Mr Prime Minister, we shrank the dragon: THE INSPIRATION

Powerful semantics and widely dispersed optics evoke a sense of suspicion in me. Folks, It isn’t because of current Covid19 gloom and doom. It probably is my going through the School of Hard Knocks after I finished all schooling that stopped at handing me degrees and things. As a consequence, with me alarm bells ring when somebody’s hype after numerous other hypes keeps hitting me with sickening regularity.

China’s political system is one such entity. It has fooled the world into abject surrender through its low-cost manufacturing might, based on prison labour and below-sustenance level wages to its people. West didn’t care as long as it was getting stuff 20 to 50 percent cheaper than what they could have produced. Immediate gains, folks, immediate gains has been the mantra. China is flouting proprietary right by blatantly copying their designs. Well, let’s ignore it. They help me make much greater profit margin by making my smartphone cheap; I will live with their chicanery. China is dehumanizing millions in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Well, we will put aside our moralizing. “Look, how low my cost of production now is,” exulted Samsonite.

Through my life’s experiences, I have come to believe that compromising with your principles inevitably hits you big. It is not that India did not fall into this trap. It did. And it ruined many of its own small and medium scale industries. In India, the decades-long refrain has been that China is militarily all too powerful. So we decided to mollycoddle them by buying electronic parts, firecrackers and cheap stuff like doormats and plastic toys.

Well, you allow someone to go on pulling wool over your eyes, he will. If it is China, it is a pastmaster at that.

Many Indians sitting in Delhi and in position of power chose to think afresh. I thought along those lines too. I mean, what on Earth are we dithering about! Vietnam could eventually scare the Americans to retreat and also make China run for cover; did they not? Haven’t we ourselves foiled them in 1967 and recently in Doklam?

That realization struck me like a ton of bricks. Then as a problem solving exercise—bless my corporate management experience—I figured why can’t I find a solution that takes care of some perineal problem area such as Pakistan’s intransigence. Liberation of Balochistan suggested itself. Pakistan is truncated one more time and China’s much-touted CPEC goes for a toss.

*****

Comments

Kohli and Smith, a la Tharoor

Now that Virat Kohli and Steve Smith are once again facing each other down under, a friend asked me to compare them—batting prowess and all. It was pretty late in the evening, and it would be a fair guess that I had guzzled quite a few shots more than what I should have. I cannot explain it, but somehow on such occasions a bit of Shashi Tharoor seeps into me. The comparison, as a result, went like hereunder; Kohli is all brio prior to steadying himself to face the ball. Thereafter, an uncanny blend of organization and destruction, fricassees a delectable stew. Smith appears antsier with his outre and wacky routine at the crease. You agonize whether that is an idiosyncratic boondoggle or an act of some substance. For some recondite reason though that prefatory drouks quietude in him, and readies him to lacerate the bowler: the final product a non sequitur to what was transpiring when the bowler was readying himself for the run up to the crease. Or, is it a carefully woven pha...

The Vaccine Conundrum

A vaccine developed and ready to be injected in less than one year is a miracle that no research laboratory or pharmaceutical company would have dreamed of before 2020 began. Their track record has been that Jonas Salk’s lightning-fast development of polio vaccine in less than 4 years, and Ebola vaccine was approved in December 2019 after the first Ebola incidence was found in 1976, i.e. more than 40 years after. From discovery to approved vaccination is a 10-year long process involving 2-5 years of discovery research, 2 years of pre-clinical period, 5 years of clinical development at its very best, 1-2 years of regulatory approval, and then of course comes in the manufacturer. The clinical development period has its 3 phases that is creating the buzz we hear day in and day out these days. Phase I is when researchers concentrate on the question, “Is it safe?” Phase II tries to establish whether the vaccine is activating an immune response or not. Then comes Phase III when they ans...

Disruption for Common Good

The word ‘disruption’ didn’t stand for anything good until Clayton Christensen, in his famous 1995 article posted in the Harvard Business Review, repurposed it in a positive context. What exactly is disruption though? In business parlance, when an upstart, e.g. Uber takes on the limousine car market and then expands itself to take on taxis, and does it all through a simpler model and cheaper processes, it is disruptive innovation. In that respect disruptive innovation is just a strategy to help new entrants dislodge long-time incumbents. The success or failure of the strategy is reflected in the bottom line of the entrant’s financials. And disruption is no longer limited to products and services. It is eminently relevant to bringing about social change. Its success takes a long time to show up after successive hiccups that invite disapprovals. Today, what critical disruptions are needed in India? First, all Indians need to be convinced that the people living on this l...

Pradeep Goorha

Search This Blog