TIMES OF INDIA SUNDAY COLUMNS BY GURCHARAN DAS
(Appears every other Sunday. This archive contains columns from January 1998 to September 2002)

GOD IS IN THE DETAILS January 6, 1998

If there is a widespread consensus on economic reforms, as everyone says, why are there such frustrating delays in implementing them? If we are agreed on what is to be done, why don't we just do it? One reason is that we haven't had a true reformer at the top, such as a Deng or a Thatcher. The agenda of our political class is also at odds with what the world believes is necessary for the prosperity and well being of our citizens. Moreover, we haven't had reformers heading our ministries dealing with infrastructure. The most important reason, however, is that our discourse is disfunctional. We continue to waste our energies in debating "the what" when we ought to focus on "the how". How to reform is a more difficult challenge and it is not for lazy minds. It needs the full application of the mind; it needs problem solving ability; and it needs mental toughness. Most of all, it requires acute attention to detail. It is not for drawing room amateurs. We Indians are good when it comes to defining the broad picture. But we fall apart when it comes to detailed planning and tactics which lead to successful implementation. This is a flaw which attaches both to our public and private sectors. Hence our products and governance are both shoddy. Most of our politicians and businessmen suffer from this disability. Our political parties are mentally lazy. The leftists want more money for the poor. No one grudges them the money if it actually reaches its beneficiaries. But people resent that most of the poverty funds are lost in corruption and administrative expenses. Why don't the leftist parties apply their minds to showing how subsidies can be cut and redesign poverty programs so that the poor actually receive the benefits? The voters will respect them and might even vote for them. The BJP wants Indian companies to became strong and competitive. This is a laudable objective and few will contest it. The BJP wants to achieve this objective by eliminating foreign competition in consumer products. But it doesn't offer a criteria to decide what is a consumer product. The BJP merely says that it wants high tech and not consumer products. However, even the simplest consumer product today contains high technology. Potato chips are easy. But isn't a car or scooter, a personal computer, a telephone a consumer product? Will the BJP yuppies give up their Marutis and go back to driving bullock carts? For even the Ambassador was based on foreign technology. Because the BJP has not mentally applied itself to these issues, it will turn over the task to bureaucrats. And what will happen? Since there is no objective way to make the distinction, between a consumer and non-consumer product we will return to the bad old days of the licence-permit raj. These are the consequences of mental laziness. Every Indian wants electricity. However, putting up a power plant costs money. Everyone knows that our government doesn't have money. But the global private sector does. Thus, the only alternative to living in darkness is to have private power. Why, then, have we lost six years in endless debate over each private power project? The problem with private power is that our state electricity boards are bankrupt, and no sensible supplier will sell electricity to a bankrupt customer. This is a genuine problem of "the how" and this is what we should be debating. It is no good moaning about bad MNCs. Fortunately, this U.F government had made some real breakthroughs in solving these difficult problems. If the U.F wants to go down in glory, it should now complete this job over the next few months and leave us with some showcase power plants which have achieved financial closure and are ready to start construction. The citizen will be forever grateful and might even vote for them. Instead of berating multinationals, let us learn from them. One of the first lessons that a young MNC manager learns is that "God is in the details." It is not enough to have a broad strategy; success depends on penetrating the details of an issue. One has to be mentally tough in choosing between unpalatable alternatives. It is this attention to detail which allows MNCs to deliver awesome performance--e.g. reducing costs by 30 per cent across the globe within 9 months by involving 100,000 people, as Nissan did in 1989.

Can BJP a True Conservative Party January 20, 1998 

The centre of gravity of Indian politics has shifted perceptibly to the right since 1991. At the same time the BJP is showing hopeful signs of moving into the moderate mainstream. This is an opportune time for the BJP to bring together the large number of decent, conservative, God fearing Indians of all types, who have been disenchanted for two generations with the irresponsible politics of socialism and subsidies, as much as with the cynical promises of an empty secularism. However, only by shedding its narrow sectarianism can it hope to offer the voter a responsible right wing alternative. A modern democracy needs a viable second party in order to have political stability. We have learned this lesson painfully in the last few years. The Congress, despite its waning popularity, represents a viable left of centre alternative. The BJP has the historic opportunity to become a stable right of centre party. We must accept the reality that only these two national parties can provide stability, and stop searching for third party coalitions. The BJP, on its part, must realize that to became a mainstream party it must rethink its identity. Rightist parties all over the world have only succeeded at the polls when they have distanced themselves from the fanatics and lunatics at the fringe. If it wants to find resonance with decent, sensible Indians the BJP must abandon the politics of hate and communalism. Indian intellectuals for their part, can no longer dismiss the country's largest political party as contemptible. The responsible thing for them to do is to begin a dialogue with the BJP and help it to discard its extremism and shepherd it into the mainstream. As a conservative party it is right and proper for the BJP to be drawn to tradition. But it should look to the rich, tolerant, syncretic tradition of India's past, rather than its own specious, narrow and sectarian version. A Hindu worships all dieties and the Indian mind is stubbornly eclectic. Buddhism disappeared from its birthplace partly because Hindus started to worship the Buddha as one of their Gods. A similar fate might have befallen Islam and Christianity had they not been more vigilant. The BJP should tap into the rational and worldly tradition of India's past. Most Indians have got it wrong in thinking that India's past is mainly other-worldly. Look at the marvellous animal stories of the Panchatantra, the love poems of Vidyakara, the realpolitik of Arthasastra, and the great Indian texts of astronomy, mathematics and medicine. Even the ancient religion of the Vedic texts is speculative and not dogmatic. This India is positive, upbeat and self-confident, in contrast to BJP's India which suffers from feelings of inferiority and hurt pride from recent domination by Muslims and British. To be a true right of centre party the BJP needs to demonstrate greater commitment to free markets and economic reform. The voter distrusts Congress' commitment, despite Mr. Manmohan Singh's historic achievement. No one has attempted to sell the economic reforms--least of all the Congress--as the right thing to do in order to to build a vibrant competitive economy which will do more for the poor than the tired, old socialist and populist solutions. The Swatantra Party attempted this task thirty years ago but its timing was wrong--the nation's centre of gravity was too far to the left. Today, Indians understand that the socialist party is over, that we need to dismantle controls, and that 5 per cent of Indian workers cannot hold to ransom the other 95 per cent. What should be BJP's economic agenda? Given its misguided commitment to swadeshi, it is impractical to expect it to drop it now. However, there is a vast area of domestic reform which lies untouched. The BJP should commit to: (1) sell or close the loss making public sector, (2) revise our socialist labour laws, (3) allow an entrepreneur to close an unviable business, (4) dramatically upgrade infrastructure, (5) work with the states to remove "inspector raj", (6) abolish actroi and substitute VAT in place of irrational state sales taxes, (7) repeal the urban land ceiling law, amend rent control, and have rational land use policies, (8) remove trading restrictions on farmers, including delicencing sugar and cotton, (9) dramatically improve the delivery of primary education and health, and (10) implement financial sector reforms, including opening insurance to the private sector. This is a huge agenda of domestic reform which does not touch the sensitive area of swadeshi and external reform. If the BJP can implement this ten point agenda, it will make a better and more competitive India. We can live without further external reform for the next 5 years--the WTO, in any case, will ensure that we do not reverse ourselves.

IN PRAISE OF UNSELFISHNESS February 17, 1998 

"In the arena of human life the honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action," wrote Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is good to be reminded of Aristotle's words for we suffer in India from a bias against action (and in favour of contemplation.) Because the Brahmin always had the upper hand the author of the Bhagvadgita felt compelled to extol nishkama karma and the path of action. It is not often that a human worth is recognised but it does happen once in a while and it did last month, when one Satya Pal Dang was awarded the Padma Bhushan for a life lived for the sake of others. For a brief day it restored my faith in Delhi. Satya Pal Dang decided to light a candle when others were cursing the darkness. But he was different from other do-gooders who are so busy doing good that that they find no time to be good. Satya Pal is a palpably good man. The secret of his benevolence rests in a fellow feeling that puts him on the same level with the fellow who suffers. He has been lifelong communist. But unlike most communists, Satya Pal and his lovely wife, Vimla have lived their life in the trenches. In the fifties and sixties they organized industrial labour in Chherta, near Amritsar. For twenty five years they selflessly ran its municipality, and the community reciprocated by showering them with affection. In the eighties Sat Pal turned to fight terrorism in the Punjab through community action. Vimla created a successful campaign to rehabilitate the widows and the children of the terrorist's victims. Till today they remain on the hit list of the terrorists. Sat Pal, as the Punjabis call him, was born in district Gujranwalla in the old Punjab, in a village called Ramnager, which flickered briefly into history as the place where the British forces decisively defeated the Sikh army. It came to be known in our history books as the "Second Anglo Sikh War," and paved the way for a hundred years of British rule in the Punjab. Sat Pal came from an Arya Samaj family and went to the Government College in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad). There he won all the prizes. His family dreamt of a glorious career for him, until one day, to their horror, they discovered that their boy had become a Marxist and a card carrying member of Communist Party. It was a great blow to their bourgeois hopes of power, wealth, and prestige. Sat Pal was thrown out of college in Lyallpur for organizing a strike. He shifted to Government College, Lahore, where he joined the circle of famous leftists--Rajbans Khanna, Romesh Chandra, Surinder Sahgal Inder Kumar Gujral (Yes, Inder Gujral!). There he also met Vimla, who was also an ardent activist. In that charmed circle, Vimla was admired for her good looks, her deep convictions, and her glamorous background. Her father worked for the BBC; her mother had been trained in Italy in the Montessori teaching system; all her brothers were communists. Her mother taught at Sir Ganga Ram College, headed by the famous Miss Chattopadhyay who was connected to the nationalist movement through her sister, Sarojini Naidu. They used to meet at the Indian Coffee House in Lahore and listen to the poetry of Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. But Mijaz was their favourite, and Sat Pal used to recite his famous lines: 'Tere chehre pey yeh anchal / bahut hi khub hai lekin / tu es anchal se ek parcham bana let / toh accha tha.' It was natural for the brilliant Sat Pal and the vivacious Vimla to fall in love. I happened to lunch with Sat Pal and Vimla a few months ago in Chherta. After lunch, Vimla brought out an album of photographs of their younger days. One of the pictures was taken in a Bengal village. It showed Sat Pal and Vimla, two idealistic faces, helping out during the terrible famine in 1943. "After returning home from Bengal we raised a lakh of rupees for the starving victims." said Sat Pal. Another photograph showed Vimla in Prague in 1947, where she had gone to attend the first World Youth Festival. There was triumph in her eyes. She had been elected Vice President of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. Her self assured smile conveyed the wonderful confidence that she felt as a youth leader at the peak of the international communist movement. She had every reason to believe that right was on her side, and they would rule the world. Stalin's genocides had yet come to light. Nor had the Soviet tanks moved to crush freedom in Prague one spring morning. How was this innocent face peering out in sepia tones to know that her God would turn out to be false? What was never false, however, was Vimla and Sat Pal's life long fight against injustice and poverty. Their small share of happiness exists because they ceased to think of themselves.

THE BRAHMIN AND THE SAMURAI MARCH 3, 1998

No one reads Arthur Koestler any more. But in the forties and fifties Koestler was a powerful, iconoclastic, intellectual presence. First, he destroyed the communist god in his celebrated Darkness at Noon. This was at a time where everyone was, at least, a socialist. Then, he visited India and Japan and punctured the myth of Eastern spirituality in the The Lotus and the Robot. The Indian government was so put off that it banned the book--but only after everyone, who was going to read it, had, in fact, read it. Koestler wrote munch nonsense in the book, but there were great moments of insight as well. In it, he compared India and Japan--"the most traditional and the most 'modern' among the great countries of Asia." He is worth another look today, because we are embarked on the same brave journey to join up with the global economy that Japan took forty years ago. Japan, with all its troubles, is regarded as a great nation capable of defining the future of the world. India is still perceived to be puny, mostly irrelevant to the world's material destiny. It need not have been so. Our paths diverged in the fifties. When Japan decided to become an exporting nation, we decided to close our doors to trade. Japan was optimistic that it could compete in the world economy. We were pessimistic. It was a high risk decision for Japan because its earlier efforts had not been successful--"Japani maal" meant inferior goods. But Japan showed the courage of a Samurai whereas our Brahmins in the North and South Block played safe. Koestler found that India and Japan had similar social structures, based on the family with its clan extensions and a caste hierarchy. In both societies the old sought respect from the young; the male dominated over the female; teachers were meant to be venerated by their pupils; conformity was valued more than individuality. Both approached Reality intuitively rather than rationally and empirically. Koestler also noted important differences between the two. Japan's caste system was fluid; India's was rigid. A Japanese commoner could pass into the Samurai class by adoption and marriage. Rich moneylenders often bought Samurai status for their sons by marrying them to the daughters of the Samurai during the Shogunate. When the feudal economy changed into an industrial economy, the new entrepreneurs and the zaibatsus became the adopted son-in-laws of the feudal state. In India, inter-marriage and even inter-dining between castes in unthinkable, especially in the villages. This is because caste is sanctioned by religion and is part of one's dharma. In Japan, caste is a matter of social hierarchy, to be dealt with pragmatically. In India authority has a religious character. The guru imparts spiritual darshan by his presence; the sensei imparts wisdom, but it is of a worldly nature. The Indian is careless in dealing with society but he is careful in dealing with the deity. In Japan it is the reverse. The Japanese non-chalantly claps his hands at the Shinto shrine to attract the attention of the gods, but in matters of social etiquette he is watchful, elaborate and punctilious. He knows thirty-five ways to wrap a gift parcel, and his worst tragedy is to lose face in society. The Indian is full of religious anxiety; the Japanese worries about prestige. The Indian thinks that sex is only for procreation; the Japanese understands that sex is also for recreation. The Indian is consumed by guilt over masturbation; the Japanese thinks it a casual pleasure, almost like smoking. The Indian woman is a temptress who saps a man's strength; the Japanese woman is a provider of manifold pleasures. The Indian child is deluged with affection and his education starts late and remains lax. The Japanese child is subjected to strict social conditioning from a very young age. Koestler's insights have obvious implications for national competitiveness. Japan's secular spirit explains, for example, its love affair with technology. Indians, in contrast, are less curious about how the world works. It is fashionable for India's policy-makers to wring their hands, and moan that Indian companies do not invest in R & D. Lest we forget India was lost to the Mughals at Panipat in 1526 because of Babur's superior technology. Eleven months later Rana Sangha and the Rajput confederacy also succumbed at Khanua to Babur's superior cannon. The fault lies in our caste system. Brahmins used to be the only educated persons, who had little interest in the world. Nor did they like to dirty their hands. The artisans, who could have made technological advances, were uneducated. But now there is hope, for the 1991 economic reforms have unleashed the long-suppressed commercial energies of the Indian people. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur--especially the sons of the Brahmins. India is in the midst of a social revolution, similar to Japan's redefinition of its merchant class during the 1868 Meiji Restoration. It is no longer comptemptible to be a Bania or to work with one's hands.

WHY INDIANS HATE CAPITALISM MARCH 17, 1998 

"There is an eternal dispute between those who imagine the world to suit their ideas, and those who correct their ideas to suit the realities of the world," wrote Albert Sorel. It is this problem which is at the heart of Mr. Shanti Swarup's attack on me (TOI, 27/2). He accuses me of trivializing the modernisation vs westernisation debate in "Culture Complexes" (TOI, 9/12/97). He may well be right, but I think the real difference between us is that he has fallen into Sorel's trap in believing that the world fits his obsolete ideas, rather than in understanding a changed reality. I sometimes ask myself why is it that so many Indians, especially intellectuals, hate the market. There are two reasons I can think of. One, is that no one is in charge in the market economy and this causes enormous anxiety. The second reason is that we tend to equate the market with businessmen. Since we think that businessmen are crooked we tend to transfer this negative image to the market. Hence, we feel the need for the heavy hand of government to keep the market in line. Because the market is invisible nothing one can say will convince people that the market is morally blind--that it is merely an arena in which people buy and sell. We forget that the market is, in fact, the best ally of the ordinary citizen, because it forces businessmen to compete. It is like democracy, in this respect, which forces politicians to compete. This suspicion of markets is magnified when it comes to the global marketplace, for there truly no one is in charge. Hence all our anxieties get multiplied and for this reason MNCs, FIIs, become obvious targets. And to diminish the anxiety we take comfort in Hindutva and the familiarity of swadeshi objects. Mr. Swarup and I agree that to be modern is to subject our ideas, and attitudes, as well as our production methods and systems to the test of reason and experience and retain what is tenable and shed what is not. In light of the experience of the last eighty years, it is clearly irrational and unmodern to retain our attachment to socialism (despite the historical irony.) The problem with socialism is of performance, not of faith. If socialism had worked we would all be socialists today. It was the noblest vision that man even had--to build a compassionate society which would wipe away poverty and oppression. Alas, every time it was tried it led to statism and oppression. That evidence is no longer in dispute. A series of controlled experiments were conducted in the last fifty years on a scale that is the envy of every social scientist. Germany, Korea, Vietnam and China were sawed into two and capitalism was installed in one part and socialism in the other. In every case the capitalist part not only out-produced the non-capitalist one, but it also delivered freedom and opportunity. Yet most Indians do not accept the market economy. Even my mother, who thinks that socialism was the work of the devil, believes in "fair" prices and "decent" wages. Although she accepts that people must earn vastly different salaries in order to give incentives for performance, she complains that there is now too much greed in our society. Like most educated Indians she does not think, as I do, that better results will be achieved if people shamelessly follow their self-interest in the bazaar rather than lofty moral principles. Mr. Swarup says that Japan is a poor example of a modern society. He may well be right from the perspective of the five per cent well-fed, upper middle class Indians. But for the majority of our countrymen, who live degraded lives in desperate poverty, Japan is a modern utopia, which has delivered unparalleled prosperity, education, health and welfare to all its citizen--all of this in a couple of generations. Japan has its flaws, to be sure. But so does every society. We Indians, who are at the bottom of the heap on any scale of human welfare, would do well to put ourselves in the shoes of our less fortunate compatriots before we pass judgement on other nations. Mr. Swarup has written much nonsense on the obsolete technology of MNCs, which keeps Indian firms permanently dependent. It is the usual gibberish from the over-active minds of the "dependency school," which has no basis in the real world and shows a total lack of understanding of how companies operate. An MNC, like any company, invests in order to succeed in the market place, and it will employ whatever technology it takes to win. If it employs old technology against a competitor with the latest technology then it clearly shoots itself in the foot. MNCs have no interest in neo-colonial constructs. Mr. Swarup has not addressed the main issue in my article: can one be modern without becoming Western? This is unfortunate, for if he had then he would have truly furthered the debate on  modernization.

ONE POINTEDNESS TO GLORY MARCH 31, 1998 

There is a concept in Yoga called one-pointedness (Ekagrata in Sanskrit.) Successful governments, like successful companies, have an uncanny ability to be one-pointed, while seeming to do hundreds of things in the routine of the day. One such government was Deng's in China; another was Thatcher's in Britain; and going back a couple of generations, Churchill's government during the Second World War was an obvious example of Ekagrata. All these governments had focus and purpose. Not since Nehru's days have we had such a government in India. The only lesson to draw from our recent unhappy election is that the Indian voter has given no party the right to pursue a controversial agenda. A mandate, so fractured between provincial, local, caste and religious identities, can only mean that the ruling coalition will have to govern through consultation, compromise and consensus--both with its allies and with the opposition. The BJP certainly does not have a mandate for hindutva or swadeshi. Hoerver, this does not mean that it can't govern purposively. There is a vast unfinished agenda of economic reform. Much of it is uncontroversial, but it does require commitment and will power. To debottleneck infrastructure, for example. But if I were to select only one point on the reform agenda, and make it the one-pointed purpose of the new government, I would unhesitatingly choose education reform. Eliminating illiteracy will do more for the average Indian than almost anything else. An educated work force will give Indian companies competitive advantage in today's workplace which demands a "knowledge worker"; it will raise the backward castes far more than reservations by making them employable. It will lead to better governance as the voter becomes more responsible. It will liberate Indians--as Epictetus says, "only the educated are free." Of all the parties, only the BJP took the trouble to define a vision and program of education reform in its manifesto. It spelled out an outstanding program in 21 steps with which no sensible Indian can disagree. If only it would now implement it with Ekagrata it would make India an efficient and compassionate society. The BJP document emphasizes both the quantity and quality of education. It promises to deliver "near complete functional literacy in 5 years" by mobilizing societal participation and progressively raising spending from 3 to 6 percent of GNP. Its reform package includes a massive expansion of vocational training in high schools in order to build employment skills; teach agricultural studies in rural schools; create incentive for attendance in primary schools through mid-day meals and free test books; involve NGOs in the expansion of primary education; introduce an anti-cheating law (with safeguards against abuse); provide autonomy to colleges and universities and academic freedom to scholars; select 10 to 20 centres of higher learning and make them world class; preserve traditional knowledge and skills; provide low interest bank loans for meritorious students; expand ago-industrial and technical schools with the help of industry; and remove gender disparity. The main deficiency of BJP's program is its silence on teacher re-training, which is the single most important step in raising the quality of primary education. This retraining, as Krishna Kumar says, ought to focus on the child's view of looking at the world and develop curriculum materials which employ local resources and reflect the local milieu of the child--i.e. make education less bookish and more relevant. Even more crucial however, is to bring teachers back into the classroom. Jean Dreze and Amartaya Sen noted in their recent book, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity that in the four districts they studied in U.P. two-thirds of the teachers were chronically absent. Panchayati Raj offers an opportunity to bring the teacher back into the classroom. The 11th schedule to the Constitution has placed primary education under the panchayats. In theory, this means that the local community and the parents should be able to hold the teacher accountable. In practice, however, this is not easy because the grip of the state education departments is very tight and will not be easily loosened. One solution is for Doordarshan to telecast primary education classes in different languages in the mornings to supplement the teacher's input. Electronic education can raise the quality of education and moderate absenteeism (but it cannot replace the teacher.) In our enthusiasm for primary education, however, we should not fall into the trap of de-emphasizing higher education. Our experience of the past six years, since the reforms began, is that cheap, educated, wired professionals represent our true competitive advantage in the global economy. The common element of all successful developing societies, regardless of the type of economic policies they pursue, is elementary education. If the next government achieves only one thing--a revolution in primary education--it will find, to its happy surprise that it will be voted back to power. If this is not the stuff of politics, then what is the point of politics?

ONE POINTEDNESS TO GLORY APRIL 14, 1998

Literature is about passion. But so in business. How else do you explain the insane behaviour of otherwise ordinary, sensible Indians who have pulled out all their hard earned savings from the bank in order to start a business and chase a dream. Don't they know that nine out ten business close down after twelve months? Even since the Revolution of 1991 I keep running into these mad heroes.. The most remarkable feature of a vibrant, healthy economy is the very high failure rate of its entrepreneurs. Success in business goes against the odds. In India, there is also the indignity of having to grovel before and bribe a dozen inspectors .Thus, an entrepreneur has to be a gambler or a lunatic with a fundamentally impaired judgement about life. Some will call this courageous, others stupidity. But it is passion at the root which inspires this behaviour. These entrepreneurs are as mad as our medieval Rajputs from Mewar who went to battle time and again, when they knew in their hearts that defeat was their only prize. The opposite of this big chested behaviour is bureaucracy and statism. The bureaucrat is cold, calculating, risk averse and mean hearted. The entrepreneur is decisive and in a hurry; the bureaucrat is indecisive and likes to delay things. No wonder the bureaucrat hates the entrepreneur's passion. Although bureaucrats are mostly found in governments, there are plenty of them in big companies as well. Large companies tend to become enormous socialist enterprises and have to be periodically shaken up. This has been happening in America where large companies have been viciously downsized during the last decade. Many large Indian companies face a similar fate. Those companies who are able to destroy the disease of bureaucracy will emerge competitive and successful in the future. The others will face extinction. We Indians have got so used to bureaucracy over the past 50 years that we are horrified at the loss of jobs in our big public sector companies. We forget that a couple of thousand Englishmen ran India before 1947. We don't know what it is like to breathe the free air of a non-bureaucratic society. My grandfather used to say that sometimes he felt freer during the British Raj than under the "licence raj." Statism is bad no matter where it is found --whether in the public or the private sector. On the othe hand, we must celebrate our chaotic entrepreneurial bazaar economy, whether in Delhi's Chandini Chowk, or in Bangalore's Silicon Valley or Bombay's Dalal Street. What is common to all three places is the risk taking passion of entrepreneurs? Why does one entrepreneur succeed while the other nine fail? That is a mystery. But Peters and Waterman came closest to unravelling it In Search of Excellence (unquestionably the best book written about business.) They said, successful enterprises exist for their customers, treat their employees like decent human beings and they innovate constantly. When I left the corporate world four years ago I was Managing Director, Worldwide Strategic Planning at my company's headquarters in America. There I saw a lot of bureaucracy in my office. I saw very highly paid executives in their plush glass tower offices pass weighty memos from the left side of their desk to the right side of their desk. The most important lesson that I learned in my job is that a strategic planner should not be a planner. He should be a "discoverer", in Henry Mintzburg's words, "who pursues wildflowers in the fields". He should constantly seek new ideas sprouting here, there and everywhere. Whether inside the company or without, he should latch on to the most promising entrepreneurial possibilities and fertilize them. A good strategic planner should look for experiments that have been started by others, and like a good venture capitalist nurture them. He should focus the company's resources and attention to these innovations. Good companies like Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems do an outstanding job of acquiring these small experimenters. This is what the wise Austrians, Hayek and Mises called the discovery process in a capitalist economy. As we approach the 21st century we in India must re-evaluate our old ideas about business. We were taught to think of our banias as black-marketeers and profiteers. We must shed these cliches, just as we must cleanse our minds of the statist bias in our thinking. Max Weber got many things right about the ethic of the entrepreneur, but he missed the notion of passion. Fortunately, the internet has levelled the playing field for our entrepreneurs. Many of the huge, hierarchical MNCs, who strike such terror in the hearts of our Bombay Club, are faced the same threat of extinction unless they reinvent their business and make them less hierarchical and open. As new players to the global game, we can take heart from the fact that in the next 25 years the way that business is done will change so dramatically that and whoever can forsee the changing needs of the market will go to glory. No MNC has a head start. Any mad, passionate Indian entrepreneur can write his own future.

ONE POINTEDNESS TO GLORY  JUNE 23, 1998

There is nothing like a good nuclear bang to focus the mind. As we begin to adjust to living in the post-bang world we must ask ourselves what is important to us as a nation. What are our national goals? Where does the bomb fit into our objectives? The BJP wants us to be counted and respected in the community of nations. That obviously cannot be a goal, for respect is the result of something that we achieve. Military power, however, can be a national objective. But history teaches us that unless military power is backed by economic power it cannot be sustained. Russia has many atom bombs; Japan has none. But the world respects Japan. We too have discovered to our chagrin that the atom bomb has not won us the respect of the world. The reason is that it is not backed by economic stature. On the contrary it has made us a laughing stock, and put us in the company of rogue states like Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Even our best friends, who do not condemn our atomic tests, regard us with sad puzzlement. Our national goal could be to achieve a certain quality of life for our people. Or it could be to socially raise the lowest castes. Or to achieve harmony between different religious communities. But I believe the only sensible goal for India has to be economic. Economics is not everything, but it has to be the most important thing in a country where one third of the people live degraded lives of unimaginable poverty, and another third live in constant anxiety about making ends meet. If we agree to define our goal in economic terms, there are many ways to express it--in terms of employment, inflation, productivity, as a poverty index, competitiveness, literacy, exports, and so on. Generally, economists like to express it in terms of growth. That is not a perfect way, but it is better than any other. When an economy grows strongly, a lot of good things seem to happen it. High growth creates jobs, slows down inflationary pressures, raises tax revenues of the government, which can be wisely invested on schools, roads, electricity, and on poverty programs. If we agree on economic growth as our national goal, then we must be prepared to measure all our actions against this criterion. We must also eshew the temptation to have multiple objectives. Nations, like companies, are most effective when they are one-pointed. We must evaluate every action of every politician and bureaucrat by asking, "does it promote economic growth?" For example, law and order, speedy justice, political stability--all good in themselves--also promote growth by creating a sound climate for investment. Can the bomb promote high growth? It can, conceivably, if it helps to reduce the defence budget on the grounds that conventional forces can be cut once there is a nuclear deterrent, and the savings are plouged into infrastructure. But this is a specious argument. The experience of the last fifty years shows that no nuclear country has been able to cut its conventional arms. Spending on nukes has invariably been an add-on to the existing defence burden of the country. In fact, the bomb will push us into a costly arms race, escalating our defence expenditures and deny funds for economic development. Does the bomb offer any other benefits? The bomb could possibly have furthered our security if Pakistan did not have it. But how does it help if both sides have the bomb? It only makes the subcontinent a danger spot. To this the BJP responds with the classic deterrence argument. It is that the unthinkable horror of a nuclear disaster will deter self-interested, non-suicidal leaders on both sides to even start a conventional war. And thus, it will, paradoxically, promote peace. The empirical evidence in support of this argument is that none of the members of the nuclear club has fought a war. While this argument has some logic, I believe the logic of disarmament is far greater. Meanwhile, the sanctions are going to hurt. They are going to succeed in denying funds for our power plants, roads, ports, and drinking water programs. Foreign companies are also going to think twice before investing. A potential German investor is reported to have said, "Why should I invest in India? It might blow up and with it my factory." It is true that Pakistan's pain will be greater. It is also true that American companies will suffer more. But how does this help the Indian child who can't do his homework because of load shedding? The budget was our great hope. But that hope is also dashed. A bold, reforming, growth oriented budget would have dramatically changed global sentiment in India's favour. In the end, our rulers have to remember that our national goal is not to prove anything to the world or to our enemies. It is to improve the lot of our people

ONE POINTEDNESS TO GLORY  July 7, 1998

There are three kinds of companies, according to Professor Birch of M.I.T. He calls them elephants, mice, and gazelles. The elephants, of course, are the large Fortune 500 companies like General Motors. At the other end are the vast majority of tiny enterprises in the bazaar--retail shops, restaurants, and services. These are the mice. The third are the gazelles, which start small and grow extremely rapidly through innovation. Microsoft, Intel and other high tech companies are examples of gazelles. Sometimes gazelles create entirely new industries, as in the case of Federal Express or UPS, who have pioneered the courier industry. Professor Birch's research shows that 70 per cent of the new jobs in the United States have been created by the gazelles. And its worth noting that the US has been extremely successful at generating employment--having created 26.4 million jobs in the last two decades! The elephants have not added to employment; in fact, they have downsized in the past decade. Neither have the mice: for every new one that comes up, another usually dies. The gazelles eventually become elephants, but on the way (as they ride the "s-curve") they create enormous number of productive, high quality jobs. Successful economies, thus create conditions for the gazelles to come up and to succeed. In India, we too have had our gazelles--Reliance, NIIT, Jet Airways, Titan Watches, Infosys, Ranbaxy, to name a few. Our challenge as a nation is to find the small entrepreneurs who have a vision and a dream, and who will be the gazelles of tomorrow. Once found we have to make it possible for them succeed. This is not easy. For the scarcest resource in any society is entrepreneurship. And four out of five entrepreneurs fail. So it is a real art to find the one who will succeed. How do we find and nurture the gazelles of the future? And who should do it? Clearly, the government should not. It should be kept as far away from them as possible--it does not understand business and it will only succeed in killing them. The answer is venture capitalism. Many of America's gazelles came up through this path. Venture capitalism is a risky business. It consists in spotting a potential winner from among a large number of business start-ups. A venture capitalist doesn't go into business himself. He looks for a young person with an idea, and offers to provide him or her with capital (and management help) in exchange for a share of future profits. Since banks are risk averse and won't lend to a young person with an idea, every entrepreneur is always short of capital and welcomes a backer. When the business takes off after three to five years, it usually needs another dose of capital to fund expansion. By now, the business has built a track record of profits, and the sensible thing is to take the company public, and raise the expansion capital through the stock market. This is also the opportunity for the venture capitalist to book his profit, sell his shares, and exit from the venture. And look for another gazelle to nourish. In the past few years, a number of successful businessman have asked me for advice on philanthropy. Typically they say, "I have made my money and I am not getting younger. What I should do? Where should I donate my money?" When businessmen think of philanthropy they usually think of temples, hospitals, schools and scholarships. These are good things, but I generally turn them in the direction of a good NGO, because I find they are doing a better of social uplift than private charities. But now that I think of it, spotting and nourishing gazelles would be an excellent form of philanthropy. What could be a better idea than to provide seed capital to a young person with a dream, and thereby create lots of productive new jobs in the economy and build competitiveness at the same time? There is not an entirely new idea to India. Some business communities--notably, the Jains in Gujarat--provide risk capital to youngsters in their clan, with the understanding that they will repay it later in life. In the 19th century there existed a similar support system for Marwari youngsters, who went off to Calcutta from the villages of Rajasthan. These young men learned to do business as apprentices in existing Marwari firms before setting out on their own. They also lived together in dharmashalas, and at night they would recount their exploits of the day. Thus, they learned from each other's mistakes and these dharmashalas became their Harvard Business School. Many people will argue that venture capitalism is not philanthropy, it is business. Call it by whatever name--but if you agree that entrepreneurs are one of scarcest resources of society, that they generate productive jobs and wealth for our country, then spotting and nourishing gazelles in one of the best things that we can do in India.

WHY INDIANS MAKE POOR TEAM PLAYERS July 21, 1998 

It is the height of our monsoon season, but the damp, humid air is filled with a middle-aged conservatism, which paralyzes our corporate life into inaction. A dogged resistance to change is compounded by the lack of cohesion at the top of our companies. That Indians don't make good team players is a well known fact. A Swiss manager of a multinational company, who has been associated for many years with its Indian subsidiary, said the other day that a sure way not to get action is to put two talented Indians on any task force; they will never agree with each other and brilliantly argue the proposal to death. There is also the story of two Indians who meet in New York and decide to form the India Association. When a third one arrives, they form a Tamil Association; with a fourth comes the Bengali Association. And so on, until there are 15 regional associations and the old Indian Association is forgotten. One day some one has the "brilliant idea" to join the regional associations into an Indian Association. So back they go to square one. It's a funny story, and it makes us laugh, but it also illustrates the divisiveness in our character. Take any institution in India--scratch the surface and you will find factionalism at the top. Whether it is a university, a hospital, a village panchayat, or a municipal board, it is beset with dissension. What is the cause of our divisiveness? Is it our diversity? Is it the caste system? It cannot be caste alone for even in the most homogenous Marwari companies brothers, uncles, nephews incessantly fight with each other. I have observed this problem in family-run business, public sector enterprises, even multinational subsidiaries. I think it is serious enough for businessmen to be concerned about it. To some extent, jockeying for power exists in every company, everywhere. It is natural for directors to build empires, quarrel over turf and squabble in board rooms. But in good companies around the world these conflicts are contained so that they don't hurt competitiveness. In India, I fear, they tend to spill out, and when they do the effect is devastating to younger managers. Not only do they get caught in the cross-fire, but also they tend to emulate this damaging behaviour of their seniors. It is an old problem. Every schoolchild knows that foreign invaders were able to conquer India because our armies were not united. According to Arrian, Porues lost to Alexander in 326 B.C., partially because of poor co-ordination among his generals before the Macedonian phalanx. "While the defenders of the Punjab were brave...(and) each man fought to the death...(the soldiers) were unable to make a mass movement in concert with their brethren of other corps." Similarly Babur's victories at Panipat and at Khanua (against the Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sangha) are partly explained by the divisions in Indian society and poor co-ordination on the battlefield. Although the Marathas had more cohesive armies, they too suffered because some sub-castes armed themselves against others. The British Empire professionalized the Indian armies. And after 1947 the Indian army has been "an island of discipline." Despite that, however, there have been problems between generals in the battlefield. In the 1962 Chinese War, the commander of the Fourth Division at Se-La confessed that "private animosities, personal weakness and in many cases lack of mutual confidence among the commanders...led to disaster." In even the wars that we won--1965 and 1971--there were major failures of co-ordination, according to General Harbaksh Singh and Sukhwant Singh. Harvard Professor Steve Rosen states in a new book on India's armies, "The only justifiable conclusion is that in 1965 the Indian Army displayed low levels of cohesion within infantry units, which led to their early collapse in battle; low levels of cohesion among infantry units which affected their ability to co-operate on the battlefield; and perhaps even lower levels of cohesion between tank and infantry units." Does poor teamwork have to do with our character and personality? Psychologists he tells us that the Indian male is exassively indulged as a child by the mother and the female relatives and he lacks a close identification with the father. He tends to submerge his identity within the family, and this results in a weakly developed ego. When he grows up, he tends to have hierarchical or dependent relationships, rather than good, co-operative relationships with peers based on equality. This is an interesting hypothesis but it needs broad empirical data to validate it. Is it a problem of trust? Where people spontaneously trust each other there is a high degree of co-operation and lower transaction costs. Does our caste based society makes us suspicious of non-kin? My economist friends has no patience with this theorizing. They say that once there is sufficient competition in the Indian market, and companies are fighting for survival, then you will get excellent teamwork. I hope they are right. Meanwhile, businessmen ought to be aware of the problem and do something about it.

.REVOLUTION IN THE INDIAN BAZAAR AUGUST 4,1998

There is a palpable sense of excitement in the Indian bazaar. From Pathankot to Burdwan and Bikaner to Tellicherry young people everywhere are galvanized and are flocking into the new computer schools of NIIT, Aptech and others. These are the hip places to hang around these days. It is even more thrilling than the last time around, almost ten years ago, when the STD/PCO booths first arrived in the towns and villages across India. And now, if this government has its way, the bazaar will soon experience a third information revolution when internet kiosks begin to offer the world wide web at local call rates. All of us remember the wonderful things that happened when STD first arrived in our bazaar. Mothers could suddenly speak to their sons working across India and the world. Apple farmers in Himachal began to make harvesting decisions based on a quick call to the wholesale markets in Delhi and Bombay. My father could consult a doctor in America from a village in Punjab. We suddenly experienced the empowering nature of communication. We could make things happen on our own, without depending on the government. The second revolution was even more significant. In the mid-eighties a few entrepreneurs saw what the government did not: that the world was changing and no one would be employable without computer skills; that the market had a huge and growing appetite for IT professionals; that our schools and colleges were still creating an army of unemployables. NIIT and Aptech stepped into this vacuum, and began to offer computer lessons in a few cities. They were immediately successful, but they could not cope with the demand. Smaller companies entered the market, but they could not deliver the quality. Since NIIT and Aptech did not have the capital or the human resources to expand across the country, they hit upon the idea of franchising their schools (like McDonalds and Titan watches.) They looked for entrepreneurs in small towns who had the space and the capital, and they made them their partners. They helped their partners to design the schools and buy the computers. They selected and trained their teachers and conducted exams under their watchful eye. Soon there were NIIT and Aptech centres flourishing even in the smallest towns. Today these centres are training quarter of a million students a year. The secret of their success lies in attention to detail and consistent quality. On May 22, the Prime Minister announced a task force on information technology. By June 9th the task-force had posted a background paper on the net, inviting reactions from the public. On July 5th the task force published its first action report on the website. On July 15th the Finance Minister announced a sweeping IT tax package which has electrified the industry. On July 30th the cabinet cleared the time-bound action plan of the task force. On August 15 the PM is expected to announce that Internet access nodes will be available through private providers at all district headquarters at local call rates. Thus, the Indian bazaar will soon add another three letter word, PTC (Public Teleinfo Centre), to its vocabulary, and every schoolchild will have access to a PC and internet as easily and ubiquitously as his access to the chaatwalla. In fact, many of the STD-wallas will upgrade to become PTC-wallas. If this PM does nothing else but implements the full IT Action Plan, his place in history is assured. India's rank on the Global Competitiveness Report will leap upwards instantly. What our schools and colleges could not do the great Indian bazaar has done it. The bazaar succeeds because the businessman knows that his existence depends on his customer. If he offers courteous, cost-competitive service, the customer rewards him. The shopkeeper shows you a hundred sarees even if you don't buy one. Your thali arrives in three minutes flat in the Udipi restaurant. Compare this to buying a railway ticket, or paying your telephone bill or dealing with the linesman of the state electricity board. The government companies are monopolies where the customer is a nuisance. Many large Indian companies also behave like our public sector. But there are a few companies, like HDFC and Sundaran Finance, who offer unparalleled service, and they are rewarded. There are only three ways that a company can achieve competitive advantage--with superior products, or superior costs or superior service. Indian companies are primarily focused on superior costs to help them compete in the world market. But this strategy is vulnerable to devaluations in competitor countries. And our companies are at least 20 years away from offering superior technologies and products. So their only choice is to offer superior service. I tell every Indian company with global ambitious to learn from our bazaar and adopt a superior service strategy. The beauty is that it is practically free compared to the other two strategies. But it needs every employee to acquire the mindset of the Indian bazaar.

SWADESHI & ADITYA BIRLA AUGUST 18,1998 

This BJP government is finally beginning to make some solid and sensible moves. Its new I.T. policy has electrified the computer industry. It has unilaterally opened imports of two thousand products from our neighboring countries-it is the boldest action taken by an Indian PM for freer trade in the subcontinent. It has settled the self-destructive dispute with Maruti. It is taking quiet decisions in power, telecom, and the privatization of PSUs that should soon bear fruit. The bad news, however, is that it is constantly having to fight swadeshi forces from within, who are playing the same negative role that the leftists did in the last government. Its proposal to open up insurance (permitting 26 per cent foreign ownership) was shot down by swadeshi hard liners in the cabinet. A pity, for this single action would have done more to turn foreign sentiment in our favour than anything else. Those who espouse swadeshi would do well to remember Aditya Vikram Birla, the most dynamic Indian entrepreneur of his generation. During his short 52 year life, Aditya built 70 factories in six countries and notched up Rs 16,500 crores in sales and Rs.1500 crores in net profit, fully half of it emanating from overseas. He became the world's largest producer of viscose staple fibre and palm oil; the world's third largest maker of insulators and the sixth largest of carbon black. What is more significant is that Aditya Birla was the first Indian to have faith in globalization, which he once described as follows, "We produce staple fibre in Thailand, for which we buy pulp in Canada. This fibre, made in Thailand, is sent to Indonesia for converting to yarn in our unit there. This yarn is then exported from Indonesia to Belgium, where it is made into carpets, and finally the carpet is exported to Canada!" We should pause and reflect that Aditya Birla was an Indian, and yet India does not figure in this global value added chain. Why? The reason is simple--our economy was closed. Our rulers had decided to follow swadeshi. Instead of promoting exports, they wanted our swadeshi industrialists to substitute imports and make everything at home. For four decades we practiced swadeshi and denied our people access to new knowledge, new technologies, new ways of organizing business, and a chance to participate in the enormous expansion in global trade and investment which brought prosperity to country after country in the second half of the 20th century. Thus, we deliberately suppressed growth and sacrificed two generations to a misconceived ideology. This tale of missed opportunities is enough to make one weep. If Aditya Birla put his trust in the world economy he was rewarded in seeing his foreign enterprises become globally competitive. There was little swadeshi protection in Southeast Asia and his companies in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia faced savage competition from the Japanese, Americans, and Europeans. Because he was confident, he did not run away from competition. He chose to fight and he won in the end. Ruthless competition was the school which taught his companies to become strong. What pushed Aditya Birla out of India were Mrs. Gandhi's damaging policies. It is sad irony that at the very time that the countries of East Asia were beginning to open up and liberalize, Mrs. Gandhi turned inwards. Her brand of swadeshi socialism also suited the bureaucracy nicely. Aditya Birla once recalled that he was invited to be a director of a foreign company, promoted by his own joint venture. "My becoming a director would have resulted in foreign exchange inflow to the country, from director's commissions and from substantial exports of goods from India. But I needed to get permission from our government. For nine months the permission was not forthcoming. I finally went to meet the concerned officer, who said, 'Mr. Birla, we could even prosecute you if you accepted the offer to become a director of the foreign company!' Imagine my embarrassment with the foreign company's board of directors who were unable to comprehend why it would take anyone nine months to accept a directorship. Finally the permission came, but after a heavy drain on precious management time." Aditya Birla contrasted this situation with the Nissan Corporation, which gives serious thought to any suggestion that saves even 0.6 seconds of a manager's time. Here in India, man-years are wasted to secure trivial permissions which should not even be required. Take another minefield-our company law. The text of India's company law extends to over 500 pages and consists of 658 sections. In Thailand, company law is covered in thirty-four pages; in Indonesia seven pages. Aditya Birla was ahead of his time in globalising his business, but today's swadeshi proponents should remember that theirs is not a new idea. It has been vigorously practiced in India for four decades with incalculable harm to two whole generations.

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN  SEPTEMBER 1,1998 

"Indians are among the brightest people on this earth," said a German statesman recently. "Yet India can't seem to take advantage of the global economy. Why can't they understand that there is only game in town? Those who learn to play it will enter the 21st century; the others will be left behind." No nation in modern times has grown rich or economically strong without becoming a successful trader. No developing country has lifted its economic growth without exports. India's finest years since Independence were 1994, 1995 and 1996 when its economy grew seven per cent a year. It is not surprising that exports also boomed, increasing twenty per cent a year during those three years. India and China had the same level of exports in 1994, around $13 billion. Today, China's exports are over $150 billion and India's are languishing at $33 billion. This explains why the world respects China and not India. This is why Clinton goes to China but ignores India. Everyone knows that East Asia's miraculous success was built on exports. Export-led growth transformed Japan into an economic superpower and put teeth in the four Asian tigers. But few realize that to be top exporter you have to be a top importer. And India has always been bitterly antagonistic to imports. This partly explains India's failure with exports. The world's top 15 exporters are also the world's 15 importers-and virtually in the same order- -according to the WTO. It makes sense: the more output you want, the more input you need. If you want to export toys, you need to buy raw and packing materials, machinery, and computers. If these are not available at home, you need to import them. "But we have always allowed imports for export purposes," say the bureaucrats. That's true. But our systems and procedures are so hostile to imports, that they break the back of any honest exporter. One back-broken exporter told me that "only stupid people export from India." A second reason for our export failure is our damaging SSI policy, which reserves 800 products for the small scale industry. These are simple products like garments, toys, shoes etc. But they are precisely the one's where we have a competitive advantage with our cheap labour. The Far East countries, built their export success on these same products. The global economy needs these products in large quantities but our SSI policy inhibits large volumes. Nor can our SSI exporter compete with large companies from the Far East, who have large plants, financial muscle, marketing and distribution networks. At CEO of Procter and Gamble India we tried and failed to make India a sourcing base for one of our products. However, the cost of the high technology machine exceeded the SSI investment limits and $500 million in potential exports were lost to India. For these and other reasons the Abid Husain Committee has recommended scrapping small scale reservations. But this has not happened. Meanwhile, China's exports of toys, garments, small appliances has risen from $3 billion in 1985 and $70 billion in 1997 whereas ours has gone from $2 billion to $14 billion in the same period. According to the 1996 World Investment Report, as much as one third of all trade now takes place within transnational firms, and another third between transnationals and other companies. The bulk of world trade is not the export and import of finished goods but a highly complex exchange of components among the subsidiaries of multinational companies based in different countries. UNCTAD data shows that U.S. multinationals exported 40 per cent of the sales of their subsidiaries in 1993. It was high as 64.4 per cent from developing countries of Asia and 84.9 per cent from Malaysia. However, it was only 4.1 per cent from India (in 1986). Multinationals do not export from India because it is still not a good place to do business. MNC's are willing to put up with our inefficiencies when it comes to the domestic market but they won't risk their global business to the uncertainties of our red tape, corrupt customs officials, congested ports, and unionized dock labour. Hewlett Packard seriously looked at India for globally sourcing print heads for its ink jet printers. But it picked Malaysia instead because it was more reliable. HP wanted a turnaround time of 24 hours from order to shipment; the best India could do was 5 days. Our red tape and poor infrastructure scared them away. The truth is that every politician, bureaucrat, and customs officer has tried his hardest to kill exports. If India wants to win the game and become a successful exporter, it must open imports, reduce duties and non-tariff barriers; it must scrap SSI reservations; it must improve infrastructure--especially port handling; it must--cut red tape permits, and discipline customs officials. Thus, it will become better place to do business and MNC will begin to export from India

Find a dream 12 March, 2000

Not since the heady days of the Green Revolution in the late sixties have we seen the same excitement and fever amongst our people. This time it is the educated young in our largest cities that are leading the charge. The last time around, I remember Daniel Thorner, an extraordinary American academic, used to travel extensively in Indian villages in the 1960s, and he wrote passionately about capitalist stirrings in the Indian countryside. He described how thousands of farmers in Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh were electrified by the arrival of the Mexican seeds and rushed to adopt the new technology. While leftists complained in the Economic and Political Weekly, these courageous farmers went on to transform India from "a basket case" to a food surplus country. I have just returned from a tour of college campuses, including IITs and IIMs, where I found the same energy and fire that Thorner wrote about thirty years ago. Once again, it is the thrill of a new technology that is electrifying young Indians. This time it is the Internet. Although the subject of my talks was different, students on the campuses wanted to talk only about how to become Internet entrepreneurs (because of my association with a venture capital fund.) They had the most amazing ideas, which they referred to as their ``inner dreams''. I encouraged them to pin their dreams to a business model, and quickly seek venture funding. "`The moment is yours,"' I reminded them, for God's sake, seize it. Some brave ones have found the religion and have taken the plunge. They are beginning to burn the midnight oil as Internet players. And venture companies are falling over each other to grab the best early players. Companies like NIIT are setting aside funds to incubate hundreds of entrepreneurial ventures. You have only to read The Economic Times and Business World to follow this revolution from week to week. My fund alone has evaluated more than 500 business plans in the last three months. Young managers in our industrial companies and banks have also been bitten by the Internet bug and are beginning to leave their secure jobs and become partners in Internet start-ups. These ventures will soon face tough competition from our established companies and from Internet companies from the US, the home of the Internet. This is happening in Japan where Sony and Fujitsu are linking with American dotcoms. NEC has recently acquired a 30 per cent stake in eBay, and Yahoo Japan's share price is quoting at 2,000 times projected earnings for fiscal 1999. I am also associated with traditional Indian firms and the contrast is dramatic. Whereas older members of bania families usually run our established companies, it is rare to find someone over 40 at the head of an Infotech company, and they come from various caste backgrounds. The average age of Internet entrepreneurs is 25. The old companies are tight-fisted; the new ones spread their wealth-typically 15 per cent of the shares are owned by employees in the form of ``stock options''. The older firms are unionised with a thin layer of professional management. Everyone is a professional in the new companies and he feels like an owner. Because of the boom in infotech stocks, many have become rich beyond his wildest dreams. Our industrial companies are generally not globally competitive and they focus only on the Indian market; our new companies in the information economy have their customers overseas and their employees think globally. Many people ask if the Internet is a fleeting fancy or is it here to stay? The answer is that there is hype but there is also solid base in reality. The Internet will change everything we do, and it will revolutionise business. Last year in America 15 per cent of shares and 5 per cent of books were sold on the Web and 40 per cent of car buyers consulted the Net. Traditional travel agencies are beginning to disappear. Although Web businesses have still not any made profit and e-commerce in America is only 1 per cent of retail sales -- no company can afford to ignore the Internet. The mania for infotech stocks, however, is a technology bubble. Their shares are over-valued and 3 out of 4 Internet stocks in America now trade below their issue prices. When dotcoms can raise capital so easily, they will tend to waste it. Having said that, the Internet is like the discovery of electricity and young Indians are right to chase their ``inner dreams''. This moment is theirs, and they must seize it.

American Beauty April 23, 2000

I have just returned from New York, where I had gone to sell my new book to American publishers. The book, India Unbound, is being released this month in India by Viking, and it is the story of how a rich nation became poor and will be rich again. The average American, I discovered, is not interested in India although he is obsessed with China. ``Why couldn't you have been Chinese?'' said one publisher wistfully. There is, however, a growing realisation among a section of America that India is poised at the cusp of history. They understand that the new digital economy is likely to transform India, which will turn increasingly middle class in the early part of the 21st century and might even conquer poverty. Clinton has focused on this theme since he went back home and the New York Times and other papers have run extensive stories on the new Indian and Indo-American entrepreneurs. Americans instinctively understand this message because they have experienced the power of the new information revolution. They have seen their productivity surge in the last five years. As a result, the American economy today carries the rest of the globe on its shoulders. It is the world's market, and its dynamism exerts a strong pull on economic activity around the world. After the Second World War, America experienced unprecedented prosperity and all income groups shared in it. This pattern changed after 1970 as the growth in American productivity slowed down. Rich Americans in the top 20 per cent bracket continued to get richer while the incomes of the bottom 40 per cent stagnated or declined. This disparity in incomes continued until late 1995 when suddenly American productivity began to surge again, reaching an astonishing 6.4 per cent annual rate in the last quarter of 1999. At the same time, unemployment fell to its lowest levels for decades, inflation remained low and wages of the poorest began to rise. The ranks of the long-term jobless plummeted from almost 2 million in the 1993 to just 637,000 today. The unemployment rate of high-school dropouts declined from 12 per cent to 7 per cent and among blacks it came down to 7.3 per cent, the lowest since 1972. In the face of these promising numbers Americans are for the first time in decades cautiously optimistic that perhaps inequality may finally have been tackled and the rising tide of the new economy may lift up all the boats. The question is whether America's productivity revolution is exportable, and can the new digital economy do the same for India. Many are sceptical. They argue that only a tiny minority will have access to computers and the Internet. Instead of broadly lifting the masses, the new economy will create a digital divide between the haves and the have-nots. ``When there aren't enough blackboards, how can we expect all Indians to become computer literate?'' they say. The answer may well lie in a little known experiment by NIIT in 371 schools in Tamil Nadu where NIIT instructors are providing subsidised computer education to school children. After school hours, NIIT's school facilities are thrown open to the residents of the town to enable NIIT to make up for profits lost during the day. If the Tamil Nadu experiment succeeds, the country might have found a model for taking computer education into government schools, and computer literacy could explode across the country. If there is profit to be made, competing education companies like Aptech will scramble to replicate this across the country. Punjab and Karnataka have already started the bidding process. When the Prime Minister Vajpayee's IT Task Force offered us the dream of making all school children computer literate by 2010 we thought it was a pipe-dream. If this model works, that dream might well come true. If we can solve the education challenge the rest will be easy. The Indian economy is embarrassingly sound today with high growth, low inflation and swelling reserves. And the forces of the information economy are relentless, profound, and are spreading like virus. Capital is no longer a hurdle, and capital-rich nations do not have an inherent advantage. Neither does inherited wealth. Nor does it help to be white. Anyone with a powerful idea can succeed. One-third of the new economy millionaires in Silicon Valley are reportedly Indian or Chinese. Thus, the new economy is far more democratic. Indians will undoubtedly succeed in the new economy, but will the masses be able to ride on the wave? The answer to that question lies in the quality of our governance, which remains the soft-underbelly of India.

DESPERATE LOVERS 7 May 2000

V.S. Naipaul was in India recently and he was speaking once again on his old theme-the Muslim invasions of India. This is a delicate subject, and it takes courage to confront it in these inflammatory times. But Naipaul has never lacked courage. His thesis is that the creative urge dried up on the subcontinent with the Muslim invasions as all our talent was slaughtered. It disappeared so completely that it took us five hundred years to recover from this terrible tragedy. Naipaul may well be right, but I think he overlooks at least one powerful example of creative flowering in the interface of Muslim Sufis and Hindu saints. I refer to the bhakti movement, which swept across India after 1400 and touched the lives of ordinary people as nothing did since Gautama Buddha. The central idea of bhakti is the passionate belief that I can be united with God through unconditional love and devotion. Love has long been a metaphor for religious experience in India. An ancient passage in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad compares the attainment of freedom and enlightenment to the experience of a man in his wife's embrace. A person, it says, 'in the embrace of the intelligent Soul [knows] nothing within or without…[H] is desire is satisfied, in which the soul is his desire, in which he is without desire and without sorrow'. Tamil saints first popularised this idea of bhakti, and later it was spread across India by a galaxy of medieval bhakti saints-Kabir, Mira, Nanak, Tulsidas, Lalla, Chaitanya, Tukaram, Ravidas, and many others. The chief mood of bhakti poetry is erotic (sringara), as seen from a woman's point of view, whether in its phase of separation or of union. When Mira addresses love poems to Krishna she adopts the feminine personae of a wife, illicit lover, a woman with a tryst, even Radha herself. Krishna is her god but he is also her lover. The most common sentiment is the pain of separation from the lover and the constant theme is self-surrender of the beloved. In classical times Indians sensibly pursued multiple ends in life. These were virtue or righteousness (dharma), wealth and power (artha), pleasure and sex (kama), and release or enlightenment (moksha). During the prime of life a worldly householder (grihasta) pursued wealth, power and pleasure. Only later in life did he turn to moksha. Thus, in antiquity there was a nice balance in the aims of life and Indian civilisation was not as "other-worldly" as it became later in medieval times when a fifth objective (pancham purushartha) swept the minds of hearts of men and women. This was love and it supplanted the other goals, becoming the highest, higher even than moksha. By reaching out to the masses in their everyday languages, the bhakti saints created a veritable social revolution. By offering entry to the lower castes they forced reform on Hinduism and prevented mass conversion to Islam. Since boundless love of God was the only requirement all were rendered equal. By promoting a direct relationship between the soul and God, the bhakti saints eliminated the priests (as Martin Luther did in the Reformation and Buddha did two thousand years earlier). They offered confidence to the poor masses and helped bind together the diverse elements of the subcontinent into a single functioning society. A new form of musical composition also took shape in their songs, which continue to be performed even today in concerts, on the radio and television. Although saints like Mira subverted the traditional ideals of Indian womanhood and challenged the social order, her mystical love for Krishna did not create the sort of problems for her as Saint Joan's visions did in the West. The conservative Rajputs thought she was mad, or a liar or a sorceress but she was not burned at the stake. (Joan was burned, remember!) Critics contend that bhakti flowered because Muslim rule prevented most men from pursuing worldly power. Society had become more rigid, the caste system more entrenched, which checked the ambitions and mobility of men. Turning inwards was a natural response, allowing people to accept their unhappy material condition. They argue that bhakti permanently damaged the Indian psyche by making us ambivalent about the value of human action in this world, and this places us at a competitive disadvantage today. Personally, I am shy of such cultural explanations. I do believe, however, that whether one is a believer or an agnostic, these desperate medieval lovers made a great contribution to world civilisation, and traditions like bhakti provide us today with a safeguard against the onslaught of the mindless global culture.

HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD AND CRY 21 May, 2000

One evening last week, as I sat down to watch the news on television, I was assaulted by a series of confused images: there were heart-rending faces of the drought in Saurashtra, confident youngsters in Chennai preparing to launch a dotcom company, a corrupt bureaucrat caught stealing from tribals in MP, and Lara Dutta beaming under her crown. I asked myself, how does one begin to make any sort of sense out of all this? We are used to thinking of India in terms of dualisms-the rich vs the poor, upper vs lower caste, illiterate villagers vs sophisticated urbanites. But the real dualism that these TV images portrayed, I thought, is the contrast between the vibrant private space of India and the impoverished and callous public space. And no single institution has contributed more to our disenchantment with public space as our bureaucracy. No single institution has disappointed us more. When we were young we bought the cruel myth of the 'steel frame.' We were told that Britain was not as well governed because it did not have the Indian Civil Service. Today our bureaucracy has become the single biggest obstacle to development. Indians think of bureaucrats as self-servers, rent-seekers, obstructive, and corrupt. Instead of shepherding economic reforms, they are responsible for blocking them. Experts widely believe that East Asian bureaucrats helped in engineering their economic miracle. Why did they succeed and Indian bureaucrats fail? A Korean businessman told me that man for man your bureaucrats are smarter. 'But, whereas your bureaucrat is a know-it-all, ours listens to us and collaborates with the citizen.' Secondly, East Asian bureaucrats are specialists, who are not shifted from job to job, and they acquire expertise and commitment. Third, their bureaucracies are smaller, with shorter lines of authority and this makes for quicker decisions. Fourth, when you bribe, your work gets done; in India, even after a bribe you are never sure. The competitor is the enemy of businessmen in other countries. In India, it is the bureaucrat. Compare this with China. Mr. Sahgal, an executive of Phillips Carbon Black, visited China two years ago to set up a plant. A senior Chinese official met him at the Shanghai airport. He was short of time; so the bureaucrats came to see him at his hotel. The land officials promised him a plot within thirty days. The tax officers in their uniforms and epaulettes patiently explained their seven-page income tax code and three-page excise code. The head of the electricity board agreed to give a two-km transmission line in thirty days. The mayor came in the afternoon to take him in his car to his factory site in Wuxi, 200 km away-a distance they covered in two hours on the new highway. In contrast, Phillips Carbon Black took nine months and a half dozen bribes only to acquire the land in Durgapur and six months to get an electricity connection, with a full-time person chasing after the officials. It is too easy to blame politicians in a democracy. The idealistic Mr. Nehru wanted a regulatory framework for his 'mixed economy,' but the bureaucrats gave him License Raj. In the holy name of socialism they created a thousand controls and killed our industrial revolution at birth. In my 30 years in active business I did not meet a single bureaucrat who really understood my business, yet he had the power to ruin it. In the end, our failure has been due less to ideology and more to poor public management. In the summer of 1991 we did finally get rid of the License Raj. We put DGTD out of the way, but we did not get rid of the DGFT, which together with Customs continues to destroy our exports. The Inspector Raj is also well and alive, and its victims are not only businessman, but the poorest rikshaw-pullers in our city. Since the reforms began, the bureaucracy has blocked investment in infrastructure because it does not remove the policy infirmities in the way. Liberalisation is the economic independence of the nation, not from foreign rulers but from our own desi rulers. If I were a bureaucrat today I would hang down my head and cry because my son is ashamed of me. What is the answer? Clearly, it is not to abolish the bureaucracy. Every country needs governance. But we must cut down our government and make it results oriented. The Vajpayee government must understand that the second-generation reforms will not take off without serious administrative reform. It can be done as Britain has shown-it has 40 per cent less people in government than in 1979, saving a billion pounds a year.

The goodly middle class June 4, 2000

It has been a long hot summer and almost everyone seems to be having fun criticising the economic reforms. The Congress party has taken leave of its senses and wants to undo all the good work of its worthiest member, Manmohan Singh. The RSS continues to make noises against globalisation. The Left parties want to protect the labour aristocracy in the public sector against the interests of the labouring masses. Sharad Yadav has shamelessly given away free telephones to all telephone company employees. That leaves only the Prime Minister to fight for India's future all alone, with only a handful of reformers to depend upon. The reforms are anti-poor this is the constant refrain of the critics. Talk of the poor, I am convinced, confuses the debate on reforms. In the short term, the reforms will have no impact on the poor. In the longer run, the reforms will pull up the poor into the middle class. In any society, the top 15 per cent of the people will do well and look after themselves. The bottom 15 per cent will fail and will need to be looked after. In between is the 70 per cent or the vast majority of the people, which in successful economies becomes the middle class. Our real tragedy in the last 50 years is not our poverty but that we did not create the middle class. Our socialist policies suppressed initiative, jobs, economic growth and middle class opportunities. Hence, our middle class was barely eight per cent of the population in 1980. After the economy started seriously growing from the 1980s, the middle class has tripled, according to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, and is now 18 per cent of a much larger population. Given the right incentive system, the middle class invariably pulls itself up through hard work, self-help and education in a competitive society, and the task of the economic reforms is precisely to create such an incentive system. If the reforms are successful, they will succeed in making a majority of India's population middle class within a generation. And then, it will also be easier to look after the poor when they are 15 per cent of the population rather than forty. Who have the reforms hurt so far? Scrapping licensing has only hurt the corrupt bureaucrat and businessman. It does not immediately affect the poor. Similarly, opening the economy to trade and investment has only hurt the inefficient Indian producer and his labour. Neither of them are the wretchedly poor. Reducing controls on the economy has only brought efficiency, removed monopolies, and liberated new entrepreneurs. It is true that the second phase of reforms will cause job losses and pain. But these jobs belong to our pampered organised labour, primarily in inefficient public sector companies. This labour has amongst the lowest productivity in the world, is insensitive to consumers, and gives Indian industry a bad name. By no stretch of the imagination can we call it poor. Nor will cutting subsidies significantly hurt the poor. Experts are unanimously agreed that over 75 per cent of the subsidies do not reach the poor. Fertiliser and power subsidies are enjoyed by the rich and the middle class farmers the rural poor are mainly landless labour. Similarly, the food subsidy through the PDS does not reach the poor, especially in Bihar and UP. Food subsidy has largely been enjoyed by the urban middle class. Economists around the world have been arguing that subsidies are the worst way to help the poor because they distort the price mechanism for the whole economy and misallocate society's scarce resources. Instead of subsidies it is better to give money to the poor (which, of course, has its own problems, for all Indians, including millionaires, will stand in a queue to be counted among the poor). The reforms, thus, do not hurt the poor. Unlike our past policies, the reforms focus on prosperity and not on poverty. They assume that the poor do not want handouts; they want viable jobs so that they can pull themselves up into the middle class. By making the economy efficient and productive the reforms will create jobs, growth, and the middle class. Our politicians need to understand this, and proclaim from the rooftops: "The reforms are not anti-poor!" Meanwhile, the experts in the academia, the NGOs, and the development institutions need to dig deeper into the explosive growth in our middle class to gauge the success of the reforms (and not be mesmerised by our controversial poverty figures). Finally, let us remember what Aristotle said: "The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control and outnumbers both of the other classes."

THE TRUTH ABOUT KERALA 18 June, 2000

Ever since Amartya Sen we have come to believe that Kerala is a model of successful government policies in education. We avidly read V.K. Ramachandran's essay on Kerala's achievements in Indian Economic Development-Selected Regional Perspectives, edited by Sen and Dreze, and we discovered that the communists at least educated their people. We concluded that the answer was for the state to raise its spending on education and everything would look after itself. Thus, our battle cry throughout the 1990s was to lift India's spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP. Now we learn that we were wrong. Digging deeper we have found that the real reason for Kerala's success lay not in government policies but in community action. The initial spark for the spread of education began more than hundred years ago with the Christian missionaries who set up the first modern, open-to-all schools in the old state of Travancore. This spurred the Nairs, led by Mannathu Padmanabhan, to set up a vast number of community schools. Muslims and Ezhavas did not want to be left behind and they followed the example. Kerala's community initiatives also led to the famous reading room movement and libraries came up in the smallest villages. After Independence the Left parties unionised the teachers, brought the schools under state control, and forced the government to pay their salaries. But even today 65 per cent of Kerala's 12,400 schools are in private hands. The lesson from Kerala is that success in education usually comes from private and community efforts, and not from the state. Americans have learned the same lesson. Their best schools are in communities where parents are involved and Parent-Teachers Associations are strong. Even a few volunteers can make the difference. Wherever this American idea of community initiative been tried, such as in gram shiksha samitis in Madhya Pradesh and Andhra or by NGOs in other parts of India, it has made all the difference-despite enormous opposition from the bureaucracy. We have learned from painful experience that the state is highly inefficient in providing education, just as it is inefficient in producing steel, watches, power, or banking services. The Indian state spends Rs 3000 per child per year in primary education, but a third of our children are illiterate. Teachers earn Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 15,000 per month but a shocking number don't show up in classrooms. The ones that do are uninspired and pour rote learning into students. The reform of Indian education has to begin with the conviction that schools have to become accountable to parents and neighbourhoods instead of to bureaucrats at state capitals. We have to fight for the autonomy of our schools and make teachers responsible to parents. Since the state has failed as a producer of education, its role should change to one of enabler. Parth Shah in his Agenda for Change suggests that the state should completely get out of classroom teaching and NGOs or panchayats or the private sector should run schools and charge fees. The state should give parents coupons worth Rs 3000 per child per year. The central idea is competition among schools and choice for parents. If their neighbourhood school is bad they should be able to move their child to a competing school. Some schools will charge the basic price of Rs 3000 a year; others will charge more and offer higher quality education; and some parents will be willing to supplement coupons with their own funds. Thus, schools will compete for students and become innovative in providing better education. Parents will be empowered, teachers will be forced to become 'customer friendly' and Indian education will blossom. This may sound radical but the idea of putting parents in charge of the Rs 3000 per child per year that we spend on education today is sensible. The key is that we don't need to increase spending to dramatically improve the quality of education. But will our parents return the compliment and get involved in Parent-Teacher associations? I think they will because they want their children to get ahead. Murali Manohar Joshi, our minister for human resource development, thinks that education is about Saraswati Puja, packing research bodies with saffronites, and deleting Marx from history books. All of this has nothing to do with educating our young. He should be aware that in the 21st century winners will be divided from losers, not on the basis of capital or natural resources or skin colour. They will be divided on the basis of useful knowledge. This applies to individuals and to nations. Hence, smart nations are racing to reform their education systems, and we too should bring education centre stage in our second phase of reforms.

ONCE AGAIN, DEMOCRACY VERSUS CAPITALISM 30th July, 2000 

It is the height of our monsoon season, the air is heavy with dampness, and our reactions are slow. Fortunately, our economy is moving nicely it continues to be among the fastest growing in the world which is why it is so difficult to understand the behaviour of our capital markets. Our weakness, however, is governance. This is ironic, for we have had much greater experience with the institutions of democracy than of capitalism. We began our schooling in democracy fifty years ago, but we did not give a free play to the market until a decade ago when our reforms began. Yet, governance at all levels is appalling, all our states are bankrupt, and our confidence in government institutions is at its lowest. We need both economic growth and robust political institutions to be a successful nation. Although we now rely more on markets, we still need clean and efficient civil servants to regulate them. The slow pace of the reforms is also a symptom of the weakness of our politics, which allows vested interests to hijack policies for the common good. Politicians blame our failures on the reforms and the ordinary person confuses the ills of government with those of the market. At the best of times it is difficult to appreciate the market system. Over the centuries human beings have dealt with the problem of survival through tradition or command. They organised society around custom and usage, the son following the occupation of his father from generation to generation. Adam Smith tells us that in ancient Egypt, every man was bound by a principle of religion to follow the occupation of his father. In India, as we well know, our caste system assigned us occupations in the same way. The whip of authority has been the other method of organising the jobs of society. The pyramids of Egypt and the temples of India were built by the command of pharaohs or maharajas. More recently, the Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union were carried out by the command of the Politburo in the same manner. It is only in very recent times that human beings invented a third solution to the problem of making a living. Called the market system or capitalism, it gives individuals the freedom to follow their inclination to do what is in their best interest. And the lure of gain (not tradition or authority) steers a person to his task or occupation. And yet in this interplay of self-interested individuals, the tasks of society get done by an invisible hand, as Adam Smith called it. Because it is invisible, this system is more difficult to grasp. It lacks the simplicity of custom or command, which are visible for everyone to see. It is harder to understand how a society can function or how the dirty jobs in society get done cleaning toilets, for example if there is neither a ruler or tradition to command it. Banias and bazaars have been around for thousands of years, ever since there was an agricultural surplus. Historians tell us that this began between 8,000 BC and 10,000 BC, when the first towns emerged as centres of exchange. But markets are not the same thing as the market system. For one thing, it requires that money making be regarded as respectable, and we know thathistorically, commerce has had a bad odour in all societies, including India. Although we see today the wondrous spectacle of thousands of young Indians, starting new business ventures all around us, the idea that their struggle for personal gain might actually promote the good of the whole society is too bizarre for most people. Even the most sophisticated Indians distrust the market because no one is in charge. Hence, politicians find it difficult to win votes by appealing to economic reforms. No wonder Samuel Johnson said, There is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does. Democracy, in contrast, is easier to understand, but it is more difficult to achieve. Capitalism is easier to achieve (because exchange is natural to human beings) but more difficult to understand. The irony in India is that we have established the more difficult political institutions of democracy over the past fifty years. But it is the younger institutions of capitalism that are currently more successful. Sadly, it is our political institutions of governance that are letting us down. The lesson in all this is that we cannot take democracy or capitalism for granted. Neither do they necessarily go together, even though they have human freedom in common.

THE USES OF NATIONALISM 27 August, 2000 

For good or for bad we have a nationalist government in power. Nationalism is generally not a pleasant virtue and the world has grown rightly suspicious of it after all the damage it has inflicted during the last two centuries. Nationalism drove the European nations to colonise the world; it made Germany and Japan militaristic and this caused two world wars; it led to the murder of six million Jews in the holocaust. These were terrible tragedies of nationalism. However, nationalism also has its uses when a nation is young. It can help a country modernize and develop with a sense of urgency as Japan did after the Meiji Restoration in 1867-1868. It can help a people to unite to throw out a foreigner as India did in the years before Independence. Nationalism can also help a country become cohesive, which is useful for a diverse and plural country like ours. We have suffered heavily in the past because we were disunited and did not act as a team. India was lost, first to Babur and then to the British because of parochial quarrels and intrigues among our divisive rulers. Independence too might have come a dozen years earlier if Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah had been able to work together as a team. Bernard Lewis once observed that "when people realize that things are going wrong, there are two questions they can ask. One is, 'What did we do wrong?' and the other is 'Who did this to us?' The latter leads to conspiracy theory and paranoia. The first question leads to another line of thinking: 'How do we put it right?'" In the second half of the nineteenth century Japan asked itself "How do we put it right?" Contrary to what many believe Japan was not always unified. Before the Meiji revolution the feudal Shogunate was divisive. There were dissension and dissents, often violent. The lords of the great fiefs of the Far South and the West, once enemies, finally united against the Shogunate. After the emperor replaced the shogun, the Japanese decided to become one, under the slogan. "Honor the emperor!" The second thing they decided was to catch up with the West. So, they hired Western technicians and sent Japanese agents abroad to learn Western technology. They did not complain. Japan began to modernize by sending a high level delegation, including Okubo Toshimichi to Europe and the United States, visiting factories and schools to learn how the West had modernized. The delegation returned to Japan after two years "on fire with enthusiasm" to reform. One of the reforms that it implemented with characteristic intensity was to give universal schooling to boys and girls. The schooling imparted knowledge but it also instilled punctuality, discipline and a sense of national unity that helped create the modern Japanese personality. In contrast, Latin Americans and some Indians complained. They said that our poverty and backwardness were the misdeeds of world capitalism. Multinational companies replaced the colonial rulers in their script. Raul Prebisch, the Argentine economist, who created the "dependency theory," argued that poor nations would always remain dependent on Western nations because of unequal terms of trade. After the Asian miracle in the 1980s this second rate theory was rightly discarded. It is always easy to blame the "Other". It feeds into the hands of narrow nationalists who want India to return to isolationism and become a cocoon economy once again, cut off from competitive stimuli and opportunities for growth. Our nationalist government should reflect deeply on Japan's experience with modernity. It will quickly realise that the first thing it must do is to redefine its nationalism and become inclusionary and shed its antipathy for the minorities. The idea is not to be Hindu but to be Indian. Only then will it realize the power of national unity. Meiji Japan did the job so well that Japanese teamwork has become the envy of the world. Next it should be "on fire with enthusiasm" to reform the economy like Okubo Toshimichi. Third, it should with equal intensity overhaul our education system and not only ensure education to all Indian boys and girls but improve its quality. Finally, it should remember that all nationalisms run the risk of becoming militaristic and it should create powerful safeguards against that eventuality, including giving up the nuclear bomb in a negotiated settlement with Pakistan and China. Only thus will India realize the positive benefits of nationalism. If it were my world I wouldn't have nationalists, but since it isn't, the second best thing is to make the best use of what we have

THE LIBERAL FALLACY 10 September, 2000 

I find it difficult to understand why there has been almost no appetite for education reform in India when there is universal consensus that education is not only good in itself but it also helps a nation to become competitive. It is just as incomprehensible that India, which followed a socialist path before 1991, progressed so slowly in education over its forty socialist years. After all, education is one of the few things that socialists around the world generally did fairly well. My historian friend, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, reminds me that I am guilty of the liberal fallacy--that is, I naively assume that reasoning will prevail over interests. Hence, I tend to get surprised when the opposite happens too often in the real world, whether in democracies or autocracies. The road to power is through satisfying interests, Jeremy Bentham tells us. It is not enough to point out what the wrong policies are, as liberals tend to do, but one has to go beyond the irrational policies and trace them to the interests--both economic and political. The agenda of the state is set by interest equations and the discourse of knowledge is effective only to the extent that it is congruent with the discourse of power. Reasoning about right and wrong policies, while not entirely irrelevant, is of limited use if one's agenda is, in fact, to shape a new reality. India's democracy has an overwhelming majority of poor voters. This too makes a difference to the way things work. The journalist, T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan, points out that in the long run the forces that drive markets and democracy will converge; in the short run these forces often tend to pull in opposite directions. Since politics is a short run game and growth is a long run one there will never be a situation that is completely optimal, with the result that at every point in time most of the people will be disappointed. Hence, no one bothers about education because results take a long time to come. When a politician promises rice for two rupees a kilo when it costs five, he wins the election. N. T. Rama Rao did that in the 1994 state elections; he won the election, became the chief minister, and went on to bankrupt the state treasury. He also sent a sobering message to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in Delhi, who slowed India's reforms because he realized that votes resided in populist measures and not in doing what is right for the long term. Since the 1980s politicians have vigorously competed in giving subsidized electricity to farmers--in Tamil Nadu and Punjab, they have actually given it away free. When politicians do that, where is the money to come from for creating new schools or improving old ones? But there are now some signs of hope. At least two reforming chief ministers might have won their elections as a result of reforms. Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh opened schools with vigour and made them accountable to village panchayats. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra, among other things, turned over the management of water to its users in villages; he also raised electricity rates to farmers and brought transparency in governance through the use of information technology, much to the annoyance of his bureaucracy. It is exceedingly important for political scientists to study these two elections and tell us exactly what happened. If it is true that the reforms won the elections, then it might embolden political leaders in other states to pursue education and economic reforms. George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity." He was telling us the same thing--reformers must create a coalition of interests behind sensible policies if they want to succeed. This seems to be happening in many countries. Politicians everywhere are realising that their countries will be left behind in the globalised knowledge economy unless they improve their education systems. In the United States, both candidates are competing to demonstrate to American voters that if elected they will undertake the biggest education reform in American history; to prove it, they have each visited over a hundred schools since their campaigns began. Recent surveys show that mothers in India, including the poor, also understand that the passport to their children's future is good schooling. They seem to care more about literacy than promises about free electricity and two rupee rice, which they know to be false. This may be why they have been booting out the incumbent politicians at regular intervals. Now is the time for our geriatric political class to get smart, tap the huge unsatisfied demand for schooling among voters, create a coalition behind education, and start winning elections

OF LIFE AND DEATH 24 September, 2000 

Early this month I read in the papers that a celebrated and attractive couple had killed themselves in Bristol, England in a death they had planned for forty years. It was a tragic and haunting love story: the wife had terminal cancer, and instead of being divided by disease the couple chose to be united by death, taking a lethal overdose and breathing their last in each others arms. The news item caught my eye because one of them, Stephen Korner, was the author of a book on the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant that I read as an undergraduate in college. The book had made me reflect on my own beliefs about right and wrong and had taken away some of the pain of reading the almost unreadable Kant in the original. Ironically, Kant had argued that it was wrong to take one's own life. I discovered from Anajana Ahuja's moving account in the London Times that this was not an ordinary couple. They were both handsome and brilliant. They had fled to Britain from Czechoslovakia, met in London, and married during the war, and then rose to distinguished positions in British public and academic life. She became a pioneer in the National Health Service and an eminent magistrate and he a famous professor of philosophy. When their daughter was twelve they told her about their suicide pact. It was an unusual conversation to have with a child, but the Korners had always treated their children as adults. Their daughter grew up to become a molecular biologist and married the Noble laureate, Sidney Altman at Yale. When the suicide finally happened, the daughter was devastated. Her parents had left a note for the police and Schubert's Trout Quintet, their favourite music, was played at the funeral. She exclaimed that no one should ever emulate her parents. Suicide is an old subject and people have debated it over the centuries. In recent years, however, it has acquired significance because modern medicine has made it possible to live far beyond one's useful life. Doctors can keep one alive even when all other organs have stopped. This has raised the question of social cost. Experts calculate that sixty per cent of Western society's health care costs occur in the last nine months of a person's life. Is it fair, people ask, to prolong someone's life at the expense of the rest? Activists of the "right to die" movement strongly advocate that a person has the right to end his life rather than face the indignity of life support systems at a hospital. This issue has got connected in America to the debate on abortion, where "pro-choice" liberals support the individual's right to choose to have an abortion; the "pro-life" conservatives counter that the foetus is alive, and they would jail the mother for terminating a pregnancy. One of my readers, Dr. Pankaj Shah, an orthodontist in Rajkot, has written an unusual letter. Many of mankind's problems, he says, would be solved if men and women were to know their date of death in advance. They would plan their life better, would not indulge in misdeeds, become religious, and love their families and friends. However, Dr. Shah says that his friend doesn't agree. The friend says that on his last day he would get an AK47 and finish off not only his enemies but all the politicians. As a liberal, I certainly think that a person ought to have the right to commit suicide. It is his or her life after all. The stigma that attaches to suicide in most societies is unfortunate. But, perhaps, it would go away if the legal framework were changed. In the abortion debate I am also strongly pro-choice, and I think it is disgraceful that the extreme right in America has forced this onto the Republican agenda. As a social democrat, I could never vote Republican, in any case. Neither do I have a desire to live a long life-and certainly not in the humiliating surroundings of hospital. I have always desired a short and intense life. Like most people, I would prefer to die a natural death. But if it meant prolonging life unnecessarily I would not hesitate to pull the plug. Yet, I am a conservative when it comes to re-engineering human beings. I like people as they are--with their foibles. Like George Kennan, I wouldn't want human beings to be perfected or tampered with. (Sorry Dr. Shah!) Who knows what we might unleash if we started on that genetic route? I'd like human beings to remain "cracked vessels" in Kennan's words or "crooked timber" in Kant's famous description. In the same vein, I would resist attempts by science to meddle with our imperfect weather.

THE WILL TO LIVE 8 October, 2000 

The Korners' suicide last month, and my column on it, has brought an unusually large amount of mail, and some phone calls, as well. My mother admonished me, saying that no one has the right to take his life-it is God's gift, she says. Another reader reminds me that one's life is not one's own, but it also belongs to one's family and society. If one commits suicide, then not only does one place one's parents' old age in jeopardy, but also infringes on the rights of one's children and grandchildren to whom one owes the sharing of one's lifetime of experience, thereby ensuring that culture is passed on. The most moving letter came from Gujarat, and it reminded me of King Lear. After leading an honest life and discharging his obligations, my middle class correspondent retired to live with his children. But now he finds that he is unwanted by his children for whom he sacrificed everything. He feels humiliated and wonders if it might not be better to opt for mercy killing. There is but one truly serious problem, wrote Albert Camus, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is worth living or not amounts to answering the fundamental problem of our existence. Since the beginning people have debated whether it is natural or perverse to escape from life's difficulties. As for me, I have come to believe like Montaigne, that to die well requires greater moral stamina than to live well. Heroism consists in facing death with equanimity, and this reflects the highest qualities of a well-resolved life. I want to comfort my letter-writer and tell him that human life is the mystery of undeserved suffering. The innocent always suffer. This is not only the central problem of the human condition, but it also gives birth to tragedy. I commend to my Gujarati friend Nietzsche's famous definition of tragedy: "a reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death and the joy of life's inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed." Nietzsche had Greek tragedy in mind, especially that of Aeschylus, the first writer of tragedy, who revealed to the world the strange power that tragedy has to present suffering and death in such a way as to exalt and not to depress. The ancient Greeks had a wonderful ability to see the world clearly and think it beautiful at the same time. They thought freely and deeply about human life, without the burden of religion and priests, and were willing to confront the giant agony of the world. In India, the Buddha also saw that the world is made up of individuals, each with a terrible power to suffer and there is this awful sum of pain in the world. His solution to sorrow was to turn inwards and deny our everyday world of experience. The Greeks were aware that injustice was built into the nature of the world, but they dealt with it in the spirit of enquiry and poetry. And when enquiry met poetry tragedy was born. We tend to misuse "tragic" in everyday discourse. We confuse the word with disaster. Tragic pleasure, as the Greeks knew it, and as Aristotle defined it, is the emotion of pity and awe, which purges and purifies us in the end. The result is a feeling of exaltation that Nietzsche spoke about. Aeschylus' Prometheus is an innocent sufferer, who passionately rebels and defies the gods and the powers of the universe. To the messenger of the gods who bids him to yield, he replies that he cannot, just as the wave in the sea cannot fail to break on the sand. With these last words, the universe comes crashing upon him, and he proclaims, "Behold me, I am wronged!" Thus, the tragic poet shows us that mankind can meet disaster grandly, forever undefeated. The same is the case with Sophocles' Antigone, the high-souled princess who goes with open eyes to her death rather than leave her brother's body unburied. Rather than give in to her uncle's unjust law, she cries out, "Courage! The power will be mine and the means to act." In another play, Euripides' Trojan Women, Troy has lost the war to Greece and a handful of women are waiting for the victors to carry them away to all that slavery means for women. The Greek messenger comes to tell the Trojan queen, Andromache that her son is to be thrown from the wall of Troy. She says to the child: "Go die, my best beloved…" When we see Prometheus, Antigone and Andromache on stage, we feel pity and awe; as we identify with their defiance and affirmation of life, we feel purified and freed and better able to face life and death.

THE ENEMY IS INSIDE 22 October, 2000 

ur old family companies are woefully depressed. What a contrast to the heady days after 1991 when they were exhilarated-finally, they thought, their day had come. Now, no one gives them respect. The stock markets have punished them, and any corporate raider lurking in the dark can take over their company at a fraction of its book value. The raid on Mr. Nusli Wadia's Bombay Dyeing has sent a shiver. The economy, too, has irreversibly changed from a sellers' to a buyers' market and is moving,