Today, intersecting technologies, AI, Blockchain, cloud computing, the Internet of Everything, software-defined networks, and molecular biology are reshaping our world. My friends know me as an Economist Nut--sees everything from just one lens. It is easy to see the path to prosperity with this lens. Its opposite--the political way--is one hell of a bizarre and comical way to self-destruct. The wo
rld actually looks one big theater from my lens. Except in rare moments of sanity. I have been a futurist and an innovation buff all my life. Hence my personal brand slogan--the hedgehog who senses the future. Started with spotting the emerging trend of globalization in the early 1980s when nationalism was still pervasive. I was an industrial economist for a decade focused on technology's role in economic development. Thereafter, I became a business journalist in the 1990s, An early proponent of free market economics in India, I championed deregulation of telecommunications, ten years before it became conventional wisdom,
VSNL's privatization was eventually implemented exactly as I had proposed it. As I had predicted, the restructuring of Indian telecom paved the way for the relocation of services industries from the West to India. Public policy can be tiresome--well-tried and effective economic ideas are ignored till strong leaders are at the helm of affairs. I moved to the USA for a different life. A decade later, the wheel of history turned as dysfunctional third-world politics arrived in America!! On the positive side, the USA may well be at an inflection point--the transformation of its gigantic health sector seems imminent. The archaic health delivery systems domestically, and worldwide, are unable to make the best of medical devices and biotech drugs. I started a group, "Support Market-based healthcare" on Facebook to expound on the policy issues of the next-generation health systems. My latest metamorphosis is entrepreneurship--as a partner in a wearable and Internet of Things startup eyeCam LLC. It is not all about economics, stupid! This startup is planned to be a forerunner to an innovation factory that turns technologies into innovative products. Born in the "Indian Jewish" community of Sindhis in India, I grew up in a small, one-factory town of Sindri in South Bihar. I was fortunate to be educated by an eccentric group of American Jesuits at De Nobili School. Now I am lucky to be living in the city of San Francisco just as it is transforming itself to be the tech capital of the world
