Passionate About India

Natural resources have always been the moot point for many a conflict and have tempted Kings and kingdoms into conflicts and wars since ages. A quick journey across our history would be enough to realise that the mightiest regimes have made planned moves to conquer natural resources – be it precious minerals, radioactive elements, energy resources, drugs, water or even human power. Talking about modern history, countries like US, UK and other Western powers have invaded nations in search of human slaves to natural gas. Amidst all this, the bad news is that the era of cheap natural resources is definitely far gone. Natural resources and illegal occupation are very closely linked together; yet the correlation is largely ignored. The one time champion and monopolist nation of natural resources today is finding it expensive to explore its own natural wealth and is rather depending on imports. As per the US Geological Survey, 2011, United States imports 93 per cent of its antimony and 10...

If in the world one needs to locate a string of pearls and a ring of fire at the same point, it has to be, without any doubt, India. For almost the last six decades or so, our neighbours have been attacking us on all fronts and as a nation we have been consistently acting as a sitting duck. It’s obviously a matter of immense pride that India, in its history of existence, has neither invaded any foreign land nor attacked any nation with an intention of occupying foreign territory. But then, against such a strong principle, a country also needs to develop similar strong counter-principles. It should have had a mandate that it should be treated the way it treats others. This is where we fell flat. On the one hand, we do everything possible to make sure we as a nation treat geographical borders with the utmost respect and righteousness; but then, on the other, we have failed to sprinkle the same feeling among others. Unfortunately, we largely failed to protect our borders and give it the ...

Joseph R. Biden Jr. just became the first US Vice President to visit India in three decades. While India considers this to be a proof of its popularity and widespread influence, there is The People’s Liberation Army of China (PLA) proving us all wrong. PLA crossed the Line of Actual Control (LAC) into India for the nth time this year alone! That China is bullying India has become more a common headline these days – and during a time when India is busy with some ineffective verbal tactics to cajole and persuade its adamant, powerful neighbour. But all along, we’ve seen China adopting the carrot and stick approach while dealing with our nation. How have we reacted? Actually, the more pertinent question is – have we? History stands testimony to the fact that India – more often than not – chooses to sit back and take the blow (or many blows-after-many!) than being proactive in its foreign policy. Is there a wiser justification to the fact that even a much smaller (and weaker perhaps) ...

Pedigreed European brands – from Rolls Royce to BMW, from Armani to Marks and Spencer – all evoke awe inspiring respect and admiration. And that’s the case with many expensive European brands glittering in the lives of the rich and famous across the world since many decades (from Rajiv Gandhi’s classic Rolex to Saudi King Abdullah’ pristine fleet of Rolls Royces). These brands, marketed globally by a horde of European MNCs, also got visible support from governments in Europe under the premise that the larger these iconoclastic brands and MNCs grew, the more would grow Europe’s employment base. But as has now been evidenced empirically, contrary to common perception, MNCs and such brands have really not turned out to be the proverbial gold mines for European economies. Far from it, as the situation stands now, multinational enterprises employ less than 1 per cent of the European industrial workforce; greater than 99 per cent of the workforce is employed in Small and Medium Enterpri...

Strange as it may seem, despite India’s image of an amiable and polite nation, the country is surrounded by a league of adversaries with their noose always sharp to bait the hinterland and disturb the peace-cord of the nation. Needless to say, Pakistan is a major player in the league; China too is not far behind for all the obvious reasons. But what is most disconcerting is that the entire set of our neighbours, including Bangladesh and Nepal, have left no stone unturned to create political fissures in the border states; thus creating a rift between various ethnic and racial classes. Not only by our immediate neighbours, but India is also attacked with venomous content by and from unlikely quarters including apparently non-interfering Saudi and UAE communities. The malicious exercise against India has been active since quite a long time and today has enveloped all border-sharing states with its circumference engulfing almost all possible ethnic communities. To get the best desirab...

The opening of the first Starbucks outlet in South Mumbai in October last year triggered quite some frenzy among Mumbaikars, with long queues of venti-mocha-frap verve translating into a major rock concert hysteria. And it was all for a coffee shop! Imagine the burst of marketing energy from Starbucks to take advantage of this excitement. Within five months of opening its first outlet, four each were opened in Mumbai and Delhi (taking the footprint of the coffee chain to nine outlets in India). It reminded me of the kind of madness that was witnessed during the launch of Pepsi and the relaunch of Coke in India, way back in the early 1990s. Here’s the simple truth – our craze for foreign brands has never ceased, despite our progress in almost all dimensions of socio-economic parameters. Why? Because as a nation, experience has taught us that our brands have never quite had the gumption of American, British, European or even Japanese brands. The halo was and is missing. This lack of uni...

The People’s Republic of China may have initially missed out on industrial revolution that made the western nations what they are today and constrained China to an emerging economy in spite of its mercurial economic growth for the last three-and-a-half decades. But learning from the past, it is all set to become a front-runner in the virtual revolution, and is very ready to leverage maximum possible benefits out of it. In fact, it has gone a step further to set off cyber warfare with other countries in the congested and tightly competitive virtual world. And this time, it won’t settle for being a laggard, for it is heading fast towards its most cherished goal of becoming a global superpower! Undoubtedly, the modern warfare is no more about the number of casualties or destruction of physical property. The new doctrines of war is all about attacking a nation economically and paralyzing it for years to come. An economically broken nation would not only destroy its human capital in t...

Just a couple of months back, the entire global media fraternity was talking about the next probable war between China and Japan over the issue of a small group of islands in the East China Sea. Just when people thought that the issue was cooling down, last month, a delegation of former US officials submitted a report to Hillary Clinton that the dispute could spin out of control and result into a military confrontation; add to that China’s recently declared intentions to deploy marine surveillance drones to track maritime activity around the cluster of islands from where the conflict originated. The entire issue is certainly far from over, with both the nations in no mood to step back. There is, of course, nothing new in the conflict between Japan and China. Through centuries, these two Asian neighbours have been brutal to each other – politically, economically and militarily. The Japanese monarchy before World War II was notable for their imperialistic intentions – they invaded C...

The recent case of Indian traders being kidnapped in China has opened up a can of worms. Apart from the case revealing weaknesses in the Chinese judiciary (as I had highlighted in an editorial a few weeks back), it has also brought out in the open something that traders from India (and other countries) were facing for a long time but not speaking about openly. The big trade that happens between India and China is through the scores of wholesalers operating out of wholesale markets in India like the Sadar Bazaar in Delhi. These are not the big guys who prefer getting into litigation that easily; they also aren’t amongst those who operate with lawyers and bigger paraphernalia. These are smaller traders, though huge in numbers, who go to Chinese towns like Yiwu in particular and pick one or two containers of goods worth Rs. 30 lakh to a crore once every quarter. And they now fear entering China. The question is why? Can one incident of kidnapping shake up an entire community of traders, e...

Ever since the American economy went bust and the European economy has been going down, it’s sad to see my favorite magazine, The Economist, frantically trying to defend the wrong and go wrong by criticising the right. Time and again. Just a handful of weeks ago, in their frantic effort to criticize everything Chinese and everything non-market oriented, The Economist did a cover story called The Rise of State Capitalism (January 21-27, 2012). Basically, the story talked about how economies like China and even India are becoming more dependent on large public sector units and how this is bad blah blah. The obvious supposed scare is that public sector corporations are inefficient, have time overruns, invariably have cost overruns, have ingrained corruption and so on! The real scare is the growing might of China, of course! Our group is into almost all kinds of consulting activities and we rarely come across a private sector company where an executive doesn’t ask for a bribe before award...

Indian diplomat collapses inside a Chinese court In November 2011, Wang Sixin, a law professor in the Communication University of China, opined, “In India, the common law tradition allows judges to begin litigation just based on a news report or a letter from a petitioner, whether [the petitioner is] a lawyer or not. China needs to adopt this practice.” This suggestion of his sounds quite ostensible considering a nation where freedom of speech and expression is highly censored and the judiciary has been used to further this dictatorship of the State. The same was the cruel case in Yiwu city with the Indian diplomat, S Balachandran, who was denied food and medicine despite his repeated requests that he was a diabetes patient; this went on till he actually collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. Balachandran was trying to present the case for the release of two Indians who had been kidnapped by Chinese traders because their Yemeni firm had not yet paid some dues. This blatantly r...

This editorial comes at this crucial juncture when the ruling government and the opposition (that includes some Congress allies in the government too) have locked horns over the entry of foreign private players in the retail segment. The debate was imperative as the retail industry has always been considered as the nervous system of any nation, and this industry has in most of the cases even helped nations revive themselves during bad times. So it was interesting to evaluate the entire debate from an analytical dimension as well. Currently, the organized retail in India is only 2 per cent of the retail industry; clearly, a huge opportunity is waiting to be unleashed. The opportunity can be gauged from the fact that the American organized retail market is 80 per cent of the overall retail market, Thailand is at 40 per cent and China at 20 per cent! If on one hand organised retail is a global reality, then on the other, the Indian middle class has the given power to splurge, making the p...

When I went to China a decade back, what I saw hit me very hard. I felt that if all of us in Delhi were to work 24x7 for 25 years, it would still be tough to convert Delhi into Beijing. That’s the China I was expecting to see when I went there again last month. What I saw instead was an extra 25 years of growth in the last 10 years!!! If ten years back, there were gigantic roads but less cars, this time the roads were filled with American cars; brands which American companies haven’t even cared to launch in India! If the last time I saw high-rise buildings, then this time I saw ten times more of them! If the last time I was amazed with Beijing, then this time I realized that we couldn’t even become Guangzhou if we worked 24x7 for the next 50 years. I believe that every Indian politician must have a visit to China as a mandatory part of his induction process into the Parliament (especially the Communists of India who have also so shamefully cheated their respective states year after yea...

A few days back, the world population touched the 7 billion mark. No wonder the debate has gained momentum about how this growing population would put unprecedented pressure on already scare resources. The riots over food (in Egypt), water crisis and deaths due to curable diseases in developing countries have raised concerns over the population explosion. With the 7 billionth living child hailing from a country like India (and some other nations, symbolically chosen by the UN), the blame of populating the world and causing the global crisis is being shifted back to the developing nations and citizens of the Third World! But then, the moot question is – is the earth really not ready for 7 billion people and is nature really stretched for generating resources for all? Are the citizens of developing nations consuming more and is the population expansion in these countries the real reason behind the growing resource crunch? Last year in August, Obama blamed India and China for the global f...

United States’ finely tuned images of ‘land of opportunity’, ‘land of the free’ and ‘home of the brave’ – all have in recent time received a major jolt with protestors pouring in from all over the country in thousands. It is probably the biggest protest since anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations in the 70s! Finally their police are finding it tough to control their own people. This time they are failing to smoke them out, because the enemy lies in every other house. I wrote about the coming end of capitalism – the way we know it – in 2008 itself as an aftermath of the latest recession that has hit the world due to its blind belief in free market profiteering and was surprised why (despite people around the world, from countries in the Middle East to a laid back country like India, showing a tendency to come out on the streets to press for their rights) people in the western world were delaying coming out in the streets to press for what was their right – the right to stable and dignified li...

The strength of the Chinese population can be gauged by the very fact that today around 19.3 per cent of world population is Chinese. But then, such a figure based on the law of averages hides more than what it reveals. The figure that talks volumes about the Chinese sphere of influence, at least with respect to human capital, is that of 50 million plus overseas Chinese who are settled in various parts of the world and playing their bit in accelerating the fast-paced Chinese economy. Today, overseas Chinese not only pump money into the Chinese economy but also facilitate Chinese ambitions of global cultural and political colonisation. Overseas Chinese have made themselves inimitable in almost all spheres of influences – from heading many hard power areas by chairing vital positions in global forums, military and political institutions of many nations to being the face of various soft power areas of influence. One may not be well versed with the Chinese powers-that-be, but at the same t...

There is this flippant yet popular joke that goes like this: if you clone yourself four times, one will be Chinese! That says it all about the manner in which the world perceives the ubiquitous Chinese – populated and copycats. There’s no doubt, China has become numinously overpowering and has integrated itself into the lives of people all across the globe by their sheer human power and the power to produce goods and services at a prodigiously unprecedented pace and volume. So much so that from Greenland to Antarctica, and from Middle East to Europe, if one were to try and search the origin of the products used in these countries on a daily basis, in all probability the ‘origin’ would turn out to be China. Be it your cell phone or the laptop, or even the engine of your car, everything turns out to be made in China. An original iPhone or even its look-a-like (with similar or more features), both are made in China. In fact, all this is known. But what is mostly unknown is the infrangible...

Recently, in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), China toppled Japan to secure the second position globally, after US. In fact, China was very close to achieving this feat the last year itself, but fell short at the last moment. As per reports, if China keeps growing at its current pace, then by 2025, it should topple the US to become the largest economy of the world. Who could have imagined that an economy, which was languishing till about three decades back, has put itself in such formidable position? What is even more amazing is the fact that at a point in time when the world economy is still recovering from the global recession, China kept on growing. The growth has been such that in 2005, it first overtook Britain and France; then in 2007, it surpassed Germany to secure the position of the third largest economy of the world. It is not that the growth did not bring in iniquitous distribution of wealth; but then, at the same time, China has managed to pull out a staggering 600 mi...

It is not that Washington has done something like this for the first time. In fact, the US has got a checkered history of taking gratuitously arbitrary and insensitive stances, with a singular objective of fulfilling their own selfish motives. I’m referring to Obama’s recent trip to China and his most ridiculous statement of how China can play an important role in making the Indo-Pak relationship healthier. Not just this, Obama has clearly indicated a visible tilt towards China by offering to strengthen communication, dialogue and cooperation on issues related to South Asia and work together with China to promote peace, stability and development in that region! Although US Presidents have had a sparkling history of purposefully committing such extravagant blunders (for selfindulgent American gain), Obama seems to surpass them all, as it has been extremely rare for any American President to acknowledge China as a harbinger of ‘peace’ in South Asia, and that too with respect to India and...

I’ve always been an admirer of China. I have also been an admirer of Mao Tse Tung – despite the scandalous (true or untrue) details of his private life – and believe that today’s China, good or bad, is an absolute direct result of his vision. What I have admired the most about China is the way they have been able to pull out millions of people from below poverty, in a matter of a few decades. This feat of China is unmatched in recorded history. What has made them achieve this unbelievable feat is their macroeconomic bottom-up model, wherein they focused on creating purchasing power directly within the poor. This has enabled them to become one of the formidable forces in the world today. They also know that if there is one nation which could pose challenges in the path of Chinese glory, it is India. So some time back, I came across an intriguing article, which generally got overlooked by most. It was reported by almost all mainstream newspapers that a Chinese strategist has contended th...