It is strange to see two independent columnists talk about essentially the same thing in their respective columns on the same day without any special occasion to do so.

Two columns published on rediff.com ponder over the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship in India.

GV Dasarathi cites the successes of ISRO and Tata in making a point about the creativity abundant in India and the success stories hitherto unnoticed.

The other (ed: India) is confident about its capability, dreams big dreams, then goes ahead and translates the dreams into reality. There are innumerable success stories like ISRO and Tata Steel in India today, in manufacturing, electronic hardware, pharmaceuticals, software, fashion design, or any area that you can think of. The problem is that these are not highlighted. Creative individuals and organisations who are developing products or technologies with a lasting impact are unsung heroes.

Dasarathi advocates changes in the way we view and reward creativity…

We need drastic changes in the education system and in government policies to reward creativity and value addition. Changes that produce creative people, visionaries, dreamers, people with guts, like Vikram Sarabhai and Jamsetji Tata.

In the first instalment of a 4-part series, Arindam Banerji tries to respond to the oft-asked question about why India cannot seem to produce overwhelmingly effective innovations. He uses a long list of innovative strides taken by India and Indians in the fields of science and technology, business, R&D, etc. in order to make his point.

Yet, even after listing the innovations, he cautions against too far ahead of ourselves…

The changes taking place in Indian R&D are indeed impressive and in some cases, like the Indian pharma — the research and products are indeed world-class. But let us measure ourselves, before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

Outlook’s table of data is impressive enough, but we have to compare the impact of those innovations with say a list of inventions the 1920s and 1930s (ref. Forbes article).

His next column ahould provide more insight into what seem to be the factors that seem to be missing in India and its indigenous innovations.

How difficult, I mean how difficult is it for a webpage to recognize the browser that is referring to it!!

And yet… we have websites that do a half-baked job of recognizing the browser and worse still… deny access to that page citing browser incompatibility!

Half knowledge, they say, is dangerous!

For your information, I was using Firefox 0.9.3