People to Follow

There was a question in Quora recently about who are the policy wonks who have considerable influence in India. This made me come up with a list of people who, in my opinion should be the ones deciding India’s policy.

Intellectuals who I wish would wield more influence than they currently do would be as follows -

1. Raghuram Rajan – Previously the chief economist of IMF and currently the chief economic advisor to the PM of India and the author of the book “Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures still Threaten the World Economy”
2. Subramanian Swamy – I don’t think he needs an introduction, at least not in the cyber circles. The wiki article describes how awesome he is.
3. Nitin Pai – He is a graduate of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from where he obtained a Master in Public Administration degree. Currently director and founder of The Takshashila Institution, an independent think-tank. He blogs and tweets about public policy and India’s geopolitical interests. He blogs at On the Indian National Interest and tweets at Nitin Pai (acorn) on Twitter. He is also the editor of the magazine The Indian National Interest Review
4. Arvind Panagariya – Economics professor in Columbia University and the author of the book “India – The Emerging Giant” along with Jagadish Bhagwati.
5. Jagdish Bhagwati – Economics professor in Columbia University
6. Brahma Chellaney – A professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, blogs at Stagecraft and Statecraft
7. Pratap Bhanu Mehta – President of Center for Policy Research, New Delhi and tweets @ Pratap Bhanu Mehta
8. Atanu Dey – Economics professor in University of California Berkeley and blogs at Atanu Dey On India’s Development
9. Bibek Debroy – Indian economist and a professor in Center for Policy Research, New Delhi and tweets @ Bibek Debroy (bibekdebroy) on Twitter

Other names that come to my mind are journalists and columnists Gurucharan Das, blogs at http://gurcharandas.blogspot.in/ and M.J Akbar, blogs at http://mjakbarblog.blogspot.in/.

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How do you justify Dronacharya asking Ekalavya to cut his thumb off?

Answer by Anirudh Acharya:

Ekalavya belonged to a tribe that paid obeisance to the Chedi and the Magadha kingdom, then controlled by Shishupala and Jarasandha. These kingdoms were not exactly great friends of the Hastinapur empire. Jarasandha wanted to become the emperor and wield control over Hastinapur and Drona was indebted to the royal family of Hastinapur.

He could not possibly live in the patronage of the Hastinapura empire and let his training and knowledge go into enemy hands. Stealing or no stealing he could not let Ekalavya walk away with his treasure trove of knowledge because he belonged to the enemies of Hastinapur.

IMO it had nothing to do with caste or any such thing, as is made out to be in recent times.

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How can you explain all Indian Political parties in layman’s terms?

Answer by Anirudh Acharya:

The following graph will give you a rough idea.

(The image is not mine. I found it on twitter)

For a more detailed analysis – Niti-mandala – The Indian Political Spectrum

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Is Oracle (India) a good place to work for a fresh graduate?

Answer by Anirudh Acharya:

I currently am an Application Engineer in Oracle.

OK, first the sub-questions:

What exactly will an Oracle Apps engineer learn to do in the first year or two?

You will be involved in building web applications using J2EE. In this process, if you are hard working and proactive, you can spruce up your java and Sql knowledge, and you can get a good understanding of the architecture of web applications, how the business logic of the web applications are coded, and a lot of UI design for the web applications.

What specific work you are going to do is going to depend on which team and product you get assigned to.

Regarding the team, the above work description is more accurate if you get assigned to an application development team. If you are in a QA team, you will be working more on Selenium and less of the above. You could also end up in a code patching team. I do not know much of the QA and patching teams, so cannot speak much about it.

Coming to the product, some of the products you get assigned to are PDIT, EBusiness Suite, Fusion Applications etc.. Fusion Applications has most of the product development work happening, for the simple reason that it is a new product. I have heard that an Apps Engineer in other teams will usually be more involved in maintenance of already built apps. So in such a case you will be more involved in bug fixing and less of product development.. but I cannot say this for sure. This is just hearsay.

How easy/difficult is it to transition to a product development or R&D role- to start doing the sort of work that gets you patents.?

If you are not assigned to a product development team, I think you will have to wait for a year to get transitioned to one of them. If you have a good rating in your first year and are on good terms with your manager, then I would presume it is pretty much possible.

With regards to R&D I am not sure what you are expecting. Your work will not concern the architecture of the product( you might get to do this after a while when you get promoted to senior engineer, architect etc.. but not sure about it). As an apps engineer your main focus will be on the UI of the product, so you will be dealing with a lot of xml, jsff and jspx. You will also be involved in the DB schema design and business logic of the application.

With regards to patents, if you are in the dev team you can start filing patents right away as an apps engineer. In fact, you will encouraged to file more patents. They regularly conduct Patent Workshops etc.. patents get filed pretty often. So you don't have to wait for anything, you will start with the kind of work that can fetch you patents, if you have good ideas. Your patents will be more about UI design patterns and not about any tweaks or cutting edge algorithm to streamline the architecture of the product etc… At apps layer the technology is more or less frozen and you work with the framework that is provided to you. There is little scope to alter the framework.

What other companies could utilize the same skillset in case Oracle turns out to be a dead-end?

Again I can only speak for the people in dev team. As part of product development you will be working extensively on one of Oracle's internal framework called Application Development Framework( ADF). If you become a pro in understanding and using this framework, you can quit your job and move to US or Europe and become an independent ADF consultant, on similar lines of a SAP consultant. You get paid bucket loads for this job. But you will have to be the god of ADF for that. One guy from my organization just did this recently.

Other than that if you if you want to switch jobs you will have to keep yourself up to date with your data structures and algorithms knowledge, which will require some extra effort outside office hours, and apply for other companies. But I am not sure if the kind of work you do in other companies like say Amazon or Microsoft will be very different( though the pay hikes  and bonuses are higher in these places).

Besides all this I would like to add a few points:

1. The work culture is pretty chilled out, the work is not very hectic and the working hours are very flexible. And there are a good number of team outings, lunches and parties etc.. So if you like what you are doing here, it can be an enjoyable place to work in.

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Reviews of: Chanakya’s Chant

Answer by Anirudh Acharya:

★★★☆☆

Ashwin Sanghi tries his hand at a political thriller. He narrates two stories parallely in alternate chapters, one of the historical Chanakya and how he aided Chandragupta to become the emperor of Bharat and the other is how a small town schoolteacher,  Gangasagar Mishra ventures into politics and manages to build a national level political party and propels it into victory through pure cunning. And the author tries to draw comparisons between the two.

The contemporary story of Gangasagar Mishra is quite boring and pretty predictable at times. But the narration of the historical tale of Chanakya is pretty accurate, very interesting and gripping with a lot of attention to detail. I would say the book is worth the read solely for the good telling of Chanakya's story.

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Reviews of: India After Gandhi (book)

Answer by Anirudh Acharya:

★★★☆☆

A good compilation of post independence Indian history by Ramachandra Guha. It also gives a good perspective to understand present day India. The book is rich in detail and the writing style of Guha is brilliant and makes the book a very interesting read. But at a few places Guha does compromise objectivity in favour of Nehru, especially in his telling about Nehru's grand centralized socialist economy and his foreign policy of Non-Aligned movement( India and the Non-Aligned Movement.) both of which are more or less proven wrong in retrospect.

In short, the pros of the book –

• The period between 1947 and 1950, the making of the constitution and the consolidation of the princely states was very well covered. It could have been made better by covering in more detail Ambedkar's contribution,and his story and how he came to be in the Constituent Assembly in the first place. This part of the book makes the whole book worth reading.
• The reordering of the states on linguistic lines and Potti Sriramulu's battle.

the cons of the book are –

• The author has hardly written about Indian politics since Rajiv Gandhi's time. Guha goes off on a tangent about the role of cricket, Bollywood and other cultural events. Nothing gets spoken about the liberalization of 1991, the effect of the collapse of the Berlin Wall on India, Pokhran nuclear tests, the Bofors scam etc.. The events that take place after 1985 have been given very little space in the book.( I personally think that this was done because it becomes impossible to tell India's tale beyond 1985 without pointing out the many mistakes made by Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which the author seems very reluctant to do)
• Should have covered the period of emergency and the Janata Party's first non-congress government that followed in more detail.
• A certain amount of objectivity would have been good while discussing the Nehru's policies and his five year plans in the 1950s and the events that led up to the Indo-China war.

Another similar book which I have not read but intend to is Bipin Chandra's India Since Independence. I hear the book covers post 1990 events in more detail, should check it out.

But overall the book is well written and definitely worth a read( a couple of reads actually).

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Reviews of: Clash of Civilizations

Answer by Anirudh Acharya:

★★★★★

A brilliant book by Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist from Harvard, on the geopolitics of the coming century. We have had many books in favour of the concept of the world becoming a global village and how the information revolution will slowly rid the world of cultural and ethnic differences between different races of the world, the most famous among them being The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century: Thomas L. Friedman. Huntington provides compelling arguments for the contrary. Just as the previous century saw the world politics revolve around principles such as communism, socialism and democracy, Huntington says that the politics of the coming century will be pivoted around the major civilizations of the world. The book is brilliantly written. He outlines the different factions into which the world will be divided and puts forward his thoughts on the future of the world's geopolitics.

I have not read the book The World is Flat completely, but I have read it in parts and have to say it's reasoning pales in comparison to Huntington's theories. I am much more inclined to believe what Huntington has to say.

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