India Miscellany

Conversing with V. is always refreshing, motivating and educating, to say the least. He was here last week, and we spent a long time talking about a whole gamut of things sitting in one of our favourite haunts in Bangalore - the coffee board of the India Institute of Science (IISc); from Computer Science research in India, Asha projects (we spent a few hours at Shristi too), to discussions on some of the latest books on socio-economics of India. Not to mention plans of future marathons, 100-mile races in the Amazon and Sikkim, trekking in the Himalayas one of these upcoming summers and whatnot...

I also ended up buying a couple of interesting books at the IISc book stall - C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze's India Development and Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality.

CK Prahalad's book (he doesnt need an introduction as the Professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the University of Michigan Business School, and has been named about the top ten management thinkers of the world in every major survey for over a decade) is about empowering the Bottom of the Pyramid, the 4 billion people of the world who live on less than $2 a day. These people are the world's most exciting, fastest growing new market. Collectively, he says, the world's billions of people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power. How do we serve them and help them escape poverty? Prahalad shows this is being done - profitably. Through several case studies implemented in countries like Guatemala, Brazil, India, etc. how poverty could be eradicated through profits, by involving these people in whatever form of production/markets they are suited for.

Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze's book also seem very fascinating on the socio-economics of India. I am yet to read it of course (too many books piled on my desk as must-reads). Roger Penrose's new book is for the serious reader, taking one through the nuances of the essential fields of mathematics and physics for an audience interesting in understanding the guts of the latest areas of physics like string theory, twistors, quantum physics, etc. I intend to spend a few months on it sometime soon hopefully.

I finally got around to completing Mark Tully's India in Slow Motion; well, almost. I have a couple of chapters left. It is a nice account of some of Tully's travels in India trying to understand some of the key problems India is facing. There is a first-hand account of the Babri Masjid when Tully was on site. Next is his conversation with Mathew Samuel, the reporter who caught Jaya Jaitely on tape accepting bribe in the Tehelka scam. Most saddening to me were the stories from the villages - about how farmers in most places have such a tough time growing crops, with growing debts, cases of suicides in villages, insentivity of the government towards subsidies for agriculture, mismanagement, corruption and bereaucracy at all levels. One sad fact was that due to lack of proper storage for grains produced, most of them go wasted, in fact over a third! This when the same could be used to feeding millions others who are forced to go hungry...There was a truly amazing story about this IIT Chennai graduate who decided to give up the fancy jobs of our world, bought a piece of land of a few acres in a place in North Karnataka, started farming, became one with the farmers so that he could understand their problems more, and was now trying his best helping them out and himself. Truly amazing.