ES FOR MASSIVE DER CM BOMMAI

rime Minister Narendra Modi will also be laying the foundation stone of MysuruKhushalnagar four-lane highway, which is a 92 km long road project, which will be developed at a cost of around Rs 4,130 crore, and thereby boosting connectivity of Kushalnagar with Bengaluru and will help halve the travel time from about 5 to only 2.5 hours. Other projects that PM will inaugurate include the IIT Dharwad, the longest railway platform in the world at Sri Siddharoodha Swamiji Hubballi Station, the electrification of HosapeteHubballi-Tinaighat section of the railway network and the upgradation of Hosapete station, various projects of Hubballi-Dharwad smart city, and laying the foundation stone of Tupparihalla Flood Damage Control Project.

There was a time in the United States of America, when the term ‘Bangalored’ meant outsourced abroad. A US job getting Bangalored meant that it ceased to exist in the Silicon Valley, and got shifted to India’s Silicon Valley. While the term is not much used anymore, due to other outsourcing hubs emerging in India and elsewhere, some recent stats show that such an early mover advantage is difficult to beat and that Karnataka has been building upon this advantage effectively in recent years under the visionary leadership of Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai. The state could attract Rs. 10 lakh crore worth of investments from the Global Investors Meet (GIM) held last year, and its investment proposals are being fasttracked under the direct supervision of the Chief Minister. If the current momentum continues, Karnataka is all set to overtake Tamil Nadu as India’s second largest industrial state.

The inbound investment scene has turned hypercompetitive among various Indian states in recent years. States that were never in the reckoning for Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) are today major destinations that have succeeded in attracting major projects. This headway that some of these states have made in recent years would make it seem that

Karnataka and its capital Bengaluru have been overtaken in the race for economic development. But some core stats show that things are otherwise.

Leading real estate consultancy Knight Frank had recently published their report for 2022, which shows that as far as office space consumption was concerned, Bengaluru led the whole of India with 14.5 million square feet. This figure would be more appreciated when you know that the runner-up, National Capital Region (NCR-Delhi) was a distant second with just 8.9 million square feet, and the country’s economic capital Mumbai even behind that.

When it comes to residential real estate consumption too, Bengaluru recorded a sector-leading 40% rise by way of residential units, growing ahead of Chennai at 19%, Hyderabad at 28% and Mumbai at 35%, with only NCR-Delhi ahead of it at 67%. But a closer look at the absolute numbers show that the difference is not so huge, with Bengaluru selling 53,363 residential units as against NCR-Delhi’s 58,460 units, and in fact this difference may not mean anything given the huge difference in sizes between these two urban agglomerations.

When it comes to attracting high quality companies to Bengaluru, one big advantage that Karnataka enjoys is that it doesn’t have to do anything much, other than facilitate the new entrant. A recent example of this phenomenon is the US based Q2 Holdings which selected Bengaluru for its India office. Q2 is a publicly traded fintech major that works with Fortune 50 Banks globally and features as the fintech partner for 40% of all the US banks.

Bengaluru was never unknown to Texas based Q2 Holdings, as another Texas based giant and one of the Top-10 semiconductor companies in the world, Texas Instruments, was the very first company that started the offshoring wave in Bengaluru in the early 90s. But Q2 is in a very different business and offers comprehensive financial services including digital banking and lending solutions to banks, credit unions, alternative finance and fintech companies in the US and internationally. If you ask where else in India but Bengaluru would such a company set shop, you are correct, but only 50% correct. Yes, Bengaluru is indeed India’s fintech capital. When Q2 was considering India, Bengaluru would have been the first choice if not the only choice.

But the bigger story is that Q2 was most probably considering India itself due to Bengaluru’s preeminence in the global fintech map, and not the other way around! How can anyone guess it? Just take a look at their list of geographical locations. Apart from their various offices across the United States, Q2 has only three offices worldwide - in London, in Sydney, and now in Bengaluru!

Q2 CEO Matt Flake explained the rationale behind selecting Bengaluru this way, "At Q2, we have invested in our state-of-the-art office space in Bengaluru and we will continue to invest approximately 40% of our revenue and workforce to expand our Bengaluru office, and our mission is to build strong and diverse communities by strengthening their financial institutions. The opening of the Bengaluru office will enable us to deepen our mission’s impact by supporting our local India team members and their communities, as well as attracting new talent.”

Yes, talent, that is the attraction! Bengaluru has got talent. India has got talent too, but Bengaluru has got it within one city premises so that companies like Q2 can hit the ground running, whether it is work-from-office, or work-from-home or hybrid models that they are pursuing. Bengaluru’s talent pool when it comes to highly trained and highly experienced professionals, be it software engineers, fintech specialists, data scientists, biotechnologists, researchers etc is unparalleled anywhere in India. In fact, the very reason why it became the global outsourcing hub starting from the 90s is that it had the maximum number of electronics & computer science engineers as well as PhD holders among any city in India.

This actually happened in Bengaluru in the 90s due to two reasons - one, the presence of high-tech PSUs like Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), Bharat Earth Movers Ltd (BEML), Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) etc, and secondly due to Bengaluru’s long running focus on the higher education sector, especially engineering colleges. While some of these PSUs like ITI and HMT are no more active, and while the private sector giants like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Biocon etc have emerged stronger, the focus on higher education is something that Karnataka takes seriously to this day.

A recent example of this priority for higher education was seen when under the guidance of Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, the Minister for Higher Education CN Ashwath Narayan and the State Higher Education Council (SHEC), coordinated a hitherto unseen kind of international tie-up, by which four public universities in Karnataka were facilitated to partner with different renowned universities in the US state of Pennsylvania.

Under this unique and long-term engagement model,, these four universities - Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Bangalore University, Bangalore City University and Mangalore Universitytied up with different renowned universities in Pennsylvania like Commonwealth University, Kutzdown University & Millersville University. During the formal signing ceremony of this partnership, the Vice Chancellors of all the four Karnataka universities and the high-level delegates of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) were present.

The four Karnataka universities will benefit in different areas as per the individual tie-ups and it includes partnerships in diverse domains like computer science, business administration, geography & geo information science, strategic communications, English language, sports management and sports psychology. Universities on both sides will benefit as this opens the doors for twinning programs and joint development of research projects and academic programs.

Such tie-ups as well as academic and research agreements are nothing new for Karnataka’s famed central institutions like Indian Institute of Science (IISc) or its well-run private sector deemed universities like JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research (JSSAHER) and Nitte Deemed University. But this is the first time that the state’s prominent public universities have been facilitated by the state government to undertake such partnerships with leading universities in the US.

Such long-range planning and implementation have always been a hallmark of Karnataka, and it is accelerating now under Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s strategic leadership. And this is showing some great results in the corporate sector too. Ever since the global and Indian inflation rates spiked, the massive inflow of risk money into India’s celebrated startups had waned, and everyone expected Bengaluru to take the biggest hit, being the country’s startup capital. But the numbers reveal a different story.

According to a recent PwC India report on the subject, while the overall fund inflow into Indian startups declined by 33% in the calendar year 2022 over the previous year, it was Bengaluru startups that continued to raise the maximum capital. As many as 679 Bengaluru based startups succeeded in raising capital ranging from less than $20 million to greater than $100 million in 2022, as against only 466 such startups in NCRDelhi and only 336 such companies in Mumbai that could raise this kind of capital.

More than $100 million each was raised by 25 Bengaluru-based startups, including ?DailyHunt?, ?Swiggy?, ?Udaan?, Table Space, ?ShareChat?, ?Dunzo?, Byju’s and ?Ather Energy?, while there were only 15 such large fund raises in Delhi-NCR and only 8 such successful funding rounds in Mumbai. Bengaluru also led its bigger peers in the highest number of unicorns with 29 of these giants, followed by NCR-Delhi with 16 unicorns and Mumbai with 11. Indeed, if Bangalore 1.0 was about PSUs, and if Bangalore 2.0 was about IT & IT Services, Bengaluru 3.0 (its name change was in 2014) is about startups and sunrise domains like fintech and biotech. These relentless waves of economic boom have resulted in an unprecedented 584% rise in Bengaluru’s total built up area, as the city struggles to employ, and to house and to transport 12 million people.

This has invariably resulted in deep ecological impact especially to its once famous lakes, and also in its now infamous traffic congestions. Studies done earlier have estimated that billions of dollars worth of man-hours are lost because of IT workers getting stuck for long on its congested roads. But under CM Bommai’s leadership, considerable headway has been made in easing the congestion to reasonable levels.

This includes better day-to-day planning, going in for multi-modal transport systems, and also long-range plans to develop other cities and supporting infrastructure like national highways so that Bengaluru is not squeezed further. The Basavaraj Bommai Government is getting good support in this regard from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari. Minister Gadkari who recently visited Karnataka and inspected its national highways, had announced new projects and updates. He has announced that the 10 lane Bengaluru-Mysuru expressway will be open for operations in February, which will significantly ease the traffic flow between these two major cities and industrial cum tourist hubs. A brand new highway too has been announced, which is the 72-km six lane highway between Karnataka's Chitradurga and Davangere districts.

This will be built by NHAI at a cost of Rs. 1400 crores and will extensively use sustainable methods like plastic in bituminous concrete and milling material in service roads, which will reduce the maintenance cost of these roads in the future. But the most exciting part of this project is that it will be a vital segment of the longer highway connecting India’s IT capital Bangalore with its financial capital Mumbai, reducing travel time and congestion. Another new highway between Karnataka’s Nelamangala and Devihalli which falls under National Highway-75 has also been announced. Following his vision to take development of the state to every nook and corner of Karnataka, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai has recently directed officials to start mini-textile parks in 25 taluks spread across the state. The Minister for Major and Medium Industries Murugesh Nirani has also informed the Legislative Assembly that close to 90% of investments received during the recently concluded Global Investors’ Meet (GIM) in Bengaluru would go to Tier II cities in Karnataka.

The government is also getting good support from major conglomerates for furthering industrial development outside of Bengaluru. One such key deal is happening right now, as Tata Electronics is taking over the operations of leading Taiwanese based iPhone maker Wistron Corporation, with their plant in Kolar more than 50 kms away from Bengaluru.

The city’s air connectivity is also getting a shot in its arm with Bengaluru Airport’s Terminal 2 beginning domestic operations from 15 January. Almost coinciding with this, helicopter service provider Blade India has announced that their services will connect Bengaluru Airport to Hosur Aerodrome in 20 minutes, whereas by road it now takes up to 3 hours during busy traffic.

On the ecological front too, the Basavaraj Bommai Government has been making great strides. A recent study shows that Karnataka’s groundwater levels have improved, and while much of it is due to the favourable wet year, there is no doubt that the lake revival projects have also positively impacted groundwater. The state also got a major endorsement recently when the World Bank announced that it will be bringing Sub-Saharan farm officials to Karnataka to learn from its science-based watershed model that is aimed at developing climate-resilient agriculture.

Why You Often Need To Be Unhappy To Be Successful

If you make happiness your primary goal, you might miss out on success as well as the challenges that give life meaning.

In 2007, a group of researchers began testing a concept that seems, at first blush, as if it would never need testing: whether more happiness is always better than less. The researchers asked college students to rate their feelings on a scale from “unhappy” to “very happy” and compared the results with academic (GPA, missed classes) and social (number of close friends, time spent dating) outcomes. Though the “very happy” participants had the best social lives, they performed worse in school than those who were merely “happy.”

The researchers then examined a data set from another study that rated incoming college freshmen’s “cheerfulness” and tracked their income nearly two decades later. They found that the most cheerful in 1976 were not the highest earners in 1995; that distinction once again went to the second-highest group, which rated their cheerfulness as “above average” but not in the highest 10 percent.

As with everything in life, happiness has its trade-offs. Pursuing happiness to the exclusion of other goals–known as psychological hedonism–is not only an exercise in futility. It may also give you a life that you find you don’t want, one in which you don’t reach your full potential, you’re reluctant to take risks, and you choose fleeting pleasures over challenging experiences that give life meaning.

The way to understand the study above is not to deny that happiness is good; rather, it is to remember that a little bit of unhappiness has benefits. For instance, gloom has been found to aid in problemsolving. The author Emmy Gut argued in 1989 that some depressive symptoms can be a functional response to problems in the environment, leading us to pay appropriate attention and come up with solutions. In other words, when we are sad about something, we may be more likely to fix it. Psychologists call this the “analytical rumination hypothesis,” and it is supported by research.

Obviously, this is not to argue that clinical depression is good — misery can quickly render people incapable of solving problems. Nor am I saying that depression passes a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, the analytical-rumination hypothesis is evidence that getting rid of bad feelings does not necessarily make us more effective in our tasks. And if these emotions can help us assess threats, it stands to reason that too much good feeling can lead us to disregard them. The literature on substance use suggests that this is so: In some people, very high degrees of positive emotion have been connected to dangerous behaviors such as alcohol and drug use and binge eating.

An aversion to unhappiness can lead us to forgo a meaningful life. Indeed, as one group of researchers that surveyed college students in 2018 found, fear of failure is positively correlated with meaning derived from romance, friendship, and (to a lesser extent) family. When I talk with people about their fear of negative outcomes in life, their true source of fear in many cases centers on how they will feel about having failed, not about the consequences of the failure itself. This is similar to the way discomfort with uncertainty causes more anxiety than guaranteed bad news. To avoid these bad feelings, people give up all kinds of opportunities that involve the possibility of failure.

But bringing good things into your life, whether love, career success, or something else, usually involves risk. Risk doesn’t necessarily make us happy, and a risky life is going to bring disappointment. But it can also bring bigger rewards than a life played safe, as the study of happiness, academic achievement, and income suggests. Those with the highest performance at work and school made decisions that were probably unpleasant at times, and even scary.

None of this is to say that we should shun good feelings, or that we’re foolish for wanting to be happy. On the contrary, the desire for happiness is natural and normal. However, making the quest for positive feelings—and the fight to banish negative ones—your highest or only goal is a costly life strategy. Unmitigated happiness is impossible to achieve (in this mortal coil at least), and chasing it can be dangerous and deleterious to our success. But more important, doing so sacrifices many of the elements of a good life. As Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning, has written, “It is the suffering that we choose that affords the most opportunity for pleasure, meaning, and personal growth.”

Happiness itself would lose its meaning were it not for the contrast that we inevitably experience with sadness. “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness,” Carl Jung said in an interview in 1960. “The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” You can take Jung’s words to heart by committing to a regular practice of gratitude in which you give thanks not only for the things that make you happy but also for the ones that challenge you. It feels unnatural at first, but it will come easier each day.

Some of the most meaningful parts of our lives are a direct result of negative feelings that slipped through, despite our best efforts to block them out. For example, I am the father of three young adults; it was not long ago that my wife and I were going mano a mano with three teenagers. We lost a lot of sleep then, but I wouldn’t trade away a moment of those experiences (now that they are safely behind us).

Some people take these lessons to lengths that might seem unimaginable. One is Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. “If one imagines a soul of iron that weathers with grief and rusts with mild depression, then major depression is the startling collapse of a whole structure,” he wrote. But as he told an interviewer several years ago, he eventually found a way to love his depression. “I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy,” he said.

This, in a nutshell, is the paradox of being fully alive. To strive for relentless positivity is to aim for the dimensionality of a Hollywood movie or children’s book. So though suffering should never be anyone’s goal, each of us can strive for a rich life in which we not only seek the sunshine but fully experience the rain that inevitably falls as well.

(By Arthur C. Brooks for The Atlantic Daily)