Guest Post: Harsha Konduri

One of the most successful entrepreneurs of BITS Goa, he has been quite an iconic figure for many of us. He has agreed to make the first contribution to the guest post series on my blog. In this post, he talks about entrepreneurship and some of the challenges against it in our country today. Enjoy the post while I sit back and sink my sinful teeth into a really huge bar of fine dark chocolate presented to me by Guru, who is back from the US :D. Thanks a ton Guru and welcome back!
     

"I play the game for the game's own sake." - Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.

Its been a while since I've been able to write few sentences about a freakonomic view on anything that's come my way - but there was one certain thing - next time I sat down to blog - it would definitely take the title straight out of Sherlock Holmes mouth - as a tribute to the Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes effort.

It is customary to write why : but this time it was more 'who' :  it all is , where you are reading this from.

But 'the why' is nonetheless significant :

Why are the Google phenomenon  or Yahoo trend not from India?

By asking this very pertinent question , we are eventually forced to answer three daunting retrospective questions

1. Can the next-likes of them,come from India?
2. Could they have been from India?
3. If they can,When would it be?

In my pursuit to try to get to these questions - I get the perspective from the way I've seen or been a part of the various interactions with startups which operate from Bangalore to Boston :

The Social Setup

The top pick in the blame game would be the way whole societal structure is interlinked for example :

Take a look at this :

1)A Brahman Boy - out of a well to do family narrowly escapes repeating 7th grade - we hear this : this fella should be caught in the exception block of the Indian caste system - Brahmin's are born to be brilliant at education and NOTHING else.We leave every other good bit of the Vedic chaturvarna caste system and its responsibilities and cling on to only the single glorifying characteristic of them.

2)Gets 12/75(16%)in Maths 1A in Grade 11 - has a brother who raked 100% in every possible exam in the very school - the younger brother went to.The instructor puts both of them in a COMPARATOR but the call to such a function is just with just one parameter 'MARKS'.The problem is we expect all siblings to be W'right' Brothers and their stardom - easily reproducible.

3)They guy next door syndrome - this actually stems from the fact that parents (most of them) try to identify the success/failure of their own son and that of others in the ward himself and be very attributive of this to the son and expect him to excel and protect their pride

An aggregation of the attitude we demonstrate in each of these situations will lead us to putting the premise this way - we force the son to choose the virtual 'path of glory' - which is often over crowded - more so because we are more than 100 billion people in which we belong to 2 distinct categories - 1)being the 'wandering generality' and the 2)wanting to push our son into the class of 'wandering generality' which sums upto the 100 billion - which is a reason enough that our Service Industry flourishes - not taking anything away from them that we've been able to build Infosys,TCS,Wipro,erstwhile Satyam.

The key element that goes missing here is the 'ability to risk anything,to do what you'd love to do'

Which is a amalgamation of discovering your work love - which is often inhibited at the roots because we are forced to take the path often traversed , the moment the lookout starts - the outlook changes.

Risk taking ability - Imagine if Sabeer Bhatia - wouldn't have given up the much respected BITS Pilani degree in between to go to the US - it would have taken much longer for us to see free web-based email.If the shackles of societal pressures would have played too much on Evan Williams(of Pyra Labs fame - which created BlogSpot.com) , Manoj would have had to forward this piece of thought to all of you.

While this is the 1st part of the series of why we need to play the entrepreneurial game for its own sake - would like to thank Manoj for having me guest blog on his 'very soon will be' famous blog-spot.

P.S. Dark Chocolate rocks!! \m/