BS Murthy

Winston Churchill felt that the Indian polity was not ripe enough for independence but Mahatma Gandhi pressed for swarajya nevertheless. Some fifty-five years after Atlee freed India off the British colonial yoke, what is the bottom line of the world’s largest democracy? Barring the brief aberration that was the internal emergency imposed on it by Indira Gandhi, India, has been cruising on the path of democracy. That is about the physicality of going through electoral motions but what about the cerebral quality of the Indian democratic output? The cheerleaders of the Indian democracy cite the shining examples of its electoral maturity in avenging Indira for her emergency and dumping the Janata Party for its insipid rule. Oh, how the wonderful Indian voters routinely dump the haughty in the dustbins of anti-incumbency and where else on earth does democracy shine ever so bright, and such, tend to shape the grand narrative. Was Winston wrong then? No for doubts arose soon as t...

Materials management is about the functional integration of purchase, storage, and issues that involves planning and control of the material needs of an enterprise. Since all the three activities are independent, yet interdependent, they need to be harmonized for achieving overall functional efficiency. But the hitch lays in the halo of the purchase activity entailing glamorous prominence that the other two lack. This aberration is attributable to the functional characteristics of purchasing as well as to the positional prerogative the department enjoys in an organization. Functionally, as the purchase activity involves interaction with willing vendors, the buyers come to occupy the centre stage of the materials management arena. Besides, the cerebral scope the purchase activity entails, which besides providing buyers the opportunity for the flourish of thought and expression in file-noting and letter writing also affords them an ego satisfaction the circulation of their signat...

Management seminars, for long, have come to be perceived as the curative mantras of managerial ills, more so of the public sector enterprises. What with the governments too pitching in to improve their administrative functioning, the seminar halls came to be abuzz with activity and that entailed the high priests of managerial training to rub shoulders with the high and mighty. But if one thing is lacking in all this glamorous glitter, it is method.   But to have the desired effect, even the mantras, as custom ordains us, have to be chanted with appropriate intonation as otherwise they tend to be mere syllables – rhetorical but not impactful. It is apparent that the people organizing or conducting seminars somehow fail to bring this to bear in their managerial recitals. So, the benefits that are supposed to accrue to the participants and their sponsors alike from these expensive exercises are generally not commensurate with the time and money spent on them. Broadly speaki...

In his  Autobiography of a Yogi,  Paramahansa Yogananda, quoted Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s idea of nationalism in his own words thus: ” I call myself a nationalist but my nationalism is as wide as the universe; it embraces all nations. My nationalism includes the prosperity of all nations. I want a strong India able to transfuse its strength to other nations …. Let us look for something new; let us try the power of love and God which are the truth.” Elsewhere,  Gandhi  had proclaimed that  ‘loyalty to the country is always subordinate to loyalty to God’  and re-emphasized that his nationalism was  ‘not exclusive’  but is   of  ‘intense internationalism’. His   averment that  ‘nationalism is as wide as the universe’,  indeed, is the  upanishadic  concept of  vasudhaiva kutumbakam  but as it does not sync with the absolutist precepts of the Semitic faiths, obviously it is of no avail to ...