Passionate About India

The world has been written about Sachin, but this is something that has gone completely unreported. That’s how Sachin wanted it to be. It was 2003. Without much expectations, my team had gone to Sachin to invite him for the launch of my book, The Great Indian Dream. He obviously was busy but he kept the copy of the book. One fine afternoon in 2004, we were overjoyed to receive a call from Vinod Naidu, then the Director of Worldtel, informing us that Sachin had gone through the book and wanted us to meet him. We had no clue what was in store for us. My colleague Deepak Shah went to meet him and what followed was a dream come true for anybody. Yes!! The Master Blaster had agreed to endorse our Great Indian Dream Foundation advertisements!! An association that lasted for 3 years!!! At that time, the market rate for a Sachin Tendulkar endorsement was Rs.4 crores per year and he had decided not to charge a penny for the same from us. Not just that, he had decided to give us one day to shoot...

I am taken back to the year 2000, when during the then American President Bill Clinton’s historic visit to India, I had started my seminar series called “The Great Indian Dream – India can beat America,” with a front page advertisement in leading dailies welcoming Clinton on the day of his arrival to India. The header of the ad said, “LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN SUPREMACY.” It has been seven years since then, and the time has come for people to realise the unfolding of the same in front of them and grasp the reasons behind the same. The time for the great power shift has come – the time for power to shift from the American hands to the Chinese, Indian and, dare I say, the Middle Eastern hands. As I wrote in my editorial two issues ago in The Sunday Indian magazine, on account of the cataclysmic losses that each of the US financial behemoths has been suffering, many of them have been incessantly bailed out by Middle Eastern petrodollars. So, while the investments of Kuwait Investment Authorit...

With the shootouts and arrests of a number of suspected terrorists, the police seem to have cracked the series of bombings that have been rocking India of late. The interesting thing is that most of those arrested have two things in common. Firstly, they are from Azamgarh (and our cover story focuses on that); and secondly, they all seem to be educated. I was recently there for an interview on a TV channel and the topic being discussed was – “Educated terrorists! Is it the new face of terrorism?” What really shocked me was the complete lack of perspective on the entire issue that the speakers had. While one top police officer said that it was not his concern, the other speaker – the head of a well known university – started blabbering that it’s the result of alienation, discrimination, economic marginalisation and the Gujarat massacre, etc., etc., almost giving his tacit support to the heinous act of barbarism that happened recently in Delhi and other cities. He even tried to compare t...