English or Kannada?

On the one hand, you have Friedmans of the world proclaiming that the world is flat; praising technology and English for bringing Bangalore closer to the Bay area. On the other, you have politicians in Karnataka who want to stop kids from learning in English. Regionalism? Nationalism? Linguistic zeal? Cheap gimmick to secure votes? Perhaps all of the above.
Here's a discussion on the issue:
The Indian Economy Blog » English Language Schools In Karnataka

Da. Raj no more

It would be an understatement to call him a film actor. Dr. Rajkumar was a phenomenon in Karnataka. After 77 summers and 206 films, he breathed his last yesterday. His end marked the beginning of violent scenes that rocked Bangalore for two days. Mobs on a rampage, the papers proclaimed. Four, correction five, correction eight dead, including a policeman, they exclaimed.

Millions of his fans lost an icon. But the first family of Kannada cinema lost someone close to them. If only the masses had the decency to allow the family to grieve! Poor sons of his, they had to shout into microphones begging for calm.

The man held sway over Karnataka for over five decades, starring opposite several generation of leading ladies. Now I admit, toward the later years, it was painful to see him sing and dance. But people still flocked to the cinemas! He dominated the scene like no other. In South Indian cinema, you had MGR and Sivaji Ganesan jostling for position in Tamil Nadu. North of that border, in Andhra Pradesh, you had NTR and ANR dueling for top spot. In Karnataka though, it was Da. Raj all the way. Sure you had Uday Kumar, Kalyan Kumar, Vishnuvardhan and the like. They were no match really.

A memorable scene from one of his films? With someone like Rajkumar, one is not enough; I'll give you two: waking up in the Himalayas and breaking out into a song "naadamaya" in Jeevana Chaitra; and the plaintive cry at the end of the movie Sanadi Appanna -- "paapuuu..."

"Cut! That's a wrap", the Director has yelled.

Is the Next Silicon Valley Taking Root in Bangalore? - New York Times

From NYT:

BANGALORE, India, March 19 — Twenty young engineers, mostly from the Indian Institute of Technology, India's premier technology school, peer into computer monitors in the no-frills office of Read-Ink Technologies, a start-up company housed in a small building in the bustling Indiranagar neighborhood of this city.

Bangalore's flourishing outsourcing companies, including Infosys Technologies and Wipro, have attracted worldwide attention with their global clients and tens of thousands of workers. Less known are the many technology start-ups, like Read-Ink, that have taken root here in recent years.

The new firms are drawn by the region's big pool of engineering graduates, many of whom have expertise in esoteric new technologies. That advantage, coupled with labor costs much lower than those of Silicon Valley, is starting to turn Bangalore, long a center for lower-end outsourcing services, into a center of higher-end innovation.

Some of these firms are self-financed, others have capital from the West. Some are run by foreigners. Others are founded by Indians, including returnees from overseas.

Read-Ink, one of the self-financed operations, is developing an advanced handwriting recognition software that can read scanned forms, claim forms, medical records and even digital tablets.

Its founders, Thomas O. Binford, a retired computer science professor from Stanford University, and his wife, Ione, a former manager at Hewlett-Packard, arrived here four years ago with five suitcases. They say they are now close to signing up their first business customer.

The signs of this shift toward high-value work are becoming more visible. Executives at Silicon Valley Bank, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and provides consulting services to technology and venture capital firms, said they were seeing twice as many Indian start-ups looking for capital investment than even a few months ago.

"Our technology and private equity clients are leveraging India at an unprecedented rate," said Kenneth P. Wilcox, chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank and SVB Financial Group.

When the members of the Bangalore chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit network for entrepreneurs, collaborated with the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham to sponsor a business plan competition last month, they were stunned to draw 125 entries vying for the $150,000 top prize.

At the same time, Bangalore is becoming a hunting ground for venture capitalists looking for promising investment opportunities, such as Promod Haque, managing partner at the venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners in Palo Alto, Calif.

About 40 percent of Norwest Venture's portfolio companies, or about 20 companies, have development operations in India, mainly in Bangalore. "More and more people are figuring out that Bangalore is a critical step in making start-ups capital-efficient," Mr. Haque said, explaining that cost savings here can help stretch initial investment funds.

Mr. Haque is taking a hybrid approach to investment. He pairs entrepreneurs of Indian origin who have returned to India (many have spent time working in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) with Western executives who have marketing and management expertise.

One of his investments is Open-Silicon, a two-year-old silicon engineering company. Its chief executive is based here, but its headquarters and marketing chief are based in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Like Open-Silicon, which has most of its customers within a five-mile radius of its headquarters, many technology start-ups are servicing American and European markets," Mr. Haque said.

Indrion Technologies, another new Bangalore start-up, has six engineers working on embedded semiconductor solutions for sensor-control networks. Its co-founder and chief executive, Uma Mahesh, a computer science engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, is optimistic that he can attract venture capital because innovation among India's new companies is "a very believable story for investors."

Perhaps not surprisingly, this increased start-up activity in Bangalore has caught the eye of influential American lawmakers. Many American political and business leaders have said they are worried about a technological brain drain from the United States to places overseas.

Representative Jerry Lewis, a California Republican who is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said that he was trying to find a government agency to sponsor projects in areas like nanotechnology, semiconductors, energy and pharmaceuticals, and possibly to collaborate with agencies in India.

"We are figuring out what kind of support and funding is needed from the Congress," Mr. Lewis said in a phone interview, adding, "The issue is not so much about losing innovation leadership as it is about how to make innovations happen on a cheaper scale and how to make more of it happen."

That Bangalore can be an incubator city for start-ups is demonstrated in Read-Ink, which the Binfords have financed entirely from their savings and retirement fund. They live and work in the same building, saving on rent. The ground floor contains a kitchen and employee dining room as well as the Binfords' bedroom and employees' guest rooms.

Mrs. Binford also runs an all-night accounting back-office service for American customers. "It is a small service with seven accountants," she said, "but helps cover the costs."

Improving the accuracy of handwriting recognition beyond what currently marketed software products offer is a complicated technical problem. "Current products have an accuracy rate of 80-85 percent; ours will be a 5-7 percent improvement," said Mr. Binford, Read-Ink's chief technology officer.

But in getting there, the Binfords have struggled to recruit and retain the best engineers in a competitive market. They said they had deliberately stayed in stealth mode for fear of talent poachers.

There are other growing pains. Finding venture investors at the early stages of a start-up business can be difficult because the majority of investors prefer to make safer later-stage investments. There is also a lack of homegrown innovators serving as role models.

"The entrepreneurial heroes of the Valley are accessible to many people," said Sabeer Bhatia, who moved from Bangalore to the Silicon Valley and co-founded Hotmail, later acquired by the Microsoft Corporation.

Sridhar Mitta, president of the Bangalore chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs, said, "We are not going to be another Valley anytime soon," but he added, "The city can match up with Boston or Austin as a competitive place to start up innovative product companies."

Is the Next Silicon Valley Taking Root in Bangalore? - New York Times

Goodbye, tata

Its true what they say about death and taxes. There's no running from either. But what they don't tell you, what they can't tell you, what you can only know is how much it sucks. Well, death, at least. For its sheer finality. Earlier this week, on Sunday morning my 80-something grandfather passed away. Regular readers of this blog may recall him I referred to him in this entry.

To me - not that the world revolves around me - but, this was the probably the first time I was left with a vague sensation of having undergone a thoracotomy without morphine or such. Remind me to send a memo to all those new-age and old-age gurus who preach peachy optimism of the "It will always get better" variey. "Ah, not true", I say. Just when you think it can't get worse, guess what - it can.

All the comforting thoughts in the world - at least it was a quick (and hopefully painless) death, he had lived a full life, he was surrounded by his family just the day before, etc. - do little to lessen that hollow feeling. It sucks, in a very deep and profound way.

Flash back to Saturday night, when it is Sunday morning in India, thanks to the magic of time zones. I sit down to dinner. Barely two chews later, my brother calls up. In an apparent euphemistic message, he says tata is in the ICU (tata translates to grandfather in Kannada. Said with soft "t"'s). As I dial my uncle's cellphone, I cling to a moment of self-created deluded naivete that was shattered by a "Naresha, sad news" greeting. What follows is an extended period of utter helplessness and pangs of nostalgia.

Back in days when life, as I knew it, was simple, my grandparents lived in a quaint little old town Mysore (Maisuru), about 3 hours from bustling Bangalore, which we called home. About a decade ago, they moved to Bangalore, to where most of his family lived. Before that though, almost every vacation from school meant a much-anticipated trip to the town of palaces, parks and grandparents. During our stay there, thanks to tata, we were assured of treats from Shyam Rao bakery (the taste of rusku still lingers on ... ) and evening trips to Cheluvamba park. And how we enjoyed exploring the zoo with him! Or the boys' outing to the railway museum, where we hopped on and off old, rusty trains under his watchful eyes; ogled at the maharani's luxurious coaches. And ended a perfect evening with sweet coconut water.

Not that it was all a party during those days. You see, he and I had very different ideas on how to spend the first part of the day during vacations. He believed in the get-up-early routine, whereas I was in love with the back of my eyelids. Every morning he used to read Kumara Vyasa's Bharata, not too quietly, I might add. Later in the day he would quote verses, explaining the literary beauty in that book. The geeks that we were, we loved it.

One of the things that I loved most was when the two us would go down to the bus stop in the morning and watch those red buses. Sitting there beside him, sometimes on his lap, reading the numbers on the bus, I was happy. As I was when he regaled us with tales of elephants -Drona, Balarama and the like- and Dasara.

He had a way with kids. A picture that many of us who knew him will carry in our mind's eye is him sitting on his favorite chair, one leg crossed over the other knee forming a square, where one of us grandkids or greatgrandkids gleefully gooed gibberish. And he sang lullabies (for the record, my favorite: eesha ninna charaNa bhajane) or talked to the baby in baby-speak in a way, only he could.

Religion and spirituality was a big part of his life. Apart from the usual festivals, an annual Gita chanting during the winter month saw several people at my grandparents'. A couple of years ago, he was briefly hospitalized and the doctors wanted to observe his condition for another day before discharging him. But he insisted on going home to perform the rituals on the anniversary of his mother's death.

Stubborn, he sure was! Ironically her's, my great-grandmother's that is, was the first death I remember. I was all of four, old enough to prefer long pants and shun shorts, when she passed away. That evening, a bunch of us squeezed into a taxi and headed down to Mysore. I saw him in the verandah. He bent down and said with a wistful melancholy, "nammamma hogbitlu kano" (roughly translated, "my mother's passed away").

One thing that mattered very dearly to him was people. He wanted them to remain close, to be connected. May be that is why he built bridges for a living, as an engineer in the public works department. Every time we spoke, in person or over the phone, he had a come-back-to-Bangalore message. And I am sure he said that before I boarded the plane after my previous visit. It has been a little over two years since. In the past two some days, I have tried to recall what he said last. I remember the blessings and the nice things he always said. But that snapshot in time of how exactly we parted, that eludes me. Its funny. When you meet someone, you don't think its going to be the last time you are going to see them. May be then we'd remember more clearly.

At the end of our vacation in Mysore, he'd accompany us to the bus station to see us off. Invariably, he'd shed a tear as he waved to us before the bus departed. Now, his bus has departed for the last time. I wasn't there to wave goodbye. Its my turn to shed a tear.

Bangalore, Karnataka Bihared

Not too long ago, Laloo Prasad Yadav's reign came crashing down after his debacle in the state assembly elections. Bihar, notorious for its lawlessness and chaos, seemed to have taken one step in the right direction after innumerable mis-steps. It would be foolish to think we've heard the last from Laloo, the self-appointed kingmaker. Like cockroaches, he has shown the capacity to survive any political outcome of even nuclear war proportions. His shrewdness may be commendable, but the sheer stupidity of the people who propel him into office again and again and again, is shocking.

The thing about cockroaches is that their remarkable reproducing rate allows them to not only outlast, but outnumber anything that can threaten their existence; feeding on virtually everything in their habitat. If its Laloo-roach in the north, its DeveGowda-roach in the south. A self-appointed kingmaker in the state of Karnataka, the former PM has held the state government, now on the brink of collapse, under a tight leash. The humble farmer, as he tirelessly reminds us, has toiled hard to make sure every project in Bangalore is either scrapped, or worse, suspended in time. His excuse? The best interests of the people, of course. Never mind that the voters gave a resounding slap in the face at the recent panchayat elections. Never mind that Bangalore is crumbling, according to every Bangalorean's assessment of the city.

As if his pathetic posturing was not enough, he has set off a whole new political drama. The players: the constantly cribbing Chief Minister Dharam 'cry baby' Singh (DS); the son of the soil Deve 'secular' Gowda (DG), his sons DG Jr.-I, DG Jr.-II.

DS is running a coalition government supported by DG's party. DG, increasingly peeved at not being able to regress Bangalore into a village, decides to withdraw support. DG Jr.-II enters into a pact with the main opposition party (BJP) and claims to have the backing of an overwhelming majority of DG's party. They want to form an alternative government. It is blatantly obvious the sycophants in DG's party wouldn't have the nerve to rebel against the 'man'. Much less when taking sides against the man, in favor of his son. DG is being shrewd, of course. He cannot shake hands with his sworn enemies, the BJP.

The question is whether the people of Karnataka see through this factitious facade or will the ensure that Karnataka is Bihared?

My grandfather in the news!

Stand up, speak up, shout out. That's what my grandfather does when things don't work the way they are supposed to. He may be 80 years old, but that does not stop him from making all the right noises. As reported here, the State Bank of India had not bothered to fix a 'software problem' that cost senior citizens interest that rightfully belonged to them. I'm glad to know my tata had a role in correcting the wrong. Here's a quote from the article: "Says 80-year old S Nagaraja Rao, an accountholder with the Sri Nagar branch of SBI in Bangalore, "I have five deposits of Rs25,000 each. At 9 per cent rate, every quarter Rs563 has to be credited to each of my accounts. But the actual amount that got credited used to be Rs550, Rs553, etc." Each time he had to contact branch officials to get the correct amount credited to his accounts."

Indian elections

For a few days now, I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog. I suppose its mostly out of a bloated sense of self-importance! At any rate, the recent Indian elections seemed like a good excuse to web-ify my rants from time to time. So here goes ...

The dance of democracy in India has certainly thrown up more than its fair share of surprises. Firstly, the defeat of the BJP-led coalition shocked and surprised most political pundits. The I-told-you-so'ers like Swaminathan Aiyar in the Times of India were a minority. Whether people had an issue with BJP's policies or not, everybody was sad to see Mr. Vajpayee leave. His holding out the olive branch to Pakistan, in spite of Musharaf's backstabbing etc., will probably be his crowning achievement in the history books to come. Jim Hoagland, in his column in the Washington Post thinks the increasing closeness of Vajpayee administration with the US cost the incumbents dearly. Likening Brajesh Mishra, the national security advisor, to Star Wars' Yoda, Hoagland bemoans the defeat of the NDA government.

Congress, under Sonia Gandhi seems to have gone the Madonna way - by reinventing itself. Rather, it has gone back to its time-tested campaign tactics - the dynasty and food, water, power slogan. In one of her speeches, Ms. Gandhi says it was time "to do something for the poor". How wonderfully vague! What's more, it seems to satisfy the Indian voter! It was certain that Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin would become an issue now that she had a real shot at the top job.

The communist parties (yup, they're still around!) were suddenly thrust into the national limelight. With the support of the Left a necessity for minority Congress to survive in the Parliament, people had to take notice of what the Left parties had to say. And boy, they fired some serious shots at the business community. Demolish the privatization ministry, they said. The issue Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin and now the left parties' shenanigans. This one-two punch was too much for the markets and the indices tumbled. Brokers must've been saying, 'gravity sucks!' And then began a day or two of "will she? won't she?" suspense. Will Sonia Gandhi lead the next Indian government? Many of the major newspaper editorials pooh-poohing BJP's criticism's of the foreign issue used big words like inclusiveness, plural ethos etc. in supporting Ms. Gandhi's bid. Some like the Pioneer didn't share those sentiments. Finally, following her "inner voice," she declined the PM post. The die-hard Congress loyalists were aghast. Many others breathed a collective sigh of relief. And a few like Mike Marqusee in the Guardian cannot resist using the "R" word. He thinks Indian Hindus are racists. Hmm.. I wonder black men and women Britain or the United States has elected to serve in the highest offices?! That might be too much to ask for, given that in America's centuries old democratic traditions, the first Catholic President was JFK!

As the dust settles down, Dr. Manmohan Singh, best known for starting the economic reforms in '91, is set to take over as the Prime Minister. Like Mr. Vajpayee, Dr. Singh is well-respected man both in India and abroad. Congratulations, Mr. Prime Minister!

On a related note, in the Andhra Pradesh (AP) assembly elections, the cyber savvy Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu was voted out of office. George Manbiot, in his column in the Guardian has an interesting note about it. According to him, Naidu's defeat amounts to Tony Blair's defeat since all those programs that were so doggedly pursued in AP were planned out by the US consultancy agency, McKinsey and financed partly by Blair's government.