Over the past one month, a lot of noise has been made of India's triumph at the world stage. It started off with the Twenty-20. Then it was Viswanath Anand. Last week it was Dr. Pachauri, though the Nobel is meant for IPCC, which he has been heading since 2002.
A lesser known individual, Dr.Ullas Karanth has won this year's WWF Paul Getty Award for conservation leadeship. Dr.Ullas works in the area of wildlife conservation in general and tigers and elephants in particular. He has been fighting with the Government of India, to adopt newer scientific methods of counting tigers in the wild. These new methods like capture- recapture technique will lead to the real number of tigers alive, which have been inflated by the government as we saw in Sariska.
In an interview, Dr.Karanth says that the tigers will survive to the next century. We still have hope, as long we have men like Dr.Karanth and Mr. Valmik Thapar.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Little known Great Indians
Sunday, October 07, 2007
A saturday spent as Earth Day
An old man entered the class. His name was Prof. Narendra Sakhalkar. He kept me spellbound and most of the class as well for the next hour and half. It was so intellectual that I attended the same session again with another batch. His speech made me déjà vu of having read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
His speech covered a variety of topics from history, astronomy, geology, religion, physics and biology. The gist of what he spoke was:
We, Homo sapiens sapiens are in deep trouble regarding our survival as a species, because of the past 150 years of Industrialization, which might over the next 50 years, ensure a doomsday in any of the various possible ways. Whenever it has happened before, the most dominant species is the one which gets hit the most. This time it will be us and mammals in general.
He classified the past 4 lakh years from the Homo eructus to today into 4 time periods as,
Man within nature - The period when we lived as scavengers eating the dead animals in the jungle.
Man with nature - This was when we started agriculture. He made an analogy of this being like a child scratching its mother's face with its nails. Agriculture was the first time when we brought monoculture against the poly culture (diversity), which is nature's design.
Man against nature - This started with the industrial revolution in the Europe, and the laying of railway tracks, which lead to destruction of large tracts of jungle.
Nature against man - This is where we are now, when the earth has started showing the signs of refusing to accept whatever we have been doing for so long. Melting of glaciers as large as the size of California in a single year , increase in surface temperature of oceans and hole in the ozone layer of some of the signs which have been documented to prove beyond doubt that we have arrived here.
The most frequently said way out and why each of them will not happen are,
1.God created man as his image and hence He will not let us perish - All religions say that God is the creator and manager of the entire universe, the size of which we are still not able to comprehend. That being the case, He will not interfere into the affairs of a spec of dust called Earth, that too for a problem created over 150 years, which is not even a second in the cosmic clock.
2. We will evolve technology that will save us - This could be a possible solution if we can arrive at a consensus on this within 2010. We will need the top 1 percentile of the human intelligence to be dedicated to this. But it is unlikely to happen, as most of them are involved in the development of arms.
3. We will conquer other planets and galaxies and make it our home - This is the most ridiculous solution possible, surprisingly suggested even by Stephen Hawking. All the planets in the solar system have been ruled out. The current travel speeds in space achieved rule out reaching them before 10000 years even if we start now.
So, the bomb has started ticking. Its not a question of 'if' anymore, Its a question of 'when'.
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Part 2
In the afternoon four of us, flat mates decided to visit Gilbert Hill. Its a 65 million year old hill made of molten lava, located at Andheri, 10 minutes drive from our place. It offers panoramic view of Mumbai from the top, which can be reached by the stairs cut in the rocks. We could see as far as the Juhu beach, Hiranandani, Borivili and Thane. To reach it one has to pass through a shanty town. High rise buildings have come around the hill over the past 3 years until the Mumbai High Court passed a stay order early this year.
Monday, September 24, 2007
3 coffee, 2 sandwich and 5 quarter life crises
When you have a 10 day break between the trimester exams, one the best thing to do was to get around with a bunch of friends and chat. On the evening of a rainy day in Mumbai, 5 of us got together outside Dhiraj and talked for over an hour and half, between coffee and sandwiches, on the state of our lives right now, when we are doing II year MBA from a relatively well known institute. The five of us were SS, RS, RK, RM and me.
The discussion started off, when RM said that if we had a few minutes of clearer thinking during the two hours of CAT that we wrote close to 2 years ago; we would have been at one of the IIMs.
True. No denying of this. Life is Unfair - the earlier we start accepting this simple fact the better we are.
Then it turned on to the institute that we have landed ourselves in. If IIPM calls itself the largest b-school on earth, ours can surely stake claim to be the densest one. Most B-schools in Mumbai, barring NITIE have a concern over space, typical of the city in which they are located. But I m sure none of them can claim to have produced more MBAs per square feet of the land that they own than ours.
Education is the starting point of strengthening a nation. The better skilled the students going out of a system are that much better off the nation is going to be. So any anomaly in the system of education will get magnified down the line in the careers of the students. This is all the more true in the case of professional degrees like engineering and management.
This makes it very important to keep the 5 lettered word called G-R-E-E-D away from an educational institute. But we have found only that in ours and more of that as we have moved from the first to the second year. There is no problem with an educational institution making profit, but making profit without providing value for the money you charge is unpardonable.
The discussion moved on the line saying that in the first year of our course we could have competed with any guy from a top b-school. But as we have moved along the course, they have received considerable value added day- by-day and the gulf has widened that it might not be possible now.
It was sad to hear that a lot of guys had come into the institute with fire in their bellies, but as they progressed the fire had been doused and they have settled for a life of mediocrity.
As the number of students admitted into the institute has gone up, the institute has consciously chosen people with prior work experience, to leverage on their work ex during the most important placements. The going might be easy when the economy is booming and the industry is plagued by a serious talent crunch.
Despite all the negative tone of the discussion, a few of them, SS and RM in particular wanted to do something to stem the situation. All of us were left gasping as to what to do and where to start, if we needed to do something to the institute before it became our alma mater.
I m sure that despite all this, we might in the next twenty years see a few solid entrepreneurs and a number of high profile corporate performers from the batch of 2008.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Will this come true?
The HT reports that Kamal, Rajni and Maniratnam may come together for a new movie and have been meeting each other recently on the story discussion. So far the three of them have worked with each other separately but never have all three of them together in a single project.
As far as i know, Rajni and Kamal have worked together in at least 10 movies, excluding the guest appearances. Kamal and Mani came together for Nayagan in 1987, which is Kamal's best performance so far barring, Anbe Sivam. In 1991, Thalapathy brought Rajni and Mani together. This movie brought back on screen the Rajni of 1970s and 80s who made his mark as a 'performing' actor and not just as a superstar who banked on flipping of a cigarette and hair style.
If this does come true, it will hopefully be the magnum opus for all three of them, and the day the movie hits the screen will be marked by a frenzy in Tamilnadu that will overshadow what was witnessed for Sivaji.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Come Be My Light
The cover story on a recent issue of TIME, is about a book called Come Be My Light, which is a collection of letters written between Mother Teresa and her confessors and superiors over six decades from the 1940s to the 1990s.
Teresa had reportedly, requested the Church to destroy all her correspondences, as they might make people to concentrate on her rather than Him. But the Church refused to do so as all the correspondences are preserved and reviewed in course of beatification and canonization.
The letters indicate that for a large part of over 50 years, she found dryness, darkness, loneliness and torture, and couldn't find any evidence of God speaking to or directing her. In 1946, during the break she took from teaching with the Loreto Sisters, to Darjeeling, she claimed that God directed her to the service of the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. After this, she left the Loreto Sisters to start the Missionaries of Charity.
But soon enough her flip-flops had started and continued as late as 1995, two years before her death. The content of these letters seem more or less the same with only the recipient changing as her confessors died.
I feel that Truth is the nearest and the cleanest form of God that one can ever find on earth. With due admiration to the great work done by Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity, if she is not convinced of the existence of God herself, why should she go around the town claiming to do service to the poorest of the poor to fulfill God's will. Rather she could have just done things to ameliorate poverty for the sake of it than trying to answer some call which never existed in the first place.
Being an agnostic who goes to temple at times, I have always felt that, there has never been anyone on earth who has been convinced throughout his/her life of the existence of God. Similarly a dozen holes can be punctured into an argument put forth by an atheist to disprove the need of a God. A theist has his own moments of darkness when he doubts the existence of God and an atheist has his equal share of moments, when he feels his rationality crumbling down.
May be, only when the entire world accepts their shares of doubts, on either side of the debate, will God show up, for He knows that day is never going to come.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The Pursuit of HappYness
Ever since I did my summers at the private banking department of a bank in Hyderabad during May and June this year, my brother had been asking me to see this movie in which Will Smith is an intern at Dean Witter Reynolds. I had more or less been doing the same that Will does during his internship at DWR. Calling up prospective clients,(High Net Worth Individuals) for the private banking services of the bank. I didn't have the pressure of standing first among the group of 20 that Will had, to become a broker.
Moving on to the movie, there are very few movies, the mere mention of the name of which, brings you a myriad of images and makes you think for a few minutes, however busy you were or whatever you were doing. This definitely is one among those few. The others that fit this list from my limited scope are Forrest Gump, Shaw shank Redemption, Apollo 13, Life is Beautiful in English and Anbe Sivam, Kaakha Kaakha, Dalapathi, Mahanadi, Nayagan and Ethir Neechal in Tamizh.
The movie is based on the real life of Chris Gardner (played by Will smith), who struggles to make ends meet and tries every possible way to come out of the daily grind and make it BIG in life. Chris gets an internship at DWR and is simultaneously faced with crisis at home (with his wife leaving him), and is even rendered homeless, over unpaid dues.
I particularly liked the scene, where Chris tries to solve the Rubik’s cube, while Ronald Reagan addresses the nation on the state of the economy. It seemed as though the entire economy is one big Rubik's cube for which no one knew the solution, while common men and women endured agony for their existential necessities.
The best performance in the movie undoubtedly is by Jaden Smith, Will Smith's real life son who plays Chris's son Christopher. The rapport that Chris and Christopher share on the screen reminds you of the one between Guido and Joshua in 'Life is Beautiful’.
The movie brings to light the problem of homelessness that even the 'mighty' U.S faces. This is a stark contrast to the glass, steel and tarmac that we are used to associating with the U.S. The way Chris manages his time at the office without taking restroom breaks and rushes back to the charity shelter before 5 in the evening, after getting Christopher back from the day care, makes one feel that Life is a mystery and can be unravelled only by showing grit, when the world shuts its doors on you.
The last day of the internship when Chris is chosen among the 20 in his group to become the broker, Will Smith walks into the deal room with an ' I am the king of the world' look on his face, for savoring which any amount of hardship can be endured.
Friday, August 24, 2007
The AIMA Pune trip
Went with a gang of friends to Pune for 2 days for a management simulation game conducted by AIMA. The event happened at Singhad Institute of Management in a serene village called Kondhwa outside Pune. So, we started from Mumbai on Monday evening by the Deccan Queen. The train has a number of firsts and onlys to its credit, like
The first train to be certified ISO 9000 in India.
The only train with a cafeteria, where you can actually sit and have food as you do in a hotel.
The route between Mumbai and Pune is one of the most beautiful ones in India, as far as I have travelled, where the tracks cut across the Western Ghats. During monsoon, which it was this week, it offers you some breathtaking views of valley, waterfalls and mountains all in fresh green. The added pleasure of travelling by the Deccan Queen is that you can enjoy all this as you relish your cutlet and coffee as you do in a bakery down the street.
The game was conducted by AIMA on a software that they have developed called Chanakya. The software was robust. There was not a glitch in it throughout the 2 days that we played. The game was a board room simulator in which there were 4 members per team and each had to play the role as a CEO, CFO, COO and CMO.
Each four member team was a company. In each group there were 8 teams, which made it essentially as 8 companies competing for the same market. We had to take decisions on the operations, marketing and financial aspects each quarter, and the game was played over 5 quarters.
The winning criteria was the book value per share, which made the way you managed your finances more crucial than the way you invested in technology, produced efficiently or marketed the product. This winning criteria, made the reading of the seemingly simple Balance sheet, Income statement and the cash flow critical after every quarter. We felt that we should have had one of the CAs from our class in our team as they would have helped us in reading these statements in a jiffy.
The game helped us realise, at least now, how much of financial accounting had been misunderstood by us. We made a stupid mistake of not issuing equity shares during the 2nd quarter of the game when the chance came our way and hence not capitalising the share premium into the reserves and surplus, which would have improved our book value. This made us go from 3rd to 8th rank after round 2, the end of day 1.
The next day, we had to play 3 more rounds and somehow jump from 8th to the 4 th position to scrape through to the next round. We did play a little better on day 2 than on day 1, and managed to move from 8 to 6 to 5 and stayed at 5.
Of the 8 teams from NM, one managed to get to the regional finals and they have also ended up being the regional winners, who will play in the national finals at Coimbatore in October. Hope they win at Coimbatore and become the national champions.
Overall, it was a great learning that made us realise that small decisions that you make in the board room has a significant impact on the company, which makes business seem simple yet remain complex.
Friday, August 17, 2007
A treasure trove
The Hindu has come out with a superb 24 page supplement on the 60th Independence Day. I laid my hands on it at the NM library today. It can be accessed online here.
I haven’t read it in full and i think it will take at least a week for me to do it, because of the depth and the sheer number of the articles in it. These articles are a good reality check written by an illustrious list of contributors , than the breast beating that most of the other newspapers and magazines did on the occasion of the Independence Day.
It also has a special painting by M.F.Husain, and photos and cartoons from the archives of The Hindu.
I think it is a must read for every Indian.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
India 2007 to 2022
India 2007
60 Years have passed since we got the right to decide on our own collective destinies. A lot has been achieved and a lot more could have been….
The Prime Minister's speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort has much of the usual rhetoric.
The key points can be summarised as,
1. Rs. 25,000 Crores infusion into agriculture
2. Rural infrastructure and connectivity through Bharat Nirman
3. Urban infrastructure augmentation
4. Planned Industrialisation
5. Universalising of secondary education
6. Increase in the number of IITs, IIMs and IIITs
7. Social security for senior citizens below poverty line
8. Conservation of natural resources and concern towards global warming
Overall, it was a reiteration of the UPA government's policy initiatives and the usual quotations and two from Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and ofcourse, Rajiv Gandhi. The text of the speech glaringly omits even a mention of the 123 nuclear deal between India and the US.
This being a special independence day, I decided to give my shot at some of the events that might happen between the diamond and platinum jubilee of our independence.
I hope that whichever of my predictions are gloomy, I am proved completely wrong and in the ones that look good, I have a gross underestimate.
India 2007 - 2022
The following are some of the key events that might happen between today and 15 years from today
1. The Government will keep pumping in thousands of crores of rupees under the name of agriculture under a minister who will spend his time in the offices of the BCCI in Mumbai or the ICC in London, while the farmers will keep commiting suicide in Vidarbha and Andhra Pradesh. Atlast, by around 2015, when farming becomes impossible for most farmers of India and our food security is threatened, the Government will call in for the private sector participation in agriculture. Large companies will enter farming and take over thousands of hectares of land. This seems to be the only way a second green revolution will be ushured in, unless the Government creates SAZs (Special Agricultural Zones) as adviced by Dr.M.S.Swaminathan.
2. The political structure of the country will not undergo much change, except maybe for a little more federalism and splitting up of a few states in the Hindi heartland towards governable smaller units.
3. The private sector will continue to flourish and remain the largest employment creator, absorbing large number of people displaced from agriculture.
4. Education and litreacy will spread. Hopefully, secondary education will be universalised before 2020.
5. College education will spread, foreign universities will set shop in the country, making careers in teaching remunerative and good teachers to be sought after.
6. More and more conflicts will be seen in the transition from agriculture to industry, like the latest one being witnessed for Tata's Titanium-di-oxide plant in Tamilnadu. This should settle by around 2012, when comprehensive regulations on rehabilitation should emerge.
7. God forbid, we will have a confontation with China, with the sort of resources they are building up in Tibet and coming very close to our backyard. Hopefully, UN will intervene and good sense will prevail.
8. India will win 2 medals in Beijing 2008 and 5 in London 2012, and hopefully one cricket and hockey world cup in between.
9. India will become a nuclear powerhouse and get closer to US as a strategic partner as we are the most trustworthy in Asia.
10. We will bid a sad adieu to a few great species that inherit the wild of our country. I hope it is not the Royal Bengal Tiger and the Asiatic Lion.
11. India will send an unmanned mission to moon in 2010, manned space mission in 2015 and manned moon mission in 2020.
The times have never been more exciting to live in India.
I hope to revisit this on 15th August 2022 and be happy to find myself totally wrong in the points 1, 6, 7 and 10 and 3, 4, 5, 8 and 11 being grossly underestimated.
Jai Hind !
India Quiz at NM - Finals
2. This city derived its name from the Sanskrit equivalent of the term ‘city of virtuous deeds’ and was as usual modified by the British to its current name. Which city are we talking about? Pune from Punyanagari
15. The founder of this media company decided on the logo of his company after he saw the bindi on the forehead of his wife. Which media company are we talking about? NDTV
Fatehpur (UP), Ballia(UP), Nandyal(AP), Lucknow, Kanakapura(Karnataka), Jalandhar, Lucknow ,____________ Assam. The constituencies represented by Prime Ministers of India from V.P.Singh till Vajpayee. Manmohan represents Assam in the Rajya Sabha
1. Mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty
2. Mutual non-aggression
3. Mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs
4. Equality and mutual benefit
5 .Peaceful co-existence
