Five Differences Between India and China

Rajiv Lall, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Infrastructure Development Finance Company (IDFC), was the opening keynote speaker at the India Business Conference 2008. The India-China economy comparison is inevitable in any business conference. As the head of IDFC, Lall talked about India’s infrastructure issues by comparing it to China’s.

Note: I haven’t had the time to figure out how to insert a table within Wordpress, therefore I created an img. Please click thru the img to see full table text.

Indian government finances 50% of its infrastructure projects. Therefore, India is not as highly levered as China where the govt only invests 16% from the budget and 54% is funded by debt from banks and private sector. However, India has very high subsidies and inefficient distribution system and hence loss-making operations. For e.g. 45% of the total power distributed is lost due to theft (illegal tapping of power lines).

In India, only 44% villages have power. Farmers enjoy subsidies, and power is delivered for free to villages. On the other hand, 99% of China’s villages are powered. Rural taxes are often higher than those in urban areas.

Said Lall, India’s biggest challenge – Leadership. Enough said!

India Post: Innovation In An 150-yr Old Organization

I don’t watch TV regularly, but a show called Startup Junkies caught my attention as I was channel surfing. Start-up Junkies takes you behind the scenes of a growing start-up company, Earth Class Mail, as it attempts to raise funding, build a team, develop a prototype and find new customers and partners.

In a nutshell, Earth Class Mail scans your snail mail and brings it online. For a subscription fee, you can now scan and shred your snail mail online. TechCrunch covered the company a while back, the comments to the post are very interesting. The pitch by Ron (skip to 13:50 mins of the video – sorry MojoHD doesn’t provide an embed option), CEO of Earth Class Mail, to India Post was entertaining. It is hard to tell whether the India Post officials really “drank the koolaid” or just being polite.

It’s hard to see any value proposition for India Post and the average Indian, for various reasons – including lack of internet penetration outside the cities (5.3% in all of India). Not to mention, India Post is facing increased competition from private courier services and is getting creative to boost revenues and keep its staff busy. In the past, they’ve even experimented with retailing and services, including delivering milk. I went to the India Post website and they do have an ePost feature. It’s email-to-snail mail or vice versa service, and that makes a lot of sense, again considering the low internet penetration.

If you’re currently living in India, would love to hear stories of encounters with India Post services and your experience using ePost.

Indian Mythology Industry – Third Incarnation

Last week, ACK media announced the acquisition of a popular Indian comic book brand Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle for $2.5 millon and is reportedly planning to invest $15-20 million in the next 3 years.

Samir Patil, founder investor and CEO of ACK Media told Hindustan Times: “It is a 100 per cent cash deal. We are looking to invest $15-20 million over the next two to three years to make use of opportunities in licensing content and characters, intensifying retail penetration and introduce more offerings in the digital medium.”Â

Smart move by ACK media, in acquiring the IP rights to popular Tinkle comic characters Suppandi, Shikari Shambu, Nasruddin Hodja, Kaalia the crow, Tantri the Matri, and the crew. I’m pretty sure the $20 million investment is largely towards digitizing these comic book characters into feature film releases.

The animation industry in India is heating up – Â opened up by the successful release of India’s first animation film Hanuman in 2005, and now followed by a sequel Hanuman returns, and a bunch of other big-budget and big-banner animation movies in the pipeline. With India being the most religious country in the world, most of the animation movies are based on Indian mythology characters India.Â

For the publishing and media companies, this is the third incarnation of the Indian mythology characters over the last 40 years – same stories, but packaged in a different format…

 1967: Anant Pai, the father of Indian comics, partners with India Book House to launch Amar Chitra Katha after contestants fail to answer questions on Indian mythology. If you, like me, grew up in early the 80’s, Amar Chitra Katha was the only source for Indian mythology characters besides, of course, your parents and grandparents.

1987: Then in the late 80s, Ramanand Sagar produced Ramayan, the first epic TV serial that ran for years. It was immensely successful and spawned a new industry of Indian epics made for TV – followed by Maharabhata, Krishna, and a few others.

2007: India’s first animation movie, Hanuman, is released in 2005 opening up the animation industry in India. And according to this IndiaFM article, bg names in Bollywood are falling over each other to hit the market with new animation movies based on mythology characters from popular characters like Hanuman and Krishna to little-known characters like Ghatothkach.

How to say “I’m going to stab you in the gut” in Indian?

Stephen Colbert picked up a story by LA Times – one of the world’s 7,000 distinct languages disappears every 14 days, an extinction rate exceeding that of birds, mammals or plants. At least 20% of the world’s languages are in imminent danger of becoming extinct as their last speakers die off, compared with about 18% of mammals, 8% of plants and 5% of birds.

One such language facing extinction is Sora, spoken by 288,000 natives in South Orissa in eastern India. More information here on the Living Toungues. The Sora language is unique in that entire sentences maybe expressed by one word. David Harrison, the guest on Colbert Report show, borrows a word from Sora to prove his point – phu-phoon-kun-tam, which in English translates to “I’m going to stab you in the gut”.

Who says you don’t learn anything from Comedy shows? Watch the video clip here, very funny! I only wish Comedy Central didn’t screw up in writing the description text for the video. India has 22 official languages and hundreds of regional languages and dialects, but none called “Indian”.

Incredible India: Now On YouTube

The Ministry of Tourism has tied up with Google to create a sponsored channel on Youtube, reports DNA India. The user India, first created in Dec 2005, has recently uploaded 18 videos.

Launching the channel here, Tourism Secretary Shilabhadra Banerjee said the online videos will increase the penetration of Incredible India campaign, especially among those who remain glued to the internet and computers.

“In using YouTube for their campaign, the ministry becomes the first in the world for its innovation in promotion,” Rao said.

The Ministry of Tourism had earlier launched a Incredible India website with 18 Incredible microsites. A few years back, posters of Incredible India started appearing on Edison and Metropark stations, townships with sizeable Indian population.

India experienced a 13% YOY increase in tourist arrivals and a 17% increase in foreign exchange earnings. However, the surge in Tourism has its downside as well. It’s a huge distraction to the locals affecting their livelihood and culture and impacting the very tradition that Incredible India is proud of, as Fareed Zakaria reports in this episode of Foreign Exchange (skip to min 18:23).

India: A tale of a young country and old Presidents

I haven’t blogged in almost a month and a lot has happened during this time. The biggest news coming out of India is the election of it’s first lady President. Even though the President’s role in India is mostly ceremonial, there was a lot of drama and controversy. I was talking to someone and she argued that the President’s post must be eliminated- her argument was the President has no real executive powers and is a burden on the taxpayer’s money (even after the end of term). This inspite of the fact that the President plays a key role in forming governments at the central and state level.

All controversy apart, she had one thing in common with her predecessors – at age 72, she followed the tradition of Indian President’s being well into their 60s or early 70s at the time of beginning their term. So bored out of my mind and out of curiosity, I pulled some numbers together and plotted a graph. Given that more than half of India is under 25 years age and a third under 15, doesn’t the country need a younger president?

Date With Destiny: 7-7-7 or 7-7-2007?

Reports the NYT, “Christmas. New Year’s Eve. Spring break. There are certain dates on the calendar when travelers know that hotel rooms in prime vacation spots will be nearly impossible to come by, even if they try to book months in advance. This year, add another day to the list: Saturday, July 7. That’s because that date — the almost numerically perfect 7/7/07 — is being sought after by couples around the country as the ideal day for a wedding. More than 31,000 couples have already signed up with theknot.com, a wedding-planning Web site, saying they plan to marry that day, a figure that is roughly triple the number for any other Saturday that month — and nearly 20,000 more than the number of couples who got married on the corresponding weekend a year earlier.”

My numerologist friend, Hariram Subramonia, doesn’t think 7-7-7 is auspicious numerology-wise. He writes in an email, “7 is not a good number for marriage date. 6 stands for Venus and hence 6 is good, number 7 stands for Ketu (Neptune) which stands for philosophy (spirituality in broader sense). Number 7 also stands for intellect or deep thinking and insight. You can very well see that 7 isn’t good for marriage (an emotional bondage), since 7 is all about intellect (more to do with mind than emotions). Hence, in numerology date 7 isn’t a good date to get married. Now coming to 7-7-2007, if you add the digits it results in 5 which has got nothing to do with 7 at all. But 5 is the most lucky number and hence luck might favor the marriage. 5 also stands for business and money, hence couples married on this date will get lot of money yet their marital bondage might be more about business than emotional bonding. To add to this, 7-7-2007 is a Saturday. Saturday is good for only one thing – spiritual matters. Saturday is the last day a person would want to get married as it indicates Saturn or complete failure in marriage.”

On an unrelated note, online voting for “New Seven Wonders” has ended and the results will be broadcast live streaming from Lisbon. WSJ’s Carl Bialik questions whether 7 wonders in the new world are enough? The Taj Mahal of India is on the list and I know from talking to my friends that they’ve voted for the Taj and are eager to see it make it list of New 7 Wonders. I hope the Taj makes the cut too, only because it has been neglected and decaying. I hope by making the cut, the Taj gets the attention it deserves.

The technophiles have called out 7-7-7 as the Scriptless day. It is a way of thanking Javascript. for what it has brought to us in the form of Ajax and Web 2.0, by removing all client-side scripting from the sites.

Personally, it’s just another day or just another birthday!

Idol Worshipping And Superstar Economics

Quentin Tarantino once said in an interview that the primary driver of the the film industry in the US and India was the superstar system. While Superstar Economics has been debated in the US, there’s no room for debate in the Indian film industry. The superstar renumeration is usually the biggest expense in a big budget Indian movie.

India’s costliest film, Sivaji, produced at an estimated $23 million was released 2 weeks ago. The hero of the film, Rajinikanth, is worshipped by his fans all over the world and it is a norm for die-hard Rajinikanth fans to buy tickets at multiple times face value to watch the first show of his newly released film. As successful as Steve Jobs was in generating media hype and long lines at Apple stores for the iphone, Rajinikanth wins hands down.

His movies are in a genre of it’s own, as his fans fondly call it the “wholesome entertainer”. It is a combination of John Wooish style, Tarantinoesque punch line dialogues, grandeur of a Met Opera, Stephen Kingish surprise endings, mixed with a few songs and a social message. My friend Ramprasad Sandilya and I decided to experience our first Rajinikanth movie ever, and it was certainly an experience worth writing about.

We were greeted with die-hard fans dressed like the superstar, some wearing his t-shirts. It was like a tailgating party without the alcohol. I noticed someone buying packets of popcorn and I bet he wasn’t going to eat it all. As soon as Ramprasad and I took our seats, I got a tap on my shoulder and handful of shredded newspaper pieces. The lights dimmed, titles rolled in, fans started screaming and whistling, pieces of paper and popcorn were floating up in the air. I heard a voice from behind me, “Rajini’s entry is in 5 minutes”. He had obviously seen the movie before.

At the end of it all, I asked a fan what the thought of the movie. He seemed a bit offended by my harmless question. Apparently Rajinikanth movies are not categorized as good or bad. He said, “What else can you expect from a Rajini movie? It is all about the experience”.