The Kamla Show is pleased to debut its Ideas Channel with Live Mint Radio. LiveMint is an online property of Mint, the leading Indian business newspaper that has partnered with The Wall Street Journal.

The launch on November 10, 2008 focuses on movers and shakers in business, technology and innovation in the Indian disapora and the broader high tech community. We bring you a weekly series of Silicon Valley icons including Yogen Dalal of Mayfield Fund, Mitchell Baker of Mozilla Corp, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures and board member of Google among others.

You can tune in to listen to a new interview each week and invite you to visit the site at Live Mint Radio.

We are pleased to bring you, in partnership with Live Mint Radio an interview with Yogen Dalal, veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur.

A past guest on the Show, in this interview he talks about the Magic of Silicon Valley. Besides the magic of Silicon Valley, Yogen also remembers his work with Vint Cerf, the father of Internet who was his mentor, his time with ClarisWorks and working with Bill Campbell, on his current digital lifestyle and how he became a venture capitalist.

Yogen has been living in the valley since the early 1970s and is currently Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road.

You can listen to Part-1 and Part -2 of interview on Live Mint Radio, as well as read the full text transcript.

London-based journalist and author Jules Stewart’s second book titled, Spying For The Raj: The Pundits And The Mapping of the Himalayas was released in 2006.  Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who is listed as the world’s greatest living explorer by the Guinness Book of Records, has written the forward for the book.

I caught up with Jules in London in 2006 just before his book was launched. We spoke about the book, and why and how this difficult task of mapping the Himalayas was undertaken by the British. What were the geopolitical reasons that propelled the British to undertake this trans-himalayan survey?

This fascinating book traces a 30-year (1864-1894) effort that was led by British Captain Thomas Montgomerie to map the Himalayas. The official name of the project was The Great Trignometrical Survey of India. The trans-himalayan region was an unknown territory and the British had huge gaps in their knowledge about the contours of the mountain range, Tibet, and the rivers that originated in Mount Kailash.

Captain Montgomerie recruited local people from various regions of the Himalayas, trained them and established standardized ways of measuring their steps. The recruits were not pundits by caste, but were a small group of eclectic group. There was Kinthup, the Tibetan tailor’s assistant from Darjeeling, and there was Nain Singh from the Kumaon region among others.

A major geopolitical reason that propelled the British to undertake the survey was Russia’s ambitions in the Northwest frontier region. This was the Great Game of the 19th century, when the Russians were almost there at the gates of India says Jules. The Russian search for a warm water port led them to this part of the world, and the British wanted to contain the Russian threat. In order to do that they needed to have a better idea of the terrain of the trans-himalayan region for military planning and logistics purposes.

Jules suspects that Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim had quite a few characters drawn from the survey. He thinks that Colonel Creighton in Kim was modeled after Captain Montgomerie.

Jules is a journalist based in London. In 2005 he wrote his first book called The Khyber Rifles. President Musharraf of Pakistan arranged for Jules to tour the Northwest frontier area.. Jules is already busy putting the finishing touches for his third book, which is a history of the Northwest frontier province. He is already thinking about his fourth book and is interested in writing about the Siachen glacier conflict.

This interview was originally recorded in May 2006 in London.

India Himalayas British Raj The Great Game Jules Stewart Indian Podcast

Ashish Gupta is co-founder of Helion Venture Partners, a India focused venture capital firm with a $140 million venture fund. Ashish is an entrepreneur turned investor and is one of the few investors to have had a successful exit in India. He was an early investor in Daksh that got acquired by IBM. He has invested in over 30 companies as an angel and a VC and sits on the boards of Kirusa, Naukri and others.

Earlier this year I caught up with Ashish to find out about his journey as an entrepreneur  and how he and his c0-founders built Junglee in the 1990s without a formal business plan or business model. What they had was good chemistry among the team members that saw them through their bumpy ride to success. What probably also helped was they founded the company at the start of the dotcom bubble and the team members were either Stanford alumni or students.

In part-1 of the interview Ashish talks about how Junglee was born and how they landed funding from friends and family. Ashish candidly confesses that often he was politely shown to the door by VC firms when he tried to raise money. The founders of Junglee eventually lucked out and got money from friends and family with the help of Rakesh Mathur. He has an interesting story to share about how Rakesh got involved with Junglee. Interestingly, Helion was a recent investor in Rakesh’s startup: SMS GupShup.

Tune back in for Part-2 of the conversation.

In case you missed, you might want to listen to Ashish talk about Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship in India. This was a series of conversation that I recorded with Ashish towards the end of 2007 in Bangalore, India. Ashish Gupta on Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital in India Part-1,  Part-2 and Part-3.

Technorati Tags: Ashish Gupta,Junglee,Helion Venture Partners,Rakesh Mathur,entrepreneurship,VC,Bangalore,India,Technology

Mr. Shyam Benegal is one of India’s best known film directors, and was part of the Hindi parallel or art cinema of India during the 1970s and 1980s. A prolific filmmaker, he has made feature and TV films and documentaries along with  hundreds of advertisement films in India.

In this series of conversations Mr. Benegal talks about growing up in Aliwal, near Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, his career in the advertisement industry, his films and Guru Dutt, his cousin.

In part of our conversation discusses how his interest in films began. As a six-year old boy he got hooked to films and that developed into a life-long passion. The first film that left an indelible impact on him was Cat People, a horror film that he saw as a six-year old boy. He confesses that he got nightmares after watching the film. But, that did not preclude him from watching films, and he sometimes watched two films a week at his local cantonment theatre. At home his still photographer father dabbled in making films of his family and also showed short films that he bough from Kodak.  So, in a way he was surrounded in an atmosphere of films and photography.

By the time he was in college Mr. Benegal’s cousin had started to make a fame for himself in Hindi films, now known as Bollywood.  So,  after completing his studies Mr. Benegal decided to move to Bombay since ce there was no film industry in Hyderabad during that time. Instead of joining his cousin’s Guru Dutt’s film production company he decided to work in the  advertisement industry.

He spent about a decade in the advertisement industry before he made his first feature film Ankur. After the success of Ankur, Mr. Benegal went on to make films like Mandi, Nishant, Bhumika, Junoon, Manthan, Kalyug, Zubeida and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero

This is part-2 of a 6-part interview with Mr. Benegal.

Mr. Shyam Benegal is one of India’s best known film directors, and was part of the Hindi parallel or art cinema of India during the 1970s and 1980s.

A prolific filmmaker, he has made feature films, TV films and documentaries, and hundreds of advertisement films in India.

The conversation with Mr. Benegal is a multi-part episode, where he speaks about growing up in Aliwal, near Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, his career in the advertisement industry, his films and Guru Dutt, his cousin.

In Part-1 Mr. Benegal talks about his recent nomination (2006) to the Upper House (Rajya Sabha) of the Indian Parliament. Earlier this year President APJ Abdul Kalam nominated Mr. Benegal as a member of the Rajya Sabha. His tenure as a Member of Parliament (MP) is for a period of six years. This is the first time that the filmmaker has held a political office.

Mr. Benegal was born and brought up in Aliwal, near Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. He relocated to Bombay after graduating with a Masters in Economics from Hyderabad, and instead of joining his cousin Guru Dutt’s film production he decided to work in the advertisement industry.

He spent about a decade in the advertisement industry before he made his first feature film Ankur. After the success of Ankur, Mr. Benegal went on to make films like Mandi, Nishant, Bhumika, Junoon, Manthan, Kalyug, Zubeida and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero

Mr. Benegal introduced many talented actors like Shabana Azmi, Anant Nag, Smita Patil, and Naseerudin Shah among others to the Indian film industry.

Mr. Benegal has no immediate plans to retire.

This interview was originally recorded in  Mr. Benegal’s office in Mumbai in April 2006.

Technorati tags: Shyam Benegal interview, Shyam Benegal podcast, Shyamm Benegal, films, Guru Dutt