To build, or not to build

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, also known as the Nikkei Shimbun or just plain Nikkei, is the leading financial newspaper in Japan, where its status is similar to or higher than that of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. No salary man (pronounced sa-ra-ree-man, the euphemism for overworked, gray suited men propping up the world’s second largest economy. FYI, there’s no sa-ra-ree-woman) worth his salary would be caught without his copy of Nikkei. Not that he reads it. For reading pleasure he has the sports tabloids and the semi-porno mangas (cartoons). You won’t see Michael Jackson or his sister gracing its front page, unless, their antics are somehow affecting the share price movements of, let’s say, some lingerie manufacturer. Even there, the stress would be on the financial aspect and not on the sleaze. What I mean to say here is that this is a very serious newspaper.
Talking about news media, recently, there has been an increase in the number of news items related to India in various foreign newspapers. And like most Indians outside the country, I also keenly follow such news. Sometimes they make you feel good and sometimes they make you feel bad or angry. However, there are times when you feel confused. So it was with this small news item in Nikkei (April 10).
Here is the gist of the article headlined “Ascetic training in India”.
“Toshiba, a major electronics company, is sending its employees to India for training. NEC, another big company, is also sending its employees to India.” Now, isn’t that something to be proud of. Usually it is the other way round. It used to be Indians who were going to advanced countries to learn stuff. Anyway, listen to the reasons. “Go and reinvent yourself in a place where power fails at least twice a day” and “The number of employees in a company with experience accumulated in a place where conventional wisdom won’t work will determine the strength of that company.” So, that’s what they want. A kind of boot camp to build character in their youth who have gotten used to the good life for too long. Where else but India?
Still, a few things bothered me. First, where is this place with two power failures a day? Mumbai? Maybe, or even Delhi. In Kerala, a day where power fails only twice would be a very good day, calling for celebrations that might include burning down a few transformers and power lines. So, if these companies really want their recruits to excel, they should send them to some place like Kerala.
Second, the person who gave the above comment didn’t qualify conventional wisdom as "conventional wisdom in Japan". For example, conventional wisdom in India says that a man jumping onto the track in a railway station is taking the shortcut to the opposite platform, whereas, in Japan, it’d halt the entire railway network, the guy is probably dead and (I’m not sure about this) his family is saddled with a fine of millions of yen. So, what he should have said is “a country with a different set of conventional wisdoms”.
The third thing that bothered me was related to the aforementioned spate of news about India in the world media. These news articles usually have words like IT, outsourcing, call centres, back-office, English-speaking, cows, poverty, less than a dollar a day etc. etc. with the odd Bollywood news thrown in once in a while. Many of them, however, inevitably end up comparing India with China and India ends up the loser in most cases except for the perfunctory mention of India’s democracy, which again is sometimes seen as a negative that holds up the reform. The gleaming cities of China as opposed to the dilapidated, obsolete infrastructure in India. And just when our leaders, after noticing these news items, are trying to get the infrastructure thingy going, Nikkei comes and tells them, “Hold it. Here is a business opportunity if ever there was one.” This has put them in a quandary. “To build (infrastructure), or not to build: that is the question”.

P.S. A similar confusion was sowed in my mind some time back by New York Times, which condemned India for changing its drug (not cocaine guys, but medicine) patent laws to comply with WTO rulings. To be fair, they also mentioned the lobbying of American and European pharmaceutical companies. Signing up meant that we couldn’t manufacture cheap knock-offs of medicines (largely serving the needs of poor countries, including India.) So, what’s the deal here? Is it OK to make knock-offs or not? If so, what’s the big deal with pirated CDs and DVDs or software or fake Louis Vuitton bags?