Of all the tech tigers in India, Wipro is one of a handful that stands out from the pack. In the past five years, it has become one of the most accomplished tech services providers in the world. Wipro is known to go above and beyond to make customers happy--a move that's paid off handsomely. From the story of Wipro's transformation and its impact on the tech services industry and the rules of global competition, journalist Hamm mines a treasure of business lessons. He also provides a rare glimpse into the mind of Wipro's charismatic leader, Azim Premji, one of the first business leaders in India to decree that his company would not pay bribes. You'll see how his adoption of world-class business processes helped Wipro thrive--and how Wipro is helping to fulfill his dream of a better educated, more prosperous India.--From publisher description.
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The stunning Booker Prize–winning novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day that critics have likened to Richard Wright’s Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India’s caste society. “This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before” (John Burdett, Bangkok 8). The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society. Recalling The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, The White Tiger is narrative genius with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation—and a startling, provocative debut.
Airlines willing to develop insight from foresight relating to the expected ’step phase changes’ will eventually improve their margins. However, the backward-looking airline, managed using old strategic levers and short-term metrics, will cease to exist, merge, shrink, become more dependent on government support, or become irrelevant. ’Management innovations’ are not going to deliver the required improvements; innovation within management is essential for airlines' survival. In Flying Ahead of the Airplane, Nawal Taneja analyzes global changes and thought-provoking scenarios to help airline executives adjust and adapt to the chaotic world. Drawing on his experience of real airline situations worldwide, the author concludes that there is a gulf between what executives are doing now and what they need to do to stay ahead of the curve. To close this gap, the author suggests that airline executives focus on just three relevant initiatives: a) aligning business and technology strategies, b) redesigning organization structures to centralize the role of the scheduling function, and c) developing relevant brands that integrate social networking technology. To support this third initiative, the book provides insights on branding from 20 fascinating non-aviation case studies from around the world. Flying Ahead of the Airplane will assist practitioners in airlines of every size to integrate future trends into their mainstream thinking and launch flexible business models to manage risk and compete effectively in the ’flattening world’.
The records contained in a long forgotten chest found in London set off three intrepid adventurers from Britain, Pakistan and India on an exciting and dangerous mission to unravel a top-secret plan hatched two centuries ago by the Divans of Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore.’ While narrating the story of their expedition, the author weaves a web of fiction of high drama, full of suspense and unexpected twists and turns, in the back-drop of historical facts, with a touch of romance and espionage, before bringing the curtain down with a thrilling climax at a remote and astonishingly beautiful place in Karnataka.
In This Book, The Author Recalls Some Of His Unforgettable Experiences And Also Record His Observations On The Behaviour Of Tigers. There Is Also A Chapter On Jungle Superstitions And Uncanny Episodes. Like New.
Founded by the chieftain Kempe Gowda around 1537, the story of Bangalore has no grand linear narrative. The location has revealed different facets to settlers and passers-through. The city, the site of bloody battles between the British and Tipu Sultan, was once attached to the glittering court of Mysore. Later, it became a cantonment town where British troops were stationed. Over time, it morphed into a city of gardens and lakes, and the capital of PBI - Indian scientific research. More recently, it has been the hub of PBI - India's information technology boom, giving rise to Brand Bangalore, an PBI - Indian city whose name is recognized globally. Hidden beneath these layers lies a cosmopolitan city of sub-cultures, engaging artists and writers, young geeks and students. People from every corner of PBI - India and beyond now call it home.In this collection of writings about a multi-layered city, there are stories from its history, translations from Kannada literature, personal responses to the city's mindscape, portraits of special citizens, accounts of searches for lost communities and traditions, among much more. U.R. Ananthamurthy writes about Bangalore's Kannada identity; Shashi Deshpande maps the city through the places she has lived in since she was a young girl; Anita Nair draws a touching portrait of a florist who celebrates the glories of the Raj; Ramachandra Guha describes his close bond with Bangalore's most unusual bookseller; and Rajmohan Gandhi recounts the Mahatma's trysts with the city. From traditional folk ballads to a nursery rhyme about Bangalore, from poems to blogs, from reproductions of turn of the twentieth century picture postcards to cartoons, Multiple City is the portrait of a metropolis trying to retain its roots as it hurtles into the future.
From Kannada's first Jnanpith award winner, a landmark of modern fiction that documents a vanishing world. When Hoovayya and Ramayya return from their studies in the city to their ancestral home, much has changed, throwing the even tenor of village life out of joint. The entry of Subbamma, the young wife of much-married Chandrayya Gowda into the House of Kanooru, sets in motion an irrevocable chain of events which signify the coming of age of a resolutely traditional society. Acutely conscious of the burden of their education amidst the torpor of manorial life, the brothers are forced to witness the descent into cruelty of Chandrayya Gowda, who breaks old familial ties, and demands an impossible fealty. The petty meanness of the Gowda s old age and the idealistic vitality of youth confront each other when Hoovayya and Ramayya both fall in love with Seethe, their childhood playmate, with disastrous consequences for the manor house of Kanooru. The epic conflicts of a decaying feudal order are seen through a multiplicity of characters, and voices that refuse to be silenced. The first stirrings of change in the lives of the Belas, the highland plantation workers and their labouring women, the proud Shudra landowners, the secretive and predatory Agrahara of the Brahmins, are dramatized by a humane eye sensitive to the slightest nuance. The House of Kanooru is ultimately a moving tribute by one of Kannada s greatest writers to the spirit of modernity. Translated from the Kannada by B.C. Ramachandra Sharma and Padma Ramachandra Sharma.
Cultural and spiritual bonds with ‘nature’ are among the strongest motivators for nature conservation; yet they are seldom taken into account in the governance and management of protected and conserved areas. The starting point of this book is that to be sustainable, effective, and equitable, approaches to the management and governance of these areas need to engage with people’s deeply held cultural, spiritual, personal, and community values, alongside inspiring action to conserve biological, geological, and cultural diversity. Since protected area management and governance have traditionally been based on scientific research, a combination of science and spirituality can engage and empower a variety of stakeholders from different cultural and religious backgrounds. As evidenced in this volume, stakeholders range from indigenous peoples and local communities to those following mainstream religions and those representing the wider public. The authors argue that the scope of protected area management and governance needs to be extended to acknowledge the rights, responsibilities, obligations, and aspirations of stakeholder groups and to recognise the cultural and spiritual significance that ‘nature’ holds for people. The book also has direct practical applications. These follow the IUCN Best Practice Guidelines for protected and conserved area managers and present a wide range of case studies from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.
The notion of the postcolonial metropolis has gained prominence in the last two decades both within and beyond postcolonial studies. Disciplines such as sociology and urban studies, however, have tended to focus on the economic inequalities, class disparities, and other structural and formative aspects of the postcolonial metropolises that are specific to Western conceptions of the city at large. It is only recently that the depiction of postcolonial metropolises has been addressed in the writings of Suketu Mehta, Chris Abani, Amit Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Zakes Mda, among others. Most of these works probe the urban specifics and physical and cultural topographies of postcolonial cities while highlighting their agential capacity to defy, appropriate, and abrogate the superimposition of theories of Western modernity and urbanism. These ASNEL Papers are all concerned with the idea of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis from various disciplinary viewpoints, as drawn from a great range of cityscapes (spread out over five continents). The essays explore, on the one hand, ideas of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation, and, on the other, the possibility of transforming, reinventing and reconfigurating the ‘postcolonial condition’ in and through literary texts and visual narratives. In this context, the volume covers a broad spectrum of theoretical and thematic approaches to postcolonial and metropolitan topographies and their depictions in writings from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, and greater Asia, as well as the UK, addressing issues such as modernity and market economies but also caste, class, and social and linguistic aspects. At the same time, they reflect on the postcolonial metropolis and postcolonialism in the metropolis by concentrating on an urban imaginary which turns on notions of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation – as the continuing ‘postcolonial’ condition.
A history of how India became a major player in the global technology industry, mapping technological, economic, and political transformations. The rise of the Indian information technology industry is a remarkable economic success story. Software and services exports from India amounted to less than $100 million in 1990, and today come close to $100 billion. But, as Dinesh Sharma explains in The Outsourcer, Indian IT's success has a long prehistory; it did not begin with software support, or with American firms' eager recruitment of cheap and plentiful programming labor, or with India's economic liberalization of the 1990s. The foundations of India's IT revolution were laid long ago, even before the country's independence from British rule in 1947, as leading Indian scientists established research institutes that became centers for the development of computer science and technology. The “miracle” of Indian IT is actually a story about the long work of converting skills and knowledge into capital and wealth. With The Outsourcer, Sharma offers the first comprehensive history of the forces that drove India's IT success. Sharma describes India's early development of computer technology, part of the country's efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency, and shows that excessive state control stifled IT industry growth before economic policy changed in 1991. He traces the rise and fall (and return) of IBM in India and the emergence of pioneering indigenous hardware and software firms. He describes the satellite communication links and state-sponsored, tax-free technology parks that made software-related outsourcing by foreign firms viable, and the tsunami of outsourcing operations at the beginning of the new millennium. It is the convergence of many factors, from the tradition of technical education to the rise of entrepreneurship to advances in communication technology, that have made the spectacular growth of India's IT industry possible.
