft-skill classes. "The report was technically correct. But I was so shy that it was hard to seem persuasive."
Tata Consultancy Services, the country's largest information technology company, has an in-house training centre along with an affirmative action programme. It has joined with the government to help economically disadvantaged students improve their office and leadership skills. There are also thousands of neighbourhood storefront corporate manners institutes holding packed classes on weekends in cities and small towns across India. The schools are unregulated, and the quality of the programmes varies. Still, analysts estimated that more than half of India's 3 million graduates go to finishing schools, making it a growing, $60 million-a-year industry.
"Everyone sees an opportunity right now in finishing schools, from the big corporations to the retired teacher who thinks they have wisdom to share," said Pallavi Jha, managing director of Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School, which teaches the art of winning friends and influencing people in an emerging Indian economy.
In the northern city of Varanasi, placards in winding alleys advertise classes teaching "Personality Development". One recent evening, in a narrow lane where women cooked over open fires, flight attendants and customer service trainees filled an air-conditioned classroom at the Arora School for Spoken English, Body Language and Accent Training. One student, Rehan Ahmad Khan, 22, said his family has been in the sari-making business for generations. He said he had paid $200 for a four-month course to help him become a "big-business international sari tycoon."
"With this school, I feel I can go anywhere and expand my business to the rest of Asia to America," Khan said. "I now know to always smell fresh, never arrive late to a meeting with internationals and look people in the eye. Plus, these skills make me cool."
Recruiters say India has some of the world's best-educated engineers, business majors and technology wizards. But their lack of social polish and communication skills puts them behind competitors such as China, where finishing schools are often compulsory. "When an executive doesn't do well at an important international board meeting, it's not just a reflection on the person. It hurts the company, and that hurts India," said Gary Sarang, 36, associate vice-president of Industrial Finance Corp of India, who was sent to Warwick's class when he started working at Citibank in India several years ago.
"In India, we're dealing with clients in the Far East and Europe," said Sarang, who was working in the finance world in San Francisco before he returned to India in 2007 because there were more job opportunities in Bangalore than in the Bay Area. "I was coming from California, so I needed to learn not to wear flip-flops or sneakers to a meeting."
The larger problem is India's overburdened education system, which is academically rigorous but often emphasises memorisation over critical thinking, said Raja Subramanian, chief executive of Radix Learning, a finishing school for software engineers that charges companies about $150 for training in social skills, thinking and confidence.
"Let's face it. In India the demand for education outstrips supply. The number of qualified teachers is very low," said Subramanian, a former university professor. "There's so much rote learning that we are producing a lot of social duds."
In New Delhi, Warrick works in a charming bungalow with stained-glass windows and a lush garden. She looks the part of an etiquette teacher: At 5-foot-9, she has perfect posture. Warrick, half Swiss and half Indian, studied clinical psychology at Cornell University and was named Miss India America in the 1990s. She has starred in her own reality TV show in Britain, on which she took four ill-mannered, binge-drinking young Britons to India to help them learn poise and respect.
Her classes cover everything from dining etiquette to avoiding questions that are acceptable in India but inappropriate elsewhere, such as asking a person's salary or weight. She teaches that it is fine to maintain common Indian habits such as respect for elders and standing when a boss enters the room.
"I learned how to power-dress, wear a tie and not wear my trousers so high — they can be dropped to the waist," said Kabir Nayar, 30, a technology executive whose company, Bharti-Airtel, sent him to Warrick's school to prepare for a trip to London.
Warrick said that her business once catered to "girls marrying rich men" but that once India's economy took off, she was deluged with corporate students. "In India, we have the brains," she said. "But when it comes to soft skills, we are way behind."
