Word: nilekani
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...seems to be working. When well known Indian business scion Nandan Nilekani's first book hit the shelves this year, Penguin sold over 60,000 hardbacks - a total that raised expectations for best-sellers in the country. A decade ago, the company wouldn't have dreamed of printing more than 7,000 copies, says Padmanabhan. When the fourth book in the "Harry Potter" series was released in 2001, Penguin sold 30,000 copies. That was a good haul, but still small in comparison to the U.S., which sold 3.8 million copies, and the U.K., which sold another million...
...reliance on the U.S. Such talk faded as a subsequent collapse in global trade left no nation untouched. Yet with their big populations and growing middle classes, the BICs now seem to have suffered only a glancing blow. The word redecoupling is beginning to appear in the media. Nandan Nilekani, who is about to leave the chairmanship of Indian tech company Infosys for a government post, speaks of "tactical coupling" and "strategic decoupling." That is, nobody could escape the short-term effects of a global crisis, but the basic BIC growth story still holds. (See pictures of China doing business...
...solve everything, God knows, but the world will be a safer place if those who have recently escaped poverty are not now told by those who have never known it that they have to accept less than they dreamed of. "We cannot deny people their aspirations" said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Indian IT giant Infosys Technologies, in an interview by the New York Times's Thomas Friedman at the New York Public Library this week. Do so, and those denied aspirations will mutate into something much more dangerous...
While painting India's potential with broad rhetorical strokes, Nilekani achieves an impressive breadth nonetheless. He sketches an overwhelming list of sociocultural hurdles from the political legacy of Nehru-era socialism to education, the deeply entrenched caste system, and urbanization. But his reliance on platitudes and wide-eyed optimism is cogent only to a point: the hows are lost in the dust of repetitive hopeful declarations ("a different type of moment seems to be upon...
...intellectual's salvo on the power of ideas is only convincing if such initiatives like universal health care and education cease to be continually and fatally stalled. Until then, such optimism will continue to be shouted down by the piercing shrieks of India's present challenges. And as Nilekani concedes, if you are playing a waiting game with India, you will lose. The Bill Gates of India does his best to weave his "safety net of ideas," but resolving India's inherent internal conflicts is sadly easier written about than done...