So, today I was donating some money to giveindia.org, started by IIM-A Alum, Venkat Krishnan. This is not like any other NGO aggregation “startup”, but a trust worthy one. They take the pains to filter out NGOs in India which actually do relevant work and do not exist just to mint money.

Anyway, so this is the price of education for a child for 1 year:

Amazed? $47.40 for 1 whole year of education for a child in India?! Think again! Thinking what can you do with $50?

Or you can just donate that money to giveindia.org

PS: I won’t crib about our political system, politicians etc this time. Have a plan B for that ;)

On October 2nd 1869, Putlibai Gandhi gave birth to Mohandas. The man who changed the world for ever. All of us know what he did and how he achieved it. He was an ordinary man with an extraordinary determination and the only difference between him and the rest of the world was his “soch“. A man of such resilience is very rare to see. People try to bog you down, until you don’t succeed, “people” will try their best to prove you wrong. But once you succeed you make 1+ billion friends (Zuckerberg only has 500 million) and some enemies. And that is totally justified, a strong willed and an honest person is bound to make some people unhappy, a politician will keep every one happy (I call it, pseudo-happiness).

Anyway, I want to talk about the lessons he wanted us to learn and follow for a good life and for a developed nation. People mistake in understanding those lessons and take them literally and say “How is that possible in today’s world?”. Well, let’s talk about some and let’s rethink about those lessons from today’s perspective.

1. Resilience - The man kept going!

Take-Away: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.” ~ Winston Churchill

Never give up! There is nothing in this world which cannot be achieved.

2. Selflessness: Now, this is one of the most disputed characteristics, people say, “If I will be  selfless in today’s time, the world will screw me and I will be left with nothing.” I say, lets not take selflessness literally.

Take-Away: Work for the needy, that does not mean quitting your day job and teaching the poor for free. Put in your share. We think, a single contribution cannot change the world, well, Facebook and Google exist because of crowd sourcing. A phenomena started by a single person, which became viral. Why can’t we make “good karma” and “giving in your share” viral?! I don’t ask you to donate all you have! If you can spend $80 on a Calvin Klein denim, you can surely donate $50 to poor. Now, you will say, there is corruption and how will I make sure that my money is going to the right hand (I say that’s an excuse, a lame one). Go to GiveIndia.org and start your good karma.

3. Education: I have already ranted a lot about Education in my previous blog post. To summarize Gandhi’s vision on education:

“The purpose of education is to bring out the best in you” ~ Gandhi.

Present day education is defined as to get 90% grade in school, clear AIEEE, IITJEE, SAT etc and get into a good college, get a good MBA/MS and that makes you “educated” and “intelligent”. But think, did that bring out the best in you? By my personal experience, my undergrad brought out the worst (tried to learn something which people said is hot in the market and the in-thing) in me and now I discovered in my Masters what I really wanted to do and I am happy going it all day long.

So, my bottom line is, be an educated person, i.e.: learn what you like and understand what you want and if education makes you feel your are good for the community, then you are actually educated.

“Literacy is not the end of  education, not even the beginning. They are not related” – Gandhi

4. Simplicity, Faith and Truth

I will leave you with this awesome Gandhi’s speech to elaborate my last point.

Happy Birthday Gandhi Ji!!

UPDATE: An awesome Gandhi Rap!

No body made me truly realize the importance of India’s freedom, its glory, except my Grandfather. When I was a child, I used to wake up early in the morning on 26th Jan to watch the Republic Day Parade, but as I grew older, my interest faded in the Republic Day. I was no more enthralled by the Indian Army’s might, by the President’s salute or by the colors of India, “the Jhanki“. It was just another holiday for me.

Anyway here is the poem (now when I read this, I feel inspired):

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~Rabindranath Tagore (From Geetanjali, 1910)

The last two lines of original Bengali version are harsher. They state:

“Lord Father, strike {the sleeping} Bharat (India) without mercy,so that it may awaken into such a heaven.”

While Tagore was not a politician, his poem has continued to inspire Indians to create a free-thinking, united and dynamic nation. The poem is also very popular among the liberals in Bangladesh. – Source

I wish we start thinking about our nation first, respect it,  unite together and destroy all the evil powers which try to harm us. This message goes out to all those young guns out there, respect your nation, it will respect you. The present state of India is not what our revolutionaries envisaged, we need much more that just a blog post or a Facebook/Twitter share. We need a revolution, a revolution in our thought and a revolution in the way we perceive things. Be the change you want to seek!

As Tagore said:

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

I am very optimistic about India’s future, lets make it the Golden Bird of the 21st Century.

Update:

By a revolution I do not mean fight, kill others etc. What I meant was eradicate poverty, educate people, stop (and I really mean stop) discriminating people on basis of color, race, religion or cast. Divide and conquer might be a good approach in algorithms, but not in case of countries or people. Respect your country and each other.

Happy Republic Day!

You can watch the Indian Republic Day Parade, 2010 here Live!

His post addresses an answer to one of the most common topic these days,

India is rising, India will be a superpower in the next 10 years, west is going down, India has an edge over China with it’s English speaking people etc.

But is India actually in a position to take over the west? Can it manage to transfer the center of gravity of the worlds largest companies (Like MSFT, CISCO, IBM) to India and itself start new ones?! I don’t think so with our corrupt politicians, lack on innovation, the great caste system, internal security, the education system and lack of infrastructure to name a few! Mr Sujai’s post details this case study in his blog, I will take some excerpts from his blog:

In reality China is leaving India behind by a bigger margin every year.

Chinese have built the biggest dam on the planet, built the longest bridges, built the fastest cities, built their own planes, submarines, ships, magnetic trains, and even the highest railways while India continued to lay another layer of asphalt on its decrepit roads after each rainfall.

India is not even showing a promise of catching up, It is still content to play a small game.

Is English really India’s edge? – how come their lack of good English not stop Huawei from becoming world #2 in telecom equipment?, How come it did not stop Lenovo, Haier and ZTE from becoming leading global brands? Just to give a perspective to Indian readers – 2 telecom equipment companies of China, Huawei and ZTE put together made USD 30 Billion in 2008 while the entire IT-ITES industry of India put together made USD 58 Billion in 2008-09.

Indians are in self-denial. They foolishly believe everything Thomas Friedman tells them, and they are happy serving their European and American masters setting up BPOs, KPOs, LPOs, software services, helping them do their things in a cheap and cost-effective way, “I am an Indian. I am good at services. I should just stick to it”.

China is even popularizing entrepreneurship as a cultural attitude with various initiatives including TV programs. Infosys, TCS and Wipro, the giants of Indian software services which the Thomas Friedman lauds, did not do much to sponsor or promote startups in India (barring few exceptions).

Here are some comparisons:

GDP: India has around $1.209 trillion and China around $7.8 trillion.

GDP growth: China grew by 9.1% where as India by 6.7%.

Per capita GDP: People say, more population means less per capita GDP, but China is even more populous than India! India has a Per capita GPD of $1016 where as China has $6,100. That’s a big difference and something to worry about!

Inflation: India’s inflation is 7.8 % where as China’s in in negative, -1.2 %

Labor Force: The difference is population is not much! India has 523.5 million where has China has 807.7 million

Unemployment rate: India: 6.8 % and China: 4.3 %

So, as we see, the Chinese economy has seen some radical development and has grown significantly, where as India has been pretty slow. As Mr. Gurcharan Das puts in his book India Unbound, “India will never be a tiger after 1991, it is an elephant who has begun to lumber and move ahead.“.

But is the lumbering good enough?!

Ok, so, what does all that mean? We need a solution right? Here are some for  starters:

1. Provide quality education, which stresses more on the learning than getting good grades! (Remember 3 Idiots, the movie?). If we will have our next generation well educated (not just knowing how to write their names), we will solve some of the problems in India, which we tend to ignore, but the biggest evils in the Indian society  like the caste system – what ever it preaches, it just wrong and not at all justified! The divide on the basis of cast, color, religion, region, skilled people which can look beyond the BPOs and KPOs.
2. Overhauling the Political System in India, I believe, this is the key to India’s growth. We really need to re-check the way our politicians run this country, it seems impossible, but its a dire requirement. Corruption has plagued the Indian society and presently there is no mechanism to correct it.
3. Dignity of Labor

This list could go on and on! But who will implement these solutions?

As Mahatma Gandhi said

You must be the change you want to see in the world.

It’s You…..

UPDATE

India’s voice BPO segment falling silent

China can overtake US economy by 2020, says PriceWaterhouseCoopers

His graph compares per capita income, life expectancy and population of the respective countries. He predicts that India’s per capita income will be equal to the per capita income of US and UK on July 27th, 2048. Hmmmm, interesting, hope I am there to see that day. :)

Wondering how this interesting chart was rendered?

Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofit Gapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED.) – Source

More information about Gapminder

Video courtesy Indiatimes’s TED channel , Video