My scribble

Ganesh Natarajan on startups —

-> Keeping the circumference: don’t be lured into doing too much too fast too broad.

-> Not to get carried away with immediate perks/ attractions from around.

-> Help building blocks: Educational institutes, Government (even the Indian one), Industry Ecosystem (an example of large IT companies supporting the startups)

-> NASSCOM ‘s role in encouraging the startups: Pune identified as one of the hubs for tech startups, NASSCOM has helped around 1400 startups all over the country (whoops, I didn’t know that).

Ganesh took special care of promoting the significance of Commerce Ecosystem (not only IT).
Silicon valley could not be built without Stanford – True

More to follow …

Lack of water and power has affected the nation big time which has depicted some intense dependency on monsoons. Frequent load-shedding and simmering heat have aggravated north India’s woes this year. In Maharashtra, scarcity of monsoon rains in areas except Mumbai has had the cities reeling under pressure. Major cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, and Hyderabad are without current for a few hours every day. Is it that India cannot provide drinking water unless it gets rains every year? Don’t we have the appropriate infrastructure for water supply or is it that we have been flooding people with too much of water all this while (irresponsible usage)? However, for power issues, it is definitely the lack of high capacity power generation stations and efficient transmission. Whatever the reason, these are definitely not the indicators that India is on its way of becoming a superpower. A superpower thinks ahead of the time, it plans in advance, it prepares itself for most of critical situations; India stands nowhere close. Basic amenities and infrastructure are a must for India to become a superpower.

India has decriminalized sex between two people of same gender, years after most other non-Muslim developing nations. Indians still think Hijras and Homosexuals are same. Look at the irony: in a secular and democratic nation called India, religious leaders from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian sects have got a significant say in case of legalizing same sex relationships. The great Indian culture has never talked about gay sex (except a few statues in Khajuraho or some Mogul time literature) and we, an independent India, kept (in fact in our minds still keep) following 150-year old British law without ever questioning it. Many thanks to those gay organizations and groups for making our minds broader! I wish India realizes it could well become AIDS’ victim in next decade and we need to handle sexual trends and acknowledge Sex as one of the basic needs of every living animal. India, stop being over proud of your culture, every nation is culturally as rich as you are, get off that burden for once and grow up. A superpower needs to be a strong and liberal society first.

Another frame that could damage India’s claims of being on road for superpower is the way Public companies are being managed. With aviation minister admitting to AI’s total failure, India republic has completed a full circle in its PSU’s awful running. My sympathy goes to AI’s employees. Air India has been a story of a Bad organization (offering freebies to every possible and miniscule politician) with worse management (replete with babus under political pressure) looking down the barrel. It is high time we increase private share in AI or even Indian Railways. AI’s monopoly over several airports needs to be ripped off. Failure of PSUs coupled with lack of revenue generation schemes and reluctance to bring in professional corporate management while getting rid of red tapes have combined to make India lag behind rest of the growing world. I wonder if India has really opened its doors!

As a nation, are we always covering up? Isn’t this time we start thinking and planning ahead of time? Structure, ideas and implementation are different things, when are we going to realize that ideas/plans are fine enough and now we need more care on implementing them?

Hope the structural changes in the pipeline are brought out to fore and India’s leadership (with no left in it, thankfully) shows more intent and active intent at that.

1. I respect his fabulous persona; Dynamic, Wonderful and Extremely Talented (love his cartoons)

2. Misunderstood (unintentionally) and Maligned (politically and deliberately) by media and so-called ‘progressive’ people who have been fooled around with supposedly ‘balanced’ concepts of secularism and equality.

Anti-rich, anti-Marathi, anti-Maharashtra DOES NOT mean equality.

3. In my knowledge, he was / is never against any particular community. His outrage has been against Atrocities (yes, you read it right … I call it ‘atrocity’ when your house is surrounded by slums, when you have to undergo load-shedding while slums heavily indulge in power thefts, when you are robbed or looted by those slum-dwellers and they’re never caught, when a deserving candidate from Maharashtra does not get to sit for Railway exam in his own state) … against Maharashtrians !

4. MNS has highest number of ambulances running in my area at least (I am the witness). They have never distinguished between people while providing such services. Kudos to Raj Thackeray for that !

5. As far as I see, he has never done things for political mileage. None of his major outrages was soon followed by an election.

Gonna write more about Raj … am in process of further research !

Regards,
Yogesh Ramesh Sharma

As we go for elections 2009, there’s no dearth of issues in any part of the nation.

Maharashtra will be voting to stop farmers’ suicides, less price for Maharashtra’s favorite crops of sugar and cotton, power woes, uncontrolled migration and resulting ever increasing slums. The neighbor Karnataka suffering from attacks against Women, Christians will be fighting against imbalanced growth and increasing poverty also. Gujarat, still in phase of recovery from communal divisions, is facing a crisis of sorts with mediocre rehabilitation record for displaced due to various reasons like industrialization or the infamous Sardar Sarovar and the increasing divide between the rich and the poor. Tourism capital Goa has had its share of security woes with Marathi-Konkani locals’ widening angst against tourists and outsiders that has resulted in no co-operation.

Rajasthan, which managed to defeat one the most progressive chief ministers it ever had in assembly elections last year, has its own set of issues which include reducing female proportion, very poor HDI (human development index) and inward growth of deserts from west. State of Madhya Pradesh, with its two biggest problems being child deaths due to malnutrition and large number of unlicensed arms, has been deprived of power after creation of Chhattisgarh which in turn is suffering from Naxalites and withdrawal of some of energy projects. Same with Orissa, plagued by Naxalites and crazy Hindu movements, the state has suffered badly and lack of efforts to reduce poverty and beggary has resulted in higher count of sudden deaths across the Utkal.

Moving to the east, Bangala Bhoomi cannot still recover from the embarrassment of Nano ouster. The never-improving and poor centric Left rule has hampered Bengal’s dreams. Lack of decent education and scarcity of jobs have lead to Criminalization in northern part of the state. Moreover, almost all the eastern, north-eastern states, UP and Bihar share the plight of illegal insurgency from Bangladesh and Nepal. Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, containing the yet unresolved border with China, have grown enormous amount of jobless youths in past few years.

The southern state of Kerala, despite of being better placed on account of literacy and sex ratio, has problems a plenty. Emigration seems to be the key concern area for Kerala with educated young population continuing to move out to Gulf nations, Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore for jobs and career opportunities. The land of Tamil is probably bearing the consequences of lopsided development policies could suffer more due to tensions between lawyers and politicians. The neighbor on fire, Sri Lanka, could spell dooms for Tamilians with undesired infiltration. Andhra, the only non-Hindi state below the national average for literacy and Human development, has got its share of woes with huge number of beggars, Naxal problems and Telangana movement.

Then we move on to the northern part of the nation: Punjab and Haryana, the only well-to-do regions in the north, are still not visible on the global map, relying mostly on local industries. These anti-women states are still very much ruled by the religion and its fanatical followers. The national capital has to still undergo pains of crimes every minute and the scars it has inflicted are long lasting affecting Delhi’s quotient for global attraction. Shortage of English users could prove detrimental to Delhi’s dreams of successfully hosting CWG-2010.

Not much need be listed for UP and Bihar, which lag behind in every aspect of development and prosperity. These states have a lot to be fulfilled despite being two of the richest in terms of natural resources. Gorakhpur open border continues to be a headache for India while crime, poor education, lack of industries and lackluster infrastructure (where its difficult to even breathe) have hindered growth of these states. Jharkhand, despite its mineral richness has failed to put up good show. Uttarakhand with all freebies and tax rebates to industries is starting to lose its green look. Despite a decent presence of industries, Uttarakhand is not earning much and may well face bankruptcy issues affecting government servants.

The beautiful J&K has got bloodier by the day, the state is shattered after Amarnath land controversy and scrapping of Kashmir railway connection. Terrorism still crops its head up every now and then. As a result, we have jobless youths in Jammu and Angry youths in Kashmir after atrocities by Indian armed forces.

Tails up for a fight

It’s very difficult to settle down in a society where you think you’re radically different from others, you can no more relate to that society, that culture, that set of values. Similar, I think, is the plight of the Indian youth which resides in metros. Many of us have matured well before the average Indian age for ‘Indian maturity’, we relate to something that’s not generally accepted in our country. It is a severe deviation from streamlined India.

Realistically, Gandhi-Nehru are not our heroes, we don’t vie for government jobs, we don’t crave for Bollywood and its ‘running-around-the-trees’ movies, we are no more concerned about when our marriage is going to take place (or whether it’s going to happen at all), we don’t fight for gender equality coz we think it’s a given in our society, ‘Money’ is not the ultimate aim, we want we have everything available online and more importantly, we don’t think ‘Doing business with rest of the world is like slavery’. [P.S. – the traits are just to define the metro Indian youth categorically. More or less if not entirely, we are like this, most cases in-between]

However, there’s still a sizeable section of Indian youth that departs from this, in fact the majority differs from the above mentioned stratum.

1. Girls in pubs, girls in short clothes are attacked, molested time and again; moreover they are fed with some ‘useful and essential’ moral lectures

2. Politicians who rule us do not feel the need for an online social campaign, they can afford to ignore us

3. Most powerful medium yet in the country, Television, does not run even 10% of its time for something of our liking

4. Slum youths (belonging to some specifically poor and backward areas) attack us, our properties and get away with it very easily

5. Governments are generally sleepy towards us, with marginal budget allocation and major focus on keeping the majority in ‘backward classes’

Is this fair really? Why don’t we ever take out the anguish? Why don’t we ever express? Why don’t we vote?

The divide is ever increasing and severely widening; this could lead to clash of interests in the future alongwith continuation of imbalanced growth and extremity issues.

Is it our mistake that we are born in a well-off family, ‘Upper caste’ in a social hierarchy? We are suppressed when we fight against reservation.

Why we are not allowed to speak against people from slums? People from certain areas come to our places and build dirty and insecure slums around our habitats, yet we are made to share our cities with them (this is after paying loads of taxes which predominantly get directed to ‘development’ of ‘hamaare raajya’).

Mangalore pub attack is a recent shock. What is Shri Rama sene, who has given them the right to decide what should girls do and what should they drink or not drink?

Look no further, it’s you and me …… BJP is ruling Karnataka, ‘we’ have voted for them and that’s how they are in a position to take decisions on our behalf. Yediyurappa has not done enough against the hooligans and thus, they continue to haunt ‘us’. Now, next on the list is Bangalore pubs and V-day celebrations – as per SRS chief.

Even more shocking is the support SRS has garnered, many of the Indians are in favor of what SRS did, not expressing though. Majority of those who oppose the activity may go wordless if asked “What if your sister or wife would want to drink liquor or visit some pub?” You got it right, what’s around us is nurtured by our fellow Indians who ‘differ’ from us. India in a deeper conflict and further imbalance!