More Than Just a Glass Ceiling

Most of the Indian women we know, even in GenNext, have grown up with subliminal messages about being a “good girl”, i.e. of behaving in a manner that conforms to society’s stereotypes and prescriptions of what success for a girl looks like. A venerable aunt used to hold up as an example worth emulating a girl who had a PhD in nuclear physics and an amazing job, but “when she walked in to the room you would never know that-she was so simple and ordinary in everything she did and said”. It took many years before we picked up the courage to ask, “But if she was so wonderful, what was the matter with her that she made no waves?” If you are from a middle class family in Tamil Nadu, as one of us is, you have probably been raised with a variety of wheedling voices asking you to […]

Inside the Mind of Young India

The sampling methodology and the survey instrument have been explained in detail, and the field work relatively recent, done in mid 2007. Not meaning to be xenophobic, it was still a bit sad to note that such a study got done because Konrad Adenauer Stiftung initiated and commissioned (and presumably funded) it. It is true that in India, we generally have trouble finding adequate funding for regular studies of this kind which tell us more about ourselves. If the quantum of data were proportionate to the quantum of our usage of the term demographic dividend, we should have had several more and larger youth studies in the public domain. One is not referring to country wide studies done for private companies that measure cola consumption or media habits or advertising preferences of young India; but of public domain insights on how young people think and feel about issues like those […]

IIM Review Committee

However, competition is about to explode. Top management schools of the world will soon be in India, many are already here in some form or other. Singapore, China and Dubai are aggressively attracting campuses of the world’s best management schools. The IIMs, with their current level of wide ranging government control and interference on their operations and very limited degrees of strategic freedom could end up being marginalized. The poor pay scales and continuous attempts to “regulate” faculty activities, lead to difficulty in attracting high caliber new faculty. The poor quality of infrastructure relative to the newcomers, the severe controls and constraints in internationalizing their footprint of knowledge etc., needs to be addressed. This report focuses on each of these problems and suggests a way forward. On autonomy and accountability The best way to enable the IIMs to survive and seize the opportunity ahead is, to empower their present boards […]

Reflections On The Night Of Terror

It was sheer luck, providence, kismet, that some of us live to tell this tale, while many of us were not so lucky at all. The pain on the faces of their loved ones is devastating for all of us watching – a pain that seems to come all too frequently nowadays. While television stations are going up the learning curve with each such episode, the Government seems to have not learnt at all. Not even learnt that we need a different Home Minister, someone better equipped to do such a big, important, and complex job. These past few days, as we weep with the victim’s families, and listen in horror to friends tell of watching people being killed in front of their eyes, my mind has been screaming, “It is NOT the economy, stupid”. Who cares where the Sensex is, when we have senselessness all around us. Who cares […]

Made in India

A few weeks ago, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad organized a conference where alumni entrepreneurs were invited to share their experiences with the centre and with students interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Most of us would assume that very few people showed up on either side, since the popular perception of IIMA is that it is the bastion of straight-and-narrow corporate executives, and not the breeding ground for off-the-beaten-track entrepreneurs who march to the beat of his own drummer. Factually, the audience comprised about 150 alumni entrepreneurs and over 250 eager beaver students who came to learn whatever they could and to ask questions like “Is 5-6 years of work experience in a company a good thing before striking out on your own” and “how do you know when you are ready to take the plunge”. At the conference the CIIE also released a book […]

Let a thousand Indias bloom

Lots of debate is happening around how to build “Brand India”. There are two commonly voiced dilemmas. One, that some of the harsh realities of India are so harsh (poor infrastructure, poor human development index, poor responsiveness from Government to potential investors, corruption etc.), that they will always appear as ugly black warts, marring the credibility of any ‘beautiful India’ or ‘powerful India’ branding that we do. The other dilemma is that there is no single India, and that it is impossible to reflect, under a single brand, the ancient heritage and the modern accomplishments, tourism’s “incredible India” and ITES’s 24×7 “industrious India”, manufacturing’s “innovative India” and the magic of handcrafted artisan India, the budhist stupas and Nehru’s temples of modern India, yoga, medicine and the IITs. The answer to the first is simple – yes, we need to work on our warts, but even as we do so, we […]

Music of the Hemispheres

What sets Corporate India apart from its western counterparts is to do with their differing responses to chance. We will experience such differences more intensely as India gets further globalised. It isn’t fashionable to say so in these days of globalisation, but my last few encounters with global corporate America have been tough. The difference in cultural wiring is becoming obvious by the day and cope strategies that enable me to be myself, and not a poor imitation of them, must be devised. Of course, there is no difference on all the big stuff like how to calculate ROCE and what the best practices of corporate governance are. But it’s the small stuff that tends to stress one out. Like, for instance, the repeated requests to rehearse a presentation from the podium at the venue of the big meeting, even after we have agreed on the content, the format, the […]

Sarinomics

Why every working woman should give pleated power dressing a shot The other day, I was reading an article in the British press, where the author said she was very surprised that some young women in Britain said that they actually wanted to wear the hijab. It occurred to me that people must be equally surprised when young women in India say that they want to wear a sari. Who in their right mind would want to be bundled into 18ft of fabric(Yes, that is the standard sari length). Surely, it is one more form of cultural gender oppression? I can understand women of my age, cohort and background wearing saris, because when I started working, there was no question of wearing anything else. It was just NOT DONE. But what about those who are now in a global India, free of such unwritten rules? Yes, I can see more […]

But what do the ‘have-nots’ want?

The poor do not have the mind space to be concerned with how much the ‘haves’ have, or how they spend it; they are totally occupied with whether their own quality of life and amenities are improving or not, says Rama Bijapurkar. The newspapers have commented sharply on the prime minister’s CII speech urging a ceiling on exorbitant corporate salaries and curbing of conspicuous consumption. He says that the ‘haves’ showing that they have too much will upset the have-nots and sow the seeds of resentment in them, and ignite social tension. While his motives for saying so are beyond question, because he is an honorable man and an intellectual worthy of the utmost respect, he does seem to be totally out of sync with how the very constituency that he seeks to speak on behalf of, is thinking.  Over the past five years, ever since the India story started […]

The New Indian Women