I had just entered my teenage years when I discovered the power of the idiot box. As we sat huddled before the eye-popping technology in a rectangular shape , my first memories are those of hearing a deep baritone voice, intellectually refined , possessing extraordinary depth and talking esoteric stuff. I did not understand much, but was hugely impressed by the missionary man. It was Verghese Kurien.

When I last heard the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s government was working over-time to ensure that Kurien was forthwith denied some luxurious privileges; a cook, his car and a security guard. Modi’s government, frequently lauded as a development model by cosmetic analysts , gullible scribes and super-sized CEOs , is obviously looking at cost-cutting in times of difficult financial crunch, I guess. Perhaps that explains the charitable excesses of lollipops sops and tax-breaks being provided to industrial houses , who therefore hail Modi as a bearded messiah, the accessible magical alchemist. Kurien, is in no Fortune Top 10 billionaire list like Ambani bro’s and matching Mittal’s. He does not own colourful cricketers and hold yacht-parties even as his companies sink in deep waters. Neither is he giving tall spiel on corporate governance in a US business school. And neither has he written management potboilers on the emerging shape of the world. He is just simply greater; much bigger than all of them put together.

Read more. . . (IBNLive)