Statesmanship is not just about entertaining the peasants.........

Even as the first ball is just being bowled at the idyllic sea side southern port town of Hambanatota in Sri Lanka, for the just started T20 Cricket World Cup, the Sri Lankan premier is all set to land in India. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is scheduled to lay the foundation stone for an international Buddhist university in Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, on September 21. This event has not gone down too well in the state of Tamil Nadu which accuses the man of genocide against ethnic Tamils, a legacy of the Tamil freedom movement in that country, from which the Sri Lankans have not emerged looking like angels. Shouting slogans against the 'genocide' of ethnic Tamils in the island nation and holding Rajapaksa responsible for 'war crimes', Vijayaraj, an unmarried auto-rickshaw driver, took his colleagues by surprise by dousing himself with kerosene and setting himself on fire even as ploitical parties of all hues go to town on the issue and whip up a frenzy in Tamil Nadu. Vijayaraj was rushed to a nearby hospital and his condition is stated to be critical. Just a few weeks ago close to 178 Sri Lanka tourists in Tamil Nadu bore the brunt of a fresh round of protests in Tamil Nadu when a pro-LTTE group intercepted the seven buses they were travelling in. The pilgrims were returning to Nagapattinam after offering prayers at Velankanni. In another incident, a group of Sri Lankan tourists were accosted by another Tamil group who waved black flags at them while they were on their way to the Trichy airport. This has prompted the Sri Lankan government to issue a travel advisory against travelling to that state. Sri Lanka just a few years ago had just one major port at Colombo, that is not the case today. The Chinese, in China Harbour Engineering Co & Sinohydro Corporation Ltd JV, have built them a superb facility at Hambanatota on the sothern arc of Sri Lanka and there is a perception that the nervous Lankans are looking at closer ties with the Chinese even as statesmanship is held hostage to regional politics in India. A strong Chinese presence in Sri Lanka controlling sea routes is a major threat to India. After all 100 % of our East-West cargo goes by Hambanatota. While we enjoy the cricket, that should makes us nervous indeed......... India, should she want to play a major role in the region needs to seperate local politics from strategic interest.

Are we really green?

In a world where everybody seems to want to go green, it is a pertinent need to understand, their understanding of going green or green initiatives. Is it wearing a green ribbon on their sleeve, a green Tee Shirt or using paper made of Elephant dung?

A few days ago, I was at the facility of a major paint manufacturer in Bangalore and on my way to meet their Director noticed a gent rushing off with a forked stick in one hand and a large plastic bag in the other. His mission.....to catch a rat snake that was enjoying a gentle stroll in the sun! Catch the snake he did rather deftly and then he let it off in the wilderness outside the campus. I was impressed enough to mention this to the Director and he said that it was normal practice. After all, humans had invaded their territory.They did not slaughter snakes! I once knew a CEO who claimed that his facility was a green one simply because he had a large green lawn, which was watered by drawing water from bore wells in a water depleted area of Bengaluru. One might wonder if this is really a green initiative. Going Green is using resources as efficiently as possible and cutting out waste, even at the cost of pushing your own costs up. A good example would be Xerox that recycles its old photo copiers at a steep cost. They do reduce waste! Cutting down on the amount of paper used is also highly beneficial for the environment. A product called ElectroForms can help companies capture information without having to store vast amounts of paper. Individuals and Corporations need to make things happen without vandalizing nature.

Teachers Day!

Most nations would like to lie and that is a fact. Either they would like to gloss over shameful events or parts of history that seem so unpalatable that they would rather distort than square up to. Master's at distortion of history are our immediate neighbours and cousins the Pakistani's. They have made it a fine art, so much so that their history seems to start in 712 AD when Mohammed Bin Quasim, the Arab landed in Sind, rather than Mohenjo-Daro and the civilizations of the Indus, because that seem to be too Hindu and so Indian. Many would like to trace their genesis to Arabia rather than the sub-continent.A greater sham has not been perpetrated by so few on so many! Moving forward Pakistan has again distorted their books indicating that eventually they were the victors in their four wars with India, so much so, that the loss of East Bengal is no big deal and hence has lead them to a pass where they might have a repeat in Baluchistan which is protesting shameful neglect, abuse and exploitation just as the Bengali's of Bangladesh did and eventually broke away to form a new nation. Nations are not vaudeville players and are expected to learn from painful lessons in history. The question is how do you fool a nation into believing the drivel that you dish out? The easiest way would be to blatantly lie in school text books or even worse highlight certain areas while glossing over others. Hence you incept thoughts into young minds that are fertile grounds for ideas, true or otherwise. You need to catch them young and most importantly you need the teacher to be part of this nefarious agenda. The other day I bumped into a lady from a state of India, in course of a workshop. The agenda was to discuss, what of our achievements we were proud of. While I was contemplating what I could gas about ( my friends say I blow my own trumpet ), the lady without batting a shapely eyelid said, I'm proud to have been born in .........state.Nothing else, just that she was born at a place!!!!!! I was flummoxed and have a sneaking suspicion that many of our text books at the state level are jingoistic enough to have ideas that are carried through to adulthood. A tragedy, as far as I'm concerned! Can you be so foolish to pretend that you and your people are a cultural fountainhead in a nation as old and diverse as is India? If nothing else we ought to learn from Pakistan and teach our youngsters the right things without being parochial or jingoistic. As a maturing and forward looking nation we owe that to our young and even more so to ourselves as teachers around what is yet another Teachers Day in India.

The Nokia Story.........

What is the similarity between Nokia and the Titanic? Separated by almost a century the cell phone manufacturer and the ‘unsinkable’ ship would seem to have little in common but they do indeed. When the Titanic hit an iceberg, her side shell was sliced open like a can of Sardines. This caused sea water to flood a few of her side tanks and from there flow to the other tanks on one side of the great ship. The flooding could not be contained and the ship eventually went down as her dead weight increased. Naval architects the world over learnt from this tragedy. Ship design and construction changed for all time. Longitudinal and transverse bulkheads connected decks and hence if a tank was holed, flooding was contained to one or two tanks and the ship though crippled could still float. The titanic story seems to be playing itself out on the economic stage with Nokia, today. The Finnish behemoth contributed a quarter of that country’s growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer’s spending on research and development made up 30% of the country’s total, and it generated nearly 20% of Finland’s exports. In the decade to 2007, Nokia was sometimes paying as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax. Nokia gradual descent as a mobile phone leader in the wake of the rise of Apple and Samsung has set alarm bells ringing in Finland and Europe. The Finnish economy can implode with just this one company going down, in what is nation that has not cared to diversify its economy and mitigate risk.The Netherlands tell a similar story with Royal Dutch Shell contributing about 56% to that country's revenue as percentage of GDP,last year.

One company national economies always face the risk of sinking like the Titanic unless they diversify and not solely depend on that one goose that lays the golden egg! I feel particularly sad as my choice of mobile phone for close to fifteen years has always been Nokia, till my son thrust a Samsung on me a couple of months ago, forcing me to change brands. And that I guess sums it up..............