Remarks of Dr. Sam Pitroda
I had a meeting this morning with the mayor of Bangalore, and I said, “Look. First thing we should do is give more power to mayor.” Mayor has no power in India. Nobody knows who is mayor. They are mayor only for a year. Funny. In a year, you don’t even know where to go to the bathroom. You need three or four years to figure out what you are supposed to do. But the reason behind one year is, we don’t give you time to figure it out. So we can do whatever we are doing, and that’s the way it is. So I told him this, push to get mayor five year term. Same thing in district. District head is who? Collector. There is no electorate member at the district level. Why can’t we have district level developmental model through all the stuff you are doing, to really decentralize?
I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I have lots and lots of ideas that I want to share with you, I want to remain connected with you. I am indeed very proud of what you are doing, I want to be of help. I am obsolete, I know that, I recognize that, I respect that, but I still want to work and be busy. So I start every day at eight o’clock in the morning and I work to 11, 12 every day, Saturday, Sunday, because that’s the only thing I know how to do. I have no holidays. I’ve never taken a vacation in 50 years, because there is just too much work out there in India. It’s better to be busy than go on a beach and have a drink. That doesn’t excite me.
And it’s good to see so many of you on Sunday afternoon. And I really, really appreciate your coming to Sunday afternoon, because that’s the only slot I had available. So I told Carl, who’s a friend of mine, and Carl is an interesting character. I don’t know whether you know of Carl, but you should Google Carl. Carl is a very close friend of mine, he and I do all kinds of crazy things.
We just launch in San Francisco, along with Brewster Kahle, this Internet archives where he took 450 thousand books from India and put it online. Government of India panicked and said, “Wait a minute, how could you do that? It’s still copyright.” We said, “Don’t worry. They sue us, we’ll decide. We’ll worry about it.” Because government of India is not going to tell us what to read, what not to read.
And you need people like that, globally, to confront the system. Carl and I decided once to take all the Bureau of Indian Standards and put it online. I don’t know if you know Bureau of Indian Standards costs 14 thousand rupees in India and 1.4 lakh for foreigner. These are our safety standards, fire standards, these are our laws, and as a citizen you have no access to it but you are supposed to follow it. Funny thing.
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