AnnaPurna Consulting

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C Words

India is newspaper heaven. It has the world’s biggest English speaking population so undertaking a media campaign (in this case a series of twelve interviews to mark the Indian launch requires deep reserves of stamina. There are so many newspapers, journals and magazines each with an unquenchable thirst to talk about India and its changing place in the world.

Each interview has followed a similar line of questioning: are international investors losing confidence in India as a high growth, dynamic market? Each journalist pressed us on whether India’s reform agenda has stalled through political paralysis and pandering to narrow vested interests. [Read more…]

Generation C

Shanghai seems very quiet. Restaurants are less crowded, taxis are easier to find and the vast acreage of shiny new high-end shopping malls that have sprung up all over the city have an eerie, tumbleweed feel to them. Could it be that the long awaited slowdown in the Chinese economy is starting to bite?

No. If people are staying home, it is less to do with them feeling the economic pinch and all to do with – how can I put this delicately? – an urgent need to procreate.

We are two months into the Chinese Year of the Dragon and it is regarded as extremely auspicious to have a child born in this particular lunar year. So if you want to give birth before the dragon gives way to the much less auspicious snake, you only have a few short weeks to conceive. No wonder the place seems deserted. [Read more…]

A Tale of Two Cities

This week is fashion week in Lagos. This is an image of Nigeria that rarely makes the headlines. More often, it is the other side of life in this extraordinary country that catches the eye of news makers: corruption, sectarian violence and poverty. Recently, Boko Haram, the Islamic group behind a series of violent attacks in the north and that operates on the fringes of al-Qaida has been dominating international perceptions of Nigeria.

This perception does reflect the reality of much of life in the country. Nigeria has been a poster child for the curse of oil. It has defined the all too familiar tale of how fragile post-colonial political institutions succumb to the flood of money that washes through the corridors of power as oil is literally sucked from the coastal swamps and dispatched across the Atlantic to gasoline-hungry US consumers. Add in an already complex ethnic and religious matrix and it is not surprising that Nigeria has set the standard for countries where the abundance of natural resources and chronic wealth disparity go hand in hand.

Sitting in the foyer of one of the now numerous five star hotels on Victoria Island in Lagos, the trappings of all this wealth are easy to spot. Well-heeled guests pull up outside the hotel in their brand new Range Rovers and bustle through the swing doors in a swirl of Italian designs and private equity chatter. Secure in this hotel, we are cocooned away from the teeming chaos of the rest of Lagos where the millions that have migrated from the countryside to create one of Africa’s biggest cities are still largely waiting for the trickle-down effect from this extraordinary concentration of wealth and power at the apex of Nigerian society. [Read more…]

A long road to Damascus

Last week in New York, I took part in a roundtable discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations. Billed as an exploration of the business risks and opportunities emerging from the Arab Spring, my fellow panellist – Jared Cohen from Google Ideas – and I had no difficulty in highlighting a plethora of risks. We were harder pressed to identify clear opportunities.

A year after the fall of Mubarak, the democratic promise of last February has been overshadowed by the rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme and the bloodshed in Syria. What seemed to be the long overdue emergence of people power has it seems been replaced by a return to a kind of Cold War rivalry between the great powers over their own strategic interests in the Middle East.

In Egypt, the intoxicating euphoria of 2011 has been replaced by a sober realisation that there will be no easy transition to secular liberal democracy. Many in the West are preoccupied by the rise to prominence of Islamic parties both in Egypt and elsewhere and this nervousness tends to overshadow the immediate concern that at a time of falling inward investment, rising unemployment and inflation there is little experience of competent economic management in most of the countries in political flux. In the past twelve months, Egypt has had four finance ministers. [Read more…]

A Golden Age

Earlier this week was the Golden Globe awards ceremony, the warm-up to the BAFTA and Oscar ceremonies. World leaders probably don’t have time to watch televised award ceremonies and probably even less time to watch movies. But it is interesting to speculate which of the current crop of new releases might grab their attention.

I am sure British leader David Cameron would like to lose himself in the box set edition of one of last night’s winners, Downton Abbey. The tale of an English aristocratic family whose fortunes change as the certainties of the Edwardian era are upturned by the ravages of World War One and the consequent clamour for social justice. But in this fictionalised world the hard edges of class war are smoothed over by a benign sense of noblesse oblige whereby the lower orders are indulged by the kindly benevolence of their lords and masters. It is all very heart-warming. Unless you are a peasant. Or a pheasant, come to think about it. [Read more…]

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