“India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.” - Mark Twain

The Story of Rural India

60+ % of the population lives in Rural India. India’s economy is an agrarian economy. Simply put, we depend on land, labor and nature to play its role and nature, as we all know, thanks to Al Gore is very fickle. Droughts are common along with the uneven distribution of rainfall or excess rainfall which all cause wastage of crops. Recently installed irrigation systems are the best-in-class according to some, but they don’t reach every farm throughout the vast plains of India.

The darker side of Rural India? The farmers are committing suicide. These suicides have been causing the...

Most people are excited when they take their first flight. They are ecstatic, they tell everyone about it, they are happy to be above the clouds and see the midnight blue sky from their fancy window seats.
In theory, it sounds so right. It sounds like a magnificent thing to happen to humanity, the dark sky, the city lights, the aerial view, the clouds below you, and the pretty airhostesses getting you a glass of scotch. What could possibly be wrong with this fantastic experience?

Well, a lot of things. I will tell you about how fundamentally flawed the airline industry is, I will rant, I will complain and I will go through every point which has annoyed me about taking a flight. (Consider that as my warning for this post being a longread) and at the end of it all, I will make sure you hate flying as much as I do.
To give you a background, I fly every week, sometimes twice a week on the...

When I walked into the conference room, I noticed twenty-five people staring at me with vacant expressions, their hands stopped moving on their laptop keyboards and they just stared, coldly. I was about forty minutes late. I looked at my watch and proceeded to sit down, asking one of them where my coffee was.

My phone rang about five minutes after, I answered it. I didn’t answer it to say I was busy. I actually had a conversation. It lasted about 8 minutes. I proceeded to check my IM’s and Twitter mentions and I asked about my coffee, again. Some guy who was wearing a rather odd colored maroon shirt decided to start speaking. How could I start paying attention if I didn’t have my coffee? I looked at the guy who was now in-charge of making sure I get my cup of java before I killed some people with my bare hands. He wasn’t performing so well under pressure, it seemed. I sighed. He smelt...

As a country India has always been one of the first one’s mentioned when people speak about the nations which are - developing.

India has always had it’s problems but people continue seeing it as a land of opportunity, the biggest democracy of the world, the tolerance and the vibrance, the population and their struggle with life. The religions and the adoption of the western culture. People see India as a nation waiting to be developed.

But it’s not that simple.

The problem isn’t from the outside, it’s us. We demean our country, constantly, unnecessarily at times just for the heck of it. We complain about the inflation and we rant about the infrastructure and we eventually end up dying. That’s our life. The way we even start conversations now with strangers is by saying things like “How about those roads, eh?” We don’t really do anything, most of us don’t even pay our taxes and yet...

I have been around people who are starting up their businesses in India recently. I speak to them about the decisions they take, have dialogues about the capital funding they require and mostly tell them they’re doing it wrong.
Most of them actually decide to startup because they’re out of options and they can’t essentially find a suitable job or they just can’t work for somebody else. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

However my problem is that for different reasons most of them choose to be exclusively online, stating that the eCommerce market is where it’s at right now. And that maybe true globally, but not in India.

I have different theories for why we don’t as a country shop online, one obviously being the debate of the internet penetration level, the literacy rate and poverty levels of any developing country like ours, the other which is only applicable to India is that we as a country...