Month: December 2009

Best of 2009: Politics

Best of 2009: Digital India

Following a tradition from 2008, in this last week of the year, I am giving links to what I think where some of my better posts. I have categorised them into five topics: Digital India, My Presentations, Entrepreneurship, Politics and Personal / General.

Blog Past: On Watching Swades

One movie that is worth watching many times over is Swades.  This is what I wrote after seeing the movie first in early 2005:

Swades is about an India most of us don’t know – and probably don’t want to know. It is an India around us that is very different from us. We cannot get away from it. It stares at us in the form of children begging outside our car’s closed window and us wishing that they’d just go away. It is an India that sits in between all those fancy high-rises and malls that are coming up – we wonder if these eyesores could be erased. It is an India that we encounter occasionally as we take trips to ancestral hometowns – and leave thinking how time has, for the most part, stood still. Even as Swades is about rural India, we cannot escape the symptoms in the slums of urban India. It is as much about the India we did not build after Independence – poverty, overpopulation, illiteracy, malnutrition, darkness still reign across parts of India.

Swades is also a film about hope. It is about the difference that each of us can make in this other India. What this India lacks is vision, will and co-ordination. People there have for the most part accepted that things will be the way they are. The British may have left more than half a century ago, but large parts of India are still in a subjugation mindset – some of it forced by circumstances, some of it accepted due to ignorance. One of us can transform the lives of a thousand. If Lagaan was about how a Bhuvan can bring about change from within, Swades is about how a Mohan Bhargava can bring about change from the outside – freed from the shackles of the past of tradition and culture.

Each of us has to do what we are best at and at the time of our chosing. This change in us has to come from within. Some of us may accomplish this by being entrepreneurs, some by being engineers or doctors to bring about innovations that can make a difference, some by adopting schools or orphanages in this other India, and some by contributing financially. Swades is not about dramatic top-down change, it is about slow bottom-up transformation. It is about many micro-revolutions which need to take place all around.

Swades reminds us that even as one India grows, there is another India that’s still far behind. And whether we like it or not, the land that both occupy is the same. One India cannot go too far leaving the other behind. We are one nation of a billion people. We are all part of one India. What the more fortunate among us have to do is to provide the leadership that can help bring about change in the other India. As we think about the problems of the other India, there are solutions that exist. But for making these real, we will have to leave aside some of our old mindsets.

Weekend Reading

This week’s links:

  • Time Person of the Year: Ben Bernanke. “He didn’t just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.”
  • Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them: “Findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.”
  • The Protocol Society: by David Brooks. “In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions.”
  • 3G’s Data Dilemma: from DailyWireless.org. “Why 3G’s Data Dilemma Will be the Re-Birth of Citywide Wi-Fi.”
  • 10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010: by Pete Cashmore. “While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent.”

Airport Access

I almost missed a flight from Delhi to Mumbai last week because of traffic on the access roads. A 2 km stretch took 35 minutes to navigate.

I am sure there must be dozens of people who go through this pain in multiple Indian cities daily – or at least the metros.  Something needs to be done to ensure that airport access becomes easier. Mumbai does have a train station about 10 minutes from the airport, but Delhi doesn’t have anything as of now. (Don’t get me started about Bangalore!)

The broader issue is that of urban planning. We seem to be be having absolutely nothing of it. It isn’t a difficult exercise, but it needs some experts to do it. Someone once mentioned to me that Mumbai has all of one urban planner.  Surely, we can do better than that.

Life with Bifocals

One knows one is growing old when one gets bifocals!

I got mine this week. It has been a couple days since I have been using them, and it hasn’t been easy adjusting with them.  I guess I will have to get used to life with them. The alternative of switching between two pairs of glasses isn’t exactly appealing. Given my high number (-10 and -12 in the two eyes), there aren’t too many other options.

I got specs when I was 10 years old. (I am now 42.)  I hope the bifocals don’t limit my ability to read and work on the computer — two tasks which are the cornerstone of my life. For now, the reading vision has definitely improved, but the computer working isn’t easy for now. I guess I will get used to the bifocals in the days to come.

Customer Relationship Monetisation

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. But what it should really mean is Customer Relationship Monetisation.

Most companies spend a lot of effort working through the strategies for new customer acquisition. But little is done for leveraging the existing customers – beyond the first product the customer signs up for. What is needed is to upsell and cross-sell. In effect, the metric that needs to be tracked should be the number of products that a customer is using. In most companies, the number will probably be between 1 and 1.5. Getting it to 2 or higher and thus increasing sales numbers is probably going to be easier than getting new customers.

Another benefit is that the more products a single customer users, the greater will be the loyalty. Or, put another way, single product customers are more vulnerable to switching to competition.

Presentation: Mobile as Magic Lamp for Customers and Employees

I did a presentation last week at the Milagrow SME Conference in Delhi. A part of it was similar to the one I had done at Interop in Mumbai in October, but I added some new slides in the first half. Here it is:

Presentation at Milagrow SME Conferencehttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=cdocumentsandsettingsrajeshmydocuments091217-milagrow-091219021054-phpapp01&stripped_title=presentation-at-milagrow-sme-conference

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