Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
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…
From the Editor On June 1, as the mercury hit 47 Celsius and turned Delhi’s roads — or what passes for them in most parts — into pancake griddles, the government released a report that feebly tried to suggest remedies for the human-resource mess in Air India. The same day there was bad news about…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have noted the gold-plating stage yet, but we certainly know…
It’s hard to be a couch potato in India because (a) most homes have stiff, unyielding sofas; (b) it’s not easy to set yourself up with a six-pack of beer and a bag of chips unless you go on a major shopping expedition; (c) your wife wants to watch Saraswatichandra threatened by a lynch mob…
English with an American accent, there were jokes about being the “51st US state”, the US military had a huge presence, and the economy was heavily indebted to a consortium of mostly-American banks. Fifteen years later I was listening to a JP Morgan executive in an office in Makati, the business district in Manila, tell…
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…
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…
I remember back in the 1970s, when a new India was just over a quarter of a century old, Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his foreword to his “Calcutta” wrote: “The imperial residue of Calcutta, a generation after Empire ended. is both a monstrous and a marvellous city. Journalism and television have given us a rough idea…
They say nothing sharpens our minds as much as high danger or a threat to our survival. We are prepared to stand and fight when we are cornered. Twenty-two years ago, when we were staring into the abyss, we pulled a reformist rabbit out of our socialist hat. But it took just about five years…
From the Editor These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that we Indians seem…
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and It is all moving…
Although commerce is older even than the thirty pieces of silver that persuaded Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus Christ, it took humans a long time to start to formally teach, and learn, the elements of business. The oldest business school in the world, ESCP Europe, was set up in Paris in 1819, a pipsqueak in…
From the Editor When I stepped into this role in mid-2010, it seemed India was unstoppable. Gross Domestic Product growth had averaged 8.5 per cent since 2004, when the United Progressive Alliance won power. The financial markets in the United States and Europe were in disarray after the US sub-prime crisis laid down a napalm…
From the Managing Editor An early breakfast is something that most journalists don’t care for. Most of my tribe skip it and among those who don’t, very few sip their coffee before 10 am. Like Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, we finish our days late and start them late, you see. It was, therefore, unusual for…
From the Editor Raghuram Govind Rajan is a lucky man. Two weeks into his new job as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India his friend Ben Bernanke, who he calls “cautious and nuanced” in his book Fault Lines, handed him a big gift- a delay in the “taper” in the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative…
From the Editor Once every year, we pay obeisance to the best and strongest companies in India. It is not grudging admiration. Our corporate icons deserve every bit of their applause. No management school, or case study, or how-to hardback that you pick up at an airport bookstore can teach you how to plot a…
At Business Today we write about companies all the time. Often, it is a top-down view. We meet the Chief Executive Officer, the senior members of the management team, the stock-market analysts whose job it is to keep a gimlet eye on their wards, the suppliers, the competitors, the regulators. But it is very important,…
Exactly two years ago we ran a cover story on India’s skills crisis. This was just after Subramanian Ramadorai was named Adviser to the Prime Minister in the National Council on Skill Development. How quickly have we moved down the skilling highway? Glacially slow, and frighteningly so. For a nation where tens of millions of…
In 1908, when Henry Ford began making his revolutionary Model Ts on an assembly line in Detroit, there were 241 carmakers in the United States. (In comparison, India has 20 carmakers in 2013). “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the…
Sometimes India’s economy resembles a rambunctious teenager brought up short by a finger-wagging headmaster. Our finance minister can now recite with his eyes closed a string of figures that seek to prove that India has not done badly at all in comparison with the rest of the developing- and indeed the developed- world. P. Chidambaram…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT-YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
From the Editor I remember sticking an aluminium one-yen coin and a copper one-US-cent coin to my computer screen in Tokyo around the mid-1990s and watching in fascination Las they became equal in value, with the yen appreciating to 100 to the dollar. It was nice for frequent travellers like me- when I paid my…
From the Editor Looking down at my bowl of gazpacho at dinner one recent night. I realised that I do not own a single moustache spoon, with guards, so that guests with resplendent whiskers could eat soup and not leave any trace behind- the kind made for Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner around 1900. Nor…
From the Editor We need to place the AgustaWestland helicopter “kerfuffle”- as a former defence minister put it- in context. The 12 AW101s were headed for the Indian Air Force’s Communication Squadron, which flies VVIPs around. to replace its ageing Mi-8 fleet. The new helicopters are strictly not combat craft-they are personnel carriers and can…
From the Editor Within the space of a week, I met N.R. Narayana Murthy for a long and friendly conversation at his airy venture-capital office in Bangalore’s Jayanagar suburb and then conducted telephone interviews with the company’s Chairman, K.V. Kamath, who was in Mumbai and its CEO, S.D. Shibulal, who was attending the World Economic…
From the Editor Most of us are lucky if we get fifteen minutes of fame. You can be famous, but not rich. Fame is fleeting, and unless you are V.S. Naipaul, your best shot at fame is when you are young or Amitabh Bachchan, in good health, good to look at, and very good at…
From the Editor Many, many moons ago, I used to visit a cousin pursuing his B.Tech. programme at IIT Madras. The campus was beautiful; of an early Sunday morning you saw deer darting past drowsy students who had lolled around the amphitheatre the night before watching a movie after consuming a special dinner in the…
From the Editor The US Congress stepped back just in time from the fiscal cliff, but Indian sensibilities about the Delhi gang rape and killing fell off another cliff days before we went to press. P.N. Vasanti of the CMS Media Lab told me that coverage of the rape aftermath (and by that I mean mostly…
From the Editor We are waiting to exhale. Food prices fell in the last fortnight of December, for the first time in six years, and headline inflation is expected to drop sharply to about 7.5 per cent in December. The rupee has risen two weeks in a row. Industrial production rose 5.9 per cent in…
From the Editor Three economists are gazing at a glass half full of water. The optimist sees a glass half full. The pessimist sees a glass half empty. The realist picks up the glass and drinks the water. I’m sure you’ve heard that joke, but we are hard put to find some levity as we…
From the Editor Companies and human beings are surprisingly similar. Over a long period of time we build an intricate geodesic dome of habits, rules. principles, emotions, likes and dislikes. Changing ourselves is very. very difficult, even when we know that our future well-being, prosperity and happiness depend on how we change and adapt. Similarly,…
From the Editor It was a bracing week: I started and ended it with conversations with honest men whose cleanliness shone through. Both had had something to do with ‘national resources’ up in the stratosphere or deep down beneath the seabed. There is much financial skullduggery afoot, but we have not run out of sentinels,…
From the Editor One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At ev’ry word a reputation dies. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3 At every word of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Manmohan Singh’s reputation has…
From the Editor I have a confession to make. Many moons ago, I studied to be an accountant and despite one of the world’s toughest entry barriers with single-digit-pass rates in the chartered accountancy examinations-dreamt of crunching numbers while boning up on ‘double-entry bookkeeping’ and the mysteries of profit and loss. But the world of…
From the Editor The word “flurry” is used to describe a sudden blast or gust, or a sudden commotion, and it. has been used frequently to label the announcements from the government’s blunderbuss over the past three weeks. My dictionary also tells me flurry is the “death-agony of the whale”, but we don’t want that,…
Competition is fierce and kicking in India, not least between business magazines. Which is why we love being flies on the wall as we watch the 800-pound gorillas slug it out with the upstarts in their pens. The stories are always riveting. They tell us why long-time incumbents drowse at the top of the tree;…
The day before this issue of Business Today hits news stands, America will vote for a new president. The day after you invest less than 80 US cents in our quality journalism (in the event that you paid its full cover price), the Chinese Communist Party will meet to anoint a new leadership. Both transitions…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have not got to the gold-plating stage yet, but we…
A laughter club in Mumbai is forced to “zip it” because a humourless neighbour is disturbed, not long after a 63-year-old cartoon unleashes a cleansing of school textbooks that would warm a tin-pot dictator’s heart. In the same “cosmopolitan” city, a woman is arrested for possessing liquor that she was using to make chocolates, and…
From the Editor The deeper we sail into the economic doldrums, the greater is the wonderment that there is so much locked-up promise in India that we cussedly ignore. Politics oozes from every pore of ours; we expect the economy to take care of itself. Over the past few months I have talked in great…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we story tellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page-views.…
From the Editor When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be …
From the Editor Caprice and cowardice were both on display last fortnight. Ten days after a bunch of state election results delivered a hard punchi in the Congress party’s solar plexus, Pranab Mukherjee delivered a Budget for 2012/13 that was simultaneously retrograde and revanchist. Reformist it was not, and neither was it bold, despite many…
From the Editor Our Prime Minister can seem like an accidental politician. Speaking publicly, he comes across as earnestly wooden, and when he addressed the nation on September 21, the eve of the autumnal equinox, you often felt the tele-prompter was scrolling up faster than Manmohan Singh could enunciate, But speak he did, and many…
From the Editor What a fortnight it has been. We have plumbed new depths in animus and acrimony. Not a day goes by without a shrieking melee, either at a press conference or on the streets. The “Reform Spring” has very quickly faded into a fruit-salad autumn, with mangoes and bananas flying around in a…
From the Editor “I am a tiny speck in a sea of brands, buffeted by colour, geometry and neon, a homo brandus furiously rowing his flimsy coracle as it is carried inexorably towards the lethal rapids of consumerism. “Brand” has interesting etymology. We say something “brands itself on our consciousness” or that our latest purchase…
From the Editor Why did god create stock-market analysts? To make weather forecasters look good, runs the rather puerile joke. But seriously, company analysis is an earnest business-in much of the world, that is, except India. I remember in my wire-service days we used to have lively debates on how to report stock price movements…
From the Editor Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 If you have ever had the misfortune of falling…
From the Editor By the time this issue of Business Today hits the news stands, voting for new governments in three Indian states will be completed. The seven-phase Uttar Pradesh election will stretch through February. Tiny Goa follows in early March. When the votes are counted on March 6, one in five Indians will have…
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…
Jeff Immelt stepped into Jack Welch’s shoes four days before 9/11. Even more than the legendary Welch, he has GE blood in his veins – his father worked for the company and he met his wife at the company. The 28-year-old GE veteran stands six feet four and has a firm grip, as befits an…
Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
Just as we were putting this special issue of Business Today to bed. Thomas M. Hoenig. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote a provocative essay titled Too Big to Succeed in The New York Times, noting that America’s five largest financial institutions are 20 per cent bigger than they were before…
Senior Editor of this newspaper were about to sit down for their evening news-planning meeting when the smoke alarms started jangling. Within moments the first floor newsrooms filled with thick billowing smoke. Journalist for both the Hindustan Times and its sister Hindi newspaper, Hindustan, began to file out and down the stairs There was no…
And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him…stupendous.” …
Have you heard the story about Warren Buffett, the 215 millionaires, and the coin-flipping orangutans? It takes some telling and you will have to buy a biography of the Sage of Omaha to read it. The point the world’s canniest investor made (in 1984) was that markets are not efficient, stocks are not all priced…
H for Hitler. A for arrogant, R for rascal, I for idiot …” I’m sure many of us remember the “Hari Sadu” commercial about the cheeky young man getting back at his nasty boss because he’s already heard from job site naukri.com. It was acid, funny, and emblematic of the “me do” generation that is…
Sexual harassment can be crude and overt or very subtle, but you know you are being sexually harassed when you experience it. Those around you may even be oblivious to it, especially if the dominant work culture is male. Harassment is upsetting, threatening, and insidious. It can be obliquely transmitted through glance or gesture or…
Nothing matches the rush of blood to the brain when you read super-sized success stories. Nothing tells the story of the Milky Way of densely-packed stars across India’s business sky as vividly as our annual BT500 rankings. Year after year, from the first listing in Business Today’s March 7-22 1992 issue, the rankings have chronicled…
Remember when mall meant a tree-shaded promenade in Shimla or one of those picturesque cantonment towns, and plastic was when your grandmother graduated from tin buckets in the bath- room? Now the Oxford dictionary lists “malling: the action of passing time at a shopping mall”, and tykes, tots, teens and tweens wash through our malls…
You won’t get the lounges with pile carpeting, deep sofas, canapés and laptop docks. You don’t have the noise and to-do of Mamatadi’s Duronto non-stop trains either. What you do get is efficient ground staff checking you in at the airport; much better on-time performance than the larger carriers, smart and purposeful crew members; crisp…
India is a land of plenty. It is also a land of plenty of waste. If you suffer Malthusian nightmares of the Great Unfed Billions, think of the food we produce that we don’t even consume. We could be buried by an avalanche of fruit (15 per cent of global output) and vegetables (11 per…
I had my epiphany on a Seoul subway in 2004. All around me, young men and women rode to work silently, mesmerised by television programmes streaming live into their handsets. Digital Multimedia Broadcasting was just starting off, but South Korea was already one of the most wired nations on earth — more than 70 per…
A professional suitable match for a beautiful, slim MBA Punjabi girl… Boy to be MBA, Engineer, CA.” Not too long ago, in the matrimonial ads crowding our weekend newspapers, brides or grooms looking for a mate proudly proclaimed that they were “BA Pass”, the key to a happy life. No longer, though. India produces millions…
Kishore Biyani reveals why he sold a controlling stake in his flagship Pantaloons stores to the Aditya Birla Group in a candid conversation with Chaitanya Kalbag Kishore Biyani is waiting, relaxed, in a darkened hotel suite. He’s just flown in from cool London to broiling Gurgaon. He talks softly and very fast, jumping in before…