Remembering Anand Ramachandran

I recently lost a good friend of mine whom I knew since my school days. Looking back at his life set me thinking about a few things.

Early Days

Anand Ramachandran was a voracious reader ever since I knew him. But everyday fiction was not for him. He read Philosophy and Mathematics, and studied these as well.

Mathematics was one of his abiding interests from the time I first knew him. Like some others, I think he was first influenced by the logic and precision of Maths. I can’t recall the details but he used to mention challenging problems in Algebra and Real Analysis when he was 15 and I was 17! At that time, he wanted to do a good first degree in Mathematics and then go on to do a PhD. In this, he was definitely influenced by his elder brother who did a PhD in Maths in the US and went on to be a faculty member there.

Anand spurned advice from others to be practical and do Engineering, and decided to do Maths in a college instead. But, by the early 1980s, college education in India had started to decline in quality. Anand got into Vivekananda College, a well-regarded college in Madras, but he found the syllabus and teaching pedestrian. He was particularly vexed by the need to pass exams which he didn’t find challenging, and which involved swotting if you wanted to get outstanding marks. I can recall his getting really frustrated by the fact that he had to do this humdrum stuff when there were so many more interesting problems waiting to be solved. And, friends kept telling him about the importance of exam marks to get admission to a “good” MSc programme. That only made things worse as did the fact that his brother had done an MSc from IIT Madras before going to the US. I am not sure of this but I think he finally enrolled in an MSc at Vivekananda College itself.

Change of Interests

But, Anand’s interests soon broadened into Philosophy and Linguistics. Within a couple of years, he had enrolled in Deccan College at Pune which had a good Linguistics Department, and started working with Probal Dasgupta (see photo below). Anand found the academic and social environment of Pune conducive to his pursuits and interests, and this became a city where he would not only spend time but make lasting friendships.

Anand chafed against exams wherever he went and Deccan College was no exception. Yet, he not only managed to study there but land himself a scholarship to MIT. By then he had become a fan of Noam Chomsky (below). While entering MIT was probably his personal high point, his stay there was tempestuous.

I don’t recall the details, but he was asked to leave the PhD programme. Anand told me that the Dean agreed he had been treated unfairly but he had to leave nevertheless. From what I understood, his friendship with Chomsky harmed rather then helped him, and he got caught in the crossfire of vicious academic politics. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Anand’s lack of tact and direct talking would not have been of great help in this episode.

This experience was tough for Anand psychologically and left him with bitter feelings about academia. While he didn’t expect much from Indian academia, he felt let down by US academia as well. But this was not the culmination of his love-hate relationship with academia. More about that later!

Music takes him on a different path

One of Anand’s other passions in life was music, and he remained a true fan of good western classical music for as long as I knew him. While at Pune, he had become friends with a European man who had, if I remember right, been a member of the Osho Ashram. This individual had developed very high quality audio speakers and was making a business out of selling these hand-crafted speakers. Once he recovered from the MIT fiasco, Anand started selling these Cadence speakers. Prospective customers were rich, well-heeled connoisseurs of western classical music. With his erudition, it was not difficult for Anand to become friends with many of these individuals, friendships that became a big support for the rest of his life.

Anand started selling the speakers in Pune, but later moved to Bangalore where he even set up a studio that acted as a listening room to experience the quality of the speakers. But, given his intellectual interests, it was impossible for Anand to remain in sales, and he got interested in academic pursuits again.

New Academic Interests

By now, his interests had shifted to Statistics and Finance. I have forgotten how this came about, but he eventually became a consultant to Cranes Software, a company that was developing and selling statistics tools. Not surprisingly, he again came into conflict with some of the academic consultants to the company who questioned his lack of certified expertise in the form of degrees.

Anand returned to academics a few years later to do a Masters degree in Mathematical Finance at York University. Anand really took to the UK, and found it conducive to his temperament and interests. He struggled to finish the degree because he again felt somewhat straitjacketed, but finish it he did, and he stayed on to do a PhD as well.

His PhD was marred by an acute infection that affected the functioning of his heart and almost killed him. But Anand survived. He always gave a good deal of credit to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and the care he received from them. The NHS is often pilloried for being inefficient and slow, but Anand was very impressed by their care for him.

Anand finally finished his PhD a couple of years ago at the age of 45+. He had to leave the UK, but found a job with a start-up in Singapore.

Anand remained a free spirit till the end. He couldn’t stand authority and got into conflicts with people in positions of authority throughout his life, even in the start-up! He hated other forms of rigidity as well, particularly the regimented nature of exams. But it is a tribute to his doggedness that he persevered to complete his PhD.

Some Concluding Thoughts

I believe that with Anand’s quality of thinking and academic interests, he would have made a really good professor if only our academic system were more flexible. Had he the good fortune to be exposed to a classics tripos at Cambridge or a liberal arts programme at a top US university, he would have done really well. I hope things change fast so that we don’t lose more Anands. I see a sliver of hope in some of the new programmes that are coming up in India like the Liberal Arts programme at Ashoka University.

Anand was an aesthete. This was apparent from the things he liked throughout his life – Mathematics, Classical Music, Yoga, well-written books. While he could get very angry about some things like stubborn bureaucracies and the narrow mindedness of Indian academia, he was himself non-violent.

One thing I really admired about Anand was his perseverance. At a time when many people are thinking about hanging up their boots, Anand was doing his PhD and thinking about what he should do next. He was keen to settle down in the UK, but alas that was not to be.

In the last few years, Anand had mixed feelings about me, since he now saw me as an establishment figure with authority. I think he felt, like some other friends did in the past, that I tried to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds at the same time. Anand is one of many mavericks I have known, who were attracted towards me at some point, but later drifted apart. Luckily I have maintained links with many of these friends thanks to Kajoli who shares their free spirit. That happened with Anand too – she remained in much closer touch with him than I did.  

Anand Ramachandran, Rest in Peace. A tribute to Anand would be incomplete without my great appreciation for Anand’s sister Hamsini who supported him through thick and thin and helped him sustain his dreams.

[These are my personal views and based on my personal recollections. Sorry for any errors.]

Re-discovering Bihar

My last visit to Bihar was more than 20 years ago, so I was curious to see how the state has changed since then. The sense of anticipation was high as I now look forward to a prolonged interaction with the state – as Director of IIM Indore, I will be the mentor-director for the new IIM to be set up in Bihar.

Patna: Improved Infrastructure, but still very crowded

I had read about runway length and clearance constraints impeding flights in and out of Patna, and the reality of that was clear as we landed. Unlike other airports across the country that have expanded, got new terminal buildings, aerobridges, etc., Patna airport looked pretty much the same as I remember it from all those years ago. Looking at it closely I realized that it is a narrow rectangular strip with trees at the end, and no scope at all for expansion. The apron can’t accommodate more than a few aircraft, so clearly Bihar’s capital will need a new airport very soon.

All Indian cities have become more crowded over time, but Patna seems to be bursting at its seams. There have been infrastructural improvements in terms of flyovers and bridges, but the city still looks very crowded. Of course, like other cities, Patna has some areas that are sprawling and reminiscent of an earlier age – particularly the areas where the secretariat is located and where minsters and senior officers stay. But these look particularly incongruous in Patna because of the congestion in the rest of the city.

IIT Patna’s New “Vertical” Campus

We set off straight from the airport to the suburb of Bihta about 35 km from Patna where the new campus of IIT Patna is coming up. On the way, we had to negotiate significant traffic jams at Danapur as trucks heading to the railway yard had blocked much of the road. Further down, we passed the Bihta Air Force Base before arriving in Bihta town, and crossed the railway track across a new-looking bridge to get to the IIT campus on the other side. All in all, it took about 75 minutes to get from the airport to Bihta, and providing quick access to the city will become critical in the years ahead unless Bihta Air Force base gets converted into the new Patna airport as has been proposed by some.

The IIT campus is flanked by a brand new Hero Cycles plant, (apparently set up in order to meet the enhanced demand for bicycles in Bihar thanks to the state government’s scheme to provide cycles to girl students in government schools – more about this below) and a private educational institution with an imposing name – NSIT. Across the road is an HPCL oil storage facility.

The IIT Campus has a massive administrative building, a few academic buildings, 4 blocks of 8-storeyed hostels that will accommodate about 1,000 students, and multi-storeyed accommodation for faculty and staff. All these buildings are at an advanced stage of construction and should be completed in the next few months. A lecture hall complex and other infrastructure will come at a later stage. Personally, I would have preferred to see the lecture hall complex ready now rather than the admin block, but I guess they had to make some choices!

Some friends made critical comments when I posted photos of this IIT campus on Facebook, saying that the campus looks more like an apartment complex. I believe such criticism is unfair. Given the scarcity of land, we need to re-think the way we design academic campuses. Hostels and residential facilities have to go vertical, and scarce horizontal spaces can be used primarily for playfields and gardens. Clever design can make the campus seems spacious, green and open. Horizontal sprawl will have to be a thing of the past! If you want to see how this can be done, take a look at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the beautiful new university built in Clearwater Bay about 25 years ago.

Bihar has been an exporter of students to other states for as long as I can remember, but things are beginning to change now as high quality education comes to the state. 2 central universities, an IIT, IIIT, and an NIT are just some of the central institutions being set up. Besides, there are new state-supported institutions as well such as the Chandragupt Institute of Management at Patna (CIMP). This institute is presently located in a temporary premises in the heart of Patna as it awaits its permanent home that is under construction.

Gaya and Bodh Gaya

On Day 2 of our visit, we set off on the 115 km trudge from Patna to Gaya. The road is narrow (2-lanes) but otherwise in good shape, and the sides of the road are green with fields. It took close to two-and-a-half hours to reach the Circuit House at Gaya. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Circuit House spic-and-span, in much better shape than circuit houses I have seen in some other states.

We quickly moved on to the adjoining town of Bodh Gaya which has a very festive look. The roads are lined with flags, many countries have built monasteries, and hotels and lodging houses are all over. Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world throng this town where the Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree. The Maha Bodhi temple had a festive air as well, as the day we visited was the concluding day of a week-long festival.

I felt a little awkward at the temple given the circumstances of our visit. I had been planning for years to visit all the important Buddhist pilgrimage sites, to re-trace the path of the Buddha. But it took an “official” visit to set up a new IIM to finally take me there!

The Mahabodhi temple is beautifully maintained with clean approaches, marble flooring and orderly flow of pilgrims. One thing that did surprise me though was the small number of Indian visitors – for a moment, one could easily imagine that one was in a different part of Asia!

Gaya has a cute airport, designed to meet the needs of international travellers visiting Bodh Gaya. During the tourist season, international flights connect Bodh Gaya to a number of Asian countries that have significant Buddhist populations. The only domestic connection is to Delhi and Varanasi (Air India) and this too doesn’t run the whole year around. But Gaya is on the main railway line from Delhi to Howrah, and is served by three Rajdhani Expresses apart from a host of other trains.

Gaya has a significant military establishment, a new Officers Training Academy, built on the premises of the erstwhile Army Supply Corps North Centre that was re-located to Bangalore a few years ago.

A Useful Learning Experience

On this trip I had the privilege of accompanying Shri Amarjeet Sinha, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of HRD, Government of India. Mr. Sinha has spent most of his career in Health and Education. Thanks to him, I was able to understand the socio-economic development of Bihar in a historic perspective ranging from the enduring impact of the Permanent Settlement on land use in the state to the recent improvement in some of its human development indicators.

I learnt that every girl student in class 9-12 in Bihar gets a free bicycle, uniform, and a scholarship, amounting to a total of more than Rs. 5,000. The bicycle, in particular, has resulted in a sharp reduction in school dropouts as girls are now able to reach school quickly and without significant cost. Thousands of girls have been trained in self-defence, in judo and karate. I was impressed to hear about a scheme of the Bihar government whereby young women from the Maha Dalit communities have been hired as catalysts (called Vikas Mitra = “friend of development”) to get girls in their communities to attend school, give remedial classes and improve adult literacy. All of this was quite impressive, and I look forward to learning more about these developments as I spend more time in Bihar!

[The views expressed here are the personal views of the author.]

Deepakk Goyal and Passion Greens: The Future of Indian Farming?

This was a few years ago at IIM Bangalore. I was looking for some articulate IIMB alumni who could speak to our students to give them an alternate perspective on careers. One name that quickly came to mind was that of Deepakk Goyal. I knew he had done a few different things – undergraduate studies in the United States, a longish stint in his family’s trading business in Kolkata, a late MBA at IIMB where he was one of our mature students (and unlike almost all the others, already married with kids), and then a stint with private equity.

But I was totally unprepared for what was to follow. When I got through to Deepakk on the phone, he told me that he had become a farmer in Central India, near Indore. And, that farming was his new passion, what he would be following in the years to come.

Deepakk didn’t figure in my thinking for some time thereafter till I moved to Indore in January 2014. I was trying to discover any connections and contacts in the Malwa region and then I suddenly remembered Deepakk. We spoke soon after I moved to Indore, but didn’t actually meet till the Global Investors’ Summit in October.

Deepakk’s Farm

I had somehow got it into my head that Deepakk is into organic farming. Maybe because I couldn’t imagine him doing anything humdrum and, from all reports, organic farming is very challenging though also remunerative. When we finally visited him at the end of December, I realized that I was right about Deepakk doing something far from the ordinary, only it doesn’t have to be organic farming for it to be exciting.

The topography can change rapidly in these parts of MP. As we drove down the Khandwa Road, past the construction site of the new IIT at Simrol, and across the short Ghat section a little further down, accompanied for stretches by the huge pipeline carrying Narmada water, there are long green stretches. You actually cross the Narmada at some point. The Narmada is one of the few Indian rivers to retain its glory as we found to our delight during our earlier travels in MP to places like Maheshwar and Omkareshwar. Seeing the fertile stretches in the vicinity of the Narmada, I expected to see Deepakk farming well-irrigated land.

But, we were soon in for another surprise. As we waited by the side of the road a few kilometers beyond Sanawad town for Deepakk’s wife Shilpa who was following us some distance behind on the road from Indore, we saw dry, barren land. We turned left off the highway and followed Shilpa on a dusty and winding road till we reached Deepakk’s farm in village Gunjari.

And, what did we see here? A small farmhouse near the gate with a few tiny rooms on the ground floor and a kitchen and covered verandah space on the first floor. Rows of pomegranate plants neatly running away on a large expanse in front of the farmhouse. And a huge open tank of water close to the farmhouse.

The Indian Farmer: A Major Risk Taker

Most people who have grown up in cities have a romantic notion of farming, shaped by movies and books. Indian folklore shows the Indian farmer anxiously waiting for the monsoon rains, benefiting either from the monsoon’s bounty or ruined by its failure. The farming story has typical villains like the usurious moneylender waiting for the crop to fail so that he can possess the farmer’s land.

In recent years, the rash of farmer suicides in Andhra Pradesh and Vidharbha has made many of us more aware of the complexities of farming. Higher returns have induced farmers to embrace cash crops, but the risks have also increased as investments are higher and farmers become more dependent on credit to finance this investment.

I remember someone once telling me that the biggest risk taker in our country is the Indian farmer. This was in the context of Indian entrepreneurs being risk-averse!

I can’t recall the exact content of his thesis, but one of my seniors in the doctoral programme at IIM Ahmedabad, SJ Phansalkar studied the risk-taking behavior of Indian farmers. Phansalkar himself went on to become a distinguished academic and author, and in recent years has worked for the Tata Trusts.

The Challenges of Farming

Well, all this esoteric discussion on risk-taking in farming became live and real when Deepakk told us about the challenges he has faced in the last few years. Several things can go wrong – insects, pests, animals, fungi, diseases of various kinds – any of these can unexpectedly ruin a crop. Market prices are unpredictable as they depend on demand and supply in a particular year across markets.

But Deepakk has learnt, even if the hard way, how to overcome these adversities. Some things I took away from our visit – each crop has its own idiosyncrasies and hence understanding a particular crop in all its details across cycles becomes important; expertise is fragmented and often tainted by the commercial interests of different sellers who are only interested in hawking their products; yet, there is scope for experimentation if done with careful monitoring.

Deepakk’s farm reminded me of what I saw on my visits to Israel – healthy looking plants growing in a barren landscape. In fact, Deepakk is very much like an Israeli farmer, totally committed to what he is doing, using technology intensively but thoughtfully, and fiercely protective of his efforts. He uses drip irrigation and soluble fertilisers to control the use of water and at the same time ensure that the plants get the nutrients they deserve.

The Future of Indian Agriculture

Deepakk’s advantage is his ability to invest capital and use technology and at the same time manage the risks involved. What we got at his farm was a glimpse of what Indian agriculture could look like in the future. It’s romantic, but in a different way from what you would see in an old Hindi film. What’s not clear in my mind is how the transition from the old to the new will happen…and how we will manage the social upheavals that are bound to accompany such a change.

Reflections on Paths Not Taken

The other day, someone asked me why and how I became interested in the pharmaceutical industry. This set me thinking about some of the other interests I had over time, the ones I didn’t pursue. This blog is dedicated to two of the paths not taken.

My Tryst with Biology

I have always had an interest in modern biology. We had a reasonably good Biology teacher in school, Mr. David, who explained the basics of modern genetics well. But, more importantly, somewhere towards the end of my school years, the British Council screened the multiple part BBC series on Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. I still have some visual memories of the episode on genetics where Bronowski explained Mendel’s experiments.

Sometime during the same period, Madras played host to an international conference on Molecular Biology where there were a number of prominent international scholars speaking. I attended their talks though I didn’t understand much of what they were saying.

One of my school friends, Vimal Jain, had a strong interest in medicine and hoped to do research on cancer one day. Under his influence, I started reading about cancer as well and even contemplated doing medicine. I visited CMC Vellore to find out more about this possibility but was discouraged by the miniscule number of places available and the intense competition for these.

During this period, I read several interesting books, including one on Josef Issels, a German doctor, who proposed alternate therapies for cancer that involved identifying and removing all other potential sources of infection including bad teeth! I just did a quick internet search and found that Issels’ treatment is still alive though it remains as controversial as it was during Issels’ lifetime, with some considering it ineffective, and others as outright quackery.

While my parents didn’t discourage me from studying Biology, or from reading about cancer research,  I can’t recall their active encouragement either! But, my interest in Biology didn’t go away, and I got a chance to pursue it again when I was studying Physics at IIT Kanpur.

In our final year, in fact in our final semester (January-April 1986), I attended a course which was titled (I hope I remember this correctly) Foundations of Modern Biology. It was taught by Prof. S. Ranganathan, a brilliant biochemist, who had done a post-doc with one of the outstanding figures in Organic Synthesis, Prof. Woordward, at Harvard in the 1960s. Ranga brought RNA and DNA to life in a dramatic way. I now realize that this was a state-of-the-art course at that time, and Ranga was really current with the interface between Chemistry and Biology.

As an aside, IITK had some incredible faculty in the Chemistry department in the 1970s and 1980s including CNR Rao, D. Balasubramanian, P.T. Narasimhan, M.V. George and Ranga himself. Chemists in India recently celebrated Ranga’s 80^th birthday and he was conferred with an Outstanding Teacher Award.

This fascination with Modern Biology has remained with me over the years, and is one of the reasons I have been interested in the Biology-driven pharmaceutical industry.

And another with Political Science

During the year (1986-87) I spent at Stanford doing my Master’s, I was drawn to other subjects. As Indian institutions go, IIT Kanpur (where I did my undergraduate degree) had an inclusive curriculum. Though I majored in Physics, I was able to do courses in Art, Sociology, Economics and Philosophy as part of the Humanities and Social Sciences requirement. But these seemed really inadequate when I saw the Course catalogue at Stanford. My urge to do other courses increased further when I spoke to some of the undergraduate students there.

So, I used the flexible credits that I had to attend a Political Science course titled “Political Economy of Development.” It was taught by a really articulate and knowledgeable professor called Terry Karl. I really enjoyed her classes and ploughed through the huge books we had to read as part of the class readings including Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies and Barrington Moore’s Dictatorship and Democracy.

Professor Karl was more interested in Latin America than Asia, but she encouraged me to work on a term paper on India, and I looked at the Punjab conflict (which was prominent at that time) with a Political Science lens. I still have the paper I wrote, and I must say it wasn’t a bad paper at all even if it was somewhat simplistic.

Another source of encouragement during the course was the teaching assistant, Alison Brysk. When I first saw the size of the readings for the course, I was really scared, so during the first tutorial session I asked Alison how they expected us to read so much. I still remember her response: one of the things we expect you to learn from the course is how to read efficiently (or words to that effect!).

After the experience of this course, I seriously thought about applying to a PhD programme in Political Science. If I remember right, I even discussed this with Professor Karl, and she was quite encouraging. But, I finally chickened out, because I really didn’t know what I would be able to do with a PhD in Political Science in India. As I was committed to returning to and working in India, I decided that this just wasn’t a good idea.

But I retain my interest in Political Science and what we did in Political Science 114K to this day. I have been lucky to have a chance to teach courses that build on this interest. I started teaching a course on Business, Government, and Society with Rajeev Gowda about a decade ago, and have taught this course off and on, including this year at IIM Indore to our IPM students.

Tailpiece

I am lucky that I have been able to keep alive my interest in Modern Biology and Political Science even though I don’t pursue them as the principal tracks of my career. I am not an expert in either but you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy studying these subjects!

[The views expressed here are the personal views of the author.]

Why can't we develop breakthrough drugs from India? Lessons from the Vertex Story

Why can’t India create new breakthrough drugs? Or, at a broader level, what prevents India and Indian firms from undertaking radical innovation? These are questions that have been on my mind for several years. I tried to answer these questions at a system-level in my book From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India. One of our doctoral students, Pavan Soni,  is currently engaged with these questions at the organizational level in his doctoral work on building capabilities for radical innovation in resource-scarce environments.

These questions came alive again as I read Barry Werth’s gripping account of the founding and early years of Vertex Pharmaceuticals: The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company’s Quest for the Perfect Drug. Vertex was founded over twenty years ago, so this is not a new book, but the story nevertheless gives an insight into what it takes to develop new drugs. Incidentally, in its first four years, Vertex did not manage to develop a drug though it made progress with some candidates and gave up on others.

Key Features of the Vertex Story

I found several interesting things about the Vertex story:

Distinctive Philosophy: Founder and CEO Joshua Boger played a fundamental role in shaping Vertex. He worked for several years in senior scientific positions at Merck, one of the top research-driven pharma companies, before founding Vertex. He believed that the time had come to scientifically design molecules rather than use the traditional approach of screening hundreds of compounds to check them for their potential therapeutic activity. He felt that a small company devoted to this new approach was more likely to be successful than a traditional pharma company which had a dominant logic based on screening. This led him to take the risk of leaving Merck in spite of a very successful career in the company.

The Role of the Scientific Advisory Board: While Boger put together a stellar Scientific Advisory Board, Werth’s account suggests that, at least in the case of Vertex, the SAB contributed more towards the company’s external image than the company’s own scientific work. In fact, early on, Vertex “fired” one of the high profile SAB members, Harvard Professor Stuart Schreiber, because it began to see a conflict of interest with Schreiber’s own work and felt that Schreiber was not careful enough about keeping the company’s “secrets.” Schreiber went on to stay a step ahead of Vertex in many of its early scientific quests.

Ability to sell ideas: In high technology and discovery-driven fields, technologists are often the best salesmen. Boger played the sales and marketing role to a “T”, whether it was striking deals with established drug companies like Japan’s Chugai or Burroughs Wellcome, convincing investors to participate in Vertex’s IPO or managing gatekeepers at scientific journals like Nature.

Role of the CEO: But, Boger’s contribution went well beyond marketing. He played a key role in deciding which molecules to work on (e.g. the choice of the “re-design” of FK-306, an established immunosuppressant, as Vertex’s first project), attracting top talent to the company, restoring motivational levels when spirits sagged, and pivoting to a different molecule when things didn’t work out. I was amazed by his self-confidence and unwavering drive (the book gives no evidence of any self-doubt at any stage!). Boger also integrated the discovery effort across disciplinary boundaries, a tricky task when there are well-established antagonisms between disciplines, and you are working with a group of high achievers with huge egos.

People and Network: Vertex benefited from the networks of its board members (key to raising the Chugai investment), ability to raise money at regular intervals (including through an IPO capitalizing on a short-lived bull run in biotech stocks) and the incredibly hard work of its early employees who worked for days without a break in order to stay ahead and have a story to tell.

Intense scientific competition helped as well as Vertex scientists were continuously under pressure from competitors like Schreiber as to who would take the lead. Information about the latest milestones achieved in university laboratories filtered into the company through informal networks and rumours acted as a spur for development.

Vertex was able to assemble a team of all the specialists needed to work on drug development – chemists, biologists, crystallographers, spectroscopists, etc., all of the highest caliber, either from top pharmaceutical companies or leading research groups. Creative abrasion was expected to help generate the best ideas. The main retention tool apart from the thrill of developing a new drug was stock options.

At least in the first four years of Vertex, drug development never happened in the structured, rational way that Boger envisaged. While that was the holy grail, many milestones were reached through intelligent guesses, trial and error, and sheer luck. Yet, throughout, the effort was to get there.

Why can’t we have a Vertex from India?

Let’s fast forward to today. Which elements of Vertex’s fast evolution could be replicated in India, and which would be inimitable?

With enough money, it should be possible to get skilled people for the technical tasks, and the equipment required to do these tasks. But I am not sure that we have the kind of people who Boger was able to attract to Vertex: scientists with the deep expertise at the frontier of the field combined with the original thinking required to make breakthrough discoveries, and the strong aspiration to do so. Managing such prima donnas as a group is not an easy task either.

Also, certain elements of the Vertex model simply don’t exist in India. In most fields and sub-disciplines, there is no Harvard equivalent that is pursuing the cutting edge of research and can provide competitive stimuli or research inputs to a young start-up. The gap between academia and industry is often lamented in India, and this gap affects the development of “high tech” industry the most. Email and the internet are no substitute for the flow of information across organizational boundaries thanks to informal professional networks.

And India’s investors and capital markets may not have the risk appetite and be sophisticated enough to make the frequent investments that would keep a company like Vertex afloat. In its first four years, apart from the initial funding, Vertex raised money from Chugai and also completed an IPO. Its only now, and that too in a relatively established space like e-commerce, that we are seeing multiple rounds of funding in quick succession.

I can’t imagine we have too many Boger equivalents who are able to straddle “high science,” technology and business.  The only person who comes to mind is Vijay Chandru of Strand Life Sciences.

Conclusion

It’s going to be difficult to create Vertex-like companies out of India. But there are a few things we can do to help the process, at least on the supply side.

We need to scale up what the Department of Biotechnology has supported reasonably well over the years – creation of a critical mass of highly qualified scientists and technologists in the areas of modern Biology and related fields. We can also expose more of our most talented scientists to the excitement of entrepreneurship and business through carefully crafted workshops – e.g. NSRCEL at IIMB had run a couple of workshops for young scientists/doctoral students at NCBS and IISc on the Business of Science, and this can be replicated elsewhere. Good incubators – like the Venture Centre at NCL Pune – would make getting off the ground easier.  

Parallel Lives

Biographies can be inspiring, and thought-provoking, and I have always enjoyed reading them. In general, I have preferred reading about contemporary figures rather than historical ones as I relate better to the present than the past. But, a problem with the typical biography is that you learn about one person in absolute terms, without benchmarks, unless the author chooses to provide them.

I recently had the opportunity to read three books which, instead of looking at a single individual, profiled parallel lives. This choice happened by chance and not by design, but all three were wonderful reading experiences.

An Uncommon Friendship Indeed

An Uncommon Friendship – From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust by Bernat Rosner and Frederic C. Tubach (with assistance from Sally Patterson Tubach) is the amazing story of an Auschwitz survivor (Rosner) told by a German contemporary (Tubach) whose family had strong Nazi sympathies at that time. After the War, Rosner and Tubach both emigrated to the United States where they made their own lives – Rosner as a retail executive, and Tubach as a professor at the University of California. They happened to meet in California many decades after the War and slowly discover each other’s past.

Rosner spent about a year at Auschwitz where his survival was nothing short of miraculous. At a critical juncture, he was just one step away (or one guard’s gesture away) from being assigned to a path to the gas chamber rather than the line to live another day. Rosner had dealt with the horrors and nightmares of the holocaust in which he lost his entire immediate family by suppressing their memories and building his life anew in the land of opportunity. The last person with whom you would expect him to share his past was Tubach, given his family’s Nazi background. But An Uncommon Friendship is a heart-warming tale of how Rosner and Tubach slowly discovered each other to the extent that they travelled together to Europe to the villages of their childhood to re-construct and share their past. This tale of human bonding is such a sharp contrast to the inhuman atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany that one wonders how such extremes can happen in the same human race.

Rosner got a lucky break after the War when he was able to emigrate to the United States rather than re-locate to the fledgling state of Israel thanks to the magnanimity of an American soldier he befriended when the Americans took control of some of the regions that had been under German occupation. The soldier turned out to be the scion of a rich American family, and arranged for him to enroll in college in the US. Rosner grabbed that break with both hands and built his life afresh.

Troubled Talent

Robert Peace, the protagonist of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs got such a break as well, but what happened thereafter couldn’t have been more different. Peace, an African American, was born to a hard-working yet penurious woman and an enigmatic, drug-dealing father (who spent most of his life behind bars for a murder that the book suggests he may not have committed) in a troubled, crime and drug-plagued suburb of Newark called East Orange. 

Academically brilliant, he went to the best schools his mother could afford including a top notch Jesuit institution in Newark city. Impressed by his promise, the school’s most successful alum sponsored Peace for a university education of his choice. This allowed him to attend Yale University.

The book is written by Jeff Hobbs, Peace’s (white) roommate, an aspiring if unsuccessful novelist, and tells the story of Peace’s life with a particular focus on his years at Yale and what happened thereafter. Peace’s life is juxtaposed against those of his contemporaries, rich and poor, black and white. What emerges is a sensitive yet stark sociological portrait of contemporary America that gives a more nuanced picture of socioeconomic conditions, race relations, crime and discrimination than what gets from the typical coverage of the recent killings of black youth by white American policemen.

As its title suggests, this book doesn’t have a happy end. Peace is a complex and infuriating character, brilliant but deeply flawed at the same time. Was his inability to “make it” in the land of opportunity the result of human frailty or the milieu in which he grew up? Why could Bernat Rosner overcome his past and build a new life but Robert Peace not do the same? Can the barriers of race and discrimination ever be overcome? These thoughts will live with me for a long time to come.

Nehru and Bose

I drew the title of this post from the third book - Nehru & Bose: Parallel Lives by Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Like all Indians, I knew several things about both Nehru and Bose before I read this book, and much more about Nehru than Bose! Nehru, the aristocratic visionary, to whom we owe the concept of a modern, democratic India but also the ideological barriers that come in the way of our achieving our economic potential; Bose, the courageous and impatient nationalist, whose mysterious and sudden disappearance and death created forever an enigmatic halo.

By re-constructing the lives of Bose and Nehru in the chronology and context of the freedom struggle, Mukherjee brings out the similarities and differences between these two outstanding freedom fighters.

Neither was poor, both had socialist leanings, and were strongly committed to India’s freedom. Both had their differences with Gandhi, and had trouble in understanding some of the tactical decisions he took in the course of the freedom struggle. But, they dealt with these in different ways. Nehru treated Gandhi as a father figure (Gandhi was a great source of emotional strength to Nehru after Motilal’s early demise) and kept many of his differences to himself, while Bose was impatient and outspoken. The book clearly suggests that Gandhi trusted Nehru more than he trusted Bose. There also seems to have been a fear of Bose’s charisma and his ability to mobilise and motivate people. To compound matters, Bose had many competitors in Bengal politics and sometimes needed to take a more extreme position in order to demonstrate his leadership.

The biggest difference between Nehru and Bose towards the end was of course their attitude towards the use of force in the final thrust for freedom. Bose’s fascination for the military and all that goes with it went back to his youth, and manifested itself in the creation of the Indian National Army (INA). Bose and his colleagues showed considerable physical courage in this endeavor and ex-members of the INA became important contributors to the development of India. But, Bose’s grand dream of teaming up with the Axis powers was doomed almost from the start – Mukherjee’s book brings out well the inherent contradictions in Bose trying to work with the Nazi leadership.

Mukherjee has not, as far as I can see, brought out any startling new facts about Nehru and Bose. But, by re-telling history in the right sequence and going back and forth between the two protagonists, he shows clearly that Nehru and Bose had several things in common, including a warm personal friendship for much of the 1930s. This is book is a wonderful introduction to the history of the time as well as the two towering persons who are the subject of this book. Unlike the other two books I wrote about in this post, this book is focused more on the subjects’ public persona, but I suppose that’s inevitable since they were public leaders of such importance.

Tailpiece

These three wonderful books illustrate the power of profiling parallel lives. I hope to find more books in this genre, and perhaps even write one myself someday!

Actors, a Lawyer, a Journalist, and a Management Pioneer

We have accumulated hundreds of books over the years. Keeping them dust-free has always been a problem. And, shifting them a major challenge. Luckily, we didn’t move for several years (we were in the same house from 2003-2013), but my move to Indore and shifting out of the IIMB campus meant that we had to finally deal with these books.

Once in Indore, I started accumulating more books, till I realized that this can’t just go on. So, I finally decided to go electronic and green, and shifted to a Kindle a few months ago. There were two other immediate drivers for this – the difficulty in carrying more than one book while travelling, and the challenge of finding the “right” books to read. Bookstores are slowly going extinct (Indore doesn’t have a good bookstore, not even at the airport) and most airport bookstores have an amazingly uninspiring collection of books.

Reading with the Kindle Paperwhite

The new Kindle Paperwhite is a revelation. What I really like about it is that it weighs hardly anything and you can use it in any ambient light conditions (unlike a laptop screen for instance, which is unreadable in bright ambient light). The other advantage is the huge collection of books available and the fact that it takes less than a minute to download a book if you have a good wifi connection.

The only thing I don’t like about using the Kindle is that every book looks the same. In a printed book, you have variety of colour, paper texture, cover illustrations, layouts and fonts. But, on the Kindle, all books look the same.

Books I read on the Kindle so far

This post is devoted to the books I have read since acquiring my Kindle Paperwhite. All of them are biographies or autobiographies. In recent years, I hardly read any fiction. I find “true” stories fascinating enough. And, I suspect that most non-fiction has some embellishment anyway. At the minimum, it depends on reconstructing things from memory, and, I am sure the brain plays its own games.

Two Actors

I am not a filmi person, and don’t queue up to watch the latest releases. But I can’t escape some interest in movie stars. The first two books I read on the Kindle were about movie stars who are as different as different can be.

Meryl Streep By Charles River Editors

I always liked Meryl Streep as an actor. She is so versatile yet appears natural in every role she plays. And, she has a quiet dignity to boot. The short biography I read showed how incredibly professional she is. If you believe the book, Meryl Streep’s personal life has been largely free of controversy as she has, unlike most film stars, managed to keep her personal and professional lives in two different compartments. As a result, the book has very little “juice” and would have been shunned by any Indian film publication! 

Meena Kumari By Vinod Mehta

Meena Kumari’s short yet tempestuous life is, in that sense, much more “interesting.” But all credit to Vinod Mehta for a sensitive yet apparently honest portrayal of her life. I was never a great fan of Meena Kumari, and she died before I started seeing Hindi films, but I got interested in reading this book because when I read Vinod Mehta’s memoirs, he mentioned that this was his first book as a rookie journalist in Mumbai. Vinod has succeeded in building a compelling picture of the difficult circumstances in which Meena Kumari grew up and worked, of the pulls and pressures she faced from her poor family and her much older and possessive husband, Kamal Amrohi. In the process, he also talks about the Hindi film industry in the late 1950s and 1960s, the big studios and iconic directors. Looking back, those seem like much simpler times!

Three Public Figures in Different Fields – Nariman, Urwick and Attkinson

Before Memory Fades by Fali Nariman

My grandfather was a lawyer. Sometimes, while working on a complicated case, he would explain his arguments to me hoping that if I could understand the arguments, they would be clear to the judge as well. As a result, I developed an early interest in the law.

Earlier this year, I read Zia Mody’s concise yet insightful look at ten judgements that have impacted India in a big way. Fali Nariman’s memoirs complement this book and add much more in terms of the relationship between the executive and the judiciary, between politicians and lawyers, and between legal luminaries and juniors at the bar. I particularly liked the parts about the excellent training he received as a young lawyer in Bombay, and the challenges and dilemmas he faced in representing Union Carbide in the Gas Tragedy case. I guess lawyers have to be good at managing contradictions, at compartmentalizing things, as they sometimes have to support apparently conflicting perspectives in different cases.

Lyndall Urwick: Management Pioneer by Edward Brech, Andrew Thomson, and John F. Wilson

I hadn’t heard of Lyndall Urwick until I attended the Pan-IIM World Management Conference at IIM Kozhikode last month. One of the speakers, John Wilson, mentioned his name during his talk. It turns out that Wilson is the co-author of a book on Urwick, the pioneer of the scientific management movement in the UK. Urwick came from a business-owning family, but was shaped by his experience in the first World War, and became an evangelist of scientific management practices.

“Evangelist” is the right term to describe Urwick for he seems to have been undeterred in giving literally hundreds of talks, and writing a similar number of articles on his favourite theme. Though scientific management is usually associated with efficiency and productivity, Urwick had a larger canvas that included organization design and a humanitarian approach to the management of people. Like all pioneers, he faced several difficulties in getting his thoughts accepted, and the reception of his ideas in certain quarters was not helped by his direct speaking. In fact, his contributions were appreciated more in the United States than in his home country!

Overall, I was most impressed by Urwick’s commitment to his theme and the tireless persistence with which he pursued it over his lifetime. Reading this book made me wonder whether we had similar unsung proponents of management in India. From whatever I have read, the management movement in India, if it can be called that, started after independence and picked up steam in the 1960s thanks to people like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Vikram Sarabhai and Ravi Mathai. But some management innovations go back to the early part of the 20^th century when the Tatas experimented with both efficiency improvements and welfare-oriented people practices (like limiting the work day to 8 hours). While many histories of Indian business exist, such as Dwijendra Tripathi’s wonderful books, I must look harder to see whether someone has written a history of management thought in India. If not, here is a great opportunity!

Stonewalled By Sharyl Attkinson

I found Sharyl Attkinson’s Stonewalled from the New York Times bestsellers list. Attkinson is a formidable journalist with an impressive list of awards to her credit. Investigative reporting is her forte. Stonewalled is all about how she became disillusioned with, and finally left, CBS News as the network channel thwarted her efforts to pursue investigative stories that would show the Obama administration in a poor light. Attkinson provides plenty of evidence to show that the predominantly “liberal” media establishment applies different standards to the coverage of Republican and Democratic presidents. But most alarming about her story is the extent to which the US government is willing to go to track and monitor someone they perceive as inimical to their interests. Quite an amazing story, fascinating, yet scary at the same time. Big Brother is watching!  

More Next Week

But, the most fascinating books I read on my Kindle so far all track parallel lives. I’ll write about these next week: