BOOK REVIEW

A Personal Journey and Evolution of Technology

Subhajyoti Ray

t is my uneducated guess that in the next 10 years, we would see at least 15 (auto)biographies of former techentrepreneurs and other adventurers in the tech world with the common theme of how technology could make India a superpower. Ajit Balakrishnan tries nothing of this sort in this slim and smartly produced monograph. Happily, there is no overbearing theme of a changing India or the world in the book. Instead, Balakrishnan attempts to understand the world especially the world of technology, and how it leads to paradigmatic shifts in economy, society and polity. In parallel, the invisible subtext of the book also tells us something about what kind of social mores, economic structures, political decisions and entrepreneurial spirit allow for harnessing an emerging technology to be on the winning side. By now many of the readers would have read the book, and many more would have read the reviews in mainstream newspapers and magazines. I have read the book at least thrice and discovered completely new perspectives each time, while looking for an appropriate box to slot the book in. I have failed in the latter task. Here is why. Yes, it does talk about tech entrepreneurship, but it is not a handbook of running a successful tech company. It does talk about evolution of technology, but it is not an elaborate history of the 20th century tech revolution. It comes suspiciously close to an autobiography, yet some of us know that it is just about a small part of the authors rich life. Finally, the I does occur uncomfortably

The Wave Rider: A Chronicle of the Information Age by Ajit Balakrishnan (London: MacMillan), 2012; pp 213, Rs 599.

frequently in the narrative, but it is more to establish the ownership of the perspective offered, rather than to tom-tom the authors personal achievements. Yet, surprisingly it is about technology, it is about a personal journey, it is about evolution of technology, it is about intellectually understanding the tech world we live in and a philosophical rendition of shifts that have taken place since the 1970s. It is little wonder, therefore, that I have not been able to assign a little rectangular box to this book. The publisher has conveniently and correctly slotted it in as non-ction! Entrepreneurs Perspective Coming to the substantive part of the monograph, it has 15 chapters. Given the authors experience, width of knowledge, range of perspective and a knack for meaningfully summarising even world changing events, each of the chapters is a short story that could have been expanded into a full-sized novel. It is therefore, futile on my part to summarise each of the 15 chapters (they cannot be summarised any further than they are in the book without losing the essence). Take the rst chapter titled Waiting for First Trade. In a sentence, it is about how Balakrishnans edgling internet company Rediff.com got listed in National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ). But the chapter by putting together the anxieties of an entrepreneur, the state of
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global markets, the process of pre-listing, the physical and mental strains of the founder, the way to deal with investment bankers, the vivid description of the people and processes involved is a veritable handbook for all tech entrepreneurs on possibly the single-most important landmark in their careers. All this in just 14 pages, ending with a poetic twist: is going public like being imprisoned in Alcatraz a prison from which there is no escape? The rst half of the book comprising Chapters 1 to 8 is perhaps the most helpful from a thinking entrepreneurs perspective. Based as they are on personal experience and anecdotes, they make for easier reading and understanding. The fast pace, the intense suspense, the unsuspecting twists and short and sharp perspectives allow the reader to move quickly through this part and yet not lose sight of the complicated interplay between opportunity and challenges, importance of timing, criticality of the environment, shocking surprises and real dilemmas. In addition to the rst chapter, entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs in the tech world would nd the following chapters instructive: The Plunge and The Birth, The Crash and The Lawsuit. For non-entrepreneurs, which is most of us, I would call out the following chapters: Domesticating the Computer; a brief and tightly woven narrative of how several factors beginning at different points in time converged to make interconnected computers almost a consumer item. More interesting is the description of the exact role of many of the scientists, tinkerers and business people in making this happen. Decoding the Crash, a non-starters guide to why and how markets crash and New Laws for the New World, how every major technological shift requires and/ or is powered by a new set of rules of the game are the other chapters in the rst half of the book.
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BOOK REVIEW

Subtle Narrative From Chapter 9 onwards, as we move perhaps closer in time and things become magnified and sounds become amplified, the narrative then becomes richer, very finely nuanced, opinions and perspectives become subtler and perhaps a tad complicated. Let me give a brief summary of each of these chapters. Chapter 9, The Fifth Wave based on Kondratiev Cycles, describes the latest technological wave we are living through. Low-cost chips and domestication of computers caused this wave. Like the previous waves, the key inventions in this age were necessitated by social need. In this case the social need to find useful information and documents. Google was able to convert human judgment for finding information in a computable form fire up a network effect and reach a tipping point in a short period of time. Balakrishnan reminds us that in markets where such network effects operate, a few leaders, or even one company, corner all the financial benefits. Chapter 10, The Networks of the Information Age, explains the somewhat disconcerting effects of network economy: a handful of active players run these networks others are passive participants and the influence of these active participants are magnified

due to the use of widely available technological tools. Such networks, according to Balakrishnan, can bring about profound changes in the modes of production much like the Industrial Revolution did in a previous era. Paradoxically, while such networks promote globalisation, they also encourage and empower oppositional movements based on fundamentalism and ethnic identity. Guilds of Our Time (Chapter 11) is a crisp analysis of how institutions and professions start to change much after technological waves creep in. Amid screams and protests, institutions change to adopt, or are forced to change or sometimes just wither away. The Battlefield at Night (Chapter 12) analyses the financial crisis of 2008 and its attendant political and social fallout. The links between the Financial Crisis, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the spat between nation states and information networks look unconnected, yet they collectively mark a new turning point in social history. Chapter 13 on Fighting Off Predators brings back the entrepreneur to the forefront and discusses some of the real-life dilemmas faced by them. It warns entrepreneurs against predators, passion traps and invisible technology shifts. Getting on the Wrong Side of a Tech Revolution (Chapter 14) recounts with historical

xamples how easy it is to end up on the e wrong side of technological revolution. The last chapter of the book A New Season articulates Balakrishnans views as a realist: uncertainty about the future direction but a reassurance that there is going to be change: imperceptible but definite. There are no grand predictions about the future of the world, only a faint hint of what might happen. It is also deeply personal: about his unflinching modernist father, about the historical opportunity that his hometown Kannaur missed when Vasco da Gama decided to move on to Calicut and most importantly, about his own mortality. Conclusions A vividly narrated and richly contextualised story of a personal journey through the major tech-shifts of the 20th and early 21st centuries by possibly the last Renaissance Man of Kannaur. It is about time we moved on from simplistic and templatised guidebook type narratives of western tech pundits and focused on the more nuanced and rooted stuff of our home-grown gurus.
Subhajyoti Ray (subho@iamai.in) is a historian and president of the Internet and Mobile Association of India. The author of the book, Ajit Balakrishnan, has been the Chairman Emeritus of IAMAI since 2008.

NEW

Higher Education in India

In Search of Equality, Quality and Quantity
Edited by

Jandhyala B G Tilak
India has a large network of universities and colleges with a massive geographical reach and the facilities for higher education have been expanding rapidly in recent years. The story of higher education in India has seen many challenges over the decades and has not been without its share of problems, the most serious being a very high degree of inequity.
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Drawn from writings spanning almost four decades in the EPW, the articles in this volume discuss, among other things, issues of inclusiveness, the impact of reservation, problems of mediocrity, shortage of funds, dwindling numbers of faculty, and unemployment of the educated young.

Authors: Andr Bteille Shiv Visvanathan Suma Chitnis Satish Deshpande K Sundaram Rakesh Basant, Gitanjali Sen Jayati Ghosh Thomas E Weisskopf Lloyd I Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph A M Shah Errol DSouza G D Sharma, M D Apte Glynn L Wood D P Chaudhri, Potluri Rao R Gopinathan Nair, D Ajit D T Lakdawala, K R Shah Chitra Sivakumar Amrik Singh Jandhyala B G Tilak Anindita Chakrabarti, Rama Joglekar Karuna Chanana Saumen Chattopadhyay Samuel Paul Deepak Nayyar V M Dandekar M Anandakrishnan Thomas Joseph

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