Commandant's note

The Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry is a unique Regiment of Indian Army.  It is the only infantry regiment born out of `patriotic volunteers’ of Jammu and Kashmir which rose to fight against Pakistani raiders in October 1947 on a clarion call given by Shiekh Mohammed Abdullah. The volunteers held the Pakistani raiders at bay until arrival of Indian Army on October 27, 1947,after which they fought with them shoulder to shoulder till the attackers were ousted.

In recognition of their valour they were organized as the 'J&K Militia’, the first force to be raised after Independence. Since then the J&K Militia has participated in all operations with valour and courage.

In recognition of their bravery, 7 and 14 J&K Militia were converted into `Ladakh Scouts’ after 1962 war and merged with Indian Army. Rest of the force too was converted into regular army in 1972 after they performed exceptionally well in the 1965 and 1971 wars.

This regiment is a true symbol of national integration and secularism.  For the first time in 1948, it introduced the concept of `MMG’ (Mandir, Masjid and Gurdwara under one roof), which was later adopted by rest of the Indian Army as `sarv dharm sthal’.

The regiment has been conferred four Battle Honours, of which three were earned while it was a para-military force. No other para-military force has earned any battle/theatre honour in our country. The fourth one was earned during Kargil War. JAK LI has earned the distinction of becoming the only Param Vir Chakra winner of the Siachen Glacier.

Inspite of being the youngest regiment of Indian Army, it is one of the highest decorated. They include one Param Vir Chakra, two Ashoka Chakra, 11 Mahavir Chakra and 21 Unit Citations/Appreciation, amongst  others  awards.

Unbeknownst to the world outside, the regiment has rendered yeomen  service in containing militancy by motivating youth and providing them respectable and secure jobs in large numbers every year, especially at the height of militancy.

JAK LI’s Regimental Training Centre is located at Srinagar in the most picturesque environment. The regiment has won accolades when assigned jobs overseas, including in Sri Lanka and various UN Peacekeeping missions.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Digital dharma

Social media could influence more than 150 of 543 Lok Sabha constituencies in 2014. Chandran Iyer examines the implications. 

Social Media is poised become the most potent weapon for political parties girdling their loins for the 2014 general elections. Apart from party propaganda work which appears to have already started in right earnest, there is the added promise of lampooning rivals, highlighting personal achievements and scoring brownie points in the fond hope that the voter will catch on.

To be sure, the days of dust-bowl election campaigns in India’s boondocks are not a thing of the past but the cutting edge to arguably the most explosive election campaign likely in 2014, is most certainly going to be provided by a proliferating social media.

Right on top of this list are two of India’s main candidates, Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and BJP strongman Narendra Modi whose recent Twitter monikers, ‘Pappu’ (naïve) and ‘Feku’ (boastful) respectively, have already acquired a life and logic of their own. As elections draw closer, many more such parallels may be thrown up, to the delight of the public, specially the social media-using public.

Political parties, quick to spot the potential of this newly-emerging bandwidth, are aware that an issue breaking out on Twitter or Facebook is more likely to catch eyeballs as compared to the mainstream media which is increasingly been seen as ‘compromised’ and ‘affiliated’ to one or the other political party. For the first time, social media is being seen as a direct connect with the people – without the well informed journalist and blue collared analyst coming in with his or her two penny bit.

Speaking at a debate on ‘Will Internet and social media be a game changer for the next general elections’, Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari recently said, “Content agnostic new media platforms are definitely not something that any politician or political party can ignore. However, elections are a complex exercise where voting preferences depend more on local/regional variations. Therefore, one variable may not be a game changer.” May be.

Admits archrival, BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad, “the power of social media cannot be denied and political leaders will be forced to take the demands of young India into consideration.’’ By the looks of it, they probably, already are.

Just how significant is the scale of this social media outreach? According to a recent study, it is set to play a very vital and decisive role in influencing the outcome of general elections in at least 160 Lok Sabha constituencies. In other words, a significant portion of the urban vote. In a tight contest, such as the type being predicted in 2014, it can become anyones game.

Says a study conducted by IRIS Knowledge Foundation and Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), “There are 160 high impact constituencies out of the total of 543 constituencies, which are likely be influenced by social media during the next general elections.’’ In such a situation, a little tweet or a throwaway line on the net could lead to a frenzy of talk shows, high decibel comment and seemingly endless controversies, all stirred in one direction - impending elections.

In situations such as these, the mainline media, particularly the 24x7 news matrix, on the look out for little tit bits to start a talking heads chat show, can ideally feed on the social media. In turn, both can feed on each other.

India has about 60 million-plus social media users and the numbers are continually increasing. The study categorises high impact constituencies as those where “Facebook users account for over 10 per cent of total voters in a constituency.’’ Even though, the country’s internet penetration is relatively low; about 150 million people out of a total population of 1.2 billion go online. According to the IRIS-IMAI survey, these numbers are poised to go up as D-Day approaches.

Away from dreary and cliched election speeches, a whole new world is opening up – a world where an issue can snowball out of proportion - like the Anna agitation or Kejriwal anti-corruption stir - to be lapped up by an adoring public. Social media's first impact were felt in the now celebrated Twitter spat between former IPL head honcho Lalit Modi and the Congress minister Shashi  Tharoor in 2010 over the equity pattern in the former IPL Kochi team. The seemingly minor exchange ballooned out of proportion and cost Tharoor his job as the junior minister for external affairs. It also made Lalit Modi scamper for cover in London. And guess what Modi is doing from London? Tweeting against the present management of BCCI of course and grabbing headlines!

According to a study on social media usage by The Nielsen Company conducted in collaboration with analytic and research company AbsolutData, nearly 30 million Indians who are online are members of social networking sites and about two-thirds of them spend time on the net on a daily basis.

More importantly, says the study, Indians spend more time on social media than they do using personal email. According to it, an equal number spend up to an hour on social networking and email. However, while just 8 percent spend between an hour and three hours on personal email, 20 percent spend the same time on social media sites.

The growth of social media has given rise to a new breed of entrepreneurs whose job it is to provide specialised election-related services to individual candidates or to political parties using the digital platform. In this, they are taking the help of software professionals. In some instances, political parties are outsourcing work to newly-cropped IT companies which provide niche information of the kind they require.

This novel experiment was witnessed during the 2012 Gujarat assembly elections, as well as the recently-concluded Karnataka assembly elections. Pune-based Xtech Infocom, an information technology-enabled service provider company, was given the task of managing Congress propaganda. Explains Riyaaz Sheikh, head business relations of Xtech Infocom, “We work for political campaigning through digital medium for individual politicians, regional and national parties. We have provided technological support for campaigning, propaganda, giving information to voters about the party’s policies through bulk SMS, Bulk Voice and cloud telephony”.

Sheikh’s company helped the Congress in Gujarat in the last assembly elections in implementing their election strategy. “We worked hand in hand with the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) in Ahmedabad.  Our boys worked with GPCC's IT cell. Our task was to reach out to maximum voters in the state through mobile telephony and internet and ensure that the party message reaches them. We helped the party in planning total electoral strategies”.

While this social networking may not have been enough to take Narendra Modi off his high pedestal, it certainly suggests the pattern of things to come. The methods employed by Sheikh’s company helped in deploying state-of -the art telephony system along with updated voting slip database and putting into place a call centre where voters phoned up for getting detailed voting slips on their mobile along with the name of their leader.

During the Karnataka assembly elections, political parties set up their own election cells with IT experts and professionals to propagate party agenda and to take liberal pot shots at the opposition.

In Karnataka, BJP became the first political party to set up a professional wing to take care of the social media, christened the Communication Cell. Points out Channamallikarjun B Patil, cell convener: “Our total campaign via the social media was designed by members of our Communication Cell. Our five-pronged strategy included letting the world know about the achievements of the first BJP government in south India through the social media. Second was the party manifesto and the party's future plans; third exposing UPA’s corruption - we released an online version of UPA 100 not out scams – a complete ready reconnoiter of the scam-infested of UPA in the last nine years. Fourth,was the voter awareness programmes via social media and the last, details of clean governance provided by Chief Minister Jagdish Shettar’s government.’’ To be candid, this is one case where even the social media could not help a beleaguered state government and party mired in graft but the general elections could throw up another picture.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
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Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

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From Neecha Nagar to Miss Lovely

Indian cinema’s association with the Cannes Film Festival goes back a long way. As the world’s largest film producing nation inches its way back into the reckoning on the Croisette, here is a historical overview of what has gone before

India’s association with the Cannes Film Festival goes back all the way to its first edition in 1946. That year, Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar, loosely adapted from Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, won the Grand Prix along with ten other titles. Eleven films were given the top prize because Cannes was seeking to make up for the hiatus of the War years.

Legend has it that the Cannes event was originally supposed to kick off in 1939 because the Venice Film Festival awards were “rigged” – Jean Renoir’s superb Grand Illusion was passed over for two utterly undeserving films – one made by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, the other by Benito Mussolini’s son. Politics has remained a constant factor for Cannes ever since.
 
In 1946, Neecha Nagar was in great company. Among the films that were awarded in Cannes’ inaugural edition were David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City.

Until the mid 1990s, India was a constant presence on the Croisette and several films from the country competed for top honours at the festival. Then, the world’s largest film producing nation dropped off Cannes’ radar. It rankled because Cannes has always mattered. 

As the multi-talented French creator Jean Cocteau once said, “The Festival is an apolitical no-man’s land, a microcosm of what the world would be like if people could contact each other directly and speak the same language.” At the festival, everybody does indeed speak the same language – the language of cinema. For 11 days, Cannes turns into the movie capital of the world and no nation that fancies itself as a force on the global stage can afford to miss out on the action.

Since the curtains went up on the festival – the first Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) was handed out to Delbert Mann's Marty in 1955 – Cannes has recognised the best filmmakers of the world with its trophy.

Run your eyes through the list of filmmakers that have won the Grand Prix/Palme d’Or over the years: Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Luchino Visconti, , Michelangelo Antonioni, Lindsay Anderson, Robert Altman, Joseph Losey,  Martin Scorsese, Ermanno Olmi, Volker Schlondorff, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda, Constantin Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders, Shohei Imamura, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Soderbergh, Mike Leigh, Abbas Kiorastami, Emir Kusturica, Chen Kaige, Coen brothers,  Taviani brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke…

This list is by no means complete, but it’s a veritable who’s who of the men who have shaped the contours of modern cinema. Unfortunately, only a solitary woman director – Jane Campion for The Piano, 1993 – has ever won the Palme d’Or and that is one imbalance that the Cannes Film Festival would be keen to rectify.     

What separates Cannes from other festivals is its constant edginess. Even as it celebrates Hollywood glitz and glamour, it revels as much in showcasing the auteurs and the in-your-face upstarts, and in spotting and pushing new talents from around the world. You love some of the films, you hate others, but you can rarely ever completely ignore anything that the Cannes selectors pick.

The last Indian film to compete in Cannes was Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham in 1994. Another Malayalam film, Murali Nair’s Arimpara, made the Un Certain Regard cut in 2003, a year after Bhansali’s reworking of Devdas had a special red carpet screening at the Grand Lumiere.

But India was blanked out year after year by the globe’s premier film festival until it made a comeback with Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan breaking into  Un Certain Regard in 2010. Yet, Indian filmmakers, big and small, land in Cannes’ buyer-seller space with movies in a bid to access the growing Diaspora as well as tap new markets. .

But for those saddened by the dwindling global esteem for the quality of Indian films, it is a tad painful to see relatively small filmmaking nations that were once way behind India in terms of international exposure - South Korea, China, Iran, Thailand, Taiwan – being ‘officially’ celebrated in Cannes every year.

 In 1954, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen bagged a Grand Prize, while Ray’s epochal Pather Panchali was adjudged the Best Human Document in 1956. As many as 17 Indian films were in Competition during the first two decades of Cannes. Besides Pather Panchali, these included Ray’s Paras Pathar and Devi, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, Biraj Bahu and Sujata, V. Shantaram’s Amar Bhoopali and Shevgyachya Shenga, Prakash Arora’s Boot Polish (for which Baby Naaz won a Special Mention in 1955), and Moni Bhattacharjee’s Mujhe Jeeno Do.


In the 1970s and 1980s, too, Indian cinema figured frequently in the Cannes Competition with films like Mrinal Sen’s Ek Din Pratidin (1980), the Jury Prize-winning Kharij (1983) and Genesis (1986), MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1974), Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1976), Ray’s Ghare Baire (1984).

Two Indian films came tantalizingly close to winning Cannes’ top prize. One, of course, was Pather Panchali, which is today listed on the festival’s official website at par with the 1956 Palme d’Or winner, the French documentary Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World), made by legendary oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle. It was felt the French film pipped Ray’s debut work for of its technical brilliance – it was one of the first films that used underwater cinematography to capture the depths of the ocean in colour.


The other was Mrinal Sen’s searing critique of urban middle class mores, Kharij, which, in 1983, was up against a film of the quality of Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama. While the latter was given the Palme d’Or, the jury, headed by American writer William Styron, adjudged Kharij the second best by bestowing the Jury Prize on it. In 1983, Cannes had a particularly strong Competition line-up and the runners-up finish for Kharij was no mean achievement. Among the films that Sen’s entry upstaged were Robert Bresson’s L’Argent and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia.

In the late 1980s, two Indian films did the nation proud – Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay won the Camera d’Or (for the best debut film screened in the festival across all its sections) in 1988 and Shaji’s Piravi bagged the best film prize in Un Certain Regard in 1989. In 1999, Murali Nair’s Marana Simhasanam, screened in Un Certain Regard, won the Camera d’Or.  
   
But the last two decades have seen a complete washout, with no Indian name making it to the list of 20-odd films that compete each year for the Palme d’Or although a special screening of a documentary celebrating the popular strain of Hindi cinema, Rakesysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bollywood – The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, was hosted by the festival in 2011.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

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Why the BJP was decimated

State assembly results show that voters will come out strongly against corruption

The voters of Karnataka have delivered a decisive mandate against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in the state. The Congress party looks all set to occupy the regal portals of the Vidhana Soudha, which is the seat of state legislature in Karnataka.

The results of the recent assembly polls have shocked even the most hard line poll pundits. While many had predicted that the Congress would fare well in these polls, very few had imagined that the BJP would be mauled so badly. The saffron party has been virtually decimated to the extent of being placed in the third position behind the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular), an ignominious situation for them indeed.

This assembly elections recorded the second highest voter turnout in 35 years with a polling percentage of 71.29. There were 2,940 candidates in 223 Assembly segments, with the election in Periyapatna constituency being put off due to the death of a candidate. What are the reasons for this dismal performance by the BJP?

Corruption seems to have been the main issue in this election. The infamous scandals involving the Bellary brothers related to mining issues, resignations of various ministers due to impropriety and the ouster of the then Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa who was indicted by the Lok Ayukta on charges of corruption, played a huge role in the decisive shift of public opinion against the BJP.

However one must inject a dose of caution before we credit the Congress for its victory. The Karnataka voter may have punished the BJP this time. However, they are also aware of the various corruption scandals that have plagued the Congress-led UPA government in New Delhi. They may be in an equally punishing mood during the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, with the Congress being at the receiving end.

It is a dream gone sour for the BJP. Karnataka was the first south Indian state that the BJP won when Yeddyurappa became chief minister in 2008. While this was trumpeted as a great victory, there were some ominous signs even then. Certain shady individuals like the mining barons of Bellary district led by Janardhan Reddy had funded the BJP and this was well known to the central leadership of the party.

In many ways the BJP government was doomed at the very start of its tenure by its association with individuals of dubious repute. A plethora of corruption scandals followed, ranging from illegal mining to various instances of land grabbing by ministers. Yeddyurappa was relieved of the CM’s post and this caused an irreparable rift in the party. He formed the Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP) with the help of many other BJP stalwarts like CM Udasi ,who left the party with him. Yeddyurappa always had a mass following among the Lingayats, who are a very powerful community in Karnataka and constitute a sizable proportion of the electorate.

This election has been largely lost in North Karnataka. This region accounts for 96 seats. In the 2008 elections, the BJP won a record 56 seats in a region once considered a Congress fortress. This was mainly due to the consolidation of Lingayat votes in favour of the BJP. North Karnataka has always been crucial in deciding the fate of political parties in the state. In the 1985 elections, Ramakrishna Hegde came to power with 139 MLA’s, of which 60 came from North Karnataka. In the 1989 elections, Veerendra Patil of the Congress became chief minister, largely due to the 68 seats the party won in North Karnataka. The loss of Lingayat support has proven very costly indeed for the BJP.

Once the excitement of the election results has subsided, the real challenging task of governance begins. Rural Karnataka has been severely neglected with reports of numerous farmer suicides. About 100 farmers have committed suicide this year alone, largely due to drought and ever increasing input costs. A total 2,986 farmers have committed suicide in Karnataka in the last decade. The new government has to remedy this immediately. Recent studies have shown that Karnataka is among the most corrupt states in India. Cities and towns in Karnataka are bursting at its seams and lack adequate infrastructure when it comes to transportation, community hygiene and health. These challenges are immense and one hopes that the electoral verdict against corruption and maladministration will resonate loudly in the ears of all political parties.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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Book Review: Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo

A land torn asunder

Violence has become synonymous with Congo. Explosion of violence in Congo has been hitting headlines incessantly. Also, in recent times, Angelina Jolie has been visiting often as UNHCR goodwill ambassador to meet the women suffering due to war still ravaging. This is clearly indicative of the precarious situation in Congo. The situation was no less dangerous when in 2006 Anjan Sundaram had taken the decision to go to Congo to get something ‘to hold on to’ and work as a journalist. His transformation from a mathematics scholar under the tutelage of Serge Lang, a legend of mathematical theory, to a reporter on ground was encompassing.  He ‘broke with’ America. Congo ‘consumed’ him.

This book, Stringer- A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, is all about Sundaram’s experience on the ground - replete with a journalist’s struggle to get a foothold in a place which was unpredictable. The way he has cloaked his personal experience with words is very smooth. The book begins with the lines, ‘I was already feeling perturbed.’ It initiates a reader into Sundarm’s run to save himself from the pitfalls ahead.

Family of Jose and Nana hosted Sundaram in Kinshasha and their house served as the anchor for him to explore the places around, consequently meeting the local people and his ‘aide’ Mossi. Mossi, as described by Sundaram, was like a close support and his description is that of a friend in need. ‘Mossi Mwassi was a refugee from South Africa. He had a short crop of grey hair.’ His face screwed up when he saw Nana. But Mossi was undeniably helpful: he knew all the journalists and also which stories were hot’. Sundaram’s way with words enbales him to capture every change of scene to perfection. When it begins to feel that the description of Congo is stretching somewhat, he shifts to Serge Lang. At other times, he gets back to America to make the reader understand the circumstances from which he reached the house of Jose and Nana. Annie was Sundaram’s bank teller and Jose and Nana were her in-laws.

The readers will enjoy the change of scene as they are at the right time. But the best is the way even the minute details have been put into words. This makes one travel to the very spot about which Sundaram is writing or become a part of the experience which Sundaram underwent.

Writing about his return to Jose and Nana’s house after he was forced to give away his phone and most importantly the numbers saved in it, Sundaram says, “People swelled towards us like a sea. We sat in an old Volkswagen whose twelve cushioned seats had been pulled out and replaced with wooden benches; soon we were more than thirty inside, cramped side by side, hands between our knees. We squeezed more for the women who brought in her drooling infant. The windows were sealed shut, so there was no breeze, and inside it was suffocating. The human smell engulfed us.”

Sundaram lived in a ‘dingy room’ but this had put him close to people and felt the ‘pulse of the people’. This, as Mossi had said, was good to ‘live cheap, move like the locals and discuss the issues that mattered to them.’

The book is about the way Sundaram managed to gain a little balance in a completely strange place and then moved around to find stories which led him to report about militias and their attacks. There are also people from India and Pakistan who are as important as the local citizens. Sundaram reported the violent events at a place called Fataki and he was helped by his Pakistani friend Ali who gave him the necessary details and where to go.

Apart from the way Sundaram has narrated the entire experience, it also brings to the fore the way he took initiatives and his friendship and approach of an ordinary man, but with strong mind, kept him going even to the most difficult places.

Thanks to the vivid first hand description that Sundaram provides of Congo, the reader is able to understand the ravages that Congo has faced simply in order to satiate the greed of the people who are hardly aware of the predicament of the land.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
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and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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A Toxic Tale

Animal Planet is crawling with them. So is Nat Geo Wild. It’s snakes and the modern day snake charmers, herpetologists with a penchant for one way conversations – folks like Austin Stevens, Jeff Corwin, Brady Barr, the man who started it all, the late great Steve ‘Crikey’ Irwin, and of course, our  home grown sweet talking snake wrangler – Gerry Martin, who seem to have taken over all the prime time slots on animal tv.

They make for wonderfully exciting viewing, I will give you that. Most folks, even those that love dogs and cats and birds, and find monkeys cute and white mice adorable, shudder at the thought of a snake slithering along their arm.

Snakes inspire revulsion and reverence in equal measure. The scales, the forked tongue, the unblinking eyes and the possibility of a lethal liquid flowing through their switchblade fangs elevates them to the status of a god for a few and the very devil for the rest.

So I can understand why it is like standing barefoot on the very edge of reality tv to watch a man as mortal as you and me, literally kiss death as his lips touch the raised hood of a king cobra. These men catch mambas by their tails, taipans by the neck and play with rattling rattlers like they were a child’s toy. The tiniest scratch from any one of these snakes could lead to a painful and hideous end for these experts.  Even with antivenom, the recovery process is uncertain, slow and very painful. So those men are risking a whole lot for good television. Should you try this at home? Sure, go ahead. If you’re as incredibly lucky as I once was, you will survive both the encounter and the feeling of having been monumentally stupid when the realization of how close you were to a grisly death has washed over you. And if you are not, you will be in that privileged ringside seat to the spectacle of watching the limb that suffered the hemotoxic bite disintegrate in front of your very eyes as you writhe in the kind of agony that might make getting impaled on a stake feel like a vacation. Or you could try guessing which of your organs is shutting down first as the neurotoxins motor along your arteries. Whichever the nature of the venom, it is unlikely to be a quiet death, I promise.  

Here’s my story that I might have shared in bits and pieces on earlier occasions but this time I present it to you in its entirety as a prelude to ‘what to do when the naughty one from Eden comes calling’.

A few springs ago, I was walking out of my office which was then sitting pretty near the green glades of Sanjay Van near Qutab Institutional Area, when I spotted the guards crowding around a pair of flower pots. I peered over their shoulders and saw them poking at a long slim snake with sticks. More than two feet long, a deep dirty brown with bands running rings around it. Some wanted to kill it with sticks, some suggested burning it while a few where of the opinion that it should either be left alone or carried outside the premises and released.

One of the men said that he had often seen these snakes around the area. Now that got me thinking. If this snake was common in the area, it was important to know whether this snake was venomous or not and what should one do if one of these snakes just pops up around a corner. So I suggested that they put the snake, unharmed and whole, in a container so I could take it to the zoo and get it identified and find suggestions for a viable protocol if this kind of an encounter was to happen again (mobile phone cameras weren’t really de rigueur in those days and so physically carrying the snake was the only way out).

A plastic bottle was procured and the snake, still sluggish in the cool of the morning was poked and picked and placed inside the bottle. One of the guards thought the snake might find the confines of the bottle claustrophobic and punched a few holes into the cap. But now the holes seemed big enough for the snake to escape through them and so he stuck a few twigs to plug the holes. Equipped thus I stuck the bottle between the seat and the door to keep the bottle upright and drove off to the zoo. A speed breaker later, the bottle keeled over and a forked tongue flickered out of the port window in the bottle cap. If the snake got out, it would be impossible to find in the folds of the car’s insides. I had to pull over and set things right. Like I said, it was a monumentally stupid decision to transport a potentially dangerous reptile in this fasion and then to drive with this distraction through Delhi’s notoriously hostile traffic.

Anyway, we both survived the trip to the zoo where I explained my situation to the folks manning the gate and I was ushered in to reptile house. I held out the bottle with the gaping holes in the cap (the twigs had given in to gravity and had fallen through. The little snake had climbed along the length of the twigs and was now poking its head out of the bottle). The man at the reptile house shrank back in horror. “Krait! It’s a Krait”, he whispered. My hands must have started shaking involuntarily at the exclamation for the bottle vibrated in my hand and the snake dropped down again to the bottom.

A krait?! I had been cradling a krait all this while? t krait in Re first time I came across those five dreaded letters was in Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, that unforgettable tale that pitted a pair of cobras against a brave and wily pet mongoose. In the story, Kipling’s krait was smaller but as venomous (as a matter of fact, ounce for ounce, krait venom is even more potent than cobra venom) and dangerous as those hooded emissaries of doom. “It is still a little chilly these days. This one got out a little too soon and that’s why you are still alive”, snapped the zoo ‘expert’. “Half an hour is all it will take for this little devil’s neurotoxins to take you to the brink of respiratory failure”, he added.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

ExecutiveMBA

The auto bloodbath

Going by how matters have been in the past year, there is little hope that India’s auto industry will grow beyond the single-digit mark in FY2013-14, even if macroeconomic indicators and economic sentiments improve substantially. By sutanu guru
This kind of brutal bloodbath was not witnessed even after the global financial meltdown of 2008 when it appeared as if Apocalypse and Armageddon had jointly invaded the global economy. From about 1.6 million domestic sales in 2007-08, passenger car sales fell marginally to about 1.55 million units in 2008-09. Not just that, the auto industry registered a spectacular turnaround almost immediately and kept growing at a very healthy pace. By 2011-12, passenger car sales had reached close to 2.68 million units.

Something similar happened with sales of commercial vehicles that reflect even better the state of health of an economy. From about 490,000 units in 2007-08, sales crashed to about 384,000 units in 2008-09 in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown. But as with passenger cars, the recovery was swift and sure. By 2009-10, sales of commercial vehicles had recovered smartly to 532,000 units and crossed 800,000 units by 2011-12. The magic one million mark was looking very much within reach. And everybody was going ga ga over the brilliant prospects of the Indian auto industry. Some over optimistic souls even started predicting that the auto industry growth rates in India will keep outpacing that of China and that India could well emerge as one of the five largest auto markets in the world by 2020.

In 2010, the consultancy firm Ernst & Young conducted a study on behalf of Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India. The E&Y study predicted that the Indian automobile market would clock the fastest growth rates between 2010 and 2020. Average annual growth rate for the Indian market between 2010 and 2020 was pegged at 14%. The average annual growth rate for the Chinese market was pegged at 8%; the forecast was 6% for other emerging markets and just about 4% for developed markets belonging to G-7 countries.

According to the survey, domestic sales of cars and SUVs would jump to 5 million by 2015 and further double to 10 million by 2020.


Is it any surprise then that every automobile company in India and its third cousin has been making a beeline for the Indian market? Is it any surprise that states like Haryana, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat are fighting pitched battles to attract automobile companies to their states. Is it any surprise that the quick decision of Narendra Modi to encourage Ratan Tata to relocate his Nano manufacturing plant to Gujarat in the aftermath of Singur added spice and polish to his already glowing halo? And why not since the numbers being bandied about have been so jaw droppingly awesome. The same E&Y study predicted that the size of the Indian auto industry will balloon from $25 billion to $110 billion by 2020; the value of exports will rise from $3.5 billion to $30 billion and the size of the auto components industry too will balloon from $26 billion to more than $110 billion by 2020.

So what happened? Far from maintaining the much touted growth momentum, auto sales have actually crashed in recent months. The decline in sales has been so widespread and so precipitous that 2012-13 is guaranteed to register an actual decline in numbers as compared to the previous year. And hardly anybody seems to have been spared from the onslaught. Hyundai has seen sales falling more than 16% y-o-y in March 2013. Tata Motors has had to suffer the trauma of a more than 60% fall in sales in the same month. The only company that seems to have come up smelling of flowers in the aftermath of his bloodbath is Mahindra & Mahindra, whose gamble on the rising popularity of multi-utility vehicles seems to be paying off.

The two wheeler market too, is going through a series of potholes. The market leader Hero Motocorp has reported an 11% y-o-y decline in sales in March 2013. The erstwhile partner of Hero, Honda seems to be the only major two wheeler company whose fortunes continue to improve in this gloomy scenario. But across the board, the breathless optimism about the prospects of the Indian auto industry seem to have evaporated.

Virtually no one is willing to bet on anything more than single-digit growth rates for the industry even if macroeconomic conditions and economic sentiments improve substantially in 2013-14. In effect, we could be looking at car and SUV sales of about 2.5 million units in the year 2013-14. So if the E&Y forecast about domestic sales of 5 million units by 2015 has to come true, Indian consumers will need to double their car and SUV purchases in just one year. Even the most optimistic of Indians does not expect GDP growth rate to improve substantially beyond the 5% or so it has managed to eke out in the year just gone by. Equally important, despite the Reserve Bank of India finally taking some steps, nobody expects a dramatic fall in interest rates. But the most important factor is what we call investor as well as consumer sentiment. With General Elections round the corner, the citizen or the analyst is not expecting any drastic step or any bold decision that could boost sentiments in the economy. In fact, with each passing week, the intensity of bad news keeps increasing. The current account deficit is already at an astonishing 6.7% of GDP, the highest ever in the history of independent India. Latest figures reveal that manufacturing output, including that in the so called core sector has actually declined. Newly released data also shows that cutting fares has not improved passenger traffic for airlines. Consumer inflation also remains stubbornly high, refusing to come down below double-digit levels. In the event, it is but natural for consumers to postpone their car purchases till the situation improves. Says Kumar Kandaswami, Senior Director at Deloitte India to B&E, “The only macroeconomic reason for the slowdown is that people buy cars only when there is some growth in disposable income. And there hasn’t been much in recent months. Other factors like interest rates and fuel prices have also played their part.”

Read more......

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face

BBA Institute

Words, places and other friends...

You are one of those people to have followed their hearts. When did you realise that writing was your true love?
The discovery that I could write a novel was an accident. I had been reading a lot of novels when I was unemployed. As soon as I secured a job for myself, I was assigned a project. Not much work was coming in, so I began writing a novel. I had just read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens then and was very impressed with his writing. I realised that one could write a novel in an autobiographical narrative style. I enjoyed the entire writing process. It involves lot of reading. I have always enjoyed reading books. Reading is my real and true passion. Reading stimulates my imagination and writing exercises my imagination. This is ecstasy!

Was there ever any fear of your book not being appreciated?
I have never had any fears when it comes to becoming a writer. Of course I am very much concerned as to how my books would fare in the market and how readers would react to my writings. The outcome and results of one's efforts are the surprises of life. It’s my earnest desire to produce a work of genius. This quest to author a masterwork propels me to plunge into novel writing.

Do you think it was easier to venture out into writing because of your location? Would this have been possible had you been living in India?
I wrote my first novel in Delhi. I wrote my second novel during a rainy Thanksgiving weekend in Seattle. So the location does not matter. The most important factor is my ‘state of mind’ at that time. I am eternally grateful to the Indian system. In India, English Literature has a special place. This gives a window into Western civilisation. And the US has such a great County Library System. I took advantage of the Library Culture to write my second novel.

Your first book, An Adolescent Mind, is a semi autobiographical novel. How did the idea of the subject come to you?
I had the story idea of my first novel for a long time in my head. It is a slice of life story. It is written on the basis of experience. I wrote the novel by fusing real life experiences like first love, peer-pressure, political events, Indian society, the media and the imaginative. Also, I must admit that I have this tendency to mythologise myself. An auto-biographical novel gives me such a platform.

While writing, is there a method that you follow?
I do not have any method to writing. In many ways writing a novel is a mystery. Something inexplicable happens. And thoughts flow in the form of words. And my fingers tap on my computer keyboard. I believe divine inspiration comes into play. I am just a medium. A novel is a miracle.

It is very tough to play with fiction... what’s the inspiration behind your second book True Colors of Love?
I read Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is a brilliant short novel. I began toying with the idea of writing a book which had an off-beat narrative. True Colors of Love is an experiment in that sense. The narrative is in the second person. It is also based on certain real life experiences. I have depicted first love; the pathos and the urges of a young man and his fascination for a nymphet.

How do you tackle creative blocks?
Writing a second novel is a tougher call. All of us have a story to tell. There is one novel in all of us. Writing True Colors of Love was challenging. And I am glad that I accepted it. After I wrote the first chapter, I could not go forward. Oftentimes beginning a novel is easy. The middle game and the end-game present greater challenges. I was able to overcome the challenges by extensive reading and plunging into a dream world. Will power also played an important factor. There are times when the ink of the pen goes dry. At that time I feel exhausted. It is tiresome. There is no peace. Then later, when I stick to the task, it all comes up well. And the novel is complete! Perseverance is the key.

Read more.....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

ExecutiveMBA

A Socialist's Baptism By Fire

Francois Hollande's adventure in Mali has signalled that the French policy of "Francafrique” is all but over, says Saurabh Kumar Shahi

It feels like only yesterday when Socialist Party candidate for the French presidency, Francois Hollande, while trying desperately to outsmart incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, was promising a complete overhaul of French foreign policy, including clamping down on military adventurism in Africa, which France has historically seen as its playground. To give him his due, he did expedite troops pullout from Afghanistan. More importantly, just weeks ago, Hollande refused permission to intervene militarily in its former colony, Central African Republic, where President Francois Bozize was forced to accept a power-sharing deal with insurgents who looked set to take over the state. However, something changed this winter.

Mali, another former French colony, has been in the line of fire for quite some time now, mostly because of some inadvertent indirect actions of France itself. France under Sarkozy had enthusiastically supported Islamists against Gaddafi. These Islamists then ethnically cleansed the Tuaregs, a sort of Berber people, who were part of the rainbow Libyan armed forces. The Tuaregs were then driven back to their traditional homelands in Northern Mali. Armed with the leftover Libyan army weapons, these Tuaregs assembled in northern Mali to claim their own state. As the Mali government dithered, the Algerian Islamists saw an opportunity to shift their base away from Algeria where they were being hunted by the Algerian forces. They moved to northern Mali to apparently support the Tuareg revolt, but then  took over themselves. France was quiet until last week when the Islamist forces advanced into positions in central Mali and captured Konna, that left the capital Bamako, still 600 km away, vulnerable, if  the French are to be believed.

With the Mali government still dithering, Hollande ordered the first military strike of his career. As this story goes to print, France has deployed 550 troops; C-160 transport aircraft and attack helicopters and has carried out several sorties of Rafale jets bombarding the rebel bases and frontline, managing to slow the speed to their advance. However, the retaliation was more severe than the French commanders had thought and France lost one attack helicopter and some men in the initial fight. Three other helicopters were damaged and rendered out of action. Sources suggest that the French decision of strategic bombing and other air attacks without decent ground support will prove to be disastrous.

In days to come, Hollande is going to face problems on several fronts. First, the almost complete and across the board support inside France will change if the victory is not swift. According to sources, the victory will not only be late to come but might not come at all. The quality and training of French Special Forces was exposed just weeks ago when a French mission to rescue a French hostage, an agent of the French secret service DGSE, from Somali Islamists was botched up, leading to the death of another personnel and capture of another without recovering the first. It was later revealed that the French special forces involved in the botched mission were spotted the moment they landed in Somalia, a couple of kilometers from where the hostage was being held, leading to a tip-off that helped the rebels quickly arrange men and machines. It just added another embarrassing legend to the reputation of an Army that has historically shown great enthusiasm for surrenders without a fight.

Second, Hollande's policies have increasingly started matching those of Centre and Centre Right parties. His last eight months have been disastrous with ratings comparable to what Sarkozy had. The more he turns right, the more he loses his traditional votes. Says John Rees, an independent political analyst based in Paris, “There is very little difference between Sarkozy's response over Libya and Hollande’s response over the Mali crisis. That is sad because Hollande promised so much. Its his inability to deliver on the domestic front, his inpability to live up to the high hopes that many in France hoped that he would deal with austerity, which has driven him into an incredibly reckless foreign policy in the hope that it would bolster his poll ratings. These gambles sometimes work but in recent history in Europe they have often turned out to be incorrect.”

In fact, the admission of mistake has already started coming with an unnamed Elysee Palace official  being quoted to have said, “What has really struck us is how up-to-date their equipment is, and the way they've been trained to use it. At the start, we thought they would be just a load of guys with guns driving about in their pick-ups, but the reality is that they are well-trained, well-equipped, and well-armed.”

Read more.....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face

BBA Institute

Cashing on the cash

Direct cash transfer schemes are still quite perforated

After series of debates and arguments, over the decades, the incumbent government has finally realised the flaws of direct subsidy and thus announced their intentions of implementing direct cash transfers to the people. There is not even an iota of doubt that the subsidies were always vague in nature and rarely reach the actual beneficiaries, these are meant for. Most of the time, the subsidies meant for the bottom of the pyramid trickle up and reach to those who are at the top of the pyramid. There are innumerable examples of government employees and rich villagers carrying BPL cards and thus availing the benefits meant for the poor and needy popula. This is a major reason for the money collected as annual taxes from common Indians got redirected to the coffers of the rich and not for who it was collected from and the real poor. Eventually, the band of bottom of pyramid kept on widening and never saw any breakthrough. In spite of several economic measures, the gap between rich and poor never got bridged. Be it fertilizer subsidy, gas subsidy or oil subsidy, most of these services were majorly availed by those who had enough and by those who belonged to the upper category of haves and not by those who struggled as have-nots and are lingering in poverty!

After six decades of policy making, the policy makers adopted the globally practised direct cash transfer scheme. No doubt, this very scheme is million times better than the currently practised subsidy scheme. At least, the money paid by tax payers would reach the families. If one goes by global examples, cash transfers have helped many nations reach their target audience directly. For instance, a huge paradigm shift was brought in Sierra Leone through cash transfers to farmers with an intention of aiding them to purchase agricultural tools and inputs.

However, there are lot of misses between the cups and lips when it comes to implementation of the said policy. Firstly, there are still hundreds of villages where banking facility is not inclusive. As per the latest Census, merely 60 per cent of all households have access to banking services and the formal banking system. Still, more than 60 per cent of the rural population does not have bank account and only 25 per cent of rural dwellers uses banks for availing credit facility. In such a bleak scenario, direct cash transfers through bank transfers would fall flat. Thus the first and foremost challenge to the policy makers is to bring these villagers under the ambit of conventional banking system ensuring that every single individual has bank account. Moreover, there still exists a huge task of opening a bank account for all these villagers and even before that providing them with relevant documents (read: identity and address proofs) to do the same. Further, every village, through numerous channels, have to be educated about the benefits of banking system and thus have to be roped into the concept of ‘financial inclusion.’

The next issue with direct cash transfer is in the access to cash itself. Most of the households in villages are male dominated. In simple words, the financial decisions are sole proprietary of the males in the family. This would not only become victim of gender discrimination but also may dilute the very objective of cash transfer. It has been widely seen that if cash handling by men is quite skewed as compared to women. Even in NREGA schemes, the cash disbursed to workers are used more for household by women and more for alcohol and tobacco by men. In a classic case of Malawi (published in a paper titled, ‘Cash Transfers in the Context of Pro-Poor Growth’), it was found that “the value of cash transfers was undermined by the exceptional increase in maize prices during the 2001-2002 season: in May 2001, the monthly cash transfer purchased 70 kg of maize, but only 16 kg by February 2002. As a general lesson, cash transfers are likely to be inadequate in the absence of measures to address wider economic instability.” Going by various precedence, there is a huge probability of the money being used for anti-social and non-essential purposes. This may lead to alcohol abuses and other form of misuse and thus leading to incidences of domestic violence too.

Read more.....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

ExecutiveMBA

PAUL BRACKEN: PROFESSOR OF MANAGEMENT AND POLITICAL SCIENCE, YALE UNIVERSITY

China, too, is shifting its nuclear forces to mobile missiles and submarines. These weapons can be put on alert in a way that would be highly visible to US satellites and the global media. Thus, the Chinese can easily “nuclearise” a crisis with US or anyone else. They do not have to detonate a nuclear weapon, but only alert adversaries to the dramatic increase in the political stakes and dangers of a showdown.

Russia, not wanting to be left out of the act, has recently staged the largest nuclear exercises in decades to remind everyone that it remains a serious nuclear player, too. These individual developments are troubling. But they cannot be understood in isolation from the larger multipolar system of major powers that is forming. To a great extent, this is a nuclear multipolar system: possessing nuclear weapons contributes to a country’s global status as a major power.

To see this, consider the following question: When was the last time that the US or anyone else seriously proposed that India sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – that is, that India give up the Bomb. Given America’s economic problems and looming defense cuts, as well as growing Chinese power, there is no longer even a remote possibility that this demand will be made. India has become an accepted, legitimate member of the nuclear club, the fiction of the NPT notwithstanding. It is even less likely that China or Russia would disarm for the sake of a nuclear-free world.

But the most urgent problem stems from the breakdown of major countries’ one-time nuclear monopoly and the empowerment of smaller countries like North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, and, quite possibly, Iran. A new set of rules for diplomacy, military strategy, and arms control is needed to stabilize this emerging nuclear order. Pretending that it does not exist is not a strategy.

Read more.....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

 

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

 

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

ExecutiveMBA

Who let the street down?

As Yet another turbulent year draws to a close, it’s time to see who quashed investors’ hopes on the street. Though the second half of the year saw share prices of a number of top companies coming back on track, some stocks still remained painfully low. B&E finds out the top value destroyers for the year among the BSE 100 constituents

Slow demand hits all

IT giant Infosys topped the chart biggest wealth destroyers (in %). Affected by a slowdown in revenue from Western clients remained the biggest problem for the company. Between Jan 2, 2012 and December 15, 2012, it lost 15.91% of its m-cap. ONGC stood second with 15.66% reduction in its m-cap due to slow oil and natural gas discovery in the new fields and poor yield from existing assets. Two companies from Adani group made it to this not-to-be-proud list. Adani Enterprises suffered due to increasing international prices and a forced 7% promotor’s stake sale to meet compulsory share holding norms, while Adani Power faced issues due to low margins. GMR infrastructure suffered various bottlenecks including sectoral and its own internal issues.

Western disturbances hit Infy

In absolute terms, Infosys and ONGC lost market capitalization to the tune of Rs.178.94 billion and Rs.106.60 billion respectively between Jan 2, 2012 and December 15, 2012. Among others Bharti Airtel saw its m-cap coming down by Rs.39.42 billion due to lower user base and less than expected average revenue per user. However, it is expected that the capex made by the company may soon bring a change in its fortune in the next financial year and a good recovery is on cards for the telecom giant. Rising non-performing assets troubled Punjab National Bank to a great extent during the year. During the given period, the bank’s market capitalisation fell by Rs.3.38 billion.

Read more....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

ExecutiveMBA

Has Russia chosen the wrong guy once again?

With inflation cooling down to a post-Soviet record-low of 3.8% and real wage growth improving, some may wonder why is there an expectation of growing opposition to Putin during his upcoming Presidency? His reluctance to implement structural reforms coupled with his refusal to openly tackle rampant corruption in Russia could be contributing factors – but election fraud in the recent elections, surely not

Almost six months ago (on September 24, 2011), while addressing his party’s members at a congress, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, should stand for the presidency in 2012. Clearly, this wasn’t a bombshell by any quarters; in fact, the announcement was quite expected. But that day, post the announcement, two things were more or less certain – Putin would win the elections and the opposition would protest the results. The definiteness in the above certainties was not because Putin was expected to win the March 2012 Presidential elections through fraudulent practices, but ironically because he was expected to win despite such practices. In other words, Putin’s popularity had held strong at such high levels over the past few years and especially as of recent times, that even international observers had expected quite a reduced form of ballot fraud.

It isn’t that Putin himself wasn’t aware of his massive popularity. His decision to allow the installation of more than 182,000 web cameras at 91,000 odd polling stations and admittance of thousands of independent, international election observers during the March 2012 elections should have convinced even critics that the man was changing. This is not to say that irregularities did not occur – a Chechnya polling station even documented a 107% voter turnout – but Putin’s final overall vote tally of about 64% matches closely with exit polls conducted by multiple agencies (like Public Opinion Foundation and All-Russian Public Opinion Research Centre) that forecasted that Putin would obtain around 58-59% of the polled votes. If at all Putin’s supporters abused the election process, to be fair, it couldn’t have mattered beyond a few handful of percentages in the final tally. And one really would be strongly given to believe that Putin would not have undertaken underhand election practices for such a puny advantage.

It’s abundantly clear that Russians en masse are supporting Putin’s candidature, more for the way he has stabilized the country from the pits it had reached in the 90s Yeltsin era, than for his dictatorial prances. Then why is there an expectation of growing angst in the upcoming Putin presidency? Like we said, election fraud surely can’t be the reason.

And even peddling Russia’s ‘impending economic downfall’ as the reason may, on the face of it, sound quite eccentric – while Russian real wage growth has returned to near double-digits (9% y-o-y in January 2012), inflationary pressures too have cooled down to a post-Soviet record-low of 3.8% in February. With 4.3% y-o-y increase in GDP in 2011, Russia’s economy has broadly even recovered from the global economic crisis. But a deeper look, and some questions around Russia’s remarkable growth, led clearly by ‘black gold’ (oil accounts for nearly 20% of Russia’s GDP, over 66% of its exports and 50% of its government revenues) surely start gaining locus standi.

Read more...

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

 

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

 

2012 : DNA National B-School Survey 2012
Ranked 1st in International Exposure (ahead of all the IIMs)
Ranked 6th Overall
Zee Business Best B-School Survey 2012
Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri’s Session at IMA Indore
IIPM IN FINANCIAL TIMES, UK. FEATURE OF THE WEEK
IIPM strong hold on Placement : 10000 Students Placed in last 5 year

BBA Management Education

Bid adieu to these 10 WMDs!

The only thing that can perhaps be worse than hiring the wrong employee is hiring the wrong leader. In this incisive analysis, Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri, Honorary Director, IIPM Think Tank and Prof. A. Sandeep, Group Editorial Director, Planman Media, identify 10 CEO traits that are an agglomeration of bad news for the companies that they lead.

It’s the position that makes the most bucks. But then, it is also the position where the buck stops rolling. The CEO is answerable to every stakeholder imaginable for the success or failure of any operation/division; be it marketing, HR, operations or finance. He takes decisions, sets the direction and sets the organisation up to execute on his strategy; and can be the critical difference between a company that ups the ante and one that falls of the cliff.

The traits that define a good CEO have been the subject of scrutiny and debate over several years, but it remains largely unresolved. That’s certainly bad news for corporate boards, who would want to go to any extent to ensure that they have the right man. Based on exhaustive research and industry interface over the years, we present an expansive primer of 10 typical traits of unsuccessful CEOs, which should act as red flags for any company.

#1 the best one-trick pony you met

To be true, multi-tasking is a way of life today, but one really wonders if it is the trait that should be associated with CEOs. If you look at expert analysis, CEOs looking to specialise in one area, with the belief that it leads to better efficiency and performance, need a very urgent reality check. Dr. Louis Csoka published a benchmark report titled ‘International Communications Research in December 2006, which proved that multi-taskers were not only more educated in comparison (78% more) but were also better paid (200% more!). It is also affirmed in a research by Dr. Levenson (University of Southern California), Dr. Gibbs (Chicago Graduate School of Business) and Professor Zoghi (Bureau of Labour Statistics) titled, ‘Why Are Jobs Designed The Way They Are?’, that in world leading organisations, ‘multi-tasking’ “leads to greater productivity” as compared to specialisation. One case in point is highlighted in the NHS Report from Institute for Innovation and Improvement, which wrote of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, “Gates is the original multi-tasking man...” In fact, Gates’ belief in multi-tasking is so supreme that “once, Gates hung a map of Africa in his garage, so he could have something to occupy his mind for the precious seconds spent turning on the engine of his Porsche.” In other words, there is a significantly high probability that single/limited tasking CEOs would easily find their way into the ignominious list of worst performing CEOs.

#2 let’s be history together!

Does your organisation revolve heavily around one power figure, with his immediate deputies leading the rest in following his cue blindly on every occasion? If that be the case, you must delink from this organisation at the earliest opportunity. The right CEO is one who identifies potential insiders and grooms them relentlessly into leadership positions, and keeps a list of potential successors ready. The wrong CEO, simply put, is one who does not do that. Global HR consultancy Heidrick & Struggles reveals an interesting research finding, which states that “merely announcing who your next CEO will be, can move the market value of your company by 5% or more!” Centre for Economics & Business Research also proved in its benchmark research of 350 FTSE firms in 2005 that firms with unplanned succession planning for CEOs underperformed their counterparts, who had proper succession planning in place.
 

Read more....

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

 

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

 

IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman

ExecutiveMBA