To dream and to do.....

What makes one great is a question that would elicit varying answers and is highly debatable. Many considerations enter this discussion and there are few definitive answers that are if they could be found. My point of view is that, the following makes a person great: 1. Excellence in his/her field 2. An ability to wield disproportionate influence 3. Has contributed to society positively 4. Has progressed without a Godfather They are the ones who set the stage for those who came after them to play out their romance. Pioneers, warriors, revolutionaries, innovators, dreamers, adventurers and creators, they stretched the limits of the freedom they were born into. They challenged the dead certainties of their times with the power of ideas, conviction—and faith in themselves above all, without consideration of the system. Looking at only India over the last twenty five years, my laundry list is as follows: 1. N.R.Narayanamurthy – NRN hailed from a tiny town in Karnataka, of poor Brahmin stock and went on to build one of India’s most respected organizations, Infosys in an India that offered entrepreneur’s very little support. He changed the way Indian entrepreneurs think that allowed future generations of young Indian’s to dream big. 2. Dhirubhai Ambani – Well, the young uneducated man from a non-decrepit Gujarat village built India’s largest privately owned corporation with vision and sheer guts. He taught us to think large, think fast and never mind the obstacles. 3. Kapil Dev – Before him, the Indian spinner came on to bowl in the tenth over of an Innings. In 1978 on his debut he struck Sadiq Mohammed of Pakistan, with a sharp bouncer, forcing the batter to call for a helmet. Indian fast bowling had arrived. Kapil then lead a rookie Indian team to the 1983 World Cup win, getting a nation to believe that we are good enough to compete with the big boys. 4. Shahrukh Khan – The Badshah of Bollywood is popular worldwide and wins his place in my list simply because he rose in an industry rife with Godfather’s. Khan made it on his own and makes every Indian proud, particularly, the Indian Muslim, who can identify with him and dream big. 5. APJ Abdul Kalam – A technocrat and scientist, he rose from a very humble background in Tamil Nadu. Leading India into the 21st Century as President was the culmination of a wonderful life. 6. Sachin Tendulkar – The greatest batter in cricket, of our time and probably of all time. He was a nation’s hope on the cricket field for many years. 7. Arvind Kejriwal – He seems to bat for the common, beleaguered Indian and frightens the run of the mill politician. Kejriwal seeks to make a difference with intelligence, daring and chutzpah. 8. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw- Indian woman entrepreneur. She is on the Forbes list of the world's 100 most powerful women and the Financial Times’ top 50 women in business list.A woman role model par excellence, she has put India on the Bio Tech map of the world. I would have loved to place Mother Teresa on this list, but left her out simply because she was not born an Indian. Do let me know if you do not agree with my list.

A serious lapse in judgement....

The other day Dr.Sumramanium Swamy startled a TV anchor by saying that folk in the media need to be investigated too for what he called owning 'large farm' houses and possessing disproportionate wealth. Well the anchor, ducked that one fairly easily but Indian media will find it very difficult to duck the one on Tarun Tejpal the founder and Founder Editor at Tehelka. Tejpal has been in the news for various reasons, with a sting operation on the BJP where he exposed the wheeling and dealing of politicians to his incisive writing and novels. However, now he has raised hackles due to his alleged unsolicited advances towards a young woman staffer working at his newspaper. The young lady resisted and has since protested. Apparently the newspaper in question did not have the mandatory committee to deal with sexual harassment and her grievances were not given due consideration. Something which the Tehalka management, under siege, finds itself at a loss to explain to a nation that is upset and annoyed. To add insult to injury, Tejpal claims that it was a bad lapse of judgement and that it was a serious misreading of the situation. Here the case gets murky because Tejpal seems to be insinuating that he was not entirely at fault and at worst he made a mistake as he misread the situation. He has offered to step down from his position for a period of six months! India today is at the proverbial crossroads. As the demographic dividend plays out and young women join the organized work force, it is going to be very difficult for predatory men to understand that there is a definite line between flirting and harassment. Tejpal indeed made some serious lapses in judgement, more, so that the laws of the land cannot be trifled with, however drunk with power one is. The Goa government, where this alleged incident occurred has since taken suo sponte cognizance of this act and might investigate further. And they should, not because of the earlier skirmishes that the BJP and Tehalka have had, but because a clear message needs to be sent out to macho men who cannot keep their hands to themselves. A few hours before the news broke I was discussing a case of sexual harassment at Mitsubishi and Tarun Tejpal provided an interesting coincidence. Workplaces are not arenas for power play and projection of dominance over what one considers to be a weaker person. Bullying and harassment are the pastime of the uncivilized and those who do not understand that need to be pursued and punished with all speed.

Indian English

A few days ago Mulayam Singh Yadav, the erstwhile Chief Minister of India's biggest state Uttar Pradesh, dropped a veritable bombshell when he said that English needs to be banned from Parliament in order to promote Hindi.Now Yadav was gently reminded that India is a multicultural diverse nation, where different languages are spoken and understood, he responded that Indian languages could be allowed in Parliament but not English. This stand, former and latter, has left most sensible people flummoxed.Indian English is as Indian as is say Hindi, Marathi or Kannada and is the language in which most business gets done.In villages in Karnataka there has been a steady rise of children enrolling in private English medium schools. How come they see something that Yadav has missed? Companies that I have seen transact their business in English and hence select through an English interview process and there is no escaping that fact. The interesting point is, why revive old ghosts? The Hindi bogey was considered dead and buried and most non Hindi speakers muddled their way through a Bollywood movie and listened in rapt attention to Lata Mangeshkar or Kishore Kumar ( both incidentally are not from the Hindi heartland )without understanding a word. English in India is still considered the language of the elite and rich and politicians can hobnob with the rich but cannot be seen to be doing so.Both SM Krishna in Karnataka and Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh lost elections as they were considered to be pro rich/anti poor and pro urbanization. The Hindi debate was settled long ago and we need to navigate around it rather than running aground on a non- issue. India has greater things to contend with in both the near and far terms and we do not need another language row.

The Tendulkar of field hockey

The called him the Bradman of hockey, when India ruled the hockey world and was unbeaten at the Olympic Games from 1928 to 1956. Major Dhyan Chand was a wizard and it is said that Adolf Hitler offered to buy his hockey stick at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Incidentally India thrashed the German national team in the final, witnessed by the Fuhrer.

The Germans were expecting an easy win, not because they had a better team but simply because they considered themselves to be racially superior to the Indian's.Apparently Adolf Hitler left the stadium in the midst of his team getting slaughtered.On the morning of the final, the entire team was nervous since they had been defeated the last time they had faced Germany. In the locker room, a Congress tricolour was produced. Reverently the team saluted it, prayed and marched onto the field. The German team was successful in restricting the India side to a single goal until the first interval. After the interval, the Indian team launched an all-out attack, easily defeating Germany 8-1, incidentally the only goal scored against India in that Olympic tournament. At the end of the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics which India won the Gold Medal a reporter said: 'This is not a game of hockey, but magic. Dhyan Chand is in fact the magician of hockey'. India was a nation fighting for her independence and desperately searched for heroes, that were not brushed aside as mythical. The Indian team's feat in Germany must stand out as a landmark event in our history where a nation believed that the white man could be beaten at his game on his turf. Dhyan Chand scored 400 goals in his international career.Nobody has come even within sniffing distance. His stick was tested in many countries, to check if it concealed a strange magnet, as that was Dhyan Chand's superb ball control and wizardry. In celebrating Sachin Tendulkar, let's not forget great sportsmen of the past.I understand that in a world that lives in the fast forward mode, the past is fuzzy and forgettable.Nations forget their history at their peril. Call him the Tendulkar of hockey, but give the man his due.Major Dhyan Chand was a torch bearer of Indian sport and Indian's for that matter when we were desperately seeking heroes.

Cricket

Amidst the breast beating surrounding the retirement of Sachin Tendulkar, I sat through a sad piece of interviewing by one Boria Majumdar, a sports journalist. The gent was interviewing a galaxy of stars; Brian Lara, Rameez Raja, Gautam Gambhir and the bad boy of Pakistan cricket S.Akhtar. Well the drift was as follows: Sachin was the greatest to have graced the cricket field and stands above the rest. While I love Sachin, Boria's stand is a bit rich. How can one compare, Sir Gary Sobers, Viv Richards, Brian Lara,Sachin Tendulkar and the great Don Bradman. All of them batted their way to history in different era's and demolished the best of their time. Bradman of course stands tall with his average of 99.94. An awesome feat which has since not been matched.

Boria's stand is that Sachin is greater than the Don, simply because the latter did not play in India. Well, he did play against India in Australia and literally nailed every Indian bolwler. Importantly the Don missed five years of cricket due to one Adolf Hitler jack booting through Europe and WW2, while in his prime. Sachin tendulkar is our pride and a great cricketer but to place him on a pedestal is robbing cricket of that place. The game deserves better.Sachin was a child prodigy who fulfilled that promise.

Rahul Dravid's count of 8 series-defining performances in Test cricket is not just the highest for any Indian Test cricketer, it is the highest by any batsman in all of Test cricket history. This is what makes Rahul Dravid such a giant even in international cricket. How does he compare with Sachin? The game of cricket is a great one and can we leave it at that please?

Sardar

The hoopla surrounding the raising of the so to be worlds tallest statue in Gujarat honoring the original Iron Man of India is not only quixotic but downright bizzare with two of of India's main political parties in a messy scarp as to who owns him. To be fair the Congress movement ( not party ) which was at the fore front of India's freedom struggle had Vallabhbhai Patel as its foremost leader next only to the Mahatma alongside Nehru. Patel was India's home minister and integrated a nation that many in the West thought would fall apart, as the natives were too naive to govern themselves. One such advocate of this idea was Winston Churchill the former war time Prime Minister of Britain who tried his utmost to deny India her freedom from a repressive and suffocating English rule. Well, Sir Winston was disappointed on both counts - India got her freedom and held together as a nation, thanks to the man that we are discussing, Patel. Patel took charge of the task to forge a united India from the British colonial provinces allocated to India and more than five hundred self-governing princely states, released from British colonial rule by the Indian Independence Act 1947. Using staunch diplomacy, backed with the option and use of military force, Patel's quiet leadership persuaded almost every princely state to join India.A remarkable feat by any stretch of imagination. Patel died soon after independence and Gandhi but not before he had persuaded a reluctant Junagadh and Hyderabad to integrate with India. Hyderabad needed some small persuasion from the Indian Army which rolled into the state and occupied it in all of four days despite the bravado of the Nizam's army which was hoping that the Saudi's and the Iranian's would bomb the Indian Army to smithereens.The Saudi's and Iranian's if they had harbored such thoughts, wisely refrained and Hyderabad was taken with remarkable ease on completion of Operation Polo, as the armed forces action was labelled.This was a precursor to India driving the Portugese out of Goa. The operation galvanized a nation - occupied for a thousand years, it gave a young India something to cheer about, a huge psychological boost. The man responsible for this was Patel with his decisive leadership. As the years rolled on and we had a dynasty replacing the Brit's in New Delhi, Sardar Patel was jettisoned to the side lanes of history and was a passing reference in our history books. Now as a statue which is to be the tallest one in the world is being raised in the heartland of the BJP, Gujarat, by a man who the Congress party fears and loves to hate, Patel is up for grabs.The Congress's charge is that a non secular Narendra Modi is raising the statue. Well, Sardar Patel was a true blue secular who was not deterred from rebuilding the Somnath Temple, much to the chagrin of the then Prime Minister of India J.L.Nehru. The Somnath Temple was a temple repeatedly sacked and eventually destroyed by Islamic zealots from Afghanistan and then later Indian Islamic rulers. Sardar Patel initiated the process of reconstruction and today's Somnath temple is a legacy of the Indian's stubborn resistance towards religious intolerance and the will to hang in there against all odd's. Patel was an icon, a towering figure who needs the respect of a grateful nation and that his statue is being raised in the land from which he hailed is a tribute that he deserves. Two negatives can make a positive and I'm glad that the BJP and Congress have managed just that! Results do matter, never mind the reason.