India Insight

Infosys’ head honcho S.D. Shibulal revealed he is an INTJ type.  It is hardly surprising then that Shibu, as he likes to be called, was one of the pioneers of the Global Delivery Model – corporate speak for outsourced IT services.

INTJ (short for Introvert, Intuition, Thinking and Judgment) is a rare personality type based on psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s works. INTJ personalities are self-starters, preferring to work alone without an authority looking over their shoulders and meticulously plan their activities to achieve success.

Shibulal’s thoughts on M&A and his company’s margins reflect his INTJ traits.

“M&A is like falling in love. There is no plan like falling in love!” he said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.

Considering it has only made three acquisitions over the last five years, Infosys clearly doesn't fall in love easily.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, one of India’s most influential businesswomen and among the world’s most powerful women, says she’s an accidental entrepreneur.

Mazumdar-Shaw has shown that modest garage start-ups can extend beyond software and hardware companies. She set up what is now India's largest listed biotechnology company in 1978 and she encourages others to follow suit.

“Today a lot of early stage research work can be done in a garage,” she said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.

By Danish Siddiqui

Mumbai provides everyone living in it with an opportunity to earn and survive. Be it a white-collared job in a multinational company located in one of the city’s plush high rise buildings or killing rats by night in the filthiest and dirtiest parts of India's financial capital. This time, my tryst was with the latter.

I decided I wanted to meet Mumbai's rat-killer army employed by the city's civic body. Very little is known about this tireless force that works the bylanes of the metropolis every night. Mumbai's municipal corporation employs 44 rat killers and also has a freelance contingent, who aspire to be on the payrolls one day. Employees of the pest control department receive a salary of 15,000 to 17,000 Indian Rupees ($294 to 333) while contract laborers are paid 5 Indian rupees ($0.10) per rat they kill. The rat killers are expected to kill at least 30 rodents per night and hand over the carcasses to civic officials in the morning. If they fall short by even one rodent, they are expected to make it up the next night or else they stand to lose a day’s pay.

I zeroed in on a family living in the eastern suburbs of Mumbai, six of whom kill rats for a living. The oldest of them is Javed Sheikh, 61, who has been killing rats for the last four decades. The youngest rat-killer, on the other hand, is Javed's son, 12-year old Waseem Sheikh. Only the father and the eldest son are employed by the sanitation department of Mumbai’s municipal corporation; the rest work as freelancers.

State Bank of India Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri took recourse to the Great Bard when asked about what the banks, who now own a substantial portion of the debt-hobbled airline Kingfisher Airlines, would do about its exposure.

“Much ado about nothing,” Chaudhuri said in response to the media frenzy, in a reference to the Shakespearean comedy about two pairs of lovers who are caught in a web of misunderstanding.

Even as he tries to make light of the situation, Chaudhuri, the largest lender to Kingfisher, has reason to be worried. He, himself, is fighting rising bad loans at his own bank and wouldn’t like Kingfisher to add to it.

Bailout. A term which till recently was alien to India.

It was something the West did, to save their big financial institutions which had grown too big too fast and had squandered their cash positions while betting on complex instruments that even they did not fully understand.

India, and largely Asia, was rather different. We were the growth engines of the world. The Asian giants would prevent the global meltdown from getting worse and would reverse it eventually, or so went the perception.

Three years on and as the Greek crisis looms, the major Asian economies and their counterparts from around the world are still pondering on how to prevent the problems in Europe from spreading worldwide.

By Vivek Prakash

There are a couple of stories I've been waiting to do since I heard that I'd be moving to India last year. Maybe it's part nostalgia, part fascination, but I'm happy to be able to interpret these stories visually, finally.

The last time I was at a circus was some twenty-five years ago. My father brought me to the Bandra Reclamation in Mumbai to see it. I can't remember which one it was, maybe the Apollo Circus? I remember the smell of fresh dirt and popcorn. There were fireworks. There was a dome where three people on motorbikes rode on the walls without crashing into each other. There were big cats; lions and tigers with some jumping through flaming hoops. I was wide-eyed and thrilled. I've dreamed of seeing and photographing that show for years.

Twenty-five years later, I came to the very same location, with a camera in hand. When the Rambo Circus pitched tent, I jumped at the chance to spend a few days documenting what Indian circuses are like. This place has been in my imagination for so long.

A strategic partnership agreement between India and Afghanistan would ordinarily have evoked howls of protest from Pakistan which has long regarded its western neighbour as part of its sphere of influence.  Islamabad has, in the past, made no secret of its displeasure at India's role in Afghanistan including  a$2 billion aid effort that has won it goodwill among the Afghan  people, but which Pakistan sees as New Delhi's way to expand influence. 

Instead the reaction to the pact signed last month during President Hamid Karzai's visit to New Delhi, the first Kabul had done with any country, was decidedly muted. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani  said India and Afghanistan were "both sovereign countries and they have the right to do whatever they want to."  The Pakistani foreign office echoed Gilani's comments, adding only that regional stability should be preserved. It cried off further comment, saying it was studying the pact.

It continued to hold discussions, meanwhile, on the grant of the Most Favoured Nation to India as part of moves to normalise ties. Late last month the cabinet cleared the MFN, 15 years after New Delhi accorded Pakistan the same status so that the two could conduct trade like nations do around the world, even those with differences.

The past few days have been quite busy for the government. As yet another spiritual leader started yet another “movement” against corruption in the government and bureaucracy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was at the chic French seaside resort of Cannes, holding discussions with heads of state of the G20 nations on how to deal with the crisis in Greece.

Back home, another petrol price hike left the general public seething as the main opposition  Bharatiya Janata Party went on the offensive yet again. Singh put up a firm stand when he said that the country should move more in the direction of deregulation. It was a situation he has found himself in regularly during his second term, that of political versus economic compulsions.

Talking about political compulsions, the biggest problem Singh and his government seem to be facing right now is not the opposition or a frustrated middle class bogged down by double-digit inflation and price rise for most food products and essential commodities, but an ally who has been known to have her way within the UPA coalition.

By Annie Banerji

India, touted as a land of mysticism and spirituality, boasts a large number of TV channels devoted to religion and faith. But for self-avowed Hindu reformist Swami Agnivesh, a former member of anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare’s core team, the limelight of primetime reality TV was just too tempting.

Agnivesh sees it as an important medium to fight against exploitation, violence against women and the killing of unborn baby girls. But some have scorned a perceived publicity stunt gone too far.

Agnivesh, who controversially split from Hazare’s cadre of anti-graft warriors that mobilised millions against India’s corruption-smeared government, will on Tuesday appear on reality show Bigg Boss, India’s version of primetime hit Big Brother, in which contestants are under house arrest for three months with round-the-clock camera surveillance.

A Delhi University college has banned the use of cellphones or laptops in its hostels — a bewildering step in a university regarded as a role model for other educational institutions in India. Even more alarmingly, it is only the women students who are the receiving end of this diktat.

Daulat Ram College, a girls’ only college in New Delhi, has barred students from having cellphones or computers in their rooms. While most of the residents are above 18, they say their rooms do not even have a latch and that supervisors can storm into their rooms at 2 a.m. if they suspect them of having sneaked in a mobile phone.

Resentment over these rules led to a student protest over the weekend, but no concrete step has been taken to revoke these rules so far.