WHILE READING THIS week’s cover story about Nara Lokesh, I told myself that the apple does not fall too far from the tree. His father, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, was among the original technocrat politicians. No, I am not forgetting Rajiv Gandhi and C-DoT, but IT was a nascent industry then.
I was actually trying to find a tree closer to Andhra Pradesh and found that it is the only state that has the neem as its state tree. The peepul/sacred fig has the most claimants—Bihar, Haryana and Odisha.
Lokesh is the minister for information technology, electronics and communications, real-time governance and human resources development in the government of Andhra Pradesh. On the organisational front, he is the Telugu Desam Party’s general secretary. This cover has been in the pipeline since Google announced last October that it would set up its global AI hub in Visakhapatnam. The $15 billion investment is the largest greenfield foreign direct investment India has ever received.
While Chief of Bureau (Delhi) Namrata Biji Ahuja interviewed Lokesh for this cover, Special Correspondent K. Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy wrote the main article that brings together his new investment strategy for the state and the metric to measure it—the speed of doing business.
“Our AI journey started way back in November-December 2018,” Lokesh told Namrata. “We were the first state to actually have a policy around it. But then we lost power, and the project was shelved for five years. But, as soon as the National Democratic Alliance government came to power, we restarted our efforts, because we knew the power of data and AI.”
While on the topic of business, let me mention Senior Special Correspondent Nachiket Kelkar’s article on how the young generation of India Inc is reshaping old businesses, from Uttar Pradesh’s sugar mills to Mumbai’s high-street retail. The article comes with interviews from Rishabh Mariwala, Shashwat Goenka, Anandamayi Bajaj and Avantika Saraogi.
We also take note of the developments in Venezuela. Senior Assistant News Editor Ajish P. Joy interviewed Mercedes Baptista Guevara, an attorney and diplomat based in Spain. A friend of mine, Mercedes was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and closely follows political developments there. She also writes in this issue, along with senior journalist K.P. Nayar, who spent decades in Washington, DC, as a foreign correspondent.
In @leisure, Senior Assistant Editor Pratul Sharma writes about the Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan, a classical musical festival in Jalandhar that has endured for 150 years and is adding fans. In these days of 60-second reels, T20 cricket and bite-sized news snippets, I am amazed by the growing popularity of events like these. Another example is the ongoing margazhi season in Chennai, which elevates the classical arts to a higher plane.
Most of you would have noticed that Dr Mazda Turel’s column, ScalPen, is now a two-pager with detailed graphics. The gifted doctor is now taking the experience 360° with a video. The first episode will be up on THE WEEK’s YouTube channel on Monday, January 12.
In Otherwise Cracked, my friend K.C. Verma reminds us of the age-old trick used by parents to pass messages bypassing children, by spelling out the core word. Sometimes it does misfire, KC. An editor of THE WEEK once told his brother: “Don’t say damn in front of the k-i-d-s.”