Max Muller
When a speaker at an offshoring conference in an Asian city was talking on India: What can it teach us, few among the delegates knew that the title was a verbatim lift from a hundred year old book by F Max Muller, a German scholar of Sanskrit. Max Mullerand many other European scholars in the 18th and 19th century first brought to the world what traditional Indian treatise have in store. What they were attracted by was the quest for truth among Indian sages thousands of years backthe first explicit acknowledgement of Indias knowledge culture by outsiders that continue even today in the form of Tom Friedmans World is Flat!

The IITs
When Pandit Nehru envisaged the setting up of the IITs, opinion was divided about the rationale of the government spending so much on higher education. With time, as Indias economic progress did not match the expectations, many of the graduateswho were the best brains in Indiamigrated to developed countries, giving rise to a popular phrase: brain drain that ruled the Indian psyche for decades, raising questions about government funding once again. Well, no one needs to be told today what the IITs have done for India. Today, there is hardly any truly global corporationespecially in the knowledge industrieswhich does not have an IITian in a senior managerial position. Apart from selling India, many IITians have invested in the country. But, most importantly, they have been able to tell the world what knowledge means to a nation which at the time of their set-up, was facing basic problems of food, potable water and health!

KPO
While BPO came to India; India discovered KPO. The traditional definition of BPO carried an adjective non-core to the processes getting outsourced. India dropped it. BPO was discovered by American companies to cut cost and enhance efficiency. In India, they learnt that they could add business value by offshoring. Many companies who had hardly outsourced, offshored to India. Be it research, legal process, product development or engineering design, companies discovered that they could offshore and even outsource them to India. What a better name than Knowledge Process Outsourcing? And what a better proof of Indias knowledge-centric environment?

Gandhi
To put Mahatma Gandhi in this list would seem out of place to many. But through his insistence on non-violence as a weapon against the British in the struggle for Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi proved to the world, in the most convincing way, that in a battle of reason and might, reason is the winner. Opinion was divided over whether Gandhis non-violence would have worked against say the Nazis. We do not know; neither did Gandhi preach it as a universal principle. By choosing the path of reason, he was just showing his confidence in the British peoples collective sense of reason. It was a strategy based on the conviction that by appealing to the rationality of the opponent, you can win your case. A pure passionate you versus me would not have got the kind of success that India got: not just the independence but a solid foundation for a nation that would sustain democracy in the future.

The Middle Path
It means different things to different people. To the critics, it means lack of courage; to the modern analysts it symbolizes de-risking. From Buddhas time to Narasimha Raos, the middle path has been a favored course of Indians. The traditional preference for the middle path in India has been guided by the desire to avoid the extremes that often means jingoism and the tendency to prefer vehemence to reason: the reason why Indias politics has been dominated by centrist parties since independence. Critics point out that the middle path forces consensus which sometimes lead to mediocrity. That may well be true in a few cases, but, by and large, the middle path has been able to create a culture of trust and cooperation.

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam/
Dr Manmohan Singh
Democracy is populism; the rule of the might of numbers. Yet, the fact that at a time two of Indias top poststhe head of the state and the head of governmentwere held by two of the most accomplished scholars in their areas showed that whatever may be the state of politics, Indians still reserve their highest respect for the learned. In fact, many of Indias presidentsDr Rajendra Prasad, Dr S Radhakrishnan, Dr Zakir Hussainwere the best-known scholars in their respective fields. While the path that they took to reach the positions may be different, the fundamental reason is the same: the politicians who elect the president understand very well that by putting up the scholars as candidates, they could appeal to the sentiment of the common Indian, who has the sincerest respect for men of knowledge.

Raaga Music
Indian classical music is one of the earliest aspects of Indian culture to gain acceptability and popularity outside India. The striking difference of the classical music in India as compared to the Western classical music, is the scope for improvisation by the individual. The rules of the ragas are as stringent as they could be. Yet, the scope for improvisation is so much that it often baffles Western critics. This is based on the principle that while discipline is important; it is only by rich infusion of individual creativity that an art form can flourish: a true pointer to a knowledge culture.

The gharanas of Hindustani music are based on formalizing this tradition through what is called Guru-Shishya parampara, which is based on the training being passed on from the teacher to the disciple over years. This again points to the importance of the guru.

CK Prahalad (and others)
Guru is a word that was given to the world by India. It is no surprise that CK Prahalad, an Indian-American professor has been voted as the worlds greatest management thinker in the Thinkers 50, an annual list of worlds greatest management thinkers. Prahalad is not alone; he is accompanied by many more Indiansthinker and author Ram Charan; innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan; and Prof Rakesh Khurana of Harvard. Many others like Prof Mohanbir Sawhney and Jagdish Sheth are not in the list but are acknowledged thought leaders in their areas, not to forget the late Prof Sumantra Ghoshal. The influence that these thinkers have on the world business is huge.

While management guru may be a 20th century phrase, the concept of independent philosophers in various areas whose sole aim was to help in the advancement of knowledge is also a culture that the world draws from India and Greece. The success of thinkers like Prahalad is a reaffirmation that the love for knowledge and ability to do abstract thinking as a trait has not changed in centuries!

The Kama Sutra
(and other treatise)
If the influence of CK Prahalad and Ram Charan on business leaders and managers today is immense, so was it in ancient India, and in almost all walks of life. Vatsayanas Kama Sutra is surely the most well known treatise on a specific subject, but by no means was it the only such example. Bharatas Natya Shastra (on aesthetics), Kautilyas Arthashastra (on real politick) and the Smritis of Manu and Yajnavalkya (on social guidelines) are all examples of a prevailing culture of thinking in ancient and medieval India. While Indians have taken pride in what these treatise discussed years back, what has been less highlighted is that the authors of all these were sages who were not practitioners in these areas but focused on pursuit of knowledge alone, for the sake of larger mankind. While they were pure jnanayogis, the practitioners were the karmayogis. This clear distinction between knowledge and actionwhich is articulated in the Gita as the path of knowledge is for the sages; path of action is for practitioners (jnanayogens sankhyanam karmayogena yoginam)is the best example the world has on the focus on advancement of knowledge, something that the academics like Prahalad and Govindarajan are practicing even today. And so are many other academics.

Pathological Learning Syndrome
According to the annual DQ-IDC Best Employer Survey in the last few years, one of the top three factors which makes Indian IT employees change their jobs/stick to an employer is what technology they would get to work on. Needless to say, the newer the technology the better is the attractiveness of the job. The typical Indian IT workers love for learning anything new defies all logic. In fact, the tendency to learn for learnings sake is so acute that a global research firm coined a phrase for it: pathological learning syndrome. A cursory look at certification agency Brainbenchs annual Global Skills Report will convince one beyond doubt. India, which in the last year got more IT certifications (such as Microsoft, Cisco certified professionals) than any other country except the US, accounted for more than seven times the certifications than the third-placed Russian Federation!

Lack of Systems
A not-so-positive aspect of Indias knowledge culture is the complete dependence on individual capability and reluctance to devise and follow systems, giving rise to popular jokes such as one Indian is better than one American, but ten Indians are worse! Lack of systems creates chaos. Some say, however, that a lack of systems paves way for more innovation! You decide.

Parliamentary Democracy
In his book Future of Freedom, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria proves the correlation of GDP (through capitalist wealth creation) and democracy. The only country in the world that defies his formula is India. The sustainability of Indias democracydespite all the flaws that critics point outis the best pointer to the average Indians love for freedom. Without a solid foundation of rational decision-making, it is not possible to think of a sustainable democracy, that too the only one with truly democratic communists!

The Explorative Indian
The history of a vibrant trade practice in ancient and medieval India is well recorded. While Kalinga (Orissa) on the East Coast used the sea routes to sail to Java, Sumatra, Bali in Indonesia and other countries in South East Asia, Gujarati traders practiced their trade with West Asia and the Arab. The primary reason was, of course, trade but the explorers used this opportunity to spread the local culture in these lands, which are vibrant even today in places like Indonesia and Cambodia. It was probably the first instance of Soft Power, which modern consumer companies like Coca Cola and PepsiCo were credited with or accused of using centuries later. What is significant here is that even at a time when military might, religious conversion or a combination of both were the only known recourse to spread influence (and even trade, remember East India company centuries later?), Indians recognized the power of Soft Power!

College Street
Anyone who has been to Kolkatas College Street (and to a lesser extent other such places as Sunday book market in Delhis Daryaganj) knows how throngs of booklovers spend entire days in these places looking for rare books. While there may be great second hand bookshops in many cities in the world, such democratized old books markets could be seen only in India!

Unity in Diversity
The popular slogan about Indias uniquenessthe pluralism in Indian societyis a direct result of the Indian psyche to respect others viewpoint. It does not mean shying away from debating out the opinions, but being able to coexist peacefully even with all those debates! Though that culture is getting diluted of late, it is still the prevalent culture. And that is the culture of rationalism.

Free Press
The Indian media has a developed world professionalism and a third-world like sense of responsibility, said an American media analyst a few years back. While the second part may not seem too true today (but then, who believes today that India is a third world country?), no one can question the freedom that media enjoys in India. While credit has been given to democracy, Nehrus vision and many more things, it is difficult to believe a free, vibrant media would exist and grow without the basic curiosity on part of the common Indian to know the truth!

Software Prowess
It is in our genes, quipped Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister credited with putting computer in everyday vocabulary in India. He was talking about the Indian engineers ability to excel in developing computer software. That was two decades back. We still do not know if it is in our genes. What we know is that today global technology landscape is unthinkable without India. While critics have often termed Indian software houses as coding factories, in the last few years, Indian companies have proved that when it comes to competing on latest tech, they are second to none. And just look at the number of R&D labs that global multinationals have set up in India, and there is no scope for any debate.

Shyamanuja Das
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in

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