Reflections

One of the most curious aspects of the West’s approach toward the East is its transparent hypocrisy. They are hypocritical, and they are completely transparent about it—they simply do not care what others think. The Western Coterie and Selective Solidarity Look at the phrase "the Western civilization." Everywhere you look—in video after video, article after article, television series, news broadcasts, and political decisions—we constantly encounter the phrase "Western civilization." Their movies proclaim membership in this civilization, and their politicians speak of the West as a single, unified unit. That is fine, but they shouldn't expect others not to band into units of their own.   Look at BRICS. BRICS was envisaged as a platform where developing countries could meet each other’s needs. Yet, the West tend to see it as "anti-West." This is absurd, for BRICS is a collection of nations spanning deep Western allies like South Africa, neut...

  In the millennia before the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s there were large families. Not only were people living in joint families, parents had 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 children and more. What that did was it these two factors, the joint family system and large immediate families, parents with large number of children built a strong interconnected family structure. The effect of this was compounded by the gotra system wherein the relationship was supposed to be maintained over the past five generations; after five generations you could intermarry because then it was considered that the blood relationship had broken. Now in this contextual background it developed a society which was deeply interconnected and it developed a family system which was deeply interconnected. People cared about each other not just real brothers and sisters but even cousins. That is why when marriages took place entire villages were involved and a lot of people came because there were a lot of interconnecti...

The location was not a place where you expect to learn a life lesson – it was the SILC Center in Pune, at the Learning & Development Rendezvous, an event of the L&D Global Pune Chapter, on the 8 th of October; on the menu was an eclectic mix of a Power Negotiation Panel Discussion and a Leadership Masterclass; these are not things that lead to such esoteric things as Life Lessons – nonetheless, the surprise item floored me, and touched my heart… The Meeting With the founder of Snehvan A SOFTWARE ENGINEER ON A DIFFERENT PATH What do you do when you are a software engineer? Especially if you are from village? You go to the rarified environs of a Software company, and earn money and create a better material future for yourself and your family; even going abroad in a few cases, perhaps leaving India for good in some cases. These are stories you have read ad-nauseum in the news; you have read of the CEOs of American companies who left India, plastered all over the m...

BUILDING AN ASPIRATIONAL HALO AROUND LOCAL SUCCESSES One of the most surprising aspects of our collective behavior, as collectively expressed through the organized as well as social media, is the ever-present phenomenon of the Abroad Dream… the dream of at least some Indian parents and children alike, to go and settle abroad, or work abroad. Another aspect of this is the penchant to give undue importance to NRIs / PIOs in our media; a third aspect is the near-devoted tracking of PIOs success-stories, especially in the realm of politics… the fact that the Media gives prominence to these is mute evidence of the fact that we, the people, give importance to them THE POLITICAL NRI… Let us consider the third case, and examine it a little more clearly. It is near-certain that having a number of prominent PIOs in positions of power has been of benefit to us in the realm of Business, wherein it is a win-win situation… the PIO is better aware of how to do business in India, and ca...