Monday, December 20th, 2004
In search of Kaveri amma
Swades is a film that will do every Indian proud.
The film is comfortable in its Indian skin, never mind if the colour of its skin is brown. It captures the dichotomy of a nation where some people live in the dark ages (without electricity) and others are scaling the pinnacles of global excellence. It is about how the bright India can lead the dark India into the light.
A Newsweek special issue on Leadership (December 2004) features Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. The magazine calls him “the CEO most responsible for India’s rise as an outsourcing power.†Here is one of the points Nilekani touches upon in the interview “The fruits of tech development cannot be limited to a few people in the tech industry. In a democratic society you can’t have a situation where a bunch of guys make dollar salaries and the rest go on living in misery. You just can’t have an ‘enclave economy.’ People who have benefited financially in a big way definitely need to give back. I draw the parallel to America in the early 20th century when business barons like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and Henry Ford gave large parts of their wealth to philanthropy. At a critical juncture in history they established not only that wealth is important but also that wealth has to be recycled into the system. That is part of creating social democracy.â€