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IITB Spring 1967Scan_20160217 NYC Fall 1967 1 NYC Fall 1967 2

First Photo is with IIT friends Tejinder Singh and Satinder Bir Singh. I am in the middle; The second photo was in one of the automatic photo taking booth at Expo 67, which took four photos for 25 cents and instantly printed them out. I thought it would take one photo when it flashed on my back. I got back in time for the third but assumed that there were only three photos so left before the fourth. Two color photos were taken in New York. My friend Umesh Malhotra is one with the sun glasses. His friend Vikram Tewari ( in bush shirt) was going to NYU. Other two were cousins of Umesh in New York City.

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I graduated from IIT Bombay with my B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering in the spring of 1967. I left for US on my 22nd birthday, August 29th 1967, to do graduate studies at Michigan Tech.  My travel took me to Paris, London, Montreal and New York. After 5 days of travel I arrived in Houghton, Michigan on September 3, 1967 on a Greyhound Bus from Detroit in the middle of the night.

I and my IIT buddy Umesh Malhotra travel together from Kanpur by train to Delhi and then by an Air France flight to Paris, with stopovers in Tehran and Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was still in high state of alert as it had been less than 90 days since the June 6th war. We were allowed to carry $8 each as our spending cash, though Air France promised us some cash ($20 each) and free hotel stay in Paris as part of   our air fare. We stayed with one of my distant uncles in London. Montreal had the world fair (Expo 67). We spent a day at the world fair. In New York, we stayed for a day with Umesh’s cousin. Summer of 1967 also saw India devalue its currency by one third. Rupee went from five to a dollar to seven and half to a dollar. It almost derailed my plans!

We flew to Detroit and took a 10 hour bus journey to Houghton Michigan’s upper peninsula. Incidentally, Detroit was burning as it was having last of its regular summer race riots that day. Houghton was a quintessential small Midwestern town with a population of less than 7000 back then. Bus dropped us by the side of the road near the university. As we stepped out of the bus it was cold dark night. Luckily for us Michigan Tech was anticipating the arrival of foreign students and had reception parties at the bus stop with blankets. Next day we were taken to town where we could buy our winter gear. I bought a real warm jacket with fur collar and a hood for $6, a jacket like that would cost about $120 easily now.

First snow came within a month and it never left the ground till May of the following year. It snowed almost 300 inches that year. Having grown up in hot plains of northern India, it was a shock of the life time.

Academically, we found Michigan Tech very easy. Having spent four years in a rigorous and competitive IIT, easy going environment at Michigan Tech was a piece of cake. When I aced my tests, a professor thought that I might have been cheating. He sternly reminded me that cheating was not allowed in USA.

We settled down in to an easy routine. US was still in love with old west. The most popular TV shows included Bonanza, Gun Smoke, Virginian and High Chapperal.  The other popular shows included, Mission Impossible, Star Trek, and Laugh In. All in all life was fun.

1968 came as a rude awakening as Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot in quick succession. Vietnam War started to go bad. Lyndon Johnson decided not to rerun, riots broke out Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Richard Nixon was elected as POTUS.

ManmohanFreeMan manmohan-singh2

 

Manmohan Singh served as the Prime Minister of India for two full terms from 2004 to 2014. He came with an incredible reputation as a reformer and no body had better economics credentials than him. A lifelong bureaucrat, who had served in all the top economic jobs, was inducted in 1991 by Prime Minister Narasimhan Rao as his finance minister to lead his economic liberalization program. He was given full credit for the 1991 reform, even though there were no further reforms during the rest of the tenure.

There were no reforms at at all during his prime ministerial tenure. He talked about inclusive growth while enjoying the momentum created by Vajpayee’s reforms. The biggest program created during his term was the NREGA, which was an old fashioned redistribution boondoggle. The road building program came to screeching halt too. The Telecom policy was turned on its head when the revenue share model got replaced with spectrum sale,  which resulted in massive corruption. The original goal of the revenue share was to prevent this source of corruption. There was scandal galore during his term. His pristine reputation was fully tarnished. With no new reforms, I can’t think of any, and no privatization of public sector companies, the growth rate steadily declined. Further tax terrorism during his tenure, dried up FDI.

Manmohan Singh turned out to be a total disappointment. He was made the prime minister by Sonia Gandhi and he felt beholden to her. He also was never able to assert his leadership in the cabinet. I am told by a source that he called Pranab Mukherji “sir” in the very first cabinet meeting. Pranab never accepted him as his boss. Even after 2009 elections, when he had the moral authority to assert himself, he refused to do it. As a matter of fact Rahul Gandhi treated him with contempt, both in word and deed.

I consider his 10 years as the PM as wasted years for India. China pulled ahead while India languished. For this I rate him as one of the worst, if not the worst, prime minister of India. I rate him 1 on the scale of 1 to 10.

Atal-Bihari-Vajpayee atal-bihari-vajpayee-pm

 

Atal Bihai Vajpayee was the Prime Minister of India from 1998 to 2004. In my opinion he was the best Prime Minister India has had. He was at the head of a coalition (NDA) and had to depend on his allies to execute. His Raj Dharma and coalition Dharma  policies were very successful. He served a full term without a whiff of corruption.

His signature Telecom reforms transformed in India. All the current internet based entrepreneurial activity in India is because of these reforms. The new telecom policy went in to effect on Jan. 2001. There were 17 million land lines and one million mobile phones on the day the policy was announced. By the end of the first year of the policy, India still had 17 million land lines where as Mobile phone had grown to about 80 million. By the end of 2013 India had 904 million mobile numbers and only 29 million land lines. The telecom policy was developed in co-operation with Tie in Silicon Valley. Its main feature was licenses were freely given to all comers, Government had revenue share model where it got 7% of the revenue. Operators were not allowed to sit on the license and had to initiate the service within a year.

Telecom was not the only sector which was reformed under Vajpayee. He initiated the Golden Quadrilateral road building program to build expressways connecting four major metros of New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. In addition to that he initiated Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna to build secondary connectors. Other reforms included: Airline sector, Finance Sector and Automobile Sector. He carried out the biggest privatization of the public sector also. These reforms gave Indian economy a booster shot that lasted till 2008. Annual economic growth reached almost 10%. Most of the growth came after the elections of 2004 which UPA won. Growth under UPA was mostly because what NDA had done as there were no reforms at all under UPA!

The other big bang change under NDA was India going nuclear overtly in 2008. After initial furor, world powers came to accept India as a legitimate member of the nuclear club. His foreign policy innovations included a Bus trip to Lahore and warming up towards United States. First of these backfired when Pakistan army aggressed along the LOC in J&K but the second one was rewarded handsomely with US-India civilian nuclear deal.

Vajpayee was a transformational  figure. For that I rate him the best prime minister India has had. I give him 9.5 on scale of 1 to 10. The only reason I hold back half a point is his initial failure to curb Gujarat riots and his fulminations about Muslims.

Jobs NeXT-logo-designed-by-Paul-Rand

I saw the Movie Steve Jobs on the flight back to California from Abu Dhabi. It brought back some old memories. I was present at Davies Symphony Hall on Sept 19, 1990 for the announcement of NeXt computer. If I remember right, Steve Jobs said that he already had orders for 15,000! That turned out to be a little bit of an exaggeration.

In 1992 Novell acquired USL (UNIX Systems Lab) from AT&T and became the owner of UNIX operating system. That made me the Czar of UNIX as it was I who had done the deal and USL reported to me. USL had distributed UNIX as source level product to OEMs ,who ported it to their various processors and distributed along with the hardware to their customers.

I felt the companies like Sun had a hard business model; they were doing the Sparc Chips and competing with Intel; system boxes and competing with Compaq; and doing UNIX and competing with Microsoft. And all this on a relatively low volume platform! I felt that Novell could level the playing field with Windows NT by converting UNIX into a binary product running on the same hardware as NT. In that case UNIX and NT would compete on their own merit. UNIX was a mature OS and had a very good SMP version while NT was still maturing and was only a single processor implementation.

I can’t recall the exact date but I think it was in late 1992, I got a call from Steve Jobs requesting a meeting. We agreed to meet for a dinner at Gaylords restaurant in Menlo Park. Steve liked Indian food and Gaylords was his favorite. Steve showed up with an entourage for our dinner. Gaylords already knew what Steve wanted and there was no need to order. Steve told me that I would like what he had pre-ordered.

He got to the point very quickly. What the hell was Novell up to with UNIX? I told him what we were trying to do. He got very upset and started to shout at me profanely. He said that it was the dumbest thing he had ever heard. As food started to get delivered he got very agitated as things were not to his liking. He told me that we should look at NeXT OS UI to compete with Windows UI. I told him that our focus on server side and not on the desk top side. Again he thought that was an even dumber thing and started to berate me. Then he abruptly got up and left, leaving me to eat alone and pick up the tab.

Movie resonated with me. Steve Job I remember from that night night was portrayed truly in the movie.