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India Unbound

by Gurcharan Das (former CEO of P&G, India, currently a VC      and  a consultant to Industry and Government.)

India was supposed to one of the richest nations of the world a couple of centuries before, did you ever wonder why it has shifted sides? Were we really looted by the British? How much of India's wealth was really taken away by the British? Was it a few billion dollars(a few hundred crore rupees)? Some say that British haven't really taken away everything, instead they gave us our railways, our industries and democracy. How true is it? If they really gave us our infrastructure, did we fail in exploiting it? 

If Capitalism promotes wealth creation and Socialism takes care of fairer distribution of wealth, wasn't the mixed-path taken by Nehru and others of his time, the best possible path for the then newly freed nation?

What was the cause of failure of Puru (Porus) in the great war with Alexander? Is it anyway related to us Indians as a whole? Is there anything for us to learn from it?

Corruption seems so rampant in our country. I have, like many others, learnt to accept it as a norm, rather than an exception. Have Indians been corrupt, or was it an off-shoot of the actions of our mis-guided leaders in the past (and present)?

To all ye engineers out there, did you ever wonder why you get so much excited about solving problems related to concepts rather than get your hand dirty at getting something working? 

Why do we find factionism (almost) everywhere in India? Is it our diversity? Is it our caste system? Are we poor team players by the nature of the soil we were born from?

I've definitely longed for answers to questions like this that concern India. Why it is the way it is, what has gone right and what has gone wrong in the post-independence years? From that point of view, what are and aren't we doing right? Last week, one of my colleagues, sent out an e-mail about this book "India Abound" which I ended up buying at Begumpet airport a couple of days back. I've just finished three chapters and I bet you'll find this full of historical statistical data with appropriate references and quotes. You'll end up with an overall understanding of how things have been and what probably needs to be done by us, of the current generation to make India a better place! 

I'm adding this last piece of comment first, just to ensure that I don't miss out thanking Mihir, a colleague of mine for telling me about "India Unbound".  

I've recently finished reading Dilbert Principle. Its not a recent one, but an excellent book. Some things made me roll on the floor with laughter. Some others made me think quite a bit about why they are the way they are. Obviously, I don't want to talk about the obvious ones, but here's one that's not-so-obvious:

One particular e-mail sent to him goes something like this: Our CTO wants us to build a battery powered device with a light. This light should be turned on when the device is switched off and vice-versa.

On the first look this may seem like a dumb thing, but haven't we seen laptops (which run on battery) when you turn it off? The point is if you have an LED with a simple switch which completes the LED circuit   when the switch is turned off, the job is done!

Thanks to my new found love in dilbert, I'm now reading Dilbert Future. :) :)

This is probably more a note to myself of possibly all the books I've read till 2002 than anything else:

Carlos Castaneda

1. First Teachings Of Don Juan
2. The Second Ring Of Power
3. Tales Of Power
4. Journey To Ixtlan
5. Fire From Within
6. Art of Dreaming
7. Magical Passes
   

Lobsang Rampa

1. The Third Eye
2. You Forever

Osho Rajneesh

1. Quite a few books

Richard Bach

1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull
2. Illusions
3. The Bridge Across Forever
4. One
5. Running From Safety

Robert M Pirsig

1. Zen And The Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance
2. Lila

James Redfield

1. The Celestine Prophecy
2. The Tenth Insight

Scott Peck

1. The Road Less Travelled

Jane Roberts

1. Seth Speaks
2. The Seth Material
3. The Nature of Personal Reality
4. The Unknown Reality (yet to complete the later parts)

Betty Shine

1. Mind Magic
2. Mind Waves

Betty J Eadie

1. Light from within (?)

Linda Goodman

1. Star Signs

Shirley MacLaine

1. Out on a Limb
2. The Camino

Robert Kiyosaki & Co.

1. Rich Dad Poor Dad
2. CashFlow Quadrant
3. Guide To Investing