Passionate About India

Raghuram Rajan is potentially great news for the Indian economy. Anyone who talks about “Saving capitalism from the capitalists” has to be good news, for humanity per se. The IIT, IIM educated man is an intellectual of a relatively high calibre. Not that all his arguments are correct – mainly because of his lack of understanding of the positives of a planned economic system – but his heart is in the right place. Having spent most of his life in USA, his panacea for all ills, as expected, is capitalism. Where he scores however is his better understanding of capitalism’s ills and where capitalism’s ‘fault lines’ are. He has rightly championed the cause against monopolies and oligarchists – and that’s the key reason why he is the man India needs. Rajan’s analysis about India very correctly observes that the big Indian billionaires (the guys I call “Blood billionaires”) are in those sectors where there is high government interference, and where licensing and price controls are highly ...

A lot has been said about Steve Jobs. Indeed, he was a fighter and his success story is most inspiring. His biography ‘The journey is the reward’, written years ago, inspired me personally to try and achieve more. And since Steve Jobs was the creative wild and hippie underdog during the same era as Gates, perhaps he overshadowed Gates largely during our times. Yet, I have always maintained that Bill Gates is the man who is the real visionary. Far beyond any businessman the world has seen in our times. For who is a greater business icon? The man who makes billions and keeps them as reserves or the man who makes billions and then uses that money to change the world into a better place to live in? Yes, that’s what differentiates Bill Gates from all his contemporaries. Greatly inspired by the Rockefeller family, Bill Gates, in the year 2000, by combining three of his and his wife’s charities, decided to do what no one could ever imagine. He decided to give away 95% of his wealth to ch...

On the 13th of January, 2014, our current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh laid the foundation stone for one of India’s largest nuclear power plants in Haryana amidst protests from various groups. Had logic and public opinion been something that our Prime Minister or his government respected, then AAP perhaps would not have been there in the first place. But these have not been his forte; as is well known, he neither uses his mouth (the absolute lack of communication from him), nor his ears (the disregard for public opinion). Or perhaps he has sold his soul so massively to Western interests that his skin has become far too thick for anything to affect him, including the imminent end of his official tenure. I have been a diehard anti-nuclear energy man from day one, and wouldn’t spend too many words delving into the scary possibilities of a Japan-like natural disaster and its possible effects. But the fact is, nuclear plants can be most fragile and such incidents can have disastrous cons...

I have written about these earlier too and I think the time is ripe to repeat the same. These are India’s biggest economic issues, yet, despite some voices here and there, nothing is being done about them on a red alert scale. Yes, I am talking about black money and corruption and how our politicians, hand in hand with bureaucrats and businessmen, have placed us at a shameful position with respect to these. If BJP really needs a unique differentiator to convince the electorate, then rather than just focusing on the economic development agenda, they should necessarily spearhead the fight against black money and corruption and not be just another voice speaking against these issues. I collate out here various statistics that I’ve mentioned in some of previous editorials too, and you’ll see how pathetic India’s situation has become with respect to black money. As per various reports, the amount of black money stashed abroad by Indians is approximately $1450 billion, the largest in the wo...