Thoughts from TiECon West 2005

Yesterday I attended theTiECon West 2005 conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It was a great day. I got a chance to hear Bruce Chizen talk about how he turned Adobe around and Daniel Rosensweig on what challenges he saw Yahoo through. Apart from that, of course, it was a great opportunity to network; met a lot of new people and learnt quite a bit about emerging trends and entrepreneurial challenges.

However, what I want to talk about most is the Musings section that concluded the event. The title was: Musings: Democracy & Sustained Economic Growth, Freedom & Empowerment. The moderator was Michael Krasny, Ph. D, Senior Editor KQED.

This was one of the most engaging and thought provoking programmes I have seen in recent years. This has inspired me to embark on the mission of writing this blog. My initial goal is to capture some of the fundamental ideas expressed in this session and then on an ongoing basis make this a place to exchange ideas on a subject that is dear to many of my fellow Indians - how can we improve India; make it the world leader that it should be and more importantly how can I contribute?

The following is a brief summary and the message from each of the speakers:

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute, Columbia University

An extremely well read and scholarly person, he commented on the economic disparities in India's development and in particular stressed the stark contrast in India's urban and rural development. He seemed to be very much in tune with India's political realities. His message was very crisp - eradication of extreme poverty by 2015 and enabling rural India to share the economic prosperity of urban India through technology.

Dr. Jayprakash Narayan, National Coordinator LOKSATTA

The best speaker on the panel, I was very impressed by the depth of his ideas and his fluency of narration. He emphasized his deep democratic conviction and shed some light on differences in the development strategies and execution between China and India. He also pointed out that the large imperfections in democratic India should be viewed in the proper perspective and not compared "as is" with the US and the UK today which went through similar stages of growing pains 80-150 years ago. He also gave some of his ideas on how we can improve some of our governance structures at least at the state level to improve efficiency, accountability and decision-making abilities for those in power. He called upon the attendees - the best and the brightest in many ways - to reflect on the difference they can make to India. He mentioned these 2 websites for those wanting to learn more:

http://www.voteindia.org (now hosted at http://www.janadesh.org)
http://www.loksatta.org

Kamran Eliahian, Chairman & Cofounder Global Catalyst Partners

An Iranian by birth, he is a confirmed Gandhi-phile - to the extent that he has been instrumental in buying rights and screening Arabic versions of the movie Gandhi throughout the Arab world especially in Palestine. He talked about some of his experiences, showed several snippets of the movie and made some light-hearted comments on American politics. His message was very simple - internalize and spread Gandhi's message throughout the world, "You should be the change you want to see in the world!"