Brave For Free

Before a death diverted my thoughts, I was planning to write about movements and leaders. I did not want to comment further on either side of the Lokpal debate, but it did get me thinking about how the drive had started in the first place, and why a man without any particular credentials can make us part of his crusade About movements, leadership and what forms them. A couple of weeks ago I came across two TED videos that seemed particularly relevant. In the first, Derek Sivers talks about how movements get started The Anna story brought this to mind. A relatively ordinary, obscure man from well outside the centre of events; he probably started by dancing to his own tune, just on his own. He probably did not start with thoughts of followers or movements. Somewhere down the line, he got his first follower – maybe Arvind Kejriwal - and eventually a movement formed. I found this rather personally interesting too. Of course, I have no intention of starting any movement that leads to fastin...

While the corruption movement rages on, a personal note of sadness intruded yesterday. At breakfast, my mother casually mentioned to me an accident where a coconut tree had fallen on someone, killing him; we dwelled briefly on the freak, tragic nature of it – trees don't usually fall on people in Mumbai, coconut trees even less so – but I didn't think very much of it then. The next morning, a large obituary notice abruptly made the matter more personal. The person in question was Ved Prakash Arya . I have known Ved, on and off, from my early IBM days; he was a customer then. We met again a decade later; him as COO of Pantaloon Retail (Future Group was still in the future) and me as a newly minted CEO of subsidiary company Futurebazaar. I can safely say that I would not have made it through my first year without help, and a key person providing the steadying hand was Ved. He was effectively my boss, but more than formal interaction Ved's off-the-cuff feedback and pointers...

I do want to think of Anna as a force of good, I really do. An honest man who is able to inspire lakhs of people to come out on the streets in protest seems just the kind of leader I want to follow. Yet I fret. And suggest bravely, for free, that many things about the Lokpal Bill campaign make me deeply uncomfortable. I've read the draft texts of both the government bill and the Jan Lokpal version , and I must say I do not find the government draft as unreasonable as is made out to be. I do not agree with some significant parts of it, but I have more differences with the Jan Lokpal than with the government version. First, I dislike the process. Anna's fast is not a protest – it is an insistence on getting his way over others. He now wants bill passed (not just presented to parliament mind you – but passed ) in a mere three weeks more; differing opinions be damned. Gandhi is known for his fasts, but he was protesting against an authority he had no way to participate in. Als...

I recently read Annie Zaidi's book about dacoits, dead children and the fear of being groped, and it set me thinking about how easy it is to be brave when nothing is threatening you. I know I present it as an earthshaking revelation that the universe needed me and only me to discover, but it is the start of a blog and I can be forgiven for a small amount of self-importance. After all, blogs are essentially exercises in the unshaken belief that people want to read what you write. Back to the bravery bits. My daily commute to office, strewn with garbage, potholes, oddly designed roads and casual, insouciant encroachment reminds me repeatedly that in India a lot of things need work, but I also realize I live in a world that is not threatened in any way. A complex web of interactions that we never think about keep our lives free of many fears and constraints, things that I and the people around me take for granted. The freedom to speak, the freedom from arbitrary search and seizure,...