Venture Capital, Before High Tech

Highlights from an interesting piece in New York Times.

THE United States military — credited with spawning the Internet — also helped in the genesis of venture capital. So reveals Spencer E. Ante in “Creative Capital” (Harvard Business School Press, $35), a sometimes slow but ultimately satisfying biography of Georges F. Doriot, the transplanted Frenchman who is often called the father of V.C. Doriot, a United States Army reserve officer who rose to brigadier general, was appointed an administrator - entrepreneur on the home front, responsible for equipping, clothing and feeding millions of soldiers overseas. He and his staff, including many of his students from Harvard, funded research into innovative solutions. A lightweight plastic flak jacket (the Doron) saved thousands of lives. And even some failures had their upsides. Grunts found their powdered lemonade “useful as stove cleaner or hair rinse.”

The book’s matter-of-fact storytelling is not always as superb as the story, but as the book advances it gathers poignancy. Doriot had won the hand of his Harvard-assigned research assistant, Edna Blanche Allen, a brainy beauty. Their 48-year marriage was childless; Harvard men were surrogate sons. Edna had a dream house built for the couple on the Massachusetts shore, then died of lymphoma; her ashes were scattered into the ocean. Doriot kept writing her love poems. Nine years later, in 1987, the pipe-smoking general succumbed to lung cancer. His ashes were cast from the same spot into the Atlantic. DORIOT’S charismatic, French-accented lectures at Harvard over 40 years inspired multiple generations of leaders with firsthand stories and pithy sayings — for example, “Someone somewhere is making a product that will make your product obsolete.” His cause, venture, became ubiquitous, even in philanthropy.

“Someone somewhere is making a product that will make your product obsolete.” - Georges F. Doriot

Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It

Highlights from a book review by Lisa Margonelli in New York Times. Lisa Margonelli is an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long Strange Trip to Your Tank.”

• Why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance.

• In 1987, Americans drank only 5.7 gallons of bottled water per person per year, but the cumulative impact of ad campaigns and the vision of Madonna fellating a bottle of Evian in “Truth or Dare” more than doubled consumption by 1997. In 2000 the chief executive of Quaker Oats bragged to analysts that “the biggest enemy is tap water.” By 2005, the enemy had become the consumer’s bladder; and in 2006, Pepsi, which owns Aquafina, spent $20 million suggesting that Americans “drink more water.” That year we drank 27.6 gallons each at a rate of about a billion bottles a week.

• But marketing swings both ways. As quickly as bottled water became a symbol of healthy hyperindividualism — sort of an iPod for your kidneys — a backlash turned it into the devil’s drink. one expert tells Royte, “the total energy required for every bottle’s production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil.” Mayors from San Francisco to New York suddenly became aware of the new symbolism of bottled water as a waste of taxpayer money, a diss of local tap water and a threat to the environment. Some canceled their city’s bottled water contracts.

• By the time I finished “Bottlemania” I thought twice about drinking any water. Among the risks: arsenic, gasoline additives, 82 different pharmaceuticals, fertilizer runoff sufficient to raise nitrate levels so that Iowa communities issue “blue baby” alerts. And in 42 states, Royte notes, “people drink tap water that contains at least 10 different pollutants on the same day.” The privatization of pristine water is part of a larger story, a tragic failure to steward our shared destiny. And if you think buying water will protect you, Royte points out that it too is loosely regulated. And there is more — the dangers of pipes and of plastic bottles, the hazards of filters, and yes, that “toilet to tap” issue. But there is slim comfort: Royte says we don’t really need to drink eight glasses of water a day. Drink when you’re thirsty, an expert says. That’s refreshing.

The Indian Context
This book review caught my attention for various reasons. The protests that erupted in the State of Kerala over excessive water use leading to depletion of ground water resources in the local community is still fresh in the mind. The second issue that comes to mind is the study made by Delhi-based NGO, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), headed by Ms Sunita Narain, revealing that all soft drink brands sold by Coke and Pepsi comprised a cocktail of pesticide residues. This had forced some of the State Governments to restrict sales of cola products. Further, Coca Cola was also in the news being accused of disposing hazardous sludge outside its bottling plant in Palakkad, Kerala.

In the Indian context, people use bottled water especially while travelling, more for health considerations as tap water is considered not safe enough to drink without purification/boiling etc. Thus, many people while travelling consume Coke/Pepsi feeling that its safe - but which subsequent tests proved not so safe. As regards the bottled water, it was interesting to learn recently from a conversation I had with a person who had visited a water bottling plant. He had been told that bacteria is eliminated at the plant stage while bottling, but it develops/grows after 4-5 hours. Thus, even bottled drinking water is not safe, this person was told! But, as we know our Indian conditions, we still feel bottled water is safe - may be, continuous advertisements have reinforced that thought in our minds.

"Drink when you’re thirsty, an expert says. That’s refreshing," concludes the book review. Very true. Only the question is which water - bottled water or tap water? May be if we are at home, tap water - duly boiled would be good for consumption and if we are travelling then we will have no alternative but to consume bottled water.

The Open Road

Came across this interesting review in Mint of Pico Iyer's new book on Dalai Lama - "The Open Road".

The Open Road, Pico Iyer’s new book about the Dalai Lama, is less a biography than an extended profile. The Dalai Lama has used his prolonged exile to take Buddhism out into the world. He has promulgated a system of “global ethics” that does not rest on a foundation of religious belief or practice and allows the denizens of our shrinking global village to cut across their differences. Thanks to him, Iyer writes, “Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have become a living and liberating part of the global neighbourhood.”

Iyer notes that the Dalai Lama takes as his political model the figure of Gandhi, a man whose commitment to non-violence and to peaceful resistance brought down a powerful empire. Just as Gandhi opposed British dominion without demonizing the British people, so the Dalai Lama has always emphasized forbearance and the need for Tibetans to look within. But, as Patrick French pointed out recently in The New York Times, “Gandhi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March and starving himself nearly to death—a very different approach from the Dalai Lama’s ‘middle way,’ which concentrates on non-violence rather than resistance.” Iyer acknowledges that as the years roll by and Tibet’s situation remains unchanged, among Tibetans “there is less and less hesitation about criticizing his Middle Way policy and the government deputed to implement it.”

The Open Road closes on a cautiously optimistic note. Iyer observes that no one knew at the beginning of 1989 that by the year-end the Berlin Wall would have fallen, and the Cold War would come to an end, and suggests that something similar may happen with China and Tibet. It is to be hoped that this is so but, in the year of the Beijing Olympics, and at a time when paeans to China’s rising economic power are being sung in many quarters, the immediate future of Tibet appears to be a closed rather than an open road.