The recent Mumbai terrorist attacks has done one interesting thing for Technology awareness in India. It has introduced Twitter for the first time to many Indians and also to many other people around the world. Twitter, although perceived as popular, with millions of active users, is still niche and used by the minority of internet and mobile phone users around the world. However, with the recent atrocities in the Indian city of Mumbai taking place and the worlds media referencing Twitter heavily, interviewing people leaving their comments on Twitter and even streaming Twitter feeds live on the their web sites, what value does Twitter add to the quality of citizen journalism? How is simply repeating what is shown on the news channels on Twitter useful? Has Twitter enabled everyone to become sensationalised and misinformed pseudo-journalists? Or has Twitter become a life line of information for people to give out vital news on where to find blood donations and locate hospital lists of those hurt or killed and generally bridging the global divide between friend and families whole are dispersed around the globe?  Do you worry that terrorists with mobile phones can monitor the chatter on Twitter to their advantage and plan counter measures before the authorities can react?  Lets here your opinion!

As I sit here in my hotel room in San Franciso, on a warm autumn evening, I can’t help feeling excited about the approaching Tata Jagriti Yatra. When the concept was dreamt up in the living room of one of the organisers two years ago, who would have thought that we’d have reached this point where it is all about to happen in a matter of weeks? For myself, and many of the early organisers who have been with us since the first day, it has been almost a religious affair to meet every Saturday morning at 11am to plan and discuss this years Yatra. Some of us have never missed a single one of those meetings in the two years that have passed. They started off in the living rooms of organisers in London, then swiftly moved to local pubs and bars. Later we had the fortunate use of meeting rooms at a London office and eventually when the India team got established on the ground in Mumbai, we moved our meetings to teleconferences. In the early days we had people from London, California, Dubai and India all participating in our meetings and then, slowly but surely, the gravity of momentum started to shift towards India more and more. Today, the whole operation is being run out of Mumbai, with support and guidance from the original founders, and our team is evolving at an ever increasing pace.

Tata Jagriti Yatra is about enterprise lead innvotion. Some may badge that as entrepreneurship, others may call that innovation, and yet more may look upon it as creativity. Whatever your notion is and however you perceive the goals of the yatra, one core aspect permiates through the whole concept of the Tata Jagriti Yatra venture. That concept is of ignting the spirit of enterprise through exposure to amazing role models.

Since I was a teenager, a huge role model for me has been Richard Branson, the flamboyant and crazy British businessman who loves to pull stunts and break world records. In many ways, Branson inspired me to start up my own music magazine at the tender age of 16 in a similar vain to his very own “Student” magazine of the 1970’s. The zeel to continue in the publishing business transferred to a floppy disk based computer magazine called Digital Illusions. I started that magazine in the mid 1990s with a bunch of like minded friends out of the back of a bedroom. This was when the internet and the web had not yet reached the mainstream. We developed our own “Web” browser of sorts. It was more of a magazine content reader which display images, words and played audio and presented the magazine in ways in which most people had not yet experienced - all through a compact and neat little pieceo of software that friends and I developed ourselves with no real prior experience of how to go about doing something like that. the venture was an over night success and within a year we had over thousands of subscribers. The operation expanded to include numerous paid writers, and businesses actually parted with good money to place ads in my magazine when they saw what an avid and growing following we had. We could run rings around the traditional paper based magazines and have the most up to date news and reviews because we were not limited by the traditional print run because after all, our magazine was digital and played off three 3.5 inch floppy disks. Each month we’d include free “public domain” (open source) software on the third disk which would keep people coming back for me and every year at the annual computer fair being held in London, the spotty faced teenagers who run Digital Illusions disk magazine would walk out of those fairs with bags bursting with free software to reviews and free hardware kit to write about. I look back on those days and still think how crazy it was that businesses actually trusted a bunch of scruffy looking teenagers to take away their wares for next to nothing and write about it all in a professional manner.  However, trust us they did, because ultimately we lead by example and took the leap of faith to immerse ourselves in something we were good at (computers and software), and enjoyed doing which event from the first issue of the disk based magazine. From our innovation in publishing media and presentation software to our ground breaking way of inticing people to come back each month for more through giving away open source software, the business spoke for itself and quite rapidly avid readers and advertsisers latched on to a good idea.

The reason I’m telling you about those heady days of yesteryears is because I would have never attempted what I did, had it not been for the role models I was exposed to. Branson’s almost reckless madness and risk taking in business, but also his flaboyant audacity to take on the establishment and ruffle their features was exciting to me as a teenager and it brough a starkle to my eyes. It is this sparkle we hope to capture during  Tata Jagriti Yatra and we hope it inspirs the young minds of India to think out of the box, learn how to innovate and then drive the energy and innovation in to responsible and sustainable enterprises.

For all those Yatri’s who have applied to be on the train and have been accepted, I urge you to read Richard Branson’s latest book - “Business Stripped Bare. Adventures of a global entrepreneur”. I picked this book up on my business trip out to the US and I couldn’t put it down till the plane had landed. The book is a personal story of why Branson is in business. It tells the reader about what drives Branson to innovate and continually transform himself and his businesses around the world. For all those who are looking for some inspiration in their start-up business and for some excellent food for thought before you board the Tata Jagriti Yatra train on 24th December 2008, this book comes highly recommended.

All the best,

Kaustav

If asked to recount 5 top events of my life, I will perhaps always include my participation in the Azad Bharat Rail Yatra (Free India Train Journey) in 1997-98. A chartered train with over 200 students cris-crossed India in an exciting journey that celebrated India’s 50 years of independence. The second edition of this journey, called Jagriti Yatra (Renaissance Journey), takes place this winter, 24Dec08-11Jan09.

Jagriti Yatra (JY) succeeds the Azad Bharat Rail Yatra (ABRY) after 11 years. These 11 years have not been a blink in time for the world, and certainly not for India. We have seen a great deal of change in these years. As JY unfolds, we need to perhaps assess our ABRY direction and evaluate where we need an inflection and where an about turn is necessary.

To that end, the JY team has rightly positioned this journey as a forward-looking, future-oriented event focused on India’s need of the hour: Entrepreneurship. As an ABRY participant, I am also in position to point out certain themes & messages of the last Yatra that need to be revised for the consumption of the new generation that will come aboard.

As many participants will recall, we had a 5-point agenda on the train (Population Control, Environment & Sustainable Development, Values, India & the Globe, Agro-Industries & Entrepreneurship) and additionally, a focus group on an Ideal Village and Ideal City (which we named Azad Gaon & Azad Shahar). While certain messages have remained topical and have acquired an even bigger importance, a few themes need repackaging:

a) Population Control: ABRY’s consensus was that population growth is a problem and we need to control our numbers. This position was heavily conditioned by the state propaganda and our biases. Indians (and people from other developing countries) are sometimes diagnosed as possessing a ’scarcity mindset’ as opposed to an ‘abundance mindset’ of Westerners. Growing up, one would look around and easily associate the scarcity of resources with number of people claiming them. This thinking expressed itself during events like ‘load-shedding’ (this concept is unknown in the West) or queuing up at the railway station to purchase tickets or over rising prices and while dividing waters. Research (not necessarily recent) has revealed no causation between population and poverty. Thinly-populated countries can be miserable (think sub-Saharan Africa) and heavily-populated regions can be rich (think Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, New York etc). True, larger numbers require more resources but they also accelerate innovation. Innovation fuels prosperity which eventually shrinks the birth rate and populations reach stable levels. To focus on population control as a means of reducing poverty is like rowing against the tide to escape the storm. India needs to focus on creating opportunities for the people, accelerate development and reap what many economists are beginning to term as ‘demographic dividend’. In the process, population will take care of itself.

b) Ideal Village: There was a bit of Gandhian thought that hung upon us like still air throughout the journey, especially after the visit to the Sabarmati Ashram. While Gandhi was clearly a great individual and leader, no serious economist would term his notions of development well-considered. His focus on self-sufficiency may have been good as a tool of civil disobedience, but in post-independence India, it was a recipe for disaster. From that wellspring arose the idea of developing villages (because that’s where India lives, they say). Our well-meaning leaders relied unquestioningly on Gandhian insights and still do. However, this kind of thinking that treats assumptions as axioms is very harmful. Yes, majority of people live in villages but should they continue to live there? A cursory analysis of concentration of world’s wealth (and common sense) reveals that cities are where wealth is. In developed nations, very few people live in rural places or earn their living through agriculture. We can improve the lot of rural India by focusing on creation of cities, not on improving villages. There is a thin line between the two but this difference in paradigm has a powerful impact on how we allocate resources.

c) Agro-Industries: Similar to the Ideal Village discussion, the emphasis on agribusiness was not forward-thinking. In India, we often take agriculture as non-negotiable and then, proceed to think about how we can create more value out of it. It is a sound idea in the interim but our end-goal should be to wean our workforce away from agriculture, as much as possible. Today’s India is reflection of this trend where we have moved away from an agriculture-dominated economy to a services-dominated one. During 2005-06, agriculture accounted for 20 % of India’s GDP while Services accounted for 54%.

d) Values: I was a part of the Values group and remember that we created a poster of a Tree of Values which showed how there are some basic values (the trunk) and how they provide the bulwark for other values (branches) which ultimately help us in achieving success and joy (fruit/leaves). For us, the trunk was ‘Honesty’ and ‘Integrity’, and none of it is obsolete 11 years from then. This is a discussion that requires an inflection since a better understanding of values has assumed a much greater role in assimilating a global world. The more we are joining up, the more we need to learn to understand and respect differences. The predictions of homogeneity (’global village’) have fallen short and as different regions of the world develop at varying rates, the melting pot runs the risk of occasionally turning into a seething cauldron. Samuel Huntington’s 1993 thesis ‘Clash of Civilizations‘ appears full of prescience as he predicted that Post-Cold War conflict will stem from cultural, rather than ideological differences. At that time, this appeared counter-intuitive to many since ideology was supposedly a more powerful force than culture in modern times. Not many people doubt Huntington’s thesis anymore. 9/11 can be considered a watershed in this development and as an event, it stands between ABRY and JY. The next wave could be based on any other identity, beyond cultural or ideological. Therefore, it is important to widen the scope of the Values discussion and include not just culture/ideology but also gender, sexuality and race as possible fulcrums of the emerging world order.

e) Environment & Sustainable Development: We debated endlessly about how forests needed to be saved and rivers needed to be cleansed. The awareness regarding environment has peaked in the last few years with global warming taking centrestage with war on terrorism, so this presents another inflection point. While ABRY understood the importance of Sustainable Development and also endorsed several local and national solutions, I think JY needs to take this dialogue further and include the nuanced nature of the issues that now beset us on a global level. Some of the recent analyses have shown powerful connections environment has with peace (think Water) and terrorism (think Ivory), going beyond the traditional foil of industrial development. The debate has also taken on a moral shade due to clamor by the developed world that China & India need to rein in their emissions and energy hunger. While the West easily neglected any fallout on environment during its coming-out, developing countries are expected to show restraint when they need it least. This calls into question the fairness & politics of development. JY must explore these issues and present India’s case.

I am sure JY team is crafting a 5-point agenda for this year’s Yatra but if I may throw in my suggestions on which broad areas to focus on, these will be:

1. Role of Government & Civil Society
2. Sustainable Development & Environment
3. Religion & Values
4. Free Market & Regulation
5. Entrepreneurship & Education

I wonder what others think.

(The above is a reproduction of the latest post from my blog: serialbus.wordpress.com)

Hey everyone. I have some great news for you all. We’ve just launched the Tata Jagriti Yatra Flickr photos account. You can stay up to date with Yatra activities through photos and short videos posted to our Flickr page.

If you’re a budding photographer or an eager short movie maker with a penchant for recording impromptu short videos, on your mobile phone for example, then we have a challenge for you. For all those Yatri’s who have been selected, we ask you to docoument your adventure on Tata Jagriti Yatra and post your pictures and short 90 second videos up to our Yatri Flickr group. Please note, it’s a moderated group so please allow some time for your submissions to appear. We moderate the group in our spare time so things may not always appear immediately.

Thanks!

Kaustav

Hello to all Yatri’s and general visitors to this blog. I’m pleased to tell you that we have our train time table available to view on the web site. It should give you an accurate schedule of when and where the train will flag off from, end up at and when we intend to arrive at and leave from all the places we’ll be visiting. I hope this helps you all co-ordinate your travel plans as the start of the Tata Jagriti Yatra draws near (flagging off at Mumbai Central station on 24th December 2008 at 11pm!). This time table should also be useful to all those who cannot join the yatra at the very start and intend to join the train at a later point or drop off at a later point before the trains final return to Mumbai on the 11th of January 2009. 

Of the next few days we’ll be updating the time table so that the city names are linked to a page detailing who we’ll be visiting at each stop, so I suggest you all return to this page on a regular basis. 

Thanks!

Kaustav