Let them play computer games

 How can the prince reach the crow-master, who, after having been slashed to pieces after a deft bout of swordsmanship, has flapped out of death in the form a dozen misshapen crows and reassembled himself on a castle battlement to which there is no obvious means of traverse? As the teenager’s mind races and he strategises a route that involves multiple launching pads for superhuman leaps, his mother comes up from behind and orders him to shut down the computer. He has entertained himself enough for the day, with TV, football with his friends, and at least 100 pages of Eragon, re-read for the nth time. Time he got back to his maths. After all, he has do well in his 12th Board exams, do better in assorted entrance exams and prepare himself for a successful life. The son protests that he has already studied enough for the day. This is a routine piece of family drama acted out in most middle-class homes of urban India with much sincere passion on the part of all members of the cast involved. In most cases, it continues as intermittent farce till the exams finally get over. Rarely, it ends as tragedy of the kind that was witnessed in Delhi recently, where a girl, who eventually got 94per cent marks in her Board exam committed suicide because she didn’t want to study science while her parents wanted her to study nothing else. At the root of this collective perverse behaviour is an education system that is badly out of sync with the real world. The average middle-class Indian parent tends to take pride in the vaunted IITs, and in the toughness of the entrance exams for IITs and IIMs. He looks at the success of Indian IT firms and the fabulous salaries of IIM grads, his chest swells up with patriotism, stars float over his eyes and he turns on his son and, these days, daughter to push the teenager down the path of austere abstinence that alone leads to scholastic success. This is perverse in multiple ways. For one, neither these institutions of learning nor India’s educational system as a whole can claim to be world-class. A recent ranking of the world’s finest universities found that only two from India figured in the top 500, with the higher ranking one kicking in somewhere between 300 and 400. The ranking was done on the basis of fairly objective parameters such as the number of Nobel prizes won by faculty or alumni, citation of articles written by faculty members, etc. India is yet to break out of the ancient Brahmanical scholastic tradition that held that all knowledge has already been discovered and that the seeker’s job was merely to learn what had been laid out in the relevant texts. The system militated against innovation. Only sheer individual brilliance could squeeze out the odd original idea from those wrung out by this system of rote learning. Educational systems around the world have evolved, to encourage innovation and creativity. Students learn to question, not to passively acquiesce in the wisdom handed down by generations. Such system-induced originality lies at the root of not just the higher rankings of the West’s educational institutions but also of their economic success. Mind-numbing conformity is only one problem. Capacity, or its lack, is another. Only around 9per cent of Indians make it to college. There is no reason whatsoever to keep the number of IIT and IIM seats as limited as they are. We need a huge expansion in the intake of students across the board in the tertiary sector of education.

The illusion of spectrum scarcity

 Come what come may, penned the Bard, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. Actually, time brings all things to pass! Everything is a matter of chronology, really. Consider, for instance, the radio frequency spectrum for mobile telephony. In particular, the issue of extra bandwidth for the next — the third—generation (3G) mobile services. With the passage of time and technological change, the notion of routinely licensing chunks of spectrum for service providers is now being vigorously questioned, the world over. Very unlike in the analogue era, today’s digital technologies do allow for new approaches to freeing up and managing spectrum. As much as 99% of even highly saturated bands may be vacant in any specific moment in time and space, innovative software can dynamically shift signals to make full use of the fleeting openings in the wireless “ether”(“white spaces”). The point is, new technologies do allow for much flexibility in spectrum usage. The hitherto wholly under-utilised dimension of the spectrum can come into full play with new protocols that allow for regular use of the “white spaces” on frequencies. So, although the electromagnetic spectrum is finite and limited, it can be virtually non-depleting for practical purposes. The implication that spectrum may not be scarce in the traditional sense has profound significance for public policy design. It may well call for a paradigm shift. Against the backdrop of “dynamic spectrum allocation” with its possibilities for enhanced wireless connectivity, a spectrum policy of allocating extra bands of static (read ‘fixed’) spectrum to network operators is entirely questionable. Static spectrum allocation can be very inefficient indeed. Now, bandwidth demand would vary along the time dimension (from hour to hour), and the space dimension (from region to region). So it would inevitably be the case that the region with the largest spectrum peak demand would determine the spectrum demand for the whole mobile network. This would be the case for each service provider. The end result would be that a substantial part of the spectrum would be summarily wasted, in any given time and space. Instead, we need to leverage recent advances in spectrum management practice to make way for flexible and open access to a precious resource, the airwaves, in an increasingly wireless world. The fact remains that the instrument most used to assign spectrum resources to telecom operators has been auctions. The idea has been around since circa 1959. The logic was that the telco estimating the highest value for the spectrum would likely bid the most.

A favourite movie

 The Infosys chairman and I have something in common It was only the other day, while flipping through a magazine, that I realised that the founder of one of India’s most innovative corporates and I had something in common, apart from living in Bangalore. “Why can’t you learn from him?” has been the constant refrain at home ever since N R Narayana Murthy rightly became an icon after starting a company which, in the space of 25 years, has become a household name all over the world. The question of “Why can’t you learn from him?” has been reiterated with each magazine story on the simplicity of the guy who thinks nothing of picking up a broom to clean the toilet on a daily basis. I have been known to pick up a broom but that is only when there is a cockroach to be disposed of late in the night when there is no maid to do the needful. Magazine stories on how he queues up for his meals at the self-service office-canteen have evoked caustic comments on my habit of parking myself in front of the TV during one-day cricket matches telecast in the evening and insisting that whoever serves me tea does not stand between me and the idiot box when a ball is being bowled. And there is no getting away from the guy even when one is holidaying overseas in Sri Lanka on one of those few-days-and-some-nights tours which seem economical when you read the advertisement. After checking in late in the night at a Colombo hotel, I was irritated at how long the process seemed to take for a reservation which had been made on the phone from India. Without quite calling the chap at the counter an idiot, I was trying to make him feel like one when he looked up and said, “We had another gentleman from Bangalore staying with us called Narayana Murthy and he was so well-behaved, so well-behaved.” And the guy at the Colombo hotel counter sighed as if to wonder why not all Bangaloreans could be counted on to be well-behaved! So it was with a feeling of ‘Here we go again’ that I picked up the June 4 issue of ‘The Week’ and realised that Narayana Murthy was one of the icons featured in the cover story. As expected, the snippets mentioned that he was uncompromising about simplicity, had refused Z-category security, lived in a three-bedroom house bought in 1986 — one bedroom more than the flat I had bought in 1995 and called Deja View and don’t ask me why! — and took the company bus to work. If my company had a bus and I could be sure of a seat, so would I, I told myself. It was the next bit which grabbed my attention: “Hasn’t watched a movie for 20 years, except The Titanic.” And then I realised that Narayana Murthy and I finally had something in common. And I’m not referring to the bit about not watching a movie for two decades. If I haven’t watched a movie in a theatre for 20 years, it’s not because I have been busy starting a company and making it a household name and not just in terms of M-cap. It’s just that the sound level in movie halls gives me a headache. And it just doesn’t make sense to pay for a headache when you can get one free! It was the bit about the ‘Titanic’ which caught my eye. If I have seen a movie 20 times in the last decade on a late-night TV channel, it is the ‘Titanic’. ‘Titanic’ is one of the most classy films ever screened even if it is all about class, with the ladies and gentlemen aboard the world’s most exclusive luxury liner not expected to fraternise with the hoi polloi in the steerage. And yet Leonardo di Caprio’s eternally young Jack Dawson is able to reach out to Kate Winslet’s winsome Rose Bukater who doesn’t quite know how to escape from the impending marriage to a millionaire which her mother has arranged. Dawson, as the young artist who lives for the moment and asks for nothing more than blank paper to sketch the daily inspiration on, comes across like a breath of fresh air on a ship full of millionaires who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Yet ‘Titanic’ is much more than an impending marriage on the rocks and a shipwrecked 1912 romance! There are moments of incredibly moving heroism like the musicians playing “Abide with me” even when the ship is going down. And if, while inputting this, my mind hums “My heart will go on”, it is because we Indians are not just moved by M-cap, whether we are Narayana Murthys or scribbling scribes!

The regulator or a doormat?

 

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has a former telecom hand, having been the Telecom Commission chairman earlier, He would soon realise the telecom world has undergone a change since his DoT days. More importantly, he followsl, who came minus any telecom experience, but with the blessings of the then communications minister, and left behind a considerable legacy. Of course, whether that legacy is good or bad is debatable, depending on which side of the fence you are on. And this (which side of the fence) issue is what has turned the regulator into a controversial body and controlling that would undoubtedly be the challenging part of new assignment. Speculation that his the chosen one to succeed  he had been doing the rounds for months. So much so that his appointment as the head of C-DoT-Alcatel venture, several months ago, was made precisely with this in mind. Apparently, for a person to be appointed Trai chairman, he must be holding some sort of a government position. But that is the government’s side. It was the division among the industry which was even more interesting. It depended on whether the corporate lobbied for him or not. Those who supported his candidature would not tire of narrating an incident when he apparently threw out of his room a top corporate executive, whose powers in the corridors of power are legendary.