Month: August 2011

From the first of a series written a year ago:

India, like every successful entity, must have a set of principles at its core from which all governance and policies are derived. These principles should be understood by its citizens and therefore must be

• Comprehensive
• Comprehensible
• Minimal

These principles are an expression of fundamental and foundational values which are acceptable to a large number of people who have different secondary value systems. We call them “Pretty Good Principles,” or PGP for short. They are:

• Minimal Government
• Individual Rights
• The Relationship Between the Individual and the Government

This week’s links:

• Top 10 Gadgets we can’t wait for this year: by Dylan Love.
• 10 Big Projects to transform India: on Rediff/Business Standard. (via Vijay)
• India Today Mood of the Nation survey: “Congress comatose with stinkflation”
• Not a Happy Birthday: by Tavleen Singh. “The reason why political leaders are called leaders is because they are elected to lead countries. They do not have the right once they accept public office to hide in back rooms and shy away from the responsibilities of public discourse.”
•  Scratch cards as marketing tool: from Business Standard, on Netcore’s 90ml cards. “90ml is a scratch card which can be bundled as a relationship card, product replica card, visiting card and even packaged with any product. The 90ml engagement process also includes Multimedia Messages (MMS) and voice based communication, along with vanilla SMS.”

The past year has seen me make four short trips to the US. The single most important reason has been Atanu. The “think time” that we spend together helps me in working through the roadmap going forward. The only thing then left now is to make the time to ensure I can now start implementing all the things that we have been discussing. That will be the most important thing I do in the coming year.

As an entrepreneur, I have done many different things over a career spanning twenty years. It is a mixed record. I now have to use much of that entrepreneurial thinking in the “blue ocean” political landscape as we seek to build out the elements that lay out an alternate agenda and future before the Indian people.

This will require getting millions of people in India to change their minds. That will not be easy. And that is why I am excited. It is a hard problem, but one that is not intractable. Only when people’s minds change will India’s political and policy future change.

So, it is on to a new year, and a new chapter. I do not know how long this book is. What I do know is that, in the spirit of a true explorer, I am ready for the “mountains beyond mountains.”

On the personal front, I have been watching Abhishek grow more and more independent. He is now six years and just entered first standard. He was very excited at the prospect of having plenty of  younger kids in the school; that thought itself made him feel big!

In Abhishek’s life, in the time we get together, I do what he wants me to do. Interests have varied through the year. Beyblades gave way to Cricket Attax cards which are slowly giving way to trains (again). We now spend mornings studying the Indian Railways timetables. I have a O scale train set I had bought four years ago which we will finally open this Diwali.

As a father, all I can do is to help Abhishek create memories and experiences. His world is already so very different from the one I grew up in – as is always the case from one generation to generation. More than anything, we need to help the next generation learn to learn in different contexts.

For me, the one additional goal is to create a better India for Abhishek and his generation.

Continued tomorrow.

Looking at things from a wider lens, the last year has been a year where India has lost a lot of faith in its political leadership. Scams, decisions not taken along with some extremely stupid decisions, corruption, inflation – it has all added up to a difficult year. And the most recent fall in the financial markets has only added to the gloom.

One of my learnings in the past year has been that leadership matters. Our Prime Minister is just not cut out for the job. He shouldn’t have been there but for the word of a Lady. Leading and running India needs skills of a different level.  Decisions made (or not made) can impact hundreds of millions of people. When survival becomes paramount, development and governance take a backseat. That has been the tragedy of India through most of its Independent years.

This is the politics that needs to change. We need to create a demand for capable leaders. Companies and countries need the right leadership to thrive. There are a few such leaders in India. Our goal has to be to give them an opportunity to lead the nation. We cannot have India bequeathed by a single family  from one generation to the next.

Continued tomorrow.

As I look back at the past year, I can see it from two different angles – from the Netcore lens, and from the India lens.

In Netcore, our enterprise business has grown well. Our focus has been on “profitable growth.” Ensuring continued profitability helps simplify decision-making and requires continuous adaptation in changing markets. It is not about growth at any cost, as we are seeing some competitors do in this market.

The OneIndia portals too have shown healthy increases – in traffic and more importantly, in monetisation. As the Internet grows, so will the importance and use of languages other than English. We are now planning the next phase of expansion in OneIndia.

What did not work was the MyToday direct-to-consumer portal for mobile VAS content that we had set up a year ago. Collecting small amounts of money independent of the operators is an extremely hard problem to solve. Perhaps, we were too early. Maybe the model itself is flawed. We need to make a call soon on what we do going forward in this space.

Continued tomorrow.

Today, I turn 44. And after 7 years, I am once again travelling internationally on my birthday. This trip is not as much about work as it is about thinking through how I am going to bring about the political and policy change in India that I have written about.

This August 15 comes at a time when I am in transition. Over the past few months, I have been delegating more in Netcore and increasing slowly the time spent on the other activities, which are largely on the political side. Not direct politics, but more on the peripheral side, as a supporting player.

Going ahead, I need to start a new innings – a second life, as it were. As an entrepreneur and change agent in the political sphere, working to build what I think of as the third pillar of the Indian Right. BJP and RSS are two powerful pillars, but there needs to be a complement to get centre-right policies and transform India.

Continued tomorrow.

From the first of my annual series written a year ago:

Once every year, I turn the mirror inward to look at my life -on my birthday. It is that time of the year once again.

The dominant theme for the past year was about NetCore, the company I run. I spent the better part of the year focused on the business – more than I have in the past many years. Part of the reason was that there was nothing else to do – the political side of things via Friends of BJP took a backseat given what was happening within the BJP during the first part of the past year. In addition, as we expanded the consumer side of what we do in NetCore, it required a lot more attention from me.

This week’s links:

• Freeing up the sales force for selling: from McKinsey Quarterly. “Most sales reps spend less than half of their time actually selling. Here’s how companies can reshape sales operations to allow them to focus on their real job.”
• India’s Health Problems: from WSJ. “India’s infant-mortality rate—50 deaths per 1,000 births—is worse than Brazil’s and China’s. India’s poorer neighbor, Bangladesh, also does better.”
• Indian States Comparator: from The Economist. “If Uttar Pradesh were to declare independence, it would be the world’s fifth most populous country (as the map below shows, it has about the same number of residents as Brazil). Yet its economy would only be the size of Qatar, a tiny oil-rich state of fewer than 2m people. That makes it poor on a per person basis.”
• It’s all in the economy: by MJ Akbar in India Today. “[BJP President] Nitin Gadkari’s principal task over the next year will be to put together a viable economic policy for the party which the voter can assess, measure and then identify with.”
• What happened to Obama? by Drew Westen. “The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred.”

Bali and Binsar capped off a summer of plenty of travel. Pune, Surat, Anand, Nageshwar, Bali, Binsar, Nainital. It was a packed June-July for us.

As I write this a few days later, I cannot but help think of the beauty in India, and how little we know of it. If only we can improve the information about and accessibility to destinations like Binsar, tourism can be a huge revenue generator for us. Indians now want to travel, and for the most part, it is still much easier to travel to Bangkok, Singapore or Bali than it is to travel within the country.

The other thing I loved was vacationing with my parents. It brought back lots of memories from childhood, especially the trip we had made to Kashmir and the frequent ones to Mount Abu. When I went to IIT, these stopped. Now, with Abhishek growing, we have decided to do these trips annually within India.