Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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To make a lot of money, you need to have ideas and time. And to come up with ideas, you need to have a lot of free time. And for a lot of free time, you need to have financial freedom.

Talk of vicious circles of life.

Time for another Friday Update. I like these Friday updates more than regular blog posts. I can be short. To the point. Touch upon variety of things. Generate ideas and prioritize things.

Without further ado, the hits, misses and random musings for the week that went by.

Hits

• TheStorez.com. Arvind T, a classmate from MDI Gurgaon launched his venture. He has been at it for about an year now and he says that he has done things from selling books on a pushcart to going to all the small bookstores in every nook and cranny of India. More on him in subsequent posts. Please help by spreading word and giving him feedback.
• Morpheus Capital. Thanks to Ashish, spoke to Sameer and Nandini of Morpheus Venture about ideation and entrepreneurship. It was a very good conversation and they gave me a lot of food for thought. If there are any start-ups looking for mentoring, support, contacts or even a bouncing board for their ideas, they are an ideal team.
• Living Out of a Suitcase. I have been writing since I can remember and been blogging since 2004. Have been a really fruitful exercise and the time is ripe to start working on my first piece of fiction. This is something that I have always wanted to do. Tentatively called ‘Living out of a suitcase’, the book is a compilation of thoughts and rants of a 25 year old Indian. And no, its not a biography. Have written two chapters already. Lemme know if you would want a sneak preview.

Misses

• Bandwidth issues. My site (and as a result this blog) suddenly saw a lot of traffic and I exceeded my bandwidth. My site was unavailable for a couple of days. The issue is still not sorted but at least the site back online for now. Thanks to efforts of Trisha Infotech (my web-hosting provider).

Random Musings

• Theater. Saw Naseeruddin Shah act in a rendition of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. I did not understand much of the play, but Naseeruddin Shah was fabulous. I now know what it is like to be mesmerized at an individual brilliance.
• Hit by Plagiarism. This Facebook group uses one of my blogposts as its introduction (the first 20 bullet points) without any credits of any sort to me. Don’t know what to do about it. In a way its good, its affirmation for the fact that I write well and people appreciate it. But it sucks to see someone else use your work and you cant do anything about it.

All in all a not so exciting week. Lets see what the next one has in store for me.

Kunal (my partner @ n00b.in) says

I dont know what I want to do in my life, but I want to die a legend.

I couldn’t agree more. In fact we can use this as a VC pitch (if ever we have one). No wonder Kunal and I are in this together.

What motivates people to do sundry, little, insignificant jobs? again and again?

For their whole lives where the possibility of advancement or even recognition is remote?

Mr. Raj Thackery has now said that all the shops and establishments in Mumbai Maharashtra (or is it Maharashtra Mumbai) have to have their signboards in Marathi (IBN, TOI). He has also gone ahead and said that

Two days is what the shopkeepers have. Consider it a threat or whatever

I obviously respect Mr. Thackery’s enthusiasm and affection for the Marathi language but he has ignored a few very important things in his blinding excitement. Things like law and order in the state. Things like livelihood of these business owners. Things like putting the nation of a billion people first (compared to the proverbial Marathi-Manoos). Things like development of his beloved state of Maharashtra. Things like dividing the country into pieces.

I understand that with proliferation of media and advancements in technology, people, especially the youth today, are forgetting our rich culture and adopting things more western. It is creating a huge divide in the generations and newer generations are actually forgetting what Indianness is all about. A time might come when we would loose our centuries old traditions. When the kids would not know what joy Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and other regional languages are. And a time like that would totally suck. But forcing people to adopt regional languages and dividing people on that criteria .. ?

The implications of this seemingly politically motivated move by Mr. Thackery are very huge. To start with, it will create a divide between Marathis and Non-Marathis. It will disturb the law and order situation in the state of Maharashtra. It will create unnecessary and avoidable clashes between the groups. It will do everything but promote the Marathi language.

What about a Marathi Manoos? Do they really care? Are you trying to say that Marathi Manoos is so dumb that he cant read what’s written in English/Hindi on signboards? That he can’t identify global logos/brands from a distance?

What about the businesses? For them this is just one more nuisance that they have to cope up with while conducting business in India. They would incur one-time expenses in painting the new boards. And they would retain a life-long disgust for a political party and would hate with all their might. Who losses in the end? The political party, its workers and supporters.

Lets for a second assume that we go all-Marathi in the financial capital of the country. Fast-forward 10 years. No foreign company would want to open businesses in India. No investment would happen. No intellectual and/or academic and/or business exchange would happen and Marathis would remain where they are. Backward, poor, still fighting for Roti, Kapda and Makaan. Do we really want to remain there?

And yes, I love India, Hindi and my roots. I am as proud Indian as I can ever be. Yet at the same time I am forward looking and I don’t mind accepting new things that the world has to offer. I look forward to a day when people would introduce themselves as Indians rather than Maathis, Punjabis, Bengalis, Asamese. I look forward to a day when we would have a communal harmony and “leaders” like Mr. Thackery would have to find new ways of getting those idiotic votes.

And in the end, may be I am too blinded with the thoughts of development and progress and I am ignoring something very important. Can someone show me the missing pieces?