Month: February 2012

I wrote this a year ago. While we did have the Anna Hazare movement, we are back to square one. Corruption has been accepted, we are no closer to getting any Bill to tackle it, and we are getting ready to cast millions of votes for the Congress.

Can an Egypt happen in India? My answer is No. We are a society that didn’t even throw out the colonialists. Why then should we bother about oppressors of our own ilk? Let British Raj 2.0 continue. Of course, we must vent feelings out once in a while, but other than that, we are happy to let the looting, scamming, divide-and-rule continue. Imperial rule is our tradition.

This week’s links:

• The Age of Big Data: from New York Times. “The march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”
• The Leadership Secrets of George Washington: An interview with Ron Chernow in Wall Street Journal.”America’s first president understood a stubborn truth: People ‘don’t need to like you—much less love you—but they need to respect you.'”
• Where’s the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting: from WSJ. “It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings.”
• Lawrence Lessig’s New Book: John Battelle reviews “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It.” “Lessig likens this dependency corruption to alcoholism – it “develops over time; it sets a patter of interaction that builds upon itself; it develops a resistance to breaking that pattern; it feeds a need that some find easier to resist than others; satisfying that need creates its own reward; that reward makes giving up the dependency difficult; for some, it makes it impossible.””
• The Farm Loan Waiver in Rural India: from Mint. “Bankers complain that farmers are refusing to pay back the money they have borrowed despite a good harvest and high food prices, perhaps because they expect another debt waiver.”

One of the services I find myself using a lot on the 3G activated phone now is the audio version of BBC World Service. (I guess given that it is audio, it would probably work quite well on 2.5G also.) I grew up listening to a lot of BBC, and listening once again to the headlines in the same sort of familiar voices feels good.

This made me wonder why there aren’t more Indian Internet radio stations – other than some of the FM ones who rebroadcast over the Internet. I am quite sure there is an opportunity to create different kinds of talk radio, perhaps along the lines of NPR in the US which can lead to some serious discussion.

I finally got around to activating 3G on Vodafone. I had tried the demo last year and was disappointed. But now that all the network issues seem to have been resolved, I decided to give it another try. So far, so good. For the first month, I decided to try the Rs 850 for 3GB data plan, and see what all I’d like to do on my phone without worrying about data consumption. Then, will probably move to a lower plan if I find the data consumption isn’t that much.

Video is where the 3G experience really makes a difference. For general browsing, while it does seem faster, the difference is not that big since most sites do now have lighter mobile versions.

What do you use 3G for?

I will be moderating a panel on Mobile Marketing at ad:tech in Delhi on Feb 24. The panelists are:

• Dippak Khurana, Co-Founder & CEO, Vserv.mobi
• Dr. Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO and Co-Founder, Vuclip
• Abdul Khan, Senior Vice President & National Head of Business Marketing, Tata Teleservices
• Kiran Gopinath, Founder & CEO, Ozone Media Solutions

What are the kind of questions you’d like to see answered?

 

With BMC elections a couple days away, perhaps the new corporators will consider why arterial roads have to be repeatedly dug up. Look at the road stretch from Worli to Haji Ali. One part of it is almost at a 45-degree angle now! Every few months, some part of is under construction.

Nepean Sea Road is in the same state now — repaving is under way. Come monsoons, whatever road is done now will be gone, and it will be time for the next road work.

Surely, we can do better than this. As a friend put it, it is time we citizens ask for SLAs (service level agreements) from our government!

It has been one amazing winter, especially the past week. In general, Mumbai is one of those places where the only weather one has is: hot and humid, and more hot and more humid. This year has been an exception. With temperatures dropping to sub-10 degrees Celsius, it has been an absolute delight to feel the cool winter breeze in Mumbai.

I don’t know what implications we will have with this unusual weather going forward. But for now, we can surely enjoy it as it lasts for another few days. One hasn’t felt this cold in Mumbai on a successions of days in living memory. Let’s enjoy this while it lasts. And then we will be back to your hot and humid days.

So little has changed since I wrote this a year ago:

This week’s links:

• How leaders kill meaning at work: from McKinsey Quarterly. “Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways.”
• The right role for top teams: from strategy+business. “Analysis of informal networks offers a potent leadership model for the C-suite: Make top teams the hub of the enterprise, and watch performance improve.”
• Interview with Aneesh Chopra: from The Atlantic. “The outgoing chief technology officer of the United States talks SOPA, open government, and MacGyvering an innovations policy for the country.”
• Empowering India: A FICCI-Bain report, focused on identifying best practices across states.
• Stealing is a bad thing: by Atanu Dey. The first in a multi-part series. “Societies that steal are less able to produce the good society in contrast with societies that are in some sense honest. The good society, I believe, is one which is, minimally speaking, not materially impoverished.”

History is about people, their motivations and their actions. With 20-20 hindsight, we can study what people in the past did and how successful they were in their objectives. Understanding our past will help us decide what we should do in the present and guide us into the future. This is, in some ways, the ultimate reality show. And we are all participants in it. We may choose to ignore it – but we do so at our own peril. For it is our future and our children’s futures that are at stake.

We stand at a moment in time where we can shape the future path of India in a way that can be very different. For that, it will require us to understand the choices, and then stand up for what is the right one.

It will not be an easy path ahead – for us and for India.  Many times in India’s history, we came across a fork in the road, and somehow managed to make the wrong decision. . There are a few right ones, but they were not good enough to get us to the destination of a developed nation. We will face a similar choice soon.