Twins” is what many of our colleagues in India called Udai and me at the Small Industry Extension Training Institute (SIET Institute, now known as National Institute for Small Industries Extension Training [ NISIET ]) in Hyderabad where we both were working together for the first time half a century ago. Very soon, Udai became the director of its Extension Education department and so my “counterpart”-a graceless, domineering foreign assistance term-as a consultant for Extension Education to the new staff college for the Government of India’s small industries consultants. We immediately saw eye to eye on just about everything. He, too, was convinced that the consultants needed to work in interdisciplinary teams. For that, they needed interpersonal skills that small-group and sensitivity training develop the best and that Udai had learned from Max Corey to facilitate and highly value. He easily saw that those skills also had to get rooted in actual practice together with operatives, foremen, and managers on the factory floor and not just talked about with managers in the office. SIET’s director had already agreed to all parts of this sequence, and the initial programs had strongly confirmed. So Udai stepped right into pairing with me to facilitate the small-group sessions and organize and review the fieldwork (with me or Sujit Bhattacharji, who had come with me from Aloka). With Udai-and/or soon after-also came doctoral students who had worked with him in Delhi; some of them also stayed as faculty members in Hyderabad or worked together with us later-most continuously during our stay of six years in the 1980s-to decentralize decision-making in Indonesia’s public health system and to develop India’s own professional society for applied behavioral science.
In addition to becoming ever-closer colleagues at SIET Institute, we became long-lasting family friends. In Hyderabad, our family visited Udai’s home when his son Anagat was born, and the hijras (eunuchs) danced on this occasion. Twenty years later, our family visited his home in Jaipur when ‘Anu’ (nickname of Anagat) married Shilpa, and Udai’s mother danced in front of the procession to the bride’s house. One of the photographs on our wall shows me with the turban put on my head by Udai for the wedding. We overlapped two years in Chapel Hill-Udai in the Department of Psychology and I in the new Population Center and in Public Health- and Udai’s family broke the coconut in our new house just as they did earlier in Hyderabad. Next, we overlapped in Indonesia in his successive provinces and then in Jakarta, where they also had a twin-grandson with them. After that, I, often with Ronnie, visited them many times in Jaipur, and each time, Rama prepared extra rough and tough Rajasthani bread for me because that’s how I liked it best. We also got to know their wider, expanding family, which we like, too. Only weeks before Udai died, I saw him already frail and sick. Then, the third edition of Training for Development was underway; the first edition had already brought us close while working together all through Hyderabad to Chapel Hill. From our working together so closely and personally, Udai’s two particular features stick out most prominently for me. One is his openness to what mattered most, and the other is his quiet determination to go for it. This became most startlingly clear at our first and quite unplanned meeting and its quick sequel at what others would quite understandably assess at an enormous price. In 1962, at Erik Erikson’s first public meeting in Delhi, Dr Pareek chaired a reputed session to introduce psycho-social history, with Krishna Kripilani introducing his biography of Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography. Standing around as it finished, this stranger asked me what I was doing in India, and I told him about the new institute, the three-week interpersonal sessions we had started there and, in response to his asking, I presume, how I had come to value those so highly. “Were any position open there,” he asked. Only a few days later, his application arrived, to work with me and in the hope of becoming the department director. What he was foregoing, it turned out, was his 18 years’ retirement benefits in a senior research position in the Ministry of Agriculture. In later years, too, I have seen Udai again and again quietly assessing complex situations and personal choices and come up with particular action(s) – quietly, avoiding open conflict with others, and seeing no need to explain his determination. The second feature I think of in his working is his relentless recording of experiences. It stands out extra starkly because even otherwise excellent col leagues-everywhere and certainly in my work in India-seem to have great difficulty developing like habits for full systematic rerecording (even now that the ever new technologies have made it much easier).
Two examples can best illustrate the recording and the sharing of it with participants. First is the content sheet of our standard report to the participants in a three-week program of “Sensitivity Training in Regular Courses”: First, in three sections, 12 single-spaced pages, about The Training Design Sensitivity Training in Practice Effects of the Training on Participants Then 12 appendices in four sets: The five readings handed out during the program Extension sessions at the SIET Institute Five data forms about talk frequency, interaction patterns, participants’ functions in the group, feelings in the group, and group climate And lastly, the participants’ “rating of sensitivity sessions.” The second example of Udai’s (and my) characteristic follow-through is that all the readings we referred to we soon included in a hardback SIET book entitled Agents of Industrial Development. Our book Readings for Trainers, Consultants and Policy-Makers followed some years later and also Training for Development, rewritten separately for policy makers and for trainers (SAGE, 1992, 2000).
Dr. Rolf Lynton (April 1924- December 2024) on Udai Pareek (January 1925- March 2010)
(Reproduced from T. V. Rao and Anil Khandelwal (editors) HRD, OD and Institution Building: Essays in Memory of Udai Pareek, Atlantic Publishers, 2024)
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