"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower," Steve Jobs.

And how well these words describe the man himself. For a man who takes home an annual salary of $1, it is surprising that Jobs regularly is in the list of the world's rich and powerful.

In his resume, Jobs says his objective is to look for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. "Am willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy, a bit of that "vision thing" and I'm not afraid to start from the beginning."

Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin to Joanne Simpson and an Egyptian Arab father, Jobs is the chief executive officer of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.

Jobs lives with his wife, Laurene Powell and their three children in Silicon Valley. He also has a daughter, Lisa Jobs from a previous relationship.

Here is Steve Jobs' Commencement address at Stanford University where he speaks about the highs and lows of life, how to counter challenges and how to fight the odds to come out victorious. Jobs delivered this speech on June 12, 2005.

I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.

I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born.

My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.

She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course."

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.

After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

I loved it.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in thecountry.

Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.

Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

And we designed it all into the Mac.

It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.

But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky -- I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.

We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh -- a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

When we did, our board of directors sided with him.

So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down -- that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologise for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me -- I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.

Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So keep looking until you find it.

Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."

It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.

It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day.

Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades.

Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.

It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.

It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.

It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.

Stay Hungry.

Stay Foolish.

And I have always wished that for myself.

And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you.

Over 50% of petrol prices are made of taxes!!!

India’s bureaucratic albatross

The following article is by Tavleen Singh taken from Indian Express.

Tavleen Singh

Every time I deal with Indian officials I become so depressed that I almost need therapy. As a reckless optimist and a proud Indian, I keep hoping that I will one day go into a government office and notice the changes that are necessary if India is to drag herself out of poverty, illiteracy and corruption. Having just last week had dealings with officials in various government departments, I can only report the opposite. Our officials remain untouched by technology, modernity, national interest or higher ideals. So I endorse from the bottom of my heart a new report that concludes that our bureaucrats are the worst in Asia. The report is the result of a survey of 12 Asian economies done last year by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy based in Hong Kong, and although bits of it have found their way into Indian newspapers, there has been not nearly as much fuss as there should have been about a report that shames India.

The report blames India’s ‘suffocating bureaucracy’ for us falling behind countries like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar in providing our people with minimal standards of healthcare, sanitation and education. Examine just the sad fact that 43 per cent of Indian children under the age of five are underweight compared with 20 per cent in Vietnam and 14 per cent in Bhutan and you understand what we are up against. It is not because of a shortage of funds that millions of Indians are forced to live in conditions of shameful poverty and degradation. The Government of India spent Rs 4 trillion on various poverty alleviation programmes last year. The report points out that if even half this money had been distributed among our estimated 60 million poor households, they would each get Rs 80 a day and so rise above the poverty line. Our own Planning Commission pointed this out more than a decade ago but because there has not been the smallest attempt to get our babu-log to work more efficiently, nothing has changed.

The result is that our bureaucrats and the army of petty officials that work under them have remained mired in systems that make the simplest procedure into a long and difficult thing. One of the offices I had to deal with last week was the Regional Passport Office in Delhi. It was hell. There were queues for coupons that allowed you to join queues to enter the building, that led you to other queues that led to a maze of windows behind which sat bored officials. There was no system. If I had not had the help of a guide, I think I may have queued for days, as others do, and taken months to get my ‘tatkaal’ (at once) passport. My English brother-in-law did not even need to go to the British High Commission to renew his. He filled his form online and in three days he had his new passport.

Indian government departments have computers today and access to the Internet, but they seem not to understand that this should put an end to filling endless forms. And, other useless procedures. If things are bad in Delhi, it is hard to even begin to describe how bad they are in the provinces. I have been into provincial government departments and provincial courts in which they are still using ancient typewriters. Then, there are the filthy working conditions that get filthier in our state capitals. Rotting garbage, stray animals, dusty furniture, wires hanging everywhere and mountains of waste paper. The general impression is of a country falling to pieces and not one that harbours dreams of becoming an economic superpower.

The reason why this column bangs on and on about the need for urgent administrative reforms is because without them we can do almost nothing else. It is not just civilian government departments that are mired in 18th-century systems, but even those that deal with national security. Bad governance is a pernicious, pervasive disease. If you want proof, all you need to do is spend five minutes observing procedures in your nearest police station. That is all the time you need to discover that it is not just the absence of modern weapons that handicap our police when they are dealing with Islamist terrorists. It is incompetence enforced by convoluted and confused procedures.

Having covered governance and politics for more than 20 years, it is my humble view that India could become an economic superpower with clean air and water, magnificent new cities and a healthy, literate population, if we could make our officials do their jobs properly. Dr Manmohan Singh knows this and has been talking about the importance of administrative reforms since the first press conference he gave after he became Prime Minister in 2004. Why does he do nothing about it?

LIFE-CYLE

Just exactly as if you are landing a spaceship from another galaxy, your soul enters your body and lands here on Earth. Perhaps you come from out of nowhere, out of nothingness.
Or else you had a previous existence somewhere, in another realm or in this realm, and you have forgotten it.
Perhaps you land here of your own free choice.
Or some cosmic force some karma beyond you causes you to land on this planet; and you have no choice. No matter. This is Earth. You land and stay for a while.



You come here to do certain specific things.
You may have one task or many. Your tasks may be obvious to you or you may need time, effort, maybe struggle even to clarify your tasks.
You may never quite even clarify your task until the moment your time in this body ends.
You may work on your task for years before you realize, “This is my task.”
The tasks you came to perform may take the whole of your life or be done in an instant.
You may be aware you are performing your life task while you do it.
You may perform your task quickly, hardly noticing anything special, unaware you are doing the task you came to do while you do it.
Your task may be so easy, obvious and natural, you never even wonder, "What is my task?"
Your unique blend of talents and interests may lead you to your task and you just do it.
Or, your task may be a constant, unpleasant struggle you fight every step of the way.
Your task may be noble and wonderful and gain you recognition, rewards and honors.
Or, it may be simple, totally unnoticeable by anyone else.




You will be born with a powerful innate desire to remain alive. You will do almost anything to continue living. At some point you may discover some limits, and allow your life to end.




Every thought you have, every action you take, every feeling you perceive is an experience.
Experiences are neither good nor evil. Some experiences are short, some are long.
Some experiences will be fun, others will be excruciating.
Sometimes experiences seem interconnected, sometimes they seem random.
They are simply experiences.




Your experiences will come to you through four modalities: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
Your body will give you physical messages of sensation, movement, pain and pleasure.
Your emotional mechanism’s feelings will attract you and repel you in different directions, sometimes conflicting.
Your mind’s thoughts will make logical inferences and judgments about your experience.
Your soul’s intuitions will guide you to realize the deepest subtleties of your experience and its meaning.




Some of your experiences will be difficult. They will bring you pain and suffering.
You may wish with all your heart that some experience did not come your way.
You may find joy in the challenge of an experience, even when the pain is most severe.
Each difficult experience is a challenge, an opportunity to continue.




You will have the experience of choosing or selecting. More than one viable option will lie before you.
You will experience weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each, as best you can.
You will perceive yourself picking one and letting go of the other.
Some experiences of deciding will be very difficult; others scarcely worth noting.
Your decisions will have consequences.
The consequences of a choice may be significant or trivial.
The ultimate consequences of a choice may be very different from their first appearance.




You will experience a process of change in yourself.
One moment you may be paralyzed with fear of what lies ahead; the next moment you will feel confident and knowledgeable having walked through the fear.
The change may come gradually with no clear moment or division.
Whether the outcome you receive is what you were hoping for or very different, you will grow through each experience.




You will experience stages in your life. You begin as a single cell and grow until you are born as a small infant. You continue to grow through the life-cycle for as long as you survive: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, maturity, super-maturity, elderhood, and frailty.
You may not live through all of the available stages. Each segment contains physical, emotional, mental and spiritual growth experiences unique to itself.
Stages may end and begin suddenly, or segué into one another gradually.
As you conclude a stage you may feel relief or remorse that it is over.
Once you move through a stage, it is over; you cannot go back.




You will receive assistance through this process. You will find various teachers and mentors
who will share their experiences and help you read the signposts along your way. You will have birth parents who will be your central guides; or you will find surrogates for them. If you do not find another person to be your guide, you may find you can look deep within to find guidance.




You will find diverse modes through which to exchange information with other beings. You will learn spoken and written languages.
You will find ways to communicate with your body. You will communicate many things through your actions. You will discover a variety of visual, auditory and tactile arts through which to express your thoughts and feelings.
You may also discern very subtle, almost unnamable communications which can be the most powerful.




Every experience requires abilities. You will master diverse skills for an endless array of available activities.
You will have innate talents for some skills; they will come to you so easily they seem automatic.
Others will require many hours or even years to master; even after much practice, you may never become proficient at them.




You will participate in games at every stage of life.
You will play with others or by yourself in a variety of contests.
Some games will be fun; some will be deadly serious. Some games will be highly competitive; others will be totally noncompetitive.
You may compete individually or as a team, against others or only against yourself.
Some games will offer physical or material rewards or acclaim from others if you are successful at them.



You will study diverse subjects, each of which attempts to explain some details of how the world works. You may study them in a school or by your own investigation.
You will acquire minimal knowledge of some, and you will dive deeply in others.
You will learn aspects of mathematics, geography, physics, sociology, economics, biology, astronomy, anthropology, history, engineering, the arts, chemistry, philosophy, and religion.




You will be inclined to produce something or to provide a service for which you receive compensation.
Your work will earn you the food and shelter you need to survive and less essential things for your enjoyment.
You may work many long hours each day or a much smaller time segment. Your work may be an important component of your life task. Or, your work may ensure your physical survival or comfort, allowing you to fulfill the tasks you came here to do.




You will find a group of individuals to which you feel connected, either by birth, or by affinity.
You will experience a bond with the other members of this tribe or with the tribal entity itself.
You will be subject to the rules your tribe makes.
You will have a position within the tribe based on your birth or your talents. Your position will affect your activities within the tribe and throughout your life. You may find you are a part of more than one tribe or that your tribe is part of a tribal confederation.




You will find deities to which to attach your greatest fears and devotions.
You may have one god or many. You may learn about your god or gods from others or you may experience them yourself. Your gods may be attached specifically to your tribe or they may claim a wider domain. Your gods may be projections of human experience or they may be something beyond human experience with a reality all their own.




At certain special moments of your life you will mark transitions: you will sing, you will dance, you will talk to your gods, and you will do special rituals to celebrate.
You may celebrate alone or in a group.
You will celebrate those moments when you or someone in your tribe passes from one stage of the growth process to another.
Special good times and special bad times call for celebrations. Repeating seasons of each year ask for celebrations as well.




You will be drawn to certain individuals with whom you will share some of your experiences more closely. You will experience strong connections with some of the friends you find. Some will remain friends for a short time, while others may remain close to you for long periods.




You will be drawn to bond strongly with a partner. Like friends, mates may remain for short or long periods of time. Your mate may be your closest, special friend or a friend with whom you share a set of experiences. You may have one mate for your lifetime or more than one mates at different times.




You will earn rewards for your work or in payment for your other activities. Some wealth will have material value which you can exchange for physical objects or services you desire or which your tribe convinces you, you desire.
Other types of wealth are more subtle and not exchangeable. You will decide which types of wealth you will pursue and how vigorously to pursue each of them.




You will exert control through your physical being, your wealth, your office, your abilities, your personal energy or your facility for managing other people.
With this power you will make some things happen the way you want them to happen.
If your power is great enough, others will do what you would like them to do, even if it is not in their own best interest.




You will experience delights of the senses. Food, touch, music, aroma, nature, movement, art and dance will intensify your enjoyment of your time here.




You will feel an intense yearning of your body to touch another person most deeply. The intensity of that touch may take the experience beyond the body, to bond closely with the other person or to procreate, to make the life-cycle begin anew.




You will experience the urge to create your own space where you spend most of your time, where you belong, where you experience roots. It may be in the place of your origin or you may feel compelled to travel elsewhere to create it. You may wish to share your home with those closest to you.




You will express yourself or create something existing independently of yourself. What you form may last for generations or for only a moment. The content of your expression may take physical form or it may reach out through other media.




You will feel the urge to show others whatever you have earned, whatever you have created, whatever you have learned, whatever you have become. You may wish to display it publicly, to have others to view it. Or, you may display it privately just for yourself or a few others.




As your experiences broaden, you will become familiar with experience itself. You will recognize its ebb and flow, and you will become more comfortable with its changes. You may experience the desire to share this wisdom you accumulate with others.



You will do things your tribe decided was forbidden or others told you is wrong. You may do some things that something within you says you should not do. You will test some of the limits by lying, cheating, stealing, or doing other things that may cause pain. You may get caught by those in power and you may have to pay a penalty.




You will participate in the birth process and the child rearing process. You may give birth to a child. You may take a central role in guiding a child through life’s stages. You may experience parenting as bringing whatever you create into existence.




You will feel impelled to share some of what you learn through life’s experience with others. You may teach in a classroom or through any mode of communications available to you.

You will experience the need to let go of some things. You will discharge waste from your body, from your physical surroundings, from your emotional apparatus, from your mind and from your spirit. You will seek ways to discharge your wastes in a manner that is safe for yourself and your environment.




You will experience disease, pain, or sickness in yourself, in those around you or even in the whole planet.
You will feel the urge to find remedies and treatments, emotional support, and focused energy to aid in the healing process.




In some activities, you will not reach the goal you desired. You will feel pain at your failure. At times, the pain of failure will become very severe.




Everything you have is impermanent. Things you work for and you value will not remain with you forever. People close to you will die. You will feel pain with loss.




At times your emotional mode will become extremely highly charged. You will be moved to cry, either in pain or in joy or in some mixture of both.



You will experience the urge to connect intensely in physical, emotional, mental and spiritual modes.
Your love toward other beings, nature, gods, or life itself will draw you very close to the other, to identify with it most intimately or to lose yourself in it.




You will become comfortable with the diversity among other beings. You will experience accepting other beings exactly as they are, in their own unique perfection, exactly as you would like them to accept you as you are.




You will go through fundamental alterations in the quality of your experience either spontaneously or as a result of prayer, meditation, ritual, song, or special foods. You will experience great love, wisdom, serenity, or connection to a god or nature.
Experiencing altered states of consciousness will affect all of your other experiences.
You will experience yourself transformed into a different being.



The limits of your experience will expand to include intuition or a transcending of this realm or a oneness with something much greater than yourself.
You may experience yourself leaving your body or knowing things before they occur.
You may experience powerful synchronicity. You may lose your sense of yourself as an independent being and experience yourself as one with the infinite wholeness of the universe.




You will experience the urge to pass on the tale of your lifetime.
You may tell your story to those most likely to remember it or you may transmit it in some other artistic form.



You will leave your body. Everyone else will experience your body becoming lifeless and begin to decay. You will no longer be present in this plane in your physical form, but some aspects of your emotional, mental and spiritual modes may continue to be experienced by others.




Your emotional, mental or spiritual modes will enter some sort of afterlife. You may be aware of your continuity between this lifetime and the next realm or you may not.
You may experience reincarnation into the body of another being and begin another lifetime.
The nature of your next realm may be determined by your activities and experiences in this lifetime. The nature of the next realm may be extremely subtle and indescribable.




Those who knew you will recall who you were, what you did, what you gave and the qualities you manifested.
If you physically parented another, your genetic material will continue within them as well.
Others’ remembering you will continue to affect them directly and the whole planet indirectly in subtle and not so subtle ways.

The Return of Malthus

For those of you who are hearing of this gentleman for the first time, he was the 19th century scholar who postulated (the Malthusian Theory), that nature will keep producing population growth, until it creates a resource crunch, which will then create a series of natural calamities, decimating the population and setting off a new cycle.

Intuitively, he found a lot of adherents, because in the old, pre-industrial, deflationary economy, this was actually true; till man learnt ‘systematic innovation’ and started to create new professions and economics became a tool in his hands to achieve progress.

After 1850, the world learnt about inflation, monetary policy and the Industrial Revolution, which created the modern era. Thereafter, the ‘natural limits’ to any constraint started to shift outwards, until 150 years later, we have started to believe that even a desperately poor country like India has a hope of beating the Malthusian Theory.

After Japan, it became the done thing to argue that human ingenuity would be able to beat all known (resource) constraints. You could have a tiny island nation with almost no natural resources, and the dubious distinction of having a quarter of all known natural disasters, which could grow to be the most productive nation in the world, by all known measures of savings and wealth accumulation.

As always, we Indians learn the wrong lessons. We extrapolated this to tell ourselves that our huge population would never hit a resource crunch, and that our own ingenuity would always delay the onset of Armageddon.

We forgot that every time man beat the Malthusian clock, then it was because he had a lot of time to see the threat and react to it.

This time, global warming will set off a series of events that might not give us enough time to react. If the current El Nino effect turns out to be a regular affair, how many years of 60 per cent monsoon deficits can we survive?

The current monsoon deficit may well turn out to be the most comprehensive, countrywide drought that we have seen in the last 100 years. We have been following coal-based energy usage, refusing to give up our right to pollute, with the “dog in the manger” attitude that it was the West that had done the most damage till now. But the worst affected will be us; the frail, weak uptick that we have seen these last 10 years, will be over-shadowed by what follows.

If we have three monsoon failures in a row, do we have the desalination industry that will produce enough clean, potable water to quench an entire nation’s thirst? How quickly do we have communication systems to create a culture of rain harvesting, water conservation/recycling etc.? No doubt, Israel has beaten all limitations to agricultural productivity, but how quickly can we duplicate those achievements?

In the short run, we will need to quickly create a market for water. There is no way you can tell a population that something has suddenly become precious, without putting a price to it.

The reason this will not happen is this: Mamata Banerjee/The Left/The BJP will politicise the issue. Just as any concessions given to the Kyoto negotiations is seen as a sign of weakness. I am very sure that no national consensus on water will be built, until it is too late.

This time, the consequence will not be economic, but humanitarian. Geopolitical think-tanks have postulated that India will be one of the worst-affected victims of global warming, with an estimated 100 million people dying.

If 2009 is to water, what 1991 was to forex, then we have the same man-in-charge. The PM hopefully has the same understanding of this problem that he had of the forex crunch. Certainly, he has the mandate to move swiftly on this issue. He just needs to tick off the following policy prescriptions:

* Get off your high horse on the Kyoto negotiations. It makes no sense to defend our right to pollute just because the West had done so;
* The country that gets off the ground first, on ‘alternate energy’, will see technological leadership in one of the most important pillars of economic progress in the current century — clean energy. The solar mission, if it is serious, is a step in the right direction. It needs to be followed up with the development of a quasi-fiscal investment market that subsidises the excess capital cost of solar energy, leaving enough space for cost-led innovation;
* Then focus on the clean energy applications. The first would be a full commodity market in water: just make water enormously profitable to everyone;
* Create a panel of IDFC-like nodal investment institutions, whose bonds have 200 per cent weighted tax-free deduction, i.e. for every Rs 100 subscribed to the bonds, you get Rs 200 as deduction (far better than raising the taxable limit). That provides a 70 per cent subsidy to the capital cost of solar power, which the institution channelizes as debt to the sector. Set high debt norms with long paybacks for eligible projects.
* Now let a thousand flowers bloom. Include the desalination industry in this panel of clean energy users. Create a pseudo-market in “water paper”, where credits are given to those who recycle industrial (waste) water, converting it to agricultural-grade clean water. This should create millions of recycling units, mostly based on solar applications, a variant of the solar water heating systems that have been so successful in rural areas;
* Promote the same ‘water paper’ to create a micro-irrigation industry, through which farmers can buy entitlement to water through the adoption of micro-irrigation techniques. Target subsidies through a small set of producers, where the leakages would be less;
* The first step is to create a sense of crisis, before a real one is created (I hope I have not spoken too late). The current monsoon may be typical of many more to come, and we will need a typical Dhirubhai Ambani overkill: create a giant capacity, 100 times the water needs of Delhi, then get to work at making it dependent on clean energy, maybe solar.

The problem with a product market for water is that the (commodity) prices will be very volatile, with prices collapsing during a good monsoon. So it has to be an investment-led market, not a product-market, i.e. the capital cost would be contributed through a market instrument, similar to the timeshare industry, or the one-time premium insurance products. If all sides of the industry are left open to market pricing, then there would be enough space for innovation to create a spectacular winner. A company that either reduces the cost of the project, or which can reduce the cost of capital, or which can extract other operating efficiencies, will find itself at the top of the industry.

“The cost of communication will go to zero”, said Ambani to a new recruit in 1989, when asked about the next big thing for the ‘90s. For the new millennium, Reliance should have been working at taking the cost of energy to zero. Certainly, if it can take the cost of water to zero, it would have made every Indian its customer: another Dhirubhai dream.

There is more greatness for anyone interested. A company that sits at the heart of all Indian energy usage is bound to be the next Reliance (if it isn’t Reliance itself). 80 per cent of the energy used in India’s villages, goes into water management. Think of the economic potential that will get unlocked by someone who takes that out.