Mr Ben J. Verwaayen, Chief Executive Officer, Alcatel-Lucent, France, lightened up the panel discussion at the at the India Economic Forum with his interesting take on India. Excerpts:
Anything you say about India is about incredible numbers. If you say something positive, you have to multiply by incredible numbers. If you point to a problem, you have to multiply by incredible numbers. I have three positive things to say about India. First of all, this is the country with the highest smiles per capita. This is a very important asset.
Second thing, this is a country with probably the highest capability to produce entrepreneurial spirit.
Third, there is no place in the world you can go without running into somebody from India with incredible depth of knowledge.
So, you have very smart people, very entrepreneurial people, who seem to be happy.
Everything that happens in the world happens in India but multiplied by a big number. We have institutions from the 20th century and we have citizens in the 21st century.
How do you manage the world's largest democracy at a time when people are informed 24X7 in real-time; how do you make decisions in a world that is so integrated that we elect people not on global issues but local issues.
In a lighter vein, Mr Ben said, I think what worries me the most is that if we come up with a list of people who are trusted, then the least trusted people will be people like us – the CEOs of large organisations, and the bankers, and the politicians, and the journalists.
And that is a big constitutional problem!