What’s it about Bangalore?
One of the stories going viral on my Facebook wall currently is about CNN 2010 Top 10 Hero, Narayanan Krishnan. Its a great story. The guy quits his job at the Taj in Bangalore about a decade ago and starts cooking for the destitute, the homeless, the folks who eat their own shit, you get the picture. He also gives them dignity — hugging, bathing, and shaving folks who have not had these simple pleasures we take for granted. The CNN story did not provide a link to his organization, and that left some of us wondering whether his passion has scale. Turns out that it is pretty organized with a US/Paypal version for those wishing to join the cause with him — more details at http://www.akshayatrust.org/. (I wonder whether he currently operates out of Madurai or Bangalore).
The name Aksahya Trust is close to another wonderful organization, also Bangalore based, Akshaya Patra. They provide mid-day meals to hundreds of thousands of below-poverty-line kids going to government schools in many Indian cities. When I took the Carlson undergrads to Bangalore last winter for their core IT course, we were blown away by Akshay Patra’s process efficiency and their slick messaging. I’m hoping for a tete-a-tete with Narayanan Krishnan this coming spring when I take the Carlson exec MBA class over for their International Residency in India.
People have asked me about my choice of Bangalore as a primary destination for these field visits. Why not Mumbai or Delhi? I think Steven Johnson’s idea of the adjacent possible (introduced to me by my good friend Shomik Mehndiratta at the World Bank in DC) is probably the closest that comes to explain this. He states,
“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
Of all the Indian cities, I think only Bangalore has the critical mass of nervous energy combined with sheer technical capabilities and people who have seen the entrepreneurship movie that lead to multiple parallel bold experiments of the sort described above. Johnson calls this the liquid density (as opposed to gaseous - which results in, shall we just say gas, and is therefore too unstable to be useful or solid - which is not malleable and literally frozen in its blocks) that certain cities/regions have that naturally facilitate the information flows necessary for innovation.
Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your views.
