Lost Decade?

Think about the following:

Three of modern Indian Cricketing greats - all from 1990s. (Photo Courtesy - http://rajeevmist.blogspot.com/2011/04/heroes.html)

• When you think of current generation Indian Cricket, who are your fans of? Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, Anil Kumble? Or perhaps Harbhajan Singh, Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag or Zaheer Khan? All of them were introduced into the team before 2001. 



Paes & Bhupathi - both from 1990s - still going strong (Photo Courtesy - http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-03/top-stories/29377080_1_lukas-dlouhy-mahesh-bhupathi-leander-paes)

• When you think of Tennis in India, who do you think is currently performing the best? As of today, the few remaining players in the Australian Open draw consists of Laender Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi. Both are from the 90s. The guys who were supposed to succeed them - Rohan Bopanna and the likes - didn't really fire. Sania is perhaps edging on the border of excepting this trend, but again, what she achieved in the past 10 years pales in comparison to what these two achieved in the past 10 years.



Still the best in Bollywood - all from the 1990s. (Photo Courtesy - http://www.glamsham.com/movies/scoops/11/mar/02-which-actor-looks-cool-in-moustache-031113.asp)

• When you think of Bollywood, who do you think is still ruling the roost? The Khans (Shah Rukh, Salman, Aamir and Saif Ali) & perhaps Akshay Kumar & Ajay Devgun every now and then. All of them started in the 90s or before. What happened to the next lot? AB Junior, Roshan Junior, Oberoi Junior etc?
• Which present day Indian companies do you consider great? Infy? Wipro? TCS? Airtel? All of them were household names ten years back, though each of them were less than 10 years old. Which younger-than-10 year old Indian company commands the same respect? How many such companies exist?

Try to ponder over this across more aspects - politics, Gurus, brands and so on. You will probably see the trend in other places as well. The more I think of it, the more I feel that somehow, India just stopped producing talent, in general, for a few years. It's not a fool proof theory, but just a general trend I see. I would love to see an argument proving otherwise, but for now - I feel that we somehow managed to lose a decade of talent creation. I don't know why it happened, but it seemed to have. Any thoughts?

And on that note, wishing all Indians a very happy Republic Day. The constitution has served us well, and I hope it continues to do so in the years to come. 

Political Majority vs Political Minority

One of the alarming pieces of communication heard in social media/conversations these days w.r.t to political debate in India is about how the "middle class" or "urban" voters will get woken up by the activism of Anna Hazare or the ensuing debate on Lokpal. Every time I participate in a debate, I get the response - "Did you vote?" or an appropriate corollary as may be deemed fit.

So, I have been thinking about this long and hard. After all, it seems a valid question and a valid response is a prerequisite to further debate. For the record, I have voted every single time I was eligible and present in the jurisdiction of my voting eligibility. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I wasn't present at my normal residences during both the 2004 & 2009 general elections (first time due to studies and second time due to occupation), I actually have a poor record at voting.

Having cleared my record, let me take this further. The key issue about my voting and its effects on the politics of India lies somewhere else. Having born in a middle class, high caste Hindu, and brought up in urban upbringings all my life, I am in no way a minority in the traditional sense of the word. Yet, for the purpose of politics, I am clearly a minority. For the purposes of winning an election in India, the demographic of an influential voter constitutes a lower-middle/lower class, lower caste, rural non-Hindu (Non-Hindus, in general, are known to vote en masse.)

The statistics are easy: Over half of our population live in villages, over half of our population is lower caste and over half of our population is essentially what I term lower middle class or lower. Further, almost every constituency has the same structure. Lower class will out vote, higher class voters in most constituencies in urban India too. And of course, as a whole, the lower caste, lower class population can and does determine the output of most elections in our country.

Now, the aspirations of Indians in generally convergent - almost all of them want a strong, clean, honest, non-corrupt country where people can work and enjoy their lives with safety and security. But the means to that end is significantly divergent between the political majority and political minority.

The political minority wants a government who can sacrifice day-to-day gains for long term gains, remove subsidies, reward merit, and reward equality for the weak and meek as opposed to populism. The political majority is appeased by quotas, subsidies, populism and short term gains. Nobody can fault them. They are looking for immediate survival and whoever gets them that wins the most votes.

Nobody can question the individual wisdom in their decisions and yet collectively, the political minority will almost always end up voting those who can appease to their demands and not those who can cook up a strong nation. Nobody can blame their individual demands, since the fulfillment of the same is essential to their immediate survival.

The farmer who has to pay for power will be appeased with free power while he is ignorant of the cost of free power to the nation. A hungry man will love his Rs. 2/kg rice, irrespective of whether it is the most nutritious or the best option for the nation. A lower caste auto driver will happily accept a quota, if his son graduating next year can get an admission/job based on that, irrespective of what that quota does to the nation.

To the outsider (or the observant insider), our politics might be mind-numbingly corrupt, illogical and completely chaotic. And yet, if we agree to the above premise, it is reasonably straight forward to understand why our political parties are as they are. Indian politics has to favor the political majority and since the immediate demands of the political majority, unfortunately, is heavily loaded in favor of keeping such people in the political majority, the cycle is vicious.

And I have realized, I am in a political minority.

41 books in 2011

2011 saw me reading 41 books, which is down 18% from 2010's tally of 50 books. However, I am glad that I managed to do all this reading, while taking on new hobbies in 2011 (which shall be detailed in a separate post.)

Best authors of 2011:

• Stieg Larsson: Clearly the best in terms of story, characters, suspense.
• Rohinton Mistry: Absolutely amazing characters - stunning drama and great attention to detail.
• Sunil Gavaskar: His books gives a great perspective into the era of India Cricket which was pretty much unknown to people of me, and perhaps to my generation as a whole.
• John Grisham: Good old Grisham, still fascinates me with his writing. Haven't got bored of him yet.

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

COL comparions SIN vs BLR

I am going to be posting about Cost of Living (COL) comparisons between Singapore & Bangalore on various things. The background is that I am hearing a lot of mixed reports about Bangalore's cost of living. Some saying it is becoming very costly. Others believe it is still cheap. The idea is to get some numbers.

Day 1:

Ride from Airport to Home: 
In Bangalore: Rs. 726.
Direct Conversion: SGD: 28
PPP Conversion: SGD 72.6 (assuming PPP exchange rate of 10)
In S'pore, ride from Airport to Jurong: SGD 29.00+ (as per gothere.sg)
(reasonable comparison since my house in Blore is at other end of the town) 
Analysis: With a direct conversion itself, it is just about matching, with PPP, Bangalore is quite costly.
Verdict: Bangalore is costly.

Commute from BG Road to Tin Factory By Volvo:
In Bangalore: Rs. 65+  (two legs of Rs. 10 each and one leg of Rs. 45)
Direct Conversion: SGD 1.60
PPP Conversion: SGD 6.5
In S'pore, ride from Sengkang to Jurong: SGD 1.69 (by bus. By Train is 2.02)
(Reasonable Comparison distance wise)
Analysis: With a direct conversion itself, it is just about matching, with PPP, Bangalore is quite costly.
Verdict: Bangalore is costly.

Meetha Pan:
In Bangalore: Rs. 7
Direct Conversion: SGD 0.20
PPP Conversion: SGD 0.70
In Singapore: SGD 1 (There is a guy selling Paans in Little India)
Analysis: Bangalore is cheaper by both PPP & Direct Comparison
Verdict: Bangalore is cheaper.

A reasonably scary evening

Right then, having had a comfortable sleep, now is the time to write about the 2 hours last evening that had me pretty worried..

First, the background was that I was to catch a flight last night to come to Bangalore a spend a few days with my parents. As always, I packed up in time and headed out to the Airport with my wife in tow to see me off. We took the bus to the airport, and in the middle of the journey, when bus 27 exited from the expressway and still some way to go to airport (I didn't realize that it doesn't use the expressway all the way to Changi), I decided to switch to a taxi to save valuable time (I wanted to be in time to get my standard emergency exit seat) and we alighted at next stop, shifted to a taxi.

Mid way into it, a car in front off us decided to sway into our lane with little notice, and on express way, at 90 kmph speeds, and had it not been our alert cab driver, we would have rear ended the car in front and I should have been a grievously injured man, if not dead. That was averted.

We reached Changi, alight and when it came to paying up, I realized I didn't have my wallet. I surely had it at the exit from the bus (I swiped at exit), and I was sure I checked my purse for the taxi fare while in the taxi (I was wrong), so we look around the whole taxi to no avail. Bewildered, I send my wife back into the taxi to the place we boarded to check if I misplaced it there. (Apart from the fact that getting a lost wallet is generally tough, getting it in the nick of the time for the flight looked impossible, but what was the harm in trying.)

While my wife was heading back, I take my luggage and try checking in (thankfully, the ticket wasn't in my wallet), but turns out they can't check me in because they need the credit card I booked with for verification and I didn't have the card because that was in the wallet. So, I am nervously waiting for my wife to report on the wallet and the time was ticking for the check-in counter to close.

My wife reaches the point, sees no wallet there, and asks around and miraculously, a man was sitting there, waiting a good 20 minutes for somebody to come by and pick it up. My wife and the taxi driver profusely thank him, she reports this on the phone to me and heads back to the airport with the wallet.

With about 10 minutes to check-in closure, she reaches and we are back in check-in queue (the queue is because of other flights sharing the same check-in row) and we ask the staff to help us be on time, but they assure us that I should be in time and the queue will be cleared by the deadline. It does. I feel fortunate.

Now, when I am finally at check-in, it turns out that I am NOT carrying the credit card with which I booked it. (I had feared as much in the intervening minutes and the staff had assured me that if that happened, they will charge the card I had and refund the older credit to me, but the fear was time running out.) The staff and me are trying to figure out a solution when she tells me that if I could tell the last four digits of the card, she can still complete verification. Thankfully my mother in law, who decide to stay home, was at hand to retrieve the card at home, give me this information and let me check in. I feel fortunate again that my mother in law decided to rest back at home.

By now, I was spooked. Was this a day where signs were being given of an impending disaster? Was the flight going to crash? I started recalling all the episodes of the Aircrash Investigations to revise the dos and don'ts of the crash etc (check life jacket, check emergency exit opening, don't inflate life jacket before having clear path to surface, etc).

I clear all other procedures, take my seat and the captain announces that we are expecting turbulence an hour into our journey. By now, I was quite spooked, certain of a disaster. The flight is delayed, first for 5 minutes, then 10 and they were investigating technical issues (which doesn't help when you are worried about Death or TPD, as the insurance salesmen tell you) and finally 25 minutes into the delay, they announce that they are shifting us to a different aircraft.

That was when I tweeted about it. I am generally not a nervous traveller, but you put a few ominous things ahead of it and I can get quite nervous. I was silently praying for a safe arrival home.

Thankfully, that tweet was the about the turning point. Everything from there on was a spot-on experience. After the inevitable delay, the flight took off. By now, the captain told us that no turbulence was expected now because of the ground delay. The flight was silky smooth, the immigration procedures at Bangalore was tiring (due to the queue and the late hour) but smooth nevertheless. The taxi ride to my parents' home was again uneventful.

I have to downright admit that SIA's service quality amidst all this was about excellent. They had a snack box waiting between the aircraft changes. Our in-flight service was friendly and good, albeit a bit late because it took some time for the crew to get their bearings with the aircraft change. Nevertheless, really really good experience. No complaints. Whatsoever.

Secondly, I was very happy with the company I got. A smiling Sardarjee, who was returning from Jakarta after a business trip put me at ease with very interesting conversations about a lot of things. There is more to say about that, but I am keeping it for some other time.

Thirdly, thanks to those who tweeted and enquired about the situation after seeing my tweet (you know who you are). The moral support was invaluable.