Gandhi's three monkeys

Generations of children in India have grown up with these 2500 year old Chinese sayings popularized by Gandhi in India.

Speak no evil
Hear no evil
See no evil


(Image from: http://www.southasiaoutreach.wisc.edu/high%20school/gandhiDiscovery.htm)

Is this the right thing? It actually clashes with a poem from my high-school English text book:

THEY are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink	5
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- 344, A Stanza on Freedom

It is time we start speaking for the truth - that Gandhi's three monkeys have ill served the Indian society.

Mystery Shopper Goes to Mumbai

In the piece Kurtis and Cattle in Mumbai, Financial Times's mystery shopper talks about her experience shopping while attending a business conference in Mumbai. Interesting take-aways for me from the article.

1. Prices of clothing at high-end boutiques are very high. She bought a dress for $300, another one for $95, Leggings for $35 and a kurti for $67.
2. All these were designer clothes - and she does give the names of the designers. Most designers of these women's clothing, however, were male. Rohit Gandhi, Rahul Khanna, Manish Arora, Manish Malhotra, Tarun Tahiliani. Yes, there were women too - Anupama, and Ritu Kumar.
   
3. She went shopping to a sari, but never bought one. So, Sari is no longer the symbol of Indian shopping.

"Perhaps they did not hate us after all"

The Financial Times of March 12, 2010 has a piece on Indian Art. Titled Face Values, it describes a current exhibit at National Portrait Gallery in London.

The article is informative and easy to read. What caught my attention, however, are the writer's musings on why there is a string of shows about India. Instead of paraphrasing, and losing part of the meaning, here is her direct quote.

So why, with all these exhibitions pulling in the crowds, do the British have such a taste for Indian art? The obvious answer is the fascination with the colonial past that all ex-colonisers have. Beyond that, we seem to scan these images for echoes, traces of ourselves, and are happy when we find them. Perhaps they didn’t hate us after all? Perhaps the enduring legacy of that time was a rich one? And perhaps this world is knowable, perhaps we can learn to read it, and the people who made it, and live well together in our own times.

Perhaps they didn't hate us after all? Does the current generation in India really hate the British? I don't think so. So, where is this "inferiority complex" coming from? I don't know. In fact, until I read this article, I did not even realize that it existed. The view from the other side of the fence is different, and as in this case, sometimes very different.

There is moss in them thar hills

India recently went through its annual budget exercise. Every year, the Government has the ability to modify tax rates and prices it will charge on products and services from public sector undertakings.This is very different from the US, where tax rates are considered sacred, and changing them is an extra-ordinary process. One populist measure for politicians is run on platforms of not raising taxes.

Both systems - virtually fixed tax-rates, and annually-changing tax rates create behavior patterns. In the case of the India, consumers and businesses may sometimes wait for the next year, hoping that tax rates may become beneficial for them. In the US, businesses build their structures around existing tax rates, and find it difficult to adjust to changing tax rates, or for that matter, to other conditions.

In these days of "Who stole my cheese," and agile development environments, who do we think is better suited for long-term successes - those businesses that are static, or the rolling stones that gather no moss?

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If you would like to read more on the budget process, here are two references.

If you want to understand more details about India's budget, here is a writeup on the philosophy India's Budget Process (in Theory). Rediff.com gives the stages of the budget process.

Born in South Asia?

At the recently concluded TED 2010, I met Chris Anderson, the Curator of TED conferences.

The first line about his biography in Wikipedia says: "Anderson, who is British, was born in Pakistan in 1957."

Recently I also met one of the founders of Danger, a telephone company that has now been acquired by Microsoft. A Caucasian, he said he was born in India.

These two were in South Asia, because their parents were missionaries there. Both are immensely successful. So are quite a few other successful Caucasians were born there. So, the question in my mind is:

1. Does their birth in South Asia anything have to do with their success?
2. Or, does their birth in South Asia have anything to do with their ability to promote themselves?

Or, am I misreading the situation, and Caucasians born in South Asia are no more or less likely to succeed, compare to Caucasians born in the US.

It will be interesting to have someone do a study of this.