THE APPOINTMENT OF Dr.Vishal Sikka, a Stanford alumnus and former chief technology officer of SAP AG as the new executive chairman of the Bangalore-based IT services major Infosys Technologies Ltd (annual revenue: Rs.50,133 crore) with effect from August 1, bodes well for this company, which until recently symbolised post-liberalisation India™s entrepreneurial resurgence and new technologies management capabilities. But of late, this darling of the stockmarkets has been through considerable turbulence, with a debilitating exodus of top-rung professionals and loss of market valuation.
The prime cause of the decline is that after its spectacular initial success, the company adopted a policy of rotationally rewarding its promoter-directors with the position of chief executive rather than inducting more proven professionals. Hence the talent exodus and eroding reputation. To rectify this situation, in 2013 N.R. Narayana Murthy, the founder chairman of Infosys who retired in 2011, returned to the helm of the company to restore its glory days. But to no avail. To his credit, Murthy resigned for the second time. Enter Sikka.
The grave shortcoming of Murthy and the technocrat promoter CEOs who gave the company an excellent launch, was a mofussil mindset which prevented them from advertising Infosys™ many great achievements. To accurately convey a company™s core competencies, character and achievements, intensive ad campaigns which tell its story from its own perspective, are necessary. That™s why IT companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Dell, IBM and Apple have huge global ad budgets and campaigns.
The mofussil mindset of the company™s technocrat founder-directors including Murthy, has cost the company heavily in terms of market perception and sunk its intelligent plan to transform into a global business consultancy and total solutions heavyweight. Infosys™ new CEO would do well to heed this gratuitous advice, and discard the company™s penny wise communications policy to trumpet its great achievements and messages to the public worldwide, loud and clear.
Greedy compradors
RATHER BELATEDLY, the somnolent Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has issued draft guidelines which ” subject to approval by all ill-defined stakeholders ” could rein in manufacturers and advertisers of skin lightening creams. The guidelines state that œspecifically, advertising should not directly or implicitly show people with darker skin as unattractive, unhappy, depressed or concerned¦ or inferior, or unsuccessful in any aspect of life particularly in relation to being attractive to the opposite sex, matrimony, job placement, promotions and other prospects.
Unfortunately these guidelines have come six decades too late. In the meanwhile manufacturers/marketers of skin lightening creams led by the hypocritical transnational Unilever India (formerly Hindustan Lever), have manipulated the social and historical insecurities of the population to equate skin tones and complexions of the once hated ˜Red Devils™ to build an anti-social Rs.3,500 crore fairness creams and lotions industry in India.  Unsurprisingly, this white-is-right propaganda has been bought hook, line and sinker by the brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood and television and the fashion industry to the extent that ethnic Indian women ” adulated and admired the world over for their natural tan skin tones ” have become the pariahs of Bollywood and regional cinema, dominated by deracinated whitewashed movie stars.
Against this backdrop, ASCI™s new guidelines for the country™s disconnected, esoteric advertising fraternity are more than overdue. But indications are that powerful corporates such as Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, L™Oreal, and Emami who are reaping huge tainted fortunes by scratching the insecurities of an ill-educated nation, will resort to code language advertising to continue to ply their nefarious trade. And there™s no shortage of greedy compradors to press their case.
Disturbing questions
TO REPEAT THE FAMOUS sentence of Mr. Bumble (Oliver Twist) that the law is an ass, is hazardous in contemporary India where learned justices and judges are quick to invoke the country™s ill-defined contempt laws to summon and sentence contemnors.
Nevertheless, given the inability of their learned lordships of the bench to clean up their act, sometimes one has to take the risk in the public interest.
This observation is prompted by the pathetic plight of purchasers of the curiously named Campa Cola apartments in mid-town Mumbai, being reported in the media for the past several weeks. The facts of the case are that in collusion with (inevitably) corrupt officials of the Mumbai municipal corporation (BMC), the builders of the Campa Cola complex comprising seven buildings, constructed 55 more apartments than they were licenced to build. At the time when licence violations were being perpetrated in plain sight, corporation officials made no effort to curb them. Subsequently the apartments were sold to unsuspecting buyers by the builders. A quarter century later, after much litigation the Supreme Court has held that the flats were illegally constructed and should be razed. The purchasers knew ” or should have known ” they were illegally constructed and should be evicted, ruled the court.
Several disturbing questions of morality, law and ethics arise. Isn™t the municipal corporation which has constituted vigilance squads for the purpose, answerable for failing to stop construction of the unlicenced flats 25 years ago? And if illegal flats bought for value by bona fide purchasers have to be razed, shouldn™t they be compensated by the BMC? While passing its razing order, the learned judges of the apex court reportedly advised bona fide purchasers of the impugned properties to file contract and tort actions against the builders and the corporation. Shouldn™t the justices have taken judicial notice of the plain reality that the proposed remedy will take a lifetime to be adjudicated in the clogged and moribund judicial system over which they nonchalantly preside?
As usual, the answers are blowing in the wind.