Pria Warrick Finishing School takes four work-shy, ill-mannered, yobbish Brits from around the UK and enrols them in a Swiss style finishing school in Delhi, India.

The thrust of this programme is that they are suffering a crisis of manners. Yobs, binge drinkers and thugs can be found in towns throughout the UK. The values and morals which once made Britain great - a sense of fairness, hard work, community life and respect for elders, have all but disappeared. In terms of manners and etiquette, the UK is a country in terminal decline.

This is in stark contrast to India where a can-do attitude of tolerance, hard-work and respect for traditional values and morals prevails. Binge drinking is virtually unheard of, promiscuity is rare, and politeness and manners are considered as essential attributes for any self-respecting Indian.

"So what happens when four British yobs are packed off to India to learn manners Indian style? We'll jet our four Rude Britannia characters off to Delhi where they'll live together in an apartment, and attend one of India's most well-respected finishing schools."

Can the well mannered Indians show the English troublemakers where they're going wrong? They've got two weeks to turn them around, before despatching them back to Britain...polished, reformed and with the kind of manners for which Britain was once famous.

A Reality T.V. series with Pria Warrick on Channel 4, U.K.

New Delhi now boasts of a finishing school for girls - and boys too. ANJANA RAJAN figures out what it takes to acquire the fine art of high living... .

LIKE IT or not, Hindi films tell us something about our society. There was a time back in the 1970s when the epitome of Indian womanhood was the (tight) sari-clad, well made-up homemaker who while happy to romp around trees with her husband or betrothed in the relative anonymity of a public park, would not be caught dead with him on a dance floor in a private party. She could slurp over iced sherbets for a song, but the very screen would have withered in shame had she been portrayed holding a whiskey on the rocks. The vamps provided a foil for her, and it has been much discussed how the disappearance of the vamp and the appearance of some of her proclivities in the heroine point to a new image of the modern woman.

Even though she is still expected to iron her husband's shirts, launder the kids' football sweaters to spotless whiteness and produce mouth-watering meals without so much as breaking into a sweat, she also knows how to down her drinks, hold on to a high profile career and waltz with the boss - and the table she lays, when she is wearing her chef's hat, is an impressive array of cuisines from around the world. India's new superwoman in the globalised 21st Century seems to be made of strong stuff. And since we all have a tendency to aspire to the best - or is it the Bold? Or the Beautiful? - we must be looking for ways in which to acquire a bit of that super ness.

Zeroing in on that need is Ever Springs Finishing School, an institution founded and directed by Pria Warrick, who has recently set up shop in Delhi's New Friends Colony after achieving name and fame in the same business across the world. Here, for Rs. 10,000 a month, girls and women - currently the age spectrum swings from 15 to 62, says the director - can learn to become "women of substance."

This alluring phrase includes culinary skills, taught by executive chefs from Maurya, basic introduction to French and German, the art of make-up according to occasion and times of the day - as taught by one who has assisted no less a celebrity than Aishwarya Rai's make-up artist, home management, flower arrangement, as well as the nitty-gritty like cleaning and maintenance of various home surfaces, and how to eat what you have cooked - whether chopsticks or snail tongs, forks and knives or soup spoons, they will see to it that the students leave nary a blemish on their reputation.

The school's brochure makes consistent use of the analogy of the coal and the diamond. "Women and diamonds have real value once polished," it declares. Pria Warrick sees no slur in this.

"This is a school for life. We have to accept that we are in a male dominated society. And that etiquette comes from the West. Girls get married into business families and have to go abroad and adjust to new lifestyles there. Or with the joint family."

So among others there is a course for brides to be. But what about the sense of self that should grow with every child's education and renders chopsticks and crystal chandeliers redundant in a conversation about life values? Forever Spring is obviously on a different wavelength.

"We have a course for financial skills. Some women don't even know how to cut a cheque."

But definitely, if you can't tell your Ikebana from your bonsai, if you don't know how to mix a tequila and if you flinch at saying "Bloody Mary," consider this course. Thrice a week, evening sessions, small batches, admission after an aptitude test. There is even a crash course.

After all, folding a table napkin in seven different ways is not something they teach you at any ordinary school. And the good news is that it is open to boys too, though they figure nowhere in the brochure.

Finishing schools are part of a £60m industry that teach office workers the basics of international business etiquette

Pria Warrick, who has lived in Britain, America and Australia, has become the guru of graces for a new generation of call centre techies, chief executives and MBAs

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.

"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."

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 Warrick'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."

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."

Indian business school offers lessons in Western etiquette
Published On Sat Aug 07, 2010 - Toronto Star FROM CANADA

NEW DELHI—After several weeks studying the selling points of photocopiers, printers and scanners, Surej Pillai scribbled notes as he digested another key business lesson — the importance of chewing his food with his mouth closed.

On a recent weekday morning in New Delhi, 28-year-old Pillai was participating alongside seven colleagues in a business etiquette class organized by the Japanese electronics company Canon for newly hired marketing executives.

“Remember, when you talk while you eat more air comes in, and it’s a scientific fact that makes you burp. That’s rude,” lectured Deepti Sharma, an instructor at the Priya Warrick Finishing School, which has provided training for a host of Indian companies.

From an economic standpoint, there’s little arguing that India has come of age. Its economy is roaring at an enviable 9 per cent clip and companies based here are widening their influence throughout the world.

Yet executives fear some young professionals are ill prepared for their country’s expansion because India’s education system places such a priority on academics over embracing social graces. They worry that lack of awareness of western manners could lead to an inappropriate action or déclassé remark that, in some extreme cases, could even sideline future business.

So a rapidly increasing number of companies are sending employees to Warrick and other etiquette experts to learn everything from the proper business handshake and dining etiquette to dressing for success and recovering if you forget someone’s name during a business meeting.

According to some estimates, more than half of the India’s three million college graduates attend finishing schools. Warrick is widely known here as India’s Miss Manners. In 2004, she hosted a reality show called “Indian Hospitality School,” working to transform four British slobs who travelled to New Delhi for a few weeks.

“In India we have such technical expertise, but when it comes to manners we take a back seat,” said Warrick.

Pillai nodded in agreement.

“I think with the cultural differences between India and the West, especially with dining, this is a very good idea,” he said. “No one wants to be seen by their client as being rude.”

Unlike Westerners, many Indians share food at the dinner table and dishes often served with curries and gravies are eaten by hand. “We didn’t grow up knowing you break apart a dinner roll with your hands instead of using a dinner roll,” one Canon employee said during a break.

While her students smirked or grinned at times during the all-day class, Warrick was all business when it came to demanding proper posture, quick responses and firm handshakes from her audience. “We want no limp fish handshakes,” Warrick said sternly, wearing a black dress and strand of pearls. “That shows a lack of confidence and is completely unacceptable.

“Your personal life plays an important role in the growth of your career,” she continued. “The western world is not as emotionally secure as we are in India. They say please and thank-you and sorry. We never use these words, but they are part of international culture.”

And you need to learn them, was her unspoken message.

Her eight students ranged in age from 28 to 35 and each had previous business experience with large Indian companies such as Reliance Industries before their hiring by Canon.

Yet all of them struggled with Warrick’s rapid-fire true-or-false and multiple-choice quizzes. None, for instance, said they knew it’s considered rude in the West to ask someone’s weight or salary, questions that are commonplace in India.

“Who goes through a revolving door first, the host or his guests?” Warrick asked.

Her audience stumped, Warrick explained guests precede their hosts through all doors—except revolving ones. “So you greet them when they come out the other side,” she explained.

Another question: “If you drop your fork during a meal in a restaurant, do you start using your client’s when he is not looking, wipe it off and keep eating, hand it to your server and ask for another or leave it on the ground and ask for another?”

The class answer, hand it to the server was wrong. “It’s a paid service,” she said. “You don’t want to be down on your hands and knees picking up a dirty fork. Maybe you do that at your home, but not in a restaurant.”

By lunchtime, Warrick handed off the class to her colleagues to head across town to the public-sector Indian Oil Company to enlighten a group of 60 young engineers and lawyers on the art of manners.

But before she left Pillai and his colleagues, Warrick offered a few more tips — don’t write on people’s business cards in front of them and, for goodness sake, don’t put them in your back pocket and sit on them.

“There is nothing more insulting,” she said with a smile.

In ambitious India, workplace etiquette rounds out the coursework
By Emily Wax Tuesday, July 6, 2010

NEW DELHI -- 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 call-center techies, chief executives, animation artists, MBAs and Bollywood film stars, all of whom 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 burgeoning middle classes who are the first generation in their families to enter the nation's booming and globally minded economy.