Vision 2020 : A vision for the new millennium

Having just finished reading the book with the above title, I'm left spellbound.
"The ultimate inspiration repository"
A must read for any aspiring entrepreneur in India.

I found some of Kalam's views striking and I record them here

• First and foremost, is the lack of awareness and paranoia in Indians. Throughout the book, there are innumerable instances of great innovation from Indians, right from the age of Tippu Sultan. However, I concur with Kalam, when he says that Indians don't believe that they can be innovators themselves. One instance cited is when one of the persons from the Indian intelligentsia belittles Tippu Sultan's contributions to missile development, saying that Tippu's rockets were built with the help of the French, though it was completely indigenious. There are many such cases, where Indians have done the grassroot design, but have lost the edge in the field by allowing others to consolidate on our innovation(Not allowing others to take the lead implies innovating continuously to have an edge over others) Given a huge and challenging task, there are very few Indians who start off positively. Most people shun the challenge.
• I quote Mr. Narayan Murthy here :

  "It is very easy to set your goals low in this country. It's high time to change this trend if India has to survive".

  I think this is one of the biggest problems - setting low goals. I can give an example here - When a person A goes to his teacher and says that he is intrigued by some field and wants to know more about it, the teacher scornfully replies that A has not even scratched the surface and has no scope in that 'hi-funda' field now. Is this the reply A wanted or expected? A figured out that the range of answers would be between "You can start with some basic math required" to "Thats amazing! What do you know about the field?". Agreed that the teacher may be very busy and may have prior experiences of being dissatisfied with other students, but isn't the teacher acting as an impedance in this case?
• Its high time we started innovating. I can bet that you can't name 10 innovations from India that have made huge impact in a particular field. Does this mean that we don't innovate? I think that the reason is a combination of setting low goals and losing out on developments in a new field. This is to be set right immediately. When I say innovate, it doesn't constrain to the engineering aspects only. When Richard Branson came up with Virgin one, everyone realised that it was an excellent scheme and incorporated modifications in their system on the lines of Virgin one. Is it that we can't ithink of such schemes? Nope, its just that we don't try. And we effectively wait for others to innovate and then use their methods. Isn't this dependency? Is this really independence we are enjoying? OK, globalization forces you to be dependent, but the degree of dependency is an alarmingly high number in India's case. The book brings out myriad fields in which urgent innovation's required.
• An excerpt from the book :

  ...My co-author Y S Rajan was recently in a meeting to discuss the effects of sanctions. This was before the usa had announced the details. All were Indians and working for foreign banks. One elderly gentleman emphatically said how we all have to learn to be proud of ourselves and take actions to nullify the sanctions. He narrated an episode about his visit to Japan. A leaking tap in his hotel room disturbed his sleep. He complained. Two people came, worked for half an hour and made it right. They showed the performance to him and he was satidfied. Then they apologized deeply for the inconvenience caused to him and informed him of the hotel management's decision not to charge room rent for that night. So far one can perhaps explain this as normal professionalism. But then, with a bow, the two workers showed the tap piece to him and said, 'Sir! Please see, the trouble caused to you is not by a Japanese product but an imported. We will continue to do better, Sir!' The message is that most Japanese are proud of their country's capability. They want to excel in their work. If each of us attempts to do so in our spheres of work the status of developed India will arrive sooner than we expect, because our country has many natural core strengths and competitive advantages...

  The paragraph says it all.
• One more thing that struck me was the fact that developed countries don't want other countries to be developed. This is much like the economic analogy of a monopoly, but this is a lot more consequential and can't be escaped attention.

These were some of the points that are to figure out in every person's checklist...
Read the book for more...
One thing that flabbergasted me was the amount of information collected by the authors on every field. Its amazing, and shows that this is the time to blossom, when the right person's on the throne.