Three tales to tango-Outliers- Tiger -Ideas

Well, we have just passed three months in the year 2009 and now the spring has come once again. Many are thinking how the “Green shoots of spring are all very appealing but will they really spread and grow into a solid recovery?” (Spring fever). 

I had good time to read books that was published in 2008. Two are from Indian authors one went to win The Man Booker Prize. 

Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century by Nandan M. Nilekani, and 

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga 

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell 

All three are well written with consciences.   

Nandan’s book is well searched and thought out book especially I enjoyed his lucid coverage of language issues in India. 

For me the Adiga book is a great history of Indian Economic Thought as he rightly emphasised the brutalism of the great Indian Socialist darkness India and emergence of lights. As Freakonomics author STEPHEN J. DUBNER says if your read White Tiger “you learn a great deal about modern India”. 

Gladwell’s book is a full of insights with paradise of imagination. It thrills me like when I traveled first time in plane from New Delhi to Srinagar for an international conference. 

DAVID BROOKS said in his review in NYT “It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew. 

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature.”

All three has a significant common focus on ‘entrepreneurship’ which is a industry born with human intuition or ethics. 

I will shortly post my reviews. But first I wanted to post a serious of posts on The White Tiger as he has covered a great amount of The Great Indian Socialist Darkness.

Oprah talks to herself, did Mr M K Gandhi also talk now?

In The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord re-opens the idea of Mr M K Gandhi. 

• “There's something to be learned from Mr. Gandhi, something capitalists everywhere in America should seriously ponder. They are being targeted today just as surely as were the citizens of India all those years ago. Gandhi taught his fellow citizens to think outside the box, to simply refuse to cooperate with their persecutors. 
  
• From urban street corners to suburban malls to lonely outposts in the rural plains, eventually it dawns on a startled populace. There are no trucks out there hauling American products or, for that matter, products from anywhere. The truckers too have kissed off the Obama bureaucrats who want to raise their gas tax and tax them by the mile. And so, they simply stayed home or, caught on the highway, pulled to join the lengthening train of motionless trucks forming a peculiar guardrail for passing cars. 
  
• Accessing a mostly frozen Internet is done by the pulse of dying, un-rechargeable batteries. There is no Fox, which makes liberals chortle, until they realize there is none of anything else on the nation's suddenly blank screens”. 
  

It is worth to read but at least it is not fully clear to my mind that what could be the way or method to bring those hard or core change to masses when classes determine the fate of those masses. 

It freedom sense, it is crime, to do so, but our rulers did every year after the independence. 

We are still patient waiting for a good doctor to cure the ills created by our own home grown political pundits (including some foreign origin). 

If at all I agree with Mr Nandan Nilekani‘s argument of “the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster”, it is this sense that the young age population which goes with criminal politicians during election rally, unwanted strikes, party mobs, etc without mindfulness of their business which obviously become “a demographic 'disaster” for the country which is often said ‘young’. 

Thanks to politicians for making folly of this young population otherwise mind their business in life even if they don’t bother to listen, their parents or elders advice, or teachers etc.

Final chance for (to) whom…..?

Now, Mr Nandan Nilekani is a gust blogger and he says how wrongly-it seems to be cut short vision. 

The Indian economy is going to play a major role- no matter how the ups and down. No doubt few will play like a king maker-and the blood shade will make easer for pink newspaper editor for their head line news. It does not surprise to me at least who is going to be terrible, good or bad policy maker for at least next five years. Many elections came and gone. History has shown how many representatives have had voted Bills which are not in interest of people who have elected them. 

What is called prime resource now was called walking dead bodied at least a few years ago. I mean the population in general and the young age population in particular. No doubt the truth will triumph with its own time. Those who have questioned wrongly about the unproductive population now premise to save or attempt to make them productive. I mean the “demographic dividend”. 

Mr Nilekani says in front of the coming general election “Without quick action the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster'. The next five years is our final chance”.

I do aware that nowhere Mr Nilekani said population is a problem including in his Imagining India book, which I read this January. 

Four years ago my M.Phil theses professor said during one of our class discussion. I said many studies have shown that the Public Distribution System is dysfunctional in India. And only 10 or some percent of ration reaches the poor people or targeted ones. The rest is smuggled in between politicians and government official hands. He said the 10or some percent is great achievement of PDS system we should welcome it! 

So this is how the UPA has given Job guarantee scheme which is unproductive, in the last five years, many have already questioned the UPA government achievements. Mr Nilekani put it differently “….they have in essence, done everything short of what is truly necessary” and ….”We have stumbled badly in the last several years when it has come to creating organized sector jobs and expanding access to education and skills training to the people who need it”. 

It is also true that when we all looking election after election what our government can do for us from unimagined taxes that it collects from us but we all failed to realize what it can not do, really. Indeed. The world has shown us the several other alternatives to development good society. Are our elected representatives ready to learn? The answer is no as the history has shown. 

In sum, there is no such thing as a “final chance”. Instead we must believe that every criminal who got elected in our democratic system should get no more chance to fool us. In other words, we must make fool of them not as business but in every walk of life. When I say this I stuck with the kind of police and court system we have now, will that save our life or the criminal life? 

Voting system will never tell that but everybody hope for that day and say look our democracy is living here.

Must have thought

The following text was published in the Business Line. 

Excerpts from Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century by Nandan Nilekani 

“The 1980s was a period that marked the rise of software firms in India. Right out of college, I had joined Patni Computer Systems (PCS), a family firm, whose CEO Narendra Patni came from one of India’s traditional business communities. I met Narayana Murthy here, and when Murthy’s plan to set up a small, new software company inspired six of us to join him, we walked into a minefield of regulations. We did not need much from the government, but the rare times we did have to travel to Delhi to get permissions to import a piece of hardware, we would be trapped in bureaucratic paperwork for months. Once, when one of the co-founders, N.S. Raghavan, went to Delhi to change the ‘port of arrival’ from Madras to Bangalore in an import permission letter, he had to hang around in the lobby outside a bureaucrat’s office for eighteen days. The corridors of these government buildings felt like a maze you could not find a way out of.

Additionally, since India had huge shortages of foreign exchange through the 1980s, every trip that we made abroad required the approval and sanction of dollars from the authorities. One time I had to make two trips to the United States in quick succession, and the clerk at the Reserve Bank of India demanded to know why I was travelling abroad so often—he did not see the need of it, and must have thought I was a hedonistic wastrel.

We also witnessed how much people favoured working in the Indian public sector at the time. Soon after Infosys moved to Bangalore in the early 1980s, we had hired a few bright young engineers from IIT Madras. Within a few weeks, one of them came up to me and said he wanted to quit, to join a public-sector company in Bangalore—he told me that ‘a government company will never go under, and the job I have will be for life’.

It took one more crisis to change our small steps towards reform in the 1980s into a single leap to the other side. India’s particular nemesis has been the oil price rise, which sent the economy reeling towards bankruptcy time after time. In 1991 yet another oil price rise triggered a crisis that I would call ‘third-time lucky’. It was one that transformed our attitudes towards India’s entrepreneurs. 

India was staring into an abyss by the end of the 1990s—thanks to reckless government borrowings, our foreign debt had more than tripled since 1981 to $64.4 billion. Then came the Gulf War and high oil prices. With the Indian economy on the ropes, the finance minister Manmohan Singh introduced a reform agenda… the baton for growth passed from the government to ‘the human spirit of creativity, adventure and enterprise’. 

A flurry of activity 

In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly every Indian middle-class home had a cupboard made of wood or steel, with multiple locks and several small drawers. The favoured brand was Godrej Storwel, with its hard-to-pick lock. Most Indian families kept their savings and jewellery here. People avoided putting money in stocks because of the ‘wealth tax’ on such investments. When the ‘wealth tax’ was eliminated, money came out of these cupboards and into India’s stock markets. This combination of stock-market modernization and a vibrant market enabled an explosion of new entrepreneurs, who could tap into market capital to compete across industries, and turned many once-oligopolistic industry sectors, such as airlines and telecom, into highly competitive ones.

The businesses that emerged at the top of the heap after this struggle were different from the ones before—half of the top ten companies in market capitalization in 1991 had disappeared from the list by the decade’s end. Some of the most prominent entrepreneurs who emerged post-1980, such as Sunil Mittal and Dhirubhai Ambani, had built their firms from scratch, and were a breed far apart from the closed circle, family entrepreneurs of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Leading the way 

It is also interesting how the Indian government has begun to leverage the strength of India’s IT industry in its foreign relations with other countries, as IT companies have established offices and made acquisitions across the world. In the Middle East, for instance, India has pushed governments to locate and deport terrorists, while using investments by India’s software firms there — and the threat of pullout — as leverage. As the technology economy has expanded in India, IT companies have also shifted from software exports to addressing domestic opportunities. 

Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India”

Big Government means high social costs

M.N. Sabharwal and Manish Sabharwal quote “As Nandan Nilekani says in his exceptional book Imagining India: “Our failure to create opportunities can turn our demographic dividend into a crisis. We have already experienced these problems through the 1970s and 1980s when unemployment and the lack of income mobility for working-age Indians fed into criminality and extremist movements across India such as the extreme-left Naxalite and extreme-right Bajrang Dal movements, as well as the rise of the underworld in major cities. Key players in Mumbai’s underworld, for instance, were people belonging to discriminated groups and the impoverished underclass—Chota Rajan was the son of a Dalit sweeper, Abu Salem’s mother rolled beedis for a living, Chota Shakeel grew up in a Bombay slum and Arun Gawli’s father was a textile worker laid off during the mill strikes of the 1970s. While these circumstances do not exonerate their actions in the least, these are signs of how economic bitterness can create high social costs.”

Is there any one?

Nandan says that (he) “I was keenly aware that we have always responded best in crisis. Indian economists and policy analysts remarked to me time and again, of our lethargy unless we are faced with economic disaster”. 

I don’t think any one warned as strongly as Professor B R Shenoy about the credibility of planning in India and what Government can do and can’t do. 

It is quite interesting to know who are those economists and policy analysts remarked as boldly as professor BR?

Ideas and policy is like “where access is easier.”

Nandan Nilekani interview in the Indian Express make fair comment; the following are drawn from his interview:

• Learn the right lessons, not the wrong ones, like in Sonia Gandhi’s speech yesterday….. 
• ..our labour system is dysfunctional. We’ve created a monster. 93 per cent disorganised, 2 per cent unionised. It helps every interest group, and shafts the common worker. 
  
• …haven’t presented reform as a matter of access for the common worker. It’s about opportunities opening up, about destroying vested interests. This is a failure of communication.