Team / Arundhati Virmani

Paris, 2023
Pateau Consultants is conducting several cross-cultural sessions for Sonepar, a leading technical solutions provider to electrical industry professionals.  

Weiden-Lille, 2023, March
Pateau Consultants organises a cross-cultural coaching session for the Witt Group, a leading German clothing mail order retailer belonging to Otto Group

Paris-Bonn, 2023, March-May-December
Pateau Consultants continues to support Buyin, the JV of Deutsche Telekom and Orange through on-line and face-to-face coaching and cross-cultural training. 

“Working with cultural differences can be a way of enrichening and empowerment. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the world of business today.”

Born and brought up in India, Arundhati Virmani was exposed to a multi-cultural environment on all fronts. Her father's Persian-Urdu culture and mother's Punjabi-Hindi traditions prepared her for the diversity of languages, religions and ethnies that characterize Indian society. Communicating and relating with difference has been a daily experience since her school days, from the Catholic Jesus and Mary school run by Irish nuns to the Alliance Française, by way of the famous feminist Bengali school in Delhi.

Her PhD in French History from the Sorbonne, focusing on contemporary political culture, was a successful challenge to her capacities of dealing with cultural differences. Back in India as Reader in Delhi University, the oldest and most prestigious of Indian universities, she convinced her students of the professional advantages of a trans-cultural approach and was very active in Franco-Indian academic exchanges.

Living since 1993 in Marseille with her “corrézien” husband and two daughters has shown her powers of adjusting without sacrificing one's own specificity and cultural riches.

She is currently teaching at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille and the University Paul-Cézanne (Aix Marseille III). Her experiences with cultural pluralism, her knowledge of the problems that have dogged joint ventures in India since 1991 has led her to give conferences and participate in training programmes for executives both in France and in India. She has recently worked as consultant for Eurocopter and the Department of International Management at the École Supérieure de Commerce Marseille-Provence.

Her books include L'Inde, Une puissance en mutation (Paris, La Documentation Française, 2010), and India, 1900-1947. Un Britannique au coeur du Raj (Paris, Autrement, 2009).