Modi wins India; so I think of China

A 2011 trip to China remembered as Modi becomes PM. In the hope that NaMo will make Indians proud
Bob wasn’t particularly happy to be in Beijing but the “pay is awesome”, it is “tax-free” and he hadn’t really “worked on his exit strategy”. I met him a day after landing in Beijing at a bar in the diplomatic area. He was a former Marine, slightly drunk, missing his corned beef and brisket, and fairly liberal with the F word. I had to talk to him. “You know these f****** third world countries, don’t you? It’s too hot, people are always hungry and there are mosquitoes all around.” He was slightly embarrassed when I told him where I was from. “I’d love to go to India, man. I’ve heard so much about it.” Right. But what about China? “I just can’t believe how they got this rich. They own A8s and Mercs and Beemers. They’ve got knock-offs that look just like the real thing. But I really get scared when I see jaywalkers on the road man. These guys may be rich but they don’t know how to walk. Or drive.”

Bob was right. From the time I landed in Beijing, all I could see was VW Passats, A8s, BMW 7 series, Porsches and Mercedes. Determined to find out how the Chinese do things differently from us, I zeroed in on a bar where nearly all the diplomats in Beijing hung out.

That’s where I met Will on the first day. He had just moved to Beijing from Mumbai where he had set up the kitchen for a five-star hotel. Will was bald, 6’2”, and built like a truck. He shook my hand when his wife told him I was from India. “You guys put my friend Shahid Balwa in jail.” I nearly ducked as I thought he would clobber me for what my government had done to an accused in the 2G scam. “All projects are on hold. People are unemployed. Entrepreneurs don’t know what do with the projects they’ve started. You should punish the corrupt but this takes the steam off your growth. How will you play catch-up with China?”

Over the next 15 days or so that would be the first and only time when I would hear India and China mentioned in the same breath. Talks about an Asian superpower would generally veer around Thailand, South Korea and Japan. And China, of course.

Not without a reason though. Beijing has announced its arrival with skyscrapers, expressways, bullet trains, and a whole lot of really expensive cars being driven around by guys who look barely out of their teens. “And it’s really safe. I can’t think of doing things like these back home in the States,” said Brendan, a soft-spoken hotel management graduate from New Orleans who runs two restaurants in Beijing. By “things” he meant riding his bike back home in the dead of the night or walking the streets without the fear of being mugged. “But if you really want to understand China better you must head out of Beijing,” he told me.

My Chinese was limited to Ni Hao (hello) and xie xie (thank you) so any thought of conversing with locals gave me the jitters. I decided to take the bullet train to Tianjin, a port city around 160 km from Beijing. The train touched a top speed of 332 kmph and covered the distance in 30 minutes flat. I kept my eyes peeled to check if what Paul Theroux had said in Riding The Iron Rooster still rang true. It did. In the fields along the tracks, I could not see a single tree. The Chinese farmer makes use of every available inch of land, Theroux had written. I was hoping to discover another world in Tianjin but was a little disappointed. The skyscraper-expressway-expensive car story continued. An antiques market in by the Hai He river in Tianjin competes with a modern square that the Chinese are building for tourists. Holland’s Tulips compete with Paulander and Guinness in this marketplace, complete with cuisines from around the world, and picket fences.

I returned to Beijing even more wide-eyed than I left. Back in the bar in the diplomatic area I got into an argument with an American journalist. “Bullshit. Bullshit,” he said when I suggested that our middle class was a better market than China’s. After all, nearly 50 per cent of our population would be under-25 by 2015, so we are better placed for the future, I argued. Another round of “bullshit”. And then he asked: “You guys know what to do in bed. You guys wrote the Kamasutra. Then how come Bollywood can never move beyond flowers?” Before I could answer, he shot another one: “When will you guys solve your caste problem? You guys are really smart. Then how come you are unable to overtake China?”

There was only one way to salvage my pride. I had to talk to a local. A few days later I met a researcher working for a TV station. He started by asking me what I thought about China. “You guys seem to be on a mission. You are testing the new bullet train, building skyscrapers faster than we uncover our scams, manufacturing for the world…” “Tourists come and talk about development, our infrastructure, high-rise buildings and bullet trains,” he said, cutting me short. “But you get to vote. We don't.”
Now if only Modi can bridge the gap between India and China.

Hope the Rafael missiles don't break into a song-and-dance routine

Chat with NRN

At a time the world grunts under the strain of an economic slowdown brought on by the lack of “empowered umpires” in the capitalist world, comes a book that offers a prescription for the pain. And if the book is about India and written by the man awarded India’s second highest civilian award, conferred with France’s highest civilian honour and voted the 7th most admired CEO in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit -- among a slew of other accolades -- you have a bestseller in your hands.
N R Narayan Murthy’s ode to hard work, integrity and the value system is cast in the crucible of his trials and tribulations as he built Infosys from scratch and made it one of the most respectable companies in the world.
“Our biggest challenge is,” he says, pointing at the girl on the cover of his book “A better India: A Better World”, “that every child should become confident like her. Not just in elitist schools but also in the remotest part of rural India.”
That might be a big challenge -- considering that even after 60 years of independence, India’s progress in higher education and in science and technology has not taken 350 million Indians out of illiteracy – but accepting challenges seems to be N R Narayana Murthy’s middle name. In 1995, with revenues of $5 million, Infosys was a paler shadow of itself today, and yet it walked out of a lucrative deal with General Electric because of its “unreasonable conditions”. That GE contributed to 25 per cent of their revenue and 8 per cent of their profits did weigh heavily on the minds of the Infosys team as it was sequestered into a room at Taj Residency, Bangalore, for negotiations but NRN was on way to building a “courageous and principled organization”. The rest, as they say, is history.
A compilation of 38 lectures delivered at institutes across the world, the book talks of the future of India and the world and also touches upon issues concerning leadership, inequality, corporate governance, values and globalization. Along the way, it offers useful insight into how a young man who graduated from the University of Mysore in 1967 went on to become the founder director of the company that has “revenues in excess of $3 billion… and has created more than 70,000 well-paying jobs, 2,000-plus dollar millionaires and 20,000-plus rupee millionaires (from NRN’s pre-commencement lecture at Stern School of Business, New York University on May 9, 2007).
Like that night in 1974 at the railway station in Nis, a border town between the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. NRN was hitchhiking from Paris to Mysore and he struck up a conversation with a girl in the compartment of Sofia Express about the travails of living behind the Iron Curtain. The only other occupant of the compartment, a young boy, informed the local police and NRN was dragged “along the platform into a 8X8 ft room with a cold stone floor and a small hole in a corner by way of toilet facilities”. After spending over 72 hours without food or water, he was packed off into a freight train to Istanbul because he was “from a friendly country called India”. That day marked a turning point in NRN – and India’s – history as he was “purged” of his “affinity” for the Left and decided that entrepreneurship and job-creation was the only way out of poverty.
And yes, NRN idolizes Mahatma Gandhi. “He is the greatest leader India ever had. He walked the talk; he practiced the precept; whatever was good for others was good for him too,” he says, sitting in the sprawling Infosys campus at Electronic City in Bangalore.
The dichotomy in Indian society is also at the heart of NRN’s book. A society that has one set of rules for the elite and the powerful and another set for the masses cannot succeed, he says. Mention Mulayam Singh Yadav’s manifesto promising a crackdown on computers and English, and you can almost hear him get agitated. “Somebody should ask him where he sent his son? This is just the kind of argument used in the 50s by unions and shown to be silly. If you want quality, if you want accelerated growth, there is no way you can achieve it without technology.”
At the launch of an online bookstore in Bangalore recently, NRN had said that he was “too old for politics”. So is that decision final? “Yes, yes,” he says, even before the question is asked. “I am trying to change the system in my own way… I have demonstrated that it is possible to run a business ethically. It is possible to bring in innovation and earn respect of our customers. We have raised the confidence of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs. It is not necessary to bring about a change only by joining politics,” he says.
So what does the Infosys story mean to him after all these years? “If you are willing to work hard, if you have high aspirations, if you want to benchmark with the world’s best, it is possible to do it in India,” says the chief mentor of Infosys Technologies.
Murthy’s book delves into the current economic scenario as well. “A section of managers, not entrepreneurs, overcome by greed and vanity have brought things to such a state,” he says. Capitalism will survive, he says, because it is all about entrepreneurship, and honesty -- and these values still hold a lot of currency.
And what lesson does the economic downturn hold for the youth? “Humility,” he says. “Somehow youngsters thought they were entitled to high salaries, large increments, a certain lifestyle. The only entitlement you have is your intellect, your value system, and the ability to leverage them for creating better opportunities. Youngsters should understand that they are not omnipotent. We have to work hard and be innovative.”
For anybody on the threshold of starting his or her career, or anybody looking inward after the economic gloom, this book offers just the right kind of lessons – and a lot of inspiration.

Clear and present danger in Karnataka

Elections 2009 put a lid on the embers of communal clashes in coastal Karnataka. The church attacks in Mangalore and Udupi-Chikmagalur districts in September 2008, the infamous assault on girls at a pub in Mangalore in January 2009 and the spurt in moral policing thereafter put Mangalore on the global map. Now, the state’s administrators fear that once elections are over, the embers of communal strife may burst into flames – not just in Mangalore, but in several pockets of Karnataka.
Their fear stems mainly from the increasing disillusionment and aggression among the youth. A senior police officer who has been tracking developments in the state says that youngsters are also insulating themselves from the community elders’ and leaders’ diktat. Muslim youth do not want to take things lying down anymore and Hindu youngsters feel that it’s about time the community got rid of the “tolerant” tag. Take the case of Dakshina Kannada, for instance. The communal divide runs so deep that there are frequent clashes between the two communities at the district sub-jail. So much so, Muslims convicted of cattle-lifting have to be quarantined in the jail. Incidents of workers of Bajrang Dal or Karnataka Forum for Dignity – which fights for the minorities – attacking youngsters for talking to those from the other community have become almost a daily feature.
Senior intelligence sources say that the situation in Uttara Kannada, Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts is equally volatile, if not more so. They are closely monitoring the situation because of a threat perception emanating out of Bhatkal. This communally sensitive port town in Uttara Kannada district has seen many riots in the past and has produced the dreaded terror siblings, Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal. Riyaz Bhatkal, a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who was tasked with setting up Indian Mujahideen by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, is alleged to be behind the string of serial blasts in the country last year. After Riyaz and Iqbal’s name started doing the rounds in terror investigations, there have been whispers of ISI setting up base here.
Now, police officers fear that communal trouble could be fomented ahead of the elections to further polarize the electorate. Seventeen constituencies in Karnataka go to the polls on April 23 and the remaining 11 on April 30. To use a cliché, police will heave a sigh of relief if Karnataka gets to the next month without any unsavoury incident.
Recently, at a seminar organized in a Mangalore college on communal tension in the district, a CD on the church attacks was used to drive home the point. Police officers say that this is just the kind of thing that could prove to be the spark for another round of clashes.
Like it did earlier this month in Kyathamaranahalli near Mysore. Riots broke out after two youngsters, who were said to be under the influence of drugs, were handed over to the police for eve-teasing. Within hours, a mob went on the rampage and set fire to at least 12 vehicles and four houses. Over 250 houses and shops in the area were vandalized.
The other development keeping officers on their toes is the threat of an imminent Naxal strike in Shimoga and Chikmagalur districts.
What happens in Karnataka in the next month or so will depend on how the two main parties in the state fare in Elections 2009, feel intelligence officers. While the Congress started out on a weak wicket and was touted to win anywhere between 5-6 seats, it has consolidated its position during the slog overs and looks set to walk away with 8-9. JD(S) has been relegated to an also-ran position and will thank its stars if it bags 3-4 seats. Earlier predictions said it could finish at the second position with maybe 8 seats. The joke in Bangalore was that if JD(S) could indeed manage 8 seats, H D Deve Gowda would once again become prime minister. The BJP could get 18-19 seats even though earlier calculations pegged 15 seats in its kitty. If the BJP does manage to finish with 18-19 seats, the dynamics in the state will see a sea change. To understand how, it’s necessary to go back in time a little.
When New Life prayer halls were attacked in Mangalore, Udupi and Bangalore in September 2008, the Bajrang Dal had alleged that the immediate provocation was the publication of a book titled Satya Darshini which ridiculed the Hindu belief system. Secularists said that the installation of a sympathetic government in Karnataka had given the right-wing outfits a free run of the state. On its part, the government claimed that its rival political party had engineered the attacks to bring a bad name to the first BJP government south of Vindhyas. Whatever be the reason for the attacks then, the state’s administrators are seeing a similar trend today even though nobody will say so officially.
Senior police officers say Uttara Kannada, Dakshina Kannada, Chikmagalur, Shimoga, Belgaum and Mysore are sitting on a powder keg. In fact, the threat seems to be so real that the new DG&IG of Karnataka Police, Ajai Kumar Singh – who is known for his integrity and efficiency -- has been touring all the vulnerable districts over the past 15 days or so.
At the heart of the clash of communities in Karnataka, lies economic disparity. In its heyday, Gulf money afforded Muslim youth in coastal Karnataka the latest in fashion accessories. Now, with active help from the Sangh Parivar, Hindu youth want to have an upper hand. The economic downturn and the dearth of jobs have only made matters worse. As all communities increasingly fight to assert themselves, the result is for all to see: In Christian-run institutions, Hindu teachers are becoming objects of suspicion. In Hindu-run establishments, care is taken to ensure that Muslims do not become student leaders. Muslim students in some schools and colleges have started insisting on a two-hour lunch break on Fridays in order to attend prayers at the local mosque; some outfits are forcing girls to wear burqas. Recently in Surathkal, near Mangalore, girls wearing burqas to college were cornered and harassed, allegedly by Hindu activists. The college principal passed an order saying the veil should be removed in class but student leaders wanted them to do so before entering the campus. Tension ensued and a meeting organized to discuss the issue was stormed, allegedly by auto drivers.
Another dimension that has been added to the vulnerable districts is Pramod Mutalik. After the Sri Ram Sene rose to national infamy (or fame, depending on which way you look at it) by attacking girls at a pub in Mangalore, it has been trying to hijack the Hindutva agenda from the BJP. Just like the Sri Ram Sene, numerous other outfits active in Karnataka are now looking for just the right kind of spark to fan communal flames in the state.

More on HT's new design

Couple of friends called up to say the new HT design floating on the net is a red herring.
I know.
But HT is going for a redesign and it's going to be soon. Whether it is this or some other design, we'll know in about a month.

Michael Keegan, where art thou?

This is what the new design of HT looks like, says ContentSutra.

Pretty cool, I think.
But will the Mario Garcia-designed paper survive the sub-editor? My guess is if the Design Department cannot hold its own, the paper will be twisted, turned, upturned, bettered, worsened by the subs on KG Marg and Mahim.
HT is one of the best-looking newspapers in India, all thanks to Michael Keegan, and Ashutosh Sapru and his team. Will Garcia change all that?

A little more to the Right, please. Or we blow your brains off

The only place you'll find tolerance these days is in a dictionary.
The world's going flat and everybody is scared. Scared that followers of their faith will be exposed to other cultures and might end up liking them. Scared that youngsters these days do not believe in stereotypes and judge a person for what he or she is -- and not because she or he is a Yusuf, Suresh or a Cindy. Scared that in the pursuit of wealth and fame they will not bother about what this society was built on -- faith and intimidation.
Found a wonderful article written by Johann Hari, which, by the way, appeared in The Statesman and the editors were arrested because it "offended sensibilities of the minority community". Here's the link to the piece.
Back in Delhi, few of us bothered about the left- or the right-wingers. In fact, some of us in the newspapers had decided not to give publicity to the incredulous threats that were held out by the Bajrang Dals, Shiv Senas or the RPIs. But here in Karnataka, things are very different. The Karnataka Rakshana Vedikes, the Hoysala Senes, the Sri Ram Senes have been given a free run and you can't help but take note. If you don't, they beat the shit out of you.
Ultra-nationalism and patriotism is returning, guys. The last time it happened, we saw a World War breaking out. What will it be this time?

Mehngi hui sharaab toh, toddy toddy piya karo

Got my first real taste of Karnataka the other day when we dusted an old bike, tanked up a brand new Bullet and hit the highway at 60 kmph. We were on a mission -- a toddy mission.
All plans of leaving Bangalore by around 6 am had to be abandoned as some of us in the group (mainly, yours truly) are not morning persons and had to drag themselves out of bed.
Some 45 km from Bangalore, the small town of Anekal takes you back in time by about 10 years. By the time we reached Anekal, it was afternoon already -- and we were running behind time.
It was quite an experience to move through fields and come upon a tentshack where the toddy man had kept his stuff in an earthen pot. He dished out the stuff in mugs -- not the ones you get in an upmarket bar, but the ones Indians use in toilets to wash their sorry asses after eating a whole lot of chilli and fried food through the day. The taste was odd -- drinking toddy in the afternoon is not a good idea as it gets fermented. It was a cross between buttermilk and beer, but it tasted okay. Half-a-mug was enough to make me lose sensation in my hands and legs and I was sort of flying all the way down to Pearl Valley.

A couple of beers at Pearl Valley (which, by the way, has a small stream where water drops fall like pearls) and we were all set for a hearty lunch. Saw a lot of monkeys (not just the simian kind, but also some right-wingers who were berating the V-Day culture).
All in all, it was a good day trip and I was riding a bike after a really long time so it was kinda nice (even though my ass gave up and even now I have to check once in a while if it's still on).