Sunday Posts

I was at an event yesterday where someone made a case for Autocracy. Not one, but two people made the argument that a period of autocracy is needed for a country's 'development'. The example given was China as it powered itself into the world stage in the aftermath of the Tienanmen Square massacre, but also that of South Korea, Japan and various other East Asian states. The point was that India's democracy, which some Indians see as the source of India's 'soft power', is more of a burden than an asset: Would it not be better if India was rich and autocratic, rather than what it is now, a poor democracy? We were talking about how courageous the makers of modern Indian state were in choosing democracy with universal suffrage just when India became independent notwithstanding the widespread poverty, illiteracy and pangs of partition. The Western nations ridiculed the ambition then and predicted its failure as soon as it started. Pakistan proved the point, but I...

I am learning to live with a new term - Dimaagi Naxal - which roughly translates into Intellectual Maoists. The Indian Prime Minister, who is a master practitioner of three letter acronyms and numerology and a student of 'entire political science', has floated the term recently. The irony is hard to miss: He is launching his own 'Cultural Revolution' to rid the society of those who disagree with the monochrome vision of Hindi-Hindu India, and who is better to invoke than Mao even if it is done in this backhanded way!  This is another of those political absurdities that surround us every day. The performance politics, of which the Indian Prime Minister is an acknowledged expert, has taken over the dour activities of justice and law-making. One could watch the grand inquisition of a law enforcement officer, Jack Smith, as a great TV drama, complete with tragedy, criminals and crime, as evidence of this mind-bending change. While I know little about North Korea, I can not ...

I am working on a school for entrepreneurs. It is still work in progress and I am approximately halfway to securing funding and collaborators, and therefore, my ideas are still radical and reflect what I really think about entrepreneurship. I know, after having been there a few times, that I may not be able to implement these ideas in the pure form: There will be adjustments and compromises made along the way, and at this stage, I am better off defining clearly what is non-negotiable and which parts are open to modification.  Let's take for example one of the things I want to do: Start the entrepreneurship education programme by dissecting business failures. I want to have an intensive examination of not just how businesses fail, but what happens when they do. This, for me, is an useful corrective for the celebration of start-ups, which obscures how painful setting up a business is. In fact, it is a good starting point to know that if a business doesn't work, the entrepreneur i...