Mr Scot Wrighton, City Manager, Lavasa & the Chief Guest ET2010 delivering the Inaugural Address

Prof Daniel Seidman delivers the Organizing Secretary's address at Lavasa

My Presidential Address at the ET2010, Lavasa, December 2010

The saddest story of the century

I would like to sum up our performance in the 20th century in one sentence. Indians have succeeded in countries ruled by whites, but failed in their own.

This outcome would have astonished leaders of our independence movement. They declared Indians were kept down by white rule and could flourish only under self-rule. This seemed self-evident. The harsh reality today is that Indians are succeeding brilliantly in countries ruled by whites, but failing in India . They are flourishing in the USA and Britain .

But those that stay in India are pulled down by an outrageous system that fails to reward merit or talent. Fails to allow people and businesses to grow, and keeps real power with netas, babus, and assorted manipulators. Once Indians go to white-ruled countries, they soar and conquer summits once occupied only by whites.

Ronu Dutta has become head of United Airlines, the biggest airline in the world. Had he stayed in India , he would have no chance even in Indian Airlines. Even if the top job there was given to him by some godfather, a myriad netas, babus and trade unionists would have ensured that he could never run it like United Airlines.

Rana Talwar has become head of Standard Chartered Bank, one of the biggest multinational banks in Britain , while still in his 40s. Had he been in India , he would perhaps be a local manager in the State Bank, taking orders from babus to give loans to politically favoured clients.

Rajat Gupta is head of Mckinsey, the biggest management consultancy firm in the world. He now advises the biggest multinationals on how to run their business. Had he remained in India he would probably be taking orders from
some sethji with no qualification save that of being born in a rich family.

Lakhsmi Mittal has become the biggest steel baron in the world, with steel plants in the US , Kazakhstan , Germany , Mexico , Trinidad and Indonesia . India 's socialist policies reserved the domestic steel industry for the public sector. So Lakhsmi Mittal went to Indonesia to run his family's first steel plant there. Once freed from the shackles of India , he conquered the
world.

Subhash Chandra of Zee TV has become a global media king, one of the few to beat Rupert Murdoch. He could never have risen had he been limited to India, which decreed a TV monopoly for Doordarshan. But technology came to his aid: satellite TV made it possible for him to target India from Hong Kong . Once he escaped Indian rules and soil, he soared.

You may not have heard of 48-year old Gururaj Deshpande. His communications company, Sycamore, is currently valued by the US stock market at over $ 30 billion, making him perhaps one of the richest Indians in the world. Had he remained in India , he would probably be a babu in the Department of Telecommunications.

Sabeer Bhatia invented Hotmail and sold it to Microsoft for $ 400 million. Victor Menezes is number two in Citibank. Shailesh Mehta is CEO of Providian, a top US financial services company. Also at or near the top are Rakesh Gangwal of US Air, Jamshed Wadia of Arthur Andersen, and Aman Mehta of Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp.

In Washington DC , the Indian CEO High Tech Council has no less than 200 members, all high tech-chiefs. While Indians have soared, India has stagnated. At independence India was the most advanced of all colonies, with the best prospects.

Today with a GNP per head of $370, it occupies a lowly 177th position among 209 countries of the world. But poverty is by no means the only or main problem. India ranks near the bottom in the UNDP's Human Development Index, but high up in Transparency International's Corruption Index.

The neta-babu raj brought in by socialist policies is only one reason for India 's failure. The more sordid reason is the rule-based society we inherited from the British Raj is today in tatters. Instead money, muscle and influence matter most.

At independence we were justly proud of our politicians. Today we regard them as scoundrels and criminals. They have created a jungle of laws in the holy name of socialism, and used these to line their pockets and create patronage networks. No influential crook suffers. The Mafia flourish unhindered because they have political links.

The sons of police officers believe they have a licence to rape and kill (ask the Mattoo family). Talent cannot take you far amidst such rank misgovernance. We are reverting to our ancient feudal system where no rules applied to the powerful. The British Raj brought in abstract concepts of justice for all, equality before the law. These were maintained in the early years of independence. But sixty years later, citizens wail that India is a lawless land where no rules are obeyed.

I have heard of an IAS probationer at the Mussorie training academy pointing out that in India before the British came, making money and distributing favors to relatives was not considered a perversion of power, it was the very rationale of power. A feudal official had a duty to enrich his family and caste. Then the British came and imposed a new ethical code on officials. But, he asked, why should we continue to choose British customs over desi ones now that we are independent?

The lack of transparent rules, properly enforced, is a major reason why talented Indians cannot rise in India . A second reason is the neta-babu raj, which remains intact despite supposed liberalisation. But once talented Indians go to rule-based societies in the west, they take off. In those societies all people play by the same rules, all have freedom to innovate without being strangled by regulations.

This, then, is why Indians succeed in countries ruled by whites, and fail in their own.

It is the saddest story of the century.

-Anonymous

PS. Look at what the visionary Mr Ajit Gulabchand is facing today on account of Lavasa. A decade back, he took over barren forested land and converted it to a modern paperless city - India's first man-made hill station after independence! Anyone who has seen Lavasa compares it to the best in the world - be it Switzerland or USA! We were finally showing off India's architectural & infrastructure capabilities to the world. We were showing the world how Biomimicry & Environmental Protection ideas from India would lead the change globally! And the political Mafia struck in the form of Mr Jairam Ramesh's Environment Ministry. Instead of seeing the mess created by rapid & random decrees given to multi-storied hospitality projects along India's coastline openly flouting the CRZ regulations & the pollution in most major metros, our environment Ministry selects its "targets" politically! Instead of seeing the potential National benefits of this future city and the humungous employment and tourism related revenues the city would generate, the mafia wants its slice of pie & has locked down the city with a stop-construction stay order! Today, the political class is unpatriotic & loyal only to their Swiss Bank accounts.

Yes. It is the saddest story of the century.

Fruity Bats of Lavasa

Why don't bats live alone?

They prefer to hang out with their friends!

A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center concluded.Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit. Because the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge coexists inside Kennedy Space Center, the launch pads have a number of measures available, including warning sirens, to deter birds and other creatures from getting too close. The launch team also uses radar to watch for birds before a shuttle liftoff.Nevertheless, the bat stayed in place and it was seen changing positions from time to time. Launch controllers spotted the bat after it had clawed onto the foam of the external tank as Discovery stood at Launch Pad 39A. The temperature never dropped below 60 degrees at that part of the tank, and infrared cameras showed that the bat was 70 degrees through launch.The final inspection team that surveys the outside of the shuttle and tank for signs of ice buildup observed the small bat, hoping it would wake up and fly away before the shuttle engines ignited. It was not the first bat to land on a shuttle during a countdown. Previously, one of the winged creatures landed on the tank during the countdown to launch shuttle Columbia on its STS-90 mission in 1998.Bats sure are intriguing creatures.

There has never been a TV series where the animal hero was a bat. Why not? Because people generally hate bats.For many Westerners, bats conjure up eerie visions of vampires and witches. The Chinese see these flying rodents as symbols of good luck. Fortunately, there are people working on behalf of bats - people who study bats; who respect bats; who love bats; who have, on occasion, TASTED bats.No, seriously, although bats look like evil creepy demonettes from hell that want to swoop down and bite us and give us rabies, the truth is that they are generally harmless flying mammals just like us who form colonies, care for their young, go to the mall, etc. Statistically, the average bat is far less likely to be rabid than Abu Azmi. Besides catching insects, bats play a critical role in pollinating certain plants, such as the agave, without which there would be NO TEQUILA.Even vampire bats have their human side. Researcher Ted Fleming told me that sometimes a female vampire bat will return from a successful bloodsucking trip and share her good fortune by "regurgitating to her roost mates."

Many bat species are endangered because of humans, some of whom view bats as actual food. A researcher once told me that in parts of Southeast Asia, bat soup and fried bat are considered tasty treats. In Guam, people have eaten pretty much all the bats. There's a bat shortage! You could become a bat rancher and get rich! Although you would need skilled bat wranglers. He also told me that the Gubu people of Papua, New Guinea (I am not making the Gubu people up), have a big feast wherein they boil up a mess of bats, cook them over coals and then eat them whole, after which they pick little bat teeth out of their mouths. He said that, as a researcher, he actually took a tiny bite of this dish.Incredibly, he did not say that it tasted like chicken!

So we see that bats have really received a "raw deal" from us humans. I think that from now on, we should all remember that bats are our friends, and we should make every effort to be nice to them while remaining at a safe distance! Also, if we go to a restaurant in Southeast Asia, we should make darned sure we know what we are ordering.

The Bats we see around Lavasa are the Megabats.They are also referred to as fruit bats, old world fruit bats, or flying foxes. The megabat, contrary to its name, is not always large: the smallest species is 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) long and thus smaller than some microbats. The largest reach 40 cm (16 inches) in length and attain a wingspan of 150 cm (5 feet), weighing in at nearly 1 kg (2.2 pounds). Most fruit bats have large eyes, allowing them to orient visually in the twilight of dusk and inside caves and forests.Fruit bats are frugivorous or nectarivorous, i.e., they eat fruits or lick nectar from flowers. Often the fruits are crushed and only the juices consumed. The teeth are adapted to bite through hard fruit skins. Large fruit bats must land in order to eat fruit, while the smaller species are able to hover with flapping wings in front of a flower or fruit.Frugivorous bats aid the distribution of plants (and therefore, forests) by carrying the fruits with them and spitting the seeds or eliminating them elsewhere. Nectarivores actually pollinate visited plants. They bear long tongues that are inserted deep into the flower; pollen thereby passed to the bat is then transported to the next blossom visited, pollinating it.Because of their large size and somewhat "spectral" appearance, fruit bats are sometimes used in horror movies to represent vampires or to otherwise lend an aura of spookiness. In reality, as noted above, the bats of this group are purely herbivorous. Some works of fiction are more in line with this fact, portraying fruit bats as sympathetic or even featuring them as characters. For example, in the book series Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel, a fruit bat named Java is one of the main characters in the final book of the series. In Stellaluna, a popular children's book by Janell Cannon, the story revolves around the plight of a young fruit bat who is separated from her mother. In The Winjin Pom, a 1991 puppetry-based tv-series by Richard Carpenter and Steve Bendelack, Frazer is an anthropomorphic fruit bat with a laid-back attitude and a taste for fresh fruits.

Female short-nosed fruit bats have been observed performing fellatio on their partners during copulation. Mating pairs spent more time copulating if the female did so.The video seen here is sexually explicit and was edited and soundtracked by the researchers.
Coming back to Lake Dasve, you see a lot of fruit-bats suspended from the trees at the Western end of the lake (see photos!). The best sightings of these fruitbats are towards sunset when they are in their element. They are handsome creatures with a very stylish flight path. If you take the Pontoon boat ride at closing time (5pm), you can have a personalized sighting of our very own Lavasa Fruity Bats! I have spent hours on hours photographing these fascinating mammals. In fact, legend has it that they have a photographic memory! A Weizmann Institute researcher from Israel however, is using bats to help reveal the secrets of human memory.

The Rehovot institute's Interface magazine wrote recently about bat researcher Dr. Nachum Ulanovsky, a neurobiologist who studies the most common Israeli bat species - the fruit bat. He says they are an excellent animal model for human memory not only because of their impressive spatial memory but also due to their highly developed senses and unique behaviors. Bats are being outfitted with sophisticated telemetry equipment transmitting data about the activity of single neurons or networks. These are used as the bats crawl or fly around in Ulanovsky's lab. A US company working with the Rehovot researcher developed the world's first global positioning and telemetry system that weighs only nine grams; as the average fruit bat can carry nine grams of equipment and still fly with ease, it is the perfect bat species for his experiments. To avoid disrupting the bats' natural behavior, Ulanovsky has arranged for the building of a large cave-like room with rough-hewn rocks in the ceiling.

His work, which is partially conducted in collaboration with the Hebrew University, promises to reveal new information not only on human memory but also on hippocampal diseases such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's.

We are opening an outlet at New Years which will serve only desserts - and guess what it is christened - Fruity Bat!

The Making of an Art Gallery

Today is my birthday. I'm in Rajasthan with my camera. I decided to spend my 46th birthday surrounded by Indian heritage and Indian art. I also decided to gift myself my own retirement plan this year - something that was incubating in my head - refused to get out for possibly over 20 years now! I decided to gift myself an Art Gallery at Lavasa! This is what I always wanted to do besides Assisted Reproduction. This story is about the making of one of the finest art galleries-to-be on the Indian sub-continent. I used to have a romantic notion of what it would be like to own an art gallery. To be surrounded with great art everyday, to work with artists I love, and to sell art to people that love art as much as me....But it's not as easy as it sounds.
I haven't owned an art gallery or worked at one, but I have had a close friend whos an artist to take me through the nitty-gritties of running one. Which took all of the romanticism out of the idea. There's marketing, hanging, organizing the opening, air-smooching, air kissing, and when it's all up and running, it's just like looking after a shop. We shall cross the bridge when we come to it. The tentative date of launch being January 2010.




"The best art dealers are not salesmen in the classic sense of the word. Their passion and their connoisseurship and their knowledge have to combine to convince someone to acquire something that has no ostensible function in life, and that's not always an easy thing to do. It is distinct from the normal business world because of that."
-Anonymous

In the three years of being associated with Lavasa and the team-Lavasa, I found only one more person who had as much passion for making Lavasa an art hub. He has far bigger plans than I have because he is the man who gave shape to his vision - Mr Ajit Gulabchand. He has plans to make an art-village in Lavasa that will celebrate Maharashtrian culture, art as well as everything Indian!

I have smaller dreams - getting Lavasa on the world art map with a well run art-gallery with India's best "Artist-in-Residence' program. It has taken almost two years on planning on the drawing boards. Pure passion and foolhardy financial courage (according to my wife!) has shaped the destiny of the art-gallery-to-be! There is a gallery I've seen in a small town in Mexico which is a family run operation, a small gallery that does everything from emerging to recognized international artists and they seem to do it as a labor of love.. that is where I'm aimed.. I think it is good to think outside the box. after all that is what we do when we create an art concept or painting, sculpture .. so why not think of creating a gallery in the same way..

We are now short-listing the staff at Lavasa - I am looking for an ex-art-teacher or a passionate art-lover who would not mind re-locating to Lavasa. For like-minded individuals, here are my requirements for the Vice-President, Art:

* If your motivation is purely financial, forget it. There are far too
many uncertainties in art.
* Those without any prior art back-ground need not apply.
* You have to be passionate about it. The "merely interested' won't cut it.
* You have to have a precise focus.
* In Lavasa, you have to be equally certain of loving the place more than the job.
* You have to have the ability to make both artists and collectors comfortable
with you.
* Then, if there is a secret ingredient, here it is: You have to have "a good eye."
* In conclusion, you need a wide range of skills, you need to work hard, and
you can't imagine for a moment that this going to be easy.
* You have to get along with your boss - however crazy he might look on
first appearance!

A couple of years ago, the Indian newspapers, magazines, TV channels & tabloids were full of art-news - Art was being projected as the next-get-rich-quick-sure-shot recipe.This is no get-rich-quick business.As Heller put it, There are so many better ways to make money. You either have to have a lot of savings, be personally wealthy or have backers because its very expensive.Indeed, the start-up costs are significant, which, for many gallerists, means outside funding is essential to get going. I think you have to have a reasonable amount of money before starting a gallery, rather than starting a gallery to make a lot of money. That way you can afford to show art that might be more daring and less commercial. After 19 years of private practice as a fertility physician, I dared to invest a large part of my savings into art. It is almost like my second innings in life going through my post-graduation exams all over again! The reading is more than what I remember reading in my Medical college years! I hope we get a stream of high-rollers & art lovers with good taste coming up to Lavasa. Yes, it's tough to sell art to people that have no taste or no money. It takes a lot of money to do the real thing, and connections with wealthy buyers who also have taste. For the poor and the tasteless we have poster stores. But, if it's any consolation, many of our museums show atrocities that will only be remembered in their own archives. These big organizations seem to be bent on abusing the attention of the public in the name of educating them. They are just following the crowd of other groupies to show overrated but well packaged crap. For instance, Dale Chihuly, a likeable guy with a big rep. But come on - he's over-rated. He fills up space in public areas that need "something different". What does a guy with 10 assistants have to show for his endless and repetitive production of mildly ornamental forms in glass? Chihuly has some good things but they are buried beneath the storm of mediocrity that he gets paid to ship and install. There is a dilution of art due to too much crap out there for the masses to digest. I remember Helen May Glickenstein - an art dealer from Virginia, USA telling me that until you have too many artists and too many collectors as a private dealer, do not open a space. I have not taken that advice very seriously. The most important thing is the real passion for what it is you are planning to embark on, because it is an emotional roller-coaster ride. If there is a single, basic requirement, this is it! You have to love art in some way or another to do it. I went into it because I like talking to artists and being with artists, and I like helping artists further their careers.

There are hundreds of galleries in India, dealing in dozens of different genres.You need to be certain of your area of specialization and stick to it.One of the most important [requirements] is to define the vision for the business as distinctly and succinctly as possible.From there, the rest generally falls in to place.I know that I will not dabble in Indian art - my focus is getting global art to India!I spent years finding the artists across five continents who I was interested in and figuring out what my eye was about and what my point of view was and how that all came together.I did not want to start in a cubby hole in Mumbai.I wanted to establish a gallery with huge open spaces. Mumbai was impossible with the real-estate as pricey as Manhattan. God got Nathan Andrews to sit next to me at an RCI dinner - next I met the Late Himanshu Saxena who was so very passionate about Lavasa. Then I followed my heart -
Lavasa is, unquestionably, the most beautiful hill-station in this part of the world, and in such a crowded field in India, it can be difficult for a newcomer to get noticed. I know & believe that Lavasa will give me an opportunity to teach, live and discover Art.

You have to have the ability to make both artists and collectors comfortable with you.Everybody talks a lot about how important interpersonal skills are: Both artists and collectors tend to be pretty demanding characters, and you have to be able to bridge the gap between them. More than that, you have to want to. I have been mingling, eating, socializing and going on vacations with my artist friends across the world. They are all looking forward to spending quality time painting their symphonies at Lavasa. Artists don't want to show with someone they don't feel a connection to. You have to understand the work. You also have to understand collectors.Art is the ultimate luxury item, lets face it, so we want everybody to feel safe and secure when they are spending a lot of money on a work of art.

I want to make contemporary art accessible. The fact of the matter is most people dont know that much about art, and most people do not have a vast art history background. I decided that I was going to build an art gallery where artists were going to be there talking about their work, and I wanted it to be enriching. The gallery will was really a hybrid between education and a gallery. Certainly you have to be able to recognize quality in a work of art in its own terms - pictorial, sculptural, etc.but you also have to be able to comprehend it as a means of communication. You have to be able to appreciate how it sits within a cultural context, and how it relates to other art and other cultural objects and events. And then, as a dealer, you have to be able to comprehend art as a commodity: Will it sell? Its quite a balancing act. You really need a wide range of skills, you need to work hard, and you cant imagine for a moment that this going to be easy.

The most important thing when establishing an art gallery is to be patient.
It is a business that takes time to flourish. You need time to establish connections with various art collectors, to market the gallery and find really good art that actually sells. A lot of it apart from running the actual 'shop' and having to deal with the day to day organization / management side of it, is PR. You have to devote quite a chunk of your time to PR the gallery. We take PR very seriously and have a lot of social media initiatives in place to let the world know that the "Ginger Giraffe" has come into this world! We had 9 months of solid research to choose the appropriate name for my baby - Ginger Giraffe is getting ready for a baby shower!










We had a Mexican firm jointly design the Ginger Giraffe with Toezer Contractor. Leonardo Diaz Borioli & Gerardo Sanchez Sendra from Guadalajara's well known architectural design firm - Estudio Pi did the basic design. They were flown into India and spent time with the Lavasa Infrastructure team onsite in Portofino C. We hosted them in Mumbai and the Lavasa Corporation hosted them at their offices and congratulated them on their singular achievement of getting in Mexican art-forms and architecture for the first time into India since after Independence. The pictures here show Mr Rajgopal Nogja and Mr Nathan Andrews accepting the first blue-prints of the Ginger Giraffe design.

Leonardo Diaz-Borioli is from Mexico and a founding director of the global architecture firm ESTUDIO 3.14 with offices in Mexico and France. His studies took him to Florence, in Italy, Cambridge and Princeton in the United States, and Guadalajara in Mexico. Leonardo holds a Science Master of Architectural Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a second post-professional degree from Princeton University and is currently a PhD. candidate in the history theory and criticism of art, architecture, and urban form at Princeton University.Both his academic and design practices have been published in Europe, the United States, and
México and he is the recipient of numerous awards that include architectural
biennials and prestigious fellowships and grants. Leonardo is a specialist
on Mexican architect Luis Barragán that is the topic of an upcoming book to
be published in Mexico by the ministry of culture.

Gerardo Sánchez-Sendra, his partner and CEO of the global architectural firm ESTUDIO 3.14 holds a Master in Business Administration from the Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresa (IPADE), a professional degree in Architecture from the Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) and is an attendant to MIT professional Development courses on Real State. A teacher on the school of architecture in the “Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey” (ITESM) since 2007, his previous research includes “Suprematismo Re-Visiones”, a study on the Russian Suprematist movement.




























Why Mexican architects & why Mexican architecture? The Ginger Giraffe has some other unique distinctions - singular to India! We are launching India's first Sergio Bustamante boutique within the Ginger Giraffe. Sergio Bustamante is to Mexico what Mahendra Singh Dhoni is to India! American Express carries TV commercials with Mr Sergio Bustamante across Latin America. Though born in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico, Sergio Bustamante has lived in the Guadalajara area since early childhood. In his youth, he studied architecture at the University of Guadalajara, but abandoned this pursuit when his talents and interests drew him to the fine arts and crafts. He began with paintings and paper mache figures, inaugurating the first exhibit of his works at the Galeria Misracha in Mexico City in 1966. In the early 1970's, he traveled to Amsterdam, where he further developed his talents. After his return to Guadalajara, he established in 1975, along with other artists, the "Family Workshop Studio" in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, Mexico.

While Bustamante's works initially focused on painting and paper mache, his talents inevitably led, in the mid-1970's, to the creation of sculptures in wood and bronze, many reflecting animal themes. 1979 marked the inauguration of innovative furniture designs in wood and glass with bronze accents, currently available in distinctive patterns and motifs. The creation of ceramic sculptures in the mid-1980's provided avenues for the use of color and form in ways not previously explored. In 1992, the initiation of an extensive line of exquisite jewelry in bronze, gold and silver, many set with precious and semi-precious stones and, again, often reflecting animal themes, marked a new and expansive direction for his creations. In this same year, a new series of paper mache sculptures was introduced. In the new millennium, Bustamante continues to explore uncharted paths for the further expression of his uniquely imaginative and gifted talents.Each piece belongs to a limited edition and is created by hand, therefore unique. A certificate of authenticity duly signed by the artists itself is attributed to each sculpture. All works are of very good quality, and pieces of small and big size up to four (4) meters high are available in the collection. It is amazing how Sergio Bustamante can project all that magic and fascination to each one of his works.

The art collection of many private residences, public buildings, and museums in every part of the planet has been enriched by Sergio Bustamante’s works. The Mexican government even elected them for official gifts to state governors and to high personalities. His works are more and more wanted around the globe (Mexico, United States, Japan, Europe, and recently Russia); therefore they will probably increase in value over the next years. The Ginger Giraffe will be the first step for Sergio Bustamante into the country that he loves & admires & had always longed to display his art in! We welcome Sergio Bustamante to India! Lavasa loves you, Sergio!