Emergic

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.

Because of the fear of landslides en route and the road possibly being blocked for a few hours, we decided to come the previous night to Kathgodam to take the day-train Sampark Kranti Express from Kathgodam to Delhi. En route, we spent a couple hours in Nainital. Going up, we were enveloped in the thickest cloud cover I have ever seen – we could barely see the vehicle in front of us. It was edge of the seat excitement, literally!

The clouds cleared up and the beauty of the Nainital lake became apparent. We walked down Mall Road, doing some random shopping. Abhishek was thrilled to find his Cricket Attax cards in one of the shops.

We spent the night at Relax Inn just opposite Kathgodam station. The train ride from there to Delhi was smooth. A bunch of IITians were returning back to Delhi for the start of their semester, and we were entertained with plenty of music, songs, along with memories of mine from a quarter century ago.  A flight from T3 got us back to Mumbai – on schedule.

Once we reached Kathgodam in the morning, we took a car to Binsar. The green, tranquil beauty of the Kumaon Hills becomes apparent very soon. The road isn’t that great – apparently, a cloudburst last year did plenty of damage all around, and it hasn’t been fully fixed. Plus, landslides are the norm en route. We were stuck for half hour as a landslide was cleared.

The Club Mahindra resort is nested in the valley, and makes for a very picturesque view all around. The resort was our home for the next 3 days. The occasional rain added to the charm. And of course, the cloud cover. Our only road trip out was to see the Binsar Sanctuary, from where on clear days, one can see the Himalayan ranges about 400 kms. away. That will have to wait another day for us!

The resort was very relaxing. I would sit in the balcony to do my thinking, reading and writing. We would wake to the birds chirping. The Kids Activities centre had plenty of stuff for Abhishek to do – trying his hand at carrom, chess, and more. The restaurant served us customised Jain food. And we got plenty of time with my parents to chat and reminisce about my vacations when I was growing up.

We spent a few hours sight-seeing in Delhi before boarding the overnight Ranikhet Express to Kathgodam. We visited the Rail Museum. Abhishek loves trains, and so I thought that would be a good thing to show. There were barely a dozen people walking around there! Plenty of old engines and train compartments, and the obligatory toy train ride.

Then, we did India Gate, drove around Connaught Place, had dinner at Bengali Market, walked around Chandni Chowk, passed Red Fort, and arrived at Old Delhi Railway station. Getting to the station was quite an experience – humungous traffic, which meant it took about half hour to traverse the last kilometre.

The hot and humid wait at the station ended when the train arrived. What a welcome relief, getting into the First AC coach. We had an entire cabin to ourselves. It was wonderfully comfortable. All the troubles of the past hour disappeared as we made ourselves comfortable in the train.

This was my third overnight train journey this summer, and all were extremely comfortable. More than anything, the train soothes and relaxes, and slows the pace of time.

As I was telling someone, “People have split ACs; we have split vacations.” A day after returning from Bali, we left with my parents for a 4-day vacation to Binsar. We were staying at a Club Mahindra property in Binsar (the Valley Resort). I had become a Club Mahindra member three years ago, but this was the first time that I was actually using the accumulated vacation days.

Binsar is in the Kumaon Hills of Uttarakhand. The nearest rail-head is Kathgodam, an overnight train journey from Delhi. Binsar is a 4-hour journey from there climbing up into the hills (with some valley descents). Nainital is en route from Kathgodam to Binsar.

This hill vacation was going to be as different from the Bali beach vacation as I could imagine!

I wrote this a year after a visit to China:

That is the slogan one can see all across Shanghai. Efforts are on to make cities greener and much better in every aspect. China has been building new cities at a frenetic pace over the past 10-20 years. India has done little on that front.India needs to start looking at life in its cities. Delhi has gotten a lot of money thanks to the Commonwealth Games. But most other cities languish. Urbanisation is inevitable – and it is something which has to be encouraged.

In the next 10-odd years, the number of people living in urban areas in India is likely to double. What is the quality of life we are going to have if we are not going to start thinking of upgrading our infrastructure and creating dozens of new cities from scratch across the country?

This week’s links:

• Chinese Internet: from The Economist. “Online business in China is growing even faster than the offline sort. Local tastes and needs, as well as the state, are endowing it with distinctive features.”
• Tipping Point for Spread of Ideas: from PhysOrg. “Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.” (via Rajeev)
• India’s 20 years of reforms: from Bloomberg. “20 years later, India’s transformation is incomplete.”
• Indira Gandhi Redux: TN Ninan writes: “Are we into another phase when parliamentarians write laws that the country will regret decades later?”
• On the BJP: Tavleen Singh and Chetan Bhagat have a couple of good articles that need some thinking.

For me, Bali was a good break with family. This year, we split our summer vacation into two – Bali for 5 days, and then Binsar in Uttarakhand for 4 days. It is faster to reach Bali from Mumbai then Binsar!

For me, the vacations are the one time in the year I get extended time with Abhishek. And each year, I can see his growing independence. Being a single child, it does get a bit lonely at times when we travel. But he is good at creating props from trains and other toys to create his own imaginary worlds. This time around, there was plenty of CricketAttax we played. Add to that his beyblades and TV. We watched Cars 2 (freshly acquired DVD).

I too got my own time to think and look ahead. Vacations slow down the pace of life. No meetings to worry about. A completely different context. And long stretches of contiguous time. This vacation, the thinking was less on work and more on what we need to do to change India’s political and policy future. The Mumbai blasts were yet another rude awakening. We have to change people’s minds in India and transform the country. How to accomplish this was what I spent time thinking on the beach in Bali.