My friend and super super senior from college Dilip D Souza recently released his new non fiction book: Roadrunner. He’s hosting a little quiz over at Twitter, winners of which get free copies of his book.

The book is about his travels in US, to little heard of corners of US (he was present in New Orleans and witnessed Katrina’s aftermath),  the Indian version of which we’re creating with Grassroutes

I have read few pages of the book, but my friends who have read the entire book have given it a thumbs up and have recommended everyone to give it a shot.

Dilip has been writing about development issues, politics, occasional pieces on bras and has been published in most of the esteemed publications you read these days.

His twitter page is @DeathEndsFun, do give it a shot and hope you win a copy of his book!

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

I attended a talk  by Gurcharan Das about his latest book (released quite a while ago), The Difficulty of being Good: The subtle Art of Dharma a few days ago at The Attic (you have to check it out).

One of the really interesting thing he highlighted, which I believe we all inherently know but never act upon was envy. He claims, envy isn’t the same as jealousy. Jealousy can be understood. If you suspect your wife fancying another bloke, that’s aiite, and I guess it is legitimate for you to feel jealous.

Envy is a completely different ball park. Envy destroys you from within. It is which makes you feel a lesser being because of someone else’s success. And while some might argue that it motivates them, the entire basis of that motivation is, flawed. Because, your actions might not be directed at helping yourself, but instead be directed at bringing the other person down. He gave the example of Duryodhan and then traveled few thousand years to give another example of Anil Ambani.

Apparently a study that had taken place at HBS a while back asked a bunch of folks whether they would like to earn 50,000 USD or 100,000 USD per year. The condition being: In the former case, their peer group earns 25,000 USD and ion the latter case, they earn 200,000 USD. Envy conquered all.

Nissim Nicholas Taleb in his famous Fooled By Randomness also stressed on this point when he said that, yuppies who earned their first bonus on Wall Street shifted from their smaller suburbs (where they were quite affluent) to a more posh neighborhood and were mightily depressed. Clearly, given that the new neighborhood now has people far far richer than the yuppie.

The biggest problem with Envy in my opinion is it’s ever lasting alliance with one’s ego.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

This space has been largely empty for the most part of post college duration. The reasons are obvious, but I hope to resume blogging now.

Living in Delhi has been very entertaining. Entertaining is the right word to be used here because someone that is the flavour of the town.

The area where I reside also contributes to that. With half the world’s population living here with me, (and the rest settled in Karol Bagh and Chandni Chowk I am led to believe) I am in the midst of the action. Be it getting up to go to work, which unlike BITS demands 100% attention (in terms of my physical presence), or randomly arranging last minute plans to meet someone, Delhi has kept me immensely occupied and more than mildly satisfied.

I was lucky to have found The Attic, a cosy little corner in Connought Place which brings regular doses of really good speakers. The best thing about the place being the suspiciously small audience. Consequence being, you get to interact a heck of a lot more than at usual conferences.

The place where I work, NCAER, comes out with fantastic reports, advising government and corporations on policy making. The next 5 months is going to be challenging and a learning experience with the vast amount of human as well as literary resources that NCAER providing me with.

The BITSAA Global Meet, which is the other activity that is taking up considerable amount of my time is also shaping up nicely with the panel discussions being finalized and scouting for speakers being the next step.

For those with an appetite for development and responsible businesses, I have started updating my Nextbillion with my experiences on the field with the Stories from Sarvajal’s Turf series. 2 posts have been put up and I believe I have material for 2 more which should be up by the end of next 2 weeks.

Facebook too has been of tremendous value in such times, with me needlessly messaging everyone in Delhi who I can lay my hands on and devoting my time to them. It’s part of the whole settling in phase I believe. Give me a month more, I am sure I will go back to my anti-social, virtual self. Though, I hope that doesn’t happen.

Also, I have 2 incredible roomies who have been tolerating my idiosyncrasies for long and I am grateful to them for that.

Lets see what’s in store next.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

If you want to set up shop in Gujarat but have no ideas. Tobacco is the answer. Possibly the most profitable retail business in entire rural Gujarat would be the sale of tobacco. Every single person enjoys chewing it and spitting it out. It’s like cigarettes in Bengal.

Next would probably be telecom. They all have electricity in their homes thanks to the Jyoti Gram scheme introduced by the Modi Government. And now most of them have cell phones.

Ok, so may be I am wrong about the Telecom bit.

But Tobacco is extraordinarily popular here. It’s also ironic, considering this is the state that banned Liquor since 1961 a la Gandhigiri but left Tobacco alone.

P.S: My fellow intern, Prateek Bhatt who studies in a jail was overlooking as I was writing this post and adds “No, please set up shop in Orissa instead.”

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

I know blogging has been intermittent, but that’s because I have been caught up with loads of other things which left little time for blogging. Actually, I have been on the road for a while and updating this space through my mobile can be a bitch. Hence refrained.

So here’s an update from my side:

• I have bid farewell to the desert and my residential address will not contain the pincode 333031 anymore.
• I will be spending the next 6 months working (at least) at the National Council of Applied Economic Affairs in New Delhi.
• At the time of writing this post, I am interning at Sarvajal, a terrific organization, providing clean affordable water to rural India and as a part of which I am traveling all across rural Gujarat.
• I have been selected as a student delegate to the South American Business Forum in Buenos Aires (I am one of only 100 selected I am told), so in case you fund me, I can attend this interesting event.
• And finally, I am the Director of the Content and Agenda Team which is working on the BITSAA Global Meet. This is going to be EPIC. The event is the first of its kind in BITSian history. There will be specific posts in the near future dedicated to this alone.

Of course this wont stop me writing about the usual boring social entrepreneurship stuff (a term I am increasingly getting irritated by) and random niceties.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

Once again, he’s the list of the BITS Pilani, Goa folks who made it to the IIMs this year. Please add names in the comments section.

Unless stated, all the folks are from the 2006 Batch.

Pilani Campus

Abhijeet Kamath: C (WL)

Abhishek Agarwal: B,C

Akhil Puri(2005): B

Amit Mirchandani (2002): L , B(WL)

Arjit Chandra:  A (WL 11)

Deepak Maloo: B

Khushboo Saraf(2004): B

Neelabh Singh: B

Rachit Chandra: B

Robin Thomas(2004): A, C(WL)

Sandeep Devarakonda (2002): C

Shoaibuddin Ahmad: C

Shubhodeep Ghosh: B

Shushant Chandak: L

Shweta Ramakrishnan: A,C

Tara Ravi(2005):??

Vishal Barfiwala(2004): B (WL 25)

Goa Campus:

Abhinav Pophali:B

Anuj Jhaveri:A,C

Ajay Y.V.S: A

Deepak Joshi:B

Ganesh Vernekar: A

Nizar Md:A

Rahul Sharma:B

Roushan Kumar: L

Sagar M:A

Saurav Ghosh:A,C

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

I just arrived from an extraordinary trip from the city of Cologne. Apart from housing some wonderful museums and giving the world it’s water (That’s Eau de Cologne), it’s been host to one of the largest student run conferences in the world called the World Business Dialogue.

I was amazed by the level of professionalism the organizers showed. The speaker list was also fabulous. I would’ve liked had there been more interaction between the speakers and the students, but it seemed that most of them operated on tight schedules.

I was also happy at them embracing social entrepreneurship. This wave of thinking is still at a very nascent stage in Europe but its still heartening to see more students wanting to get involved in the social sector.

Another thing I noticed was that the German companies have started hiring big time. Though if you want to work in Europe, be sure to equip yourself with at least 1 foreign language apart from English if you want to work on the client side.

Coming to the educational scenario, things are pretty laid back in Europe with many students pursuing 2-3 degrees and taking a year off in between them. One interesting observation about Germany was that there were no elite institutions (unlike say UK), which doesn’t mean that the standard of education isn’t good, it merely means that the playing field is more leveled. Germany is definitely a very good option for higher education, especially for its emphasis on creativity, something which is lacking in most Indian schools.

Coming back to the conference, I loved it because of the international crowd. Sure there were too many Germans than previous editions, but I enjoyed hanging out with them too and learning amazing things from there such as the complex German digital tax system (Note: The licence fee has to be paid even if the device is not attached or has no immediate capabilities to connect to internet). The lectures/panels should be put up by now, I specially recommend (as will most people at the WBD) you to check out the talk By Robert Wolcott who apart from looking like Quentin Tarantino, spoke on innovation.

Some of the things (apart from many other) I gathered:

• The Germans and most of the western world were severely affected by the recession and most of them are still in the process of recovering.
• Most didn’t see this coming and as some of the CEO of major companies admitted during the panels didn’t have plans in case they were hit with such a scenario, which mean back to the drawing board when the recession came. They were prepared for growth but not for bust.
• One of the major challenges for businesses in the future is going to be maintanence of IT infrastructure. The future is going to be how well you can keep your data real time. No one wants to wait till the evening news.
• Numbers are important but so is recruitment is a major concern. Multi-disciplinary teams are going to become more prevalent. They are much more likely to hire “boy scouts”, whose Indian counter parts I suppose are Quizzers
• Companies need to invest in risk managers to position them better since booms and busts are part of a cycle.

There was very little talk about environmental sustainability with more emphasis on business sustainability. Then there was usual chatter of how one needs to improve customer relations etc etc, you know the drill of how the entire world is a service industry.

They had a forgettable career fair, but the workshops were interesting. On the first day we played the role of consultants, with actual management consultants sitting with us and working on a case for some of the worlds’ future problems. I picked the one of business ecosystems (there were about  to choose from) and it expected us to come up with challenges and solutions to a problems we envisioned will affect the business scenario in 2030. On the second day, the workshop was more of a broadcast with industry folks talking to us about what their company did.

One of the best parts of any conference is the people and this one had some of the more interesting people I have met. I loved how down to earth most of them were and how after a heavy days of attending lectures and workshops you could go downtown to grab a cold one (or many cold ones). It was inspiring to be around people who were involved with so many fascinating projects. While the average age of the WBD delegate was 23 point something, there were the odd 18 year olds who had founded successful human rights organizations, the odd 27 year old who was running three companies and people from South Africa who were interested in obtaining an MBA in Social Entrepreneurship and them going back to their homeland and bringing about change.

The rest of the days were filled with city rallies, beerfests, visits to the museums and hanging outwith friends in pubs where everyone knew your name.

I would definitely recommend anyone to apply to the World Business Dialogue!

Enjoying lunch with friends from all over the world

On top the bridge overlooking the Rhein River. There were over a 10 thousand of these on the grill.

Latino lover

On one of the city rallies with the folks.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

As promised in the last post, my writings are being showcased on numerous platforms and the latest of them being BeyondProfit, a publication of Intellecap.They recently introduced me on their blog as a guest blogger. This means that while I am a staff writer for Nextbillion, in my free time time I contribute exclusive content to a variety of other publications, and since Beyond Profit is a platform that I admire, I decided to forge a relationship with them and provide them with content. Of course they were kind enough to give me the opportunity to do so (Thanks Adrienne!).

My first article for them is an interview I had conducted of Dr G N Rao, the MD of L V Prasad Eye Institute.

Beyond Profit’s twitter round ups are especially useful by the sheer number of companies they’re profiling. Do check that out, it’s written everyday.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

I recently wrote an article on rural BPOs for Triple Pundit, one of the bigger blogs outthere that focus on the triple bottom line approach. Jen, the managing editor was extremely responsive (Thanks Jen!).

Here’s the post, that’s titled Rural Development with Internation Business Outsourcing. I have also starting contributing articles to a host of other really great blogs dedicated to responsible enterprises and development, more on that as and when things roll out.

Coming back to rural BPOs I am doing a more detailed post for Nextbillion, which should come out in sometime. If you or anyone you know can add value to this post by sharing opinions, just shoot me a mail at rishabhkaul at gmail dot com and we’ll get talking.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

Here’s an article I wrote for the 13th World Business Dialogue’s corporate weblog called Brainforum. The original entry can be found here

I remember reading a comprehension passage during my school years titled “A billion strong or weak” which in a Rashomon-esque manner illustrated how we can look at India either as a billion mouths to feed or as 2 billion powerful hands that can be put to work.

Idealistic in many ways, it emphasized on a very important part which I only realized after coming to college.

The economy has to ensure that there’s inclusive growth. This isn’t a rant against capitalism, neither is it a cry for pity. Over the last 2 years I have immersed myself to learn more about the developmental sector and the problems that face our nation. A talk with an eminent social entrepreneur (and one of the first Oxfam GB trustees from a developing nation) made me realize that most models of capitalism don’t benefit the poor because of the way they are structured. The poor end up having no savings because they are caught in a vicious cycle of loans and debt out of which there is no escape. This isn’t to say that capitalism in itself is wrong, in fact I believe that market based approaches to alleviating poverty are in fact very essential for progress. But the form of capitalism that I subscribe to should be inclusive in nature.

I am increasingly getting attracted to localized businesses where profits are generated by not mass production but through production by masses. Ventures that employ an entire community to meet their demands, using local technology, tweaking it to optimize it and increasing productivity. This is why I was so impressed by the work the Honeybee Network was doing along with Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network. It was born out of the need for an institutional framework that would provide handholding support to the rural innovators and link them to the formal systems of technical, financial and marketing services. The idea being that of survival entrepreneurship. Given the dire condition of our villages, innovation is but a necessity rather than a marketing strategy. Some of these village technologies really need that extra push to help them becoming marketable products for the masses.  There is already a lot of talk of adopting locally generated and decentralized energy to equip communities to take care of their own energy requirements. For example Bihar based Husk Power systems which uses Rice husk to generate locally produced energy for the bottom of the pyramid. I believe a lot of grassroots innovations are sustainable and just need mentoring to make their processes more efficient rather introduce completely new technologies, most of which might be inappropriate for that region. More investments in such businesses will indeed be a step in the right direction for emerging economies, economies in transition such as India as well as the least developed nations.

In Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Mehta says that Mumbai’s average population per square kilometer in some areas is 15000 persons per square kilometers. Think about that for a second. Berlin has 2000. He further adds that Mumbai faces a lot of problems such as power shortages and water issues. But he then adds saying that most of the people who come to Mumbai come from the villages which face the same problems. Fixing some of our villages problems will in turn fix the cities problems.

Traders play with money with little or no accountability and finally its the investors and entrepreneurs that suffer. Actually, let me rephrase, its the citizens that have to suffer, which the billions at the bottom of the pyramid that suffer the most. The recession isn’t something inevitable and as long as the development isn’t sustainable and the goals aren’t created for the long term future, there are always going to be these cycles of economic downturn.

Rishabh Kaul is a rising economics undergraduate at BITS Pilani. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com