A Ray of Hope

In the past few days, there has been more depressing news than good ones--- "Butcher Doctors in Delhi & UP" ; "Jaswant's Spy Tale". But my heart brimmed with joy when I just now read about an Indian winning the prestigious Ramon Magasasay award. IIT alumnus wins Magsaysay award

Ramon Magsaysay Award Citation for Arvind Kejriwal states:

"The brazen corruption of the high and the mighty may grab headlines, but for ordinary people it is the ubiquity of everyday corruption that weighs heaviest. And that demoralizes. Arvind Kejriwal, founder of India’s Parivartan, understands this, which is why his campaign for change begins with the small things........
In electing Arvind Kejriwal to receive the 2006 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his activating India’s right-to-information movement at the grassroots, empowering New Delhi’s poorest citizens to fight corruption by holding government accountable to the people."

The Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership honors “individuals, forty years of age and below, doing outstanding work on issues of social change in their communities, but whose leadership is not yet broadly recognized outside of these communities.” An Award in this category was given for the first time in 2001 under grant from Ford Foundation.

Kudos to Mr. Kejriwal! You are a source of inspiration to the youth of India.

Dabbawalas embrace technology

We all know about Mumbai's legendary lunchbox carriers, popularly known as Dabbawalas or tiffinwalas. There are 5,000 of them and they deliver ~200,000 tiffins/day. With a unique blend of teamwork, efficiency and punctuality, they are an integral part of the city's ability to function as a dynamic financial metropolis.

Now, in an attempt to boost awareness about their service they have gone a bit more high tech. They have set up a website and an SMS service to increase customer numbers. Manish Tripathi, a software engineer, has built the new technology for them, and has been adopted as an honorary dabbawala. [http://www.mydabbawala.com/]

Burka-clad models?

The First Post, British online magazine, reports: "Women's faces are being painted out of billboards across the city of Peshawar in northern Pakistan after local government officials threatened to take action against advertisers." Welcome to the Dark Ages!


In India too there is no dearth of such male chauvinists who vandalise shops & threaten couples on Valentine's Day. I think it is a sense of insecurity that makes men try to subjugate women in name of religion and tradition. Let the feminine power grow, its good for the world.


Generally speaking, women are as capable of performing any job as their male counterparts are. So, why stifle their growth? Let them blossom and I'm sure they shall, if given free reign, make this world a happier place to live just as their very presence changes a house into a home.

Stifling the netspace

After the recent Mumbai blasts, a Government of India order had directed all ISPs to block access to certain websites which were spreading “extreme views” using their blogs. [IBNLive: 'Are we heading towards another Emergency?']. But the ISPs have gone a step ahead and blocked all the blogs in India, giving technical reasons about their inability to selectively block few blogs. Bloggers in India have not taken kindly to the government's high-handedness in trying to muzzle their right to freedom of expression and have been exchanging angry mails about this incident.

In my opinion this knee jerk reaction is not going to yield desired result. Do we ban books just because some writers try to incite communal passions? Democratic governments don't, can't and shouldn't control citizens' right to think and express. Internet is a wonderful medium of communication and by trying to manipulate it Indian govt. is only following the footprints of totalitarian states. I pray it soon realizes the futility of its authoritarian attitude and quash the order given to ISPs.

Gabbar thunders in Sanskrit

Who says Sanskrit is a dead language? IBNLive reports: "...the umd_samskritam group, comprising students at the University of Maryland and young professionals from the area, have adopted to promote spoken Sanskrit in daily life. The group launched their web site this July 11"

The group of young Sanskrit enthusiasts aim to:
1. Gather in one place all resources related to Sanskrit
2. Act as a facilitator to link all Sanskrit related activities around the world
3. Provide a platform to discuss and promote Sanskrit through forums and blogs

Checkout the website www.speaksanskrit.org, if not for the online resources on Sanskrit, then for the fun of watching Sanskritised versions of Sholay & Kya Bolti Tu [THE "WORLD FAMOUS" VIDEOS FROM SPARSH]

Narayana Murthy, a true Karam yogi

India Inc.’s corporate leaders provide a strange melange of diverse personalities - flamboyant Vijay Mallya, mild Narayana Murthy, disciplined Azim Premji, visionary Ratan Tata, astute Ambanis, focussed Kumar Mangalam Birla - to name a few. But one thing they have in common is that they are world-beating leaders whose reputations precede them wherever they go. Very soon, on August 20th to be precise, one of the most respected among the Indian business leaders, Mr. Narayana Murthy will be embarking on a 'Corporate Vanaprastha' (if at all there is any such phrase). Mr. Murthy belongs to that rare breed of entrepreneurs who have an unflinching faith in their vision and pursue it with dogged perseverance. No wonder that his brainchild, Infosys, is today one of the leading companies in its field of expertise. Under his able stewardship, Infosys has grown from its humble beginnings quarter century ago into a $2 billion plus software giant. At its inception Infosys had only 6 employees and has now more than 58,000 on its payrolls.

Mr. Murthy served as CEO of Infosys for twenty years, and was succeeded by co-founder Nandan Nilekani in March 2002. He is the chairman of the governing body of the IIIT, Bangalore and the IIM, Ahmedabad. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School; Cornell University Board of Trustees; Singapore Management University Board of Trustees; INSEAD's Board of Directors and the Asian Institute of Management's Board of Governors. He is also a member of the Advisory Boards and Councils of the William F. Achtmeyer Center for Global Leadership at the Tuck School of Business, the Corporate Governance initiative at the Harvard Business School, and the Yale University President's Council on International Activities.

Mr. Murthy is an independent director on the board of the DBS Bank, Singapore. He also serves as a director on the Central Board of the RBI, as the co-chairman of the Indo-British Partnership, as a member of the Prime Minister's council on trade and industry. He is an IT advisor to several Asian countries. The list of awards and honors conferred upon him are endless.

Mr. Murthy is known not just for building one of the biggest IT empires in India but also for his Gandhian simplicity. He has voiced concerns about corporate governance in India. He was the Chairman of the Committee on Corporate Governance appointed by the SEBI in 2003. He once suggested, if my memory serves me right, that the highest-paid executive of a company should not earn more than 15 times the salary of the lowest-paid employee of that company. That's a very noble idea, but I wonder if it has been implemented within his own company.

Now that he has decided to quit active management role in his company, he has also ruled out the possibility of venturing into other sectors like pharma/biotechnology. But the Board of Directors at Infosys has resolved to appoint him as an Additional Director of the company from August 21, as also the Non-Executive Chairman and Chief Mentor. So, his association with his company continues.

Wish Indian politicians were as visionary, altruistic and dedicated as Mr. Murthy is.

Mukesh Ambani, man with a Midas touch

It is heartening to see Mr. Mukesh Ambani feature on the cover story of Newsweek's international edition. [Bigger, Faster, Better] Reliance Industries, is now India's largest private-sector enterprise by any measure: revenue ($20 billion in 2005), profit ($2 billion), share of Indian GDP (3.5 percent). Currently, Reliance is India's biggest company by market cap (about $35 billion).

But Mr. Ambani is not one to rest on his laurels. He has already announced his plans to invest more than $11 billion over the next decade to build two new satellite cities outside Mumbai and Delhi. "He foresees these metropolises emerging within just four years, each with a population of 5 million people making $5,000 a year, on average (or seven times India's norm), and hosting top multinational companies."

His other mega vision is to metamorphose India's farming and retail sectors. "Ambani plans to invest $5 billion by 2011 to put both the farms and the stores on the road to modernity, connect them through a distribution system guided by the latest logistics technology, and create enough of a surplus to generate $20 billion in agricultural exports annually."

But this will be an uphill task given the disorganized supply chain and poor infrastructure. Experts say that due of a lack of storage, refrigeration and transportation, some 40 percent of India's fruit and vegetables spoils before reaching market.

"To transform Indian farmers into quality suppliers for his new retail chain, Ambani plans to create 1,600 farm-supply hubs across India, providing technical know-how and credit, selling seeds, fertilizer and fuel, and buying produce. He also plans to build some 85 logistics centers to move food to retail outlets and to ports and airports for export. Reliance is gearing up to train tens of thousands of new employees in the next six to eight months to do everything from erecting prefab warehouses to transporting fresh produce."

That's a splendid vision! Best of luck Mr. Ambani!!

Of Military Prowess and GFP

India's indigenously built, surface-to-surface nuclear capable intermediate range ballistic misslie (IRBM) Agni-III with a range of 3,500 km was test-fired from a range off the Orissa coast on Sunday with much fanfare. Later it developed a snag and the test-firing was described as unsuccessful. [Agni III testfiring unsuccessful]

These two events, which occurred in quick succession, made me ponder over India's military preparedness vis-à-vis other nations. I googled to get more information in this regard. I came across an interesting website, GlobalFirePower.com . It tries to predict the military might of a nation based on a composite average of various parameters like, Finance-related, Military Personnel, Armaments inventories, Logistics, and Key resources. "GlobalFirePower (GFP) provides a unique analytical display of information based on sources from all over the globe....Naturally a list such as this is designed to be subjective so there is room for disagreement as to its accuracy (or inaccuracy)."

A partial ranking of the world military powers:

1 United States of America
2 China
3 Russia
4 India
5 Germany
6 France
7 Japan
8 Turkey
9 Great Britain
10 Brazil
11 Italy
12 South Korea
13 Indonesia
14 Canada
15 Iran
16 Spain
17 Egypt
18 North Korea
19 Australia
20 Pakistan

"NOTE: Nuclear weapons, military experience, unit training and equipment quality are not taken into account."

If such a ranking using similar parameters had been designed in 1930s, India & China would not have even figured in top 20. Germany & Japan would have led the rankings for obvious reasons. GlobalFirePower website has this to add: "If history has shown the observer one thing, it is that war is a part of life. Strange as that may sound, documented records report only 300 years of known peace on our planet, leaving the rest to wallow in the path of war. What that statistic tells us is that there has been some source of conflict between two or more parties on our planet for thousands of years."

Hopefully the mistakes of last century will not be repeated in this century too. The very idea of a large scale war sends a shudder down my spine, but we can't ignore it either.

India 12th richest nation in 2005??

It is heartening to see India's GDP surge to newer heights. IBNLive reports: "India has emerged as the 12th wealthiest nation in the world with its GDP touching $785.47 billion (Rs 35,34,615 crore) in 2005, calculated by the World Bank." Now this report can kindle a sanguine hope in the heart of a billion plus Indians, but it is not prudent to be taken-in by the GDP figures alone. GDP only reflects national income and tells nothing of how that income is distributed or how that income is spent. Though India is ranked 12th in terms of its GDP but it ranks very poorly on parameters such as GDP per capita, infant-mortality rate, literacy rate etc.

Another form of statistical tool used for measuring a nation's overall growth is the HDI -- Human Development Index. "It is a summary composite index that measures a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: longevity, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Longevity is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living by GDP per capita (PPP US$)." Check for yourself the HDI data and see how well India fares. The UN Millennium Development Goals website also provides very useful and insightful data.

I am neither being cynical of India's economic progress in recent years nor am I pessismistic about our reaching the goals envisioned by our founding fathers, but all I'm trying to emphasise is that jubilation at GDP figures is pre-mature. India has a long way to go before it can be in the top league w.r.t. all the socio-economic parameters.

Some of the key challenges before us are:
1: Extreme poverty
2: Illiteracy
3: Gender & social inequality
4: Infant & maternal mortality
5: HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB and other diseases
6: Environmental sustainability
7: Poor infrastructure

The task at hand may seem onerous but it is not impossible to achieve. What is needed is strong a political will and visionary leadership. Is it expecting too much in present day India?

Of IMF and GDP

Alarmed by the rising trend in vices around the globe, IMF (International Morality Federation), a motley group comprising the puritans and zealots of various hues and leanings, has included in its recently published annual report GDP (Gross Depravity Parameter) to measure how different countries fare on moral report card. IMF has taken into consideration the efficiency and efficacy of the moral police in a particular nation to arrive at their rankings. Some of the criteria used by IMF for preparing the report include: curtailing freedom of expression of citizens; number of books banned, fatwas/threats issued against artists, writers and cartoonists, raids on night clubs/dancing bars/massage parlours, movie posters burned, the extent to which women's freedom was curbed, forceful disruption of Valentine's day celebration......the list goes on!

Afganistan, Pakistan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe are among the top rankers. India too has improved its ranking this year to 17th from 22nd last year. Denmark has fared very poorly in IMF's ranking for lending support to its cartoonist's freedom of expression. In fact, there has been a stern warning to the nations which are pursuing liberal policies towards women, artists and homosexuals.

IMF giving a clarion call to raise the MQ (Moral Quotient) of every person in the world, has urged the governments to follow the example of Singapore [Massages to go public in Singapore!] which has an excellent record in controlling "vice activities" in its society.