Climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, is manifesting unprecedentedly. The erratic weather patterns, marked by prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and uncontrolled forest fires, underscore the need to achieve net zero emissions swiftly and subsequently reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
There are four broad routes to reaching net zero (and then continue on the path of reduction):
Reducing the average carbon footprint of each human through lifestyle changes – mainly through consuming less electricity and fuel and changing to more eco-friendly diets
Technology that a) enables humans to consume less electricity and fuel beyond lifestyle changes and b) lowers the carbon footprint of economic and industrial activities like agriculture, manufacturing and computing.
Increase the natural green cover that absorbs greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and
Create, build and run technology systems that absorb and sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Decades of grappling with the problem of climate change have made it clear that getting humans to change lifestyles to reduce their average footprint is challenging, if not impossible. The reason is that fundamental human nature prevents humans from sacrificing individual comfort to attain community goals.
Preserving and increasing the green cover runs into a geopolitical logjam engendered by the uneven development of countries worldwide.
The above reasons make the development and diffusion of new technology critical to meeting the world’s net zero and beyond goals.
These technologies range from low—to zero-carbon footprint power (wind, solar, nuclear fission, and someday perhaps nuclear fusion) to greener mobility (biofuels, hybrids, hydrogen and electric) and industrial processes (grey or green Hydrogen).
Each of these new technologies faces multiple challenges in meeting its full potential.
Take electric cars, for instance. The market opened at the high end, and pricey Teslas became symbols of a woke lifestyle. In the process, Tesla solved tricky technical problems, including batteries with enough juice to support viable range and life and reliable and fast charging systems.
The Theory of Product Form Strategy (PFS) postulates every innovator of new technology faces a product-form decision at an early stage of building a business out of his innovation. The innovator company has three choices: Market the Know-How, Market a Component, or Market A System.
In a pre-print manuscript submitted to the Journal of Marketing titled “A Theory of Product-Form Strategy: When to Market Know-How, Component or Systems.”, Frias, Ghosh, Janakiraman and Duhan, have an interesting illustration of the PFS Theory. For example, consider an innovator who has developed a technology that tracks the mechanics and dynamics of a baseball bat as it meets the ball, allowing coaches to refine a batter’s ability. As a result, the innovator can decide to sell the technology to a party that determines how to market it. Alternatively, the innovator can develop the technology into a component that fits on a bat and market it to bat manufacturers.
The third alternative is for the company to get into bat manufacturing and build a bat brand based on its advanced technology.
Tesla, the pioneer in the EV market, decided to go the “Market A System” route.
This decision has impacted the very structure of the EV market globally. Today, the EV market is a positioning and pricing battle between traditional auto brands and newcomers.
In an alternative scenario, if technology pioneers had developed and marketed know-how and components in the battery technology, charging, power electronics and drive train areas (including hybrid), the structure of the green mobility market would be very different. It would be akin to how the PC industry developed with Windows and the smartphone category with Android.
Over the past year or so, the EV category has experienced a slowdown, with many people wondering whether hybrids will be the future of green mobility. As a result, the green mobility market might evolve with standard batteries, charging systems, power electronics and drive train components, releasing economies of scale in capital costs and end pricing. In such a scenario, a brand like Tesla could be the premium walled-garden brand, much like Apple is in smartphones.
Green Hydrogen has a more extensive remit than EVs or Hybrids, as it can impact broadly and deeply, as illustrated below.
The Product Form Strategy that pioneers the Green Hydrogen revolution will have a seminal impact on the global economic and industrial framework over the next few decades.
Green Hydrogen is at an early stage of evolution; given its distributional nature, it is likely to mature into a Big Oil-type category–“Big Hydrogen,” so to speak.
The penetration of Green Hydrogen will follow the Technology Adoption Life Cycle as stated in Geoffrey Moore’s “Inside the Tornado”.
“Big Hydrogen” must adopt “The Bowling Alley” strategy to release The Tornado to build tomorrow’s hydrogen economy.
I explained “The Bowling Alley” strategy in some detail in my MxMIndia column of February 16th, 2023, titled “The Diffusion of AI: What do the marketing models predict?”.
AI, Green Mobility, Green Hydrogen, and their offshoots will be important marketing and communication categories for tomorrow, and marketing and advertising people should invest in closely following their development and diffusion.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has his fingers in many pies, none of them your standard Four and Twenty – space exploration, electric cars, AI and social media, among others.
He became a global leader in space exploration when NASA had virtually vacated the field, and his electric vehicle company Tesla, headquartered in the gas-guzzling United States, has by far the biggest market capitalisation of any car manufacturer in the world, yet he has few formal qualifications in either field.
Many see Musk as a 21st-century idiot savant. Others, watching him reduce an important social media platform – Twitter – to cyber-rubble, think of him simply as an idiot. Maybe both are true, or maybe other readings of his life are true. Aged 52, Musk certainly merits a good, searching biography.
Walter Isaacson seems well-credentialed for the task. He has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci that have won awards or become bestsellers, or both.
Isaacson began his working life as a journalist. He spent more than two decades at Time during the magazine’s heyday, rising to become editor in 1996. Since then, he has been chief executive of the CNN cable television network, headed the Aspen Institute (a longstanding non-profit think tank), become a professor of history at Tulane University, and done various jobs for both Republican and Democrat governments.
This year he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by US President Joe Biden.
Isaacson’s virtue as a biographer is his reporter’s ability to gather enormous amounts of material and quickly render it as a (generally) smooth and readable account of a life bursting with dramatic events. His project only began in 2021 and covers events up to Space X’s unsuccessful Starship rocket launch in April 2023.
Musk made himself available for numerous interviews. He gave Isaacson access to places and people at key moments, such as the purchase of Twitter (now known as X), and regularly emailed Isaacson at 3am with his thoughts – and thought bubbles.
Isaacson also interviewed 130 other people, and his labours have uncovered newsworthy information that has been widely reported – and, in one case, corrected – since the book’s publication.
For instance, Isaacson builds on earlier reporting by the Washington Post to reveal the extent to which Musk’s Starlink satellite network has been crucial to the Ukrainian military’s ability to fight Russia’s invasion, providing them with continued access to the internet on the battlefield after the Russians destroyed access to other internet services. He shows how Musk was persuaded by the Russians to temporarily cut off the Starlink access after he believed their entreaties that any further victories by Ukraine would provoke nuclear war.
The implications of these remarkable revelations have been examined by the ABC’s Matt Bevan in a recent episode of his If You’re Listening podcast. But even though Isaacson revealed this information, he does not pause to discuss it in any detail. That’s one of the shortcomings of this book.
Lord of the Flies on steroids
Perhaps seduced by Musk’s apparent candour or a publisher’s pressure to rush to print, Isaacson accepts his subject’s words without sufficient scepticism. For instance, Musk’s childhood experiences at a veldskool in 1970s South Africa read like Lord of the Flies on steroids. Bullying was the norm and children were encouraged to fight over meagre food rations. “Every few years, one of the kids would die,” writes Isaacson.
Really? Says who? Musk, apparently. No one from the school is listed in the source notes, to confirm or refute this account. Throughout the book, Musk comes off as a shameless self-dramatiser, but that doesn’t mean his biographer should succumb to it.
Isaacson is an adherent of the “grand man” school of history. He has written only one biography of a woman – the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna. He is far less interested in, or comfortable with, the role structures and systems play in shaping events.
As Jill Lepore pointed out in the New Yorker, Isaacson also has “an executive’s affinity for the C-suite”, meaning he pays little attention to the people who work for Musk or the impact of his actions on their lives.
The core question driving the biography is: has Elon Musk had to be such an “asshole” (Isaacson’s term) to achieve what he has? Isaacson acknowledges it is much the same question he asked about Steve Jobs in his earlier biography of the Apple cofounder.
I lost count of the times the question, or a variation of it, was posed during the book’s 670 pages, but in classic Time-style both-sidesing, Isaacson keeps toggling between admonishing Musk for behaving like an “asshole” and admiring his ability to get results. He rarely if ever lifts his gaze beyond this binary, which means he ignores lessons learned from all those people, past and present, who have achieved things without treating people appallingly.
It also means achievements are seen solely through the prism of one person’s actions. In a perceptive article in Vox, Constance Grady reminds us that Musk’s determination to override safety concerns in Tesla factories has led to worker injury rates equivalent to those in a slaughterhouse.
Grady allows that Isaacson reports the increased injury rates, but notes his vagueness about exactly what kind of injuries occurred. Citing 2018 work by the Center for Investigative Reporting, she reveals Tesla workers were “sliced by machinery, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions, and sprayed with molten metal”.
She also notes Isaacson downplaying the company’s experience of COVID-19. Musk, a fervent libertarian allergic to any form of regulation, kept the factory running during the global pandemic. Isaacson says “the factory experienced no serious COVID outbreak”, but Grady reports there were 450 positive cases.
From Twitter to X
Musk has an immense work ethic and expects everyone working for him to share it. By relentlessly questioning all assumptions – “the laws of physics are unbreakable; everything else is a recommendation” – Musk and those working in his companies have indeed achieved a lot.
I am not really in any position to assess Musk’s contribution to space exploration, AI or car manufacturing. But I am willing to accept the evidence of Isaacson’s biography that they have been substantial – or, in the case of AI, promise to be.
I feel better able to assess Musk’s contribution to social media. Here, the evidence presented by Isaacson and many others is that Musk has damaged, perhaps irretrievably, Twitter – which he has renamed X, a letter of the alphabet to which he seems inordinately attached. Not only has he named one of his children X, he waves away the letter’s other connotations.
In 1999, Musk cofounded the online bank X.com. He soon learned there was another company aimed at revolutionising online transactions, PayPal, founded at around the same time by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Luke Nosek.
The companies merged in 2000, amid a classic Silicon Valley phallus-waving struggle over who had the idea first and who should take over whom. Levchin derided X.com as a “seedy site you would not talk about in polite company”. “If you want to take over the world’s financial system,” Musk rebutted, “then X is the better name.”
Musk lost the nomenclature war then, but realised his dream more than two decades later when he bought Twitter for US$44 billion and could call it whatever he liked.
Impulsive, determined, clueless
The picture of Musk that emerges in Isaacson’s book is of an impulsive, utterly determined person who is genuinely talented as a physicist and businessperson, and genuinely clueless when it comes to human relationships. He either doesn’t get people or doesn’t care about them – or, more likely, both.
He dotes on his children, especially X (I guess you need to do something to compensate for naming a child after a letter), yet he is capable of breathtaking callousness and rank sexism. He whispered in his first wife’s ear on their wedding night that he was the alpha male in the relationship.
In 2021, Musk’s third wife, Shivon Zilis, was pregnant with twins conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilisation, and was in a hospital in Texas experiencing complications. At the same time, and in the same hospital, a woman serving as a surrogate for Musk and his ex-wife, Claire Boucher – better known as the Canadian-born musician Grimes – was also experiencing pregnancy complications.
Zilis and Boucher, not to mention the surrogate, did not know about the other’s pregnancy.
As Isaacson drolly comments elsewhere in the book:
Musk developed an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien, as if his Mars mission were an aspiration to return home, and his desire to build humanoid robots were a quest for kinship.
Musk is on record saying humanity is in danger of not having enough smart people and it is his duty to populate the planet with as many of them as possible. To date, he has 11 children. If that notion sounds disturbingly like eugenics, it is not something Isaacson reflects on as he studiously documents Musk’s chaotic love life.
Nor does he delay his rat-a-tat-tat narration of every twist and turn in Musk’s dramatic life to question his subject’s burning desire to make humanity a “multi-planet civilisation” by colonising Mars. Musk is obsessed with this goal because he is worried about the prospect of our planet being destroyed by the accelerating consequences of climate change.
A laudable ambition, no doubt. But neither he nor his biographer stops to ask: if humanity fails so badly that it destroys this world, why would you think it could make life better on another, already inhospitable planet?
The surface of Mars. NASA/JPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Startling achievements and childish petulance
It is easy and tempting to poke fun at Musk. Perhaps this is because his personality combines grandiose visions with arrested development, startling achievements with childish petulance. His idea of dieting is to get hold of the diabetes medication Ozempic – the dieter’s drug du jour – begin an intermittent fasting regime, then make his first meal of the day a bacon-and-cheese burger and sweet-potato fries topped with a cookie-dough ice-cream milkshake.
Or do you remember how Musk responded in 2018 to a mild rebuke of his frenetic desire to play the hero rescuing children trapped in a cave in Thailand with a purpose-built mini-craft? That’s right, by labelling one of the actual rescuers a “pedo guy”.
But it is dangerously easy. Social media plays an important role in modern society. Whatever its benefits, and they are many, the algorithms embedded in social media platforms – by their owners, let’s not forget – neatly sidestep nuance and reason in debate, turbo-charge conflict and emotion, and play a role in the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Musk is now the owner of one such social media platform. But since buying Twitter last year, he has not been able to bend it to his will. His mistake – perhaps fatal, according to Isaacson – appears to be that he sees it as a technology company, something he understands, when it is really an “advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships”, something he does not understand.
Musk proclaims himself a free-speech advocate, but he has already displayed flagrant biases. He allowed Ye (formerly Kanye West) to tweet anti-Semitic remarks. He tweeted a florid conspiracy theory about the savage attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the then speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. And he has asserted China’s repression of the Uyghurs was an issue that “had two sides” – perhaps because China was important to his car company, Tesla.
Musk has become obsessed by what he calls the “woke-mind virus”, which he believes is infecting social discourse. Whatever the excesses and blind spots of those on the progressive side of politics, Musk sees this virus almost everywhere.
A longtime devotee of comics and science fiction, he has increasingly given rein to his conspiratorial tendencies, as if he really thinks The Matrix trilogy was a documentary series. In one of his 3am tweets, Musk wrote: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”. As Isaacson trenchantly comments:
It made little sense, wasn’t funny, and managed, in just five words, to mock
transgender people, conjure up conspiracies about the 81-year-old public health
official Anthony Fauci, scare off more advertisers, and create a new handful of
enemies who would now never buy Tesla.
Nor does Musk’s belief in free speech extend to the social media postings of Twitter employees or their comments on internal Slack messaging. He trampled on the company’s internal culture of healthy dissent, peremptorily firing three dozen employees who had criticised the company.
His longstanding, largely successful mantra of getting things done cheaply and quickly, regardless of impediments, finally ran aground after he proposed cutting the company’s workforce by 75%.
Just before Christmas last year he decided it was imperative to move all the company’s servers from Sacramento to Oregon as a way of saving money. Remember how presidential aspirant Ron De Santis’ big live interview on X went horribly wrong earlier this year? That was because of problems with the servers, writes Isaacson.
More recently, the drastic cutting of the site’s moderators led to floods of misinformation following the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7.
Musk has also begun to realise that advertising, which previously comprised 90% of Twitter’s revenue, is susceptible to public perceptions. It fell by more than half in the first six months of Musk’s ownership, according to Isaacson.
Geopolitical implications
As mentioned earlier, Musk has found himself playing a key role in a war with geopolitical implications.
Immediately before invading Ukraine in early 2022, Russia launched a malware attack that crippled the US satellite company providing internet service to Ukraine. Its deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, reached out to Musk via Twitter, appealing for help.
Musk did, donating US$80 million worth of technology to Ukrainian forces, including Starlink’s solar and battery kits, which were able to defeat Russian efforts to jam them.
Musk’s intervention was widely praised, but in September 2022, when the Ukrainians planned to use Starlink to guide a drone attack on the Russian naval fleet at Sevastopol in Crimea, he refused to help. He had been listening to the Russian ambassador, who had reached out to him a few weeks before.
Russia had annexed Crimea in 2014 and the ambassador persuaded him not only of Russia’s inalienable right to Crimea, but of the prospect of nuclear war if the Ukrainians were allowed to try and retake it. He told Isaacson he had been studying foreign policy and military history: “Musk explained to me the details of Russian law and doctrine that decreed such a response.”
Has technology put an individual private citizen in such a position before?
Individual companies, such as the Krupp manufacturing company, notoriously played an important role in arming Nazi Germany. Individual media proprietors, such as Rupert Murdoch, have played a role in encouraging war, as when Murdoch’s media outlets overwhelmingly editorialised in favour of the United States invading Iraq in 2003.
The combination of new global communication technologies and decades of unwillingness by governments to find ways to regulate them adequately has now put one unelected citizen, as childishly impulsive as he is brilliant, in a rare position.
The question is not simply, is he equipped to make such decisions, but how and why has it come to this?
Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I coined Concierge Intelligence (CI) as a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) owned by and dedicated to an individual and fully protective of his privacy. CI would aid the individual in understanding herself better and leading to better life outcomes in health, education, career and relationships – in general, as a putative ad copy would say: ‘Be A Better You’. Further, CI would handle routine tasks like shopping, bill paying, appointments, correspondence and travel arrangements based on a deep understanding of the individual’s preferences and needs and an up-to-the-minute and universal understanding of options. CI would be under the complete control of the individual, who can switch it off and on and decide on the level of access granted.
When I first wrote about CI in Feb 2021, the concept seemed at least a decade or more away. Not any longer. Like the world, I was unaware of the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLM) technology.
Today, many factors indicate that the first generation of CI is around the corner. A CI prototype might already be in the hands of hundreds of millions worldwide! Let me explain.
For a couple of years now, Apple has been communicating the following:
:: Many of the functions and Apps on its devices – Siri, Keyboard Suggestions, Health, Messages, Mail, Music, Books, and Apple TV – use AI to enhance user experience and utility.
:: Apple puts ensuring user privacy as the highest priority. Therefore, all its AI works on data and software residing on the user’s device, under complete user control, and cordoned off from other entities, including Apple.
The penny dropped when I first read about the Journal App that Apple is readying for release with iOS 17. Journal App gives iPhone users the means to record their day-to-day activities and uses advanced prompt features enabling users to track their emotional state and the causes.
The latest iPhones carry specialised chips that allow the device to run sophisticated AI programs on the device itself. With the breadth and depth of information, the iPhone has about its users, the phone’s processing capabilities and the level of trust Apple had built with its users, all the conditions that make for a CI already exist. Over the next few years, iPhone users, prompted by Apple, will increasingly find use cases for the CI that resides over the phone. With each new generation of iPhones, the CI will get more powerful and within the next decade, Apple will likely brand this as a proprietary feature and build a revenue model around it. CI by Apple could be the next big thing from Apple after the iPhone. If Apple keeps its promise of protecting user privacy, iPhone CI will add to the quality of life and be one of AI’s boons.
While the wizards of Cupertino are coming at AI based on an individual’s shared experiences, the wizard who has given the world Tesla and SpaceX is taking a different tack.
Musk wants Tesla to be the first to launch a fully self-driven car without a steering wheel or a brake pedal to allow a human driver to take control. While many companies, Alphabet being one of them, are at work perfecting AI systems, Musk’s approach is entirely different from the rest.
Alphabet and others are trying to build a self-driving car based on an algorithm that relies on the following:
:: Signals from a hardware system consisting of cameras and radars that transmit in great detail, second by microsecond, the physical environment of the car as it drives through a roadscape.
:: And rules that codify the signals into millions of scenarios and actions that are needed to respond to the system.
The above approach is similar to the early days of Natural Language Processing, which tried to create language models based on the contextual meaning of words and rules of grammar and idiomatic usage.
In one sense, Musk’s flip on the AI needed to build a self-driven car is simple. He believes if humans can drive cars based on just visual inputs, so can AI. So, radars are the first things he has taken out of the equation. His second lead is even greater. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT 4.0 work through patterns that a Deep Learning AI system detects from a large enough set of training data without needing an explicit set of rules. Musk’s leap is that he can build AI systems that can operate in the physical world through a large enough training data set. The difference is that in the case of the physical world, the data set is visual.
Every Tesla carries a set of high-resolution cameras. And its software records all the actions that a driver takes. Further, all the data from the cameras and the software systems are transmitted to Tesla’s servers. With millions of Teslas worldwide, Tesla has an ever-increasing training data set.
Musk is not stopping at building self-driving Robocars but is busy building a human-like robot branded Optimus on the same AI principles. The training data for Optimus-like robots will come from recording humans engaged in various activities – cooking a meal, navigating a home, an office or a mall, playing a sport, etc.
Further, in all cases, the training data will be culled so that the robot learns from the best drivers, champion players, chefs, etc. So ipso facto, robots will come out of the gate better than humans because they learnt from the best and have the advantage of being faster, connected and untiring.
Paradoxically, Musk also pays lip service to the dangers of AI and contends that he is trying to build something like Assimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into the AI systems he is busy inventing.
So, between the CI that Apple is fast making a reality and Musk’s promised Robot Intelligence (RI), AI is set to impact the daily lives of all of us significantly.
Another AI revolution is brewing in the scientific field, launching tectonic shifts that will alter human civilisation. But that is grist for another post.
Quite a shakeup in Bangalore, huh! Sorry, Bengaluru.
The market leader was dethroned by the second brand. While some saw it coming, guess the incumbent saw it much earlier, loud and clear. After all, as the market leader, if you merely rest of your laurels and do not deliver on your brand promises, you know your fate when appraisal time arrives. Then you have two options – either you accept your deficiencies and ask for another chance, or, you believe that offence is the best form of defence.
While the first option is the mature one, very few market leaders have the humility to accept so. That makes them looks fragile and vincible. No chest-thumping and bicep-pumping here. Very difficult for the also-rans itself, forget the market leaders. Have you seen any Indian brand ever stand up and say, “Sorry, we screwed this one up!”? Not possible as shareholders do not like that kind of talk.
So, what do you typically do? Go aggro! Bring in the musclemen, throw in the cheerleaders, crank up the spinmeisters and pump in lots of money. This formula may still work if you keep it all local and relevant. But no, you decide to call in your CEO and COO to cover up for you. They sounded like the Englishmen shouting at the “natives” in Lagaan. And to top it all, they changed the focus. From ground level issues the narrative moved to the spiritual invoking gods and goddesses. To make matters worse, north Indian gods were called upon into action. And the icing on the cake was a veiled threat that if you do not patronise my product and services, all hell shall break loose. That was the proverbial last straw. Not only do you guys own up to your shortcomings, you intimidate me in a language that I do not understand.
Every mistake in the brand textbook of “Things you must avoid for market leadership” was committed with full gusto:
Admit your mistakes? No.
Raise local and relevant issues? No.
Speak in the local language? No.
Never intimidate your customer base. No.
Do not spread negative vibes. No.
Do not try to impose views from outside. No.
The competition did not have to do much.
If the leader were yet to retain its position after all this, it would have been an insult to the values of Brand India. Peaceful coexistence. Collective prosperity. Positive outlook. Unity in diversity. Preservation of local cultural ethos.
Which brings me to the parleys the Indian government is having with Tesla to wean it into setting up a manufacturing facility in India. Round 1 ended in a stalemate a year ago when the government stuck to its ground of making the product in India rather than merely importing and selling it. Round 2 was quite a surprise to me. Obviously, there is pressure from the US to reopen the case and look at an ‘arrangement’.
There is no economic sense for Tesla to set up a facility in India of luxury electric cars as the very market does not and will not exist to justify the same. Unless it wishes to hedge the risk of its Chinese operation running into rough weather, or use India as an export base. We are still cheaper than China to make things and our government, in its fascination for hobnobbing with the Apples and Teslas of the world, would bend backwards in creating an incentive-laden offer more than what any local automaker would ever get. The narrative that iPhones and Teslas are now made in India is just too juicy to resist to demonstrate economic progress when elections are around the corner. Atmanirbhar Bharat can wait.
This is the other side of Brand India. Still unsure of itself. Still besotted with trappings of the western world. Still needing ratification from the west on our achievements and progress. Still focusing on quantity more than quality. Still content with just manufacturing and not designing and creating. Still stuck in “Make in India” and not evolving to “Create in India”.
Guess these are the typical signs of mid-life crisis of a 75-year-young nation. While we are yet to shake off the skin of the colonial past, we are sure of preserving the core fabric of what makes us a unique, rich and diverse eco-system. Just like any brand in its middle age… sure of what it must protect but confused about what it needs to project.
Jai Hind.
Avik Chattopadhyay is a senior business and brand strategist and commentator based in Gurugram. He writes on MxMindia on alternate Thursdays, and sometimes on other days as well. His views here are personal.
Climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, is manifesting unprecedentedly. The erratic weather patterns, marked by prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and uncontrolled forest fires, underscore the need to achieve net zero emissions swiftly and subsequently reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Quite a shakeup in Bangalore, huh! Sorry, Bengaluru.