Thursday, August 17, 2017

Angry birds and spinning wheels

"The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding - in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross."
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German, 1844-1900)
Word for the day
Iconoclastic (adj)
Attacking or ignoring cherished beliefs and long-held traditions, etc.
Malice towards none
Justice is blind, I had heard. But the government is blind, deaf and dumb, this I only realize recently. It only sees, hears and responds when an issue gets good TRPs in media.
So much so that the amount of compensation in cases of rapes, murders and suicide is directly proportionate to the TRP of the case.
First random thought this morning
The positive outcome of Doklam standoff and Kim Jong Un's jingoism could be stronger and deeper Indo-US and Indo-Japan relations. While the hostilities will end sooner or later, the warmth relationships may last much longer.
The focus therefore should be on making efforts to preserve the opportunistic thaw in relations and convert into a sustainable and lasting phenomenon. Keeping Doklam at the center of focus, may not that fruitful after all.
In the meantime, two nuclear powers are fighting each others with stones!

Angry birds and spinning wheels

Most of Indian middle class mothers could be seen complaining about Shin Chen, Doremon et. al., the cartoon character that our children are addicted to.
It was not long ago that when a digital game "Pokeman Go", got many people hooked. The fan club included some renowned people like Shah Rukh Khan (as per media reports).
The latest craze amongst masses seems to be the innocuous Fidget Spinner, being propagated as stress buster device. The device is nothing but a variation of ordinary bearing wheel that has been in use for more than two centuries.
On a visit to Mathura-Vrindavan early this week, I saw at least 500 varieties of Fidget Spinners being sold on the street of this tiny town. Yesterday I noticed that the situation is no different in the streets markets of Delhi. In the popular Connaught Place area you can see hundreds of colorful variants of designed to serve the local taste. On enquiry I discovered that most of the children I know are hooked to the device.
The point is that there are entrepreneurs who seems to have ideas that can work, and also have the capabilities to make such ideas work.
There are numerous examples of successful ideas like Whatsapp, Facebook, Angry Birds, Shin Chen, Doremon, Pokemon that transcend all boundaries be it geographical, socio-economic, or language.
I am sure behind every such successful idea there could be 999 failed ideas also. But that's not the point here. The point is that these successful ideas are about people and not any complex technology. Most of these ideas have created their market themselves. Till the time these ideas were commercialized, no one was really crying need for these products or services.
Unfortunately, our enterprise ecosystem is overwhelmingly skewed in favor of thought followers rather than thought leaders. The cherished unicorns like Flipkart (Amzon), Ola (Uber), PayTM (PayPal) etc. are all poor copies of the global leaders.
Mr. Bhatia created Hotmail two decades back. But he perhaps himself did not believe in the potential of his idea and was happy to sell it to Microsoft for a pittance. And Chota Bheem is so inadequate in rescuing children from the spell of Shin Chen.
If our government is seriously looking to create a New India in five years, we would need to develop an ecosystem that encourages, motivates and supports innovation and not just copying the successful ideas.
I do have some such ideas, if the Prime Minister does care. For those who are itching to make fun of me, I may just remind Dronacharya who taught many a prince and kings the art of winning wars and ruling always remained a poor teacher himself.

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