Veering Around

Google is Watching

2007-07-08T21:02:00.000+05:30

Google’s Web History remembers almost everything you do online.

For example, this is what I did TWO YEARS AGO, on a Saturday evening …

(Okay those were among the most harmless / neutral subjects I ever searched for)

It remembers what you searched for, when exactly you did it, how many and which links you clicked on, and how many times. It categorizes your searches into web searches, image searches, videos, maps, etc.

It also shows you "trends" -- how many searches you did on each day of the week, how many in each month of the year, and even how many at each hour of the day!

And all this mother load of personal information accessible with a single password -- that many of us manage so casually. Some note it down in their diaries / mobile phones, use same passwords across accounts, and share it with friends and colleagues. Even otherwise, hacking happens to be an ever evolving field, and even the mightiest of technology companies leave loopholes that get exploited now and then by those blessed with enough of curiosity and capability.

Did somebody say "privacy"?

I think it's time to update our dictionaries to reflect the archaic connotations and usage of this word.

Google's motto "Don't be evil" does not assure me it will/can do enough to protect its loyal users against a third-party doing something evil with the information they hold about us.

This phrase doesn't appear on Google

2007-06-05T10:57:00.000+05:30

That used to be a Googlenope.

Now, wonder what a Googlenope is?

Check out this Washington Post article

My Experiments With Zoom

2007-05-18T21:20:00.000+05:30

From Nigeria, With Love

2007-01-04T14:12:00.000+05:30

Did you ever receive a spam mail from someone claiming to be an aide of a dead president from Nigeria, and asking your help in transferring millions of dollars out of the country (obviously with you getting a part of the amount)?

Read this (dated) NewYorker article.

An amazing story of how a well educated and seasoned American – a psychiatrist by profession – had fallen victim to this con.

THE PERFECT MARK
by MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.

Issue of 2006-05-15

Late one afternoon in June, 2001, John W. Worley sat in a burgundy leather desk chair reading his e-mail. He was fifty-seven and burly, with glasses, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a bushy gray beard. A decorated Vietnam veteran and an ordained minister, he had a busy practice as a Christian psychotherapist, and, with his wife, Barbara, was the caretaker of a mansion on a historic estate in Groton, Massachusetts. He lived in a comfortable three-bedroom suite in the mansion, and saw patients in a ground-floor office with walls adorned with images of Jesus and framed military medals. Barbara had been his high-school sweetheart—he was the president of his class, and she was the homecoming queen—and they had four daughters and seven grandchildren, whose photos surrounded Worley at his desk.

Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to “CEO/Owner.” The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: “With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country, for onward dispatch and investment.” Mbote explained that he had been chief of security for the Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who had secretly sent him to South Africa to buy weapons for a force of élite bodyguards. But Kabila had been assassinated before Mbote could complete the mission. “I quickly decided to stop all negotiations and divert the funds to my personal use, as it was a golden opportunity, and I could not return to my country due to my loyalty to the government of Laurent Kabila,” Mbote wrote. Now Mbote had fifty-five million American dollars, in cash, and he needed a discreet partner with an overseas bank account. That partner, of course, would be richly rewarded.

Mbote’s offer had the hallmarks of an advance-fee fraud, a swindle whose victims are asked to provide money, information, or services in exchange for a share of a promised fortune. Countless such e-mails, letters, and faxes are sent every year, with a broad variety of stories about how the money supposedly became available (unclaimed estate, corrupt executive, and dying Samaritan being only a few of the most popular). Worley, who had spent his adult life advocating self-knowledge and introspection, seemed particularly unlikely to be fooled. He had developed a psychological profiling tool designed to reveal a person’s “unique needs, desires and probable behavioral responses.” He promised users of the test, “The individual’s understanding of self will be greatly enhanced, increasing the potential for a fulfilled and balanced life.” And Worley was vigilant against temptation. Two weeks before the e-mail arrived, he had been the keynote speaker at his eldest granddaughter’s graduation from the First Assembly Christian Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He cautioned the students about Satan, telling them, “He’s going to be trying to destroy you every inch of the way.”

Still, Worley, faced with an e-mail that would, according to federal authorities, eventually lead him to join a gang of Nigerian criminals seeking to defraud U.S. banks, didn’t hesitate. A few minutes after receiving Mbote’s entreaty, he replied, “I can help and I am interested.” His only question was how Mbote had found him, and he seemed satisfied with the explanation: that the South African Department of Home Affairs had supplied his name. When Worley attributed this improbable event to God’s will, Mbote elaborated on the story to say that Worley’s name was one of ten that he had been given, and that it had been pulled from a hat after much prayer by someone named Pastor Mark. (A more likely possibility is that his e-mail address was plucked from an Internet chain letter, which he received and passed on, that promised a cash reward from Microsoft to anyone who forwarded the letter to others.) In e-mails, phone calls, faxes, and letters during the ensuing weeks, Mbote laid out the plan: If Worley would pay up-front costs, such as fees to a storage facility where the cash was being kept, and possibly travel to South Africa to collect the money, he would receive thirty per cent, or more than sixteen million dollars.

Worley told Mbote that he lived his life with the “utmost integrity” and didn’t want to jeopardize that. He also said that he couldn’t fund the operation. (Though he would report nearly a hundred and forty thousand dollars in income in 2001, he had declared personal bankruptcy in the early nineties, had relatively little saved for retirement, and wanted to help his grandchildren through college.) No problem, Mbote answered; “investors” would provide up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for airfare and other expenses needed to move the money to the United States, while Worley would act as middleman and curator of the funds.

As promised, in late August, 2001, Worley received a check for forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars, purportedly from one such investor. It was from an account belonging to the Syms Corporation, the discount-clothing chain whose slogan is “An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer.” Worley was wary. He called the Fleet Bank in Portland, Maine, where the check had been drawn. The bank told him it was an altered duplicate of a check that Syms had paid to the Maryland office of an international luggage manufacturer.

Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it’s the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common. Advance-fee fraud is an especially durable con. In an early variation, the Spanish Prisoner Letter, which dates to the sixteenth century, scammers wrote to English gentry and pleaded for help in freeing a fictitious wealthy countryman who was imprisoned in Spain. Today, the con usually relies on e-mail and is often called a 419 scheme, after the anti-fraud section of the criminal code in Nigeria, where it flourishes. (Last year, a Nigerian comic released a song that taunted Westerners with the lyrics “I go chop your dollar. I go take your money and disappear. Four-one-nine is just a game. You are the loser and I am the winner.”) The scammers, who often operate in crime rings, are known as “yahoo-yahoo boys,” because they frequently use free Yahoo accounts. Many of them live in a suburb of Lagos called Festac Town. Last year, one scammer in Festac Town told the Associated Press, “Now I have three cars, I have two houses, and I’m not looking for a job anymore.”

According to a statement posted on the Internet by the U.S. State Department, 419 schemes began to proliferate in the mid-nineteen-eighties, when a collapse in oil prices caused severe economic upheaval in Nigeria. The population—literate, English-speaking, and living with widespread government corruption—faced poverty and rising unemployment. These conditions created a culture of scammers, some of them violent. Marks are often encouraged to travel to Nigeria or to other countries, where they fall victim to kidnapping, extortion, and, in rare cases, murder. In the nineteen-nineties, at least fifteen foreign businessmen, including one American, were killed after being lured to Nigeria by 419 scammers. Until recently, Nigerian officials tended to blame the marks. “There would be no 419 scam if there are no greedy, credulous and criminally-minded victims ready to reap where they did not sow,” the Nigerian Embassy in Washington said in a 2003 statement. The following year, Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of Nigeria’s Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, noted that not one scammer was behind bars. Last November, however, Ribadu’s commission convicted two crime bosses who had enticed a Brazilian banker to spend two hundred and forty-two million dollars of his employer’s money on a fictitious airport-development deal. (Prosecutions by U.S. authorities are rare; most victims don’t know the real names of their “partners,” and 419 swindlers are adept at covering their tracks.)

Despite Nigeria’s efforts, the schemes have reached “epidemic proportions,” according to a publication by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The agency received more than fifty-five thousand complaints about them last year, nearly six times as many as in 2001. The increase is due in part to the Internet, which makes it easy for scammers to reach potential marks in wealthier countries. “If we educate the public to the point where nobody falls for it, then they’ll go out of business,” Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, the lead U.S. agency in investigating advance-fee frauds, says. The agency estimates that 419 swindlers gross hundreds of millions of dollars a year, not including losses by victims too embarrassed to complain. In February, the son of a prominent California psychiatrist named Louis A. Gottschalk—he identified what turned out to be early signs of Alzheimer’s in Ronald Reagan after analyzing his speech—filed suit seeking to remove his father from control over a family partnership, claiming that Gottschalk had lost more than a million dollars to Nigerian scammers. Some victims try to pass along their losses. The former Iowa congressman Edward Mezvinsky, who had refashioned himself as an international businessman, was caught up in a 419 scam, and during the nineteen-nineties stole from his law clients, friends, and even his mother-in-law to cover his losses. He is serving more than six years in prison after pleading guilty to thirty-one counts of fraud.

Robert B. Reich, the former Labor Secretary, who has studied the psychology of market behavior, says, “American culture is uniquely prone to the ‘too good to miss’ fallacy. ‘Opportunity’ is our favorite word. What may seem reckless and feckless and hapless to people in many parts of the world seems a justifiable risk to Americans.” But appetite for risk is only part of it. A mark must be willing to pursue a fortune of questionable origin. The mind-set was best explained by the linguist David W. Maurer in his classic 1940 book, “The Big Con”: “As the lust for large and easy profits is fanned into a hot flame, the mark puts all his scruples behind him. He closes out his bank account, liquidates his property, borrows from his friends, embezzles from his employer or his clients. In the mad frenzy of cheating someone else, he is unaware of the fact that he is the real victim, carefully selected and fatted for the kill. Thus arises the trite but none the less sage maxim: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’ ”

Born in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio, Worley joined the Army after high school. He served for a year as a staff sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, earning decorations that included a Bronze Star. In 1976, after fifteen years in the military, he was convicted of driving a car for a fellow-serviceman who held up a store; nevertheless, Worley received an honorable discharge and was later pardoned for his role in the robbery. He went to college and divinity school, and got a Ph.D. in psychology through correspondence courses from the Carolina University of Theology, then in Mount Holly, North Carolina. A. Erven Burke, a Baptist pastor who has known Worley for nearly thirty years, has called him a man of “integrity and honesty,” dedicated to helping others.

In the early nineteen-nineties, Worley developed a sixty-item questionnaire that he called Worley’s Identity Discovery Profile, or W.I.D.P., which sought to quantify a person’s temperament in three areas: social and vocational, leadership, and relationships. W.I.D.P. assigned labels to each: Introverted Sanguine, Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Melancholy, or Choleric, or a blend, such as Phlegmatic Introverted Sanguine. People whose “living patterns” were primarily focussed on fulfilling a temperament need were labelled Compulsive. Over time, Worley built a successful business selling W.I.D.P. to churches, businesses, schools, individuals, and other counsellors.

Worley’s own profile was Melancholy Compulsive in the social-vocational realm, Choleric Compulsive in leadership, and Introverted Sanguine in personal relationships: inward, headstrong, needy. The combination, he said later, made him ripe for scamming. He had abundant time to strategize with Nigerian partners, he tended to ignore warnings, and he yearned for his family’s approval. (Anticipating his fortune, he asked his daughters to list all their debts, which he promised to pay.) But Worley’s egotism also may have made him think he could gain the upper hand. When Mbote asked him to fly to South Africa to collect the money, he agreed—but only if Mbote reimbursed him for lost wages. Worley set the price at thirty-five thousand dollars a week.

After the Syms check proved false and Mbote failed to send a replacement, Worley told him that their partnership was over. A few days later, though, he began receiving e-mails from someone claiming to be Mohammed Abacha, the eldest surviving son of Nigeria’s late dictator General Sani Abacha, who reputedly stole billions from the Nigerian treasury. Mohammed Abacha told Worley that Joshua Mbote had been operating surreptitiously on the Abacha family’s behalf, but had bungled so badly that Abacha decided to step forward. He told Worley that the story about buying weapons had been a ruse to protect the Abacha family and their money, which, he said, was actually hidden in Ghana. Soon Worley was put in touch with someone claiming to be the General’s widow, Maryam Abacha. In a torrent of phone calls and e-mails, she appealed to Worley. “I learned you wanted to hear from me,” she wrote. “Here I am. Help me.” In his e-mails, Worley seemed invigorated by this new scenario; he apparently believed that he was on the verge of becoming rich while rescuing a woman in distress.

In late November of 2001, Worley spent several thousand dollars on an attorney who specialized in international tax planning. The attorney warned him against the seeming opportunity, as did Barbara Worley. She knew little about her husband’s “project,” as he called it, but she didn’t like it. Barbara lived a life that revolved, as she put it, “around God and family.” In some ways, she still looked to her husband for guidance, as she had when they were in high school; she expressed her opinion, but deferred to his judgment.

Worley dismissed these warnings; now that he had committed money to the partnership, he had a vested interest. By the end of 2001, he was telling the Abachas that he had investigated ways to ship the cash secretly and had searched a half-dozen countries for a bank that would accept a huge deposit without alerting authorities. He reassured them that they had chosen the right partner, and begged for patience: “I am a smart man and very cautious and do not want anything to go wrong.” He settled on the Bermuda-based Bank of Butterfield, and in late January, 2002, he told Mrs. Abacha that he had spent forty-three hundred dollars to open an account there. “There will be no trail back to the U.S. and no tax to be paid,” he wrote.

Worley’s partners soon persuaded him to wire more than eight thousand dollars to retain a Nigerian lawyer and “to cover the bank fees and late fees” that supposedly were the last barriers to the transfer. But, after more delays and growing doubts, Worley told them that he would not travel abroad—the money, they said, had been moved to Amsterdam—to collect the cash. They couldn’t change his mind, so they tried a different approach. Mrs. Abacha asked him for help in claiming forty-five million dollars that she told him was hidden in an account of the Federal Ministry of Aviation at the Central Bank of Nigeria. It was a textbook 419 tactic. When Worley doubted Mbote, he disappeared; when Worley wouldn’t travel for one treasure, they found another. He sent more money.

Under this new plan, Worley allowed his partners to file false documentation claiming that he was a private aviation contractor to whom the Nigerian government owed forty-five million dollars. At the end of February, Worley crossed another line when a patient named Jennifer Morlock came to his home office for a counselling session. She had barely arrived when he told her he was engaged in a business venture with partners in Nigeria. Violating his profession’s code of ethics, he asked to borrow fifteen thousand dollars. Morlock went home, spoke with her husband, and agreed. By noon, Worley was at her door to collect the money. The same day, he went to a nearby liquor store with a Western Union outlet and wired all fifteen thousand dollars to Nigeria. He soon repaid Morlock, with interest, by borrowing on his credit card.

Meanwhile, Worley was growing more and more distressed. The number of correspondents was increasing—at one point, he counted nine—and the spelling of their names kept changing. He complained of receiving letters from “Maram Abacha,” “Mariam Abacha,” and “Mrs. Maryam S. Abacha.” “I would think that everyone would know how to spell their own real name,” he wrote testily. “Obviously, someone does not.” When he still seemed no closer to receiving the payment he’d been promised, he made a bid for sympathy, falsely telling his partners that he had been given a diagnosis of cancer. That didn’t work, so he told them that he was abandoning the project: “To date, I have lost nearly fifty thousand dollars chasing a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end of it. I cannot go any further. It will take me two years to recover from this, and I will probably be dead by then.” Mrs. Abacha’s reassurances wrung thirteen thousand dollars more from Worley, but in April, 2002, he swore he was through, writing, “I must stop this financial torment and anguish and pray that God forgives me for my pursuit of money, simply put, greed.”

For five months, Worley didn’t correspond with the Nigerians. Then, in September, 2002, a fax arrived from someone calling herself Mercy Nduka, who claimed to be a confidential secretary at the Central Bank of Nigeria. Nduka told Worley that the Aviation Ministry funds were still waiting for him, and that she was secretly working with the Abacha family. She said that they needed five hundred thousand dollars to bribe five Nigerian bank officials who had the power to release the forty-five million; plus, she said, they needed another eighty-five thousand to cover fees. Worley refused to send more money, so Nduka and her boss, Usman Bello, said that they would borrow it from investors. Worley would pass along the investors’ money and then receive the fortune on behalf of the Abachas, with shares going to him, Nduka, and Bello for their services.

Soon men who claimed to be investors began calling Worley from New York and Washington, asking him to provide credit references and requesting that he put up collateral for the loans they were considering making to him. He refused to offer collateral, but that was never the point. The investors’ questions and demands made him feel more secure, as though they were truly weighing whether to lend him money. In late November, 2002, Worley received a check for ninety-five thousand dollars, drawn on an account of the Robert Plan Corporation, a Long Island-based insurance company. Without verifying it, as he had done with the Syms check, he deposited it at a branch of Fleet Bank. In fact, the check was fraudulent, but a novice employee at the insurance company approved Fleet’s payment inquiry. When the money appeared in Worley’s account, Nduka told him to wire eighty-five thousand dollars to a bank in Latvia, which he did. He wired another thirty-eight hundred dollars when Bello said that he needed to buy a Rolex watch to bribe a bank official. Although the Robert Plan employee had approved the check and Fleet had paid it, Worley, according to federal law, was responsible for repayment. (If a fraudulent check is passed deliberately, a depositor can face felony charges.) About a month later, the Nigerians sent Worley a check for some four hundred thousand dollars from a Michigan marketing company. This check was real, but it had been stolen and altered to make Worley the payee. When Worley deposited it at a branch of Citizens Bank near his home, it cleared; following Nduka’s instructions, he wired the money to an account in a Swiss bank.

In the meantime, the Nigerians had ensnared the wife of a Mississippi car dealer, a woman named Marcia Cartwright. In October, 2002, she had received a 419 e-mail from a man saying he was desperate to get his money out of Nigeria. Two months later, Cartwright received a check made out to her for nearly a hundred and nine thousand dollars, drawn on the account of a Texas advertising firm, and deposited it at the Farmers & Merchants Bank of Booneville, Mississippi. It cleared, and, on orders from Nigeria, she sent Worley a cashier’s check for a hundred and six thousand dollars, keeping the remainder for herself. He deposited the money in his Citizens account on January 15, 2003. The next day, he wired a hundred thousand dollars to the Swiss account.

Worley told Nduka and Bello that he was certain they now had more than enough to bribe the bankers and cover other expenses. Nduka, ever polite, said that they were not quite there. She sympathized with his frustration, and Worley promised to be patient. She asked for another six thousand dollars—the balance of Cartwright’s cashier’s check—to bribe the telex operators who would execute the transfer. Worley hesitated, but soon sent that money, too. Finally, Nduka told him what he longed to hear: “All is set for the final release of your fund.”

That day, the president of the Farmers & Merchants Bank learned that the check Marcia Cartwright had deposited a month earlier had been returned as fraudulent. Bank officials called federal and state authorities, and Citizens Bank, where Worley had deposited Cartwright’s cashier’s check, was also notified. An investigator for Citizens, a former police lieutenant named Michael Raymond, told Worley what had happened and said that he was investigating potentially fraudulent activity. Worley sent frantic e-mails and made repeated calls to Nigeria, begging for a replacement check. Nduka answered with bad news: Bello had been attacked by robbers and was comatose. But, she wrote, “I have reached an agreement with them for your fund to be released as planned on Friday.” All she needed was a thousand dollars to bribe another telex operator.

Worley seemed on the verge of panicking. “If you are my friend, then make it happen tomorrow,” he pleaded. “Why are you badgering me with this $1,000? I have gone as far as I will go with this. I am desperate and have nothing else to say at this time. I am emotionally, spiritually, and financially drained.” Nduka answered humbly, calling herself “an ordinary woman” who struggled on four hundred dollars a month. Worley responded that Nduka had “touched my heart.” He wired the thousand dollars on January 30, 2003.

The next day, Raymond told Worley that the other check he had deposited at Citizens, the check from Michigan for four hundred thousand dollars, was also phony. Worley knew what that meant, and, according to Raymond, disclosed his suspicion that the Robert Plan check was probably fake, too. When Worley got off the phone with Raymond, he was enraged. “I hate being taken advantage of by you evil bastards,” he wrote to Nduka. “This is all lies?” He went on, “Your day will come that you will be judged by God, and so will I. And I am ashamed, and shamed, and an embarrassment to my family, who are so precious and Godly people. What a terrible model of a Christian that I am. Thoughts of suicide are filling my mind, and I am full of rage at you despicable people. I hate living right now, and I want to die. My whole life is falling apart, my family, my ministry, my reputation and all that I have worked for all my life. Dear God, help me. I am so frightened.”

In May, 2005, Worley went on trial in U.S. District Court in Boston on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and possession of counterfeit checks. Worley’s overseas correspondents, whose real identities he never knew, disappeared, and were never located or charged. With them went more than forty thousand dollars of Worley’s money and nearly six hundred thousand dollars from the checks. Including credit-card interest, money-wiring fees, long-distance telephone charges, and the tax lawyer’s bills, Worley’s losses may have been closer to eighty thousand dollars.

The prosecutor, an Assistant U.S. Attorney named Nadine Pellegrini, urged the jury to reject suggestions that Worley had simply been scammed. At best, she said, Worley “got in over his head.” Pellegrini portrayed Worley as the puppeteer, not the puppet, and said that he knowingly passed bad checks, in the belief that he was entering into a “mutually beneficial arrangement.” She focussed on Worley’s recognition at various points that he was dealing with liars, and said that he displayed “willful blindness” by ignoring the warning signs of their criminality and his own. Pellegrini said that Worley’s claims of innocence were undermined by consistent bad conduct—lying to his wife, borrowing from a patient, plotting to avoid taxes, posing as an aviation contractor, claiming to have cancer, and agreeing to bribe Nigerian bank officials. She was unsparing during her cross-examination. “So you don’t have any integrity either, do you, Dr. Worley?” she asked. He answered, “No, I don’t.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she told the jury, “it’s clear John Worley understands behavior of people and motivation of people, and he could and he can manipulate both behavior and reaction. . . . There is only one story here, and that’s the story of John Worley’s greed.”

Worley’s lawyer, a former prosecutor named Thomas Hoopes, cast him as a childlike man who was tricked by sophisticated con artists into a check-cashing scheme. Hoopes stressed that Fleet and Citizens had approved payment on the checks, which, he said, reasonably led Worley to believe they were legitimate. He urged the jury to focus on the final thousand dollars that Worley had sent after he knew an investigation was under way—this was evidence, he said, of Worley’s gullibility. He likened Worley to Marcia Cartwright, whom the government viewed as a victim despite her also having passed a bad check. (Cartwright made partial restitution, testified for the prosecution, and was not charged.) Mostly, Hoopes urged the jury to view Worley’s acts as foolish, not criminal. Hoopes emphasized that Worley had lost heavily in the scam. “It’s not willful blindness,” Hoopes said. “It is blind trust.”

In addition to witness testimony and lawyers’ arguments, the jury was given hundreds of e-mails between Worley and the Nigerians which told a story of their own, about a man transformed by his pursuit of riches. Reading the e-mails, in which Worley displays both cunning and credulousness—sometimes in the same message—it is clear that the Nigerians were able to take advantage of his religious convictions, his stubbornness, and his desire to be a hero to Mrs. Abacha and to his family. Patiently and persistently, the Nigerians turned Worley’s skepticism into suspension of disbelief, to the point where he seemed to worry that they might not trust him. They made Worley the perfect mark.

The trial took six days, and the jury found Worley guilty on all counts. On February 15th, Worley, now sixty-two, returned to the federal courthouse at the edge of Boston Harbor to face sentencing. Accompanied by more than three dozen family members and friends, he arrived wearing a charcoal suit with a support-the-troops pin on the lapel. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, Jr., acknowledging the “ordeal” that Worley had been through, said that he was nevertheless bound by the jury’s finding. He sentenced Worley to two years in prison, plus restitution of nearly six hundred thousand dollars, and gave him five weeks to turn himself in. Outside the courtroom, Barbara Worley, a stout woman with blond hair, said they would appeal. (They eventually decided not to.) “My husband is the victim here,” she said. “It’s an atrocity.”

One morning a week later, I drove past acres of winter-brown fields to the Worleys’ large, blue-gray house, which was owned by a trust created by the Lawrence family, one of Massachusetts’s nineteenth-century industrial dynasties. (The Worleys, looking for an inexpensive place to live after John left the Army, believe that divine guidance delivered them to the Lawrences, who needed the home restored and overseen.) Barbara, in a white bathrobe, let me in, saying she thought the meeting had been rescheduled. The house was dark, and the hallways were filled with packing boxes: Worley was preparing for prison, and Barbara was moving to a small house in a nearby town.

Barbara led the way upstairs to a living room with a brass plaque on the door. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” it read. Worley entered, wearing a red-white-and-blue robe with an eagle on the back. He sat in a green leather chair, and fed treats to Pancake, the family cat. He seemed stunned by his misadventures of the past five years. “The communications that I had with those people were so convincing that I really believed that they were real, they were true,” he said. “I would question them and they would come back with a response that was adequate to cover my concerns each and every time.” Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. “I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them,” he said. Worley wasn’t sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. “Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters,” he said.

When I asked Worley what he wished he had done differently, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he spoke about hoping that the Abachas would get back in touch with him. However, before they could resume work on the multimillion-dollar transfer, he expected them to send the six hundred thousand dollars that he needs for restitution.

“What if they sent you a check?” Barbara demanded. “Would you put it in the bank to see if it cleared again?”

“Yeah.”

“John!” she said.

“I don’t know,” Worley said finally, sounding defeated. “I have to have time to think about what I would do in that situation.”

“My husband is naïve,” she explained to me. “He trusts people.”

A month later, moments after dropping off Worley at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, Barbara called me in tears. “They knew they couldn’t go after the Nigerians, so they just get the person they can reach. They’re trying to stop people in America from getting involved in it by making an example of my husband,” she said. “Why don’t they assign an F.B.I. agent to go after the people who scammed my husband? Where’s the justice?”

An enduring trait of Nigerian letter scammers—indeed, of most con artists—is their reluctance to walk away from a mark before his resources are exhausted. On February 5, 2003, several days after the checks were revealed as phony, after Worley was under siege by investigators, after his bank account had been frozen, after he had called his partners “evil bastards,” Worley received one more e-mail from Mercy Nduka.

“I am quite sympathetic about all your predicaments,” she wrote, “but the truth is that we are at the final step and I am not willing to let go, especially with all of these amounts of money that you say that you have to pay back.” She needed just one more thing from Worley and the millions would be theirs: another three thousand dollars.

“You have to trust somebody at times like this,” she wrote. “I am waiting your response.”

Wikipedia - Advance-fee Fraud.

The Spam Report - 'Nigerian' money scam: What happens when you reply?

Expert Law - Nigerian Email Fraud - 419 Scams.

Picture Quiz #2

2006-11-05T11:21:00.000+05:30

Okay, this time around it's simple. (Or is it?)

Just name the monument shown in the picture above.

[UPDATE: 09-Nov-2006, 8:00 AM]

Okay people, you have taken good shots at it and I am sorry about Srikanth's close encounter.

The answer is 'Tower Bridge' on the River Thames in London.

And this monument, built in the 1890s, is sometimes mistakenly called 'London Bridge'. (That's precisely why any answer that says "...London Bridge = Tower Bridge" is wrong!)

The real 'London Bridge' , on the other hand, is another bridge on the River Thames, a few miles upstream, with a rather long history -- the first bridge by that name being built by the Romans around 46AD, burned down in 1013, rebuilt, destroyed again in 1091 by a storm, and again in 1136 by a fire, replaced by a permanent stone structure in 1209, replaced by a new bridge in 1831, and replaced yet again by a modern bridge in 1973.

It is mostly agreed that the real London Bridge of the current day is very dull and nowhere compered to the glorious structure that the Tower Bridge is.

Wikipedia has an amazing Hi-Res view of the Tower Bridge in all its glory.

(You can even see the paintings on the wall inside one of the rooms of a hotel in the background!)

Anyway, good shot, guys!

Keep up the quizzing spirit!

Surprise

2006-10-26T10:49:00.000+05:30

The Google

2006-10-25T12:58:00.000+05:30

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

Eye in the Sky

2006-10-24T12:15:00.000+05:30

Check out these amazing pictures of a space shuttle launch, as seen from the window of the International Space Station.

Source: Warren Ellis' blog

Dove Evolution

2006-10-23T09:56:00.000+05:30

Before you fall in love with those angels on magazine covers and billboards.

Picture Quiz #1

2006-10-22T19:33:00.000+05:30

This is the first picture quiz on my blog.

Identify the person in this picture.

Leave your answers or guesses as comments on this post.

I will give absolutely no clues to this to start with. And depending on the response, I may add a few down the line. Hope you can crack it soon enough, and that I won't be required to lead you to the answer.

Fire away!

[UPDATE: 02-Nov-06, 6:15 PM]

Now that I have received a guess, let me offer a hint:

Hint #1: The person is/was the head of a nation.

[UPDATE: 02-Nov-06, 6:50 PM]

Okay that hint was enough! "Amit" has got it right.

This is indeed Pervez Musharraf (that's why pm.jpg)

This photograph is taken from his recently released autobiography, "In the Line of Fire".

Here are some more pics ...

Well done, Amit!

Urban Dictionary

2006-10-22T19:10:00.000+05:30

Even the best of ego-surfers may not have searched for their names in a dictionary. I did. And lo! what did I find.

The site Urban Dictionary sports the tag line "Define Your World".

While it lets the users submit their own definitions -- usually for the slang expressions used across the world, a probably unforeseen outcome is that there are some attempts to "define" some common names and places.

Sample these...

While some of them may be funny, the others are obnoxious.

Before you try searching for your own name, be prepared to swallow hard. And don't try it first in front of an audience.

Kick Yourself

2006-10-18T11:59:00.000+05:30

If you're angry with someone, would you kick yourself?

Think again.

Some of us happily destroy our own wealth, in a fit of anger. A road mishap in Bangalore yesterday that resulted in two deaths, was followed by the torching of the bus by an angry mob.

The bus in question happened to be the government owned (BMTC) Volvo that cost a handsome Rs. 75 lakhs of tax-payers' money to procure.

We're surely a developing nation - not just economically. And there's a long way to go.

Bangalore Tiger

2006-10-17T14:44:00.000+05:30

After Thomas Friedman of New York Times, it is the turn of Steve Hamm from BusinessWeek.

Hamm was asked to document the rise of technology industry in India, and he chose to showcase the success story of Wipro, in his new book titled "Bangalore Tiger".

Browsing through the Introductory chapter, this sounds like a no-nonsense factual description of how the Indian technology industry has grown and its impact on the world economy, without the out-of-the-world analogies and metaphors used in The World is Flat.

While Thomas Friedman's book has pretentions of being a phenomenon, Hamm sticks to a modest approach and just chronicles the management style of Azim Premji, the work culture at Wipro, things they got right and things they didn't over the past few years, how they are trying to emulate best practices of other orgnaizations even from other industries, and supplements it with his commentary on how such a recipe could be the way forward for today's extremely competetive global marketplace.

The introductory chapter of the book is reproduced here, courtesy BusinessWeek.

Introduction

India’s New Breed of Tech Company

It was 4 p.m. on February 8, 2006, and Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Ltd.,one of the largest Indian information technology outsourcing companies, stood proudly on the marble balcony overlooking the 103-year-old main floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). He was dressed elegantly in a charcoal gray suit with a Nehru collar, with his shock of white hair in sharp contrast. Crowded around him were John Thaine,the chief executive of the stock exchange,and a half-dozen Wipro lieutenants.This was the fifth-year anniversary celebration of the Wipro listing on the NYSE, and Premji was back to ring the closing bell.

Wipro had come a long way in those five years. On October 18, 2000,when it debuted on the NYSE,Premji’s company had annual revenues just over $500 million and was barely known outside of India. Now it was a $2.4 billion company and a symbol of India’s rise.When Premji rang the bell,Wipro’s stock price stood at $14.15 and its market capitalization was just over $20 billion. In contrast, Electronic Data Systems,the American company that had essentially invented outsourcing and dominated it for many years, had a market cap of just $13 billion. If ever there was a sign of the changing of the guard, this was it.

The Rise of India

India.The name summons up all sorts of powerful images,from the Taj Mahal,to Mahatma Gandhi sitting cross-legged at his spindle,to

the latest swami to catch on with American spiritual seekers,to,most indelibly,the faces of thousands of poor people poisoned at Bhopal. But since the beginning of the twenty-first century,a new image for India is emerging.

Seemingly out of nowhere, it has become the world’s new high- tech powerhouse. More than 800,000 engineers are busy there today, writing the software that keeps Wall Street, the Motor City, and Hollywood running.They are designing computer chips, circuit boards, and sophisticated machinery for the world’s consumer electronics,aerospace,and health-care industries.At the same time, another 400,000 young Indians work in the booming business process outsourcing (BPO) segment, an offshoot of the tech industry, handling accounting, medical claims processing, customer service, and other basic business functions for Western clients.

The bright-eyed,hopeful,25-year-old Indian working in a modern office complex in Bangalore—India’s Silicon Valley—is elbowing aside those old images of illness and privation. “I see India as a big player,” says Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric Company.“It’s a billion people with great intellect.It will get bigger and bigger,and it will be a significant player in the global economy.”

How did this economic miracle happen? Liberalization of the Indian economy has a lot to do with it. But one can trace another crucial ingredient back to 1993.That’s when Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, designed (with help from colleagues) the first Internet browser.The Internet, a network linking computer networks, had been in existence for years,but it was used primarily by academics and scientists for sharing scholarly papers and technical data. Andreessen’s browser, called Mosaic, democratized the Internet. It was an easy- to-use doorway to the Net that made it possible,ultimately,for anybody in the world with a computer and Internet access to connect with anybody else.

Andreessen’s invention gave rise to Netscape,Yahoo!, Amazon .com, eBay, and Google. It underpinned the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.And it made it possible for the world’s brainwork to be done just as easily in Bangalore as in Boston.That put young Sanjay on an equal footing with Steven,Shawn,and Sven in the global competitive marketplace.

The computer industry’s executives love to talk about killer applications,or killer apps,for short.Those are the uses of technology that prove to be so compelling that they accelerate the adoption of a new technology to the point where it becomes mainstream.The spreadsheet and word processor were the killer apps for the personal computer.Browsers,Web sites,and e-mail were the killer apps in the early stage of the Internet. But when the history of our era is written, it may turn out that one of the most important uses of the Internet is that it made the minds of India available to Western businesses.

Using the Internet as the digital equivalent of America’s interstate highway system, more than 700 Indian tech services companies are delivering vital,high-quality brainwork for hundreds of large American,European,and Japanese corporations.These Indian tigers are a new breed of tech company. They harness a seemingly inexhaustible supply of raw talent.India produces 120,000 college graduates with information technology degrees each year, and 3 million people with other undergraduate degrees, according to NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), the Indian software and tech services trade association.And since Indian knowledge workers are paid about 20 percent of the level of their counterparts in the West,the Indian companies start off with a large cost advantage over their clients’ traditional ways of getting work done and a big pricing advantage over the tech services industry’s traditional powers, such as EDS, IBM, and Accenture.

This shifting of work to low-cost countries is called labor arbitrage. The practice of dividing the labor for a particular client between people at the client’s office, nearby, and in India or other low-cost countries is called “global service delivery.”A typical ratio is 30 percent near the customer to 70 percent offshore. So the basic Indian tech formula is simple:

Internet + Brains – High Costs = Huge Business Opportunity

But supplying low-cost brains via the Internet is just the beginning of what the Indian tech services outfits do for their clients. They are expert at managing people and business processes.They typically can do everything from writing computer programs to processing mortgages and insurance claims more efficiently than their clients can.Think of how the Japanese auto manufacturers took on and are besting General Motors and Ford, based primarily on superior engineering, quality, and efficiency. That’s what the Indian tech services outfits are doing to the old ways of processing data and running basic business functions in the West.They have turned these things into factorylike activities.

This approach takes not only much of the cost out of the equation,but the uncertainty as well.In a tech world where much of the success had traditionally been achieved through unpredictable art, the Indian companies have turned the management of technology and business processes into a highly productive craft.

While the United States,Western Europe, and Japan still possess the lion’s share of the world’s financial capital, the Indians have a wealth in intellectual capital—and they know how to use it.In fact, India’s tech industry is well on its way to building the most efficient intellectual capital supply in the world.While most of these companies’employees are in India,they deploy highly trained specialists in or near clients’offices.And they operate around the clock,around the year, 24/7/365.

The Indians deliver sophisticated services globally with the right people,in the right place,and at the right time.“We’re pioneers in establishing the global delivery model, which the whole services world is adopting today,”says Wipro’s Premji.“This model gives customers more value for their money. It will make the world more competitive,to the advantage of the customer.And it will generate a lot of employment in developing countries where there’s a strong knowledge infrastructure and a strong education system.”

Bursts of economic growth and employment in places that meet those criteria—in India, China, and elsewhere worldwide—translate into more demand for the goods and services produced by the West.Wrap it all together and you have the potential for a much more vibrant and equitable global economy,with India’s tech industry as one of its cornerstones.

Wipro Stands Out from the Pack

There are plenty of tech tigers in India.Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS,the largest of them,with nearly $3 billion in fiscal 2006 sales, was the pioneer of the so-called body shop business model:It assembled masses of bright, young Indian programmers and put them to work doing the routine software updating and patching jobs for Western corporations.It got started way back in 1968.Infosys Technologies,the second largest,was born from scratch as a tech services outfit in the Silicon Valley mold.It’s the most efficient of the larger Indian players,with an operating profit margin of 31 percent.Infosys is now pushing hard to add a strong high-end consulting practice to its global delivery portfolio.

Yet it’s Wipro, the number 3 player, that stands out as an icon of this new way of doing business.This book is an attempt to tell the amazing tale of the rise of the Indian tech industry through a single participant,and I have chosen Wipro (pronounced whip-row) to tell the story of India’s tigers.Among them,Wipro has the broadest array of services, including software programming, tech systems integration,systems management,business process outsourcing,consulting, and hardware product engineering.In 2006,the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals ranked Wipro number 7 on its list of the top 100 global outsourcing companies of all types, ahead of the other Indian companies.Among the Indian outfits, it pioneered the strategy of developing expertise in a wide range of different industries, from banking to retail, which is proving to be hugely successful.While all of the top Indian tech companies are expert at managing people and processes,Wipro has brought these activities to the level of science through a combination of careful structuring, close management, and constant improvements. Lastly, Wipro is an amazingly open company. Internally, it has a “zero politics” policy.That means business decisions and personnel promotions are based on merits and facts; everything is transparent. Externally, it communicates forthrightly with investors, customers, and the press. It reveals itself, issues and all.

Then there’s Premji himself, a colorful protagonist. He’s the Bill Gates of India. He built Wipro from a small, failing vegetable oil company in Bombay into one of the top three tech companies in India and a fearsome global competitor.The company’s revenues skyrocketed from $400 million in 1999 to $2.4 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2006. Premji’s roughly 81 percent share of Wipro stock makes him the second-richest person in India, worth between $10 billion and $15 billion,depending on shifts in the stock price. But, like Microsoft’s Gates, he’s also a thought leader. Premji, now 61,saw the opportunity to create a home-grown Indian computer business in 1977, when restrictive governmental policies forced Western tech giants such as IBM to leave the country.When the Western tech giants made their reentry in the early 1990s, he shifted to offering an electronics R&D lab for hire and software programming services.And thanks to that move,when the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer glitch made necessary a mammoth overhaul of the world’s existing software programs,Wipro was standing ready to help out with a small army of programmers.

Though Premji never got an MBA, he’s an avid student of management theory and practice.Early on,he realized that for Wipro to grow and thrive,he would have to create or adopt world-class business processes and management techniques. He took a stand and decreed that his company would pay no bribes—a risky move in a country where corruption was a routine part of business life. Rules of behavior now permeate the company, which goes through an earnest self-examination of its values every few years to make sure they’re up to date.

Wipro pays the same keen attention to long-term strategy. Not only does the company establish a three-year strategic plan every January, but every five years or so it puts itself through an elaborate “visioning” exercise, starting with a clean sheet of paper to rethink what it should strive to become and decide what it needs to do to get there.

Wipro is slavishly dedicated to customer satisfaction.While all tech services arrangements are based on detailed contracts laying out exactly what is expected from the service provider,Wipro has gained a reputation for being willing to set aside the contract and do more than is formally required of it—if that’s what it takes to keep a customer happy.

Ralph Szygenda,the powerful and not-easily-pleased chief information officer at General Motors Corporation,recalls a 2002 meeting with Vivek Paul,Wipro’s former vice chairman.Wipro had been doing software programming projects for GM for several years, but Paul wanted a bigger chunk of Szygenda’s business.While Szygenda had been impressed with Wipro’s programming work, he told Paul that if he wanted a deeper relationship,Wipro would have to learn the auto business so it could help GM improve its competitiveness. And to do that, Szygenda said, Paul would have to put people in Detroit.“Until I can see you from my office window, I won’t know if you’re committed,”Szygenda told him.At the time,in the wake of the 9/11 attacks,Wipro couldn’t get enough U.S.visas to station people in Detroit itself, so Paul set up an office in Canada, right across the Detroit River from GM’s headquarters.“Damned if they didn’t put an office so I could see it.They impressed me,” Szygenda says.

Ultimately,Szygenda handed Wipro a crucial job:writing the so- called middleware that ties GM’s software applications together.And in February 2006,Szygenda lifted the profile of Indian tech by naming Wipro a “tier one” services supplier alongside IBM, EDS, and Hewlett-Packard, and gave it a multimillion-dollar piece of GM’s tech business over a five-year period. Girish Paranjpe, president of one of Wipro’s business units,said the company was delighted to be selected.“It’s a huge morale booster for us to be able to play with the big boys,” he says.“Also, because we’re the only tier-one player GM picked from India, it’s a big kick for us.”

All of this attention at Wipro to process,discipline,ethics,and customer satisfaction has resulted in a smooth running machine tuned

to take on the challenges of global competition in the twenty-first century. For India,Wipro has become a symbol of what the country can achieve on the global stage.“Wipro isn’t just a company. It’s a concept,”says Subroto Bagchi,chief operating officer of MindTree Consulting Company and a former Wipro executive during the 1990s.“Wipro proved that this business model could be done. It proved to the world that India could build something world class.”

Premji is mindful of what Wipro means for India.He has a dream for the country that includes better public education, improved health care,more opportunities for rural people,and an economy so strong and vibrant that its brightest young people don’t have to leave the country to find opportunities.Wipro is helping to fulfill his dream.“We create wealth that trickles down.We create social consciousness in our employees that spreads throughout society.We teach them values, which makes them better parents,” Premji says.

Wipro isn’t just a shaper of young Indians.It’s an important model for other Indian enterprises. If they successfully adopt its ways, values, and ambitions, there soon may be hundreds of Indian companies that are capable of being global players.

Changing the Rules of the Game

Already,Wipro and other Indian tech companies have changed the rules of the game for the world’s $600 billion tech services industry. They’re the tail that’s wagging the dog.Western tech services companies grew fat and happy by collecting huge fees for advising corporations on technical matters, writing complex custom software applications,and running data centers.Now they’re finding that the way they operate is out of date. The new winning formula is to have large numbers of employees working in India or other low-cost countries,a thinner layer of highly compensated employees close to their clients,and factorylike business processes.“We don’t consider the Big Six outsourcers to be our main threat,”says Larry Longseth, a vice president in IBM’s strategic outsourcing business.“Our competition is Wipro and Infosys.”

The Western giants are trying to adapt. Most of them now have large software programming and business process outsourcing operations in India.IBM,for instance,had 43,000 employees there by the middle of 2006 and, at the same time, was rapidly developing technologies to replace human labor in services. Capgemini, the Paris- based services giant,which grew its Indian workforce by 80 percent to 4,000 in 2005, flew its 12-person executive board to India for a meeting in March 2006. Group CEO Paul Hermelin has tremendous respect for the top Indian tech firms.“Nobody can beat the Indians in projects that are well defined because they’re high quality and cost competitive,”he says.“For us to win,we have to take advantage of being close to the customers and deliver high-valueadded services.”Yet for most of the Western firms,this is an add-on to their normal ways of doing business rather than a wholesale makeover. They’ll likely have to do much more. “The U.S. and European companies don’t understand,” says Paul, who is now a partner with San Francisco private equity firm Texas Pacific Group. “This isn’t about adding a subcompact to an auto company’s product line. It’s about changing every car.They don’t get it.”

The superiority of the new business model is clear when you compare the profit margins of the combatants. The average net profit margin for the top six Indian tech services firms was 21.7 percent in 2005, compared to just 4.3 percent for the top six Western competitors,according to Bernstein Research.“We’re looking at a fundamental change in the way companies use IT services. It’s a realignment of the marketplace,” says Ian Marriott, analyst at tech industry market researcher Gartner Inc.

Once limited to routine software programming tasks, the Indian tech companies now can do practically everything the Western tech services giants can do.They’re expert at quickly developing new electronics products from a combination of standard off-the-shelf technologies and their own patented inventions.They build complex software applications from scratch.And they advise clients how best to design and deploy their new technologies.As a result,contracts that used to come in dollops and last only as long as it took to

complete a project have turned into multiyear and multimillion- dollar deals.TCS,for example,in late 2005 won an $850 million,12year BPO contract with Britain’s insurance giant Pearl Group.And this isn’t about low-cost Indian labor.The work is being done in the United Kingdom.It signals that the Indians are becoming so accomplished that they don’t need to rely on cheap labor anymore.

As the tech world shifts from its early formative phase into maturity,the Indian companies gain advantages over their Western counterparts. During the 1990s, corporations were hungry for the latest and greatest technologies, fearful that if they didn’t catch the Internet wave, they might be left behind. Now they’re more concerned with managing their computers efficiently and with integrating technologies more effectively with their business goals and processes. “When technology is at a stage where the need in the market is greater than the technology can deliver, the product innovator has the advantage,” Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys, told me during an outdoor dinner last summer in Bangalore.“But now, the tech industry has overshot corporations’ ability to absorb technology, so the balance of power shifts from product innovation to those who distribute, like Dell and Google, and those, like the Indian companies,that integrate technologies and make them work in companies.”

So it’s no wonder India’s tech industry is growing like a bamboo forest.Indian software and services exports reached $23.6 billion in fiscal 2006, up 33 percent over the previous year. And it’s still an immature industry. So far, only about 3 percent of more than $750 billion in global IT services spending (including in-house staffing by corporations) is handled through offshoring, most of it in India. Gartner analyst Marriott expects that number to go as high as 10 percent by 2008. Over the past half decade, the top Indian firms established their reputations with a few hundred corporations that are among the most aggressive users of technology, the so-called early adopters. Now, they’re selling an ever-broadening array of services to those companies and at the same time reaching out to a second tier of slower adopters,plus an army of smaller firms.Main stream European and Japanese corporations are only now accepting the Indians as their tech service providers.

The outsourcing of business process management to India is still in its infancy, as well. So far, it has mostly been about accounting, medical claims processing,customer service,and handling travel and entertainment expenses. But Indian firms are starting to provide a host of new offerings including legal,financial,and market research; medical services such as reading X-rays; and online education and training services.“Anything that can be done remotely,will be done remotely,” predicts Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

If these trends continue to pick up momentum, analysts expect the value of Indian tech services to soar.The total—including business process outsourcing—is expected to top $60 billion by 2010 and could top $80 billion, according to a NASSCOM–McKinsey report in 2005.That would require a high-tech workforce of nearly

2.3 million.While that number seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the country’s 1.2 billion population,the growth of the tech industry workforce is bolstering the fast-growing middle class and helping to boost the country’s annual GDP growth rate to 6 to 8 percent per year. If these trends keep up, India could have the third largest economy in the world by 2050, behind only China and the United States, according to Goldman Sachs & Company.

A Boon—and Challenge—for the West

These are heady thoughts, and they have come on quite suddenly. As recently as early 2001, when I traveled to Mumbai for NASSCOM’s annual trade conference,India’s tech industry was beset with angst.The country’s dot-com bubble had just burst, taking with it the hopes of thousands of entrepreneurs and the investors who had bet on it.The economic recession in the United States had put a damper on demand for Indian tech services.My new Indian friends told me that their tech industry seemed to perpetually be on the verge of making it big—but never quite pulled it off. It was a gloomy time.

Well, India has finally made it.The rekindling of Western economies combined with relentless drive by corporations to improve their efficiencies means India is in the right place at the right time with the right portfolio of services.

My second trip to India,in 2005,revealed a country in the midst of a transformation. Bangalore, in the country’s south-central region,has the feel of Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.The roads are overflowing with cars,and everywhere you look there’s a new office building sprouting up. In Bangalore, it can take two hours to travel 10 miles during the morning or evening commute. A Wipro employee told me an emblematic story:One evening,she was stuck in a traffic jam within sight of her own apartment for two hours. She used her cell phone to call her husband, who worked at home for a software company,and he walked down to her car and sat with her to keep her company during her wait.

In Silicon Valley,office buildings normally go up one at a time.In Bangalore, they rise up in bunches.Wipro’s global tech business added 14,000 people in the fiscal year ended in March 2006, bringing the total to 53,742 and the Wipro Ltd.total to more than 60,000, which is nearly as large as Microsoft.To handle the flood of new employees,it recently completed a brand-new campus that consists of nine buildings in Bangalore’s Electronics City technology office park.To take the pressure off Bangalore,Wipro and other Indian tech companies are rapidly opening new offices in Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, and smaller cities.

All of this activity has changed the psychology of India. For decades,the country had a serious inferiority complex.“We had a view of ourselves as also-rans,in business,in sports,everything.The success of Indian technology globally has transformed the idea of India about itself.We now see we can be the best and we can compete with the best in the world,”says Anurag Behar,managing director for Wipro’s Infrastructure Engineering Division.

Now there’s a new attitude on the rise: Hope. It’s personified by Priya P.V.,a 28-year-old woman with a master’s degree in commerce from Bangalore University who manages a small team at Wipro’s BPO unit. She was the first woman in her family to go to college. Now she’s hoping to climb the corporate ladder.“When I was in college, I was told, ‘You have to go out of India to have a good career,’” she says.“Now that’s not true.You can see everything happening in India.”

Indeed,now the world is coming to India in search of its talented young people.And companies like Wipro are shaping the talent of India and delivering it up to the West.The people possess the brains and enthusiasm for the job. But Wipro is taking that raw material and applying the organizational discipline to fashion a new kind of company—designed for the era of globalization—that one day may come to be admired alongside the likes of GE,IBM,and Microsoft.

It’s not just the psychology of India that has changed.The world’s view of India has shifted dramatically, too.There’s no better illustration of that shift than the scene at the World Economic Forum in Davos,Switzerland,in January 2006.India went on a charm offensive, and the world’s A-list government officials,business moguls,intellectuals, and socially minded entertainers allowed themselves to be charmed. Picture the last night of the weeklong gathering: India brought in 20 of its top chefs and a troupe of Bollywood musicians and dancers and held a gala for 600 people that lasted from 11 p.m.to 5 a.m.“We had a room of Europeans and North Americans dancing all night at our party,”says a beaming Premji.India was officially “hot.”

Yet successes of India and its tech industry could have a decidedly cooling effect on employment in the United States. Market researcher Forrester Research estimates that by 2015,3.4 million U.S. service jobs will have moved offshore.That’s a threat to both the American economy and the job prospects of millions of Americans. It’s possible that the U.S. government will try to put up barriers to stem the tide of job losses. But the globalization genie is out of the bottle.It’s likely that,in the long haul,nothing can stop it.So it’s up to Americans themselves to see this huge change coming and react to it.They have to reinvent themselves.

Think of Wipro as a wake-up call for complacent Americans. With its intensity to win and its hard work ethic, it’s a reminder of the America of 100 years ago. “Are we hungry enough?” asks Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM.Donofrio’s father was an Italian immigrant who worked three jobs to support his family in the gritty factory town of Beacon,New York.Now the IBM executive questions whether Americans still possess that kind of drive.“Or are we going to amble along and take our time? If so, the Indians and Chinese will close the gap and perhaps even surpass us.You can see the passion in their eyes.They’re people on a mission.”

Like American workers,American companies need to learn to compete with the vigorous Asian upstarts.But at the same time,they must tap into India for services and partnerships.It’s no longer a go- it-alone world.“I don’t see India as a threat.I see it as an opportunity,”says Welch,the former GE chairman.

The challenge is the same for companies and individuals: If they mean to succeed in a world turned upside down, they will learn to be as relentlessly self-improving as Wipro.

The book is due to release on October 25. Let's wait and watch to see if the book lives up to it.

There's also a blog maintained by Steve Hamm on the BusinessWeek site, with more articles and updates on this theme.

UPDATE (20-Oct): Read the Book Excerpt on BusinessWeek.

Devil's Advocate strikes again

2006-10-15T20:47:00.000+05:30

Karan Thapar, after blowing holes the size of the subcontinent in Arjun Singh's logic for reservations, is now back with a brutally incisive interview of the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Dr. Farooq Abdullah.

Watch out for the transformation in Dr. Abdullah's stand -- within a span of 15 minutes -- from saying that Afzal is innocent to saying that he is guilty but should just be pardoned.

He seems to suggest that nations should deter from punishing the guilty just because that could incite more violence or retaliation from their sympathizers. Strangely enough, that same logic does not apply to the perpetrators of violence in Gujarat -- simply because 'Gujarat is not Kashmir'.

His way of cautioning the nation of the dire consequences if the terrorist is hanged, almost sounds as if he is speaking on behalf of the terrorists -- and like clear cut instructions to the terrorists about what all should be done to avenge the hanging.

Also, at a particular moment during the interview, Farooq Abdullah actually said "Yes" when Karan Thapar said "Tomorrow, the same thing could apply to what you are trying to do today. You are as guilty as you accused Advani and Vajpayee of being [in 1999]."

It was Thapar's turn to get stunned who managed a quick "So you agree?!!" with eyes popping out, when Abdullah realized what he has just said and digged himself out of the grave by saying "No I do not agree with you ... because I see the ground situation in Kashmir."

The whole thing was so quick that it was left out of the transcript.

Here's the complete transcript of the interview, courtesy CNN-IBN:

Hello, and welcome to Devil’s Advocate. At the forefront of political leaders demanding leniency for Mohammad Afzal is the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir and now the patron of the National Conference, Farooq Abdullah. But on what basis does he make this appeal and how does he stand s up to his critics? Those are the key issues that I shall raise today in an exclusive interview with Farooq Abdullah.

Karan Thapar: Dr Abdullah, Mohammad Afzal has been sentenced to death for conspiracy to wage war against India, a verdict upheld by the Delhi High Court and also the Supreme Court of India, and yet you claim that he is innocent. On what basis do you make that claim?

Farooq Abdullah: I make that claim first of all on the basis of the lower court, where he wrote twice to the judge asking to appoint a lawyer who would defend him—and that he would suggest the name. He was turned down. His appeals repeatedly to the judge were turned down. He was then taken to the Supreme Court.

Karan Thapar: Are you therefore suggesting, when you say that Mohammad Afzal is innocent, that he hasn’t had a fair trial, and that the implementation of the death penalty would be a miscarriage of justice.

Farooq Abdullah: Yes, I do.

Karan Thapar: But how can you as a non-lawyer put yourself in judgement of the Supreme Court?

Farooq Abdullah: As far as the Supreme Court judges are also fallible. It is the evidence that is put before the judge; he will give sentence on that. Unfortunately problem is that already the lower court that had given the sentence and that was taken to the higher court. If he (Afzal) had got the right lawyers at that stage, I am confident that his case at that stage would have been proved that was not directly involved in this.

Karan Thapar: You are referring to what you consider infirmities in the trial. I put it to you that on two separate occasions — August 2005 and September 2005, the Supreme Court reviewed the verdict. It did it in full consideration of all the facts that you are talking about and it still stood by the death sentence. At the end of the day, the Supreme Court has considered these infirmities, overruled them and stood by the death sentence. Why do you then claim that he is innocent?

Farooq Abdullah: Because one, he himself was never there (inside the Parliament House). They say that he supported and helped the terrorists in coming. I also say one thing that he was used by the BSF in Srinagar—to do Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: You are suggesting that just because he did not directly participate in the attack on Parliament, he isn’t worthy of the death sentence? But an abettor in law is as guilty as those who carried out the attack

Farooq Abdullah: I agree but the point here is—remember one thing—that he himself says that he was beaten, he was tortured and all those things they told him. And I believe, if you talk to him, he will say it that they told him that if he would say some of these things, the clemency will be there and he will be released.

Karan Thapar: Quite right. And the Court records show as Nandita Haksar, his defendant herself has admitted that the court has noted all of these. And yet after noting them, the court has still decided that the death sentence is warranted. So, how can you turn around and say that the Supreme Court has not taken this into consideration?

Farooq Abdullah: I do say, all those things Supreme Court has taken into consideration. But had he got the right lawyer? Now you got a lawyer, a very eminent lawyer for the Supreme Court, what does he say? He says don’t hang him give him a lethal injection.

Karan Thapar: That lawyer was at the High-Court level. You are talking about Colin Gonsalves. But at the level of the Supreme Court, when the appeal was heard in August 2005 despite all the infirmities being recorded and admitted, the Supreme Court at that moment chose to acquit Geelani and Afsan Guru, it chose to reduce the sentence of Shaukat Guru but it chose at the same time to stand by the death sentence for Mohammad Afzal. Clearly, the Supreme Court considered the matter; it considered the infirmities you allude to and then still stood by the death sentence.

Farooq Abdullah: But have you heard Geelani since then?

Karan Thapar: But Geelani is not a lawyer.

Farooq Abdullah: No, he is not a lawyer but he is charged also—very much charged in this case. Geelani himself says that this sentence is too harsh for a man like this.

Karan Thapar: But isn’t Geelani bound to say this? He is an associate of Afzal. He is not a lawyer, he is not a judge, he is not a non-partisan man.

Farooq Abdullah: But do you know what the police said? Police, who was haunting him, and police kept on telling Geelani that we will get you hanged. The evidence put forward by the police is not absolutely infallible.

Karan Thapar: Dr Abdullah, the point is that you are not a lawyer, you have no legal experience and yet today you are putting yourself in judgement over not just the Supreme Court but two separate verdicts given by the Supreme Court, both of which were taken in full light of all that you are talking about. And still you claim to know better than the court.

Farooq Abdullah: It is something I will tell you. There are three people involved in this: Maulana Azhar, the two others who are in Pakistan. They are not here. The point here is if Pakistan can extradite those people here, you will find that the same court will come to a verdict of a lesser sentence than death. But once if he is hanged.

Karan Thapar: In other words you are saying that the Supreme Court is inconsistent? Are you saying that the Court gives different verdict to different people? That is an allegation against the court. You could be held guilty of contempt.

Farooq Abdullah: Not only Supreme Court, I will tell you of high court case, lower court case. Let me tell you infallibility of the situation. There is the case of Ms (Priyadarshini) Mattoo; DIG’s son murdered her. The case was put forward by the police was in a such a manner that the judge said, “I know you are guilty, and yet the manner case as has been put before me, it shows that you are not at fault.”

Karan Thapar: Dr Abdullah, that may be true of another case. But that does not necessarily mean that in this instance, the Supreme Court is wrong. Let me point out to you the amazing position that you are putting yourself in. On the one hand you claim that Mohammad Afzal is innocent, on the other hand you say that he should be given pardon.

Farooq Abdullah: Not pardoned…not death sentence. I said that he should be given a life sentence, which means whole life in the jail.

Karan Thapar: But this is the contradiction in your position. If you begin by saying that he is innocent, that has been badly and unfairly tried, then how can you then argue that he should be given a life sentence? Then he should be released free. You cannot have both positions.

Farooq Abdullah: No, you cannot have both positions but understand one thing—once you hang him, and tomorrow by the evidences that have been put forward or the evidences that will come back, suppose it shows that his involvement was that of much lesser degree than death sentence, how would you feel at that time? Will you be able to bring him out of his grave?

Karan Thapar: Quite true but that is a different issue. Lets come back to the point you made. You began by saying that he was innocent. Are you changing your position on his innocence? Tell me your stand, do you feel he is innocent or not?

Farooq Abdullah: He is innocent to the extent that the hanging is wrong.

Karan Thapar: So in other words he is guilty of something but innocent only of hanging being wrong.

Farooq Abdullah: Yes, that is correct.

Karan Thapar: So, you accept that the conviction is correct but the sentence is wrong.

Farooq Abdullah:I say the evidence put forward before the honourable judges has been correctly assessed by them, but the sentence passed by them is too extreme.

Karan Thapar: Let me repeat this to understand it, because its very important. The conviction is correct but the sentencing is extreme.

Farooq Abdullah: Too harsh.

Karan Thapar: In other words he is rightly convicted, but the sentencing is wrong. But you began by saying that he was innocent, now you have moved away from that.

Farooq Abdullah: No, when I said that I did not mean that he is completely innocent of what happened in the Parliament. He may be, but his involvement is so small that the sentence is so grave…and the sentence has been passed because taking into consideration of the people’s opinion.

Karan Thapar: So, you are simply now arguing for clemency. In other words you are arguing for commutation of the death sentence into life imprisonment. You are no longer claiming innocence, as you seemed to be at the beginning.

Farooq Abdullah: I may have been taken wrongly; or I might just have been able to put this wrongly to you.

Karan Thapar: Not just to me, but you had said this to PTI (Press Trust of India) on the October 1 and to the Kashmir News Service on October 8. They misunderstood you?

Farooq Abdullah: I think they misunderstood me.

Karan Thapar: Alright, let’s then take up the point of clemency. Why should Mohammad Afzal be shown clemency when the essential ingredient for clemency is a sense of remorse? Mohammad Afzal is without remorse; he hasn’t even applied for his own clemency, others have had to do it for him. He has refused to appeal for clemency, then why should he be given clemency?

Farooq Abdullah: One, you will be making him a hero for centuries to come, for a man who is of least importance at this time. Secondly, you are going to give a massive weapon to the separatists in this state of Jammu and Kashmir, which is vital for India, which is fighting terrorism for now 19 years.

Karan Thapar: It is so amazing that you are contradicting the position you took earlier as the Chief Minister of Kashmir. At the time of Rubaiya Sayeed’s kidnapping and again at the time when the BJP released Masood Azhar, you fought strenuously to stop terrorists being released. Today, you have done a U-turn and you are contradicting your own position.

Farooq Abdullah: No, not all. I am not making any U-turns. I am strictly against terrorism; I have always fought terrorism, so much so that my party suffered at the elections because I introduced POTA before Centre introduced it.

Karan Thapar: Let me quote to you what you said about the BJP’s decision to release Masood Azhar in 1999: “I told them, (L K Advani and A B Vajpayee) that we were giving in to terrorism. I think our senior leaders like Advani and Vajpayee are responsible for the global terrorism that is being spread by the band of men they released.” Tomorrow, the same thing could apply to what you are trying to do today. You are as guilty as you accused Advani and Vajpayee of being.

Farooq Abdullah: I don’t agree with you because I see the ground situation. The ground situation has been built on two points. One is that he was not given the justice that has been sold to the people at the every nook and corner you go. Second thing is that the separatists are saying that this is the way they treat Kashmiris.

Karan Thapar: Let me point out to you that this question of not giving justice is disputed by the fact that the Supreme Court on two separate occasions, including a review petition, has upheld the verdict. Surely, you can’t judge the Supreme Court, so let’s leave that aside.

Lets come to your second concern, I put it to you that if the death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment, you will encourage further Kandahar style hijacks to release this man. This one act will fuel terrorism because here he will be sitting at something that will inspire terrorists to take action to get him released. it happened in Kandahar, Masood Azhar was the penalty that India had to pay, it will happen again. You are not fighting terrorism; you are giving in.

Farooq Abdullah: Look, its very easy to say you are giving in but I am not giving in. We are fighting terrorism every day. But are you going to give fuel to terrorists, the ones who are dead? Are you going to make people like Geelani and others tomorrow masters of the situation that you have already made them?

Karan Thapar: Let’s turn to the political argument for clemency for Mohammad Afzal. You argue that if Mohammad Afzal is allowed to hang, Kashmir could go up in flames. Secondly, you have said that the peace process could be badly damaged. Soli Sorabjee says that those reasons are tantamount to blackmail.

Farooq Abdullah: I don’t think that I would want to blackmail either the Supreme Court or the rest of the nation. The point here is—you want to hang him, go ahead hang him but the consequences of hanging you must also remember.

Karan Thapar:What the consequences of hanging would be?

Farooq Abdullah: One of the consequences I will tell you —and I have been being very straight and honest on your programme—we have paid the price of Maqbool Butt’s hanging by the judge who was shot dead in Kashmir. Let me be very candid on this programme with you, those judges will need to be protected like anything. Some crook will come and will murder them. Therefore, my request on your programme is, for god’s sake please see that they are protected.

Secondly, I will tell you, this nation will go up in flames. The terrorists will do such things, which will destroy the relationship of the Hindus and Muslims here. One party who are favouring the hanging will go up and shout, or whatever they can, and the relationship will grow so bad, that it would be difficult to handle. You have seen the Mumbai blasts, how much there was. Thousands of Muslims were put in jail to extract information from them. I don’t want such a thing to happen again.

Karan Thapar: You are seriously saying that if Mohammad Afzal is hanged, India, not just Kashmir, will go up in flames?

Farooq Abdullah: I am telling you there are people—crooks—can be of any type. I have seen them at that level in my own state.

Karan Thapar:You see Hindu, Muslim riots breaking out across India?

Farooq Abdullah: Because some crook, some bad man will go and do something in a temple, somebody will do in a mosque. Do you think that will not raise tragedies? and so something more than that. Kashmir will any way go up in flames.

Karan Thapar: You are actually saying that the future of India hinges on whether Mohammad Afzal is hanged on not?

Farooq Abdullah: No, it is not the question of hinges. India will go through, but there will be a turmoil which India will have to face, I am telling you. This is how I feel, I hope I am wrong, but this is what it is.

Karan Thapar: Isn’t that how a weak state responds: at a moment of tough decision making, you are suddenly scared to execute justice.

Farooq Abdullah: Please, hang him. Go ahead and hang him, and then face the consequences. Farooq Abdullah is telling you as an Indian, what may happen. I hope it does not happen, I hope Kashmir does not go in flames. We have been paying price for it for 19 years. Today my people are starving. No tourist goes there. My Chief Minister is shouting at the top of his voice, “Come to Kashmir”, but nobody wants to come because bombs are thrown in the buses, bombs are thrown in places like Gulmarg. How will we survive? I can’t give them Government jobs; I can’t give them jobs in the rest of the country. Where will I give them a job?

Karan Thapar: So, you are saying to me that the future of Kashmir hinges upon whether Afzal hangs or not?

Farooq Abdullah:No, the future of Kashmir depends on Indo-Pakistan relations. Let me be very honest and candid about that.

Karan Thapar:Will the peace process suffer or not if Afzal hangs?

Farooq Abdullah: It will suffer because General (Pervez) Musharraf will have a tough time in trying to control his army chiefs of various regiments. Some Army Chiefs might come up and throw him out. And if that happens where will this peace process go? It will go back to zero. Where will we start then?

Karan Thapar: I gave you ample opportunity to show your anguish and concern, let me now put two critical questions to you. Do you realise that the argument that you are making for Mohammad Afzal could be made even in the case of Gujarat. Today if Mohammad Afzal is let off because Kashmir could go up in flames, tomorrow the VHP and the Bajrang Dal could argue that people guilty of riots in 2002 should be let off because Gujarat could go up in flames.

Farooq Abdullah: Kashmir is not Gujarat. Kashmir is still felt by Pakistan to be disputed. Gujarat is not disputed; part of Kashmir is with Pakistan. It is a much different situation and a much different story.

Karan Thapar: Alright my second question: you are so concerned that Mohammad Afzal’s hanging will destroy the peace process. In similar case why haven’t you also appealed to Pervez Musharraf to show clemency to Sarabjeet Singh, that too could destroy the peace process but you are silent on that subject.

Farooq Abdullah: No, I am not silent. It’s just that none asked me ever about it. Now that you have asked me this, let me speak on this. First of all, hanging is wrong. In nations that are around us, hanging is over. I plead, in your programme, to General Musharraf for better Indo-Pak relationship.

Karan Thapar: What about a plea for the life of Sarabjeet Singh?

Farooq Abdullah: Yes, I am saying. Please do not hang him. Let that be your gesture of goodwill towards India.

Karan Thapar: Let me come back to the central issue. The BJP says that this is ‘abject, graven populism’—that you are kneeling and beseeching people to give you votes, because you lost in 2002. You are using Afzal as a way of coming back to power.

Farooq Abdullah: If Afzal was going to be part of the power, Farooq would not have been speaking to you. I am not the one who wants to win elections for the heck of it because I am going to use Afzal’s life—not at all. Believe me I would not be on the stage defending Afzal because I want to win. I would rather loose. I am not going to be one of those persons like others who are using him.

Karan Thapar: One last question. You have been outspoken and people will be surprised by the extent of your outspokenness in defence of Mohammad Afzal. Your son on the other hand, who is the president of your party and could be the next Chief Minister of Kashmir, has not said a word publicly. He has actually scrupulously kept his silence on this issue.

Farooq Abdullah: I am 70 years old; he is a young man. He has sought his own thinking and his own path. I stand on what I have seen in India. I have seen India in 1947 and the massacres in India when Pakistan was made. I don’t want to see any more of blood on my hands. I want an end to this.

Karan Thapar: I want to repeat my question one last time. You are totally sincere in demanding that Mohammad Afzal be given clemency. This is not populism and this is not a way of ingratiating yourself into favour with the Kashmiri people.

Farooq Abdullah: You will never find me using this to win votes, never.

Karan Thapar: Dr Abdullah, thank you so much for talking to us on Devil’s Advocate.

Farooq Abdullah: Thank you.

Metaphor Mania: Flat World

2006-10-15T16:36:00.000+05:30

So this Tom Fried man (the pun is in his name) guy visits the Infosys Bangalore campus, and on the way back home, imagines all kinds of wierd metaphors with twisted logic, and comes up with a book.

Now that the book itself has become a bestseller, Infy decides to jump onto the bandwagon, and starts blaring its trumpets at full volume -- describing itself as a so-called 'flat world' company and starting a company blog that churns out articles (read PR gimmickry under the name of a 'blog') of why only they can be a 'flat world' company. So much so, that they have made it their corporate mantra -- "Think Flat".

Okay let's start with the original work first.

The book "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman was published first in 2005 with the cover depicting a painting without the permission of its painter. The publishers then re-released it with a new cover in 2006.

To give you an idea of the genius that Friedman is, let me quote extensively from the reviews of the book.

For guaranteed reading pleasure, I strongly recommend you read the complete reviews (links below).

Excerpts from the New York Press Review of the book:

(I really wanted to give only excerpts here. But as you can see, I found the whole thing so damn interesting and funny that I could barely cut a few paragraphs out. Excuse the expletives.)

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name)

Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.

...

If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

It's impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical approach. It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today." That it's Friedman's own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman's own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world is flat. .

Start with the title.

The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally f***ed. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting—ironically, as it were—with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman's book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author's metaphors.

God strike me dead if I'm joking about this. Judge for yourself. After the initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and gone back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a monstrous mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the "ten great flatteners," which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: "Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual." These technologies Friedman calls "steroids," because they are "amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners."

According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them. Although these 10 flatteners existed already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree—a period of time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0, with Globalization 1.0 beginning with Columbus—they did not come together to bring about Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the 10 flatteners had, with the help of the steroids, gone through their "Triple Convergence." The first convergence is the merging of software and hardware to the degree that makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub (the product featured in Friedman's favorite television commercial) possible. The second convergence came when new technologies combined with new ways of doing business. The third convergence came when the people of certain low-wage industrial countries—India, Russia, China, among others—walked onto the playing field. Thanks to steroids, incidentally, they occasionally are "not just walking" but "jogging and even sprinting" onto the playing field.

Now let's say that the steroids speed things up by a factor of two. It could be any number, but let's be conservative and say two. The whole point of the book is to describe the journey from Globalization 2.0 (Friedman's first bestselling book) to Globalization 3.0 (his current bestselling book). To get from 2.0 to 3.0, you take 10 flatteners, and you have them converge—let's say this means squaring them, because that seems to be the idea—three times. By now, the flattening factor is about a thousand. Add a few steroids in there, and we're dealing with a flattening factor somewhere in the several thousands at any given page of the book. We're talking about a metaphor that mathematically adds up to a four-digit number. If you're like me, you're already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this numerical jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For instance:

And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you a Thomas Friedman metaphor, a set of upside-down antlers with four thousand points: the icing on your uber-steroid-flattener-cake!

Let's speak Friedmanese for a moment and examine just a few of the notches on these antlers (Friedman, incidentally, measures the flattening of the world in notches, i.e. "The flattening process had to go another notch"; I'm not sure where the notches go in the flat plane, but there they are.) Flattener #1 is actually two flatteners, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the Windows operating system. In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the f*** do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

Ha ha. And some form the review by the San Francisco Chronicle:

... Friedman's latest book, "The World Is Flat," is culturally misinformed, historically inadequate and intellectually impoverished. It is also a runaway best-seller.

The book's main point is that the world is "flattening" -- becoming more interconnected -- as the result of the Internet, wireless technology, search engines and other innovations. Consequently, corporate capitalism has spread like wildfire to China, India and Russia, where factory workers, engineers and software programmers are paid a fraction of what their American counterparts are paid.

Business reporters, labor activists, historians and anthropologists have reported these trends for more than a decade, but Friedman would have us believe that he single-handedly discovered the "flat world." In fact, without a trace of irony, he compares himself to Christopher Columbus embarking upon a global journey of exploration.

To awe his readers, Friedman relies upon anecdotes and vignettes from recent trips. He breathlessly recounts visiting booming Asian cities that he portrays as landscapes littered with American logos from IBM, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Pizza Hut. In Bangalore (India) and Dalian (China), cheerful CEOs and young high-tech workers explain how wonderful corporate globalization has been for them. Friedman gushes about golf courses and skyscrapers built by U.S. companies around the world; he raves about handheld gadgets that send faxes, snap photos and play MP3 tunes; and he reminisces about sushi bars in Dubai and Bentonville (the Arkansas home of Wal-Mart).

Not until the final chapters does he acknowledge that most Indians and Chinese still live in poverty. He never mentions that the gap between rich and poor in both India and China is widening. Nor does he dwell on the fact that many of the companies that have laid off thousands of Bay Area employees (Santa Clara County alone lost 231,000 jobs between 2000 and 2004) have replaced them with workers in Asia.

...

Toward the end of the book Friedman acknowledges that most of the global population does not live in a "flat world" -- and that many have no desire to do so. To explain this, he resorts to a facile explanation: culture. He argues that cultures open to foreign ideas (he really means open to corporate capitalism and mass consumption) will blossom in the 21st century, while closed cultures will wither.

Friedman's understanding of culture is simplistic and sloppy. He relies upon analogies rather than analysis, stereotypes rather than social science, and hearsay rather than history.

...

Friedman seems vexed by what he calls the "backwardness" of Arab and Muslim cultures. He writes, "For complicated cultural and historical reasons, many of them do not glocalize [absorb foreign ideas] well.'' Approvingly, he refers to economist David Landes, who argues that in the Arab Muslim world, "cultural attitudes have in many ways become a barrier to development."

This reveals a shocking ignorance of history. For seven centuries, Islam was the global civilization par excellence, and it enabled the development of many scientific, intellectual and artistic breakthroughs during that period.

Nowhere is the European (and American) colonization and occupation of the Arab and Muslim worlds over the last 200 years mentioned as a possible explanation for anger and resentment directed against the United States and Europe. Nowhere is U.S. government support of brutal dictatorships in the Middle East (from the shah to the Saudi royal family) offered as a possible reason for opposition to Western hegemony posing as "globalization" or a "flat world." In this book, history is bunk.

Friedman doesn't appear to spend much time outside of golf courses, five- star restaurants, limousines and luxury hotels. His view of the world is consistent with dozens of elites he interviews on his global journey. The chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies, Mexican ex-presidents, U.S. secretaries of state and military generals, Japanese financial consultants and Indian and Chinese ministers of trade inhabit Friedman's flat world. The voices of farmers, factory workers and street vendors are heard nowhere in the text, though many might tell a different story -- of growing poverty, hunger and disease in the wake of World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization policies.

Ultimately, Friedman's work is little more than advertising. The goal is not to sell the high-tech gadgetry described in page after page of the book, but to sell a way of life -- a world view glorifying corporate capitalism and mass consumption as the only paths to progress. It is a view intolerant of lives lived outside the global marketplace. It betrays a disregard for democracy and a profound lack of imagination.

This book's lighthearted style might be amusing were it not for the fact that his subject -- the global economy -- is a matter of life and death for millions. Friedman's words and opinions, ill informed as they are, shape the policies of leaders around the world. Many consider him to be a sophisticated thinker and analyst -- not a propagandist. It is a sobering reminder of the intellectual paralysis gripping our society today.

Now, coming to the company that seems to think it has started the 'flat world' phenomenon.

For any concept to be used as a corporate mantra it has to be of the vision-setting, awe-inspiring, world-changing variety. Coming to the motivational value of the word "flat", a fellow blogger has this obeservation:

Meaning of "flat" from Answers.com.
Lacking interest or excitement; dull: a flat scenario.
Lacking in flavor: a flat stew that needs salt.
Having lost effervescence or sparkle: flat beer.
Deflated. Used of a tire.
Electrically discharged. Used of a storage battery.
Of or relating to a horizontal line that displays no ups or downs and signifies the absence of physiological activity: A flat electroencephalogram indicates a loss of brain function.
Commercially inactive; sluggish: flat sales for the month.
Unmodulated; monotonous: a flat voice
Lacking variety in tint or shading; uniform: “The sky was bright but flat, the color of oyster shells” (Anne Tyler).
Not glossy; mat: flat paint.
Music - Being below the correct pitch.

And a reader rightly comments:

NASA is to Space,
Google is to Innovation,
Vint Cerf is to Internet,
Richard Stallman is to Open Source,
Jesse James Garrett is to AJAX,
Lakshmi Mittal is to Steel,
[and Bush is to War :-)],

what is Infosys's crediblity in talking about the Flat World? Could someone explain, please?

Is it that, Tom Friedman visited the Infosys campus in Bangalore and mentioned it in his book? I think the Western-style campus with lawn, golf course and swimming pool flattened him! Does this give Infosys any credibility to talk about the flat world concept?!

Another blogger rightly points out that the phrase 'Think Flat' infact sounds "like an advert for a Plasma TV Screen".

And the ARC writes,

Infosys Technologies had their annual analyst event in Boston on September 25th and 26th. The theme of the event was “Win in the Flat World,” a natural theme for a leading outsourcing company headquartered in India. At a high level, many of their comments would have been familiar to those who have read Tom Friedman’s best selling business book, “The World is Flat.” However, the company is trying to capitalize on this marketing windfall by doing research into what does a “flat world” mean in their core verticals? What activities in these verticals lend themselves to outsourcing? How will outsourcing in combination with reengineering impact Cash Flows, the Balance Sheet, and the Income Statement?

All of this is the kind of red meat you need to throw in front of analysts to show you are a thought leader, but in a candid conversation between Andy Chatha, ARC’s CEO, and Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys’s President and COO, Kris was willing to admit there may not be that much revenue that can be directly attributed to “flat world” work. Much of the conversation centered on how Infosys has achieved what they have achieved.

On the other hand, in a press conference announcing astounding quarterly results on 11 October, Infosys CEO and managing director Nandan Nilekani was quoted as saying "Our business model provides a compelling value proposition to clients in a flat world."

Let's take for example one of the recommendations by Infosys to its clients, as part of its four-point 'Think Flat framework' if I could say that:

Think Money from Information

In essence, companies should shift their operation priority:

Now, do they expect their clients to be so dim-witted as to miss the obvious catch -- that "Creating Seamless Information Flows" and "Building Strong Analytics Tools and blah blah" themselves mean huge investments of money, and Infy would only be too happy to milk them away for those 'Services'?

The Motley Fool has this commentary on the Infosys stock:

Infosys: Flat World, Flat Investment?

Nobody at Infosys came up with the phrase "flat world." Thomas Friedman invented the phrase and wrote a best-seller, weighing more than two pounds, called "The World Is Flat." Infosys adopted the phrase as a corporate mantra, and the stock has been exploding ever since. Fool contributor John Finneran explores whether the flat world is also a flat investment.

By John Finneran, CFA
October 13, 2006

In Thomas Friedman's ode to outsourcing, The World Is Flat, he credits Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani with coming up with the "flat world" phrase. Although Nilekani actually said the "playing field is being leveled," Friedman's rare exercise in saving words has paid off handsomely. Infosys adopted "flat world" as its corporate mantra, and the stock has appreciated 61% in the last year. And Friedman's book, which weighs more than two pounds and nudges 600 pages, has become a best-seller.

...

Infosys hired just 2% of the 1.4 million people who applied last year, and is reputed to have the largest training facility -- in the world.

Flat-worlders come to India

Friedman forgot that the flat world works both ways -- India can come to America, but America can go there, too.

Infosys is, like all its Indian IT peers, built on a fundamental labor arbitrage -- hire Indian IT staff at approximately one-sixth of their U.S. cost, and charge them to clients at the highest U.S. rate achievable. Chipping away at this advantage are the 20% wage inflation and high attrition rates in the Indian IT sector.

However, there is a faster way to level the playing field -- just hire more people in India and dilute the cost advantages of the native firms. Infosys has 66,000 total employees. In contrast, IBM has 43,000 employees in India, and plans to invest another $6 billion there over the next three years. Meanwhile, Accenture has 23,000 staff in India.

The New World of old work

India may be the New World for IT services, but the work outsourced there is distinctly Old World. There are few signs of New World revenue, such as the transformational outsourcing services offered by IBM and Accenture. Here's the evidence.

First, reviewing Infosys' revenues by service reveals that maintaining software applications is the largest slice, at 29% of total revenue. Now, this revenue has the advantage of being delivered under long-term contracts, but it is typically for tired "legacy" systems, offering little upside to the client or outsourcer.

Second, though Infosys has invested in a dedicated consulting arm, total revenue from consulting is abysmally low at less than 4%. Consulting is critical to an IT services firm, because it helps shape client agendas and generate larger amounts of work downstream for the outsourcing and software factories. In contrast, Accenture earns 55% of its revenues from consulting, and 45% from outsourcing.

Third, the traditional pricing model of charging by the hour for every staff member dominates at Infosys. This model, called time and materials, accounted for 74% of Infosys' revenues in its last quarter.

...

"Flat world" investors, stay home

The good news is that investors in the flat world can stay home. It is much easier for Accenture and IBM to replicate the India-driven global delivery model than it is for Infosys and Wipro to make the round trip. You just take out your big checkbook and hire away -- no leadership institutes shaped like spaceships required. On the other hand, replicating the long-standing, consulting-driven client relationships enjoyed by the global brand names in IT services is much, much harder.

Valuations make the case for staying at home even stronger. Accenture has eight times the revenue and its return on equity is a third higher, but it trades at half the enterprise value of Infosys.

The world is still round

Infosys is a great company, but that does not make it a great investment. Buying its stock means a full subscription to the story of 30% to 40% growth in sales and earnings over five to 10 years.

There are just too many pressures bringing Infosys' growth rate down. The frenzied hiring of staff by local and multinational firms will flatten the cost advantage in India, while the Indian firms will be slowed by the relationship and innovation assets held by firms like IBM and Accenture.

The world is still round!

But if the Infoscions and their investors still believe in the flat world, they have company:

The International Flat Earth Society in California advocates the flat-earth theory and "will provide you with materials and show you how to fight the evil humanistic belief that the earth is round with true evidence and Biblical information that shows otherwise."

In its publication, The Flat Earth News, under a regular column, "One Hundred Proofs Earth is Not a Globe", it had once published this thought-provoking and irrefutable proof:

"If the Earth were a globe, there certainly would be -- if we could imagine the thing, to be peopled all around-'antipodes:' 'people who,' says the dictionary, 'living exactly on the opposite side of the globe to ourselves, having their fee [sic] opposite to ours' - people who are HANGING DOWN, HEAD DOWNWARDS while we are standing head up? But since the theory allows to travel to those parts of the earth where the people are said to hand head downward, and still to fancy ourselves to be heads upwards, and our friends whom we have left behind us to be heads downwards, it follows that the WHOLE THING IS A MYTH - A DREAM - A DELUSION - and a snare, and, instead of there being any evidence at all in this direction to substantiate this popular theory, it is plain proof that the Earth is Not A Globe."

Alas, there's no Nobel prize for logic.

Paraskavedekatriaphobia

2006-10-13T12:14:00.000+05:30

Today is Friday the 13th. And the above unpronouncible word refers to the fear associated with it.

According to Wikipedia, in the United States alone, $800 to $900 million is lost in business each Friday the 13th because some people will not travel or go to work.

According to National Geographic, this phobia "is rooted in ancient, separate bad-luck associations with the number 13 and the day Friday."

While the number 13 had roots in Norse Mythology, Friday was the day on which Jesus was crucified.

This fear of 13 is strong in today's world. According to Dossey, more than 80 percent of high-rises lack a 13th floor. Many airports skip the 13th gate. Hospitals and hotels regularly have no room number 13.

On streets in Florence, Italy, the house between number 12 and 14 is addressed as 12 and a half. In France socialites known as the quatorziens (fourteeners) once made themselves available as 14th guests to keep a dinner party from an unlucky fate.

Star of the Month

2006-10-13T11:44:00.000+05:30

My brother, Ravi Krishna, has just been awarded the 'Star of the Month' for August 2006 by his employer, TCS.

Congrats, Bro! Way to go!

On a side note, by the speed at which TCS works, I wouldn't be surprised if the lady employees get their maternity leaves approved just in time for their kids' marriages.

Manmohan Singh at Cambridge

2006-10-11T21:24:00.000+05:30

The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, received an honourary degree from his alma mater, University of Cambridge, today; and addressed the distinguished gathering.

The Times of India reports that the Prime Minister received "one of the most generous receptions anyone has received in Cambridge" and that his address "brought another round of prolonged and thunderous applause that continued even after he occupied his chair, embarrassing him to a point where he stood up and bowed twice to the gathering in a bid to stop the well deserved ovation."

The complete transcript of his speech:

October 11, 2006
London

“ Towards Inclusive Globalisation

I am deeply conscious of the honour that you have bestowed upon me by inviting me to deliver this lecture and by conferring on me the degree of Doctor of Law. I crave your indulgence as I begin on a personal note. I am one of the fortunate few to have been embraced by Britain’s two oldest universities. Before I went to the other place by the Isis, I saw the river Cam when I came up to study for my Economics tripos at St John’s. In the beginning was St. John’s. The colour light blue is one of my favourites and is often seen on my head. My memories of my days in Cambridge are deep. I was taught by teachers like Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobb and Professor R.C.O. Mathews. I have vivid recollections of the economist Pierro Srafa working studiously at the Marshall Library. It was here that I became a contemporary of Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Mahbub-ul Haq and Rehman Sobhan – all renowned economists from South Asia who became lifelong friends. My teachers and my peers in Cambridge taught me to be open to argument and to be fearless and lucid in the expression of one’s opinions. These virtues, and a relentless desire to pursue intellectual truth were inculcated in me at Cambridge. In many important ways, the University of Cambridge made me.

I am certainly not the only Indian who is thus indebted to this great University. Jawaharlal Nehru was at Trinity as was his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi. Both became Prime Ministers of India. I am thus the third Prime Minister of India to have come out of Cambridge. Sarojini Naidu, known as the ‘Nightingale of India’, played an extremely significant role in India’s freedom movement and she studied at Girton. Looking beyond the arena of political leadership, there were many eminent Indians, who studied in Cambridge, and then made significant contributions to the world of science and to public life in India. In this context, I think of Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was at Christ’s in the 1880s and was a pioneer in the study of radio waves and the life of plants. I think of Srinivasan Ramanujan, the master of the theory of numbers who was brought to Trinity by G.H.Hardy. I remember P.C. Mahalanobis who was at King’s and then founded the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. Homi J. Bhabha, who played a crucial role in the development of India’s nuclear programme and established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai was at Gonville and Caius. M.S. Swaminathan, the man who envisioned the Green Revolution in India, was at St. Catharine’s. I mention here only the very eminent but there are many others in the social sciences, in education and the bureaucracy in India who, like me, claim this university as their alma mater. The links between India and Cambridge are long and enduring.

Globalisation

When I came up to Cambridge in the mid 1950s, the Cold War had frozen the world into two blocs. India had won Independence a few years before and under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru was trying to establish its own place in a divided world. For Indians it was an era of hope, and there was great optimism about the prospect of development.

Today the world appears radically altered. The Cold War is history. A new age of freedom has harnessed to it new technologies that have transformed production and communication. The dismantling of state control has unshackled economic forces. More countries are now integrated into a global economic system in which trade and capital flow across borders with unprecedented energy. The age of freedom is also the age of economic growth. Prometheus has truly been unbound.

A very significant feature of the global economy is the integration of the emerging economies in world markets. In fact, the weight of global economic activity is gradually shifting to these emerging economies. They now account for more than two-fifths of world exports compared to a fifth twenty-five years ago.

In many parts of the developing world, especially India and China, per capita incomes are doubling or are expected to double over every decade. This will lift millions of people out of poverty. This pace of change is unprecedented, far exceeding what was witnessed during the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Freer trade and financial flows in the world as a whole are helping to contain inflation, keep interest rates low, and sustain higher levels of investment.

In my own country, the economic reforms we initiated in the early 1990s have made our economy more competitive. Indian business is responding to new market opportunities. India’s growth is underpinned by a vibrant and growing entrepreneurial class. Indian youth is keen to get into technical and scientific institutions – helping India gain salience as a knowledge based economy. Our country, I believe, is now on a growth path of 7 to 9 per cent per annum, while maintaining reasonable price stability. The proportion of people living below the poverty line is declining.

Globalisation: Some Concerns

These achievements of the era of globalization should not blind us to the new anxieties that globalization has brought in its wake. The reach of globalization is yet to touch many parts of the world. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the process has not removed personal and regional income disparities. In many developing countries, growth is by-passing the rural areas. Also, in the face of stagnation in their real pay, the working classes in industrialized countries are becoming fearful of the opening of markets. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. This, coupled with the inability of the public sector to provide adequate and quality services in health and education, and cater to the needs of the poor, is causing resentment and alienation. This is nurturing divisive forces and putting pressure on the practice of democracy.

These are real and palpable concerns and they cannot be ignored. Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest to you that we address these vital concerns by making globalisation an inclusive process. We need to work for inclusive globalisation. This calls for a new global vision.

Make Globalisation Inclusive

That vision must ensure that the gains from globalization are more widely shared. It is a matter of deep concern that the Doha Development Round of trade negotiations has reached an impasse. If trade is to be an instrument of combating poverty and spreading manufacturing capacities more evenly in the world, it is then vital that barriers to the export of agricultural goods from developing countries be eliminated.

Nearly 2/3rd of the population of developing countries live in rural areas. In the developed countries this falls to less than ten per cent. My appeal is that developed countries should not allow short-term national interests to prevail at the cost of promoting freer trade and combating poverty. The prosperity of so many cannot be sacrificed for protecting the interests of so few. The price of myopia is heavy on the exchequers of the developed world. The issue also has profound moral dimensions.

To convince people in poor countries about the benefits of globalization we must take a more enlightened view in liberalizing trade in services and labour intensive manufactures, in which developing countries are competitive. I see trade not only as a means to prosperity, but also as peace building. Collectively we need to devise an enlightened approach to negotiations over the reduction of harmful gas emissions, intellectual property rights in the production of life saving drugs, transfer of technologies that help to combat poverty and such issues.

Prosperity, ladies and gentlemen, is not divisible. Neither is global peace possible without the eradication of poverty. As Jawaharlal Nehru said in his address to the Canadian Parliament in 1949:

“There can be no security or real peace if vast numbers of people in various parts of the world live in poverty and misery. Nor can there be a balanced economy for the world as a whole if the underdeveloped parts continue to upset that balance and drag down even the more prosperous nations.”

Terrorism and Fundamentalism – From a “Clash of Civilisations” to a “Confluence of Civilisations”

The best efforts to eradicate poverty will be defeated if our societies and nations are threatened by the spectre of terrorism and extremism.

Open societies like India and Britain are more vulnerable to this threat. The very openness of our societies makes us more vulnerable. Yet we must fight terrorism without losing the openness or the rule of law that guarantees the freedom of the individual.

I believe that terrorism can be defeated only by combating fundamentalism and promoting respect for diversity. Britain, the land of John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, the cradle of common law, liberty and democracy, has a unique role to play in fighting fundamentalism. India too has its own pluralistic traditions and openness to other cultures. The legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru ordains that we remain committed to combating fundamentalism. We do not believe in a “clash of civilizations”. What we believe in is enrichment of the human condition through cultural inclusiveness and a “confluence of civilizations”.

Global governance

As democracies we must also stand together in making governance across the world more democratic. As a democracy we aspire to a world in which global institutions are more democratic and more representative of all the peoples of the world. The governance processes of global institutions of today – be they Bretton Woods institutions or the UN Security Council - reflect the realities of the world as it was more than half a century ago.

A more inclusive global process that carries the population of the world with it calls for a reform of these institutions, in which the developing world will have a greater voice. Not to do otherwise is to risk alienation and to render ineffectual the global system. I look to Britain, the Commonwealth and other great nations of the world to join forces in bringing about such a reordered global system.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may well wonder why I have expressed these thoughts at this forum. Before the First World War, a young man from Allahabad came up to Trinity via Harrow. After the Second War, a simple young Indian came to St John’s from an obscure university in Punjab. Cambridge University embraced both. This inclusive character of my alma mater emboldened me to speak to this august gathering about inclusive globalisation. I thank you very sincerely for your patience and for your indulgence.

Thank you.”

Gabbar 2.0

2006-10-11T15:42:00.000+05:30

Amitabh Bachchan turns 64 today.

The Big B dons Gabbar Singh's role in the upcoming remake of Ramesh Sippy's Sholay, the latest take by Ram Gopal Varma.

Thanks to Srikanth for the link.

Here's the eternal original, Amjad Khan, for comparison.

Many say the new Gabbar looks aged, frail, defeated and fake. What's your take?

"Low Cost" Airlines

2006-10-10T15:35:00.000+05:30

Air Deccan, the pioneer of low cost airline in India, has recently put up this note on their website ...

Please Note: All promotional fares, booked on or after 8th October 2006, priced at a basic fare of Rs. 300 or less, will not be entitled to a refund of the basic fare, if cancelled by the passenger. There will also be an administration charge of Rs. 750/- against these tickets.

Let's say you but a ticket with base fare of Rs. 300. You pay a total of Rs. 300 + Rs. 975 in taxes.

If you cancel your ticket, you get back a whopping Rs. 225 (less than 20% of what you paid)!

Wow! Isn't this exactly what the Indian middle-class were waiting for? Talk of Customer-driven pricing and free-market economies.

Google Buys YouTube

2006-10-10T09:58:00.000+05:30

After a few days of speculation that set the media abuzz, Google has finally made it official -- it has acquired the privately held video sharing site YouTube for $1.65b in Google stock.

TIME Magazine says ...

YouTube has long denied plans to sell out. Founder Chad Hurley told TIME in August: "We're not for sale. We're definitely looking to stay independent." Apparently $1.65 billion changed his mind.

Sitting on some $10 billion in cash, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told TIME recently that figuring out what to do with all that money was one of the company's key priorities. This deal, worth more than ten times Google's acquisitions last year combined, takes a big step toward resolving that issue.

URL: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1544389,00.html

Srike's B'Day!

2006-10-09T20:55:00.000+05:30

As the clocks tick over to 10 October, Srikanth, my best buddy from graduation, will be celebrating his birthday in Finland ...

Here's wishing him a hundred more of joyful birthdays, but not a single one of the same kind ...

2006 Masters of Design

2006-10-09T11:46:00.000+05:30

Is design a craft, a tool, or an obsession? These days, it's a bit of all three. In our annual roundup meet the creative businesspeople dialing in to the power of design, and hear sage advice on what design can (and can't) do for your bottom line -- and get an eyeful of some amazing examples of the craft. Meet our 2006 Masters of Design: Jochen Zeitz, the CEO who rescued Puma; Clive Wilkinson, the architect who imagined Google's stunning new offices; Paula Scher, the graphic artist behind some of American's best-known brands; and Steve McCallion, the product designer who predicts our appetites -- and satisfies them. Also, learn about four of design's rising stars, who are on the front lines of the design industry.

URL: http://www.fastcompany.com/design/

Wipro's acquisition tempo intact

2006-10-09T11:41:00.000+05:30

Business standard / Suveen K Sinha / New Delhi October 09, 2006

Wipro Technologies, which has acquired as many as eight companies since December last year for amounts ranging from $20 million to $56 million, will continue to acquire companies at the rate of six to eight a year, whose cost will be in the same range.

In addition, the Bangalore-based information technology company will embellish this strategy of acquiring small targets — referred to by Chairman Azim Premji as the string of pearls — with the acquisition of bigger companies.

“We will continue looking for smaller and focused companies. My hope is that our run-rate will be six-eight transactions a year, though it may be even more. We are also looking at big companies. We have some in our funnel right now, though I cannot say if it will happen in this quarter or the next,” Sudip Nandy, Wipro’s chief strategy officer, said.

Wipro began to string together its pearls in December last year after a two-year pause in its acquisition spree that followed the takeover of Nervewire Consulting, a Boston-based consulting company.

However, Wipro’s last big-bang acquisition was that of Spectramind, the business process outsourcing company promoted by Raman Roy, four years ago. Although Nandy said the Spectramind acquisition went down very well, he added it could have been better but for the high attrition plaguing BPOs.

“With Spectramind, we have learnt a lot of lessons, which have strengthened our acquisition integration capabilities. Since then, we have tried to incorporate the do’s and dont’s in the new acquisitions; the early integration planning, the role of the integration lead in getting the two companies to blend, etc,” Nandy said.

In January 2005, each of Wipro’s verticals, totalling over 25, prepared a three-year strategic plan, including a wish-list for acquisitions, which were presented to the board in June 2005.

Each of these verticals was $50-200 million in size and wanted to acquire something smaller than itself, something that could be acquired for $30-50 million.

URL: Click Here

North Korea tests its Nuclear Weapons

2006-10-09T10:18:00.000+05:30

The agency emphasized that the test being ‘carried out by (North) Korea’s own knowledge and technology’ and ‘a historical event that raised the morale of Korean people and army.’ And ‘the test will contribute to Northeast Asia’s peace and security,’ KCNA added.

URL: http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00300&num=1186

Geopolitics and Diplomacy

2006-10-07T18:47:00.000+05:30

Some interesting articles from the latest issue of The Economist ...

General Pervez Musharraf: Military misjudgment
The Pakistani leader's memoir may be a bestseller, but it does him little justice

... in his cliché-ridden and boringly boastful autobiography, “In the Line of Fire”.
...
Any less than glorious event in his life, after at least a refreshingly sinful youth, is blamed on some less worthy individual, a dull superior or jealous peer, whom the author is all too happy to name. ...

URL: http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7997005

India and Pakistan: Bomb-blast diplomacy
Cross-border terrorism still undermines a shaky peace process

IT IS hard to be on good terms with the neighbours when they keep blowing up your house. Yet, since 2003, India has sought to make friends with Pakistan while continuing to accuse it of abetting hideous bomb attacks in its cities. Pakistan brushes these accusations aside, while at the same time promising not to allow its soil to be used as a base for terrorism. ...

URL: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8001587

North Korea's dangerous game
Kim Jong Il's dictatorial regime, under intense financial pressure, is threatening to test a nuclear bomb

NORTH KOREA has few cards to play in international politics. Yet the isolated communist state is now brandishing what appears to be its ace, saying it will test a nuclear weapon and spreading disquiet in Asia and beyond. ...

URL: http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7994070