India Book Article Share: August 2006

Are Indians really dumb?

So we now have two Indias.

One has a severe inferiority complex and is unwilling to do anything creative because it thinks it is incapable of it. It thinks being called the back office of the world is the ultimate compliment, missing the implied insult in the word back. It thinks its ultimate destiny is to do all the slog work of the world.

The other is confident about its capability, dreams big dreams, then goes ahead and translates the dreams into reality. There are innumerable success stories like ISRO and Tata Steel in India today, in manufacturing, electronic hardware, pharmaceuticals, software, fashion design, or any area that you can think of. The problem is that these are not highlighted. Creative individuals and organisations who are developing products or technologies with a lasting impact are unsung heroes.

Every Indian child's history textbook says something to this effect: 'During the British Raj we exported cheap raw material to Britain, then imported the finished products at a much higher price. We were paying for the value addition done in Britain, and the Raj prevented us from doing the value addition here. We were being exploited by the British.' The IT industry is considered to be India's biggest success story, but in reality 99% of it involves the export of cheap (human) raw material and the import of expensive finished products.

India's education system, like others in Asia, emphasizes rote learning and blind regurgitation of text material/teachers' thoughts. It is designed to snuff out creativity. There is chest-thumping lamentionations by industry leaders that high school/college graduates are unemployable without costly in-house training - but no larger attempt to redesign curriculum for 21st century knowledge work, emphasizing creativity. The school system is stuck churning students out with a 18th/19th century mindset, perfect for mindless widget-asembly or bureaucratic paper-shuffling.

A similar complaint to what John Taylor Gatto makes about American schools -

Parivartan -Using India's RTI to fight corruption

Parivartan is a Delhi based citizens’ movement trying to ensure a just, transparent and accountable governance.

Parivartan

* Is not an NGO
* Is a people’s movement for reinforcement of democratic values.
* Stands and strives for strengthening of practices and systems which encourage participatory democracy including transparency and accountability

Parivartan

* runs on time, money and ideas contributed by the people.
* does not accept any project based funds from any donor organizations, whether foreign or
* meets its financial liabilities through contributions made primarily by individuals.

Right to Information Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Right to Information Act 2005 (Act No. 22/2005) is an act enacted by the Parliament of India, and the Act came into force on 15th June 2005. The Act was enacted with a view to enable the citizens of India to have access to the information under the control of authorities defined to be public authorities under the Act. The Act mandates that from 12th October 2005, the general public (of India) may approach the public authorities including the departments of the federal government, state governments, government bodies, public sector companies and public sector banks to make available the information as requested.

It is accepted by the Supreme Court of India as a part of right to speech and expression guaranteed to citizens in the Constitution. It tries to promote openness, transparency and accountability in administration and ensures effective participation of people in the administration and thus implement a more meaningful form of democracy.

Example of culture change due to IT - using IT to computerise records and make 'em easily accessible and scrutinizable. Openness, transparency are "values" held by the IT profession. War against corruption can really succeed in the IT generation.
Exposes using RTI -

Farmers' choice : HindustanTimes.com

Now drink to the ingenuity of Telangana's farmers. First they sprayed soft drinks - in place of pesticides - on cotton crops. They are moving on to hard drinks.

In some villages in Adilabad and Karimnagar districts, farmers are experimenting with cheap liquor on crops. And the results are encouraging, they say with all the seriousness of scientists in lab coats.

The farmers turned to the bottle when the use of spurious pesticides led to crop failure. Liquor treatment is cost-effective too. A litre of cheap booze costs a little over Rs 100 and is enough to spray on

two acres. Pesticides for the same area will cost the farmers Rs 3,000-4,000 .

Very ingenious. IF this proves sustainable, Crop-dusting with Purell/Budweiser to follow...

Farmers' choice : HindustanTimes.com

Now drink to the ingenuity of Telangana's farmers. First they sprayed soft drinks - in place of pesticides - on cotton crops. They are moving on to hard drinks.

In some villages in Adilabad and Karimnagar districts, farmers are experimenting with cheap liquor on crops. And the results are encouraging, they say with all the seriousness of scientists in lab coats.

The farmers turned to the bottle when the use of spurious pesticides led to crop failure. Liquor treatment is cost-effective too. A litre of cheap booze costs a little over Rs 100 and is enough to spray on

two acres. Pesticides for the same area will cost the farmers Rs 3,000-4,000 .

Very ingenious. IF this proves sustainable, Crop-dusting with Purell/Budweiser to follow...

Dependency Ratios and Economic Success

The New Yorker: Fact
The key to understanding the pension business is something called the “dependency ratio,” and dependency ratios are best understood in the context of countries. In the past two decades, for instance, Ireland has gone from being one of the most economically backward countries in Western Europe to being one of the strongest: its growth rate has been roughly double that of the rest of Europe. There is no shortage of conventional explanations. Ireland joined the European Union. It opened up its markets. It invested well in education and economic infrastructure. It’s a politically stable country with a sophisticated, mobile workforce.

But, as the Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning suggest in their study of the “Celtic Tiger,” of greater importance may have been a singular demographic fact. In 1979, restrictions on contraception that had been in place since Ireland’s founding were lifted, and the birth rate began to fall. In 1970, the average Irishwoman had 3.9 children. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, that number was less than two. As a result, when the Irish children born in the nineteen-sixties hit the workforce, there weren’t a lot of children in the generation just behind them. Ireland was suddenly free of the enormous social cost of supporting and educating and caring for a large dependent population. It was like a family of four in which, all of a sudden, the elder child is old enough to take care of her little brother and the mother can rejoin the workforce. Overnight, that family doubles its number of breadwinners and becomes much better off.
Compared to China, India has more favorable dependency ratio in the decades ahead. (Need data source, figures for China). 50% of Indian population is under 25 and so has long working years ahead of them - supporting a small fraction of retirees - 5 or more workers per retiree. Of course, economic growth not guaranteed, since human capital must be developed and deployed adequately.

From India business schools to top of world's boardrooms - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

"There is a huge demand for Indian executives," said Rana Talwar, the former chief executive of Standard Chartered in London who runs Sabre Capital, a buyout firm. "The quality of the education is very good. And Indians can adapt to any environment. When we grew up, we got used to adverse conditions."

Part of what makes Indian graduates desirable is their willingness to move for a job, said Ajay Banga, chief executive of Citigroup's $18.3 billion Global Consumer Group International in New York. Banga should know. He has relocated 10 times in 25 years. [DR Note: Reminds me of Peter Drucker saying that the only country having a US comparable internal labor migration flexibility was India]

The attitude complements the rigorous education, much of it American-inspired, at the IIT and IIM schools. One in 50 applicants to the IIT schools is accepted, and at the IIM management college in Ahmedabad, the rate is one in 532, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit rankings. At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, one in 13 is accepted.

Is China a success while India is a failure? World Affairs - Find Articles

After all, for many centuries, both India and China were far ahead of Europe economically.

Sadly, some Indians accept this notion of Confucians as uniquely capable of disciplined frugality and saving, as if India were not also a great commercial civilization.
Freedom, both in the sense of knowledge as a basis for rational choice and of physical mobility as a capacity that could be realized or blocked, is central to well-being. The Chinese hinterland villager in the Mao era, limited in information by a single political line, either believed, wrongly, that all Chinese were equal in condition and living better than the supposedly exploited and immiserated of Taiwan or was frustrated and outraged at being kept locked in the equivalent of an apartheid caste society. The Indian villager, joining an opposition political party, protest movement, or exodus to the city, had capabilities painfully denied to the impoverished Mao-era Chinese villager. In many ways, the Indian villager was better off.

Although all societies are wasteful, it may be that Leninist production numbers uniquely obscure how extraordinarily much of that production never usefully reaches an end-user or consumer, how stupendously much is wasted on the courtly lifestyle of the parasitic and large official stratum of feudal-like rulers, how much goes to the military and especially to the many secret polices with no gain--indeed, with great loss--for individual security.

The poor hate the corrupt gains of the coddled rich. Chinese grow nostalgic about the past and misremember and romanticize it as a way to criticize the lack of national health care today, just as the brilliant and well-meaning Professor Sen and others among the well-meaning Indian left romanticized Mao-era primitive equality. Today's poor in China, like the nostalgic left in India, blame China's market-oriented reforms for its hideous and growing gap between rich and poor.

That is, the issue is not a democratic political system as such, but, rather, India's entrenched political interests that benefit from the Leninist command economy, the "license raj," and conservative elites in some of north India's most populous and, therefore, electorally powerful provinces. They have had the political clout to block needed growth and poverty-reducing reform.

In fact, the causes of growing inequality in reform-era China lie in the continuation of Mao-era policies and priorities. They are entrenched in powerful identities, interests, and institutions.

In India, in contrast, the strongest supporters of its democracy are the poorest people. One can debate the diverse sources of this stabilizing legitimation of Indian democracy, assessing the contribution of Gandhianism, policies of positive discrimination, lower caste political mobilization in a second surge of democratization

In Indian nationalism, Indians must be "wary of opening the economy to foreign business for fear of repeating the experience of the East India Company, whose merchants had become rulers" and practiced "extreme protectionism," thereby locking India into one technological moment of industry, incapable of borrowing the knowledge that permitted continuous upgrading to standards of global excellence. Since independence, fearful that market openness meant dependency on imperialism, India has wounded itself, subsidizing waste and producing shoddy goods, rejecting an opening to world markets that rapidly expanded wealth in East and Southeast Asia.

Indians instead clung to the "Nehruvian developmental model ... based on import substituting industrialization leading to self-reliance" while damning export-oriented industrialization as an American "imperial" conspiracy to keep developing nations as "client and protege states" who are forced to "follow the footsteps" of an exploitative America.

the big political obstacles to India's rapid rise come from the nationalistic rejection of openness.

when European ships reached India in the sixteenth century, "India was enormously productive, wealthy and densely populated.... Indian ports and shipping had for centuries been tied into the Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and Mediterranean system on one side and into the Bay of Bengal, Straits of Malaka, and China Sea on the other." A decentralized and open India absorbed advanced technologies, and "Indian diamonds, pepper, handwoven cotton and silk textiles, and other commodities kept their old markets and found new ones.... Dutch purchases of textiles in Bengal in the late seventeenth century likely generated 100,000 new jobs for the region." India was a beneficiary of the expansion of the world market, Andre Gunder Frank concluded in 1996, "earlier and more than ... Europe." (25) Should one not imagine premodern India as a global market leader?

A democratic India, therefore, has economic opportunities denied to the Chinese people by the ruling Communist Party's dictatorial system. Democracy is not now and never was an obstacle to growth.

Compare institutions - democracy versus dictatorship, matters of political institutions, leadership, and will.

finds Tu Weiming, America's leading neo-Confucian. India is a vibrant democracy, a civilization where religious vitality and societal dynamism flourish together, and China "suffers from an inability to understand religion as an integral part of the complex modernizing process," (36) such that China should "take from" India, understood as one of China's "reference societies." (37)

It is mind-boggling that people could ever consider this abnormal China that represses its people's capacities a success and a vibrant and democratic India a failure.

Long article definitely worth spending time on. Merits a thorough read.

All the riches of the east restored, by Philip S Golub

Its distant origins are to be found in the position that Asia occupied in the world system before the North-South divide and the creation of third world countries (2) - a divide brought about by the European industrial revolution and colonialism. In a long-term perspective China, like Asia as a whole, can be seen to be resuming its precolonial history and gradually reclaiming the place that it occupied before 1800, when it was one of the main centres of the world economy and the world’s principal manufacturing power. China was then the centre of a dense, centuries-old regional trade network and Asia was the world’s main production and profit-generating area.

It is not surprising that Asia had a preponderant place in world manufacturing at the time. According to estimates by economic historian Paul Bairoch (8), in 1750 China’s share of world manufacturing output was 32.8%, compared with 23.2% for Europe, with populations of 207 and 130 million respectively. India and China together accounted for 57.3% of world manufacturing output. If the contributions of the southeast Asian countries, Persia and the Ottoman empire are included, the share of Asia in the wider sense (excluding Japan) was almost 70%. Asia was particularly dominant in finished textile products (Indian and Chinese cotton and silk goods) - a sector later to become the globalised flagship industry of the European industrial revolution.

Indian market complexity

The Indian market is widely diverse. The country has 17 official languages, 6 major religions, and ethnic diversity as wide as all of Europe. Thus, tastes and preferences differ greatly among sections of consumers.

Although the Indian government is well aware of the need for reform and is pushing ahead in this area, business still has to deal with an inefficient and sometimes still slow-moving bureaucracy.

Shocking that the official Finance ministry's website is so lackluster. No one will be rushing to invest after reading this verbiage.

Growing Indian innovation

[Das]named one major challenge as being reformation of mind-sets, governance and use of technology in education, healthcare and the rural economy, stressing the need for "motivating and creating an environment for those not just in urban areas, but also in rural areas, to take advantage of the technology."

With Indians now being globally competitive, Das said that new entrepreneurs need to have a better environment in which to perform -- one of the key goals of the commission. "A concurrent challenge for the U.S. is how do we build a partnership between India and the United States for global competitiveness," said Das.

Increasing transparency and collaboration within the country -- from homogenizing the famed Indian bureaucracy to solving the shortage of science and technology teachers by bringing together the professors who don't do research and the researchers who don't teach, the commission admittedly has a long way to go.

"We must overcome the mindset barriers," said Pitroda, "we know there is going to be resistance at all levels, but that is the challenge."

Jan Chipchase,Nokia HCI - Repair Cultures

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect Archives

What sets these locations apart from cities in more 'emerged' markets? Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice , naturally. Repairs are often carried out with little more than a screwdriver, a toothbrush (for cleaning contact points) the right knowledge and a flat surface to work on. Repair manuals (which appear to be reverse engineered) are available, written in Hindi, English and Chinese and can even be subscribed to, but there is little evidence of them being actively used.

Instead many of the repairers rely on informal social networks to share knowledge on common faults, and repair techniques. It's often easier to peer over the shoulder of a neighbour than open the manual itself. Delhi has the distinction of also offering a wide variety of mobile phone repair courses at training institutes such as Britco and Bridco turning out a steady flow of mobile phone repair engineers. To round off the ecosystem wholesalers' offer all the tools required to set up and run a repair business from individual components and circuit board schematics to screwdrivers and software installers.

Cheap, process innovation - addressing the bottom-of-pyramid (BOP) market [See C.K. prahalad's book - Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid] Ahh, chipchase refers to this later.

The informal repair services that are offered are quite simply driven by necessity - highly price sensitive customers cannot afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee.

For consumers the informal repair culture is largely convenient, efficient, fast and cheap, reducing the total cost of ownership for people for whom a small drop in price may make the difference between having or not having a phone.

Wal-Mart's Int'l Failures

"Wal-Mart Finds That Its Formula Doesn’t Fit Every Culture" NYT 8/2/06

Wal-Mart’s problems are not limited to Germany. The retail giant has struggled in countries like South Korea and Japan as it discovered that its formula for success — low prices, zealous inventory control and a large array of merchandise — did not translate to markets with their own discount chains and shoppers with different habits.

full text article

Cultural Insights India - Dina Mehta

The relevant God or philosophy is Krishna the pragmatist, not Ram the idealist. Krishna holds the philosophy that there can be several versions of the truth. Advocates running from the battlefield, in order to be alive to fight another day
Always on access and personalized service is important for customers in India. The prevailing attitude is that "I'd rather call up my local photocopy neighborhood store and get 'acceptable' quality with great service (with pick up and drop off) than go to an impersonal large store to get it processed." Here are some visiting cards I have of my local cold storage, vegetable vendor, grocer, chemist, photocopier, furnishing store.

source

The Road To Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

The Road To Serfdom

IN ORDER to achieve their ends, the planners must create power—power over men wielded by other men—of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning- and democracy.

Many socialists have the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and transferring this power to society, they thereby extinguish power. What they overlook is that, by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transformed but infinitely heightened. By uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind.

Similar pattern in all socialist/communists forms of government(including post-1947 India) - government control over means of production (will lead to totalitarianism, Hayek warned) perpetuating poverty and tyranny, instead of improvement in individual economic well-being. Need to quote Hayek.

UChicago Prof: Ronald Inden

Department of History::People::Faculty::Ronald Inden
Book - Imagining India. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990; paperback, March1992.

He is particularly interested in people's efforts to construct paradises or utopias on earth in and beside their everyday lives.These involve practices ranging from "rituals" in medieval ortraditional societies to the "media" in modern ones and, especiallyin India, the world of cinema. The problems of how people have situated and resituated these differing practices in a "developing" country like India bring together my historical, anthropological, and Indological interests.
Person to possibly interviw

Arthur Maurice Hocart - Anthropologist's works

Arthur Maurice Hocart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

# The Progress of Man: A Short Survey of His Evolution, His Customs, and His Works (1933)
# Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society (1936)
# Caste (1950)

Bernard Cohn, 75, studied colonialism, India’s caste system

[Cohn] wrote and published extensively on a wide range of topics related to India, including the titles Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (1996), An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (1987) and India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization (1971).

Books to read, sample

Dirks, N.B.: Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.

Dirks, N.B.: Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.

Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus.

Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology.

CrossCultural Communication Challenges

# Six Fundamental Patterns of Cultural Difference

1. Different Communications Styles
2. Different Attitudes Toward Conflict
3. Different Approaches to Completing Tasks
4. Different Decision-Making Styles
5. Different Attitudes Toward Disclosure
6. Different Approaches to Knowing

Areas to cover in Book

The box office’s got a line on society’s mood swings- The Economic Times

The box office’s got a line on society’s mood swings- The Economic Times
Brand and ad gurus agree that the best learning about changing social trends comes from seeing which Hindi films are ‘hits’ and which are flops, and comparing insight from this source with all other sources of consumer data that we see, be it focus groups, or product sales by geography, advertising tracks.

Bunty aur Bubbly confirmed a lot that we saw and heard about the world view of small town youth in the new India. Rang De Basanti, by virtue of being a hit with young people in big and small towns, blasted the myth that sections of the media love to propagate that GenNext is totally uninterested in serious issues, especially of the ‘corruption in politics’ kind.

The so-called saas-bahu serials have a very strong ‘bharatiya naari but strong feminist’ discourse that, based on their TRP numbers, certainly seems to resonate with a lot of women — outwardly the same, but morphing from within.

KANK is not working too well, as reported in ET, in small towns but is doing well with NRIs and metro types; this is a bit of a relief for me — it reconciles with what I see elsewhere with what the film shows. That modern issues like infidelity, individualism, loosening family structures are empathised with and accepted by all, but modern resolutions to them are SEC A1 — if that!

Was the theme too bold? Several magazine cover stories recently make the point, with reader interviews, that there is a sexual revolution on even in middle class India, that affairs in the work place are fairly usual in young India even when the parties are married, and that divorce is increasingly becoming common.

However, the resolutions that TV serials propagate so comfortingly still require the fig leaf of a compelling reason why; not “because I couldn’t help it.” (Example, amnesia or emotional trauma resulting in children out of wedlock, old flame with secret wedding in temple reappears, so this is not an affair, he had the first right etc.)

KANK’s lukewarm response in B and C towns and SECs reassures me. Marketers to SEC A1 say Indian women are embracing western wear in a big way, thus confusing the rest of us who look at B and C India and bet we will go the East-West hybrid pant & kurta way!

No wonder the film is a big hit abroad. In KANK, Indian clothes are hardly worn except on important occasions like weddings; no hectic feet touching, no prominent bindis or mangalsutras, in fact their mini-skirts are very mini indeed. (is this why most of India cannot empathise? We love our cultural trappings, it is our sajavat, even our upper-class men are going ethnic with a designer vengeance!) The representation of the global Indian is discontinuously different from the sighing for Hindustan, Om Jai Jagadish-singing NRI.

Here are well-integrated people who just happen to be Indian, who do not see their Indian identity as a cross to bear or a badge to display. Indian names, but elegant home decor with no Indian artefacts in your face, clothes that are hip, and spouses that don’t have to be Indian.

The language is a mix of perfect Hindi and well-spoken English, all in all, a well-blended cocktail, not an explosive bundle of East-West conflict. We actually are already seeing some parts of this identity comfort with upper-class Indians and young IT Indians.

New-age old: We have been seeing the trend in recent movies (Baghban, Pyaar Mein Twist) of old folks being shown as real people too, and being romantic and sexual beings. KANK oldies are snazzy, with-it, ready-to-party folks, totally risen beyond the pujya mataji and pitaji characterisation, thus far seen to be appropriate for this age group.

New-evolved parenting: Very interesting too, is the dynamics of the relationship between the parents and their grown-up children. In every focus group in all town classes SEC A, B ,C we are hearing about how the power distance between generations is getting less, and there is a huge democratisation and loosening up of the parent — offspring relationship.

KANK does a great job of show-casing that. There is a responsibility that elders carry to guide, but not to direct. As Bachchan senior says so aptly in the film, “Main baap hoon. Sazaa nahi de sakta. Sirph salaah de sakta (I am a father. I cannot dispense punishment. I can only advice).”

Take from the movie: Even if we don’t love our spouses, we love their parents forever.

The arrival of individualism: Yes, much has been made of infidelity being the theme, and it not being relevant. But actually all the stuff we read in magazines about divorce rates and young married people falling in love at the work place, tells us that our upper- and middle-class society accepts that marriage may not be for keeps if the halaat goes awry, and nobody seriously believes that ‘aurat pati ke ghar se nikalti hai, ya doli mein ya arthi mein’ confirms this.

However, the issue is that the fig leaf of some ‘majboori’ is still needed or a different kind of resolution. The film says gently, maut and mohabbat just happen, the latter often created by halaat. Even the saas-bahu serials pick up this theme often, though they resolve it in different ways.

The rise of woman power: And what about the gender battle messages we get from KANK? Art imitating life, as it were? Yes, successful, ambitious women will have problems with their spouses. But can find happiness by being themselves. That’s a huge leap away from the stereotype towards legitimising a woman’s career capability, and will come as a relief to many bright, young ambitious women that are coming into their own in our big cities.

However, there is a reinforcement of the stereotype of motherhood being the most fulfilling role. So some things change, some don’t, and the trick is to figure out what does and what doesn’t. However, the conventional Indian view that we hear from heartland India and TV serials is that you stay within the system and ‘sudharo’ it — that is the ‘shakti’ martyr mandate. You do not walk away.

Finally, new age real men do cry, apparently. The macho male is there in Omkara, but certainly not in evidence in KANK!
Rama bijapurkar

The author is an independent market strategy consultant

FrontPage magazine.com :: Useful Idiots

FrontPage magazine.com :: Useful Idiots: Islam’s Best Soldiers by Amil Imani

A new generation of “Useful Idiots,” that Lenin identified as those who lived in liberal democracies and furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also lives in liberal democracies but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.

Useful Idiots are naïve, foolish, ignorant of facts, unrealistically idealistic, dreamers, willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy, the anarchists, the aspiring revolutionaries, the neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society. The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population.

Arguably, the most dangerous Useful Idiot is the “Politically Correct.” He is the master practitioner of euphemism, hedging, doubletalk, and outright deception.

The Useful Idiot derives satisfaction from being anti-establishment. He finds perverse gratification in aiding the forces that aim to dismantle an existing order, whatever it may be: an order he neither approves of nor he feels he belongs to.

The Useful Idiot is conflicted and dishonest. He fails to look inside himself and discover the causes of his own problems and unhappiness while he readily enlists himself in causes that validate his distorted perception.

A caustic characterization of totalitarian, centralized ideology supporters.

Thoughts on Freedom: Open Society Condensed Chapter 10

The origin of western civilisation in the Greek states is depicted as a transition from a closed or tribal society in the direction of an open society. This transition caused strain and distress which Popper called the “strain of civilisation”, a problem that is liable to intensify at any time of social or political dislocation. Popper suggested that the possibility of reducing this strain by taking refuge in a more settled community is the hook that attracts people to fundamentalism and to cults and sects of all kinds. The believer hopes that this affiliation will eliminate the problems of freedom and individual responsibility that arise in dynamic and multicultural societies.

The Indian jati, (a trade guild/professional caste)was formulated to counter the pressures of personal responsibility.

1. There are two types of society: closed societies and open. 2. All human societies begin by being of the closed type, but, except when they havestagnated or died, they have always evolved toward an ever more and more opentype. 3. Up until the industrial revolution this evolution was so gradual as hardly to be perceptible within the lifespan of an individual.The evolutionary process is complicated by the fact that different sections of the community progress towards the open society at different speeds. At any given point in history there are classes for whom economic, political and cultural advantages make society relatively open, and vice versa, those for whom similar disadvantages make it relatively closed.No human community of course has ever been completely closed, and none probably will ever be completely open, but from the researches of anthropologists and historians, we can construct a Platonic idea of both.

In the light of what has been said, it will be clear that the transition from the closed to the open society can be described as one of the deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed. Owing to what we have described as the biological character of the closed society, this transition must be felt deeply indeed. Thus when we say that our Western civilization derives from the Greeks, we ought to realize what it means. It means that the Greeks started for us that great revolution which, it seems, is still in its beginning—the transition from the closed to the open society.

If we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go into the unknown, the uncertain and the insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.

Interview with Alvin Toffler: weekend FT

FT.com / Arts

“While the revolutionary wealth system is all about decentralisation, niches, flexibility and devolution to networked and distributed power, Europe’s leaders are trying to build a megastate,” he says. “Europeans have very slow-moving institutions and societies. And they are proud of that fact. This is fine, but there will be a price. The large states - France, Germany, Italy - are falling into relative decline behind the US and Asia.”

Plays to India/US cultural strenghts

His big notion of the moment is that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the “prosumer”. One example with huge implications for ageing societies: “Soon there will be one billion people over 60,” he notes. “They will be using new technologies from self-diagnosis to instant toilet urinalysis to self-administered therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. This will change the way the whole health industry works.” Inexorably, this huge aspect of the non-money economy will drive the market for medical technologies, creating vast new value and a lot of wealth for somebody.

Freed from the demands of standardisation in Toffler’s new wealth system, we will live on “customised time” suited to our own personal rhythms, working and playing by our own schedule. “Creative piece work” will replace jobs and careers as we become prosumers, much of the time outside the money economy. Work will move out of the factory and office, and back into the home.

Standardised education is among the slowest institutions to adapt. If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100 mph. But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10 mph. You cannot have a successful economy with that degree of desynchronisation.”

Japan, in Toffler’s view, also suffers from desynchronisation. “The technology is the easy part. The hard part is to make consonant changes in institutions and social structures to bring it all into sync. This is where Japan, with its notorious social and cultural rigidity, has fallen down. Japan’s main challenge is to loosen up.”

Now a car story: TN Ninan in the FT

FT.com / Columnists / Business Standard - Now a car story
[India's] export of automobiles has grown faster than software over the last four years (more than 35 per cent annually). Admittedly, that is from a low base, and the total exports of vehicles last year fetched no more than $2.5bn. But the pace is slated to pick up, not slacken; and in less than 10 years the industry hopes to be exporting vehicles worth $35bn - twice as much as the software guys did last year. Add the better-known success story on automobile component exports (like forgings), and it does look as though automobile manufacture will be a new arrow in the country’s quiver.

At nearly 7m units a year, India is the second-largest two-wheeler manufacturer in the world, next only to China. In cars, India has just crossed the million mark; 10 other countries have done that before India, but if you go by the figures provided by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, none of them is growing as fast as India’s industry. And in buses, believe it or not, India makes a sixth of the global total. Even in medium-size tractors, the country does very well in the global pecking order. This varied base is now being used as the launch-pad for getting into other markets.

The leading makers of two-wheeler companies (Hero-Honda, Bajaj and TVS) are all doubling capacity, adding another 6m to their present total. The leading players in the domestic car market have their eyes firmly set on exports. Hyundai wants to treble its car exports from 100,000 to 300,000; Maruti is developing a new car for the export market (beginning with 100,000 car exports); and Tata Motors wants to double exports every two years. Ford too has decided that India will be a sourcing point for some markets. With Toyota now set to enter the small car segment, the finance minister may well have been right in spotting the opportunity to make the country a hub for small car manufacture. Export of a million cars five years from now looks a distinct possibility.

India - on the growth turnpike

2004oration.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Flexibility of the labour market - Factor mobility is a fundamental element of the process of equalising differences. As of today, roughly 90% of India's labour force is in the unorganised sector, which is a classical labour market, undistorted by labour law. In addition, unlike China, India has no government restrictions on inter-state or rural-to-urban migration. [Similarity with US]

Policy innovations in keeping with historical patterns-
1) The first is the move towards smaller states. It is widely conjectured that smaller states are more effective at catering to local variation in preferences and technology, and at ensuring greater accountability for public goods outcomes. Uttaranchal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh are important experiments in this regard. It is, as yet, too early to tell whether the outcomes play out in line with the conjecture. If governance does prove to be superior in smaller states, then (a) it will generate convergence, given that these four states are all below the national average, and (b) it suggests one policy avenue for improving governance in other large states in the future.

2) The second innovation is the devolution to local governments, as a consequence of the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendment. The underlying premise of Panchayati Raj is that when local citizens control public expenditures, there will be a greater likelihood of obtaining good outcomes in terms of producing public goods. There are three key elements of local autonomy: (a) Transfer of functions and schemes, (b) Transfer of staff and (c) Transfer of funds, and autonomous financial decision making.

On the growth turnpike - steps
o There is a near inevitability that there will be a bulge in the working population, particularly till 2020. This effect will be further multiplied due to enhanced levels of skills i.e. accumulation of human capital.
o It is likely that this demographic dividend, coupled with strong GDP growth, will fuel an increase in the savings rate.
o Thus India is likely to fare better than it did over the 1980-2000 period, in terms of putting factor inputs into the growth process.
o The policies of the recent years - particularly in infrastructure, reductions of protectionism, and building modern securities markets - will continue to fuel TFP growth.
o Being a ‘willing globaliser’ will attract greater flow of FDI and technology.
o In addition, India has already shown a track record for obtaining TFP growth over the 1980-2000 period. TFP growth will show further acceleration thanks to the impact of information and communication technologies upon the speed of knowledge diffusion and to the network externalities.
o These elements add up to a scenario where GDP growth in India over 2004-2024 will be much higher than that seen over 1980-2004. In the coming decade or two, growth rate in India may surpass the ‘miracle growth’ rates achieved by other Asian countries. This is not surprising as India, compared to Japan, China and other high growth economies of Asia, will have advantage of an access to productivity enhancing IT, which was not available in earlier decades. This way, we will be cashing in on the ‘late comer’s advantage’.

Key growth drivers -
Thus, India - riding the wave of growth fundamentals such as demographic transition, human capital accumulation, improved incentive structures, diffusion of new technologies such as IT, total factor productivity accelerators through ‘network industries’, and an improved security environment - will be growing at growth rates which can be above 10% per annum i.e. double digit growth rates.

Highlights of Leamer review of the world is flat(sic)

Leamer_FlatWorld_060221.pdf (application/pdf Object)

From the countless facts that are material to whether or not The World is Flat, I have
selected just a few.
· The income distribution is not becoming flatter, neither between countries and nor within the US.
· Trade is a neighborhood phenomenon, close to home geographically and organizationally.
· Trade contributes to the decline in manufacturing jobs, but doesn’t seem to be the primary driver.
· Outsourcing of intellectual work is a small drop in a very large bucket.
· The US is extremely well positioned to compete in the Internet-based segment of the economy.

Outsourcing threat overblown:
1) Commerce declines dramatically with distance - not a small world after all. According to this empirical model, commerce between any two countries is proportional to the product of the masses (GDPs) divided by the distance
between them raised to approximately 0.9. An estimated
distance elasticity of -0.9 means that each doubling of distance reduces trade by 90%.
For example, the distance between Los Angeles and Tijuana is about 150 miles. If Tijuana were on the other side of the Pacific instead of across the border in Mexico and if
this distance were increased to 10,000 miles, the amount of trade would drop by a factor of 44. Other things held constant, expect the amount of commerce between Shanghai
and LA to be only about 2% of the commerce between Tijuana and LA.

2) GAO(2005) with “U.S. and India Data on Offshoring
Show Significant Differences.”
here is what the GAO (2005) has to say (BPT =
Business, Professional and Technical Services):
“The gap between U.S. and Indian data on trade in BPT services is significant. For example,
data show that for 2003, the United States reported $420 million in unaffiliated imports of
BPT services from India, while India reported approximately $8.7 billion in exports of
affiliated and unaffiliated BPT services to the United States.”26
Compared with an $11 trillion economy, those numbers are small potatoes, the Indian
estimate being less than 0.1% of GDP, less than the GDP measurement error by a wide
margin. Dividing those two estimates by say, $100,000 in revenue per job, that translates
into a low of 4,200 jobs to a high of 87,000. That compares with the US economy that
increases payroll jobs on average by almost 200,000 jobs per month.

3) The US has Extraordinary Advantages in the Use of the Internet.
There is one more thing that is really not flat: the Internet. The US is the primary home
of the Internet, and in many ways is the center of the New Economy. Fully 67% of
Internet hosts reside in the US (Table 3), and 23% of Internet users ( Table 4) compared
with a population fraction of 4.6%. Of course, China and India, because of their huge
populations, show up in the list of the top ten homes of Internet users, but my advice
nonetheless is: bet on the US.

4) A computer is both a forklift and a microphone. Clerks in MacDonalds no longer have
to be able to read or to compute - they only have to recognize the picture of a hamburger
on the cash register. That’s the forklift. It doesn’t much matter who punches the
buttons. Thus your intelligence advantage over me is eliminated by the computer, just as
your strength advantage was eliminated by the forklift. But for many other operations it
matters enormously who types on the computer. One example is computer
programming. The vast majority of people are incapable of producing commercially
viable computer code. That’s the microphone. It amplifies your natural advantages.

5) But: Physically, culturally, and economically the world is not flat. Never has been,
never will be. There may be vast flat plains inhabited by indistinguishable hoi polloi doing mundane tasks, but there will also be hills and mountains from which the favored will look down on the masses. Our most important gifts to our offspring are firm footholds on those hills and mountains, far from the flat part of the competitive
landscape. Living in the United States helps a lot, and will continue to. But those footholds will increasingly require natural talent.

Economic growth and India's future

J.Mukherji_2006.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Large Western firms have had operations abroad for many years but
the implications of a shift of key service functions to a foreign location may be
qualitatively different from the earlier shift of industrial production abroad. More and
more of the central nervous system of the firm, including its management information
system, accounting, customer service, product development and design, as well as parts
of its strategic thinking is going to be located abroad (not just in India), perhaps altering
the dominant management models more than would be apparent from simply looking at
the dollar value of the work done abroad. Closer political ties with India may generate the
needed level of comfort for firms to shift as much of that type of operation to India as
economic logic would dictate.
The US is a capital-intensive economy with a high level of technology. Along with other
countries with a similar profile, it shares a common interest in working with India to help
its own companies maintain their competitiveness and their technological edge in coming
years by drawing upon Indian skills and talent. It also stands to gain from harnessing India’s demographic profile to meet its needs in health care, financial services, and other areas.

In comparison with China, change in India is being driven more from the bottom and the
middle. India’s national political leadership often appears to be accommodating the
changes that are hurled in its direction, rather than initiating them. There is no Indian
Deng Xiaoping, a paramount leader driving economic reform, and may never be. India’s
advantage is that it does not have to depend on good leaders to keep growing.

India possesses the political liberty, pluralism, and institutional framework needed to
successfully enter the global economy. It suffers from poverty, poor physical infrastructure, and fiscal weakness. In attaining a comparatively more mature level of political development, India has solved the biggest long-term challenge facing China.
Indian democracy faces no threat from globalization but China’s system of governance is
likely to change over the medium term.

Communication with LatAm

Similarities with India - Figure 1 table is good.

South Asia - India Development Policy Review

India’s recent growth performance has been spectacular; the country remains one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But these achievements have created new challenges. The India Development Policy Review 2006 titled "Inclusive Growth and Service Delivery: Building on India's Success" focuses on two major challenges facing the country today: improving the delivery of core public services, and maintaining rapid growth while spreading the benefits of this growth more widely.

Core public services: It is essential for India’s rapidly growing economy to improve the delivery of core public services such as healthcare, education, power and water supply to all its citizens. This means empowering its people to demand better services through reforms that create more effective systems of public sector accountability. Options include decentralizing to local governments, producing regular and reliable information for citizens, undertaking internal reforms of public sector agencies, or creating public-private partnerships. But ultimately, implementation is everything.

Rapid and inclusive growth: Maintaining rapid growth will require more, and more effective, investments in infrastructure to create more jobs for low and semi-skilled workers.

Growth should more equally shared by all, as many parts of the country remain poor. Promoting inclusive growth includes revamping labor regulations, improving agricultural technology and infrastructure, helping lagging states and regions catch up, and empowering the poor through proactive policies that help them to take part in the market on fair and equitable terms.

The Garland Making Worldview

“Be like a garland maker, O king; not like a charcoal burner.” --Mahabharata, XII.72.20

celebrating diversity vs. reducing everything to a homogenous ash

World view - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term denotes a comprehensive set of opinions, seen as an organic unity, about the world as the medium and exercise of human existence. Weltanschauung serves as a framework for generating various dimensions of human perception and experience like knowledge, politics, economics, religion, culture, science, ethics.

For example, worldview of causality as uni- directional, cyclic, or spiral generates a framework of the world that reflects these systems of causality. A uni-directional view of causality would generate a monotheistic view of the world with a beginning and an end and a single great force with a single end, e.g. Christianity and Islam; while a cyclic worldview of causality generates a religious tradition which is cyclic and seasonal and where in events and experiences recur in systematic patterns, e.g. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism and Hinduism.

These worldviews of causality not only underlie religious traditions but also other aspects of thought like the purpose of history, political and economic theories, and systems like democracy, authoritarianism, anarchism, capitalism, socialism, and communism.

The worldview of linear and non-linear causality generates various related/conflicting disciplines and approaches in scientific thinking. The Weltanschauung of the temporal contiguity of act and event leads to underlying diversifications like determinism v/s free will. A worldview of Freewill leads to disciplines that are governed by simple laws that remain constant and which are static and empirical in scientific method; while a worldview of determinism generates disciplines that are governed with generative systems and rationalistic in scientific method.

Why ‘Outsourcing’ May Lose Its Power as a Scare Word - New York Times

Why ‘Outsourcing’ May Lose Its Power as a Scare Word - New York Times
considered in its macroeconomic context, outsourcing just isn’t that big a deal right now. In the years since Mr. Mankiw’s encounter with the buzz machine, economists have been crunching data on short-term trends in outsourcing in the vast service sector, which accounts for about 80 percent of domestic jobs. While there are some exceptions, they generally find more reason for concern than alarm.

In December 2005, the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that 1.4 million jobs would be outsourced overseas from 2004 to 2008, or about 280,000 a year. That’s a drop in the bucket. In July, there were 135.35 million payroll jobs in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thanks to the forces of creative destruction, more jobs are created and lost in a few months than will be outsourced in a year. Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, notes that in May 2005 alone, 4.7 million Americans started new jobs with new employers.

What’s more, the threat of outsourcing varies widely by industry. Lots of services require face-to-face interaction for people to do their jobs. That is particularly true for the biggest sectors, retail and health care. As a result, according to a McKinsey study, only 3 percent of retail jobs and 8 percent of health care jobs can possibly be outsourced. By contrast, McKinsey found that nearly half the jobs in packaged software and information technology services could be done offshore. But those sectors account for only about 2 percent of total employment. The upshot: “Only 11 percent of all U.S. services job could theoretically be performed offshore,” Ms. Farrell says.

Economists have also found that jobs or sectors susceptible to outsourcing aren’t disappearing. Quite the opposite. Last fall, J. Bradford Jensen, deputy director at the International Institute of Economics, based in Washington, and Lori G. Kletzer, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, documented the degree to which various service sectors and jobs were “tradable,” ranging from computer and mathematical occupations (100 percent) to food preparation (4 percent).

There is evidence that within sectors, lower-paying jobs are being outsourced while the more skilled ones are being kept here. In a 2005 study, Catherine L. Mann, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, found that from 1999 to 2003, when outsourcing was picking up pace, the United States lost 125,000 programming jobs but added 425,000 jobs for higher-skilled software engineers and analysts.

Economists also point out that jobs and services that are tradable won’t necessarily move to lower-cost places. Ms. Farrell of McKinsey said that despite their huge populations, China and India lack enough university graduates with the specific skills and experience to meet the staffing needs of Fortune 500 companies.

In addition, labor costs are only one of many factors that companies consider. Executives have to worry about reliable power supplies and the proximity of vendors and customers. Here, again, the United States has significant advantages over countries like India and China. As a result, only a small portion of the jobs that could be outsourced will be outsourced; Ms. Farrell believes that by 2008, outsourcing will affect less than 2 percent of all service jobs.

IFTF's Future Now: Peter Drucker on the future of India

You don't have that problem in India because they have already done an amazing job of absorbing excess rural population into the cities--its rural population has gone from 90% to 54% without any upheaval.

Everybody says China has 8% growth and India only 3%, but that is a total misconception. We don't really know. I think India's progress is far more impressive than China's.

I think some of these stats (90 to 54%) are wrong, but the point about no violent upheaval accompanying these migrations is valid.

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future - New York Times

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future - New York Times
The founding elites of India were British-educated. Today, the ambitious young pursue degrees from Wharton and Stanford, with some 80,000 Indian students in the United States. Two million Indians live there, working as doctors, software engineers, and motel owners along America's highways.

No surprise, then, that America has shaped the ideas of what India's highway can be. Mr. Rao's deputy, B. K. Rami Reddy, also with a daughter in America, was nearly breathless as he described one stretch of finished roadway in southern India: "You really feel like you are in the U.S., it is so nice. When you go on that road, you feel you are somewhere else."

The implicit effort to make India "somewhere else," more like America, more of the first world and less of the third, girds this entire project. With the highway and India's accompanying rise, Mr. Rao predicted that by 2010 or 2020, "Indians may not feel the need to go abroad."

More articles in the series:
In Today's India, Status Comes With Four Wheels
On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger
All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India

The New Pluralism -- Peter F. Drucker full-text article

The New Pluralism -- Peter F. Drucker full-text article
Society in all developed countries has become pluralist and is becoming more pluralist day by day. It is splintering into a myriad of institutions each more or less autonomous, each requiring its own leadership and management, each having its own specific task.

But all earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. [Note: India an exception??? though taking care of common good a big problem]

The only exceptions to the universal centralization of power that we mean when we talk of modern society existed in the English-speaking world and especially the United States. Religious diversity, especially in the United States, maintained a substantial sphere of pluralism, and out of this then grew the uniquely American independent college and university, the equally uniquely American nongovernmental hospital, and so on. But even in the United States the trend ran strongly toward centralization in which one political institution, the government, has a monopoly on power whereas society itself consists of very large numbers of independent individual or small enterprises, each with considerable freedom but without any power.

the task-centered and autonomous institution is the only one that performs. Performance requires clear focus and narrow concentration. Multipurpose institutions do not perform. The achievements of the last 150 years in every single area are achievements of narrow focus, narrow concentration, and parochial self-centered values. All performing institutions of modern society are specialized.

Face value | The wired man of Bangalore | Economist.com

Face value | The wired man of Bangalore | Economist.com
on his 60th birthday on August 20th, N.R. Narayana Murthy will stand down as executive chairman of Infosys, the Indian information-technology star he co-founded in 1981. To step back at all so young and fit is a novelty. To do so in favour of younger professional colleagues rather than his own offspring is odder still. But the firm Mr Murthy has built seeks to follow not Indian tradition but the best of international practice. He has shown, as Nandan Nilekani, Infosys's chief executive, puts it, that business should be run to serve customers in America and Europe, and “not in the corridors of power in Delhi.”

His biggest worry is one shared by the rest of Indian industry—shoddy infrastructure, from roads to airports. One reason why IT firms have flourished without relying on the government is that they have built much of the infrastructure they need themselves.

Word of Mouth Marketing

When asked how they make recommendations, 80% of consumers say they make them in-person, followed by 68% who say they make them over the telephone. This phenomenon is even stronger among The Influential Americans®, (the one in ten Americans who tell the other nine how to vote, where to eat and what to buy, according to over 60 years of GfK NOP research) with 90% of this group making in-person recommendations and 79% making recommendations by phone.

Surprisingly, the study found that less than 40% of consumers use e-mail to make recommendations to others, including via personal e-mail (37%), by e-mail forwarding (32%) or through mass e-mails (12%). While slightly higher percentages of Influentials use e-mail (personal e-mail 53%, e-mail forwarding 39% and mass e-mails 18%), face-to-face communication still far outweighs this medium.

The India Option by Charles Tannock

Project Syndicate
The “strategic partnership” that both America and the European Union have at times sought with China looks both more plausible and more desirable with democratic India.

With a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister, a Hindu Foreign Minister, and a foreign-born Christian President of its ruling Congress party, India is as remarkable a success story as the twenty-year boom that China’s Communist Party has delivered.

Perhaps for the first time since inventing the zero, India has a hot product to sell – and, this time, it can keep the profits for itself. Moreover, a global bidding war has broken out for Indian brains.

Indian businesses naturally chose Britain over other locations in Europe for reasons of language and cultural ties [DR Note: Same with America - the Anglosphere connection]

When “new economy” issues such as e-commerce come up at the WTO, India, the EU and the United States often find themselves on the same side.

The world is beginning to notice that India has nearly the same number of people as China, plus a more benign system of government and no designs on its neighbors.

A symphony of civilizations

Asia Times Online :: China News - A symphony of civilizations

Historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) already indicated after the first massive tragedy of the 20th century the direction to follow: "If a true world-civilization is ever to be created, it will not be by ignoring the existence of the great historic traditions of culture, but rather by an increase of mutual comprehension" (The Making of Europe, 1932).

Only a shared awareness of fundamental cultural and historical commonalities can lead to the deepening of the links ... Better understanding ... is also necessary for both sides to take the full measure of what the two ancient civilizations can achieve together.

Intellige ut credas - "understand so that you should believe" - Augustine's words on reason and faith might apply also to the actors of international relations: mutual understanding begets trust and the two are, in fact, reinforcing each other.

... re-emergence , but only ... restoration to its historical position - is already having considerable impact on the global village.

Since it shares with the Old World an accumulation of experiences in dealing with a high level of internal diversity.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) observed this general paradox of 19th-century US society: "The aspect of American society is animated, because men and things are always changing; but it is monotonous, because all these changes are alike" (Chapter XVII, Democracy in America, 1835).

... is physically almost as large as Europe and much larger than the European Union 25.

The population of the European Union does not exceed a third of ... 1.1 billion inhabitants.

...is a multinational political entity.

...one speaks of ... ethnic groups composing a gigantic human mosaic.

balance the legitimate need for unity with the richness of diversity.

find inspiration in European society and its constant effort to balance economic efficiency and social justice under the rule of law,

Friends converge towards the gentleman's culture and their friendship promotes benevolence and goodness." This was Confucius' view (Analects 12:24).[need an Indian equivalent quote]

Aware of fundamental commonalities, understanding their respective constraints and looking for cross-fertilizations, it is time ... to join their strengths and wisdoms to open a more cooperative page of history.

DR Note: Good ideas here which are what I want to echo in the book wrt India vs. USA/W. Europe. Plus, India is more of a natural ally in its pluralistic outlook and democratic underpinnings.

The Long Tail's maths begin to crumble | The Register

There's a knack to getting the buzzword book formula right. The idea can't be false - but it shouldn't be falsifiable either. The idea should be simple enough to be explained by the subtitle, but vague enough to suggest applicability to all kinds of different markets - like a bland, all-occasions scent. And it must flatter the reader into thinking they are cleverer, and much more special than they were when they began reading the book.

Namaste world - Technology Walla - Blogs - CNET Asia

More than 50 percent of India's population are below the age of 25. That is over 500 million people, nearly twice the population of the US.

India's great strength is its people--technology-savvy youth, English-speaking skilled manpower, a large pool of engineering talent and one of the world's largest domestic markets. The number of people in the working age group will increase by 250 million from 2003 to 2020. Its 250+ universities and 10,000+ colleges produce more than three million graduates each year.

...
The installed base of PCs and adoption of Internet in India leave a lot to be desired. Out of nearly 200 million households, only about five million have a PC. Fewer of those have an Internet connection, while broadband is just getting started. Most of the 38 million Internet users are from cybercafes, for whom being online is sporadic and not an integral part of their life. Connection speed of 256Kbps is considered as broadband. Even after 11 years of Internet, online activity is largely restricted to jobs and matrimonial sites, email and chat. The top two portals are still advertising "better email" as their USP (unique selling point).

The low installed base of PCs is countered by a large and fast-growing user base of mobiles. Out of the 100 million mobile phones, nearly a third are GPRS-capable. Indian users are mobile-savvy, networks are data-ready, handsets are feature-rich, market size is humongous, and therefore market potential and room for innovation are high.

Wine or mobile: India home to big biz ideas

Wine or mobile: India home to big biz ideas
Import of fine wine to India could well become a big business idea for global entrepreneurs as the tastes of the country's fast-growing middle class are growing beyond swanky cars and jazzy mobiles and now include a bottle of Chardonnay.

Import of fine wine to India has emerged as one of the '12 best new business opportunities in the world' compiled by a Fortune group magazine.

The Business 2.0 magazine, a part of global media giant CNN-Time Warner Group, said in the cover story of its latest issue that the increasingly refined tastes of India's burgeoning middle class mean that the wine market in the country was set to grow ten-fold over the next decade.

How Infosys grooms its future leaders

"The company is now in the hands of the youngsters. It is necessary to recognise the power of youth and to nurture it. We must respect youth and create opportunities for them to participate in everything. Which is why at every function, we have the youth participating. I am about the past. I am gone. They are the future," says Murthy.

"The pool of 400 leaders," says Gopalakrishnan, "that Infosys has identified is from across the globe and does not comprise Indians alone. It is in keeping with the company's multi-national, multi-cultural image where excellence is the most important condition."

Banks send investment banking offshore - Feb. 22, 2006

First came IT outsourcing. Now comes investment banking.

After years of outsourcing technology support and other back-office operations to countries like India and China, financial institutions are increasingly looking to move large portions of their investment banking operations abroad, according to a recent report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Faced with a dearth of skilled workers and shrinking profit margins, banks that want to remain competitive in the global marketplace can't afford to miss out on high-quality -- and cheaper -- foreign talent, the report said

This is high-end work!!!

Book Rationale: Culture Clashes Harm Offshoring

Culture Clashes Harm Offshoring
In an Accenture study,

two-thirds of 200 US business executives said that miscommunication arising from cultural differences

has caused problems when outsourcing offshore.

Different communication styles was identified as the key factor causing problems between onshore and offshore workers by over three-quarters (76 per cent) of the managers questioned.

Different approaches to completing tasks, different attitudes toward conflict and different decision-making styles were cited as the other main cultural factors that frequently cause upsets when managing an offshore outsourcing relationship.

Kris Wadia, senior executive in Accenture's network of global delivery centres, said that the physical obstacles to offshore outsourcing such as telecoms and facilities have largely been resolved.

He said in a statement: "However, the soft issues, particularly cross-cultural communication, will continue to present the main challenges to realising global sourcing's full potential for the foreseeable future."

KPO: India's the Eldorado! - ITeS - News - Tech News - Indiatimes Infotech

India is the most attractive destination for KPO activities, says a study by independent research company Asset Management in collaboration with Kelly Services. The study shows India will have a higher growth rate in KPO segment of 45% compared with 25% in the BPO segment. The latter will, however, remain the lead revenue earner and job creator due to the volume nature of this industry.

The whitepaper focusing on India said, “Thanks to its competitive salaries (< 40% of USA); proficiency in English (70-plus million people); large and competent pool of quality professionals (nearly three million new graduates every year), India is the most attractive KPO destination.’’

India is expected to achieve a very high growth rate in all the technically advanced segments of the KPO industry with data and market research along with R&D in medical/pharma constituting 50-plus % of KPO business in India.

‘Engineering services outsourcing can be a $40 bn business’

Engineering services (ES) outsourcing will create $40 billion opportunity for the Indian IT industry by 2020, a Nasscom report said. Nasscom and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton on Thursday released the key findings of a study “Globalisation of engineering services-the next frontier for India.”

“The total offshore engineering spend is expected to grow to $150 - 225 billion by 2020, and India with its talent pool and existing experience in engineering services, is well suited to realise 25% of this opportunity,” Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said. “However, we must ensure required steps are taken by stakeholders to address possible road blocks, especially those concerning work force and infrastructure,” he added.

Remarks by Mukesh Ambani (CEO, Reliance)- Stanford GSB

Headlines - Remarks by Mukesh Ambani - Stanford GSB

if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. This warning does not come from a left wing anarchist; it comes from a great American president, John Kennedy. Poverty is an unacceptable human condition. We must refuse to accept that the existence of poverty is preordained or that the poor are necessary so that the rich can gain merit in heaven by helping them.

New visionary, courageous, and convincing models are needed to banish poverty and restructure society. Technology offers humanity this opportunity in the 21st Century. It is possible for the first time to banish illiteracy, disease, and deprivation. It is possible for the first time to raise the standard and quality of life of every man and women on our planet. The 20th Century witnessed the victory of freedom over dictatorship. The 21st Century an usher in wellbeing for all over good life only for a few on this planet. This will be possible only if:

* There is a grand engagement of global corporations in the war against global poverty. Such an engagement must begin to eradicate poverty among the 3 billion people in the coming decades.
* This is not an appeal to their conscious. It is an appeal to their self-interest, and it is an investment for the future of our world.
* It is an imperative for the security and the future prosperity of mankind, because prosperity, like peace, is indivisible.

Motivation for the book - helping entrepreneurs (India-US/W. Europe), work effectively by transcending cultural barriers, in order to create wealth and alleviate poverty

Islam’s Other Victims: India

The fundamental leftist and anti-American claim about our ongoing conflict with political Islam is this: whatever has happened or does happen, it’s our fault. We provoked them into it by being dirty Yankee imperialists and by unkindly refusing to allow them to destroy Israel. But two things make crystal clear that this is not so:

1. The political arm of Islam has been waging terroristic holy war on the rest of the world for centuries.

2. It has waged this war against civilizations that have nothing to do with the West, let alone America.

This is why the case of Moslem aggression against India proves so much. Let’s look at the historical record.

India prior to the Moslem invasions was one of the world’s great civilizations. Tenth century Hindustan matched its contemporaries in the East and the West in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Indian mathematicians discovered the number zero (not to mention other things, like algebra, that were later transmitted to a Moslem world which mistaken has received credit for them.) Medieval India, before the Moslem invasion, was a richly imaginative culture, one of the half-dozen most advanced civilizations of all time. Its sculptures were vigorous and sensual, its architecture ornate and spellbinding. And these were indigenous achievements and not, as in the case of many of the more celebrated high-points of Moslem culture, relics of pre-Moslem civilizations that Moslems had overrun.

[M]assacres perpetrated by Moslems in India are unparalleled in history. In sheer numbers, they are bigger than the Jewish Holocaust, the Soviet Terror, the Japanese massacres of the Chinese during WWII, Mao’s devastations of the Chinese peasantry, the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, or any of the other famous crimes against humanity of the 20th Century. But sadly, they are almost unknown outside India.

US, India, Israel alliance is natural since they are all jihadism's sworn enemy - democracies, pluralist societies.

The 1000 years of foreign domination have broken the spirit of India - only recent resurgence in spirit with success in the IT sphere.

A possible 'framing' for book

"Virtually every 'fact' used in business, political life and every day human relations is derived from other 'facts' or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every 'fact' thus has a power history and what might be called a power future."
- Alvin Toffler

India on the side of US/Western liberal thinking - with similar value framework,(pluralism etc.) though implemented differently

Religion, Philosophy and Culture by Raimon Panikkar

polylog / themes / focus / Raimon Panikkar: Religion, Philosophy and Culture

Philosophy could he understood as the activity by which Man participates consciously and in a more or less critical manner, in the discovery of reality and orients himself within the latter.

Cultura anima may be one of the better definitions of philosophy (Cicero: Tusculanae disputationes. II, 13). The word means I cultivate (cura, curatio, cultus), implying honor and veneration. Culture was always culture of something. Hence has it come to mean what we still mean when we speak of a cultivated man. And it is through the intermediary of "civilization" that "culture" has come to take on the meaning that is widespread today. 7

culture is constituted by rituals, customs, opinions, dominant ideas, ways of life which characterize a certain people at a given period. If language is an essential element, history and geography are equally cultural factors.

We summarize all that in the word myth, understood as symbolizing that which we believe at such a deep level that we are not even aware that we believe it: "it is useless to say it," "it is understood," "it is obvious," "we shall not pursue the investigation any further" ... We question myth only when we already partly stand outside it: this is because it is precisely the myth which offers us the basis from which the question as question makes sense. For the myth gives us the horizon of intelligibility where we must situate any idea, any conviction or any act of consciousness so that they may be held by our mind.

Each culture, in a sense, could be described as the encompassing myth of a collectivity at a certain moment in time and space; it is what renders plausible, credible, the world in which we live, where we are. This accounts for the flexibility and mobility of myth as well as the impossibility of grasping our own myth, except when we hear it from the mouth of others because having accorded the latter a certain credibility or when it has ceased to be a myth for us.

Each culture possesses a cosmovision and reveals the world in which we live – in which we believe to be. Each culture is a galaxy which secretes its self-understanding, and with it, the criteria of truth, goodness, and beauty of all human actions.

monoculturalism is lethal and multiculturalism is impossible. Interculturality recognizes both assertions and seeks a middle way. Monoculturalism asphyxiates other cultures through oppression. Multiculturalism leads us to war of cultures (with the foreseeable routing of the weakest) or condemns us to a cultural apartheid which also in the long run, becomes stifling.

We have taken the position that cultures are mutually incompatible, but in no way have we said that they are incommunicable. The fact that the circumference and the radius are mutually incommensurable (we could have said it in a more poetic and Platonic way, of the lyre and of the bow), in no way means that they do not condition each other, nor that they can become separate.

Global Renaissance

IONS - Review 56 - Table of Contents

It is exactly this multifaceted "truth" of humanity that we hope to foster via an appreciation of the contributions of all of the world's civilizations—a truth that is not visible through the lens of any single cultural perspective, but can be seen only when appreciated from multiple perspectives. The creation of a global renaissance thus truly needs to be global, and not merely the globalization of Western culture. Again, Indic transmissions offer forceful examples of the influence of non-Western cultures.

Just like in a football game, you need multiple cameras to give a complete view of action on the field, similarly in a global business environment, you need multiple cultural cameras/lenses to understand nuances of business, and act accordingly.

Book review: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World: Books: Mike Davis

Amazon.com: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World: Books: Mike Davis

Based on such scholars as Bairroch, Parthsarathi, Gura and Pomeranz, Davis brings forth many facts that shore up his argument. 1) In 1800 India's share of the world manufactured product was four times that of Britain, and China's share was even higher. By 1900 India was fully under British control and the ration was 8-1 in England's favor. 2) In 1789 the living standards of China and Western Europe were roughly comparable and it appeared that China was making even better progress with its ecological problems. Naturally, a century later Europeans and Americans were much better off. 3) Despite all the many claims made on behalf of British rule in India, Indian per capita income stayed the same from 1759 to 1947. And contrary to the Malthusian argument, its population didn't grow very much. 4) Indian and Chinese rulers actually had before 1800 a good record of mitigating famines, and one British statistician suggested that whereas for the previous two millennia there was one major famine a century, under British rule there was one every four years.

Cultural shift from decentralized, local administration to centralized, colonial administration - which has perpetuated to this day - completely unlike the US federal system of governance

How to negotiate with the Americans

..., I have seen many times that Indian businesses provide a lot of emphasis on situation and feelings coupled with some facts versus providing pure facts without any seasoning.

As a culture, traditionally we [Indians] have always liked mingling with people and getting engaged in detailed discussions about everything under the sun. This approach described above puts the prime focus on relationship building and trust creation.

6 great tips to do business with Americans

Methods to negotiate cross culturally with Americans

1. Acknowledge the customer concern
2. Do not endorse the customer concern
3. Put a spotlight on the present situation
4. Focus on Customer issues - Discovery
5. Focus on Customer issues - Resolution
6. Focus on the Customer (the Person) Gain
7. Seek genuine help in championing your effort

Wonder if we need to do an Indian version of this?

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

Good stuff here for background on Indian philosophy

Address the world Parliament of Religions in Chicago (1893)

Middle-Class Wealth, World-Class Companies - Forbes.com

The long-term case for investing in India is a no-brainer. India's many attractions have been well-chronicled, but they can't be emphasized enough: a tradition of democracy, respect for the rule of law and widespread fluency in English. These qualities are not easy to find in emerging markets and they give India a huge advantage in the global marketplace.

Forbes special on India Investing

IT connection - Panini's contribution to linguistics/computer science

Panini biography

Panini is most famous for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the grammar known as Aṣṭādhyāyī "the eight chapters".

Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure[Swiss], professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics. Noam Chomsky has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar.

Pāṇini uses metarules, transformations, and recursions with such sophistication that his grammar has the computing power equivalent to a Turing machine. In this sense Pāṇini may be considered the father of computing machines. His work was the forerunner to modern formal language theory, and a precursor to computing. Paninian grammars have also been devised for non-Sanskrit languages. The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form) or BNF grammars used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini's grammar rules. [From Wikipedia]

Strong mathematical tradition - Roots of IT strength

2: Introduction

Indian scholars made vast contributions to the field of mathematical astronomy and as a result contributed mightily to the developments of arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry and secondarily geometry (although this topic was well developed by the Greeks) and combinatorics. Perhaps most remarkable were developments in the fields of infinite series expansions of trigonometric expressions and differential calculus.

Surpassing all these achievements however was the development of decimal numeration and the place value system, which without doubt stand together as the most remarkable developments in the history of mathematics, and possibly one of the foremost developments in the history of humankind. The decimal place value system allowed the subject of mathematics to be developed in ways that simply would not have been possible otherwise. It also allowed numbers to be used more extensively and by vastly more people than ever before.

Sri Aurobindo: Renaissance in India - Full text

Sri Aurobindo: Renaissance in India - Full textSpirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning, - and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, - that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces; she had a keen eye for the importance of the physical sciences; she knew how to organise the arts of ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of the universe could not be explained in the present terms of man or seen by his superficial sight, that there were other powers behind, other powers within man himself of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious only of a small part of himself, that the invisible always surrounds the visible, the suprasensible the sensible, even as infinity always surrounds the finite. She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, - truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence. She saw the myriad gods beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendours of the spirit. Then with that calm audacity of her intuition which knew no fear or littleness and shrank from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with God, become the ineffable Brahman. And with the logical practicality and sense of science and organised method which distinguished her mentality, she set forth immediately to find out the way. Hence from long ages of this insight and practice there was ingrained in her spirituality, her powerful psychic tendency, her great yearning to grapple with the infinite and possess it, her ineradicable religious sense, her idealism, her Yoga, the constant turn of her art and her philosophy.

2) Creative impusle
When we look at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least, - it is indeed much longer, - she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly, with an inexhaustible many-sidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades, industries, fine crafts, - the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. She creates and creates and is not satisfied and is not tired; she will not have an end of it, seems hardly to need a space for rest, a time for inertia and lying fallow.

3) Historcal embrace of the world

She expands too outside her borders; her ships cross the ocean and the fine superfluity of her wealth brims over to Judaea and Egypt and Rome; her colonies spread her arts and epics and creeds in the Archipelago; her traces are found in the sands of Mesopotamia; her religions conquer China and Japan and spread westward as far as Palestine and Alexandria, and the figures of the Upanishads and the sayings of the Buddhists are reechoed on the lips of Christ. Everywhere, as on her soil, so in her works there is the teeming of a superabundant energy of life.

India Book Article Share

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Are Indians really dumb?

Friday, August 25, 2006

Parivartan -Using India's RTI to fight corruption

Right to Information Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Farmers' choice : HindustanTimes.com

Farmers' choice : HindustanTimes.com

Dependency Ratios and Economic Success

From India business schools to top of world's boardrooms - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Is China a success while India is a failure? World Affairs - Find Articles

All the riches of the east restored, by Philip S Golub

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Indian market complexity

Growing Indian innovation

Jan Chipchase,Nokia HCI - Repair Cultures

Wal-Mart's Int'l Failures

Cultural Insights India - Dina Mehta

The Road To Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

UChicago Prof: Ronald Inden

Arthur Maurice Hocart - Anthropologist's works

Bernard Cohn, 75, studied colonialism, India’s caste system

Dirks, N.B.: Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

CrossCultural Communication Challenges

The box office’s got a line on society’s mood swings- The Economic Times

FrontPage magazine.com :: Useful Idiots

Thoughts on Freedom: Open Society Condensed Chapter 10

Interview with Alvin Toffler: weekend FT

Now a car story: TN Ninan in the FT

Monday, August 21, 2006

India - on the growth turnpike

Highlights of Leamer review of the world is flat(sic)

Economic growth and India's future

Communication with LatAm

South Asia - India Development Policy Review

Sunday, August 20, 2006

The Garland Making Worldview

World view - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Why ‘Outsourcing’ May Lose Its Power as a Scare Word - New York Times

Monday, August 14, 2006

IFTF's Future Now: Peter Drucker on the future of India

Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future - New York Times

The New Pluralism -- Peter F. Drucker full-text article

Face value | The wired man of Bangalore | Economist.com

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Word of Mouth Marketing

Saturday, August 12, 2006

The India Option by Charles Tannock

A symphony of civilizations

The Long Tail's maths begin to crumble | The Register

Friday, August 11, 2006

Namaste world - Technology Walla - Blogs - CNET Asia

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Wine or mobile: India home to big biz ideas

How Infosys grooms its future leaders

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Banks send investment banking offshore - Feb. 22, 2006

Book Rationale: Culture Clashes Harm Offshoring

KPO: India's the Eldorado! - ITeS - News - Tech News - Indiatimes Infotech

‘Engineering services outsourcing can be a $40 bn business’

Remarks by Mukesh Ambani (CEO, Reliance)- Stanford GSB

Islam’s Other Victims: India

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

A possible 'framing' for book

Monday, August 07, 2006

Religion, Philosophy and Culture by Raimon Panikkar

Global Renaissance

Book review: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World: Books: Mike Davis

How to negotiate with the Americans

6 great tips to do business with Americans

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Middle-Class Wealth, World-Class Companies - Forbes.com

Saturday, August 05, 2006

IT connection - Panini's contribution to linguistics/computer science

Strong mathematical tradition - Roots of IT strength

Sri Aurobindo: Renaissance in India - Full text

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