Root Cause

Walking With The Ducks

It is the week following Onam, the culmination of harvest in the season of Chingam. We sit on a cement bench in our village home, under the padipara - the welcoming roof covering of Mangalore tiles at the entrance, a fifty yards from the house itself. The rains have been good this year and, though Onam has come and gone, the harvest is only beginning, a rather unusual occurrence.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The luggage that I carry, on my back and in my mind, weighs heavily on me. I hate my city, the transport system, the noise, the density of humanity around, the dust and about everything else that I see on my way to the bus station. This is not my Bangalore…………

The Real Purpose Of A Corporation

Among the many questions about corporations that I have pondered on over the last few years, none is more intriguing than the one on the fundamental objective of the joint stock company: What is the real purpose of a corporation? The brightest minds, all over the World, have written in lucid detail on this, yet none of their arguments are fundamentally compelling, as, for instance, assertions in biology or physics, which are the documentations or extrapolation of observed or deduced factual behaviour. Arguments about the real purpose of a corporation always speak of founder behaviour, the corporation’s influence on Governmental policy, improvement in quality of goods and services and in their availability and about the merit of competition and the free market. Are these arguments convincing?

Why Tiger Tourism Will Never Save The Tiger

The protected forest areas of India, the big ones, have opened up to tourism in the last ten years in an way few would have foreseen. As India discovers the economic benefits of wildlife tourism and its potential in providing employment opportunities, Governmental encouragement has not been found wanting to the hospitality industry – loans, state-sponsored advertising, infrastructure support such as laying of metal roads in forest habitat and subsidised hospitality training have all been part of a heady cocktail meant to kickstart wildlife tourism and put India on par with the African continent in showcasing its wildlife to eager tourists. To crown it all, such tourism has been dubbed ‘eco-tourism’, a tribute more to the location of a resort rather than to the sustainable nature of its practices. The result: the last decade has seen hundreds of resorts that have mushroomed in the buffer zones and beyond of India’s wildlife sanctuaries.

Re-Engineering Education As If Students Mattered

India prides itself on its success in education. Largely driven by the perception of the Western media that has lauded the competence of Indian engineers and the sheer numbers of engineering graduates who fill the benches of Indian software and outsourcing companies, we are now, at the political and upper-class level, in a self-congratulatory mode. The success of Indian knowledge companies is now being seen as the success of Indian education.

A Heretic Teacher's Handbook on Global Warming

So what keeps the planet stable and cool? Life does. Trillions upon trillions of tiny marine organisms that most of us have never heard of – foraminiferans and coccoliths and calcareous algae – capture atmospheric carbon, in the form of carbone dioxide, when it falls as rain and use it (in combination with other things) to make their tiny shells. By locking the carbon up in their shells, they keep it from being re-evaporated into the atmosphere where it would build up dangerously as a greenhouse gas. Eventually all the tiny foraminiferans and coccoliths and so on die and fall to the bottom of the sea, where they are compressed into limestone. It is remarkable, when you behold an extraordinary natural feature like the White Cliffs of Dover in England, to reflect that it is made up almost entirely of tiny deceased marine organisms, but even more remarkable when you realize how much carbon they cumulatively sequester.

The Visit

Sometime ago, I visited a medium sized castings company in Coimbatore. The company has been around for thirty years and is owned by one of the largest family business groups in South India. Along with my colleague, a hardened finance guy and a number cruncher if there ever was one, I met the Chief Executive of the company – a family member - in his office. He was a sharp, middle-aged member of the business family, clad in spotless white. The office, a clean white building situated at the entrance of a large property, was air conditioned, carpetted and ostentatious, the portraits of Lord Balaji conspicuous and omnipresent, while the car outside indicated the wealth of the company’s owner.