“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

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As India Builds (Part 1)

Monday, April 30, 2007 Related Content Share/Send | 5 comments

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In 1989, I left India with two dream-stuffed suitcases for college in Western Massachusetts. This was long before the wave of Information Technology swept the country, dotting business parks across once ox-plowed fields. My Swiss Air flight roared above Bombay, above the rickshaw traffic and stray cows. Despite the 6000 miles, the 23 hour plane ride, I have always kept in close touch with my family in Calcutta and the now booming Indian business world which I left behind.

My profile, as the quintessential tech-savvy Silicon Valley entrepreneur and new age NRI (non-resident Indian), is just the type that India’s current boom has leveraged, and that the country’s future is being built on. I hold a Computer Science degree from MIT, have conceived new technology and business ideas, started and sold companies, hired and fired, all with the focused zeal of moving forward, onward, towards a future that my generation has helped shape.

The Internet - the fundamental human innovation since the telephone - has created a bonanza of leap-frog technology, literally shrinking the world at large, while our personal worlds unfold beyond once romantic distances. The 21st century teenager “networks” rampantly on MySpace and Facebook, the cellular phone illuminating half their face in its blue light. They are the real heavy-duty users of the innovations my generation launched. Their future even more intensely woven with technology, as the Internet and Wireless communication redesign the fabric of society by first unweaving the past.

What I write today, is an ode to this past.

This segment is part 1 in a 8 part series
Jump to part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Comments

dont know why but still everyone want to go to usa

ankur Monday, April 30, 2007 at 7:47 PM PT

[…] [Part 1] My family is old Calcutta. We had rice paddy fields that greened as monsoon washed over them. Heavy-limbed mango orchards bearing the juiciest and most fragrant varietals. Homesteads. A home nestled in my grandfather’s legendary rose garden in the now traumatized Bengal-Bihar border. Our relatives’ houses dotted Calcutta. These old houses in the alleys of Pathuriaghata and Shyampukur were sprawling places, bearing the stories of Calcutta’s now receding past. […]

Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Blog Archive » As India Builds (Part 2) Tuesday, May 1, 2007 at 4:02 AM PT

[…] [to be continued] (Part 2) (Part 1) […]

Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Blog Archive » As India Builds (Part 3) Wednesday, May 2, 2007 at 4:03 AM PT

[…] [to be continued] (Part 3) (Part 2) (Part 1) […]

Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Blog Archive » As India Builds (Part 4) Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 4:17 AM PT

[…] Nowhere is this boom more pronounced than in India and China. You have recently read my piece, As India Builds, on India’s architectural destruction, tearing down old houses, and building new ugly ones in […]

Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Blog Archive » India's Real Estate Boom & Architecture Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 3:55 AM PT

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