iReview: My Learnings from the book 'India unbound' by Gurcharan Das

I couldn't have timed finishing this book better than now, with the ongoing tussle on the matter of FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) in Retail, for economic policy forms a substantial part of Gurcharan Das' 'Unbounding' of India. Even as I write this, the matter is "suspended" or at least put "on hold" by the government and situations similar to this form more or less the plot of the book unleashing the economic reality of the post-independent India. Without ever sounding pedagogical, the book echos the anguish and reasoning of the many growth oriented Indians.

Unlike this note, Gurcharan Das, the author, follows chronologically, the story of India since her democratic birth through the stages of economic incubation, stagnation and turtle movement each representing the eras of socialism, license raj and pre-liberalization respectively. The mood of the book shifts from 'hopeless' to 'hopeful' as it reaches it's destination, the post-liberalization phase, consuming over three decades of history and a third of the book just to describe the struggle undergone by the business power houses including the likes of the tatas, the birlas & the new entrants, the Ambanies and Subhash Chandra - with everything right from entrepreneurs to raw materials being sparse commodities back then - in attaining licenses, setting up industries, expanding them and so on, while opening the harsh realities of a closed economy. However, the number of success stories & growth, multiplies just under a decade of liberalization, accelerating the pace of narration. In fact, the last section reminds one of Thomas Freidman's 'World is Flat' despite it being differently themed and published much later, as for once, India appears to be on the global road map running  alongside the rest of the world in terms of economic growth. 

As one would agree, India represents the extreme ends of a spectrum, whether it's the urban-rural divide or that of the haves & have nots, educated & illiterate, upper vs lower castes. Gurcharan Das resonates both voices mainly of the rural-urban with authority due to his urban upbringing and exposure to the hinterland early in his career. Das, maintains an easy to understand tone throughout and shares anecdotes  being a theory-Y manager himself. It therefore sounds as much a story of the author as it is of his motherland, brilliantly syncing his personal experiences and the historical milestones of the nation. 

Given his academic and professional background, I am not amused by the language of economics, business and  common sense that he speaks but it is his ability to string together several pieces of political, economic and industrial  developments or sometimes even absence of the latter and in connecting them with India's unique cultural, social and philosophical background that appeals to me the most. For instance, he hypothesizes on why Indians in general and those belonging to the higher castes in particular are good in IT, pointing out that because of their philosophical roots are known to understand and internalize abstract concepts. Also, the upper castes had better access to education and were the first to grab opportunities in education. This he argues, also explains why there were no significant achievements in product development, since the upper castes were never into doing or creating anything on their own and that they were always used to getting things done. 

While the theme of the book could have easily made it sound quite factual it's his analysis and style of narration that guarantee a steady flow of ideas, some of them borrowed from elite researchers. The book therefore also doubles up as a tablet sort of compilation of research findings of several sociologists on India.

Maneuvering with the language just as the industrialists did during the license raj, the author neatly packages the book in line with what is deemed to be politically correct also ignoring for a  large part the irregularities committed by the business classes as if such cases never formed  a scope of this book.

In conclusion, as Das declares, it's individuals that create history without ever realizing and he himself creates some by writing this book and making it a single point of reference on India's business environment after her independence. 

LateReal thinking

Thus goes a scene from the movie Rocket Singh, salesman of the year - Interviewer for a sales position: 'sell this eraser ripped pencil', to test the candidate's ability to think out-of-the-box. The Interviewee played by Ranbir Kapoor, a wanna-be sales guy, tries desperately  to hard-sell by enlisting the ways in which the pencil could be used only to come up with mere 'order qualifiers'. However, i feel that he would have fared superlatively in his little test had the character been a parent. Now, at this point you (especially those that have never been even remotely involved in raising children) might stop reading further thinking that I have totally lost the plot as you can't quite find any correlation between parenthood and management skills. Well, then, let me tell you, there is and here's how (hoping that the already initiated will rally around in legoing my case).

That we get inspired a bit from children is a fact many acknowledge & hence let me start off from this common ground. While their innocence, joyous state of mind, carefree attitude & ability to live in the present & short memory might sound like 2g material for the not so-philosophical minds (moreover, with the duration of this phase shortening with each generation, does anyone really seem to bother?), their ability to think laterally can be highly motivating for the worldly 'we'. For instance, my toddler son finds multiple uses  for simple everyday things such as an Umbrella, his current favorite showcasing his wide power of imagination just like an open umbrella held up high; It's his tag along toy, aside from something to swing & swirl or play peekaboo with, in addition to being his instantly fixable tent or even a house, an extended arm, a bat and a stick amongst many others. 

Before long  he will learn its primary use, and there is a chance that he might be tripped into conventionality with his thinking getting narrowed and finally tied down - just like a closed umbrella. 

However, as we get inspired by children & their oblivious  teachings to us, we know better to help them keep their minds open - a challenge to be geared up for!

iRelationships are here to stay!

Here goes a list of my constant companions off late - ipod, iphone, ipad, kindle, macbook. I guess it is common for many of us. Although we might replace apples with the soon to follow Mango from Microsoft or Icecreams from Android, the central idea is that we all definitely share a deep relation (however one-way) with smart phones, tablets and notebooks more so than with our fellow humans.  I know we are in for a consensus on this statement & I will not need to prove it, but just for the record let me settle it for once and for all.

The smart thingies are so smart that they could just sort our lives, entertain, educate and guide us, all at once. I am sure everyone knows how. Simple, just by beeping - one beep and we are up, the next reminds us of the tasks we have set for the day, another buzz when a departmental stores is around to shop for items on our shopping lists and one more to enter the corresponding expense, if one uses a tracking tool. Personally, the only task my gadgetry doesn't perform for me is to help me locate my reading glasses of which I have a habit of misplacing way too often (wish the iGods incorporate some feature to track such personal objects as well, the way for instance, an iPhone's location can be pointed out exactly).  I certainly do not have to get into elaborating on how they entertain us - music, videos, books, or a peek into the lives of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues without ever talking to them directly, and if boredom strikes us still, an update on the general bufoonery (what else can we term Rs.32 being the upper limit for Below Poverty Line in India or the sandal throwing incidents) that usually passes off as news is all that we might need to further spice us up. Moreover, they also provide us with various alternatives - hungry? little short of cooking a meal and eating it on our behalf, we are offered help in every possible way. They could surely search for a recipe or at least recommend a good eat-out place based on our personal preferences, on-going promotions, distance and so on and even direct us to it. Their usage at work is so much for granted that I have almost missed pointing it out. Thus fulfilling the roles of personal assistant, friend and mentor much effectively.

No wonder then that we spend almost all our spare time with these gizmos than with people. How could people ever match up to the skills that these smart thingies are booted with? Also, people could get boring after a period of time because of bugs in the internal coding and also because of the difficulty in re-programming with new interests, experiences and conversations. To top it all, the gadgetary is not built to question us or expect anything from us beyond some electricity. Where else could one find such unconditional relationship these days and why wonder that today we are a generation of gadget/gizmo loving people. In fact, I would even like to nominate them for the Nobel peace prize, reason being that, when each one of us gets so involved with the machinery, there is absolutely no chance of direct interaction with people and therefore zero incidence of disagreements, fights or other such unruly behaviors. So what if we have to trade-in some silly inter-personal relations for lack of spare time,  we at least, have perfect iRelationships. 

An ode to IT

A parallel post to the one on Social Media, this is an ode of sorts to the Information Technology Industry in India. Without dwelling on the so called other side of the coin, I want to conveniently look at one of the many & perhaps the most important positives that this burgeoning, nothing short of a phenomenon has brought about not just to the youth of this country but to their families - confidence. 

While a majority of the previous generation's thinking class, as I prefer to call it or the middle class, as more commonly termed, was mired with their own set of financial burdens aside from the numerous non value adding & highly time consuming transactions, including something as basic as paying bills. IT has played a significant part both in clearing mind space by reducing routine transactions just to a click of the mouse and more recently to that of a tab in applications & providing much needed & relatively better economic sufficiency thus aiding this class to move one level up in the Maslow's needs hierarchy and thereby clearing the way for social causes to adorn at least our walls.

Although, a lot of this can be considered just an arm-chair movement, (a genuine wink if the term looks borrowed or may be not,  for all I care or remember) we now have a tool to not only air individual views for the consumption of larger audience and to connect to similar minded people but are also able to walk the talk although giving due weightage to the interplay between people's values, principles and circumstances. For instance, the anti corruption campaign is just one of the many social issues that has gained mind space in many of us. Courtesy the IT jobs, the confidence and the monetary benefits such jobs offer are aiding at least some of us to pay up legally for the government wherever required instead of looking for self gains by resorting to malpractices.

Seriously hoping that this trend trends!

What draws me to social media?

Off late I seem to be spending a lot of my spare time on social media - not just me but a lot of my friends as well, I would think. No, not just for being current with the lives of my family, friends and acquaintances, but for something more than just that. As the divide between social networking and social media reduces and one engulfs the other, I would rather bring them under one umbrella and call it 'social media'. Thanks to this revolution, I do not have to rely on the news channels with apprehensions on their very content. As a lot of traditional news channels take seemingly one sided stance on various issues, finally there seems to be an alternative for knowing the pulse of the people that truly matter. Therefore, with a customary glance to the headlines, I straightaway head to the blogs section of any news channel or to the tweets that not only provide me with the updates but also complement me with individual opinions.

Not only that, with 'group-think' at play, we get to see 'collectivism' as is evident from the on-going Telangana movement or the still in news Anna Hazare campaign. For a routine individual like me, there are more attractions to this system than the one off incidents of mis-use at least till the time even this gets completely corrupted like what has happened in the case of print revolution. Till then, happy tweaking - sorry tweeting!

Grow up Sud!

Seeing my almost 18 month to-be son grow takes me back to my own childhood. While I naturally  did not expect both the experiences to be similar, I was also not prepared to see such stark distinctions as well.

Children today are no longer just that, but are prince & princesses! Not only are they called so but am afraid are also treated such and are led into believing and behaving as one. A small evidence can be found in the growing number of couples celebrating their angels' birthdays every month by cutting a cake! Not meaning any offense to the parents indulging in monthly celebrations & realizing fully well that it is purely a personal choice, it still bothers me to think whether the child would experience the joy of waiting eagerly for the yearly birthday celebration. Coming back to my stance on how we raise them, I always wonder What right do we then have to sneer at their  reactions however unreasonable when faced with a "no" after having set such high standards and upping their expectations to match that of someone whose every wish needs to be heeded. Also to be seen is their collective behavior at school when each is raised as a prince and princess coming to terms with other kids that are all raised as specially.  The love of the parents from the previous generations' had towards their children was perhaps not as overtly exhibited as it is by this generation parents. Therefore, it was perhaps easier for us as kids to be one amongst many.

While today's parents treat kids in a very special way, they do not seem to be adopting the same attitude when it comes to letting them achieve their milestones at their own pace. Competing with other parents on their kids reaching milestones starting from infancy even with respect to when they roll over, crawl, walk, talk and the list just continues. These 'helicopter parents' then assemble their wards' with strict daily time tables while on the other hand are those parents showing extreme leniency. Just the way it is difficult for kids to understand the significance of education at such a tender age it is also equally tough for them to align to a 'can't miss a day at school, can't miss a mark, can't make a mistake & should never fail' kind of set rules'.In spite of completely being aware of the cut throat competition the kids would later face in their lives once they hit the big bad world, the parents from the previous generations seem to have let their children to be. In such discussions we should of course allow for generous leeway for exceptions in each generation.

To be fair with both the set of parents, the environment or the backdrop in which the kids are raised has also significantly altered. Aspects such as greater access to information as a double edged sword cutting across better awareness vying with higher levels of confusion see-saw with the concept of 'follow the ancestral path laid down by the grandparents'. Adding further to this chaos is the factor of raising kids in a multi-cultural context for the present day parents tussling with decisions on whether to adopt, adapt or ignore becoming more frequent. Something as common as children co-sleeping with the parents to vegetarianism in a specific cutture might completely be alien to another. Decisions in such instances tend to become ambiguous. Significantly different also are the support mechanisms both generation parents had and have, with physical support being more common for our parents, technological strength is our asset: how many of us might not have thanked profusely the disposable nappies to say the least at some point?

It's not just the parenting styles that has changed over the generations (I only talk about my generation & the current one), the attitude of children themselves seem to have changed. While a single or at max a couple of toys would have kept us excited for a long time then, any number of toys, technology, outside exposure doesn't seem to satiate the need to explore & understand the world for the current kids resulting in their early initiation into playschools. Reciting nursery rhymes, ABC's, 123s even prior to entering their third year seems to be the order of the day while I  remember struggling with learning alphabets in the lower case often confusing between 'f' & 'b' & 'g' & many more at double that age!

Balancing between these two extreme spectrums then becomes quite essential, a task that is perhaps easier said than done!

Work Life Balance

Not someone to write a travel blog, I am still forced into posting this entry because of the ripples of thought a recent visit to a great eastern country stirred in me.

A short visit to this vast country made me realize that God has been very equitable in distributing the nature's beauty. This country has fantastic beaches, mountains, desert & snow!

While we marveled at the god created & man made attractions, a lot of friendly people around offered to take photographs of our family for us, something I had not experienced before. Though these incidents, faces will go a long way down the memory lane & bring a smile on my face whenever I think of them, this post is about something else, something more profound - at least for me. So without drifting further, I will make my point.

Having come from a background that focussed on consumerism, the early closing hours of the shops in this country had me wondering if it made economic sense to limit the shopping time. Though never very strong in academics, the only thing I was sure was that governments & corporates mostly benefitted when people spent - for fulfilling a need or no, by impulse or otherwise, with cash or credit, on local made goods or imported products, and longer the hours, more the spending, my not so fast processor told me. Unable to keep my confusion to myself, I had confided my thoughts to a close friend, a local in that country. Her reply not just offered me enlightenment but also had me floored. It was quite simple (for her), she said that the people spent their evenings not in busy malls where they sold zillions of things, but at homes - with their families & that the government encouraged a work-life balance, a term quite familiar to the 'HR' by profession me. When an advanced country could imbibe this concept, I appall at why corporates that probably give birth to such lip service jargons find it challenging to practice it in letter & in spirit.

Cook right to eat right - the Ayurvedic way

As someone who has not cooked until hitting the quarter century mark in terms of age and without a formal initiation into this art, I sometimes depend on the cooking shows both online and off it. Thanks to my little experiments, mom's on-call help and the ubiquitous cooking shows I have turned out to be a decent cook in a little under five years. While in the beginning my focus had been to produce something edible I learnt along the way, the real art or science (depending on the way one views it) of food per se.

With such tremendous scope for experimentation and cultural variations there is no wonder that there can be as many styles of cooking as there are people living on this planet. "Delicious, exotic and presentable"  besides the hep "low-cal" phenomenon seem to be the most trending objectives for cooking, whereas "wholesome, nutritious and well balanced" seem to have lost their race somewhere along the line by simply remaining as sale-able propositions as has the linkage between eating right and staying better. Amidst this increased importance to eating tastier food we seem to have deleted  simple and less processed foods from our menus such as, "rasam", a south Indian soup cooked with great digestives including cumin, asafetida and pepper.

Earlier the art of cooking greatly used the principles from the science of Ayurveda (I only speak of Indian vegetarian cooking as I know of no other) but now I notice that this has completely been lost and forgotten at least in our generation. While as a self declared foodie, I enjoy good food, but in parallel I am also conscious of the damage that can be done to humanity by forgetting the authentic style of cooking - using the correct combination of ingredients (which is probably more important than knowing the right proportions) and the exact procedure - that I am confident was laid on foundations of health and fitness. By right procedure, I mean for instance simple things such as  cutting leafy vegetables and pumpkins into large chunks to retain their nutrients. 

Authentic cooking - as per my definition is something that maximizes the nutritional gains while still being tasty. Also, the more processed the food, the lesser the benefit will it provide in terms of nutrition. 

While food needs to be palatable I am against the rants most chefs seem to be making on popular shows on combining and multiplying ingredients that simply should not be used together for wrong reasons such as for increasing food appeal. For instance, combining spinach and tomato for the color it brings out when actually these two should not be mixed together but Okra or ladies fingers should always be cooked together with tomato and onions. Yes, cooking has a great scope for personalization but this I believe should not go against the principles of cooking healthy food.  

While cooking shows and recipe books can teach us to cook exotic dishes only our mothers' and grandmothers' kitchens have secrets to a healthier cooking. Now, lets go and figure!

The Age of Excesses

The recent inflated prices of vegetables in India made me feel strongly about the way our lifestyle has changed since my childhood. For the better? I am not too sure.

Call me old fashioned but I still prefer getting new clothes only for festive occasions and for birthdays, than just going on a purchasing spree whenever there is a sale which is forever in places like Singapore. And of course this trend is soon catching up in India as well.

Rich food was again only limited to special occasions like festivals, weddings & so on. Now a days I am sure a lot of households' must haves in the grocery shopping list would include sweetmeats, chocolates, ice creams, cakes & the like. That brings me to another interesting observation - we do not mind spending for these so called special treats but complain, crib for buying veggies not before thinking for umpteen times & finally deciding to call off when their prices get inflated. The health factor anyways gets affected and along with it goes down the feeling of exclusivity that comes from treating ourselves occasionally to a cake, for instance. May be we live in the times when eating rich food is the daily norm and nutritious food on special occasions.

Anyways, reverting to my nostalgia - going out used to be again a once in a while occasion either for eating out or rarely for the cinemas. These days there are lot more options available for hanging out. While i agree that these outings give one a much required exposure I certainly wish we gave things such as catching up with relatives, attending social gatherings the importance they deserved. Mingling with people still betters our social skills than window shopping in a mall or making friends with gizmos do, or so I reckon!

With my son's birthday just around the corner and with all those I consider as fond childhood memories turning into routine daily activities I wonder the kind of special memories he will have. Let's see!