Passionate About India

I have very fond memories of a great patriotic politician of India (very few such men can be found amongst today’s politicians), Vasant Sathe. Apart from his very intelligent, practical and radical views on the tax structure, I remember how he always compared Korea to India to show how a small nation could surge ahead so fast while we kept cheating our countrymen. When I went to Korea recently, I couldn’t but help feel the same; I even wrote about this a few weeks ago in one of my editorials. In the week gone by, I had the opportunity to sit with a gentleman who is a consultant to a company called Electrosteel Steels Limited. He told me the most amazing story of a venture – for setting up a steel plant – by one Mr. Kejriwal near Bokaro on about 1500 acres of land. It is a steel plant being set up with a capacity of 2.2 million tonnes. Hearing the fascinating story (I’ll explain later on why I found it fascinating) of this plant made me remember Mr. Sathe again. Amongst various things, ...

Amongst the many critical predicaments that the Indian economy suffers from, corruption has been one of the biggest monsters, and thankfully the most talked about in recent days. Needless to say, corruption has corroded every delivery system and has made it completely dysfunctional. The entire Indian public life is riddled with overriding rates of corruption – from the Adarsh land scam to Commonwealth Games misappropriations to the 2G spectrum scam – the list here has been endless, and the magnitude, obscene. In fact, India’s public life was never clean – the infamous Bofors scandal, Harshad Mehta’s nexus with senior politicians and Ketan Parekh’s stock market manipulation – all had their own perilous impact on the economy! It requires no empirical study or statistical survey to exhibit that we comfortably are the top performers in all corruption related global indices. Take for instance, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) where India’s rank has been slippin...

Woodrow Wilson once said that, “A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.” Rebutting the same, decades later, Omar Bongo, former President of Gabon, argued against the use sanctions, commenting, “...It is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually millions of people end up being directly punished.” With time, the very objective of sanctions has undergone a full transformation – today, sanctions are used mostly for strategic gains than anything else. The United States and its allies (particularly Israel) are closing in on Iran! With a thumping majority (100-0), the US Senate last month approved sanctions...

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...

I have often said that the future of India depends largely upon the future of education in our country. The demographic dividend that so many of us so proudly talk about, will actually be a mirage and also be counterproductive, if we continue with the kind of education system that we currently have in India. Along with eradication of needless delays in the judicial system and a the required massive investment in health, I would rate reforms in education as the most important vision that we need to implement in order to reap dividends out of this young demographic. And we really don’t have much time left. After six long decades, India finally realised the importance of declaring education as our fundamental right, which was waiting its materialisation since Independence. This, I believe is not only very critical in revamping the entire education system of the nation, but also acts as the stepping stone towards education reforms. Starting with the Sarva Skhisha Abhiyaan program launched ...

I am always proud of everything we do, for we do things with a lot of passion! And when it’s about a book that had been a long cherished dream, I am all the prouder! Yes, my next book CULT is now available in stores. I have co-authored it with my most cherished friend of 22 years, A. Sandeep, the Group Editor of Planman Media. The book was launched in London on the 12th of December by management icon, Guy Kawasaki, a man who has also held the enviable post of "The Chief Evangelist” at the $353.07 billion-worth Apple Inc. (m-cap as of December 14, 2011; making it the world’s second largest company by m-cap) in the past. And when he says that if Steve Jobs would have been alive, he would have been proud of this book, I have reasons to be very very proud. Here I present excerpts from one of the 36 chapters of the book! The chapter’s name is: "The Winning Losers” (Section I, Chapter 10). HELLO LOSERS! If you describe yourself as the bankrupt also-ran, the sure-to-lose stooge, the...

As I sit down on the eve of my 40th birthday to write this editorial, I couldn’t have thought of writing on a more important aspect – as great political leadership is what India requires more than anything else today. And though I have written considerably on leadership, it has mainly been about corporate leadership. Leadership in corporations is massively different from political leadership, and therefore it requires a special model and a special line of thinking. While in corporations the final aim is profit maximization in most cases, in politics the final objective is necessarily social welfare maximization. While in corporations the best leaders are often the best marketing guys, in politics the best leaders necessarily have to be the people who are the sincerest and most hard working. While in business you can make do without the knowledge of economics, in politics that can be suicidal. While in business being unethical can harm you and at most your stake holders, in politics the...