Do you Believe that India will be a Super Power someday ?

Every year close to August 15^th,(India’s Independence day) and January 26^th, (India’s republic day) there is a sudden surge in patriotism around the country largely due the influence of popular media which uses the day as an occasion to cash in on the feel-good factor. Surprisingly, every year on this day everyone seems upbeat and optimistic that India is a great country and will one day emerge as an Economic Super Power.

Unfortunately things go back to normal after a few days and bad news is what you again normally get to see in most of the National Dailies. While there has been improvement in infrastructure and standard of living over the past few decades, it has been much too slow and has normally come at a great cost amidst huge corruption scandals (the most recent example being the Commonwealth Games 2010). The state of the Nation continues to be plagued by the same problems year after year despite the Economic growth which only makes the rich richer.

In such a scenario, it seems doubtful that India will ever be a Super Power and some experts suggest that it shouldn’t even try to be one.

BusinessBecause, the world’s only News+Networking site for Business School students talks about what noted Academic Ramachandra Guha spoke about when he recently visited Nyenrode Business University, here’s an excerpt:

“ Controversial Indian academic Ramachandra Guha was at Nyenrode Business Universiteit recently to discuss his book “India After Gandhi”.

Guha claimed that there are ten reasons why India will not become an economic superpower, despite its tremendous economic growth.

The theme across all of Guha’s ten reasons is that India’s challenges as a democratic state are unique. The Indian state has a huge diversity of languages, religions and cultures. It isn’t built according to the classic European recipe of “one language, one religion and a common enemy”.

Gandhi built the modern democratic Indian state, but he did it by overlooking deep-rooted divisions among Indians.

So, here are the ten reasons why India will not become a superpower

Extremism, both 1. Leftwing and 2. Rightwing

The political elite, which has transformed India’s political parties into family organizations. Because of this, 3. Public institutions such as universities, the police and the judiciary have deteriorated and 4. Democratic openness is victim to corruption “.

To read the rest of the above post click here.

Mr. Guha, does make some very strong points and a lot of us will agree with him. But many of you reading this would have different views, so do share them with us.

3 Idiots – All Izz Well And Aamir’s Swell

A case of Hostile – Mind Takeover Marketing by Aircel

Today morning one got up to a slightly different news paper. The Front page of the newspaper instead of saying “The Times of India“, said “Move On India“. As the day progressed one realized what was “Ambush Marketing” taken to the next level, which I have referred to as “Hostile Mind Takeover Marketing“.

On my way to work, I generally switch on the radio and navigate through the peak hour traffic listening to the Radio. However today all I heard on Radio were Aircel Commercials. Long boring commercials, which were playing more frequently then music (read here). Switch from one channel to another and what do you hear there, the same commercial. Aircel had completely hijacked all Radio Stations.

The day went on and I got busy with work. On my way back home, near the media display outside the elevator, Aircel had put a long sticker tape on the border of each display. I reach home and switch on the Television, what do I see. Aircel ads being played on every channel on every commercial break. Great so by now I was starting to understand this strategy very well. In any case I switch on the news channel and there is a Aircel ticker on every news channel too. Phew talk about a brand overdose.

What are we talking about here. Aircel is one if India’s telecom operators launched it’s operations in Delhi and NCR. For once I felt that spamming had reached a new level. I was also trying to do the numbers on how much all this marketing would have cost them. I believe that in these troubled times where advertising fees has been cut by almost 50%, Aircel made a killing. I still invite guesses on what all this Hostile – Mind Takeover Marketing costed Aircel.

India’s burgeoning, mobile wielding generation got yet another service provide in Aircel. Hope all of this leads to a healthier competition between the Telecom giants of India. We already have Airtel, Idea, BPL Mobile, Spice, Vodafone, BSNL, MTNL amongst the leading telecom operators in the country. We just got another Aircel.

Delhi 6 a.k.a The Black Monkey

Sms,Email,Twitter etc – Technologies That Save Lives

In the days of yore(upto the late 80′s) when there used to be a war in any part of the world or even in your own country, the only way to know about what was happening was through newspapers and radio. Indian parents who grow up during the 1960′s and 1970′s and witnessed numerous wars in the country, still narrate incidents of how they used dive into huge pits and bunkers that were dug at various places whenever they heard a plane pass by or any other loud sound.

Today, as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21^st century it is interesting to see the manner in which our lives have been transformed thanks to some amazing innovations and technologies. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in the 19^th century he would not have imagined that it would one day evolve into something that would enable a doctor working in the Democratic Republic Of Congo(DRC) to successfully complete an operation with detailed instructions from his colleague in London.

Vascular surgeon David Nott(who volunteers for Medicins Sans Frantieres for a month each year in Africa’s troubled Democratic Republic of Congo) had a 16 year-old patient whose arm had been ripped off, causing a wound that had become infected and gangrenous, leaving the teenage boy with just days to live. Nott realised that in order to save the child he would have to perform an operation called a forequarter amputation, involving the removal of the shoulder and collar bone; an operation that he had never before undertaken. So he texted a colleague back in London, who had previously carried out the procedure, and received step by step instructions back over SMS.

The cause of the child’s injuries was not clear, with some suggesting he had been bitten by a hippopotamus and other reports claiming he had been caught in the gun fighting that riddles the nation. 1,200 people die each day in the DRC from the conflict, according to the BBC, more than half of them children. Happily, the teenager on whom David Nott performed his first forequarter amputation made a full recovery. An interesting fact associated with DRC is that it has a very close relationship with the cellular industry, home as it is to significant quantities of coltan, an ore used to produce tantalum, which is used in the production of mobile phones.

Another case in point are the recent terror attacks in Mumbai. Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on 26^th November, Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed the thud, thud, thud of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons. At the peak of the mumbai violence, more than one message per second with the word Mumbai in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years. Those descriptions and others on Web sites and photo-sharing sites served as a chaotic but critically important link among people across the world whether they be Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn tracking the fate of a rabbi held hostage at the Nariman House or students in Britain with loved ones back in India or people hanging on every twist and turn in the standoff while visiting relatives for Thanksgiving dinner.

When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel, said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.Citizen journalists avoided some of the bureaucratic headaches faced by media organizations (As reported by NYTimes, read here for more).

The above just goes to show the power of the Mobile Phone today. So a big thumbs up for all the Cell Phone manufacturers who have used their expertise and skill to create such products. Perhaps the government can learn from this and equip their critical forces with such technologies, cause in today’s world technology can be used to save lives and avert crisis.

We Have Always Been At War And Have Just Refused To Acknowledge It

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“Enough Is Enough”, we can’t take this anymore, no more words and no more promises. We want action. This seems to be the mood of the nation at the present moment, people are slowly beginning to realize that the political system with which they have lived with for the past few decades is completely incapable of solving the basic problems of the country. While there has been some development and growth in cities like Delhi, the security infrastructure of the country leaves much to be desired. The 26^th November Mumbai terror attacks have been compared to the September 11^th World Trade Center attacks in New York, with the Taj and Oberoi hotels being compared to the twin towers. The United States of America however took serious action against the attacks on them and established a new administrative unit that has maintained security in the country for the past 7 years.The Poll above asks you a similar question, do you think that 26/11/2008 will be a turning point for India ?

“Now that it has been established that the terrorists landed in Mumbai through the sea route, it is certain that the operation had been well-planned in advance and a number of warnings about the attacks had been ignored. We quote Admiral Arun Prakash, the former chief of Naval Staff in an excerpt from his article on the reason behind these attacks and how the government has not yet learnt from it’s previous mistakes.

No set of people could have walked off a merchant ship in Sassoon Docks or stepped out of a dinghy at Machhlimar Nagar and launched these attacks. This operation called for reconnaissance, logistics, communications, local support and perhaps even rehearsals; all requiring time. The number of persons involved, directly or indirectly, could easily run into dozens if not a hundred. It speaks of the abysmal depths plumbed by our police and intelligence apparatus that they failed to hear an underworld rumor or a whisper on the airwaves, or obtain any sort of warning at all. But that seems to be now par for the course in India. Soon after the July 2006 serial train blasts in Mumbai, which resulted in over 500 dead and injured, I attended a high level inter-ministry meeting to discuss this issue. After presentations, discussions and brain-storming lasting a couple of hours, a final question was asked by the Cabinet Secretary: what urgent remedial and precautionary measures should we take to prevent recurrence of such incidents? after a pregnant silence, the sole suggestion that came was voiced by a junior functionary:”We must give the SHOs at the thana level more and better quality walkie-talkie sets.” I was shaken to the core because of the pedestrian and worm’s eye perspective that it demonstrated; not high-technology, not intelligence, not weapons, but walkie-talkies! And this was in 2006, after the nation had been experiencing bomb blasts or terrorist attacks with monotonous regularity in the wake of the horrifying 1993 Mumbai carnage. The score today, of course, stands much higher.

What we have been facing for many years now, and continue to face, is an “asymmetric war“, waged by a ruthless and imaginative intelligence agency. This war has many dimensions; aiding separatism and insurgency, attacking our economy by pumping in fake currency, inciting communal violence, and undermining the morale and cohesion of the armed forces (often through the instrumentality of the Indian media) are some other facets of this multi-pronged assault by the Pak Inter-Services Intelligence agency on the hapless Indian State. Like ostriches with heads buried deep in sand, we have refused to acknowledge this asymmetric war. And full responsibility for this situation must be accepted by Indian politicians of all hues, who in their ruthless quest for votes and political one-upmanship have systematically undermined every instrument of state, and rendered the nation vulnerable” (Read here for more).

It is certain that the ISI is more of a terrorist organization than an Intelligence agency and they surely have the information necessary to weed out all kinds of terrorism from the world. The US, UK, Israel and India should together pressurize Pakistan to get the ISI to reveal all it’s secrets. The Indian government cannot let this go on and let a country like Pakistan, which was recently termed as an “International Migraine” by former US Secretary Of State Madelaine Albright (read here), go scot free yet again. It’s time to face the war and act like a country of 1 Billion+ Indians.

Learn English From Home – An Excellent Online Resource To Learn And Improve Your English

Q. Which are the the World’s Most Widely Spoken Languages ?

Well, that is a question which has many possible answers depending on the definition of the term “speaker of a language“. Some surveys of languages give information on native speakers only. Others count both native speakers and secondary speakers (those who use the language regularly or primarily even though it is not their native language). Lastly, it is important to consider not only the population (number) of language speakers, but also the geographic distribution of these languages. Some languages have relatively large populations of native speakers but are used almost exclusively in a few countries. On the other hand, other languages have relatively small populations of native speakers but are used in many different countries as an official or national language.

Nevertheless a quick look at the results from various different surveys would give you an idea that Mandarin Chinese is undoubtedly the most spoken language in the world although it is distributed only in a few countries. The other languages with the most number of speakers are Spanish, English and Hindi(more commonly referred to as hindustani in the various surveys it basically comprises of Hindi, Punjabi, other variations and Urdu). Of these English and Spanish are the languages which are spoken in the most number of countries. It is quite interesting to note that if a person can speak fluent English and Spanish, he/she can travel to up to 135 countries (add to that the ability to speak French and German and your total shoots up to 177, Source ).

As per the above survey English is spoken by a majority of the population in about 115 countries and it is an accepted fact that it is a universally spoken language, the knowledge of which is considered a must if one loves to travel. While English is quite widely spoken in it’s basic form in India, good knowledge of it is limited only to the middle, upper middle and rich classes of the society. This is quite apparent from the fact that more than half of the ministers in the Indian Government have very poor spoken English language skills. The same is true for certain Latin American and European countries, where English is not taught in the schools from an early stage.

However today in the Internet age it is quite possible to learn anything that one desires without having to go to school. So if you want to learn English or improve your English language skills, you can very easily do so on the internet. Learn English Online is one such site which offers a number of resources to learn and improve one’s English. The website is very informative and provides numerous methods to improve your English. The available resources include links and information about Online Dictionaries, English Language Tests, Grammar, Phonetics, Videos, Quizzes, Podcasts and even Social networks where one can learn English by interacting with native speakers. To add to these a number of useful Learning guides are also available which clearly explain as to how one can use all of the above resources.

The website has both an English and a Spanish version and is an excellent online resource to learn English. So if you feel that you need to spruce up your English language skills in anyway, then do visit this site.

The Great American Recession – Good For Some, Bad For Others

The past week was perhaps the one of the worst weeks ever for financial markets all over the world as news about the bad financial condition of major firms like Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch and AIG crept in. As the week progressed it saw the demise of the 158 year old investment banking behemoth, Lehman Brothers which filed for the largest bankruptcy ever in U.S history on September 15^th. Pictures of employees leaving it’s Manhattan office represented a harsh reality of the current American Economy which goes for it’s Presidential Elections in just a few months. News of a Merill Lynch ( headquartered in NYC and it occupies all 34 stories of the in Manhattan) buyout by Bank Of America for USD $50 billion all stock deal was also confirmed ending the history of the 94 year old company as well. To add to the woes and distress of investors from all around the world the American International Group (AIG), one of the world’s biggest players in insurance and financial services, sought a $ 40 billion bridge loan from the US Federal Reserve as it faces a sharp downgrade from rating agencies. The Federal Reserve did come to the rescue of AIG late on 16th with a $ 85 Billion bailout.

The recession in the United States is proving to be far wider and deeper than was anticipated a year ago in August 2007 and while this is mostly bad news for a lot of people it also good news for others. The bankruptcy of Lehman has lead to layovers of it’s employees across the world and the acquisition of Merill Lynch by BOA is also likely going to result in a lot of pink slips. This in turn will have a deep impact on B-School graduates passing out in 2008 and 2009 as there would be a severe dearth of jobs in the investment banking and financial sectors for some time to come. As per IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn the global financial crisis is not over and more banks could close, possibly leading to the disappearance of independent investment houses. “The fact that a certain number of banks in the United States are restructuring shouldn’t lead to panic, But these events add to the uncertainty, and financial tensions cannot be excluded in the short term” he said in an interview in the wake of Monday’s collapse of major US investment bank Lehman Brothers (Source).

The Recession has also lead to the dollar becoming very weak. Comparing it to the rupee it currently trades around the Rs 46 mark which is at least Rs 3-4 more than what it was a couple of months back. This is probably good news for Indian Software companies and exporters as they would be earning more rupees for each dollar quite in contrast to the scenario about an year back when the rupee had become quite strong trading at around Rs 40 to the dollar.

The weakening of the dollar is also great news for a lot of Europeans and the American tourism industry as people from Europe are flocking to US to take advantage of the strong euro and weak dollar scenario. With a weak dollar, foreign tourists are flocking to the United States — particularly New York City. Compared with last year, the number of international visitors increased by as much as 12 percent during the first four months of 2008. It’s hard to imagine a city like New York seeming cheap to anyone, but for many foreign travelers, that’s exactly what it is. With every one euro equal to $1.43 and every one British pound equal to $1.82, if there was ever a time for Europeans to travel in the U.S., it’s now. During the first four months of 2008, more than 15 million foreign travelers visited the United States and spent $11.6 billion in the month of April alone — a 21 percent increase from April 2007 — according to the U.S. Department of Commerce which tracks travel and tourism statistics. After Canada and Mexico, the largest group of foreign tourists is from Western Europe, and their visits through April of this year have increased by double-digit percentages, the agency reports (Source).

Experts suggest that the current recession will take a while to get over and things are expected to become much worse before they start getting better.

DelhiPlanet Weekends : The Perfect 10

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, 10 digits which when put together can form infinite other numbers and quantities. Each of these digits have some special characteristics and qualities associated with them both mathematically and numerologically as well as historically. The Number 9 is regarded as the King Of all numbers as it is the only number which when multiplied by any either natural number would always have the sum of the digits as 9. The Number 7 on the other hand is also quite significant as it occurs very frequently in our nature and life (7 Colors of the Rainbow, 7 Days Of the Week, 7 Chakras in the Human Body, 7 Deadly Sins etc. ).

And then there is something special about the number 10 as well – it is a sign and symbol of perfection. 10 on 10 is the sign of a perfect score, All the great sportsmen in history have been associated with the number 10. So much so that if you are watching a football match and wish to know who the best player in the team is, then all you need to do is to find out who wears the Number 10 jersey.

This week DelhiPlanet delves back into history to re-capture some amazing moments and re-live the magic of the Perfect 10.

When The Aussies Were Lakered

It’s not very often that you see the Aussies humbled in cricket and that too by one man. However in 1956 during the fourth Ashes Test at Old Trafford, one man single handedly destroyed the Aussies with figures of 19/90 for the entire test. Jim Laker took 9 wickets for 37 runs in the first innings of the test match and 10 wickets for 53 runs in the second innings. Laker who was married to an Austrian national at the time and she didn’t happen to know much about cricket. On the day of his achievement when he arrived home, his wife asked him, “Jim, did you do something good today?” after she had taken hundreds of congratulatory telephone calls. Remarkably, Laker had also taken all ten wickets in an innings for Surrey against the same Australians earlier in the season, the first time a bowler had taken all ten against the Australians since Ted Barratt did so in 1878.

Jim Laker’s record of 19/90 was something that happens only once in the lifetime of a sport and it is very unlikely that it would ever happen again. Surely a great example of a Perfect 10.

The Perfect 10 X 7

At the tender age of 14, Romanian Gymnast Nadia Elena Comaneci became one of the stars of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. During the team portion of the competition, her routine on the uneven bars was scored at a 10.0. It was the first time in modern Olympic gymnastics history that the score had ever been awarded. In those days the scoreboards were not even equipped to display scores of 10.0—so Nadia’s perfect marks were reported on the boards as 1.00 instead. Over the course of the Olympics, Comaneci would earn six additional 10s, en route to capturing the all-around, beam and bars titles and a bronze medal on the floor exercise. The Romanian team also placed second in the team competition.

After Nadia there have been very few other gymnasts who have managed to get the perfect score of 10. America’s Mary Lou Retton is another name that comes to mind. Mary had perfect 10s on floor exercise and vault in the 1984 Summer Olympics. These days however it’s not possible to score a perfect 10, not because the gymnasts are not upto it but because the new perfect score is now 17.

Just like Laker, Nadia’s performance was also something that is most unlikely to be ever repeated by anyone. Yet another instance of a Perfect 10.

When Pakistan Were Kumbled

Well, for this one we’ll just let the images and the video do the talking. Anil Kumble’s feat of 10 wickets in a innings was surely a great achievement which happened right here in Delhi and it just goes to show that even Indian sportsmen are capable of achieving the perfect score.

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