By Dr Shai Vyakarnam, Director, AcceleratorIndia.
I have been a bit silent recently due to travel to two places – Palestine and Macedonia. Reflecting on my visits on flights home, it struck me how lucky young Indians are in their ambitions to be entrepreneurs.
Let us take Palestine. Highly educated, high levels of competence with the English language and yet, due to the oppressive rule they face, there is little opportunity for them. Forget about lack of money, banking fragility etc. They face many more obstacles like day to day humiliation for living in their own space, the ugly sight of a 700-km wall apparently for security, check posts and both electricity and water released at the mercy of Israeli authorities.
Actually as I write this it strikes me that many of the poor in India may feel the same about living in India! But let us compare middle classes with each other.
Then I went to Macedonia – which is an apparent morphology of “ma ki dunia” – or motherland. I have not yet had time to find out which way it went – whether the words came to India through Alexander the Great or whether he took it back as he left India for home having learnt the words in or around India. This investigation I have to save for another day.
This fabulous country of 2 million people, just north of Greece and bordering Albania gave the world Cyrillic alphabet. This is credited to Cyril (and to me Lic sounds a familiar word as well – writing) who later became saint. He, together with other founders of the alphabet, was based on Lake Ohrid in Macedonia.
Well, this beautiful country is now struggling to make anything of itself. It was part of Yugoslavia, left behind in all ways except good education; suffers corruption the same as India; lacks a developed civic system; is on the edge of a vast and quite wealthy Europe but with 30 per cent unemployment where can it go in terms of development.
We have seen the frustration of under-employed youth in the Middle East (the so-called Arab Spring) and I just wonder about places like Macedonia.
But if we think about the Indian context – our young population has everything to celebrate. The size of the opportunity within India, the freedom to act, general access to safe environments and a legal system all mean that entrepreneurs in India can think big and act big.
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A version of this blog was originally published at India Incorporated, a social media proposition with a difference that aims to encapsulate the India global story through pithy reports, interviews, analyses, profiles and features.
Published on 24 May 2011