When I’m sixty-four Give me your answer, fill in a form Mine for evermore Will you still need me Will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four? Average life expectancy at birth for Indians in 2010 was 64.4 years, which means the Beatles song could be an elegy. We fared more poorly than our neighbors,…
From the Editor Then we had to find the rudder and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up — very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody hot and wet and…
Innovation in India is not just about patents filed but about affordable, scalable solutions. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum held in Mumbai last fortnight, Business Today gathered an eclectic collection of thinkers to brainstorm about one topic: How important is innovation in the emerging world order? The hour-long discussion saw Gururaj Deshpande, serial entrepreneur;…
Few of us know that KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, produced the critically acclaimed Hindi movie Black. Or that he has taken up pistol shooting as a hobby. Or that his teenage son is a keen photographer, but he knows a thing or two about pictures and lighting himself. Most of…
Poor Manmohan Singh is caught between the Pros and the Cons. The Pros in the Opposition are telling the prime minister, who has never seemed sullied by money politics, that he should be resigning. The Congress, led by A. Raja, is telling him that he is allegedly complicit in the 2G scandal. The sad part…
The Mac II, launched on March 2. 1987, cost $5.500 and was the first computer with a colour graphical interface. Three years earlier Apple had begun selling the LaserWriter. Combined with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software, the world was waking up to the marvels of desktop publishing. Steve Jobs, who said…
Spare a thought for Indian business schools’ Class of 2013. These young women and men will be heading out into a world where financial well-being is not guaranteed, the global economy is epileptic, and the view from a management perch is vertiginous. “The bigger question is, how relevant are we in a changing world?” asks…
Song sung blue Everybody knows one Song sung blue Every garden grows one If you are of a certain vintage, you will have been moved by these Neil Diamond lines, sung on a hot August night almost exactly 40 years ago. This steamy August, India has been convulsed by the sudden expelling of decades of…
The day this issue of Business Today went to press, IBM Corporation completed one hundred years. What started as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, manufacturing computing scales, time clocks, and even coffee grinders, quickly grew into Big Blue, a vast global presence in computing under Tom Watson. Senior and Junior, building its power on the mainframe. Like…
The economy is whirling around in a populist spiral Pranab Mukherjee is starting to look worryingly like a feckless heir squandering his generous inheritance while his fretful guardian in the person of Duvvuri Subbarao tries to board up the door and keep the wolves at bay with a nail here and a nail there. The…
From the Editor “There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one,” said Baltasar Gracian, a 17th Century Spanish Jesuit monk. More of us could benefit by learning to speak little and be heard when we do speak characteristics of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Kumar Mangalam Birla. Both were born with…
From the Editor Pity the modern banker, who is described in one of the stories in this issue as “pin-striped”. In India, of course, some of the most powerful bankers sport bandhinis, ikats and kanthas. But you have to feel sorry for our bankers. We don’t have anarchists waving their fists at bank CEOS’ pay…
If you look down from a helicopter at any of India’s teeming cities you will see millions of people scurrying around using every known form of locomotion as they move between structures, many of them once described as skyscrapers when we were more down to earth, all busily engaged in every imaginable type of commerce,…
From the Editor India’s Parliament House does not resemble a ziggurat, but it does remind me of the Tower of Babel and how God descended to earth to check things out. He was so alarmed by what seemed achievable by all humans speaking one language, we are told, that he decided to scatter them and…
From the Editor I had never handled a tool in my life; and yet, in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools. However, I made abundance of things, even without tools; and some with no more…
From the Editor In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature with a bull’s head and a man’s body who dwelt at the centre of the Cretan maze or labyrinth. Theseus killed the monster, but forgot to put up a white sail to signal his victory when he returned to Athens, and his distraught father…
From the Editor Some things were on a fast track as the heat dragged us into the dog days of June, and some were on a slow track. A hirsute man in ochre raiment was about to stop eating, and since we at BT chronicle business it is relevant to note that Ramdev’s Patanjali Yoga…
From the Editor I once knew a Chief Financial Officer who took a course in “Interpersonal skills. Asked why he needed to learn to get along better with his colleagues, he said: “Because I want to learn to say ‘No’ with a smile.” Bean counters have always been feared for their attention to budgets, line…
Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India of traffic chaos, noise and tumult. Gujarat’s administrative capital reminded me more of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s high-tech capital complex outside Kuala Lumpur, than of the headquarters of Modi Unlimited. The Gujarat…
From the Editor I remember when I was a child eating the only canned peas available then. They were hard, bland and left a metallic taste in my mouth. Even if they were drowned in ketchup or smothered by spices, they remained barely edible. Why would anybody want to aspire to a “phoren” lifestyle when…
From The Editor It seems churlish to sound a pessimistic note about India’s economy when a large contingent of our business and political leaders is hard at work evangelizing “India Inclusive” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Here in teeming India, though, we could not help gathering several worrying threads in a cautionary skein.…
From the Editor “If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble a little the supreme splendour of the Lord…. I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.” The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 11-12 & 32 Julius Robert…
From the Editor “Sssssay now … what we have we here?” hisses Kaa the snake in The Jungle Book, smacking his lips over Mowgli. “Jusssst you wait till I get you in my coils!” Corruption certainly seemed to be strangling the Incredible India magic this fortnight. It began with nationwide conniption over corruption as Anna…
From the Editor “Chamko … kapdon ke liye behtereen sabun. Bar-bar, lagatar. Chamko. Kapdon mein chakachaundh chamak lane ke liye. Khushbudar, jhaagwala – Chamko.” Romance blooms when charming salesgirl Deepti Naval turns up at the bachelor digs of the shy and; gawky Farooque Shaikh to peddle a new brand of detergent in ‘Chashme Buddoor’. Life…
From the Editor Do you know what a “dominant undertaking” is Suresh Krishna does. The Chairman and Managing Director of Sundram Fasteners lived every day with the provisions of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices, or MRTP, Act. Every month in the ’70s and ’80s. Krishna would travel to Delhi to pace the corridors at…
From the Editor This has been a summer of discontent, and the portents are not auspicious. One day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced his second underwhelming Cabinet reshuffle this year, Mumbai was hit by three terrorist bombs. The markets took in both the fizzle and the pop with equanimity: the Sensex fell only 1.5…
From the Editor Stock markets and their behaviour are an inexact science. Technical analysts will study head and shoulders patterns, Fibonacci retracements, stochastic oscillators and sundry chicken entrails to tell you why prices are headed up or down. It’s like baking a bad lasagna- layers of febrile data, volatile fund flows, political flux, a government…
From the Editor Know one’s onions” means to know one’s subject well. But do we really know why our economy fares as it does, how supply and demand and rain and drought affect commodity prices and push food inflation close to 18 per cent, or the price of onions up by 350 per cent? Why…
From The Editor “Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up— very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched—except Uncle…
From the Editor When I lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, children at my daughter’s school could clamber into an “earthquake truck” for a foretaste of what The Big One might feel like. You held on while furniture and light fittings swayed, rattled and bounced around a simulated home inside the truck at the…
From the Editor Most of us are cursed with poor memory. We need episodic markers to help us measure our lives from one significant remembrance to another. Our collective memory is etched with historic events. The day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon/Indira Gandhi was assassinated/the Berlin Wall fell have calibrated the second half of…
From the Editor I remember my first car with great fondness. It was a Fiat 1100D, and I crashed it barely a month after my wife and I bought it. There was another crash a little later; we were the third owners of the car, but it held up well. Three years later we sold…
“Everybody is going to die, but I am going to die last.” He started out as a scrap trader in Patna. Today, with a personal fortune of $3.5 billion, Anil Agarwal is one of the richest men in the world. Over the last three decades, he has transformed the Vedanta Group into a $14-billion minerals…
Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under the gaze of an…
British historian and Harvard University professor [Niall Ferguson] An erudite scholar, acclaimed author, and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, British historian Niall Ferguson wears several hats. At the India Today Conclave, Ferguson spoke on “American decline: Myth and Reality”. On the Sidelines of the Conclave, BT’s Chaitanya Kalbag,…
The Jan Lokpal Bill may need to move from idealism to realism; the solution may also lie in granting independence and teeth to existing agencies created to fight corruption. The three men stood up, glowered at me, and began shouting in chorus. They ignored the business card I had introduced myself with. How dare I…
Since June 2005, when he took up the mantle of Non-executive Chairman of Hindustan Unilever (then Hindustan Lever), harish manwani has seen three executive leadership changes at the consumer goods major. First, there were two managing directors, Arun Adhikari and S. Ravindranath, under him. Expat Doug Baillie ran hul between March 2006 and April 2008…
YOGESH CHANDER DEVESHWAR has been with ITC for nearly 43 years. The past 15 years as chairman and chief executive. Having turned ITC into a multi-product company no longer synonymous with cigarettes, he is seeking a five-year extension during which a successor will be anointed. In a candid interview with CHAITANYA KALBAG, he talks of…
The US is on life support, and Asian creditors led by China, which holds $1.16 trillion of US treasuries, control the intravenous drip. Asian central banks will not be dumping their dollar assets, but there is no doubt that US power is waning. For a while there, it looked like we would all, lemming-like, race…