Pluggd.in

Being a native of Bengaluru and a current resident of US, I could not agree more with plinkplonk.

These are fluff pieces written by visiting western journalists after visiting the shiny campuses of SWITCH (satyam, wipro, infy, ..).

This piece is nothing different than the ones that gets printed often in local english media (esp. ToI). It is tiring to listen to the "phoren" returnees living in their gated communities, complaining daily about the traffic and power-outages. Bah!

After having studied in what is arguably the best undergraduate tech campus in Bangalore, I know what goes around for "research" and "high tech" in computer science departments.

All the undergraduate schools are solely focussed on getting you into one of the SWITCH companies. Woe be you if you had an independent mind and tried to join a more hacker friendly company like Google/Thoughtworks etc.. The immediate family will start distressing over you not making it to the holy shrines of Infy, Wipro etc.,

Some interesting discussion here: http://www.pluggd.in/entrepreneurship/why-wipro-infosys-and-tcs-are-the-axis-of-evil-for-indian-startup-space-2439/

Of course all is not doom and gloom. The hacker scene is quite vibrant with Python/Ruby/FOSS communities being as active as anywhere in the world. Quite a few youngsters are getting into the startup mode. Even if a lot of them are testing the waters by attending startup events, reading and blogging about it, being on HN and boot strapping their ideas…

Well, you cite perfect examples of the parental and societal pressures that tend to work against founding a startup. But there is tremendous "underground" culture of startups in India. Case in point, have a look at http://pluggd.in/ or the startup event of India http://proto.in/

Agreed that Indian startups are still light years away from achieving the same _sophistication_ as the Silicon Valley's, but increasingly I am seeing more and more people jumping into getting their hands dirty. And given enough startups, purely from a statistical point of view, a few great startups will eventually emerge from India.

Unfortunately, I will have to agree with you that the state of R&D is poor, but it is just evolution. We started late and now have lots to catch up!

This thinking is exactly the OPPOSITE of two other very enlightening yc posts:

Here, Warren Buffet says, "Most of the managers at Berkshire have “… no financial need to work” - this simply means that the people who are working are working because they love working."

http://www.pluggd.in/2008/03/startup-entrepreneurial-lesssons-from-warren-buffet

In this one, pg says that if someone gave him $1 billion, he'd still be doing "much the same thing".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79057

So my question is this. If you love what you're doing, why would you want to do it LESS? And if you don't love what you're doing, then why are you doing it?

"Logic rarely prevails" --> That comment reminded me of a piece on incarceration:

http://www.pluggd.in/incarceration-the-extreme-end-of-social-media-a-worldwide-challenge-297/

Isn't it surprising that there are so many ideas floating around to disrupt Hollywood, transform other forms of Governance, disrupt traditional business models but no-one talks about forcing change in law/judiciary itself.

At best, a startup would talk about saving a few hundred dollars in legal fees through some free advice/content on Google. Why is this so?