Belated wishes

I am as proud as any other Indian as we continue our journey of development and success. It is such a great story in itself that India has always been ruled by a government that is elected by her citizens and not by a power hungry dictator. The story gets even better when we realize that we have remained united in spite of speaking different languages and being intimidated by power hungry lunatic politicians. There has never been any question of any loss of integrity and let us hope there never will be one in foreseeable future.

The pace of our development has brought even the most powerful of nations to their knees. We can stall a WTO deal and even demand a nuclear deal signing NPT. Globalization has benefited us greatly and there have been innumerable India success stories as far as entrepreneurship is concerned.

I faced an awkward situation last week at work. We follow the Agile model of software development at Symbian and half of my team is in Britain. In the kickoff meeting of this iteration on Monday, we (the Indian part of the team) duly reminded the Scrum master (at Britain) that we would not be working on the 15th of August. When asked for a reason, we said that it was becuase of the Independence day and the Scrum master added (read with a British accent) "Um, Independence from Britain, isn't it?". What followed immediately was an awkward minute of silence and moment of awkward laughs from both ends of the teleconference device.

I wanted to tell this story to emphasize the level of development and respect that we have garnered in the past 61 years. People who treated as slaves of a petty colony are our business partners today and take a bow at our skills. This was the proudest I felt of being an Indian in my life and hope to cherish more such moments. Wish you all a very proud and prosperous Independence day.

Regards,
Anirudh.

P.S. Could not get this post on time as I was in Kemmangundi on 15/07/2008, which will be the topic of another post.