Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation - Softcover

Nilekani, Nandan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143116673 ISBN 13: 9780143116677

Verlag: PENGUIN GROUP, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A visionary look at the evolution and future of India

In this momentous book, Nandan Nilekani traces the central ideas that shaped India's past and present and asks the key question of the future: How will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? As a co-founder of Infosys, a global leader in information technology, Nilekani has actively participated in the company's rise during the past twenty-seven years. In Imagining India, he uses his global experience and understanding to discuss the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant. Nilekani engages with India's particular obstacles and opportunities, charting a new way forward for the young nation.

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Nandan Nilekani is the cofounder and cochairman of Infosys Technologies, Ltd., and the chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, he has received a number of prestigious awards, including the Joseph Schumpeter Prize, and has been recognized for his technological and economic innovation by the likes of Time and Forbes.

Thomas L. Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at the New York Times. He is the author of six bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem, winner of the National Book Award, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.

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Table of Contents

 

Copyright Page

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

 

Part One - INDIA REIMAGINED

IDEAS THAT HAVE ARRIVED

INDIA, BY ITS PEOPLE

FROM REJECTION TO OPEN ARMS - The Entrepreneur in India

THE PHOENIX TONGUE - The Rise, Fall and Rise of English

FROM MANEATERS TO ENABLERS

HOME AND THE WORLD - Our Changing Seasons

THE DEEPENING OF OUR DEMOCRACY

A RESTLESS COUNTRY

 

Part Two - ALL ABOARD

IDEAS IN PROGRESS

S IS FOR SCHOOLS - The Challenges in India’s Classrooms

OUR CHANGING FACES - India in the City

THE LONG ROADS HOME

ERASING LINES - Our Emerging Single Market

MOVING DEADLINES

 

Part Three - FIGHTING WORDS

IDEAS IN BATTLE

THE SOUND AND THE FURY - Our Biggest Fights

JOSTLING FOR JOBS

INSTITUTIONS OF SAND - Our Universities

A FINE BALANCE

 

Part Four - CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

IDEAS TO ANTICIPATE

ICT IN INDIA - From Bangalore One to Country One

CHANGING EPIDEMICS - From Hunger to Heart Disease

OUR SOCIAL INSECURITIES - The Missing Demographic

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES - India’s Environment Challenge

POWER PLAYS - In Search of Our Energy Solutions

THE NETWORK EFFECT

 

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgements

NOTES

A TIME LINE OF KEY EVENTS

INDEX

VIKING CANADA

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Copyright © Nandan Nilekani, 2008

Foreword copyright © Thomas L. Friedman, 2009

 

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For
Nihar, Janhavi and Rohini,
who keep me grounded

FOREWORD

EVERY TIME I go to India, people ask me about China. Every time I go to China, people ask me about India.Who’s going to win between these two emerging giants?

I always give them the same answer: India and China are like two giant superhighways, and each has a big question mark hanging over its future. The Chinese superhighway is perfectly paved, with sidewalks everywhere and streetlights and white lines neatly down the middle of the road. There’s just one problem. Off in the distance, there is a speed bump called “political reform.” When 1.3 billion people going 80 miles an hour hit a speed bump, one of two things happens. One is that the car jumps into the air, slams down, and the drivers and passengers turn to each other and say, “You okay? You okay?” Everyone is okay, and so they drive on. The other thing that happens is that the car jumps up in the air, slams down, and all the wheels fall off. Which will it be with China? We don’t know, but I am hoping for the best—the stability of the world depends upon it.

India is also a giant superhighway, only most of the road has potholes, some of the sidewalks haven’t been finished, a lot of the streetlights are out, and there are no visible lane dividers. It’s all a bit chaotic, yet the traffic always seems to move. But wait a minute. Off there in the distance it looks like the Indian road smoothes out into a perfect six-lane superhighway, with sidewalks, streetlights, and white lines. Is that perfect Indian superhighway a mirage or is that an oasis? Will India one day claim its future or will it always be chasing it, teasing us with its vast potential?

My teacher and friend Nandan Nilekani is bound and determined to make sure it is not a mirage. Like me, he remains an optimist, a sober optimist, but an optimist about his country’s future. He knows that the shape of India’s future, as the great environmentalist Dana Meadows once said about the future of our planet, “is a choice not a fate.” And this book is a loud, engaging, noisy, spirited argument about how and why India and its friends need to go about making the right choices—and never resign themselves to fate.

I can think of no one better to make this argument. There are not a lot of executives around the world who are known simply by their first names. Silicon Valley has “Steve”—as in Jobs. Seattle has “Bill”—as in Gates. Omaha has “Warren”—as in Buffett. And Bangalore has “Nandan”—as in Nilekani.

Nandan helped to found Infosys Technologies Ltd., based in Bangalore—India’s Silicon Valley. And Infosys, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy Services are the Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems of India. What makes Nandan unique? For me it comes down to one moniker: great explainer. Yes, he, the other cofounders, and N. R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys’s legendary chairman, have built a great global company from scratch. But the reason Nandan is so sought out is that he has a unique ability not simply to program software but also to explain how that program fits into the emerging trends in computing, how those trends will transform the computing business, how that transformation will affect global politics and economics, and, ultimately, how it will all loop back and transform India. It was his insight that the global playing field was being “leveled” by technology that inspired me to write my own book The World Is Flat. And nowhere are his explanatory skills more on display than in this, his first book.

While this book is an enormously valuable explainer of where India has been and needs to go, it is much more than that. It is a prod to his fellow Indians, and India’s American friends, to imagine and deliver on a different future by refusing to settle anymore for an Indian politics and governance that is so much less than the talents possessed and needed by the Indian people. Nandan knows what Indian entrepreneurs have accomplished without...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PENGUIN GROUP
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143116673
• ISBN 13: 9780143116677
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 514
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien