Stereotyping is bad, very bad

There is one aspect of life in India I had heard about but now getting plenty of time to face it . Which is how people react to NRIs(Non resident Indians) here in India. Some other terms used to describe NRIs include Not Really Indians and Not Required Indians.
Normally I wouldn’t post [...]

Social Investing

(Via HBS) Ronald Cohen is about to start new venture aimed at social investment. Another highly successful venture capitalist - Vinod Khosla is also pursuing social entrepreneuership actively.
This is more than just philanthropy, its a deep realization that the traditional capitalism is hitting its limits and will not work in the larger part [...]

Infothela

Can health education really solve the problems related to affordable healthcare ? Infothela, project started by IIT Kanpur computer science department, attempts to find that out in a very unique way.

You can innovate anywhere

How about using railway station coolies for providing extra security !
Or maybe give them cellphone and make them event capturing agents for the 24/7 media streams.

Language and careers

Found this on the Indian job mailing list for sales executives:
Ability to communicate in one or more Asian languages (e.g. Mandarin,Hindi, Japanese, Korean or Bahasa Malay, etc) as well as previousinternational work experience is an asset.

Knowing more language is definitely an edge. Interestingly advantage of knowing regional Indian language is diminishing by the day.  Flat [...]

Rotten morality

Something in that part of the world (yes including India) stinks when it comes to the treatment of women.  Every once  in a while you hear some crazy rural council giving  medieval justice to some women.

Few years back we had similar episode in India . People build NGO around that episode, elections won and lost, [...]

Grassroot disconnect

Seth Levine quotes his father on grassroot level changes in China:
I would predict that within the
next five years the disconnect between people’s economic aspirations and their
ability to achieve them within the boundaries of government policies could lead
to a political crisis

Information awareness is growing at a pace never seen before in that part of the world. [...]

Money-minded and proud of it

While coming to Bangalore, I was doing the ritualistic scan of all flight magazines (I am one of those traveler who just run to grab all the magazines and hoard them till I am done reading them. In Singapore Airlines you get plenty of good magazines on East-Asian events, sometimes I just enjoy the font [...]

Opensecret

Watch-dog site covering all the advocacy groups which were covertly or publicly involved with the two political parties. Tracking money flow is the first step in rooting out corruption. There should be an open source application (on the lines of civicspaces etc) which should let NGOs build this kind of money/lobby track in any given [...]

Education sector reform - manifesto analysis

Satyanarayan has an excellent analysis of education sector reform promises made by different parties in their election manifestos. Congress proposal for setting up EDFC is compelling if executed along the lines of HDFC. It seems country is still running short of 1.7% of GDP to fulfill it’s goal of 6% of GDP as [...]