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As I look ahead to the 43^rd year of my life, there are many things I would like to make happen. I don’t know how successful I will be, but it is important to have some goals.

NetCore’s foundation needs to be strengthened, so we can grow revenues at 100% or more each year for the next few years. This will mean getting our VAS Operator idea to work.

I want to help create a centre-right policy foundation in India – one that can provide the intellectual underpinnings for the BJP and other centre-right leaning parties.

Education has been an area of interest for some time, and this year will hopefully see me take some steps in creating initiatives both at the K-12 level and the other end of the spectrum (in higher education).

I want to do a lot more of two things year: blogging and meeting people to open up new business opportunities. My best ideas for the future come from these two activities.

I have not been able to spend much time in the past year with the dozen-odd ‘Emergic ecosystem’ companies that I am invested in. This is something I need to change in the coming year.

I also need to start paying attention to my health, which will mean more vigorous exercise.

Finally, I want to be with Abhishek as he continues his voyage of discovery into the world.

As I look back over the past year, some memories stand out.

The talk I gave at the November Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco. Even though I said all that needed to be said, I realised later that I had substituted passion in speech with completeness of words. I will not do that again.

Our Board Review meetings in NetCore – which began the year on a disappointing note, but ended upbeat. There were times when I was beginning to doubt that we would manage to turn things around and grow our business (there is only so much of cost cutting that one can do). These quarterly reviews have been working very well since they also make us introspect on the three months that have just gone by.

The first big Friends of BJP event that we did in Mumbai at Ravindra Natya Mandir. We had no idea how many people would show up, and were delighted to see a full house.

The disappointment the day the election results came out.

The day Abhishek got his letter of admission from Aditya Birla World Academy. Our (tense) search for a school had just ended.

The London trip with Abhishek and Bhavana – a week of togetherness, with no constraints of time.

Perhaps, the most abiding memory of the year came at the end. During the Parents Orientation day at Abhishek’s school, we visited his class (Lower KG – Caterpillars). There, on one of the walls, was a face that Abhishek had coloured (badly!) along with anyone else. The words at the bottom will stay with me for a long time. In response to a question that he had been asked (and which the teacher had transcribed) was this sentence: “I am happy today because I played with the train and tracks with my Papa.”

Tomorrow: Looking Ahead

The third pillar of this year has been my son, Abhishek, who turned four in April. This is the year when our interactions matured and we started having plenty of conversations about lots of different topics. Sometime in the past few months, he opened up as a person, and began talking a lot. The London trip that we took together as a family (with my wife, Bhavana) was a memorable one for the time that I got to spend with him.

There was some apprehension midway through the year about his school. Luckily, he got admission into the Aditya Birla World Academy in the IGCSE programme. From the first day of school we knew we had made the right choice when he announced that this was a “fun school.” A few days ago, we got a tour of the school as part of the Parents Orientation day, and both Bhavana and I came back very impressed that this education was going to be different, wider and deeper from the one we had gone through.

Even as work (NetCore) dominates, I do try and spend as much time as possible with Abhishek. We play board games (Settlers of Catan, and now, Monopoly), read books, and go to bookshops. Currently, Abhishek is fascinated with  the world’s metro (underground train) networks, the result of the recent London tube travels.

I know that as Abhishek grows up, he will get more involved with his own world. These are the years where Papa (along with Mamma) means a lot to him – and I hope I can keep it that way.

Tomorrow: Memories

In the midst of what was happening at NetCore, I decided to spend some time on the political front, albeit from a distance. A group of us started an informal group, “Friends of BJP”, to help garner support for the BJP in Middle India. I have written about my experience extensively on my blog.

The time in January when I made that decision, NetCore itself needed all my attention. But the question I asked myself was that with elections in India happening once every five years, would I regret the decision to not be an active participant come May? The answer was an unequivocal Yes, given that I would like to, in the years to come, work to see how we can reinvent politics and governance in India.

And so, I took the plunge, spending nearly half my time over a three-month period, with the “Friends of BJP.” I travelled extensively, met with a lot of people whom I otherwise would never have interacted with professionally, learnt first-hand about India’s political system, and got many ideas on what we need to do next in India.

That Next means thinking big on multiple fronts – education, transportation, urbanization, digital infrastructure, energy, and more. In India, we have never done that. Our politics has become too petty – with there always being the next election to win, which means the bold, game-changing decisions never get done.  My biggest learning is that it needs outsiders to get inside one of the two main political parties to start the process of transforming India.

It was in some ways an impulsive decision – and I do believe that there are times when one just has to do so. I had no idea when I began this journey how the next few months would play out.  I took it one step at a time, and even though the electoral outcome was personally disappointing, I can definitely say that the learnings from the process will always stay with me.

Tomorrow: Abhishek

On August 15, as India celebrates 62 years of political freedom, I will turn 42. Continuing a thread that began a couple of years ago, I write about the past year and look ahead to the next. (Here are the two previous installments: On turning 40 and 40 to 41.)

The past year was primarily about three things: NetCore, Friends of BJP and Abhishek.

NetCore

NetCore is the company I run with the help of an able professional team. We work in two main areas: enterprise tech services in mailing and mobility, and mobile media and marketing. (A third area will be added soon, and I will discuss that in a more detailed series on NetCore in the coming weeks.) August 2008 to October 2008 saw good growth, and then things slowed down dramatically from November onwards, especially in the mobile ads space.

We had a high burn rate and had to work hard in the next few months to put a brake on costs, and start to get the revenues growing. November 2008 to February 2009 was a challenging period for us, and especially for me. I always like to try out new ideas, but since we had to make difficult choices I had to put some new ideas on the back burner as we set out to the path to profitability.

Those were difficult months. But our efforts paid off, and things started turning around from March 2009. The past few months have seen only a small gap between billings and expenses,  and so we expect to be profitable on a monthly basis soon. This has perhaps been the highlight on the business front for me in the past year. Now, we can get back in a small way to imagining new ideas and working to make those happen.

Tomorrow: Friends of BJP

This series with a quaint title comes from late 2001. This is what I wrote in the first part:

Leisure Time in India used to be so simple. Pick up a good book to read, or put the radio on and tune in to Vividh Bharati, Radio Ceylon or BBC, or watch Doordarshan, the only option available on television (remember Magic Lamp, Kilbil, Santakukdi, Chhaya Geet). In just half a generation, life’s leisure activities have changed so much. There are so many more options competing for ever shortening free time. A mix of digital technology combined with distribution via the Internet and delivery to the computer (or a gaming console) promises even more change in the coming years.

If anything, the options have multiplied in the past decade. What has not changed is the time available.

This week’s links:

• Using technology to turbocharge innovation in a downturn: from McKinsey Quarterly. Has a mention of Novatium.
• The Mobile Challenge: from Union Square Ventures. “The challenge for startups (and investors!) has been identifying opportunities that are “native” to the new platforms. By “native” we mean opportunities that simply did not exist previously and cannot exist without the phone.”
• The Nichepaper Manifesto: by Umair Haque (via Vinu).  “In the 21st century, it’s time, again for newspapers to learn how to profit with stakeholders — instead of extracting profits from them. The 21st century’s great challenge isn’t selling the same old “product” better: it’s learning to make radically better stuff in the first place. Here’s how to begin building 21st century newspapers.”
• Open data is the future of web discovery: by Doug Sherrets.
• MySpace is to Facebook as Twitter as to ______: by Cody Brown. “MySpace and Twitter are hugely popular for uses neither company anticipated. The mission of each company is so vague that their products are stretched and molded into a variety of different uses. Instead of targeting and building their business around one of these users they take their sudden popularity as a sign they have a killer product. They don’t.”

I recently bought two board games to play with Abhishek — Monopoly and Mastermind. Coincidentally, both were games I had programmed into a computer in 1983 in BASIC. That was how I learnt programming. I would go to my father’s office where he had just bought a computer. (I was then in junior college – std XI).

For me, it was that stint of BASIC Programming (which I learnt from a book, and then through trial-and-error) that instilled in me a love for computers. I have never formally learnt programming but did enough of it later in my life. During those college days, I would take up board games and create software to play them on the computer. (Besides Monopoly and Mastermind, I also did for Othello and 1-day Cricket.) The joy of seeing one’s creation at work is what then helped shift my thinking from becoming a civil engineer (like my father) to doing something in computers.

That got me thinking — if someone wanted to learn programming, what is that they can do now? Something fun,   something they can do on their own and create new things. What are the options for a 16- or 17-year-old who wants to discover the joys of writing software — without going to a formal training program?

There was a time when I used to love driving. That was about 15 years ago. In the US, I had an impeccable record (was only stopped once for speeding) even though I learnt driving quite late. Now, I only drive if I have to. I was wondering about what changed. I think it was an accident that I had one night in Mumbai – the Maruti 800 I was driving hit a lamp post near Dadar when I was momentarily blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car. I was lucky to emerge unscathed from that incident — the lamp post fell on the windshield, shattered it, and glass was sprinkled all over the car but nothing much came on me. Sometime then, I decided to have a full-time driver.

I was reminded of this topic and the incident when I drove our car to VT station a couple days ago. I was driving a car after more than a year. I was ultra-cautious and even a bit tense though the roads were quite empty at 6:15 am in the morning. That love for driving is probably gone now – and I doubt it will come back.

It was in early August last year that I re-started blogging after a gap of about 14 months. There have been times when I have had plenty of topics to write – and there are moments like now when I just don’t know what to write on! But, despite the occasional “writer’s block”, it has been smooth sailing in terms of the daily updates. And I hope to continue that.

I now pipe the RSS feed to Facebook and Twitter.