Sunday Posts

Sramana Mitra writes in Forbes about the flaws that she sees in Capitalism today , that it is not rewarding the right people, the innovators and the creators, and making money for the speculators and the middle men instead. She cites a comparison between Charles Kao and the likes of George Soros , and points out that the imbalances of reward between the two needs to be corrected; that we require Capitalism 2.0 once the veil of recession is lifted. She writes beautifully, and passionately, about her faith in self-correcting nature of markets, and draws her inspiration from Ayn Rand. She reaches out to her past in Pre -liberalization India, where Ayn Rand's unforgettable characters appealed to her entrepreneurial mind and formed the basis of her faith in free markets. She points out that Rand's flaw is possibly in assuming that integrity is implicit in the character of the leaders, whereas the reality is far from it. And, this makes her muse about a new set of rules, an ethica...

In India, China is the country we don't want to think about. They are our neighbours, right, but they seem to be from a different planet altogether. We don't understand them. We feel much closer to the British and the Americans - don't we have a shared culture and a penchant for all things English - than the Chinese. The Chinese are strange people anyway - their language undecipherable, their food unpalatable and their politics unacceptable - to us. Just that, we can't wish them away. They share thousands of miles of borders with us, most of which is hotly disputed. We fought an war in 1962 and badly lost, which bruised our ego and made us afraid of them forever. Yes, there was a time when we extended our hand of friendship and talked about permanent peace in Asia based on Panchasheel , the five principles of Civilized behaviour. We counted the Chinese to be friendly because they were a poor nation trying to develop as we were doing at the time, and both of us had legit...

I am back from Mumbai , where I spent an interesting few days over last couple of weeks. My work happened to be in the same neighbourhood where my brother lived, in Powai , and which I visited several times since April 2008. This time, visiting after a gap of a few months, I noticed several new restaurants , including one by Sanjeev Kapoor , the celebrity chef, which has come up near Mainland China in Powai , a chain restaurant which has already made its name for great quality food. On the other side of the road, there were another very expensive Kebab outlet. I stopped by at the Crossword outlet which I used to frequent, but noticed that they have also opened another extension outlet only a few yards away, near the Rohtas Hotel, where we enjoyed an expensive, yet delicious and enjoyable, buffet lunch. However, all the while we were driving in and around this locality, the talk centered around Recession. It was a touch ironic that we talked about job losses and the slowdown in recrui...

I am sitting in the Dubai airport as I write this. The lounge as busy as ever, a clear reminder that the Emirates Airlines is one of the world's largest, most successful passenger carriers. The shops in the Duty Free are buzzing with tourists, though they are no cheaper than Bond Street. The new Glass-and-Steel Terminal 3 is a symbol of what could have been. But, Dubai seemed destined to be a city that would never be - some sort of Atlantis that sunk in a soulless quagmire in the middle of a financial earthquake. Friends living here are not that pessimistic. They point out that Abu Dhabi, Dubai's bigger, wealthier, more conservative cousin state, will not let Dubai fail. Though Dubai has no oil, and has to renew more than $60 billion sovereign debt in the next few years, they are always hoping that Abu Dhabi will come out as Dubai's Knight in the shining armour. It is too closely linked, they say. However, it is a bit too dire for comfort at this time. I know the planes wil...

While I am back into my crazy travel routine, crisscrossing Asia and trying to give a shape, finally, to our training business, the question whether we live in an age of scarcity or of abundance dominated my thoughts. I have spoken to people about this, and also privately debated the concepts: I even made an earlier post on this blog talking about my anguish for not being able to accept abundance paradigm when I actually see so much misery across the world. Anguish, because I am also mindful of the fact that most of these miseries are created by the scarcity mentality in the first place. While I mocked Chris Anderson's concept of FREE and talked about zero-pricing death, life and time, I am also conscious that unless we can move into the abundance paradigm, we don't really escape our animal selves and the narrow spheres we live in. Unless we feel free from scarcity, we can not really give; unless we feel the abundance, we can not overcome the fears that dominate our lives and r...

I have just finished another trip to India and I return rather reassured that the training business is on an upswing. The great freeze that affected us - training providers - last October, seems to be lifting and the companies are looking to return to business-as-usual. Of course, my conversations revealed that it won't actually be business-as-usual, and the unfreezing will take longer than immediate term. My feeling is that this market will start to return to pre -recession levels in around April 2010, but with a number of important changes which may alter the industry landscape. I have obviously met a number of industry veterans, who kept a brave face but betrayed a level of uncertainty. The balance is obviously shifting in the market, the cost cuts are still fairly severe and training managers in most corporations are still firmly on the firing line. The cosy relationships that sustained corporate training is under scanner, and increasingly, efficiency enhancing ideas, On-demand...

I could not write for last ten days. Considering my obsession with this blog, that's a long time of not writing. And, though I was busy, the reason for not being able to write was not my schedule, but the fact that I have started writing seriously. Holy cow! Suddenly, I realized writing a blog is a very public show. While it is as exciting to be invisible and nude in the public at the same time, it starts getting serious when I am upgrading my writing as a serious hobby. Something I wish to pursue, that is, with a little more effort. Besides, I am told that my writing is too verbose. By more than one person. And, that it put them off. Suddenly, I have this load on my head - thoughts on how I can make my writing more interesting. Pretending can be a lot of burden, and my pretensions have at last caught up with me. So, the world comes full circle. I started writing this blog as a sort of 'morning pages', attempting to practise writing and sending off writers' block f...

First things first. Be rich or be human? This rhetorical question isn't meant to be a moral one, but rather a practical one raised by Paul Saffo , formerly of Institute for The Future. His point is that with access to biotechnology innovations, the rich may soon become a different species. This is similar to other predictions made by scientists recently, the American scientist Ray Kurzweil in particular, that, with the advancement of nano -technology, immortality may be possible in a few generations. So, the dream of creating an ageless super-race isn't an impractical dream anymore. Indeed, whether this will happen is a matter of futurists, whose job is to weigh in various possibilities and make responsible predictions. Paul Saffo has been particularly prescient in the past and his ideas count in the Silicon Valley, where most of the research projects which can make this vision come true are being undertaken. However, since the thought has entered the realm of possibility, i...

As a part of my work on the Leadership Programme, I came to realize that one of the more important aspects that one needs to understand about leadership is what leadership is not. I have been reading Warren Bennis and his warnings about Pseudo -leadership is very real: I do think the world is full of pseudo -leaders and the big problems we face comes from the failure to call the wheat from chaff a lot of times. To start with, take the distinction, following Max Weber, between Power and Authority. Weber argued that POWER is about the ability to force people to obey, whereas the AUTHORITY is when one is obeyed without having to resort to force. In real life, however, this distinction gets blurred and too many people confuse the two. This happens on both sides of the table, incidentally; those who obey sometimes mistake the power - the senior person's ability to fire or punish the junior person - as some sort of automatic authority, and those who are in the driver's seat someti...

Nick Griffin's BBC appearance has created a row, for good reason. Many people saw the similarities with Jean Le Pen, whose fortunes were created after appearance in the French equivalent of Question Time, so much so that he turned from a rather lunatic fringe right winger to the challenger to Jacques Chirac in a Presidential run-off in a decade's time. Nick Griffin is a slightly churlish, utterly boring politician, who does not seem to stand for anything. Except the emptiness of the current political debate, one would hasten to add. If there were any questions about why Nick Griffin was even invited to the show, the show proved it: What was indeed the point in having the show with a vacuous Jack Straw, pointless Sayeeda Warsi and self-defeating Chris Huhne? If television shows are about TRP rating, bring it on! But then the BBC is not about TRP. Isn't that what one pays for, through the license fee 'tax'! That should have kept it free of the obsession with TRP ratin...