November 24, 2024

The business trip to India was probably not really needed. Other than the fact that it offers a chance to get back to home base for free. Earlier when I used to land in India, while travelling from the USA it felt like a happy and surreal experience- even the smell of the air on deplaning at mumbai was something to take note of if not outright cherish. None of that exists now after having lived in the region for almost two decades. This year alone I will have travelled to India 4 times, twice on work and twice to see my parents and sister. As long as I can manage to keep this job ( which must be a topic for a subsequent post ) , I should likely be travelling to India in work atleast twice a year. It is good to catch up with friends and family but it is really painful to see the lack of visual progress as compared both to the hype as well as to other similar GDP countries. As a well-travelled professional, it does not help if I have to lie to myself to believe that India is now a glistening emerald peninsula with blue skies and clean roads and nice looking urban vistas. It decidedly is not, and not likely to be for atleast 50 years at current growth rate. While we catch-up, the rest of the world will move even further ahead. This is what Narayana murthy was trying to make a point of with his comment on us working 80 hrs a week. We are behind and we are visibly constrained by our diversity, our politics and most fundamentally our energy resources. If we are to catch up we have to do more than just gloat over a healthy GDP growth rate. We have to grind it out for decades if not for a century. I understand this only too well. But not everyone is cut out for hard work- me included. Atleast the hard work that is required has to be well-defined, structured and ably monitored. When I look at what I do for a living, everyday there is a question I ask if what I am doing is making a shred of difference to anything or am I going through some arbitrary motions for the sake of optics. If I am feeling this, surely others might be- and at scale.  And it is not that I am feeling this now- I have always felt it in all my roles across companies and continents. There is a lot of hard work that by design amounts to nothing. This is required but it is not motivating. The broad point I am trying to make is that a large part of people are lazy. Even amongst those that are not, there is rarely enough motivation for effort since there are no points for it. In the small segment where perspicacity meets perspiration, great things always happen and will continue to happen. The key is to increase the size of this sliver. Again, more thoughts about this later.

In this trip, I had the chance to visit a factory in Mysore- so I drove from Bangalore to Mysore and back. Following the visit, we made a detour to visit a wooded area at the border of karnataka and kerala- which is supposed to have wildlife. We spotted elephants and deer even without getting out of our car. On the way back we got stuck in the infamous bangalore traffic on the outskirts. When I reached the hotel I was exhausted. The hotel, I might add, was very nice. It had a rooftop terrace bar where I caught up with an old college friend after years. 

The next few days were easy as me and my korean-american colleague just needed to walk next door to our India office. Still very small, but I was dreaming up plans to make it bigger. After all, there could be a lot of work done remotely from India- and most large companies abroad had been taking advantage of this for decades already. It is still a novel concept in our company- but there is not a consultant who does not keep pushing offshoring to reduce costs. It will thus happen sooner rather than later. I merely want to plant the first seed. There is no dearth of talent in Bangalore- it is still an eminently liveable city aside of the traffic. Furthermore, days later I was stuck on the western expressway in Mumbai where it took me an hour to get from the airport to the hotel in Goregaon- all of 9 km away. Bangalore gets a far worse rap than it deserves- Mumbai still is the worst for traffic by a distance.  I have always been intrigued by Mumbai. On the face of it, it seems to me to be the most uninhabitable city on the planet.  Given the infrastructural weakness, the property prices make no sense- it is more expensive than dubai and touching close to singapore. Rents are abysmally low- so it is not an investment vehicle by any count. What exactly would an owner be paying for and what does he get for his money? Baffling. And yet Mumbaikars are loyal to a fault about their city and in many cases insufferably defensive. Clearly underneath the ugly hardware, there is a software aspect which must be appealing. I cannot speak for that since I have never lived there. But if that is the case, it is an intriguing idea. The valuation of real estate in a city has a will o the wisp element that stems from something akin to “goodwill” on a balance sheet! Think about that for a second.

And with thoughts such as these pregnant in head, I landed once more at the immensely satisfying Dubai International Terminal 3.