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...

The newspapers and TV channels have left no stones unturned to remind people of how Arvind Kejriwal swore on his children that he will not come to power taking support from any party (“I swear on my children [that] there can be no tie-up between us. We are fighting the election against these scam-ridden parties,” he had said just a few days earlier). And it’s not any party, but the same allegedly hugely corrupt Congress against which his entire election campaign was targeted, with whose support Arvind now plans to come to power! It’s anybody’s guess now with such a support, how genuine his investigations into Congress’ so called scams would be! Welcome to the world of politics! What is worse is that this entire game is now being seen by many as his having joined hands with Congress to sabotage Modi’s chances of coming to power in 2014. And for a new party which swore on being honest and having no truck with other parties, this suspicion can be a huge blot. People would have excused hi...

Truly said, every coin has two sides. But when it comes to policies and politics, a random toss can be really catastrophic. The same can be said for globalisation. Of course, globalisation came with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand where it made the world a melting pot, then on the other it also became the reason for the cracks on that very pot – making it fragile and susceptible. With the advent of globalisation, the concept of nation-state – or rather, shall I say nationalism – gradually started diminishing! The world-order started getting governed more by knowledge and communication technologies. Along with knowledge and technology, the ease of mobility acted as catalyst to make the world smaller, more congested and heterogeneous. So when migration and cross-culture relationships were augmenting each other, in some other part of the world national identities were getting lost. That said, nationalism has the ability to enhance solidarity, but if not chann...

Aam Aadmi Party was counted off as nothing more than an apostate rebel group – as had been done many times before in the past – that could achieve nothing more than being a minor irritant to the national parties. This perception has undoubtedly been proved wrong in the recently held Delhi state elections. But hold on! AAP is still not there yet. True, they won in Delhi significantly, but there are many more factors. The national capital accounts for nothing more than six Lok Sabha seats and voting in Delhi doesn’t at all represent the prevalent national mood. The fact that the average Delhiite is more politically conscious than voters in other cities (with the exception of Kolkata) and the vast hinterland and rural belt that characterize the real Bharat, tells us the future will be a tougher climb for AAP. Each state has its own issues, their own unique problems that their people are concerned about; and these problems are not necessarily related to the issue of corruption – the most ...