Arrived late last night. Traveller's tip - go Jet Airways who remind me of the early days of Vrigin Atlantic - better, cheaper and trying harder. Given the ever-growing importance of the Indian market the other airlines had better wake up.
The last few months have seen a stream of British and American publishers turning up in India to announce grand plans for the development of publishing in India. The latest pronouncements have emerged from HarperCollins during a presidential visit by Jane Friedman and Victoria Barnsley. I'm sure that they will find interesting opportunities here and will rapidly understand the Indian market and character. We've been here for over a century and every day brings fresh surprises.
Macmillan India was founded in 1892 and has grown every year since. It now employs more than 3000 people all over the country and is publicly traded on the Mumbai and National Stock Exchanges. On the publishing front we focus on education at all levels and serious non-fiction. We have recently set up Picador India which is carving a niche in high-quality Indian literature as part of the overall efforts of Pan Macmillan. Palgrave Macmillan has its own office to promote academic works and college textbooks and Nature Publishing Group has embarked on a programme of publishing and marketing in India with the aim of finding the very best Indian scientific work needing to reach an international audience.
The other area of growth comes from our publishing services activities in Information Processing, MPS Technologies and Software Development Services. At Macmillan we have a tradition of working for other publishers as well as for ourselves in order to spread the costs of staying at the cutting edge of new developments. The alternative strategy as followed by several of our competitors is to retain these activities to themselves in order to maintain competitive edge. Both strategies are legitimate but we prefer the more social version.
The papers here today are full of Kiran Desai's triumph at the Booker but the headlines are really about the row between the BCCI and the ICC - acronyms only of interest to followers of cricket - which is really a post-imperial flare-up of the very best nostalgic kind - much hot air but no bloodshed.