India!

I haven't been posting (for which I apologize) but I just got back from two weeks in India and I am on "India time" (2 AM Monday January 11 here in New York, 12:30 PM Sunday, January 10 in Bangalore) and can't sleep so I thought I'd send out a short post.

We were in Delhi, Agra, Mysore and Bangalore. We were primarily in Bangalore to hold a graduation ceremony for the 15 AOL students who completed the Masters of Science in Internet Technology. It was a wonderfully emotional day-in 25 years of attending graduations (and I always cry, you should know) my heart has never been so full.

While we were there we visited IBM and Microsoft Research. IT is alive and well-in India. IT institutes advertise all over-on the road from Delhi to Agra I must have seen at least ten IT institutes. We might not find them up to our standards but we should know that Indians see IT as having a bright future.

Read James Fallows's article in The Atlantic Monthly and you'll get one point of view about why we needn't worry about "catching up" with India and China-I'd like to see us figure out how to combine all of what's good about India and China-the hunger of the people for a better life, their willingness to work hard and sacrifice, ideas that we think about as "American" values- with what's good about America-our ability to innovate, to recreate ourselves, our resilience. While Fallows concentrates mostly on China, a country he knows well having lived there for many years, his comments apply equally well to India. Here's what he has to say in his article entitled "How America Can Rise Again" in the current issue of The Atlantic (which I read in India on my Kindle-another story for another post):

I started out this process uncertain; I ended up convinced. America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament—Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve. Part of the mind-set of pre-Communist China was the rage and frustration of a great people let down by feckless rulers. Whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership, it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away. America is not going to have a Communist revolution nor endure “100 Years of Humiliation,” as Imperial China did. But we could use more anger about the fact that the gap between our potential and our reality is opening up, not closing.

Read more of the article and draw your own conclusions; for me I realize, in a way I didn't before, how valuable an American degree is to non-Americans and how much the students at AOL appreciated our visit, which was wonderful for all of us.

I wish all of us a happy, healthy New Year. Let this be the year in which we all close the gap between our potential and our reality.

Namaste.