Can we hold this band wagon???

Yesterday I was reading the book "Chindia" which talks about how countries like China & India are changing the face of this world. Suddenly some thoughts struck my mind - Why is India so special? Have we worked hard to achieve this GDP growth so far OR is this because of the natural advantage that we already have (vast english speaking population available at low cost). Is there any other nation preparing to take on India next decade? Do we know our strengths & do we have a vision? Or are we going to see a US like situation down the line?

Well, honestly I have no clue!!! Neither do I feel that we have worked hard (Unlike Japan) to reach this state. Most of our success so far are primarily because of the natural advantages that we have. But how sustainable those advantages are? Are we not sailing a boat without bothering about it's fuel capacity? If that is the case, the boat is definitely going to stop sooner or later. And you know how difficult it is to survive when your boat stops in the middle of a ocean!!!

I feel no strength is sustainable unless we work on it & make it better than yesterday. If you talk about players like Schumi, Fedrer & Tendulkar; these guys definitely had some natural advantage in the begining over their counterparts. But they were intelligent to understand that it's easy for counterparts to replicate their techniques  and come to their level sooner or later. So they never stopped working on their strengths & weaknesses. They got rid of all possible weaknesses to remain successful over decades or so. My point is: Even a genius has to work hard to sustain his success.

So lessons for India & we Indians would be - work hard on weaknesses, strive to make our strengths non-replicable & remain innovative to maintain a substantial lead over our immediate counterparts!!!

Health Insurance Reform - Quite a Good Idea

I briefly watched the speech by Barack Obama on Health Insurance Reform. I liked the fundamentals that he is trying to address here. The vision is quite clear - "Let no American broke just because (s)he is sick". Fundamentally I found it to be quite a noble thought, yet execution of such a reform would remain quite a tough task. As he rightly said, insurance companies play a foul game when it comes to paying the bills/reimbursements. They come up with reasons which are beyond comprehension at times. There is a tendency to delay payments. They instead look out for one small mistake on the part of the customer so that they can be denied the reimbursement. So in such a scenario, the ideal thing to do would be to introduce competition where the competitor would provide easy insurance options & easy norms so that people get "really benefited". And that's exactly what he is trying to do. He is creating an entity which will be called as a "Insurance exchange" where every individual/ small business firms can get health insurance at a competitive & affordable price. These are still only on papers. We need to wait & watch the real success of this!!! Who knows, this might become a key propaganda for politicians in next election in India as well....