Sunday Posts

I don't fly Air India. I have suffered enough already, but if I needed any more proof, today's incidents in Gatwick added to the already dismal record of the airline. It proved again that bureaucrats, particularly the Indian ones, are absolutely hopeless in running a customer facing service. I am no lover of privatization, but it is absolutely certain that something drastic is needed in Air India. So this is what happened: Due to fog, this morning's Heathrow bound Air India flight needed to land at Gatwick. If this was any other airline, this would have been fine: The passengers would normally be taken on a bus to Heathrow, a 45 minutes journey. Not for Air India: Surely the Babus could not decide what to do with such an 'unusual' situation. Their idea, therefore, was to fly the plane from Gatwick to Heathrow, about 30 miles away. The problem indeed is that the EU regulations demanded the crew had to be changed, as the original crew had already flown from Mumbai...

I read with interest a press interview given by R S Pawar , the Chairman of NIIT , on the subject of NIIT University's launch of a MBA programme. Being an NIIT student first and then an employee for several years, I regard Mr Pawar as a thought leader and a pioneer in Private Education business in India. Despite many criticisms that NIIT faced for its uncontrolled growth and resultant inability to control the quality of services, Mr Pawar and his colleagues had a vision which transformed India in a way. I know the persistent criticism is that they just took the opportunity presented to them, but this comes from people who have not seen the hard work, the management sophistication, the long term strategic thinking, commitment to professional business practises that built NIIT . I have, first hand, and therefore, I hold NIIT in very high esteem. Therefore, what Mr Pawar says about the MBA programme is worth listening to. This is of course just a Press Release, orchestrated, n...

Writing an obituary for Jyoti Basu is as difficult a writing task as any I could have attempted. This is because he had a universal presence in my political consciousness. This presence was for real – he was the Chief Minister of the state I lived in for quarter of a century. I grew up seeing him as the Chief Minister, and he did not retire until after I left home and started living abroad. In a way, I have never known any other Chief Minister of West Bengal. Besides, there is another, emotional, dimension to that presence. He was the last of a generation of people who presented a linkage to our pre -independence past, those who shaped the ideas in modern India and carried it to the present day. In his imperious, Bengali babu style, Jyoti Basu was an unlikely communist. Though he created and led, with others, the pre -eminent Left party in India, he was Nehruvian , in his thinking, in his approach, in his ideas about Modern India. He will be sorely missed. He is possibly one person ...

With my business connections in Hyderabad, I am increasingly worried about the state of affairs in Andhra Pradesh and the political tension surrounding the formation of the Telengana state. I can see the Congress Party is split in two, with the coastal MPs fasting unto death and agitating with all their life's worth against the decision, and the ones from Northern regions quietly basking in the glory of finally bringing justice to a long forgotten region. It will take some time for the dust to settle. There are two hugely contentious issues: One is the formation of the new state, and the second is the status of Hyderabad, which falls into Telengana geographically, and is closely linked by history with the region. If Hyderabad is supposed to become part of Telegana , expectedly its capital, it will suddenly change the city and the equations in the state. There are talks of making Hyderabad an Union Territory, which is really about postponing the decision for now, and taking on...

I am at it again, after a gap of almost five years, when I am actively searching for a job. This means all the things that come in the package, preparing a CV, posting it on job sites, keeping a watch on job alerts, firing off applications to those positions which remotely match my area of expertise and smarting off after reading through various rejection mails every morning. Despite the disappointments, it is an interesting exercise to do, to get a feel what I am really good at, to study the patterns of rejection letters and infer which one was written with some sympathy and which one was auto-generated, feeling the sense of hope and despair while waiting for some employers who did not say no, overall feeling young again. Also, the interesting thing here is that my heart is not in it, not yet. I am not sure whether I can get back the zeal of sending out 750 applications as I did in the first few weeks after landing in Britain, which earned me 743 straight rejections, 7 interviews and ...

While I am on the subject of Leadership Training, I had this interesting discussion about sales training in India with a friend. He was emphasizing the need of developing sales training modules specifically for India, and not rehashing the western modules available off the shelf. He also made the point that sales has a changing priority in India, because the new commercial frontiers are the villages and hitherto untouched customers for most industries. His point was - and he had been doing this for more than a decade - that the western models, if it ever worked in India, are losing their effectiveness in the context of this new marketplace. Indian trainers, indeed, covet the western practises. This is primarily based on, I believe, the faith on the superiority of Western business culture. After all, modern business culture in India is deeply influenced by Western business thinking, passed on through customer interfaces and expectations, or through consultants and executives trained in ...

Air India is in trouble. But not in as much trouble as it should be as a commercial aviation company. After all, it is India's national carrier and the government has pledged to save it with taxpayer's money. The Aviation Minister, Mr. Praful Patel, made a statement that the government will step in and bail out the company, provided the company is willing to restructure and become a leaner, profitable operation. I do not know what options were on table for the Indian government, but the broader question is whether the government should intervene and inject tax money to keep things going. Obviously, it is politically convenient and that's exactly why this will be done. But, is it expedient to do so, and we must assess the impact this will have on commercial aviation in India. To start with, bailing out a commercial entity like Air India is anti-competitive. Why give one company the access to public funds, and therefore an unfair advantage, over the other companies in the se...