Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Last week I went to sub-registrar office in Chennai. I got a big shock when I saw the notice board. The e-mail ID of the sub-registrar was mentioned as: igregn.tn.nic.in (See the picture below) This exactly shows how clueless our government systems are when it comes to deploying technology. Long live India ’s e-governance!

In 2002, I visited USA for the first time. During transit I spent some time in Singapore and Hong-Kong. I was totally shocked to see the great infrastructure, well defined rules, robust systems and responsible individuals. After I got back to India , I was frustrated and disgusted to see the Indian system. We Indians just don’t follow any rules; Even if we follow, it is short lived. Take example of Indian roads: We can’t lay good roads; Even if we lay, we will not maintain it; within months, the newly built road will have numerous potholes; Added to that we spit, throw garbage, urinate on it and make sure it is spoilt to the maximum. This phenomenon is very unique in the subcontinent. Take the well developed western world, Middle Eastern and south East Asian countries – they all well built and properly maintained. After some more experiences, I learned that it all finally boils down to an individual’s behavior. Even though Indians are as smart as anyone else in the world, w...

Before reading this post, please check out this link for my opinions about diversity. Here is the latest buzzword among Indian MNCs -- ‘Workplace diversity’. The amount of non-sense going behind this topic is pretty interesting. It also shows how, we Indians bow our heads and accept things without asking any questions. Whatever told by the parent organization in US/UK is taken as a ‘mantra’ and we end up implementing it without knowing head or tail of it. Especially the senior management of India based MNCs has no clue of the rationale behind many of such initiatives. The latest ‘workplace diversity’ campaign is a classic example. According to ‘Wikipedia’ the diversity in workplace or business is defined as: The "business case for diversity", theorizes that in a global marketplace , a company that employs a diverse workforce (both men and women, people of many generations, people from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds etc.) is better able to understa...