TWO YOUNG JOURNALISTS I know were floored by Shailesh Kumar Davey, the current group CEO of Zoho, when they met him in Kochi last year. He was in town for a tech conclave and was then heading ManageEngine, Zoho’s IT management software division. Davey was sporting a sky blue Zoho uniform shirt and dark trousers, and was down-to-earth, they said. They perhaps expected someone flashier, dressed in something a bit pricier.
Another journalist said that he was about to gently refuse the standard kit at a Zoho press conference when he noticed that it was a simple khadi pouch. Why say no to it, he thought. It held a lone fountain pen—a Ratnamson from Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh. The town on the Godavari gave India its first swadeshi fountain pen, from the house of K.V. Ratnam & Sons.
For people and companies, it all boils down to choices. Davey’s choices reflect the organisation’s culture. So does the khadi pouch and the Ratnamson. As Arattai, Zoho’s chat and calling app, was making waves, Chief of Bureau (Chennai) Lakshmi Subramanian went to Tenkasi to revisit Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu’s vision. The US has Silicon Valley, and I would proudly call Vembu’s hub-and-spoke model our own Silicon Villages.
Speaking of the US and President Donald Trump, we come to this week’s cover by Chief of Bureau (Delhi) Namrata Biji Ahuja. She argues that Chinese President Xi Jinping has emerged as the biggest winner as Trump’s transactional foreign policy undermines the US-led democratic coalition.
The cover has a column by Tara Kartha, former director, National Security Council Secretariat, and an interview with Mumin Chen, representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre, New Delhi. Rajiv Kumar, former vice chairman of Niti Aayog, and Ishan Joshi, director of Pahle India Foundation, have written about engaging China. The answer to safeguarding India’s interest, Namrata writes, perhaps lies in practising imaginative diplomacy, avoiding dependence on any single power, maintaining strategic balance and deepening ties with regional players.
On the national scene, Senior Assistant Editor Pratul Sharma looks at the churn in Bihar. In politics, a generation is measured by the churn of leadership, Pratul writes, while demographers peg it at 25 years, and genealogists at the span between fathers and sons. By any of those measures, Bihar politics is at the cusp of change as Tejashwi Yadav, Chirag Paswan and Prashant Kishor have taken to the battlefield.
October 7 marked two years of the war in Gaza, and Dr P.R. Kumaraswamy, who teaches contemporary Middle East studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, examines the timeline of events and argues that there is no alternative to the two-state solution. Any long-term solution, he says, must be rooted in the dignity and honour of all the parties involved.
Senior Correspondent Nirmal Jovial’s article presents an interesting take on technocrat Sam Santhosh’s 27-acre garden, which sprouted from Hortus Malabaricus, literally the Garden of Malabar, a 12-volume botanical treatise published in the 17th century. Santhosh has gathered 730 of the 742 plants mentioned in the treatise at his Hortus Malabaricus Garden Project in Thrissur, Kerala.
Interestingly, the Malayala Manorama’s arts and literary festival is called Hortus, and it will be hosted in Kochi from November 27 to 30. The theme is: ‘The Power of We’. Do pop into our garden, if you are in the area.