An Indian now owns East India Company

With just around a month to go for the re-launch of the East India Company - the world's first multinational whose forces once ruled much of the globe - its new Indian owner says he is overwhelmed by "a huge feeling of redemption".

It's been a long, emotional and personal journey for Sanjiv Mehta, a Mumbai-born entrepreneur who completed the process of buying the East India Company (EIC) in 2005 from the "30 or 40" people who owned it.

Acutely aware that he owned a piece of history - at its height the company generated half of world trade and employed a third of the British workforce - Mehta, now the sole owner, dived into the company's rich and ruthless past in order to give it a new direction for the future.

With a $15-million investment and inputs from a range of experts - from designers and brand researchers to historians - Mehta is today poised to open the first East India Company store in London's upmarket Mayfair neighbourhood in March.

And then there is the inevitable - and daunting - task of launching in India, a country whose resources, army, trade and politics the company had controlled for some 200 years.

It's a task that Mehta has not taken lightly, he told reporter in an interview. "Put yourself in my shoes for a moment: On a rational plane, when I bought the company I saw gold at the end of the rainbow.

"But, at an emotional level as an Indian, when you think with your heart as I do, I had this huge feeling of redemption - this indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned us."

The formal start of the East India Company is usually dated back to 1600 when Britain's Queen Elizabeth I granted a group of merchants a charter under the name 'The Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies.'

With its own Elizabethan coat of arms - now owned by Mehta - the company was made responsible for bringing tea, coffee and luxury goods to the West and trading in spices across the globe.

By 1757 the company had become a powerful arm of British imperial might, with its own army, navy, shipping fleets and currency, and control over key trading posts in India - where it was known variously as Company Bahadur and John Company. In 1874, the British government nationalised the company, opportunistically blaming the 1857 uprising on its excesses. But the East India Company army, brought under the command of the Crown, retained its all-powerful presence in India.

"When I took over the company, my objective was to understand its history. I took a sabbatical from all other business and this became the single purpose in my life," said Mehta.

He travelled around the world, visiting former EIC trading posts and museums, reading up records and meeting people "who understood the business of that time".

"There was a huge sense of responsibility - I didn't create this brand, but I wanted to be as pioneering as the merchants who created it."

"The Elizabethan coat of arms stands for trust and reassurance, but we are not repeating history. It took me four years to do the brand positioning and put up the milestones."

The 'relaunched' company, with its headquarters on Conduit Street in Mayfair, is set to open a diverse line of high-end, luxury goods in London in March and in India some time this year.

EIC products in India will include fine foods, furniture, real estate, health and hospitality.

"India is the spirit of the East India Company in many ways - it evokes a huge amount of connectivity and emotions," Mehta said. "It's also a major ambition to bring Indian products to the rest of the world. Today there is no single brand name from the East that can stand alongside, say, Hermes or Cartier from the West.

"The East India Company has that ability."

We are people, not programmed devices

Your Dimension Of Greatness

Your Dimension Of Greatness

No one can know the potential,
Of a life that is committed to win;
With courage - the challenge it faces,
To achieve great success in the end!

So, explore the Dimension of Greatness,
And believe that the world CAN be won;
By a mind that is fully committed,
KNOWING the task can be done!

Your world has no place for the skeptic,
No room for the DOUBTER to stand;
To weaken your firm resolution
That you CAN EXCEL in this land!

We must have VISION TO SEE our potential,
And FAITH TO BELIEVE that we can;
Then COURAGE TO ACT with conviction,
To become what GOD MEANT us to be!

So, possess the strength and the courage,
To conquer WHATEVER you choose;
It's the person WHO NEVER GETS STARTED,
That is destined FOREVER to lose!

do you see a poisonous snake?

It was said that once upon a time, there was a farmer who had a farm not far from Savatthi city. One day, a group of thieves had gone into the city and stole a big sack of money from a wealthy family. While fleeing, the thief who was responsible for carrying the sack of money had thought of a cunning plan to cheat his friends out of their equal share and had taken some money out of the sack and had placed a handful of it into another smaller bag and had hidden it in this particular farmer’s field. The thief had thought that he would come back to collect the bag after he had met up with his friends to split what he had left in the sack.

That morning, the Buddha had already foreseen the events that would occur and also the deadly consequences it was to have on the farmer and so, with Ananda (one of his attendants) had set out early that morning to help the farmer. When the farmer had seen the Buddha, he dually paid his respects, before carrying on with his work. The Buddha had not said anything to the farmer in regards to the incidents he had foreseen, but before leaving, he had pointed at the bag of money that was lying on the ground and said to Ananda, “Ananda, do you see a poisonous snake?” in which Ananda replied, “Yes sir, I do”.

In hearing this remark, the farmer was astonished. He himself had been working in the fields since the early hours and yet, he had not seen any snakes. And so taking with him a stick as a weapon, he had walked over to the spot where the Buddha had pointed and there behold, he saw the bag of money. In wanting to hide it within his field, he quickly covered it up with soil before carrying on working.

At the same time, back in town, the wealthy man had reported the robbery to the officials who had begun their search for the thieves. After a thorough search, they indeed came across the bag of money buried in the farmer’s field and therefore, had the farmer under arrest and sent to court to be sentenced to death by the order of the King. The farmer was traumatized and did not know what to do. Fearing for his death, the farmer had told the story of how he had come across the bag of money and the conversation that had taken place between the Buddha and Ananda - “Ananda, do you see a poisonous snake? Yes sir, I do.”

In hearing this, the executioners doubted his story and so reported it to the King. The King therefore called the farmer for further interrogation and took him to see the Buddha so that he may verify the story. At the end of which, the Buddha became a vital witness to the farmer; an alibi that saved him from execution.

After the trial, the King said to the Buddha, “Lord Buddha, if you had not been the witness for the farmer, and offered him an alibi, he would definitely not have escaped death. The Buddha had replied, “Your majesty, the moral of this case, is to beware of actions. I always express in my teachings to people to beware of thy actions; that action which will lead to suffering, should be avoided, while on the other hand, those actions which will lead to no suffering, should be done.

The farmer, in hearing these words, had contemplated on his own actions. The fact that he had canceled the bag of money by covering it up with soil has lead to his conviction. He became to understand the law of “Causes and Effects” and thus made a promise to himself that he would never act in the same way again.

This story teaches us not to let greed consume us in our lives. We should instead learn to realize that certain things are improper or wrong and if we do it, it may lead to suffering sometime in the future. If one is careful of all actions in the present, one will be free from the hands of evil. In English there is a saying, “See a penny, pick it up, all day long, you'll have good luck.” After reading this story, it may give us some idea; when we see something on the floor, we should not naively think, “Lucky me”, because if we did, then we may turn ourselves into a thief and become just like the farmer in the story.

-- Source http://www.buddhapadipa.org/pages/dhammacorner_afarmer.html

Spare 4 min of your time to watch this video and you will start loving your life the way it isNo Arms No Legs No Worries

No Arms No Legs No Worries

Have Breakfast... or...Be Breakfast! By Y. L. R. MOORTHI

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton 's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment) . Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley ). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

---- Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore . He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore

[ Management Views from IIMB is an exclusive column written every two weeks for
india.wsj.com by faculty members of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore .]

Life Has Changed A Lot. And The People Too.

Life Has Changed A Lot. And The People Too.
But The Thing Is That We Don’t Want To Accept It!
I Want To Go Back To The Time

When INNOCENCE Was NATURAL,
Not FAKE.

When GETTING HIGH Meant On A SWING,
Not PROMOTIONS.

When DRINKING Meant RASNA ORANGE,
Not BEERS Or WHISKEYS .

When DAD Was The Only HERO,
Not DEPP Or TOM.

When LOVE Was MOM’S HUG,
Not The GIRL-FRIENDS’.

When DAD’S SHOULDER Was The HIGHEST PLACE On The Earth,
Not Your DESIGNATION.

When Your WORST ENEMIES Were Your SIBLINGS,
Not Your MANAGER.

When The Only Thing That Could HURT Were BLEEDING KNEES,
Not The TEARS Falling Down Your Cheeks.

When The Only Things BROKEN Were TOYS,
Not The DYING HEARTS.

And When GOOD-BYES Meant TILL TOMORROW,
Not For YEARS & YEARS .