Ashwin Upadhyaya's Blog

The preamble of the constitution of India talks of “Equality of status and opportunity”. How then does a company within a government declared “special economic zone (SEZ)” enjoy higher privileges over a company outside such a zone?

SEZs were an example set by China. Emulating the same in a democratic country just leaves me puzzled. Each line of the preamble seems to have been disregarded. For example,

JUSTICE, social,economic and political: Entire villages have been taken over by governments without regards to the people who lived there. Exporters outside SEZs are losing out in competition with those inside SEZs. Village Panchayats which were considered as the pillars of the nation no more have a say with respect to SEZs.

I had read somewhere: Shortcuts cut short your life. This sure seems like one. And I am not sure whose life this is going to cut short. As a last note, studies suggest that what contributes to greater growth is a greater scale of liberalization, rather than increasing the number of SEZs. The whole country should be moving towards a liberal regime rather than creating a country within a country.

How does a government employee manage to extract bribe from you? Experiences in the past one week have clearly showed me that it is by installing fear. Example this conversation:

Government Employee: “Pay Rs.100″  (That is how openly they ask for bribes)

I: “Why?”

Government Employee: “Everyone pays it. You will have to pay it” (Now that is the first trick. Since most people fear acting in a way different to how everyone acts, fear sets in)

I: “If everyone pays, why should I?”

Government Employee: “Well. Don’t pay. You will know the consequences later.” (The second trick: Direct threatening)

I: “Well, I don’t mind the consequence”

Government Employee (To a person sitting next on the adjacent table): “He doesn’t know how it works” (A last ditch effort to extract money)

My hypothesis for the time being is: “A weak person bribes”.

Ideas are just a small part when you embark on a big project. As long as you have the ability to think wide, ideas never fail you. However, ideas by themselves do not take you anywhere. Execution is what is required to realize the idea. And execution is what would test an individual to his core. I have seen so many people say “I had plans to do this and plans to do that”. Of what use are plans if they are not realized?

If lack of time is an excuse to shelve a plan and not act on it, then the best strategy would be to have a plan which suits one’s availability of time. For example, for an office going person to execute an idea, he would have to rely on an idea which could be realized on weekends. A manufacturing type of idea would be very hard to realize if not impossible. A non-real-time online business might be a good idea for this person.

Companies do not have chief idea officers. They only have chief executive officers. That just goes on to show the importance of one over the other.