blog@Yantrajaal

1989 was a watershed year for both the world in general and me in particular. I had just finished my PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas and had decided to break the jinx of the X+1 syndrome and return to India. Those who have been a part of the desi community in the US in the last century would recollect this strange yearning of those who had finally arrived in the US, not just physically, but metaphorically as well, to give it all up and return to India. Nostalgia for home, sprinkled with a sense of guilt for having abandoned it, competed with la dolce vita, the good life, that America held out to the F-1 visa community of graduate students and it was always that the good life that won out. Most of F1 crowd would eventually get the Green Card, permanent immigrant status, and then become US citizens but they would always keep alive the delusion that next year, X+1, they will wind it all up and move back to India. It was a delusion because India was still stuck in socialist q...

Many young and energetic graduates from our premier institutes of learning have of late decided to opt-out of the placement services that these institutes provide to become entrepreneurs and set up new businesses. A recent slideshow-report by the Economic Times, features 10 such cases where students of IITs, IIMs and BITS Pilani have created a string of successful businesses. Prima facie this is an excellent development and we wish that many more students create many such enterprises but a closer look reveals some disquieting trends that may be worth a little more discussion. Seven of the ten businesses featured -- and these include well known names like Flipkart and Redbus, were about a service delivered out of a website. This includes monitoring school kids, booking of taxis, buses and trips, selling of goods and services over the web. Two were focused on building a software that facilitate phone calls over the web and the tenth was about building a robot. In all of these busines...