Who should be leading the nation? (Part 2)

A heads up: I might make some idealistic statements - recently read Don Quijote de la Mancha.

In my previous post I essentially said that the youth of the nation are apathetic to politics. I also said that it is not necessarily true that the engineers (the acknowledged big brains) are the best to lead the nation.

The other day, my friends and I were up all night. I guess we were revisiting good ole college days. We had just watched a movie and had nothing much to do, so we were just talking. I don’t know how we got around to the topic of politics, but it is indeed strange that we are speaking more often about it than I ever did in the past.

We were discussing the history of this nation and how certain families and parties have had a large and not particularly great(unanimously agreed) influence on the nation. I do know we should do a little more research on Indian History during partition and understand what were the forces in play, but from our preliminary and naive understanding, we believe the partition happened purely because Nehru couldn’t swallow his pride and let Maulana lead.

In the subsequent years, Nehru was quite a tyrant and tried to control several things including who became President. Unfortunately he received no support from Sardar Patel and thus Dr. Rajendra Prasad did end up becoming the first Indian President. Petty politics aside, he was the prime reason for Socialism to creep into India. It stayed longer than it should have and wreaked quite a bit of havoc. It is not all Nehru’s doing, but the almost nepotistic succession with Indira following soon after Nehru left the political scene.

The Indian political history is really funny. Pardon me for the trivia, but I can not resist it.

• The longest living Prime Minister (Gulzarilal Nanda) served twice - once for 13 days (the shortest term ever) and another time for a whopping month and 8 days.
• The second shortest term was served by Atal Behari Vajapayee (16 days).
• There have been 11 Prime Ministers in 60 years with the longest terms being: 17 years(Nehru) and Indira Gandhi (15 years).
• The Nehru Gandhi family has been in power for a cumulative 37 years officially. If you count what’s happening now, it will increase!
• A single party was in power for 47 of 60 years.

There were leaders from 4 other parties in power:

• Janata Party (3 years, 2 leaders)
• Janata Dal (3 years, 3 leaders)
• Samajwadi Janata Party (7 months, 1 leader - thankfully!)
• Bharatiya Janata Party (6 years, 2 terms, 1 leader - no points for guessing who!)

How can the nation let the same jokers lead the nation for such a long time, especially when there has not been any significant improvement from their regimes? Some of the worst scandals and ill handled crises have been in their regimes - Indo-China war, Separation of Bangladesh, the Emergency, the Sikh carnage, Bhopal Gas, formation of LTTE etc. There is a long list but these are the stark ones that come to mind.

I think it is pretty obvious that I am trying to drill across that being from a Dynasty shouldn’t count in a democracy, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. The old man is rumored to have died of syphyllis - I repeat - rumored! Two of three family members were assassinated - can’t the rest take a hint?

Are we really so starved of good people in this nation that can lead that we need to cling on to old dynasties? That too with one firang, and the other two NRIs for most of their consequential lives? Should these people really be leading the nation? Do they have a unique understanding of people’s problems? Or do they have a unique understanding of the administration machine to get things done faster? AFAIK neither! But then again, I may be wrong.

There is a new youth brigade in Politics with the degrees like MBAs from high flying Ivy League schools and so forth. Would they make good leaders? Perhaps. Definitely better than a dynasty! But I think the fundamental questions remain the same. Can they work the creaky machine that is the Administrative Services to really better the lives of the hundreds of millions of Indians that need help without disturbing the rest too much?

I think our nation needs leaders who understand the country from end to end - a person well travelled (not on govt. or party money, but his/her own), a person who understands economics, law, business and large scale project planning and execution. Such a person would be ideally suited for the job. I suppose it would take someone more than 2 decades to get good at all the things I mentioned above, which is probably why we vote for only gray haired/balding people.

India needs some serious change management. We need to manage change at various levels - the political change, economic change, social change, cultural change, environmental change and global change. We need leaders who have steered turnarounds (not necessarily business turnarounds), but turnarounds in more than three of these spheres. There are several great Indians who have. We need such people at the helm -  people who truly want to architect and create improvement from the basement upwards.

We still have huge quesitons as to how we can find such people? Fund such people to campaign? Provide training to others (like me) to become such people? When will political parties open up to allow youngsters to participate in the process? When will Political recruiment take place from campuses? After all, every party (if managed legally) would need the same set of professionals at a company. There is a lot of intellectual help that parties can take from bright young individuals. When will politics become truly inclusive?

 

Our visit to FOSS.in

Prasad was speaker at FOSS.in in Bangalore. He took a tutorial on how to build applications on the Mozilla platform. It was received very well. In fact there were several people who appreciated it’s simplicity. Anant - in his blog says, “The calculator example complete with it’s own add-on manager ( for adding scientific support ) was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.”

As if that wasn’t praise enough, Chris Hofmann, one of the creators of javascript and one of senior most members at the Mozilla Foundation said - “Of all the presentations I have seen (world over) for a primer to developing applications on Mozilla platform, this was the best.” Myk, who gave two talks at the event, also liked it. Now that is indeed great testimony.

If you are looking for the slides, they can be found here!

FOSS.in was a great place to meet the Mozilla folks and we got to really know them at a human level. I suppose all FOSS users like me tend to deify the original creators of great products we use (esp in the open source domain). I got to meet and have dinner (twice) with the Mozilla developers. We got an opportunity to educate them a little bit about India, the cuisine, the culture and so forth. They seemed to enjoy our company (which is why I think they invited us to dinner twice, a party and we even went out to try chat, pani puri etc.). Mary, the event manager at Mozilla, supposedly ate half a kilo of sweets like we eat a pair of gulab jamun. She said she liked sweets, little did we knew it was so much. Perhaps we would have sent a kilo!

I think our relationship with Mozilla is just about to begin! Let’s hope it is a long, friendly one.

 

Who should be running the nation? (Part 1)

Yesterday my friends and I were returning from a batchmate’s marriage. It was a four hour drive to and four hour drive back! So obviously we had a lot of time to kill.

On our way back, in order to keep people awake, alive and discussing, I brought up the topic of politics. It is a very touchy topic for all youngsters like me. I have never voted in my life, never taken a voters card. Hell, the fact is, I don’t even know how to! I don’t know if I am eligible or not to vote from where I stay as my permanent address is elsewhere. I have absolutely no clue and I am sure my friends are just as clueless or more clueless than I am!

I guess when it comes to being apathetic, this nation’s youth are the most apathetic to politics I know of. None of the people from any premier institute have shown any inclination to do anything about the political system. Most of us have no clue how the nation’s administration works, how the judiciary wors or for that matter how the electorate works. I don’t think I know any politician in our state apart from the CM and the opposition leader (thanks to TV!) otherwise I would not even know that.

I think the answer to: Why is it so is fairly simple:- The youth of this nation have not had to deal with any national emergency, no major wars which affected the entire country and more importantly, they are all most economically well off. For those who are not, they are struggling to make ends meet - so politics is out of the question. Even the few who are cued in on what is happening, who’s who and what not are just passive onlookers. We are all watching the great Indian Political Circus! No one really wants to do anything significant about it. I guess the main reason is that Politics doesn’t really pinch you - doesn’t affect your daily bread and butter. The only time the youth of this nation get a bit agitated is when there is a clampdown on “the internet” or there are sanctions on premiere institutes like the IIMs.

In the recent past, we have rarely seen any student movement worth mentioning. We have rarely seen any real political change brought on by the students! Unlike other nations where when students go on a protest, the center sits up and bites their nails, our nation is one where the police whip out their lathis!

I was also arguing that none of the premiere institutes in this country has any students who are aware, let alone know how to contribute. Someone mentioned the fact about some IIT junta starting a political party. What makes a bunch of engineers capable to run a nation? What understanding do they have of the system? Who says leadership should be coming from there?

I believe that leaders should be coming from where people really know what is happening - at the grass roots levels, and know what kind of macro policies need to be in place to ensure local implementation! We need the people doing Civics, economics, Political sciences, Commerce etc. to step up.  We need colleges that impart great knowledge in these fields as they are going to affect the very fabric of our nation quite a lot!

In advanced nations people study to become speech writers and campaign managers! These guys are definitely not engineers or MBAs or doctors! They are more often than not, arts or political sciences students.

I guess the question of this post - who should be running the country? is not an easy one to answer. After all India is a huge nation of a billion plus and growing fast! The current set of politicans are those that emerged out of the system in the 70s and 80s when might was right… People with a criminal history, people with no education, people with little or no understanding of how the political system works. Education ministers in certain states have never taken education seriously for themselves - are they the ones who would for the rest of people? The current situation is driven more by globalization and economics! We have moved from Might is Right to Money Matters Majorly!

I suppose this post is going to end with more questions. Perhaps in a later post I can address some of the questions and think of a few things we can start doing immediately to change the scenario! There is a lot of things wrong with the political system starting from the basic question of who should be in it - who should be running the nation? Let’s see if we can address each of them.

 

Biz models: Open source hybrid vs. Traditional enterprise software

Recently I have been reading up a lot about the hybrid open source business model. It is something quite different from the traditional model used by enterprise software companies. As the model is different, so are the pitches to customers. I am going to try and delve into the major differences but primarily from a marketing angle.

Traditional enterprise software is a little over 35 years old and stands a towering USD 60 billion. The advent of FOSS has changed how software companies run their own show and most of the enterprise biggies have taken to quite well (after all it is reducing their developmental costs).

Traditional enterprise software businesses have pitched the “one throat to throttle” concept. If anything went wrong with the software, there would be one company to blame for it, who is responsible for it. During the initial days of open source, this is precisely what was missing. With the hybrid model, it is addressed partially in that the community version is supported by the community and the enterprise version is supported for a fee (thereby providing a neck to catch hold of!).

I have a fundamental question at this juncture. If something about the software is unusable (for that business), which is it better to have - a blackbox binary or open source freedom which lets you change what you want to. Being able to craft a product to suit your enterprise ends is perhaps the largest advantage open source software provides.

Traditional software companies have focussed on licenses for usage ( not upgradation but just usage) of the software. Which is like buying a shirt with a one week limit or a movie with a 30 day expiry. If you want to wear the shirt after that one week, you need renew your licenses and same goes for the movie. Would you really let that happen in those cases? Why do people let it happen in the case of software?

The difference between charging for support and charging for permission to use is quite stark! Taking money without providing upgrades in like giving yesterday’s newspaper and still charging for it. For marketeers, this difference is quite important. With the hybrid model you are essentially pledging that you will not charge the company if they don’t use your service.

So why give out the source code a free community version? I suppose the answer lies in the concept of collective intelligence. With more people working on the product (as users, developers, testers or just advisers), it moves faster and in a direction more homogeneous with what the users (enterprise or community) really want.

This is not to say that traditional enterprise software has no role to play. It has a very big role to play. In markets where there is no software available, a more traditional approach maximizes economic returns for the company that created the software. Traditional enterprise software business model has a lot of marketing costs, which makes the products riskier. With a hybrid model, the risk is reduced as the software is try before you buy!

In India, we are already seeing traditional software companies (usually with proprietary data formats) providing companies the try before you buy alternative. The idea is that after 6 months, the data generated is stored in the proprietary format anyway - hence the user is locked in! To really give choice, the data storage should be standards compliant, thereby allowing the user to shift, if she so pleases. This freedom is the corner stone of the FOSS model.

The more we look at it, the more obvious it seems that this is a more beneficial model overall, considering economic gain of all parties involved. Only time will tell if the markets think the same way!

 

$199 PC

My friend sent me the link to the launch of the $199 PC by Everex. It was indeed quite interesting to read about since I have been following the MIT’s $100 laptop plan for a long time now. I am sure that Negroponte is definitely wondering, how the hell did this happen so quickly?

Well, I dug in a little further just to find out what exactly these two offerings are and how different are they?

Well, let’s start with the more well known one

The $100 laptop

This is a product created under the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) vision with the help of MIT Media Lab. Nicholas Negroponte has been working on this for at least a couple of years now and it is finally a reality. I have not personally tried the laptop, but there are others who have. Here is a pre-review!

The most interesting and innovative feature of the whole laptop is that it can be charged mechanically. A few winds ensures that it is good to run for another half and hour. Given that it is designed to work in the most remote African village, this is great!

From the latest news we know, the $100 laptop is actually going to priced very close to $200 ($182 from what I last remember reading).

Now for this Everex and gOS based machine: $199 PC

This machine is built to have all of Google’s products and was confused as Google’s OS. The clarifications can be found here. The most amazing (strange - however you see it) part is that these are only available through Walmart? (Is that where Americans are buying PCs these days?? ) I thought Indians bought a funny places, but buying PCs at Walmart is definitely a new thing to me and worse yet, it seems to be exclusively available just there!  What’s the deal in that?

Another interesting thing about this $199 PC is that it is powered by VIA (which is probably the third largest PC chip company after Intel and AMD). Interestingly, VIA has shown a clean value proposition in building such cheap hardware and obviously there are lots of advantags to doing that. Once the cost of the PC goes down (like the telephone instrument), it’s uptake goes up… More people using it means more outreach of software and more necessity of broadband (making PC broadband also highly inexpensive esp. in a country like India). If the dream to put a PC in every village has to be realized, hardware like this needs to be created! After all, people don’t really need super powerful machines. They just need to be able to the basic Office stuff and perhaps use the internet for communication, tele-medicine and getting info about their business (primarily agriculture and commodities). More about the Indian need and situation in another post.

This as well as the $100 laptop are powered by Linux and other Free/Libre Open Source Software (a philosophy that the start up I work with believes in passionately). The similarities are amazing and yet each tool has it’s own distinct value proposition.

Let’s see how both of these inexpensive machines pan out!