Financial Smarts/Corporate Governance, no longer a western stronghold

In what I sense as a sea change in the global attitude towards Eastern banks and financial systems, Mckinsey Quarterly published an interview with the chairman of ICBC, where Mr. Jiang Jianqing is telling Mck how ICBC came to be a bank that has not only survived the global disaster but is currently growing and stabilizing in terms of corporate governance. Their goals are ambitious and their plan is clear. 

In another interview, also conducted by Dominic Barton, a director at the Shanghai office, John Thornton, erstwhile President of Goldman Sachs and now an independant director for ICBC, China Netcom and various other firms tells Mck how Chinese state-owned giants incorporated corporate governance in their own way. Unlike most western commentators on China, Mr. Thorntons views are much more tempered, having been part of the change, he recognizes leadership in these firms are more than just capable and talks the reader through what instituting of boards and governance meant in this context.

Having been in China for almost 2 years now, I have heard all sorts of remarks berating Chinese banking, management, capability and integrity. How high the NPAs are, how badly managed they are, how unsophisticated they are. I suspect if I was a foreigner in India or any other Asian country, I would hear similar things. That is exactly why I was surprised and fairly pleased. Possibly one of the few decent side effects of the global financial crisis.

These two articles from the worlds best paid wise guys underline a marked change in the way that the west will talk to the east in the future. Not condescending, not patronizing. As equals. 

The asian elephants march forward. Slow, steady but forward.

(Dont) Get Naked by candlelight

I doubt anyone who is going to the Naked retreats Naked by Candlelight is reading this, but this is an event that really exemplifies environmental awareness done ass-backwards. 

Their cunning plan was (they have now rescheduled to 11th Apr) to spend Earth Day's no lights hour at a mountain called Moganshan a few hours drive from Shanghai listening to music by candlelight. A lovely thought, on the surface appearing extremely eco-friendly. But anyone with half a brain can see the obvious flaw in their cunning plan.

If 200 odd people are going to travel from Shanghai to Moganshan in their cars/buses (it is not  possible to reach Moganshan by public transport alone), that is going to send a shitload of CO2 out. I doubt that listening to music in the hill will even begin to compensate.

If you want to save the planet and feel cool, just buy a plant or plant a tree. And dont go to Moganshan to do it.

What is your XXXXX?

Apart from advising everyone to shut off their lights for 1 hour a day, instead of just on March 28th, I have no other cunning ideas to save the planet.

Oh, also don't use TP, use water when you can. This actually consumes less water. If you cant understand this, let me spell it out for you. TP expands to toilet paper -> paper comes from trees -> trees grow on water and sunlight (mostly) -> trees take a long time to grow and a short time to be cut. Instead just use the water. and then wash your hands well. All inclusive, water usage is way lesser than TP. Also, its way cleaner. Ask 1 billion indians.

Ok, so everybody on facebook is now taking quizzes that tell them that they are awesome/stupid/sexy/ugly/likely to be rich/tall/gandhi. Perhaps I'm miffed that it didnt say I was likely to be rich but I think this is as much fun as it is scary. Of course, ill-informed humans have been passing judgement on each other for time immemorial now, but facebook now allows you to make this quiz (I made one, it took me 10 minutes to make a quiz that would ask you a bunch of sweet questions and then insult you no matter what, but you wouldnt know this unless you tried all combinations)

The quiz result then appears on your profile as judgement passed. The ease of doing this makes me wonder if idiots will inherit the world.

Dragonball Nauseation

Stepping away from my usual save-the-planet line of attack, I chose my words carefully to speak of junk, that i believe should have stayed in the trunk.

I was actually glad that I thought Dragonball Evolution was a lousy movie made for people of extremely limited mental capabilities. Why was I glad? Because I finally saw a movie that I completely hated for how bad it was. I was beginning to doubt that I had any standards left, since I was impressed with almost all of the movies that I saw recently.  

If this is what people like today, I'd rather watch Tom and Jerry turned into a live action movie. 

I dont know what was worse, the oh so predictable storyline, the random "east is wise and confusing" trip (with random dudes chanting "Om Namah Shivya" and Chow Yun Fat saying "
Namaste" as a goodbye to Ernie Hudson)!!!! 

I beg you, young Americans and second generation american-asians (this never includes indians btw its only people that look Chinese/Korean/Jap/Philipino), please please please don't come to the east to discover yourself if this is what you discover!

If Dragonball is a success, then it is proven that humanity is getting dumber. If not, there is still hope.

Also, if you havent got it yet, as someone who liked Dragonball may not have, This is what I am telling you - If you liked Dragonball Evolution, the movie, you are really really stupid. Do you understand? "Namaste"

Stop complaining and buy some plants

On my daily dose of ted, i saw a 4:04 minute talk by a guy called Kamal Meattle, who has figured out an almost exact way to use indoor plants to improve the air quality indoors in a massive massive way. They have demonstrated this in New Delhi, arguably one of the most polluted cities in the world. 

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air.html

I will type out the recipe for happy indoor air as described by Kamal

3 plants are all it takes to improve air quality. They are

1. Areca Palm

2. Mother-in-laws tongue

3. Money Plant

All very commonly found and meant to survive easily. 

2 Things deeply impressed me about this talk. 

First, guys with non-american and non-scandinavian accents can make fantastic presentations.

And second, an extremely powerful message can be communicated in under 5 minutes. 

Kamal's talk underlines the strength of a short, sweet and powerpacked message and walking the talk. Please go check it out.

All them great ideas seem taken...

I thought I had thought of something pretty cool when i was contemplating the "plant a tree as a gift" idea - Oh well! That one was taken...

Then on the throne another cunning plan struck me, what about all the paper thats wasted in printing multiple copies of books, considering that we have technology to e-read now...hence came my cunning plan of the IBook, a digital reader which works like a book, with encryption so that books cant be duplicated for free (but basically relying on the goodness of humanity for revenue). I also thought of sending Steve Jobs an email, following which he would hand over control of Apple to me and go to the Himalayas to be one with nature. 

Alas, there are more cunning people than I thought.

Sony and various others have already done this.  A long, long time ago. Google just put half million books on the net for free! These are books published prior to 1929, when IPR wasnt big and you could write letters without having 4 page disclaimers.

I wish i could get the reader in China. There are barely any english paper books available

Lesson for the day for me: Instead of blogging first and doing the research later, i shall attempt to reverse the order.

TED

If you haven't beent to www.ted.com yet, you absolutely must right now. Stop reading this and go there.

If you are still here, thanks a ton! What is TED. Its a forum about ideas worth sharing, quite unlike this blog, which is mostly crap. TED is global thought leadership in one neat website. You better have some decent bandwidth though!

Enjoy! 

Plant a tree

Nayana sent me an interesting email today, which shows how the amount of water consumed in Mumbai in one day on Holi would be sufficient for the irrigation of Rajasthan for 1 year. Wow! 

This made me question the environomics of celebrations of all kinds. Diwali, Christmas, Eid, Chinese New Year!

Gifts, eating out, firecrackers. Each of these carry a rather large environmental footprint that is hard to reverse. Here is an idea to start a reverse trend...(this is not a new idea, but i thought of it while on the throne, hence it deserves to be blogged about)

Everytime you want to give a gift to someone, plant a tree. If they have a garden, plant it in their garden. If not, plant it somewhere else. Or fund someone who will plant a tree. 

Dont give them flowers, give them a tree. Trees are awesome! (must thank Nicolas for teaching me the power of this phrase ;)

If there are still some folks asking why is planting a tree a good thing. Let me explain, as simply as i possibly can.

Trees consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. You, me and cars consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. Lots of carbon dioxide will kill you and me. Now, go plant a tree. Also, feel free to pee on your neighbors trees and blame Al Gore.

India Works

Digressing from the planet for the day, I have to say something about Delhi 6. Its as good as slumdog, if not better! It proves that even we can look at ourselves objectively and make a movie that doesnt gloss over reality.

In Slumdog, the director was a firang, in Delhi 6 - the protagonist was, for all practical purposes, a firang!

Ram vs Allah for bullshit reasons - Yup

Real Delhi (Chandni Chowk) rather than fancy delhi (South Delhi) - Yup

Hope for a better tomorrow - Yup

A R Rahman brilliant score - Yup

Real characters, real emotions - You betcha - Probably better than slumdog where I thought the teen aged salim and jamal were too too convent educated to be "slumdogs"

Finally, there is a bit of sugar coating but not too much....the truth of the so called "heart of delhi" and the "spirit of mumbai" lies exposed.

We have no food, so we make up for it with love! 

We have no water in our taps, but our tears never dry up...we can cry for everything and nothing!

Our divisions are wide and deep - be it religion, caste, class or color! There is no f#$king escaping this...as exposed by the Kabir of Tarun Tejpal, Jamal of SM and Gobar/Jalebi of Delhi 6.

There are no truly actionable solutions, are there?

Who do we blame? The mughals? The Brits? The americans? 

Humans are a lousy race....it just manifests differently in different places but, on average, we are a horrible horrible race.

Thank God our films and our books are now questioning and attempting to unite us, not by ignoring the reality that we live in, but rather by holding up a mirror to our face, so we can see in horrific detail who we are and what we are doing to ourselves.

Now, how about an Oscar for Mr. Mehra?

The choices we make

Following my own set agenda for this blog, I'm going to talk about simple choices we all make everyday, and their impact on the planet. I wonder why I'm so concerned about the planet? Possibly because its the only we have. And summers have been getting worse....thats worth trying to fix !

Sadly, I suspect the morbid truth is that whatever Al Gore and millions of others try to do for the planet - we are on a slippery downhill slope of self-destruction and Live Earth, Earth Day etc etc will at best slow down the slide, not stop it. The human race is terrible and destructive. Our greatest strength is the cause for what will be the end of us. It is our ability to take the learnings of one generation, apply them in the next and move forward with intelligence rather than instinct. Science & Technology - The wheel, written communication, the knife, the gun, the printing press, the car,the aeroplane and the internet are all our greatest achievements and also irreversible paths to the end of this planet as we know it. Prove me wrong! I double dare you.

But coming back to the choices we make, let me start with a very personal choice for me. One that I have been battling with for some time now and one where I have finally chosen a side.

To kill or not to kill, that is the question. Eating meat, i.e. killing animals for food. There are largely 3 reasons cited as justifications to killing animals for food.

1. Its healthier than eating plants.

2. Its necessary to keep the ecosystem in balance.

3. Its tastier than eating plants.

Out of these, I agree wholeheartedly with pt. 3. Yes, animals are way way tastier than plants. The other 2 are just myths or bullshit that made sense at some point perhaps, but in todays context dont make any sense whatsoever. 

WHY WHY??? you are a crazy vegetarian!!! 

No. You are ignorant or are choosing to ignore. I am not a crazy vegetarian.

1. Meat is bad for you - healthwise and wealthwise. The risks of eating animals are way way way higher. If its clean meat, you will have heart trouble. If not, you could get much worse stuff - refer Mad Cow disease and other terrible ailments.

2. Eating animals is not keeping the ecosystem is check. The ecosystem is so screwed as a result of factory farming that we all, repeat we all need to stop eating meat right now for another million years to bring it back to a point when we can talk about eating meat to maintain balance. Balance is when you hunt a chicken or a deer with bare hands, sometimes you win, sometimes the neighboring lion eats you. Balance is not defined as buying meat in a store.

Your thoughts?

A sense of purpose

Finally, perhaps, this blog may have found a sense of purpose. After having blogged on anything, everything, and more often than not, nothing, I have found a topic that I feel I will be able to write blogs that are interesting, informative and implementable. Well, at least one of the above, some of the time.

Planet Earth, how we are messing with it and how we can begin to fix it. 

It all started for me when Al Gore invented global warming. Apart from letting the biggest idiot in the world become president of US&A, Al Gore's biggest crime was global warming. If it wasnt for him, the world would have been perfectly ok - no warming, no climateincrisis, nothing - right uptill the day everything went up in flames. The Day after Tomorrow, so to speak.

After you see his spectacular documentary An Inconvenient Truth, if you are not moved to action - then there is obviously something wrong with you. You may think he is alarmist, (I personally think he might be playing it down a little bit, just to not panic you too much), but you cannot deny the issue.

There are a million other issues to be dealt with like education, healthcare, free speech,human rights,  democracy, protectionism, but this one seems to be closer to my heart than others. So I will try and stay close to this track from now on.

Here is an interesting video, for those with ample bandwidth - Its from Ted.com which is a fantastic site to say the least.

Its about how Willie Smits converted a patch of land in Indonesia from a barren, fire-prone worthless patch to a beautiful, self-sustaining, green landscape. Its not simple to do, its not a quick fix - but these are beginnings of a solution to a problem that we, humans, have brought upon ourselves. 

Save the rainforest, Save the world!

The history of the stick

Our unfriendly neighbourhood state(barely) of Pakistan is going from bad to worse...Here's an article that I thought was interesting

http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2009/02/27/the-pakistan-army-and-the-history-of-the-stick/

"If you use a stick too often, the stick will take over" Stephen Cohen

Life mein risk middle class style

Risk is an over-used term and an underutilized resource.  Here's a theory, not supported by data or anecdotal evidence. Just a theory.

This goes out to all my middle class brothers and sisters across India. We are inherently not risk takers. The very rich and the very poor are. Which is why NRN and other middle class heroes truly stand out as giant exceptions and inspirations to the rest of us.

The poor kids have nothing to lose and everything to gain - This makes them braver and more likely to take a risk with everything they have, since they are at the bottom of the pyramid, and have nowhere lower to fall to.

The rich kids have a fairly sound safety net and hence can take on a decent amount of risk without fearing complete decimation of their future.

Us, the burgeoning middle class, have just enough (we always have just enough, however much we earn) and so we find it extremely hard to step out on a ledge and dive, we arn't sure our parachute is big enough.  In the recent past, many of us have stepped out on that ledge and taken the dive - and its paid off, some no doubt have crashed and burned.

But my theory is simply this, all other things being equal, middle class manohar will not take the risk that rich ramesh or poor pratap will.