I have said this before, and I will say it again: most National Day

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functions are a great big bore. Consulates of countries are obliged to celebrate their big day, and members of other consulates are obliged to be present. Most hosts do a routine job: they hold a cocktail reception where everyone makes sure that the people they jostle are not carrying a glass of red wine, while the networkers network and the Page Three types pretend to be embarrassed by the photographers.

One of the consulates which does more than a routine job is the British. First of all, there is Britain’s special relationship with us, so special that the consulate is not even called a consulate but the British Deputy High Commission.

Then there’s the shared language (well, sort of), the shared cuisine (they like ours, we like ours, we occasionally like theirs) and the shared capital (Haven’t met a friend from Mumbai for years? Walk down Oxford Street or go to Selfridges and there he/she/they will be). Most importantly, there’s the shared interest in cricket (what if we are world number one, the English invented the sport, didn’t they?)

The Brits also send — not always, but sometimes — some exceptional people to head their mission here. The current incumbent Peter Buckingham (not to be confused with Beckingham Palace, or is it the other way round?) is one such. If the usual National Day speeches don’t put you to sleep, it’s only because you are standing while you listen, but Peter Beckingham’s speech this year was the kind all consulates should use as a model: witty, self-deprecating yet making the points that needed to be made about the Indo-British relationship. Including, of course, cricket.

By the way, he is willing to wager that England will beat India in England this summer. Perhaps I should take him up on that. If England wins I will have to rustle up a dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and if he wins, he produces butter chicken and naan. That way, both of us will be happy to lose our bets.

Incidentally, Peter Beckingham’s wife Jill went with a small band of people a few months ago and retraced Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, all the way from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi. That’s almost 400 kilometres in Gujarat’s heat and dust, all done to raise money for charity. Amazing!

Luckily the Brits thought their monarch’s birthday attraction enough for their invitees. That’s not always so in other cases. Recently a friend, whose name I shall not mention because I would like him to remain a friend, had an exhibition where the chief guest was some Bollywoodian. My nameless friend must have followed the advice of a PR agency: invite an actor, the PR guys must have said, and the media will follow. Unfortunately, this is absolutely and incontrovertibly true.

Even a minor actor turns the media on, the flashbulbs don’t stop popping, TV news channels come clamouring in. It’s possible that very little of the footage and hardly a photograph or two actually gets used but for the PR company the frenzy is all that matters. Does anyone get a chance to look at the exhibits on display? But, the PR chap will say, that wasn’t our brief!

The media goes crazy about cricketers too. The other evening I took part in a panel discussion with captains of cricket and captains of industry. The two Indian captains were Kapil Dev and Anil Kumble, one all earthy earnestness and sentiment, the other all polished sophistication. We talked about leadership and how cricket captains share the same stresses and problems as business leaders.

Now that I think about it, cricket captains operate under far greater pressure. For one thing, they are all young, in their 20s or early 30s, when corporate leaders would just be starting the climb to the top. Then again, which banker or corporate CEO has to take major decisions watched by 40,000 ‘experts’ in the stadium and millions in front of their TV sets? I suppose they can do all this only because they are young, and the young have no fear.