Competing With The Best: Managing Strategically

“If you can run your business in India successfully, you will definitely be better prepared to face any other economy in the world. If nothing, at least you will be able to learn once you are outside”, says Dr. Rajnish Karki, the author of “COMPETING WITH THE BEST”. He further adds, “The sheer scale of Indian market offers both opportunities and challenges. While the complex nature of Indian market makes it a difficult nut to crack but those who persisted has succeeded.”

In an open interaction today in the pristine premises of the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi with Kiran Karnik, the former president of NASSCOM and currently Chairman, Satyam Computers, donning the role of anchor host, it was an evening worth it. Among industry bigwigs the session went beyond the immediate limits of the special session. Questions as wide as plummeting share market and corporate fraud and Tata’s acquisition were discussed. The market Czars discussed what constitutes the constraints now that India is no more a sellers market.

The book has the theme that global-focussed configuration was something unthinkable till 1990s. What followed has been an epoch making development for the Indian economy in general and Indian corporate world in particular. The credit for all this, said Dr Karnik in response to a question, definitely goes to the industry more than anything else.
Dr. Karki repeatedly talked about the unique Indianness about the way Indian companies work. He especially quoted the way Tatas carried out their execution. The IIM Alumni who has also taught strategic management there when asked for the reason behind the frustration of business school guys said that today’s youth lack the humility content. What a manager earlier expected after 20 years of service has begun to demand for more than that in just six months. Though the panel and the audience expressed confidence in the Indian entrepreneurs but confessed it could have been much better otherwise.
Detail abouth the author can be found at http://www.karkiassociates.com/

Art in the Capitalist World

‘Art’ and ‘market’ was never discussed so much within and outside the art circles. Traditionally art survived on ‘patronage’ of the ruling and the elite class? Today the whole concept of art making, display, circulation, and collecting has changed. Today value to art comes through so many factors; the major factors being financial, intellectual, historical and cultural. We explored the major art galleries in Delhi and NCR, the unknown and the famous artists, and the small villages of Madhubani and Darbhanga, the centres of the world famous MITHILA Painting. We talked to the people behind these galleries which pump millions and those artist who have created their mark with nothing but their skills.

There has been a noticeable expansion in the realm of art over last couple of years in India.
There has been a rise in the number of art fairs and biennales hosted across the globe in the last 7-8 years. They have created an altogether new platform for art to circulate and be sold. Indian artists and gallery’s participation has also grown steadily in these years.

With marketing came brand building; something never related to art. But with the emergence of a global art market, brand value pervades the field. New experiments, sensationalism and use of technology accompany an exponential rise in art price around the world. The proliferation of private galleries and auction homes within India points to a strong domestic as well as an international market. But the market is again only for those who have enough to do business. We tried to find people who search for a balance between monetary and artistic goals.

Since 2000 the art market has seen a steep rise. Contemporary art from India has gone global. The art fund, which is primarily concerned with art for its investment value has witnessed boom right till before the recession fears and the Lehman. The momentum generated during boom time is still pushing branded art galleries and the artists who became famous. But with business and marketing at the core of almost all these art galleries, the purpose of art as a medium to make man aware of his unconscious has taken a back seat in many cases.

The search might never be over. The search for purpose might be said to be biased one way or the other, but the art comes out of the creator in us. And a creator will create but with a purpose. What differentiates one from the other is the holiness, the impersonality, the purposefulness of the purpose.

However, how have all these shifts in the art world in general have and Indian art world in particular affected art? Does the expansion of the viewership effects an artist’s response towards audiences? In what way has the need to stand out impacted? In short, what has globalization brought to art?

Kavita Singh, Associate Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, writes, “Questions as large as these cannot be answered. One might even say that they should not be answered; the questions are more productive as they open up lines of inquiry that facile answers would foreclose. But these questions are certainly worth asking today as contemporary art from India is seen and sought elsewhere on the globe. Yet at home it remains at best confined, to a small audience of artists and art professionals, or less congenially, is ‘branded’ as an investment opportunity and traded as such; or at worst, is alienated, derided or under attack.”

The use of what Kavita calls ‘shock-aesthetics’, is the new phenomenon, to startle viewers into some form of response; raise consciousness about social issues; or to turn into a desirable commodity, or to resist commodification or anything else is the thing being tried the most these days.

Every age will have its art. Ours is not an exception. The art coming up these days has its own purpose. Simultaneously exists the struggle of traditional arts to be modern, to be relevant contemporarily. The efforts to create brand should not blind the creator.

Let us hope that the fundamentals of art will always remain the same.

The Threats (Part II)

(The Human Touch Contd...)

What they have done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her
and did her,
Stuck her with knives in the side of the
dawn,
And tied her with fences and dragged her
down.
(Sang Jim Morrison, American singer in his 1967 song ‘When the Music’s Over’)

-According to Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), in the year 2000, a total renewable water resource of Egypt was 58.3 cubic km. Its irrigation requirement was 28.43 cubic km or 53% of its renewable resources then. But the amount of water it withdrew was 53.85 cubic km which stands at 92% as a percentage of its renewable water resources.

- In April 2007, the National Geographic News reported early arrival of spring to the western slope of Colorado's Rocky Mountains. Recent studies suggest less of a temperature difference between winter and summer. Summer, fall, and winter have all started 1.7 days earlier this year. All these are signs of the world getting warmer at a faster pace.

-At the 2008 Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, from 15–19 December in San Francisco, scientists warned that, in California, extreme events such as heat-waves now occurring once every 100 years could be happening every year within a century.

-On February 3, 2009 National Geographic News reported volcanic smoke and gas from two new holes on Alaska's Redoubt Volcano—one of them (left) about the size of a football field. The Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) confirms increasing volcanic unrest at Redoubt Volcano.

-- The Guardian reported on February 18, 2009 that IPCC’s computer models had calculated an average loss of 2.5% in sea ice extent per decade from 1953 to 2006. But in reality the Arctic sea ice had declined at a rate of about 7.8% per decade. New researches reveal that melt-water pooling on the Arctic sea ice is causing it to melt at a faster pace.

-India’s agricultural production has been consistently on the decline in recent years and is growing at less than a quarter the pace of the Indian economy. Annual per capita food grain production declined from 207 kilograms (455 pounds) in 1995 to 186 kilograms in 2006. The rate of agricultural growth has fallen from 5% in the mid-1980s to less than 2% (average) in the past half-decade. Despite building of huge dams it continues to be hostage to the vagaries of the monsoon. Not a happy sign for a country of every seventh human being.

-Climate change does not simply floods or droughts. It can cause epic devastation involving super cyclones, extreme weather, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond our imagination. It can pose existential threat to our coastal regions and ruin our agriculture by causing moisture -salinity imbalance in the soil. Projections show extinction of more than 5000 useful plant and animal species mainly due to the loss of suitable habitats.

- The Technical Paper on Climate Change of Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) shows substantial spatial and intensity variation in precipitation just in a matter of decades due to global warming. It is projected to increase the risks of flooding and drought in many areas, and in turn decreased food security. The quantity and even quality of water will be affected as a result of this. Already about 25% of the contemporary African population experiences water stress. By 2025, water availability in nine countries, mainly in eastern and southern Africa, is projected to be less than 1,000 cubic metre/person/yr. By 2020s there is an increased risk of winter flood in northern Europe and of flash flood in all of Europe.

- The same report says precipitation decline and droughts in deltas of Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and China have caused drying of wetlands and severe degradation of ecosystems. The recurrent droughts from 1999 to 2001, the construction of upstream reservoirs and improper use of groundwater have led to drying of the Momoge Wetland located in the Songnen Plain in north-eastern China.

The Nature says the warming caused by greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, is the main reason behind these changes. But the most worrying perhaps has been the surge in atmospheric concentrations of methane, a gas with a warming potential twenty-three times that of carbon dioxide. The extensive release of gaseous methane from formerly frozen deposits off the Siberian coast is of serious concern given this background.

The Human Touch…(Part I)

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s has become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
-Anton Chekhov , Uncle Vanya ( 1967)

A life is worth it if it has the opportunity to explore all its potentialities. A life is worthier if the opportunities are available and the fight is for potential. But a life is worthiest if there are avenues to expand potentialities and opportunity is not an issue but only the challenge to better your best.

When a child drinks water, it never knows what it is, nor does it matter for an injured surviving on saline. When a cow consumes a plastic bag, and dies of the entanglements it causes to its digestive mechanism, she never knows, it will take her life, so painfully. When a plant dies due to logging of water or drought or because of a storm uprooting it, it never knows why every next storm is more powerful and frequent than it used to be. But there is one thing that even many of us don’t know: ‘that we men are the single most important denominator behind all this’.

Rabindranath Tagore , said, ‘Man’s civilization is built upon his surplus.’

Truly man has intelligence and ingenuity beyond the limit of bare necessity and usefulness. There lies the power of creating ‘New’. There lies our test to give our next generations a happier, cleaner and greener home to live: Mother Earth.

Can we ensure a better future for our forthcoming generations and the generations of our plants, our animals, our surroundings? Can we turn the greatest threat to man’s existence into the greatest opportunity? Can we go beyond the limits and set a new standard of a sustainable growth?

This time we don’t have an option.

The answer must be YES.

To be contd...

Artistic Freedom

''When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
There was no one left to speak out.''

Confessed prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Pastor Martin Niemöller

Creativity is the supreme art. The pursuit of art, thus, is mostly a singular journey at the conceptual as well as the practical level. Art is the making of the new and the artists despite all the commercialisation around ‘create’. ‘Creation’, as art never has a precedent, a legacy or tradition in the normal sense of the term. Even if there is a tradition, it exists not to be followed, not to be learnt and copied but to be experienced and felt only to ‘recreate.’

Art is an effort, an attempt to come to terms with the various component parts of countries, memories, histories, families and gods. Art is an experience for the artist and its connoisseurs, and even for those who ‘hate’ it. Hate is not the right term to be expressively involved to art. An effort and especially a creative effort should be only appreciated. But of late, what we have seen in recent times is that some vigilante extremists are trying to determine and control the dimensions of art. Be it the unnecessary controversy around Prof. Shivaji Panikkar , the attack on Taslima Nasreen by followers of the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) in Hyderabad in August 2007, the furore raised on the issue of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard who caricatured Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban or Haji Yaqub Qureshi , a minister in the then UP government announcing Rs 50-crore reward publicly, on the head of Danish cartoonists are all vigilantism.

Agreed it was not for art’s sake. It was uncalled for, deplorable and done with a vicious motive. But, it is also true that such violent reactions, somehow, undermine the spirit of creative urge of all the stakeholders. In any case, there will always be a section ready to misuse things created with the best of intention.

The society needs to look for ways to control over-assertion of any short of identities. At the same time overreaction ought to be discouraged for both are forms of radicalism and hence dangerous. What was done to Maqbul Fida Hussain is condemnable. The way an artist of his stature has been forced out of the country is a loss for the tradition of art in this country. Equally condemnable is the ostracising of Salman Rushdie whose writing promises a whole new era in English language and literature.

The impact is for all the reasonable persons to experience. The impact has been disastrous. Creation has got ‘ideology’. Art has become ‘political’. Love for art is being subjected to the whims of collectivism . ‘Individualism ’ has suddenly become a bad word. The expression of feelings is being subjected to hooliganism. It has suddenly got ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ colours. Suddenly artists being attacked have got media attention. Suddenly a few artists are being blamed for being insensitive and hurting sentiments. The alarm bell is for there to pay attention to. The way not only extremists but also the so called rationalists are taking extreme positions are both detrimental to the cause of institution building.

If all this is not enough we need to revisit the last line of Martin Nimoller’s confession. Otherwise art will be tied either to art galleries who are guided by business considerations at the end of the day or to ideologies. In its existence since times immemorial the love for art was probably never guided so ‘consciously’.

Salman Rushdie once commented, ‘to say that beyond self-exploration lies a sense of writing as sacrament, and maybe that's closer to how I feel: that writing fills the hole left by the departure of God.’

I don’t want that hole to be determined or defined by anyone else.

What Makes Art Contemporary

The three word ‘arts’, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘contemporary’ are in a relationship. But a contemporary art is not necessarily contemporary aesthetics and many art practices and aesthetics sensibilities are not necessarily contemporary despite being in practice.

An art is contemporary, if identified by contemporary people who matter. At the same time an art of a better genre might not be appreciated because of bad marketing or, managerial practices. So what determine the contemporariness of arts and aesthetics is mostly not the art of the arts but the art of presenting art in front of people.

The world famous Indian artist like Subodh Gupta took themes which got an international recognition. But that does not mean he is the only person who thinks on similar lines. Subodh got cows and cow dung, tongs and daily utensils, and such materials of common use to reach this stage. But no less was the role of Flora Boillot in promoting Brand Subodh. What I feel after five months of research and exchanges with these contemporaries is it’s really dependent upon things which might have nothing to do with art.

The conclusion I am able to reach as of now is- contemporary aesthetic beliefs of those who matter is critical for an art to be contemporary.

The fact remains that any folk art is better understood and practised by a larger number of people than any abstract or modern art. Any traditional art, simply because it is in the common psyche since ages is easily understood. But a folk art is not considered contemporary as it is not taken up by the marketers to the Sotheby and the Biennale.

Utility is again not all together a lost case. The survival of an art practice requires it to be of some use. There are many experiments which are in demand today but that might not be the case about them just after a couple of years. While votaries of arts would talk of art for arts’ sake, ultimately, the purpose should be commonly identifiable.

When we visit the market, many old crafts and practices have become contemporary. Yoga and meditation have become contemporary because of their utility. Because Yoga is a rage today, it has affected all forms of contemporary fitness practices. Meditation does not give much scope of changing itself, still it is a rage. Similar patterns are visible in the art world.

Contemporary is not art but the aesthetics of men who matter and the marketers who are able to drive home the point in their mind. These marketers are not the traditional painter artists but those who got taught in Wharton and Harvard: how to sell a product.

Is it good or bad? Will this trend hurt art practice? Do we need to search for better ways to identify or classify what is contemporary art and what is not? These questions are confusing. We really don’t know what’s going to happen after 10 years to the art world. As of now the most difficult is the art of waiting to watch.

Mortuary is no mystery

By Tilak Jha, Sanjeev Kumar and Manisha Sharma

The sight of a corpse leaves many with a palpitating heart. We think it is very difficult to be in a morgue handling the dead day in and out. Death, for man, has always been difficult to come to term with. And we all want to stay away from a mortuary. But “science”, says Dr. Sunay Kumar, senior resident doctor, forensic medicine at the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, “has proved that the fear of dead is a misplaced notion.” “This sealed room has all the skeletal remains of the Nithari serial killings case. It is critical until the trial goes on”, says Dr Adarsh Kumar, Asst. Professor, forensic medicine at, AIIMS. A dead body is as important as those alive to ascertain the cause of death. When there is no evidence, a dead body is the greatest witness of the dead. Autopsy is what helps to know the reasons behind the death. The forensic experts in the mortuary along with their toxicology counterparts make a dead tell the tale of their death, of their claim for justice and peace and the pain and frustration they underwent while alive. But a lot of facilities and care is required and the results can be, at times, startling. Dr. D. N. Bhardwaj, additional professor of forensic science and toxicology at AIIMS, recalling one of the autopsy says, “Everyone believed the death to be a murder, but it was a road accident, where the person was hit by a truck.” Dead bodies can be of great research value. Organ donation especially eye donation is another thing being actively promoted. Dr. Adarsh Kumar, assistant professor of forensic medicine at AIIMS says, “There can be no substitute of a dead body for research purpose. And there are a few NGOs who are promoting contribution of dead bodies.” Even in a hospital mortuaries are the most ignored places. Discussing the problems of mortuaries Dr. Kumar says that good infrastructure is limited to metros. Even at AIIMS, the lack of enough hands does affect the quality of autopsy. Another major reason is the lack of enough remuneration. “Forensic experts are the highest paid people in Australia and England.” Dr. Sunay Mahesh, senior resident, forensic medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi says, “the stigma attached to this department is another major reason why the department struggles for enough manpower. But apart from monetary consideration, the stigma attached to the job is especially for the 4th grade staffs who actually manhandles the body is significant. “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. Wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his 1962 novel ‘Pale Fire’ The obviousness and the triviality of death is enough to recognise that misconceptions about dead be removed.