The world is like a box of chocolates

I read about Munjal’s recent decision to pull out of India from Tara’s insightful piece “The World is Neither Flat nor Spiky, It is … complicated.” Hans Rosling’s fantastic TED Talk is a must see and I will definitely check out Hans’ Gapminder project and powerful visual tools when I have some time.

Now, onto Tara’s article. Although I think Tara is very insightful and intelligent, I have some reservations with respect to a few ideas in the article. The following are a few things that I have reservation on.

• I am reluctant to generalize BarCampBangalore (or any BarCamp) experience to the state of general activities in a city. For the fact that the attendees of the camp self-selected themselves to attend thus making it tricky to generalize statistically.
• I may be speaking out of my depth again but I think one big problem with India is possibly its deep-rooted corruption everywhere. (I know I am asking for trouble here.) May be what is needed is the Indian government setting up a good set of ground rules and then let the entrepreneurs and the market do their magic. I am more of a free-market guy. And I wasn’t happy to see the Hong Kong government trying to guide and help (in both this and the last administrations) which ended up messing up the city a bit.
• Sitting a little on the fence here, I think “support for alternative routes” may be good but have to be done carefully without getting into more bureaucracy and more corruption. (I welcome readers’ feedback on the level of corruption currently in India as I am basing on some old and possibly outdated info.) (As an aside, Hong Kong used to have rampant and widespread corruption. Imagine tipping your hospital’s nurses just to get clean sheets! It took years of hard work by the world class ICAC and tons of education before HK was mostly cleaned up of corruption. As I haven’t heard of any massive clean up, I suspect the corruption is still quite deep-rooted. Please correct me if I am wrong.)
• I support Tara’s call for “larger investments into the local tech economy” provided these are private funds invested in a way that makes sense to their investors. If the funds come from government, then I don’t think it is a good idea.
• Now, I may have to respectful disagree with Tara’s “idea of government as a platform for homegrown successes“. Of course, it is easy to disagree when I don’t know the details of how Tara imagine this. If “platform” means a good solid foundation in the legal system with a fair trading and tax environment, than I think it is good. But if government is required to play a role in help deciding what are “great areas” to “help” or invest money, then I will have to respectful disagree.

I’m no economist (even though I like to quote Milton Friedman or Ronald Coase as if I know economics. keywords: “as if I know” (smile)). And I definitely know less about India than I would like to. But still, I quite enjoy the thinking I have to go through to read and reply to Tara’s posting.

The world is like a box of chocolates. And thanks to Hans’ great TED Talk, I can no longer be my usually ignorant self and simply lump Africa into one blob when I talk about “problems in Africa”.

P.S. Though brilliant Hans may have been in most of his talk, many may disagree with his statement that “Mao Zedong brought health to China” when so much death and destruction of human potential were caused by Mao. Even years after his death, three young men’s lives were destroyed by Mao’s portrait.