Source: FORTUNE Magazine

It’s just before nine on an overcast morning, and Yesha Bhatt, a 21-year-old engineer from Mumbai, joins a river of black hair flowing from her dormitory to the main classroom building on campus. Jake Hu, a 21- year-old from Jiangxi province in China, slips into the procession after hurriedly downing a dosa. Others — 4,000 “freshers,” as they’re called — talk on their mobile phones and gossip with friends as they make their way to class.

This could be any college campus in America, complete with a Domino’s Pizza, a store that sells school T-shirts, and a library that’s open 24/7. But it’s not. We’re in Mysore, India, and this is Infosys U., formally known as the Global Education Center, one of the world’s largest corporate training facilities.

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Infosys at a glance:   • History: Founded in Pune in 1981 by Narayana Murthy and six others. Develops business-process software and provides outsourcing services for Cisco, Nordstrom, Microsoft, and others.   • Revenue: $1.6 billion (fiscal 2005), up 50% over the previous year.   • Employees: 49,422 (as of Jan. 1), up 34% over 2004.

Infosys Technologies, India’s second-largest software service firm, is growing fast — revenues increased 7,951 percent over the past decade, to $1.6 billion in 2005 — and last year it expanded its workforce by about 15,000. That’s an average of 40 new employees a day, and it is here, to Mysore, that many of them come to learn the Infosys Way.

These are India’s chosen. Securing a position at Infosys is more competitive than gaining admission to Harvard. Last year the company had more than 1.3 million applicants for full-time positions and hired only 1 percent of them. (Harvard College, by comparison, accepted 9 percent of applicants.) While many global firms are preoccupied with downsizing, pension cutting, and benefit slashing, Infosys and several of its Indian competitors face a rare and welcome challenge: boundless growth.

But recruiting, hiring, and training at a pace that can satisfy this insatiable appetite for talent requires more than simply showing new employees to their desks.

“There aren’t many companies growing like this,” says Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, who helped found the company 25 years ago. “Companies haven’t been investing enough in people. Rather than train them, they let them go. Our people are our capital. The more we invest in them, the more they can be effective.”

Inside the steel gates at Mysore, an old silk town about 90 miles south of Bangalore where Infosys has its headquarters, few expenses have been spared in the effort to impress the several hundred freshers who arrive each week for the 14-week training programs. There’s a high-tech bowling alley, a hair salon, an infinity pool studded with palm trees, one of the largest gyms in India, and a geodesic dome that houses three movie theaters and looks as though it just rolled in from Epcot Center.

Indeed, the $120 million Infosys center, which opened last year, is an odd combination of Disney World, Club Med, and a modern American university. It’s enough to make you forget the poverty outside and believe you’re in a First World fairy tale.

But this is not summer camp. Before even being considered for a job at Infosys, each applicant must pass an exam made up of math equations and logic puzzles that many fail. After the interview, after the job offer, comes the real test: eight hours a day at Mysore studying lines of Java code, attending team-building workshops, and learning to differentiate the do’s of global workplace etiquette from the don’ts. In order to graduate, every fresher has to pass two three-hour comprehensive exams.

Sometimes the students break down, says Ravindra Muthya, head of education and research. But only 1 percent to 2 percent drop out. “For us, this is very expensive,” he says. “We can’t lose them.”

Which raises the question: In a country like India, where daily newspapers run math equations for entertainment and the talent pool of engineers is said to be as expansive as the Ganges River, why must Infosys spend $5,000 per fresher for training?

“There is still an abyss between the academy and the industry,” says Abhishek Shandilya, 23, a mechanical engineer who graduated from college in Bangalore last year.

Infosys executives agree, saying that India’s higher-education system — often unpredictable and in some disciplines outdated — is preventing its new recruits from being placed immediately on client projects.

“I do not mean that we do not learn things in colleges,” says Shandilya, “but the knowledge we attain there is very raw.”

Many freshers, like Shandilya, come with little or no practical work experience. Infosys doesn’t mind. In fact, the company prefers hiring a mechanical engineer who lacks computer skills but shows a high aptitude for “learnability” (Infosys-speak for being a quick study) over a computer scientist who can’t solve problems beyond his technical training.

In many ways, Infosys treats its new recruits as if they’re still college students. On the Mysore campus, strict rules are in force. Boys are not allowed in the girls’ dorms (and vice versa). There’s no alcohol, anywhere, anytime. But you won’t hear many complaints. For most, the opportunity to work for Infosys is a dream come true.

Bhatt remembers hearing about Infosys and its founder, Narayana Murthy, while growing up in Mumbai. Her father, a banker, talked about how Murthy was the “most down-to-earth person.”

Yet on Bhatt’s first day of class at Mysore, Murthy was anything but down-to-earth: There was his image, 12 feet tall, beaming down from two screens in the Mahatma Gandhi Auditorium, welcoming all the freshers — or Infoscions, as they’re also called.

In 1981, when Murthy hired his first recruits, there were few rules, and training happened on the job. The job, in those days, meant working out of a makeshift office in Murthy’s home. Today the virtual and impersonal welcome doesn’t bother freshers like Bhatt or Shandilya, who says he came away inspired. With scale comes anonymity, a fact not lost on the eager employee.

“I’m one of nine Abhisheks in my row,” he jokes over a traditional Indian meal at one of the food courts.

As Infosys has scaled up its workforce, it has relied more on technology for training purposes. “Productivity improvement comes from converting synchronous transactions to asynchronous transactions,” explains Murthy. His example: switching from phone calls (synchronous) to e-mail (asynchronous).

There’s an online database of Infosys case studies for employees who need help with client requests. And because of the ever-increasing class size in Mysore, the company is turning to computers to do much of the teaching.

Nagendra Setty’s Java class in the Gordon Moore Room — one of 58 high-tech classrooms on campus — is a case in point. Setty, an applications designer, clips on a microphone and lectures for three hours about J2EE, a Java platform. Then he steps away from the lectern, allowing the 100 students to work independently, building their own applications on their own computer monitors for the rest of the day.

While most of the training focuses on technical skills, freshers spend a lot of time working on softer skills such as team building, comportment, and improving interpersonal communications. In the Jeff Bezos Room one morning, Bhatt listened intently as the instructor discussed the importance of body language and told the class to practice smiling in front of a mirror.

There are plenty of smiles down the hall in the Harley-Davidson Room, where four students in Sudha Prasad’s corporate etiquette class perform a skit about trying to get back onto campus after drinking too many cocktails at a local bar and missing curfew.

“You are all brand ambassadors,” Prasad tells her class as she runs through several what-if scenarios.

It is ironic that Murthy and Nilekani — two low-key and modest executives — created a global branding powerhouse in a country that favors the subtle over the brazen. But at Infosys U., the corporate logo is rarely out of sight. It adorns sugar packets, coffee mugs, polo shirts, and umbrellas. Each of the seven dormitory buildings is in the shape of one of the letters in “Infosys” — an effect visible only from the air.

The brand now attracts attention far beyond India’s borders. The company has offices in 18 countries, including China. Jake Hu, the fresher from Jiangxi, who eats dosas with chopsticks, is one of 100 Chinese undergraduates selected by the company and government officials in Beijing to spend seven months training with Infosys. The exchange, an attempt to deepen the relationship between the two countries, is also a way for Infosys to find and train talent while it ramps up its operations in China.

“Infosys China is developing fast and provides a lot of opportunities,” says Hu during a break from a programming class. He will return to China this spring and expects to graduate with a software engineering degree in July.

But he and several compatriots aren’t sure the salaries Infosys pays in China can compete with those of other global firms. His dream job, he says, is to work in marketing for Procter & Gamble(Research). The Chinese students aren’t the only ones talking about pay. Outside the Gandhi Auditorium, two Indian freshers are planning their escape. “The pay is lousy,” one girl says. (Salaries start at about $5,000 a year.)

While the two say they are thrilled to be at Infosys and think the training is the best around, they also know its market value and plan to find a higher-paying job or apply for an MBA after a year with the company.

Paying for talent could end up being the industry’s — and perhaps the company’s — Achilles’ heel. The competition for well-trained engineers drove salaries in India up 15 percent last year. And job hopping has become commonplace.

“Every evening, Infosys capital walks out the door,” says Muthya, the education director. “Our job is to get them to come back.”

For now, Infosys has no choice but to continue scaling up. Blueprints for expanding the Mysore campus have been completed, and by 2007 it will have the capacity to train 10,000 employees at a time. That’s more than double the number it can accommodate today.

With a million-plus applicants a year and a relatively low attrition rate, Infosys appears fit for the coming talent battle. The Mysore training center may or may not help win that fight, but one thing is certain. These 4,000 young engineers didn’t come here to laze around the pool or burn calories on the company’s treadmills. After a week at Infosys U., Bhatt has yet to make it to the gym.

Understand the components of Sub-conscious Communication.
How to work on your Body Language.
Non- Verbal Communication

Source: YouTube

Source: The Economist

INDIANS are fond of shopping abroad, a habit left over from the era of import substitution, when they had to put up with shoddy homespun goods in the name of national self-sufficiency. This taste for overseas purchases is shared by Indian companies. Between 2000 and 2008 they announced over 1,000 international mergers or acquisitions, worth over $72 billion, according to Dealogic, a research firm. Most of those deals have been sealed since 2006 (see chart).

On May 25th Bharti Airtel, the country’s biggest mobile-network operator, announced that it was exploring a deal that would surpass the $12 billion Tata Steel paid for Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, in 2007: a tie-up with MTN, a South African mobile giant, which rebuffed a previous approach last year. The deal, if it ever happens, would create one of the world’s biggest mobile operators, with 200m fixed and mobile subscribers across 21 countries.

Corporate India’s shopping spree gained momentum after 2002, when the rapid growth of the Indian economy began to bolster companies’ balance-sheets. India’s regulators also relaxed their grip, steadily raising the limits on investments abroad. Outward investment, they once believed, deprived India of scarce capital that would be better invested at home. But this fear of capital flight slowly gave way to pride in India’s national champions. In February 2004, they even allowed firms to finance their foreign acquisitions by borrowing abroad.

And borrow they did. Indian companies took on a mountain of debt, largely because it was there. Tata Steel borrowed heavily to buy Corus in 2007. Hindalco, India’s biggest aluminium company, borrowed $3 billion to buy Novelis, a Canadian manufacturer of aluminium products. Suzlon, which makes wind turbines, sold convertible bonds to finance its acquisition of Germany’s REpower.

But whereas Indian tourists have an eye for a bargain, several of corporate India’s acquisitions now seem ill-advised. The purchase of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in 2008, for example, saddled Tata Motors with a prestigious brand, prodigious losses and a $3 billion loan, the last $1 billion of which it managed to refinance on May 27th, days before it fell due. It has had to call on the help of the Tata Group’s holding company, which underwrote its faltering rights issue last year, and the indulgence of India’s biggest state bank, which guaranteed an $840m bond it floated in May. In a recent interview, Ratan Tata, the group’s chairman, admitted that the company bought JLR at an “inopportune time”.

So were these acquisitions fundamentally sound decisions cursed by poor timing? Or were they bad decisions flattered by easy money? Some suspect that the country’s corporate titans felt compelled to outdo one another. But Alan Rosling, who sat on the board of the Tata Group’s holding company during its rapid overseas expansion, makes the opposite case: the Tatas’ foreign acquisitions were not daring, they were in part defensive.

In the 1990s Mr Tata inherited a group that sprawled across many industries, but remained largely cooped up in a single country. As India opened its economic borders, the group would have to contend with foreign competitors at home, whether or not it ventured overseas. There was nothing prudent about remaining subscale in a newly open market, prey to foreign multinationals.

Gautam Thapar, chief executive of the Avantha group, which includes Crompton Greaves, an engineering firm, cites a similar motivation for some of the company’s overseas acquisitions. It retains over a quarter of the Indian market for power transformers, which it defends against global rivals such as ABB. To hold on to that share in the long run, Mr Thapar argues, it has to compete on the basis of the technology it offers as well as the price it charges.

The pursuit of technology is a powerful motive for foreign acquisitions. Before Tata Steel’s purchase of Corus, the Indian steelmaker did not hold a single American patent. The takeover bought it over 80, as well as almost 1,000 research staff.

Sometimes new markets and new technologies go hand in hand. In India, Mr Thapar points out, the traditional buyers of transformers are state electricity boards, interested mostly in cost. The spur for innovation comes from more sophisticated foreign customers, who are “willing to sit down and discuss ideas”. One of his acquisitions, for example, makes slim transformers which tuck inside the shaft of wind turbines, saving space in crowded European countries.

Western acquisitions often have a crude motivation: to combine revenues without combining costs. Savings must be identified in advance to justify the deal to shareholders, and realised quickly afterwards. The result is a disruptive yoking together of two organisations, shaking up management and laying off staff, which as often as not fails to achieve its aims.

Because Indian companies are often seeking know-how and technology, they treat their new acquisitions with greater respect and forbearance, argues Nirmalya Kumar in the Harvard Business Review. They are careful not to break what they have just bought, as Mr Rosling puts it.

Hindalco, Mr Kumar points out, was happy to leave Novelis’s senior managers in place. For six months it supplemented them with only two of its own. In 2000, when yet another part of the Tata empire, Tata Tea, bought Tetley, a British rival, it also retained its managers, anxious to preserve their knowledge of local markets.

This forbearance can go too far. In the bad old days of import substitution, Indians coveted any tat from “foreign”, just because its origins lay elsewhere. India’s corporate shoppers, too, may sometimes show their foreign purchases too much respect. Corus’s managers were surprised at Tata Steel’s reluctance to reallocate responsibilities and run the two firms as one.

The opposite problem—an excess of patriotism, not xenophilia—may scupper Bharti’s deal with MTN. Both India and South Africa take pride in their new multinational champions. Their talks fell through last year when MTN’s board argued that it should buy Bharti, not the other way around—a reversal which Sunil Mittal of Bharti condemned as an affront to the “pride of India”. But not everyone’s pride can be satisfied.

Source: The Economist

BNP Paribas is recommending its clients to reduce their exposure to China, which it has lowered to neutral from overweight, and increase their allocations to India, where the bank remains overweight. It is raising its target for the Bombay Stock Exchange Index (Sensex) to 16,500, representing a price-to-book value (PBV) of around 3.2 times earnings for 2009.

Three factors drive BNP Paribas’ switch recommendation: valuations, flows and liquidity are turning more favorable in India relative to China; India has a higher exposure relative to China in the sectors that the BNP Paribas favours at this point in the cycle; and the external funding environment, which is crucial for delivering proposed infrastructure investment, is turning more favorable for India

“The China equity market has been under-performing MSCI Asia ex-Japan by 5% since the March low, reflecting in part the stellar performance from the cyclical low recorded in late October 2008 through the end of February. Unlike other markets in this region, China is yet to see any major upward revision to earnings,” says BNP Paribas in a report.

Although India has disappointed investors because of May earnings revisions, BNP Paribas believes the INC-UPA coalition win and a dramatic improvement in the international liquidity environment will result in a sharp turnaround in the earnings revisions cycle in June and investors are discounting such an outcome in advance.

Among the three factors BNP Paribas cites in favor of India, the assertion that China shares are less attractive in terms of valuations is subject to interpretation.

According to BNP Paribas, MSCI India trades on a PBV of around 2.8 times earnings for 2009 compared with 2 times for MSCI China and 1.7 times for MSCI Asia ex-Japan. However, the bank believes India deserves to trade at a higher PBV because of its higher return on equity (ROE). BNP Paribas says India’s ROE is the second highest in the region at 22% (Indonesia is the highest at 28%), while China’s ROE is 17%.

The ROE of Indian companies is also more sustainable than that of Chinese companies, BNP Paribas notes. India’s share of regional fund flows has moved up a notch following the government elections, with the market capturing 31% of the total weekly flows for the Asia six (Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and India). This compares with India’s record of accounting for almost half the region’s outflows during the dark days of February. While the Asia six weekly flows data does not include China, data from Massachusetts-based data provider EPFR Global on U.S. mutual funds highlights a slump in China inflows from more than $1 billion a week in the first quarter to a mere $18 million in the last week of May.

Mobile advertising in India is all set to see an increase with the arrival of MVNOs and 3G, say observers.

So far, mobile has attracted low advertising spends because of its format of advertising—simple text SMS or basic pictures.

Khemka said: “With 3G, a paradigm shift is expected in mobile advertising.”

Vasudevan said: “3G will open up new avenues for advertisers, such as rich media content and video over the mobile phone.”

With 3G, advertisers may be able to subsidize the cost of downloading rich media content by subscribers.

Saxena said: “For example, a song from a new Bollywood film can be put up for download with an ad of a soft drink company as a pre-roll or a mid-roll. Consumers can download this song for free while the soft-drink company pays for the download.”

Recently, the Indian government approved MVNOs to operate in India, though the detailed guidelines for this are pending. Generally, MVNOs provide mobile phone services by buying airtime from existing telecom operators. They then market it by leveraging their brand and distribution network.

The MVNOs too will change India’s mobile advertising scenario substantially, according to market players. They can help grow the mobile marketing industry as well as the subscriber base in the country.

Citing the Blyk mobile model, Saxena said that MVNOs can even offer the entire mobile service for free if the subscriber opts to receive a certain number of advertisements per week.

Blyk is an operator in the United Kingdom that sells mobile network for free. It gives customers free airtime in exchange for accepting up to six advertising messages per day. Blyk generates all of its revenue from advertisers. The company’s priority is to ensure it has a user base that advertisers will pay a premium to reach.

Since MVNOs will be dependent on VAS and advertising to create a differentiator, it will be an important contributor to the growth of mobile advertising.

Learn about Action verbs through this cool video.

Source: YouTube

Source: The Economist

Five years (2003-08) of near-9% growth suddenly seems a distant memory. The CSO estimated GDP growth in October-December 2008 at just 5.3%.

Indeed, the IMF estimates that India will average just 5.1% growth in the calendar year 2009. There is much gloom and doom in the stock market, which has now fallen below its October-November lows. The government claims bravely that its stimulus packages are finally having an impact, but this is not reflected in the mood of corporates or households.

Maybe growth in 2009 will be 6%, a tad higher than the IMF estimate. But it may not get much faster till the world economy recovers, and that may not happen till 2010 or even 2011. If so, India will grow at just 6% annually for the next two years.

Some experts ask, what’s wrong with 6% growth? Why are we whining and groaning? After all, 6% growth will represent the fastest growth rate in the world after China’s. If India can grow at 6% when the US has just plunged downward by 6%, why not enjoy the spectacle? One consulting firm says that it scents trouble in only one of six verticals of its business. Why then is so much gloom and doom?

I personally believe that gloom is fully justified in the short run, but not a sense of doom. When a country moves up from 4% growth to 6%, this generates optimism and excited enthusiasm. But if growth falls from 9% to 6%, that is terribly painful. What matters is not just the rate of growth but its direction too.

The mood of corporates, governments and households depends a lot on expectations. Keynes emphasised the critical role played by the animal spirits of entrepreneurs, who take risks, innovate and so accelerate growth. When the economy swings up, animal spirits bubble fiercely. But in a downswing, animal spirits droop. Risk taking is replaced by risk aversion, adventure by caution, and innovation by safety-first tactics.

During the upswing of 2003-08, entrepreneurs were able to raise ever larger sums of equity at ever higher prices. They were also able to get ever larger loans at diminishing rates of interest, especially foreign currency loans. This explosive growth of cheap financing drove India’s 9% boom.

Some economists argue that India’s own savings rate has shot up to 37%, and this is the main driver of growth. Not so. The sudden rise in India’s savings rate is cyclical in substantial measure, and will now swing down as corporate and government savings collapse. The earlier cyclical upswing was itself predicated on corporate access to cheap, plentiful capital.

Today that access has become difficult and expensive. Leveraged takeovers, Tata Steel’s purchase of Corus, Tata Motors’ acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover, Hindalco’s purchase of Novellis, were once hailed as immense national triumphs. Today they look over-leveraged and overpriced disasters. Corporates with dollar loans now have to mark these to market, suffering huge losses.

The plight of small and medium enterprises is grim. They face huge delays in payments from customers, while their own credit lines have closed. Even if GDP grows by 6%, industry may grow at less than 3% per year. So, 6% growth should legitimately translate into corporate and investor gloom.

Central and state governments are equally hit by the decline in growth. Revenue from corporate and income tax has been growing at a breakneck annual rate of 30-40% for some years, financing a spending spree. This high spending pattern has now been buttressed by additional spending and tax cuts in three stimulus packages. Consequently, the government’s fiscal position, which had been improving dramatically in the era of 9% growth, is now in a shambles.

The earlier revenue boom facilitated enormous increases in outlays on Bharat Nirman, Sarva Shiskha Abhiyan, and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. But now that GDP growth has suddenly slowed to 5-6%, the government finds its coffers emptying fast, and so its borrowing requirement has tripled over budget estimates to Rs 330,000 crore.

This threatens to soak up all bank funds, curbing corporate access to badly-needed capital and thus worsening the slump. So, the second-highest growth rate in the world, 6%, is consistent with huge fiscal strain and the crowding out of corporate borrowing. Good grounds for gloom, surely. It could be worse, of course, ask Pakistan, but it is bad enough.

Finally, consider the plight of households. They have been hit terribly by a negative wealth effect. When the economy was booming, owners of shares and real estate found their assets doubling and quadrupling, and happily spent part of this wealth increase on booming consumption. But now asset values have crashed, leaving consumers feeling suddenly impoverished. The associated pain is crimping spending.

In rural India, households are still doing well, thanks to good harvests and high minimum support prices, expanded employment guarantee programmes, and rising minimum wages in many states. This is the one silver lining in the economy. Yet credit to households has undoubtedly been squeezed hard.

Housing and auto loans have fallen off sharply, and all the RBI’s attempts to lower consumer lending rates have had very limited impact so far. Consumer defaults (in personal loans, credit card debt, auto and housing loans) are galloping upwards. And the farm loan waiver may well induce galloping default in new farm loans too. So, despite the silver lining of rural consumption, this lights up only the fringes of a dark cloud.

Let’s return to the question posed in the title of this article: what’s wrong with 6% growth? The answer is that a veritable cavalcade of things is wrong with it. Even if it is the second highest rate in the world, adjusting downward from 9% to 6% is hugely painful.

In the longer run, an economy that keeps growing at 6% in the trough of a business cycle will look very strong. So there is no cause for a sense of doom, the long run looks bright. But there is every reason for 6% growth to cause gloom in 2009.

A Resume Is

• A summary of your skills and experiences that highlights your accomplishments.
• An example of your writing, and therefore should be perfectly written and punctuated.
• What shows the reader the skills you have, and generates enough curiosity on the part of potential employers, field sites or graduate schools to want to meet with you for an interview.

Contents of a Resume

• Contact Information

Include name, address, phone number and professional email address. If your present address is temporary, you need to include a permanent address. Don’t forget to include zip codes and area codes.

Your name should be the most prominent text on your resume.
If necessary, print your name and “Page 2″ on top of the second page.
Note on length: Some professions require that your resume be no more than one page, i.e., finance, and some fields allow the flexibility of a second page if the information is relevant, i.e., non-profits. Please consult with a career counselor to discuss resume length and content issues for the areas in which you are interested.

• Career Objective

If necessary, articulate your career interests or current interests and reference your skills for the specific position to which you are applying. An objective should be no more than one sentence.

• Skills

If necessary, you may list position/field specific skills. This section is most often used by fields that require particular skills including computer science and laboratory research.

• Education/ Certification

Include name(s) and location(s) of colleges attended, dates of graduation (month/ year), degree(s) earned and major/concentration/specialty.

Certifications/licensures may also be mentioned in this section.
List your most recent degree or the program to which you are currently enrolled first.
List other degrees or relevant education, including colleges from which you transferred from or study abroad experiences, in reverse chronological order.
Highlight your degree or college/university, i.e. bold, capitals, etc.
If you have not completed your degree, write “Anticipated” or “Expected” before the month/year of graduation.
If you would like to include your GPA, the correct format is: GPA: 4.0.
Do not include coursework unless it is directly relevant and unusual, but do include any awards and/or honors.
If applicable, include your certification/licensure. Be certain that you list the title of your certification/licensure correctly and to include the certification/ licensure number and date completed. If you have not completed all requirements, list the name and date of each completed component.

• Experience

Consider dividing your experience into sections: “Related Experience” and “Additional Experience” or “Professional Experience,” “Leadership Experience” and/or “Activities.”
List most recent experiences first.
For each experience, include your: job title, place of employment, location (city, state), dates of employment and description of responsibilities.
Summarize your field experiences, employment and volunteer work.
Use action verbs to describe your responsibilities and accomplishments.

Avoid…

Do not use the word “I, me or my” in your resume.
Avoid phrases like “Duties included” or “Responsible for.” 
Use quantitative information, e.g. “Developed and implemented leadership training for 50 Brandeis students.”

Source: The Economist

THE news in May that the Congress party had won India’s elections by a big margin electrified the political establishment and sent shares soaring. Manmohan Singh, back as prime minister, still needs coalition partners, but no longer relies on Communists for his majority, and needs not pay so much heed to small, venal regional parties. At home, he pledges to forge ahead with liberal reforms. Abroad, too, says Shyam Saran, a special envoy for Mr Singh on climate change, his government “will enjoy greater room for manoeuvre than in its earlier incarnation”.

If this freedom produces a robust, coherent foreign policy, it will be a post-cold-war first. “Does the elephant dance?” is the title of a forthcoming book on India’s foreign policy, by a former Canadian envoy, David Malone. Until now the country has been a wallflower and it is about time it put on its pumps. India enjoys huge global respect as a successful democracy. In marked contrast to China’s, its rise raises few hackles in the West. And its formidable intellectuals, entrepreneurs, Bollywood stars and diaspora give tremendous “soft” power. But in comparison with its stature, its influence remains pitiful, despite its recognition by America as a member of the nuclear club—the main (perhaps only) foreign-policy achievement of Mr Singh’s first term.

Indian governments’ main preoccupations are domestic—unsurprisingly, given a riotous Bartholomew Fair of a political system, and huge economic problems. India’s immediate region has also frustrated its great-power ambitions, with Pakistan chiefly to blame. Much of Pakistan’s elite continues to view India as a threat to their country’s existence. This is misguided, and in the case of the army, self-serving. Pakistan’s own jihadists remain a bigger danger. But Pakistan’s morbid obsessions tie India down, too. In Mr Singh’s second term, say his advisers, India will attempt to vault beyond concerns in its near-abroad. And, having appointed, in S.M. Krishna, a foreign minister expected to be grateful and ineffectual, he will be unfettered either by carping Communists or ambitious colleagues. He will be able to toe his own foreign-policy line. Top of his agenda will be trade, climate change and responding to China’s rise.

Don’t hold your breath on the first two. Mr Singh has liberal views on trade, and his cabinet shuffle notably got rid of the commerce minister, who was widely blamed for scuppering trade talks under the Doha round in Geneva last July. An early signing of a free-trade agreement between India and the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is expected. Yet such agreements offer more political than economic advantage. And the old domestic constraints remain. Mr Singh campaigned on what he calls “inclusive growth”. This implies protection for farmers and more. Even if Mr Singh now favours the pursuit of freer trade, Sonia Gandhi, boss of the Congress family firm, with its roots in the countryside, may well overrule him.

As for climate change, Mr Saran points out that India, like other poor countries, will be among the worst-hit by a warming globe and has an overriding interest in a successful international regime emerging from the climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December. It is true that a first casualty of the melting of Himalayan glaciers would be the waters of the north-Indian plain. But Mr Saran also stresses that agreement cannot be reached at the expense of India’s development. Many Indians feel that tackling climate change, like free trade, is something pushed on India by outsiders to bring it down. For the moment, India can hide behind America and China, which are barely inching towards a common approach.

That leaves China. To those paid to worry about such things the threat is clear and present. “He is coming over the passes from Sinkiang [Xinjiang],” says a senior Indian military man. “He is building the road to Burma [Myanmar]; he is seeking ports from all those around us; and he is selling arms to all and sundry.” This, to Indian strategists, is the “string of pearls” strategy designed to encircle their country. Now China is trying to block the Asian Development Bank from financing a project in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, territory claimed by China. Hawks say Indian politicians’ judgment about China is clouded by economic ties. China is now India’s biggest trading partner.

Yet China’s trade with India, and others, counts for something besides commercial expedience. It helps explain China’s push into India’s backyard, with roads, ports and pipelines, chiefly via Myanmar and Pakistan. So does the perceived need to secure energy lines. China’s oil use is doubling every 15 or so years. Nearly nine-tenths of its oil imports cross the Indian Ocean and pass through the Malacca Strait. India has almost identical energy concerns, though its potential chokepoint is not Malacca but the Strait of Hormuz. Its navy, like China’s, has been rushing to secure friendly staging-posts around the Indian Ocean. As a hedge, it has also been forging links farther east with China’s own maritime neighbours, including Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.

China’s trade with India also counts by reaffirming a growing interdependence in a part of the world that still defends brittle notions of sovereignty. Properly handled, interdependence could smooth the rougher edges of rivalry. But that must depend in part on how much domestic populations have got at stake. Here, India scores poorly. This week a Unicef report warned that, despite several years of breakneck growth, India falls far short in protecting its own people from poverty. Some 230m Indians suffer from chronic hunger, a number that has grown thanks to the global downturn and sharp swings in the price of food and fuel. China’s record, with malnourishment largely banished, is far better. Mr Singh’s foreign policy begins at home.