Passionate About India

LTTE is finished! Prabhakaran has been killed!! Perhaps Sri Lanka was left with no other choice. And perhaps it’s good for their future. However, the debate is not so simple. Successive Indian governments, from the time of our late Prime Minister Nehru, have had an important role to play. Not in any good manner but in a very spineless negative manner. History is testimony to the fact that after Independence, we have always played a pathetic role when it has come to managing our neighbours, thus allowing a very negatively aggressive China the upper hand. We gave away Tibet to China – though historically Tibet was always a part of India – thereby allowing China to come literally next to our borders and create continuous nonsense. We have failed miserably in handling even a country like Bhutan, which used to shield ULFA terrorists against us. We gave away Bangladesh very gallantly, but despite that, we failed to manage relations with the Bangladeshis; and speaking about Pakistan is next t...

The election results are out! We were not into any prediction games, but tried to base our prediction in the last issue on what others tried to predict! And it seems apart from Total TV and Live India, there was no one else who could make the right prediction about the election results! But I’m excited. Excited, because though no massive change in governance or the corruption index is likely with our current breed of rulers, the voters are exerting their powers in their own way; and that means that although very slowly, in another twenty years from now, these voters will elect the right people to power finally. The signals this time were clearer perhaps than ever before. Firstly, anti-incumbency is more or less out – only your performance matters! Although the mandate nationwide was clearly against BJP, in the states where they have been doing creditable work, they still have won more seats. Even in the Assembly elections, it has been the same scenario. In Delhi, Sheila Dixit led the C...

There isn’t any doubt with the fact that over the years, the percentage of electorate turning out to exercise their franchise has been falling at an increasing rate. And no one other than the political class needs to be blamed as to why such a large proportion of the electorate stands politically disengaged. And this trend, which in itself is not so encouraging, is most visible in urban India. Rightly so, for the informed and empowered urban India realizes how the political class has been continuously defeating the entire purpose of elections. But then, this has not been true for rural India! It is rightly said that the rural heartland is actually the heart of political India. Therefore, anybody willing to make it big in his/her political career would have to necessarily make it big in the rural heartland. And that is the reason most of the political class routinely marches towards rural India, albeit only during elections. While the rest of the time, not many would be much interested ...

Midway through this election, I would not be surprised if some insider reports state that at least some of the national parties, if not all, have already started working for the next election. And by this I mean the next Union election, which in any case would be much sooner than expected. For if one were to believe the exit polls results by most media houses, then I have no doubt in saying that we are heading for a terribly fractured mandate. And probably given the economic environment, there could not have been a more damaging news than this for the overall economy. With economic slowdown plaguing the whole world, it has been witnessed that the governments of most of the economies worth talking about, have been extremely involved in finding ways to tackle this recession; and if possible, to arrest its mayhem as much possible. And what we are observing in India is just the contrary, with possible election outcomes just adding to it! In today’s India, political alliances are mostly bas...

Imagine the worth of the 70 Taliban fighters that Pakistan is claiming to have killed in its latest, but disputatiously reluctant assault over the ever expanding and over ambitious Taliban. Well, hold your breath – it’s an incredible US$1billion! Yes, that’s the amount that the US government has gratifyingly pledged to give Pakistan for carrying out its indolent military operations against the Taliban, which was within touching distance of Pakistani nuclear establishments. While Pakistan is too happy to oblige the US dictums for the bait of $1 billion, what is completely getting ignored is the fact that this operation in the districts of Buner, Swat and Dir is nowhere near to routing the Taliban. And yet, Pakistan gets the money! During the Bush regime, Pakistan had to embrace the American war against terror in the post 9/11 era and had to perfunctorily fight those very rogue elements which it had incubated, nurtured and nourished over decades. In return to this so called ‘favour’ that...

you are receptive to change and don’t stick to irrational logic just for the heck of it! Prior to this editorial, I’ve written a couple of more editorials on the American President, Barack Obama. In those editorials, I have been extremely appreciative with respect to his historic win; and more than anything else, with his win that had actually made the American citizen the real winner. I had also been extremely candid with my appreciation towards him, not just for him becoming the President but the arousing reasons that made him so. For the uninitiated, I wrote that he demanded change from his fellow Americans, not simply with respect to the economic outlook or foreign policy, but in something graver; he beseeched them to realise that in the hardships of today should not be forgotten the intensity of the American character of past. This is not to miss how enamoured I was with his outstanding speeches. But then, that’s history now as President Obama is already a few months old in the Wh...

Yes! Indeed the western recession is really the beginning of good news for India! But to understand that, I’ve to take you away from the topic of western recession for a while... to the Japanese recession! For years, I’ve admired the Japanese style of management as a management teacher and given its examples in scores of my workshops. However, over the last one decade or so, I’ve been continuously facing one key question from my workshop participants – mostly CEOs from top corporations of India Incorporated. Their question to me invariably has been, ‘If the Japanese management style is as wonderful as described, then why has Japan been in a recession for the last decade and more?’ This question is what I guess one needs to understand first, if one has to really understand the beauty of the current western recession. My answer to this question has always been very simple. I believe culture plays a very important part in shaping up economies. What succeeds in one culture fails somewhere ...