India, Bharat, Hindustan: Catching the spirit of India

On this independence, it is interesting to look back at the last 63 years and contemplate what all these years have meant to us?

What is this Nation State called India? What is that makes it the oldest living and continuous civilization? And what’s in a name? Is it India, is it Hindustan or is it Bharat?

What is that thread that runs continuously through this five thousand year old civilization? Is it religion? Is it language?  Is it culture? Or is it simply a mixture of Cricket, Hinglish & Bollywood!!

With twenty-three constitutionally recognized national languages and over 600+ different dialects, we are indeed multilingual with Hindi & English as the two most widely used languages. The thread of Indianness then has to go beyond a mere linguistic one.

A surface area of over 3.2 million square kilometers, India on the world map, looks not like a piece of land, but a mother stretching her arms from her 15,000 km long borders shared with Pakistan & Afghanistan in the west to Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh China and Myanmar in the east. The Nation State is carved like a feminine figure elegantly placed in the tropical south Asia, with the three water bodies The Arabian Sea, The Indian Ocean and The Bay of Bengal washing her feet. There is indeed something about this Nation that it never ceases to exist. As Iqbal, very famously put it: ‘Kuch baat hai ke haansti mitt thi nahi hamari, saadiyon se raha hai dushman dooren zaman hamara.’ There is something about us, that we have a continuous existence and identity notwithstanding relentless foreign occupation and enemies.

India is famously referred to as the cradle of civilization with the famous Indus Valley Civilization dating as far back to 2400 BC. Though deeply argued, Aryans are controversially referred to as the first invaders from central Asia who imposed their Vedic system and language Sanskrit. It was a golden age with women enjoying equal status as men and making an equal participation in business affairs and politics. The concept of Pardha(system of Veil, an evil which later developed in mid-eighteenth century) was unheard of and marriages were consensual and not forced.

The Golden age of the Gupta Empire and the Maurayans, particularly the Ashoka is famously known as the age of Gold in the Indian history. It is said that people were prosperous and far removed from the avarices and evils of greed and hunger of present life. No one was poor. Literally speaking, India had rivers not of water, but flowing with milk!

The next important conquest with visible architectural influences was the Sultanant of Delhi and the conquest by Turcs, Afghans and the 12^th century conquest by Mohammad of Ghori.

In the south of India, the medieval kingdom of Vijayanagara, had significant impact on art, culture and prosperity of the times. Comprising of modern Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra, it was a period of development and golden age for the southern belt.

Babar’s legendary victory in the Battle of Panipat in 1526 established the great Mughal empire ruled by Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jehangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.

The advent of the British with the East India Company in the 16^th century led to the downfall of the Mughal Empire and the British either directly or through 500+ small and large princely states ruled the Indian subcontinent at the time of her independence on 15^th August 1947. When the Indian Independence Act was giving way to the independent India, the then and the last viceroy and first Governor General Lord Mountbatten, had a choice to either admit or refuse admission to the Indian Union by the princely states based on the request made by them. After a long elaborate process, we eventually had a geographically defined territory of what physically exists as the modern day India. The frontiers of land of this great Nation has been defined and re-defined many a times. What constitutes the present day Pakistan and Afghanistan in the west to Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and parts of Mayanmar was once a part of ancient India or Bharat, as it was earlier known. Then there has to be something beyond territorial limitation that we call India!

Religiously speaking, India is like a garland around the Divine’s neck with almost all religions making their religious presence in this secular nation. Even the constitution has special provision for the free practice of religion and development of religion as fundamental right under Article 25. The religious diversity can be gauzed from the fact that India has a woman President(even the most developed nation like USA is still to have a women President) Ms Pratibha Devi Patil, a Christian Defense Minister Mr A.K. Anthony, a Muslim vice-President M. Hamid Ansari, a Sikh Prime Minister Shri Manmohan Singh and a Hindu finance Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee. That is secularism not just in words but in practice. Secularism being the uniting fabric and religious diversity a matter of Indian pride, religion is again not the driving force that unites this Nation State.

In the opinion of the author, beyond the materialistic and worldly notions of Nation States, there exists a progressive concept of Nation State. A progressive Nation of accepting each other as fellow countrymen, a progressive march towards development and a progressive march of freedom of liberty, thought and expression.

The ageless, timeless, priceless noble prize winning spiritual classic by Rabindra DA perhaps captures this ‘Spirit’, ‘the Soul’ of India, ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. Where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. Into that Heaven of Freedom my Father, let my country awake!’

Our ancestors havc dedicated their lives to keep this spirit alive and it is a very hard-earned freedom that we got on 15^th August 1947. It was more then freedom from a foreign empire. It was symbolic of breaking away from all the evils of the past that had crypted into this 5000 year old civilization. It was a promise of a dream, that retaining our rich cultural vast, we will be re-born as a new India, secular and spiritual, progressive in outlook, one in spirit and democratic in approach.

On this independence day, lets re-visit and re-discover the spirit called India!

Happy Independence Day! Swantantra Diwas mubarak ho!!

The City Beautiful Chandigarh: Lessons for the City Capital and City Commercial!

 Thanks to huge infrastructural bottlenecks, a drive can be quite stressful anywhere across the country. Ruminating cows, needless overtaking, screeching horns and a startling wannabe teens cricket team in the middle of the street is not all too surprising. Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkatta; the reservoirs of modern India, the story is everywhere the same. Or so did I thought! Until I visited the City Beautiful. A drive down the Le Coubusier designed capital city, Chandigarh, left me overwhelmed.

Chandigarh, derives its name from Chandi Devi, whose temple is situated in the adjacent Panchkula district. Also, ‘Chandi ki Var’ a ballad poem by Guru Gobind Singh, the first Guru of the Sikhs gives Chandigarh, the word ‘Chandi’ in her name. And the word Chandi in Hindi also means silver! The word Chandigarh is a conjugation of two words, ‘Chandi’ and ‘Garh’, and literally means the fortress of Devi Chandi. And the fortress of the Divine, it indeed is! With its well-manicured lawns, sprawling green, expansive multi-laned roads and huge omnipresent road-side Ashokas, Deodars and Euclyptus, the city retains its spacious heavenly aura with materialist modern day amenities present in abundance. The affluence of the city can be gauged from the presence of international brands, huge malls, multiplexes and not to forget the exhorbitant land rates! Just an acre of land I was told, can cost upto 6-8 crores! Whopping, unreal and of course, unaffordable! After all, it is an expensive affair living in the fortress of the Divine, more so when taxed by mortals like us!

Chandigarh is a new city with historic roots. After the sad partition of India in 1947, the  province of Punjab needed a new capital. Temporarily, Shimla was decided as the capital of undivided Punjab. But the need for new center was strongly felt by the then Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Envisioning the concept of Chandigarh, he famously said to the architects that with Chandigarh, India will present to the world a new city that will symbolize the constitutional aspiration of a new India liberated from the archaic traditions and past. In short, the dream was to make Chandigarh an architectural expression of the confidence and reposte of the new emerging India.

The initial architectural plan was made by Albert Mayer, an associate of Mathew Novicki. Unfortunately due to his death in a road accident, the great architect had to be replaced by the legendary Swiss architect Le Corbusier who along with his team of Maxwell Fry, Jane B Drew, Pierre Jeanneret and the young promising Indian team of M.N. Sharma, U.E. Chowdhary and Aditya Prakash laid the plan for the new capital of Punjab in 1951.

With a  human development index of .86 and a population of around 100,000 and the highest per capita income in India, Chandigarh the capital of Punjab and Haryana, is one of the most well laid out cities in the country. The city that was initially designed to home some 500,000 habitants has today over double the population and is one of the highly densely populated city with 7900 habitants per square kilometers. Yet, the signs of infrastructural fabric withering away is far from visible!

With the symbol of an open hand, the city of Le Corbusier, continues to welcome government offices, people & corporations alike with her open arms. The capital of Punjab & Haryana and itself a Union Territory, it holds some15 medium to large Industrial units, has over 2500 small scale industries. The Chandigarh IT Park hosts the best names in the IT sector and continues to retain top spot as the ‘Emerging Outsourcing & IT Services Destinations worldwide.’

 Chandigarh also apparently has the largest number of per capita vehicles and yet is consistently rated as the cleanest city in the country.

So what is it in its architecture that despite her burgeoning population, increasing office and bureaucratic presence, Chandigarh continues to remain clean, green and spacious. Perhaps the reason resonates in the policy making and planning that was subsequently followed by development.

Ambitiously dreamt by India’s first PM, Pandit Nehru and painstakingly envisioned by Le Corbusier, the city is divided in sixty sectors of 800 by 1200 each covering a total area of 114 km square. The highly sophisticated 7 lane system of circulation in the city, successfully mitigates the menace of traffic and preserves the habitant zones from the nuisance of traffic. Interestingly, city has no sector  numbered 13. Seems like even the scientific designers had a touch of superstition! Each sector is well equipped with public amenities, cultural centres and green spaces and there are habitation zones for the rich and for the middle class bourgeoise alike. Interestingly the central sector number 17 situated at the heart of the city iis the principal centres of commerce, restaurant and bars. The infrastructural burden on sector 17 is supported by ancillary commercial centres in sector 35. Also all the other sectors have their fair share of everyday malls, magazines, daily necessities and schools.

Compare this with the 'planned' unplanned development in India’s unarguably very important cities: Delhi & Mumbai. Delhi with a population of around twenty million habitants, 1500 km square and a population density of around 12,000 per kilometer square is an infrastructural nightmare. Mumbai, the commercial capital and significant contributor to GDP and an average per capita income of over $ 1000, is an even more gory story. Millions of homeless sleeping on the streets, living painful lives at the mercy of police, gangs and mafia, it indeed is a deplorable and grim picture of an emerging economy. Is unplanned development, unmitigated migration and policy failure the genus of these modern day soulless jungles of concrete?

Does this development and infrastructural layout in the City Beautiful have any lessons for the Commercial and Political capital of India?

From Retailing to E-tailing

With a population of 1.2 billion and a continued population growth rate of 1.41% and a consistent GDP growth rate hovering around 8%, India is a big market with strong fundamentals. Over 63.6% of this population is in the 15-64 year age group. India definitely is the future of the world. But this numbers come with small footnotes. India is still a developing country and over 60% of its population still lives in villages.

Gandhi, aptly said, ‘The true India is to be found not in its few cities, but in its seven hundred thousand villages. If the villages perish, India will perish too.’ This simple yet strikingly emphatic statement by the Father of the Nation holds a million dollar mantra for policy-makers at the Capital to the Market-eyeing companies at the Commercial capital alike.

The message for marketers is unpretentiously austere. Creating innovative channels of communication to reach out to these masses. Could the buzz word internet hold the key? India is world’s second largest & fastest growing telecommunications industry with over 852 million mobile phone subscribers. Amongst these over 214 million users access internet. Could this mean a huge market gaining momentum for online shopping & how the marketers need to adapt to this changed market space- from real to virtual!

Online portals like Letsbuy, Flipkart, Fashion And You, Yehbhi and Snapdeal have seen positive investments to the tune of $5 million to $ 20 million from funds like Tiger Capital, Indo-US Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Accel India. Tasting success online away from their traditional brick and mortar retailing, even players like Shoppers Stop and Future Group are eyeing e-tailing.

The E-tailing model has many an advantages that are unique to its virtual presence. The first is definitely the reach of the medium to small towns and villages and other hitherto inaccessible terrains. Even in tier I towns like Mumbai and Delhi, where the real estate rentals have touched strastopheric levels, the e-tailing is seen as a great respite by sellers. And most importantly if well-positioned, e-tailing can be positioned as cool and more in sync with today’s e-generation. The economy of online operations is another great advantage as there is little inventory pile-up or real estate costs to hold inventories or open stores. Yebhi.com, for instance, has advantageously used these cost advantages to offer ‘flexible return policy’ to its customers. For foreign investors too, it could be an interesting way to understand the market before it makes a physical entry into the same.

Advantages notwithstanding, e-tailing model is a tight-rope which involves immense creativity and out of the box thinking. As the website virtually becomes your online store, reaching out globally to different markets, in the opinion of the author, homenigesation  with differentiation becomes extremely important. In other words mac-donaldisation of the site! Marketers must understand India is a culturally diverse, linguistically rich and geographically disperse nation. An adaptation of the site suited to these cultural sensibilities with an option to access in multiple Indian language can be a strong value add and differentiator.

Corporate Social Responsibility for India Inc

What does CSR mean for a developing economy? In other words, is the level and manner of CSR initiative by a Company influenced by the level of development in the economy. The recent survey by the ASSOCHAM Research Bureau substantiates the belief that yes, the level of development does influence the kind of CSR initiatives pursued. CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility connotes a more philanthrophic flavour. According to the survey, the major theme areas pursued by the India Inc., during the first quarter of 2010-11 are Community Welfare, Education, Environment, Health Care and Rural Development. Community welfare would mean being responsible and accountable for the development of the immediate community in which the Corporation is functioning through facilitating education, healthcare and projects that help in eradicating unemployment. It also often takes the form of Philanthropy that is providing monetary assistance to the NGO's active in the areas or co-ordinating with them to work towards development of the community.

The most actively engaged sectors are FMCG, Chemical and IT/ ITES. And amongst the 28 States and 7 union territories, Maharashtra followed by a distant Gujarat and Delhi/ National Capital Region received maximum attention for CSR initiatives.

The three interesting aspects clearly highlighted by the survey are that: 1. When it comes to the kind of CSR intiatives, Community Welfare is the most preferred form of Socially Responsible engagement with the society. 2. The most actively engaged sectors are the ones that are most influenced by the environment in which they operate such as FMCG, Chemicals and IT/ ITES. These sectors need constant interaction with their immediate environment for procurement, material and human resources. In the case of Chemicals sector particularly, the affluents and wastes discharged have received immense local criticism. In case of FMCG, such as Coca Cola, excessive use of locally available natural resouces such as ground water, led to the depletion of water table which pushed the giant Corporation to the footsteps of Court. And finally, Maharashtra, the most industrialized, receives the most prolific CSR intervention.

With these observations, one is left wondering if CSR is still in its nascent stages in resource scarce, energy hungry, burgeoning India. Is it a seed that will take its time to bloom or will the first mover who visualizes its strength, capture the heartshare of Philanthropic India to gain mindspace.

Punishment to punish or to reform

What is the role of law, criminal law more particularly. There are many theories that try to answer it. The punitive theory or the retributive theory of justice; the deterrent or preventive theory and the reformative or corrective theory all come out with different rationales for punishment or the lack of it. The recent re-arrest of the octageunarian Montana's notorious killer Frank Dryman raises some difficult questions. In a cold and snowy day in 1951 Dryman hitch hiked from Shelby by cafe owner Clarence Pellet and suddenly pulled out a gun and threw Clarence from out of his own car. Coldbloddedly he shot Pellet six times in the back. He avoided the hangman's noose, a relic of frontier justice. Decades later, the accussed a reformed human now was caught and sent back to gallows on charge of breaking the law by running away while on parole. Traced down in a Bollywood style by the The problem raises the dilemma if Frank should be punished for breaking the court's order and not completing his prison sentence then.

Criminal Jurists have different theories justifying each of their standpoints and each of them convincing enough their viewpoint.

Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth and foot for foot is the essence of retributive theory of justice.The theory suggests that punishment if appropriate is a morally acceptable response to crime. It brings that psychological solace of revenge to the aggrieved party, its near ones and society. Also referred to as the punitive model of justice, it seeks to punish rather then focus on the reform of the accused.

The restorative theory instead of focussing on the abstract principles of law, justice and ethics; focusses on the needs of both the parties - the accused and the victim. It endeavours to encourage offenders to repair the harm done by them by apologizing, returning stolen money or for example doing community service'. It involves fostering a dialogue between the accused and victim and reaching a consensus wherein the ends of justice are met in a practical manner. Though this might be a good manner of resolving petty crimes such as theft or breaking traffic rules, as is increasingly been done in the developed countries; restorative model can not be acceptable for resolving henious crimes such as murder, rape or genocide which are a crime against society. The restorative theory is based on the principle of corrective theory. This is because the whole purpose of punishment is to reform the individual. Individuals turn to crime due to inadequacies in society and once they are provided the right set of environment and an opportunity to integrate into the society, they tend to reform and become better human beings. Reform, Rehabilitate, Re-educate and reintegration are the four R's of the restorative theory.

Accroding to the deterrent theory, the punishment is permissible so far as it deters further performance of a greater criminal act. The underlying principle is to set the punishment as an example such that it deters the accused and other like-minded individuals from committing a similar or more heinous crime. When such a punishment is set as a precedent, it sets an example for the society to abide by the law.

Frank not only cold-blodeedly killed the person who gave him a hitch, but also evaded from the eyes of law for four long decades before he was traced by victim's grand-son. In such a reckless case, the issue becomes not just one of punishing the individual who committed a cold-blodded murder; but also of meeting the ends of justice by appropriately punishing him for committing contempt of justice. Letting a person go free on humanitarian grounds of his being an octagenarian would be justified only if Frank sincerely repent for his wrong deeds. Any thoughts on the sensitive issue that touches us all as members of the society?

BP learns the hard way the economics of CSR

Corporate Social Responsibility is not just about being a socially responsible citizen. It has tangible market implications too. The recent oil spill disaster one of its worst in the history, has pulled down BP's shares more then 40% on widespread concerns amongst investors that it may not be able to survive the disaster. Recent decision by BP to award its shareholders with liberal bonus notwithstanding no strong reief measures going to the effected residents in the Gulf, caused great concern. The Congress in the US was pulled up for action and the Obama Government was put to the litmus test with the ensuing disaster. BP on its front , which is one of the biggest players in the industry, now faces a struggle for survival and its future hinges on legilative and regulatory decisions going forward. The tremors of aftereffects can be felt across the entire oil industry. There is a six month moratorium on deep water offshore drilling followed by a call for more stringent safety regulations. Other possible implications may include search for alternative sources of energy and more legislative intervention on environmental aspects at a global level. The call for CSR resonantes not only with ethics but revenues too.

Sony: A Future Unseen?

With losses over $450 million for the current financial year and CEO salary cheque of $ 4.5 million plus 500,000 stock options, is the Sony shine losing its sheen? Compare this with a total payment of 957 million to its 23 Directors by the competitor Panasonic for 2010 and the comparison seems one of giant versus dwarf! Important concerns have raised on Sony's ethical stand and Corporate Governance compliances. Sony is also apparently losing the market share to its investors. In this gloomy scenario, the Sony investors are compelled to ask what is the silver lining in this dark cloud. Loses for the current year notwithstanding, Sony is expected to earn a profit of 160 billion yen for the coming year. Sony presently makes Bravia TVs, Valo PCs and PS game consols. Its future success greatly depends on the success of is 3D TV and Motion controlled gaming consoles. Sony still has a good brand equity and is synonymous with quality in the minds of its customers. The future for Sony now depends on its strategy. According to industry experts, Sony's ability to transform its present vertical structure into horizontal business as successfully accomplished by Apple; by leveraging from its strong brand power will determine the directions of the wind.