Hi Ravi,

Thank you for taking the time to share your insights . I do appreciate your point about "survival of the fittest" being the motivational factor behind the energy that I see here. That may also be what another reader, Punit Bhati, refers to with the cryptic comment, "You have no idea how to do the business..."

I can see clearly that there is no social saftey net here as there is in Europe and North America; people here must work long and hard and keep going in order to survive. We speak of the rewards of hard work and the motivation of the free market and often overlook the down side of unfettered capitalism. My stay in India brings this all home to me in a very graphic way.

At the same time Asengupta's comments about how the India of 20 years ago broke the confidence of Indian youth with caste/tribal quotas and instilled a "can't do attitude". His comment that "the excitement in the air reminds me of Sillicon Valley in 1999" points to what can happen when we unleash the creative power in all of us and channel it to produce wealth that can benefit us all.

We humans are reaching a critical mass and the impact of our activity now affects the whole planed (global warming, deforestation, destruction of species...). We are running out of room and resources to continue our age old habits of waste, war, and unrestrained greed.

Our ability to create and control the world we live in has never been more obvious to me. We no longer live so much at the mercy of unknown and uncontrollable forces of nature as was the case for the last 100,000 years of our existence. We are the controllers of our own destiny and because of our huge numbers, the effect of our choices is manifested in the world more quickly and more pervasively than ever before.

Call me an idealistic fool, call me a dreamer, yet one of the reasons I got into the IT profession is because it is the technology that provides the mechanism that enables us to see each other and our world; it provides the mechanism that allows us to talk to each other and in that communication to understand each other and find ways to prosper individually and as a whole.

IT in the form of email, YouTube, Google Earth, and cell phones links us together with an immediacy and at a personal level not possible before. IT shows us who we are and shows us the results of our actions quite clearly and we can either act on this information or pretend we can continue on in our age old habits.

The feedback loop that IT creates gives us the guidance to find the way to continue our existance on this earth. I believe we will find a way to address the issues that now press so heavily and urgently on us all.

I am certainly a fool and so too is the person who continues to believe that they can profit and prosper as individuals while they destroy our mother earth and impoverish our fellow humans and kill our fellow creatures who inhabit this planet with us.

I feel the divide between the rich and the poor with an overwhelming force here in India. I look into the eyes of a child who taps on the window of my car while I am stopped in traffic and begs for a few rupees. These things are not abstractions to me.

As we ate in that restaurant the other night I looked out the picture window and I saw the towering statue of the Buddha in the middle of the Husain Sagar lake. The Buddha came from India and he told of the need to awaken from our misguided notions of how to achieve success. He told us that we are all one with each other and the world.