Again… my apologies for my long absence. Just didn’t feel like writing about the usual garbage that is being discussed in the media everyday under the tag of ‘news’.

Either way, Copenhagen. The place where the world leaders hope to jointly agree to carbon emissions cut deal in order to bring emissions down in their respective countries by up to 40%.

Now, even though most of the world leaders have marked their attendance to the Copenhagen summit (even Obama), the summit will be of almost no use if the NDEs or the New Developing Economies are not present at the summit in full force. This basically means the heads of state for India, China, Brazil and South Africa.

Although Brazil and SA have confirmed their participation both India and China have not confirmed that there heads of state will attend the summit (although it looks likely the Indian Prime Minister will eventually attend).

I had posted in a  previous blog of mine on why I support the current Indian stand on the issue. Just few hours back India, China, South Africa and Brazil have agreed to walk out of the summit talks if the developed world tries to legally bind the developing world with emission cuts.

I have maintained the thought that developing world should not bow down to the pressures of the west in this issue. Neither India or China can afford at the moment to have a unprecedented slowdown on their economic growth. Both countries fight from wide spread poverty, poor health care and education systems and other social issues which can only be solved with economic growth and economic stability.

The western countries should lead from the front in a non-legally binding MoU on emission cuts and I am sure even the developing world will do their part, specially now when both China and India have proposed their action plan on the environment for the next 20 years.

I don’t see Copenhagen being a big success, but at least the idea is in the right direction. It should not go down the way Kyoto did, a climate deal is a need of the hour but the world leaders need to be realistic on what they want from the developing world, no developing country will target unrealistic cuts which will hamper its economic growth.

Let us see what Copenhagen has in store for us.

I have not written here for about a month, sorry about the delay my fine (and few) readers.

As many of you may know that the Indian government has been on an austerity drive, cutting expenses to show sympathy, if you may say, with the common man who has been burdened with the prices of essential commodities sky rocketing.

But yesterday, from what I believe they tried to take this austerity nonsense a bit too far. Salman Khurshide, the Union Minister for Corporate Affairs decided that its his turn to say something sporadic and obnoxious.

Mr. Khrushid wants Indian companies to not pay eccentric salaries to its CEOs and other top management.

“We are accountable to the people and therefore we are doing this beyond the rules,” Khurshid said.

“It would be paternalistic [for the government] to tell the shareholder what’s good for the company. However, the shareholder must have information, we will educate the shareholders whether there should be some upper limit [to the executives’ salaries] etc. It’s something that the standing committee is examining,” he said.”.

I am sure Mr. Khurshid is very aware that CEOs in India are probably one of the least payed, and most over-worked people in the business.

Every individual has a right to earn how much ever he wants (legally)! Whether he wants to use that money for social good or not is entirely the persons own decision, just to save the tax payers money with the current ‘austerity drive’ by the central government does not mean you can dictate terms wherever you feel like Mr. Khurshid!

There are already enough strong laws protecting our corporate industry. Management salaries are already governed by corporate law. A company’s top management cannot earn more than 10% of total profits. An amendment to the company’s act will also give shareholders a say in deciding executive salaries. The amended act, tabled in August this year, is currently before a standing committee of Parliament. The Minister for Corporate Affairs has already indicated that he would like CEO salary thresholds to be at lower levels.

Most of the Indian CEOs in a recent poll have clearly said that it is very difficult to attract a good talent pool without offering good pays. Which is absolutely fair! If a person has done a degree from an IIM or ISB, he does not expect to get paid in peanuts.
Kindly be a little more careful in what you call for Mr. Khurshid, you cannot micro-manage everything!

“He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much,” said Dr Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences“

In the media age when all we hear and read on the news is who had a wardrobe malfunction, how Serena Williams lost it at the US Open or how Obama’s ambitious and most importantly required health care plan is ‘socialist’, news of people like Norman Borlaug’s death gets buried under this huge mountain of, i hate to say this but crap, that we call news and information today.

A man who worked towards eradicating world hunger via science died on 12th September from cancer. Mr. Borlaug, or ‘aandata’ which means ‘the saint of the grains’  (loosely translated of course), a title that was bestowed on him by India was one of those gems of a human being who dedicated his life on eradicating a plague that has affected mankind for centuries. The simple case of, food!

Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for leading the world as the “Father of Green Revolution” and devising techniques which resulted in the quadrupling of food production in countries like India and Pakistan, helping feed millions of people in the region.

We can only hope our society can get more people in its midst like Mr. Borlaug, whose vision helped eradicate hunger in many lands.

RIP aandata!

Norman Borloug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009)

While browsing through my Facebook page, I came across an update from the official page of The Economist asking its readers the question if international migration has become too rampant?

This was actually one of the issues and one of the types of questions i never expected from a magazine such as The Economist.

I firmly see this debate as a pre-historic one. People who push for a curb on gloablisation or a curb on migration need to revisit their thought process. Bringing the world closer together is a vital aspect of bridging all kinds of differences that we face today. Be it religious differences, racial differences, cultutral, political etc.

The idea of ‘foreigners’ shifting to other countries in search for better life, better jobs is frowned upon by a large faction of the society. Sometimes the argument for this bias actually may seem valid. Such as availability of jobs for the local diaspora being penetrated by migrants and such. But on a re-think this idea just comes up as redundant and out dated.

As long as a person is shifting to another country and respects the laws of the land and the culture of the particular place, no one has a right to have an objection of that persons existence in society.  As far as the question comes of the increase in competition in the job market, well that is one of the healthiest things to have.  It would just make a prospective employee fight, work and study harder for his or her share of success.

I hope someday in the near future these types of questions will be obsolete, specially from well respected publications.

Yesterday, on-line newspapers and TV channels were leading their bulletins with the story of teenager Kritika Khanna, who jumped to her death from her apartment in Delhi because she could not secure a berth to study in Delhi University’s Lady Sri Ram College.

Nothing new about such incidents, it is an age old occurrence during the admissions season in Delhi University every year. But should this absolutely unnecessary step be taken by students just because they could not secure a seat at the best colleges under Delhi University’s belt?

In Delhi no students who has scored below 90% overall gets a seat in the good colleges that come under Delhi University. Which is absolutely absurd! One cannot differentiate the knowledge by any means between a 90% student and a 75% scoring student. May I ask what is wrong in scoring 75%? It is an excellent mark and a student with such a grade should be able to get into a good institution with a good supporting infrastructure and a good faculty.

For a country which is growing at an average of 7% and has a huge chunk of its population under the ‘youth’ category, why is it that there are not enough seats to cater to students of Delhi, and not just Delhi but India as a whole?

The answer to this question is quite simple, no Indian government since the early reform years in the 90s have gone ahead and marked higher education institutions as an important investment opportunity for the public sector. We can clearly see that the model of giving private sector opportunities to invest in education has been a dud. The business aspect of education overtakes the aspect of providing world class education in the case of majority of private educational institutions.

One of the most unlikely culprits in educational scams is the Indian media. Most private educational institutions provide a good advertising base to the Indian media houses. For example the huge full page ads provided to newspapers such as Times Of India and Hindustan Times by Arindam Chaudhary promoted IIPM. IIPM advertises it-self as better than many IIM’s in India. IIM’s or Indian Institute of Management are like the Kellog and Wharton’s of India and every educated man and women knows that IIPM is bluffing in its advertisements. But none of the media houses are able to put a story on this without disturbing a huge revenues source for them.

Another example of media abuse in Delhi’s education circle is the amount of sensationalistic coverage it does during the Delhi University admissions. The media manages to create unnecessary hype over a select few colleges that are rated higher than the others. This hype coupled with peer pressure amongst students lead to cases like Kritika Khanna, who scored 90% in her final year and commit suicide just because she could not get into one of the top colleges in DU.

Its high time the Indian government looks closely at its investment plans in higher education across India and comes up with a blue print of building quality colleges and Universities across India. The lack of quality education in a lot of non-technical fields will hurt India and its youth in the long run. It is high time the government stops giving land around the metro cities for unnecessary construction of fancy and fancier malls and instead gives this land to Universities so they can develop more quality infrastructure to accommodate more students in areas such as social sciences, politics, arts, music etc.

Yes, India is doing good in technology but we have to remember that IT professionals and engineers are not going to run the country in the future, it will be the social scientists, the politics students, the humanities students that will take over from our current political brigade.

India needs to act fast on its education reforms so that unlike us, who had to go abroad to gain higher knowledge the next generation can get the same quality education at home itself.

Clinton lands in North Korea

The new Secretary of State for USA, Hillary Clinton is on her first tour of India with many agendas to discuss with the Indian government.

One of the top priorities on her list is to push for President Obama’s ambitious yet admirable environment plan. After George Bush’s presidency which did next to nothing to promote the cause of global warming it is a fresh breath of air that Obama is taking a serious interest in trying to prevent global warming, before it gets out of hand.

Obama’s government has been trying to persuade developing economies such as India, China, Brazil, Mexico etc. to embrace and lead in plans to cut carbon emissions.

Members of the G8 group who met in Italy earlier this month agreed to cut the world carbon emissions by half by the year 2050.

Now, as ambitious as this may sound, yet as possible as it may sound this figure will not be realistic till developed economies show results first, before putting undue pressure on economic development and prosperity in the developing nations group or on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries.

Ms. Clinton has picked up the issue of climate change and possible legally binding climate caps with India which has been completely ruled out by the Indian government.

India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said “There is simply no case for the pressure we, who have been among the lowest emitters per-capita, face to actually reduce emissions”.

What the G8 members need to do right now is make goals for their respective nations on carbon emissions and prove to the skeptical developing world on how economic sustainability away from sources such as fossil fuels can still be maintained while achieving set targets in emission cuts.

For example Denmark’s increasing investments and reliance on wind and hydro energy for its day to day use is a very inspiring initiative. Of course there is a huge difference between a country like Denmark and a developing country like India but what the Danes are doing is that they are out to prove that renewable energy and lower costs can be embraced to replace a sizable chunk of day-to-day requirement of energy, which today in many areas is provided by fossil fuels.

Developing nations will need to eventually put in their efforts for this cause, but the developed nations who can afford to experiment with technologies and development need to take the first concrete steps and show results in order to prove and inspire developing economies that it can be done, and not enforce legal bindings of any sort on the developing nations which may hamper the development of the people.

This was imminent, and many people knew that an announcement would come sooner or later.

Google announced that it will be launching its own operating system next year, initially for netbooks and later for PCs.

As we all know Google has come up as one of the leading IT companies in the world. Till now most of its revenue comes from online advertising, and Google OS will probably be one of there first full blown consumer production initiatives.

One of the best things to come out of Google’s announcement till now is that Chrome OS will simply run on programmes written for the web and not exclusively for Google.

This is where till now, Microsoft, worlds leading OS developer has been almost dictating towards its users with Windows specific only software. This is very simple to what social-networking site Facebook uses, letting its users develop applications which can be used on Facebooks interface via which both the website and the developer benefits.

Google has been smart in coming up with this plan. Being the world’s premiere search engine Google has amassed a huge database of research and user habit information. They will be much well versed than any one else in knowing what kind of things people are looking for from new operating systems.

Many of the coming up OS features may be tested via Google’s Android OS, which is Google’s mobile OS.

With the company’s incursion into the OS market while also dipping its feet in various other technological areas Google may very well pose a big threat to Microsoft’s Windows brand, not immediately, and maybe not even in the next 10-15 years but in the future it may come up to challenge Microsoft in a big way, although we must bear in mind that the veterans in Redmond will not be  sitting in their chairs with the feet up!

England - Ashes winner 2005

With all the T20 cricket happening around the world coupled with India’s useless and quite unnecessary trip to the West Indies, it will be absolutely great to see some classic test match cricket in a series which is filled with history and mystique.

The first test match of the Ashes between old rivals England and Australia starts today at the new cricket ground in Cardiff, which is hosting an Ashes match for the first time.  Cardiff is the first new venue added to the Ashes listing since 1902!

The Ashes have been contested since 1882, with Australia having won 31 series and England 28, while there have been five draws in the 64 matches.

This is the kind of cricket I have been missing a lot, not the slam-bang T20 format. Yes T20 is engaging and fun but they have killed the excitement of the T20 format by playing too much of it this year, and we have just touched July. The IPL followed by the T20 World Cup was a bit too much T20 in a short span of time.

Test cricket still remains my favourite format of the game, its more of a mind game than a pure shot based game. The Ashes series in 2005 was some of the best test cricket I had ever seen, and it also helps that England still draws big crowds to see Test cricket which seems to be a dying format in the game now.

Either way, lets hope we see an epic battle between these two cricketing giants and some great Ashes memories to be added to the already flowering history.