A Week in India

The past week has rushed by and I have done virtually nothing. Have been lazy to get up. Have spent whole days watching cricket between India and South Africa. Have had great food in terms of quality and quantity. Have spent time with mom and dad. Have not studied.

I am planning to give a lecture at ICFAI later this month. In the process of making a presentation on financial crises for this lecture. Do not have many plans for Christmas. But last night I tried to read up some notes on poverty and felt that my future lies in development economics and agriculture seems to be an interesting field where India needs a lot of development as majority of the poor are in agriculture. Read some articles by Robin Sharma to motivate myself to study harder. Last night, we went to this couple who are engaged in the business of software innovation and I got some new ideas from interacting with them.

1. The model that we traditionally use in Macroeconomics of developing countries imitating technology from developed countries seems to have turned on its head, as more and more companies located in the States are outsourcing their R&D Deptts to India due to cheap and skilled labour. This couple manufacture new software products in India and sells them to Siemens, Nokia and GE. In India however, there seems to be a shortage of skilled labour more than anywhere else as salaries are rising by more than 20% annually and there are not many at the upper end of the bell curve for the growth tp be sustainable.

2. As we move into this new phase of Google-Youtube-Blogging, people will have ever more chances of changing their jobs and the number of job cycles are going to increase from 3 to 5.
This will be due to stagnation in the original sector as the skill sets would become redundant.
Also, the number of industries will keep growing due to ever-increasing innovation and globalization at an unprecedented scale.

3. Given a chance, which country would you like to be born in? The only condition is that you will be selected randomly from the populace of that country. This is Stiglitz's thought experiment. I would probably choose a country wher there is low inequality and the standard of living is high for eg. the Scandinavian countries. What Mr. A would choose however, would be India as the chance to grow is much higher.

4. They talked about the increasing number of foreign students coming to India for internships given the value India brand has on the CV. It shows your flexibility and adaptability to a foreign environment and also to some extent your foresightedness as India is undoubtedly going to be a global player in the coming decades.

5. Work Hard in order to achieve success. There are no shortcuts to success and nothing fails like success. In other words, the need to be humble in times of success.

6. Knowledge taking over as the primary asset as opposed to physical capital and land ownership. The birth of the knowledge economy.

7. The increasing dissatisfaction with current jobs, because of boredom and competitiveness, impacting happiness.

8. How can poverty be abolished in India? Definition of poverty. Measurement of poverty. How India compares to other countries? Education, sanitation and sewerage, paved roads, health services. How much does a poor person in India spend on average on festivals and ceremonies? -Tim Besley suggests close to 15% of the income- other countries average 1%

9. Prof Caselli talked about the need for sharpening communication skills and presentation skills.
Reading good books, giving regular presentations and speaking in English.

10. Being able to work with the best in your field and trying to locate the research frontier in the topic of your PhD is vastly important (Don Davis).