Nikhil Kulkarni's Blog

Does Facebook take serendipity out of your online experience?

2012-02-05T22:02:00.004+05:30

While reading this article on RWW, I went to Mark Zuckerburg's Facebook profile and lo! I see all of my own contacts on that page as people who subscribed to Mark.

What I was probably expecting to see on Mark's page was a list of his close friends, a few close facebook employees or industry veterans etc; not people whose status updates I anyway see on my Facebook stream every few hours.

It's true that seeing that some of my own Facebook friends follow Mark's stream means that I too would be tempted to follow Mark - in fact this is even more true if the page I was visiting for not a public figure like Mark but a mutual friend of a friend, whom I wouldn't follow / subscribe to otherwise. However, Facebook takes the concept of familiarity to a complete extreme. In fact, wherever I go on Facebook, my own network follows me closely. For example, I go to a new Facebook page through someone's recommendation appearing on my FB Stream, it is usually the same person's photo which appears first in the list of friends who like it.

For a moment if I were to do a thought experiment of how Twitter would do it - I would be shown a small snippet of Mark's latest status updates, the names / faces of people who follow Mark, names of people whom Mark follows, may be even top 5 statuses which Mark retweeted (Shared / Liked in Facebook lingo) from those whom he follows. (I use the term status synonymous with tweet here, guess you get the hang!)

Facebook does nothing like the above - it simply engulfs each and every activity of mine into the coterie which I indicate as my 'Friend Universe'. This often defeats the purpose of being on a 'social' network because it prevents me as a user from serendipitous discovery of new people which also inhibits my discovery of new thoughts and ideas. All this in the name of "personalization"!

Facebook is all about personalization, while Twitter is all about network effects.

I find Twitter very refreshing - I get to see so many new ideas on Twitter everyday. There are two reasons for this - first is similar to what I get on Facebook as well i.e. re-tweets / shares which allow me to retweet a thought which everyone on my own stream will also see (exposing them to this thought); however as outlined above Facebook's UI does not help much in this feature. The second feature which Facebook completely inhibits is my ability to follow anyone; Yes I can follow SRK or Tom Cruise or my next door neighbor without their permission (this also works on Google+).

I believe Facebook needs to work actively on de-stressing the "personalization" and increasing the viral / network effect to help its users discover more and take advantage of being on a Global Social Network than make their online experience a ditto reflection of their offline relationship. And as users, I think the above is a more important debate we should be having as users than the over hyped privacy concerns raised about Facebook.

Lavasa - for luxury or productivity?

2012-01-15T01:02:00.001+05:30

Couple of weekend's ago I visited Lavasa - build about 50 kms away from Pune in the Sahyadri range of hills; its a good attempt to create a Dalhousie or Mussourie equivalent for Western India. While the weather conditions in Western India do not give you the luxury of creating a 'cool' hill station - it sure isn't a bad place to spend a weekend lounging and relaxing.

However, as I read through some pamphlets which we got during our trip and researched a little more on its concept - I was intrigued by the tall statement made by Lavasa Corporation which claims that "Lavasa is envisioned to be a more liveable city of the future where residents can live, work, learn and play in harmony with nature". While I could fathom the live, learn and play - the 'work' aspect didn't quite convince me. My wife suggested that the 'work' aspect probably relates to the workers in hotels, resorsts, hospitals and schools located in Lavasa; but when I dug deeper into the masterplan [1] [2] I found out that it does envisage "a 365 day economy with a host of non polluting industries being the main economic driver; these include R&D and training centres, IT and biotech industry, KPOs and those related to art, fashion and animation."

What appeals and bothers me at the same time is that the concept is Lavasa runs contrary to most of the urban planning beliefs that are emerging across the Globe. Lavasa is modeled on European model of small towns with low skylines, spread across acres of land to provide for an exquisite living. This model of development, while looks exquisite and glamorous, is contrary to the numerous research conclusions [3] [4] [5] [6] that dense cities are more efficient, hence less wasteful and thus more sustainable for an economic and environmental perspective.

Secondly, let us assume that all the empirical research on denser cities, might be wrong - for example dense cities mean individuals have less 'mental space', there are more ecological problems arising out of confined spaces in which people operate (example sanitation), or that the costs of maintaining dense city infrastructure outweighs the benefit they accrue. Even in this scenario - I fail to understand how a city like Lavasa which is built off the expressways, far from the nearest airport would attract talent to run the R&D centers or KPO's that it wants to set up.

Thirdly, Lavasa is built on assumptions arising from European lifestyle attributes, so much so that it has actually aped European cities in design. For example, Dasve - the first model town at Lavasa is actually a copy of the Italian town Portofino [7] (on which one of the streets is named). I doubt if European way of living developed in the colder and dryer environs of the northern hemisphere can be sustained in the tropic environment of India [Criticism: 8]. The resources needed to sustain the lifestyle of west in India would be huge and lead to wastage of money, power and water - all scarce resources for a country like India.

Finally, from an economic standpoint - we are all seeing the crisis which Europe is going through. While it will be unfair to say that the city planning is the reason for the crisis - but surely the amount of public spending done by European governments across the social security infrastructure - which includes development and maintenance of these sparse but cozy towns - is one of the major reasons for the debt crisis being faced by Europe. In this larger context, is it really a good idea to develop a city based on European model?

Before I conclude, I must clarify that I am not against the concept of developing Lavasa. Surely in the new India where we have wealthy and growing urban middle class which seeks comfort in every aspect of life, from their workplaces to homes to holidays and weekend getaways - there is place for projects like Lavasa to prosper. I am sure there will be many who wouldn't mind buying a 'weekend house' in Lavasa and even more who would visit the place again and again to recoil for a weekend or two occasionally.

Lavasa sure will also take the load off the severely abused Lonavala-Khandala stretch as a weekend getaway for Mumbai-Pune residents. Such a place is also good for setting up boarding schools and recuperation facilities (with advanced medical care). However, I don't see Lavasa as a place for setting up KPO offices or R&D centers. I think the makers of Lavasa should change their vision to make a more liveable city where residents can live, learn and play - the work part doesn't quite fit!
.

Placebo Actions

2011-12-14T22:19:00.000+05:30

Flickr Image courtesy Mr. Conguito

How many of you know that the close buttons don’t close the elevator doors in most elevators built in the United States or that buttons below the signal at crosswalks "meant" for people to trigger the signal change are mostly all disabled! [Source]

Well - I just realized that there are several actions we do which are also such "placebo" actions. One example is pressing a "Ctrl + Home" or "Ctrl+End" on a browser. Pressing the Control key makes sense only in either a Word Processing software like MS word or when you are typing inside a textarea (like composing a mail etc.) wherein pressing a "Home" key will take you to the beginning of the line you are typing in while pressing a "Ctrl+ Home" will take you to the beginning of the document / text.

However, when we are browsing a webpage on a browser - there is absolutely no reason to press the Control key because either ways pressing "Home" will take you to the beginning of the document and pressing "End" will take you to its end - irrespective of whether you press the control key or not!

I am keen to do a mental exercise to identify what other 'Pleacebo Actions' are embedded in our behaviour on computers, while driving vehicles or while walking etc. Do a any of you recollect any examples? Please leave comments!

Practice means Freedom!

2011-11-27T12:38:00.004+05:30

Photo by Flickr user lrargerich

I am sure all of us are taught the virtues of practice in Childhood - most often "Practice Makes a man perfect" or familiar Kabir's doha:

करत करत अभ्यास के, जड़मति होत सुजान

रसरी आवत जात ते, सिल पर पड़त निसान

We are taught to rote the mathematical multiplication tables or to mug up nursery rhymes ... the list is endless. And we all HATE IT! Even as we grow up we start disdaining and condemning the method of rote which is perpetuated across the educational system.

However, secretly we all know that we benefit somewhere from some of the rote we did. When you secretly calculate the percentage of your increment or the approximate EMI required to fund the next investment we remember our math tables.

Yesterday, as I was watching Mtv Unplugged, I realized one more advantage of practicing any activity or art. As I watched the guitarist or the tabla player play their instrument so effortlessly and then experiment with it during the event - I realized that had they not been so adept at playing the instrument, they would never have been in a position to experiment.

To detail it out, when we start learning any activity or art. the conscious mind is occupied with 'learning' the nuances of the regular stuff that goes into it. But with practice, most nuances simply seep into the subconscious leaving the conscious mind free for noticing the matters which separate excellence from the average.

For example, for a kid learning cricket he needs to pay attention to the way he holds his bat, placement of the bat and the foot etc. However, as we start practicing, these nuances seep into his subconscious - a professional cricket player need not bother to think if his bat is placed at the correct angle, at the correct distance from his foot and the wicket etc. All this, as we say, comes naturally to him in his "style". So now s/he can concentrate on where the fielders are, where to play the next shot to score a boundary etc.

Similarly, as a student of computer programming, you often start with experimenting how a for-loop or if-then-else ladder works; you play with it, experiment its nuances. Once you've learnt the ropes, you can concentrate on problem solving - analyzing the business logic which comes to you and think what are the most effective programming tools available to you to address the logic.

This is true of all fields - as we practice the mind becomes oblivious to the granular details of the art/activity giving us the freedom to use this "practiced" mind for higher goals. In essence, practice makes you perfect - but more importantly grants you the freedom to achieve the higher things in life than the mundane stuff that you were made to practice. This I think, it the biggest virtue of practicing - freedom!
.

How the Cloud is transforming IT departments

2011-11-13T16:30:00.004+05:30

Image Credit: Kevin Dooley via flickr

The Cloud is often considered an amalgamated progression of web2.0 (SaaS) and virtualization technologies(IaaS) - which it indeed is! However, the emergence of Cloud Computing also draws from a organizational shift in IT departments - from in-sourced to outsourced. What started in IT depts as routine maintenance outsourcing is now taking shape in form of the Cloud which promises to not just outsource routine operations but everything including financial management (move from Capex to Opex) of IT infrastructure owned by the company.

As the organizational structure shifts from in-sourced IT to the Cloud - it impacts the role of the CIO, which has been a much talked about topic. However, what has not been talk about much is how the Cloud will impact the rest of the IT department and the roles of techies in it. To understand the impending metamorphosis - we need to understand the existing position of the IT department.

Across organizations departments are divided into core business departments (Manufacturing or Service Delivery - including Supply Chain and , Sales, Marketing, Finance / Accounting) and support departments (Admin, HR, Procurement, Customer Relations, IT etc.). While the activities of core departments varies drastically based on the industry in which the company operates, the activities of the support departments remains more or less the same.

Even more, almost all support departments do the same core activity - vendor management. Yes - think about it! Your Admin department doesn't employ the office boys or sends runners to deliver the couriers; heck you don't even own the office space most of the times - so all the Admin department does is to manage vendors who provide these services. Procurement - as the name suggests clearly does just one thing - procure services and goods from vendors. Human Resources - well may be not vendors but they manage "employees" providing their services to the company; if you think of employees as freelancers - HR is again just 'sourcing' and 'managing' freelance vendors.

IT however, has had an uncommon origin - IT started with some computers being used by the company, grew into a mini-factory of its own within organizations and large IT departments ended up managing warehouse sized data centers with huge server farms and loads of techie (read: non-business) activities being carried out day-in day-out. Remarkably, this also happened because till mid 90's "IT vendors" continued to concentrate on core stuff like making computers more and more powerful or creating smarter networking devices and operating systems.

Untill mid-90's,when Indian IT companies rushed to the scene and the likes of IBM and HP realized the huge potential in 'IT services', many IT departments had already grown to humongous sizes - especially in computing intensive sectors like Financial Services and large FMCG's (which needed large ERP's). IT department was doing so many activities which no one else in the organization understood but were understood to be so critical to the organization's functioning that no one dared to interfere with IT.

All this started changing with outsourcing when large components of IT organizations operations were taken over by outsourcing partners. But, there was a critical dependency, due to concerns around ownership of data and privacy and other data related regulations in many sectors - the infrastructure (data center, servers etc.) continued to be owned and controlled by IT department. In many cases the actual workforce managing the infrastructure was outsourced but the management power remained with IT departments.

The Cloud is going to break this last link to bring down the hegemony of IT department / management! The Cloud adds a layer of abstraction between the business usage of IT and the underlying infrastructure. For example, when an business starts using a SaaS application - all it needs to do is to pay to the vendor directly per user. So as far as a business department knows which service fits its business purpose, there's nothing for the IT department to do!

Even in case IaaS - even if an organization opts for an internal Private Cloud, the server farm is virtualized and business is directly provided with "virtual servers" which they can scale up and down anytime without bothering to think about security, performance, provisioning additional capacity etc. All that is taken care by the Cloud orchestration platform underneath! The application is anyway managed by a IT Service provider.

Thus, with the Cloud coming in, the IT department's role is also squeezed to vendor management. Help business select the best vendors (referred to in the IT services parlance as 'sourcing') and manage contracting and service levels of existing vendors. That definitely means of course is shrinking the size of an IT department; but more importantly also means a change in nature of activities performed by IT department.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean bad news for the IT administrators and other techie staff - they are not likely to loose their jobs - rather just re-position themselves from the internal IT department to the rolls of an IT services company. But yes, it does mean bad news for the 'traditional IT managers' - who will quickly need to gain skills in more strategic activities which have to do with leveraging technology for business gains or activities relating to vendor management such as vendor sourcing.

All this of course means more agility to the organizations and better control for business departments!
.

The most exciting period of Computing!

2011-11-05T00:14:00.003+05:30

[Warning: Suited for techies and tech enthusiasts; others may find it boring]

I was talking to one of the new joiners at our firm today - we were talking about a client using Sun's hardware for a project when he asked why Sun ran only Solaris and no other OS - I started to explain him that Solaris was actually a Unix variant when the conversation turned to free software, Linux etc. and generally into the lineage of operating systems, the history of modern computing etc.

During our brief chat I realized that for most of us post-90's generation, the seeming "excitement" times in computing were either the mid-90's when Linux and GNU/ FSF grew or it was even later when Web2.0, Software as a Service etc grew. But I think the most exciting times for the computing industry when the real "pirates" swarmed the industry was the period of 60s / 70s when the foundation of the personal computing world was being laid.

The foundation of personal computing - unlike what most people think - was neither laid by Steve Jobs / Apple nor was it laid by Bill Gates / Microsoft; most of what we saw taking shape in the mid / late 90s grew out of the multiple "under the surface" projects which were undertaken by enthusiasts in mid/ late 70s.

In the 1960s, computing was mostly done on behemoth mainframe systems - in contrast to today's commodity computers where each component is standard - a hard disk from Seagate or WD all are alike and fit into any computer; a computer from Dell and HP run the same Windows Operating System (OS) alike - mainframes were monolithic in design. Each component was designed ground up for the same mainframe, there were no commodity manufacturers of components, and, every mainframe had its own OS written only to run it - you could hardly ever port an OS from one mainframe to the other.

So the story goes that, sick of the routine to write operating systems from scratch every time they manufactured a new mainframe computer, computer companies (AT&T/Bell and GE) - who built these mainframes - funded a federal project at MIT to create a 'reusable' OS which was titled Multics - Multiplexing Information and Computer Services. This would potentially have been the world's first "commodity" operating system - however as most federal projects go, the Multics project never succeeded in delivering a final ready product to the industry and was gradually scrapped.

However, two engineers working on the project - Peter Neumann and Dennis Richie (Yes! the Daddy of C programming language) in parallel created a "smaller" clone of the Multics OS which to mock Multics was named Unix. Unix had many remarkable features - first it was 'generic' such that it could be deployed on different hardware devices, second it had software 'components' or modules which fit into each other independently - thus you could leave out components that you didn't need for your device; it was also the first OS to have a clear segregation between system kernel and system utilities, third it was built on a foundation principles of large scale systems - so it had all the essential features such as security, user accounts, scalability of kernel to suit the needs of any robust system.

To cut the story short - it is from the cradle of Unix which was (when it was developed) an open standard for Operating Systems that the DOS (predecessor of Windows) and even Linux emerged. In fact, the story continues that Unix became a proprietary Bell Labs property with time because it was developed by Richie and Neumann when they were on rolls of Bell and further development was funded by Bell. To escape the clutches of Bell - Richard Stallman created GNU (mocking Unix as GNU's Not Unix) as a open sourced 'copy' of Unix [ref].

Similar to how modern day OS emerged from Unix is the story of email and internet as well. Large mainframe were too costly to be dedicated to one or few users. Each mainframe could simultaneously perform multiple tasks of different users. Hence just like we have "accounts" on GMail or the office network - different computer engineers had "accounts" on a single mainframe.

Since different computer engineers often worked in shifts with their own 'respective accounts' on the same mainframe, they needed a method to asynchronously exchange information regarding the system. It was for this that the method of "username@system" invented which was the precursor of the email that we use today. The internet itself started from a early "point-to-point" communication between two or more large mainframe systems (which is why the email protocol needs a 'system' name after the @).

Another foundation of today's computing world is the commodity 'programming languages' which make programming for different kinds of hardware platforms possible without having to learn a new language for a new hardware. More importantly, programmers will relate to the fact that the syntax and constructs of most modern day programming languages are similar and in most cases identical and are all derived from one 'mother' programming language "C". "The origin of C is closely tied to the development of the Unix operating system" - as quoted from Wikipedia.

There's a lot more to write and the inquisitive should read all all they can on Wikipedia about Babbage's Analytical engine, Mainframes, Unix, Linux, GUI, Email, World Wide Web, OSX, DOS/Windows, C, GNU/Linux, PHP etc etc. However, in essence, I think as a computer enthusiast if I would like to live in a period other than today - I would like to live in the swinging 60s and the period post that - not for the dizzy hippy movements but for the immediate succeeding revolutions which happened in computing and software programming which shaped most of what we see today in form of internet, Cloud, tablets and mobile apps.
.

In Memory of Steve Jobs

2011-10-11T18:06:00.001+05:30

I read through this awesome interview with Steve Jobs taken way back in 1995 before he created the second revolution of his life (iPod et al). While each section of the interview is breathtakingly awesome, I wanted to reiterate some gems specifically, hence quoting them here. For the whole interview transcript go to this URL http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/sj1.html

1.

...a lot of people come to me and say "I want to be an entrepreneur". And I go "Oh that's great, what's your idea?". And they say "I don't have one yet". And I say "I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you're really passionate about because it's a lot of work". I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.

Somebody once told me, "Live each day as if it would be your last and one day you'll certainly be right." I do that. You never know when you're going to go but you are going to go pretty soon. If you're going to leave anything behind its going to be your kids, a few friends and your work. So that's what I tend to worry about. ... I think you have a responsibility to do really good stuff and get it out there for people to use and let them build on the shoulders of it and keep making better stuff.

I think the work speaks for itself. I don't think that people have special responsibilities just because they've done something that other people like or don't like. I think the work speaks for itself. I think people could choose to do things if they want to but we're all going to be dead soon,

The Web is the missing piece of the puzzle which is really going to power that vision much farther forward. It's very exciting in that way. Secondly, it's very exciting because it is going to destroy vast layers of our economy and make available a presence in the marketplace for very small companies, one that is equal to very large companies. It is going radically change the way goods and services are discovered, sold and delivered, not only in this country but eventually all over the world. As you know, electrons travel at the speed of light and so it tends to bring the world much closer together in terms of providers and customers.

... the original vision [for Apple] --which was to make this thing [Computer] an appliance, to get this out there to as many people as possible

I actually think there's actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest calibre. I've never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They've just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it.

May God give mankind the collective strength to keep the flame created by Steve Jobs alive - may God ...

prevent all of us from slipping into the complacence of having progressed enough in technology
give at least some of us an insight like he had given Jobs to create art out of science
keep giving us leaders and innovators like Steve ...
Amen

Management Is

2011-10-02T17:31:00.001+05:30

Management = Art + Science

Management is the Science of converting business activities into measurable inputs and the art of converting management theories into mathematical equations (read: business models), in order to predict outputs of such activities with reasonable accuracy and reliability.

Management is application of scientific methods to business situations.

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively.

Management is the process of dealing with or controlling things or people

Management is finding a convoluted way of arriving at the same results which otherwise can be arrived by heuristic capabilities of experienced professionals.

Management is the art of faffing so as to make 'hunches' look like scientifically derived results.

Management is the art of (mis)leading the workforce into believing that there is a method to the madness of running a business.

Why is UK Burning?

2011-08-11T00:37:00.001+05:30

This discussion on Facebook got me thinking - are the riots in UK a result of simply unemployment or immigration of unskilled labour? I think the answer is not so simple. Let's look at the facts:

It isn't the immigrant labour force which is engaged in rioting. A lot of rioters are 15-18 year old natives of the UK - born and brought up in the UK. Born to parents who themselves were NOT immigrants but locals.
A lot of those who claim they are unemployed and can't make ends meet are also those who often "refuse" to work.

I think what we are seeing in the UK is a combined result of bad educational set up and uncontrolled immigration of skilled as well as unskilled labour.

The educational set up in UK has lost its synchronization with the demands that its local economy makes of it. Universities churn number of students who are qualified in subjects which have no practical use in the real world. This isn't very dissimilar with the set up in India in the 1970s when student protests broke out in India as well and emergency was imposed. (The Janta Party govt which followed the emergency was mostly elected with support from student aligned political parties).

As a result, while at one hand unemployment grows, the UK economy's demands for skilled professionals is not satisfied by local professionals. This has resulted in the country to allow large scale immigration of skilled labour - Asians, Africans and even Americans and non-British Europeans are found running major parts of the businesses based out of the UK.

At the same time, students who are well educated - many of them graduates and post graduates - do not find it easy to take up jobs which do not justify their qualifications. The regular economy jobs such as Cabbies, electricians, plumbers, chauffeurs, Janitors etc. Again, as a result - UK allowed large scale immigration of unskilled labour from across the globe, Asians, Polish, Irish and Africans dominate this segment of the employment market as well! In fact, if you take a black cab in the UK, you have a 75% chance of it being chauffeured by a South Asian.

Over a period of time, as the number of unemployed natives grows - the problem becomes even more morose because even if some native educated citizens are willing to work on such jobs involving labour, immigrant labour emerges as a cheaper option for employers. This creates a vicious cycle where immigrants keep gaining more currency in the economy across levels of the market while natives keep loosing their jobs.

The only way to keep this balance is what most countries in Middle East do - they have laws for businesses to employ a minimum number of locals - irrespective of their abilities, costs or qualifications. Another way to do this is what US does by its tight immigration norms.

Tighter immigration norms which require companies to justify the need for immigrant labour, make it difficult and costlier to hire labour for low value jobs which do not require specialization - these jobs are often those which do not require high qualifications - Cabbies ... Janitors - quoted above. This way jobs which are localized within the economy, which can never be outsourced stay with the native population arresting to a greater extent a cyclical rise in unemployment numbers.

I do hope Britain learns the lesson and so do other countries which will face similar problems in future.

Photo of Croydon riots by tgeasland

Why aren't companies honest about their Cloud Capabilities?

2011-08-08T22:01:00.001+05:30

Reader Alert: Controversial and based on non-verifiable facts

As a part of my day job, I often interact with vendors - IT service providers, equipment manufacturers, software / middleware providers, and even consultants like me. Ever since the market for Cloud based services has opened up (sometime since 2009) - vendors across the board have come up with their variation of Cloud services.

As I explore more and more Cloud products on the ground - I find that vendors are mostly rehashing old products and technologies under the Cloud label. Well, this isn't surprising because the Cloud is not something completely new. As I have previously written, the Cloud is just an evolution over Web2.0.

However, what concerns me is that vendors are brazen enough to go to market without even making the minimum necessary changes to these products before they can be labelled as 'Cloud'. Simply rehashing the packaging and some time not even that.

Let me elaborate - true that if you an application vendor then Cloud simply means that rather than sell your application to an enterprise for a licence fee and allow them to run it on their own hardware, you now can sell it as a service charged per user per month (et al.) by hosting it on your own hardware and allowing the customer to access it through the Internet.

But, this does mean that you need to alter some portions of your application. For example, you need to change the way your application manages its user IDs to enable multiple customers use the same instance of your application without accessing each others data - this is often referred to as multitenancy in the Cloud parlance.

However, what I have often observed is that vendors do not undertake any modification in their application. Instead they tell customers that they will set up independent instances of the application on the same server to handle multi-tenancy. This way each customer's application runs on an independent virtual machine. While this approach may work, it means that your application is going to use far greater resources of the server, as a result your cost of hosting the application will go up and this would ultimately result in higher pricing for the customer.

Similarly, to move to the Cloud, you must now change the way your customers pay you - it should be based in usage rather than a lumpsum payment. However, vendors often venture out in the market without redefining their costs and their pricing strategy. When asked about pricing, they try to dabble by putting across 'bulk pricing' strategy. In effect, all this again prevents customers from harnessing the power of the Cloud. Unfortunately, since customers too have been used to the older pricing models they often agree to such pricing even though it may be disadvantageous in the long run.

When looked inside the psyche of vendor organizations, I sense that most of them are waiting for the 'market' to make the move - a customer who pushes hard for the real Cloud model or a competitor who offers real Cloud service (and starts converting their customers). No one wants to proactively change what they have been doing for years - they are all happy just relabeling the wine bottle.

In between all this - Cloud is like the invisible man - suited in full ballroom attire but without the man inside!

Image Credit via flickr by Ariaski

Yahoo Groups Spam

2011-08-03T13:17:00.000+05:30

In the last few days, I am getting a lot of spam from YahooGroups. Spamsters have found a simple way of spamming: create a group, add people's email addresses to the group suo-motto! The spamsters are so brazen to create group names which look Spam in the first look.

This is not so much trouble than being an irritant, because as soon as I see the invite, I quickly go to the group and "leave" it. But thanks to the cumbersome process flow of Yahoogroups, to do this, I have to spend at least 4 clicks to do this.

Go to YahooGroups Home → Click Manage Groups → Browse to the concerned Spam Group → Click 'Set Profile' → Click Edit Membership → Click Leave Group.

And this is assuming you are a seasoned YGroups user who knows his/her way around (folks like me)! Though the simplest way is to unsubscribe by replying to the 'add' mail; but the on-screen process can be simplified by providing a "Leave Group" button on the Manage Groups page itself.

One of the reasons why I quit using my Yahoo Mail account was huge amount of spam which its spam filters could not detect. I already had started liking GMail by then and the switch - though painful (I had a vacation responder which said please mail me on my Gmail for 5-10 months on my Yahoo Account), has been worth the effort.

I really hope I am not forced to move my Yahoo Groups (those which I am a moderator) to Google Groups due to this spam. Yahoo needs to do something to control this. I am sure the spamsters behind this are using automated scripts to create bogus groups and send out invites; should not be too difficult to catch them and block such activity.
.

My latest phone

2011-07-19T17:52:00.000+05:30

My track record of buying new phones is not very aggressive but not too dull as well. I last bought my HTC P3000 in late 2008 and my latest phone is the Blackberry torch which I bought in March this year. In fact, it was bought by Shubham for me from the US.

As yet I am quite liking the phone - blackberry's app ecosystem may not be as ecstatic as Apple or as explosive as Android but its a good mix. I have downloaded a couple of apps mostly for quick updates from social networks, email client for GMail, news updates from sites like ndtv, bookmyshow app for movie ticket booking and stuff like Google Maps and Waze.

I think blackberry is a good option if you are one of those office users of phone as you get a good mix of social apps and office email (which is the core functionality) together.

How Government Stimulus (should not) Work!

2011-07-19T14:26:00.002+05:30

The global recession has brought the term 'stimulus' in vogue; however government aid is nothing new. Government financing of business is at least as old as the 19th century - the Pacific Railway Act passed by the US Congress in 1862 authorised the government to float Bonds to finance railway projects.

Government aid is distinct than government spending; spending is the regular expense on civil and defense infrastructure development and upkeep - including spending on social welfare programs such as health care and education. However, aid is usually in form of special grants given usually to non-profit institutions to conduct activities which the government cannot conduct but requires to get conducted. Some examples of such requirements are:

Outreach programs in remote areas where government machinery is not present
One time exercises requiring large manpower such as Pulse Polio Campaigns

However, apart from such benevolent activities, government aid has been often used to fund commercial enterprises - sometimes to encourage a particular industry (ex. software in India or microelectronics in the US) which needs a push; but many times to further political interests. Recently, Government aid was used in the US and Europe to financially help companies which went bust due to economic slump - these industries were mostly those which employed huge amounts of labour.

In India we have the Planning Commission programs which while can't be classified as Government Aid, are surely also not a part of "routine expenditure". The tyranny however is that several of the programs are nothing but an extension of routine government expenditure. Take for example a scheme like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA - सर्व शिक्षा अभियान); it funds expenditure in rural schools to ensure that adequate educational infrastructure is available across the country.

Technically, the same could have been achieved by ensuring that expenditure on education by local government is increased - but instead the SSA becomes a scheme funded from the top as a separate vehicle to implement educational reform and development top down - driven from Delhi.

All this sounds like all fuss for nothing - after all how does the method of execution matter - whether schools are set up by local government or funded through a Central program? The problem with Government stimulus is that there is lesser measurement of the outcome of the stimulus at the micro level. Its far too difficult for a ministry in New Delhi to measure if a school was constructed or teachers were paid or even more if they taught well at the school (or did they teach at all) than for the local panchayat or municipality to monitor this and hence utilize funds properly.

There have been attempts by the Central government to manage this by deploying technology. One example is setting up of Central Planned Schemes Monitoring System (CPSMS) for monitoring of disbursements under the Central Plan Schemes. Such systems help establish an information system to monitor expenditure - however they will not eliminate the fundamental flaws of using Government stimulus in place of regular community spending.

Stimulus, as the name suggests is a time-bound 'shot in the arm' kind of financial aid meant to achieve a short term goal. Hence, its objectives (and in turn monitored outcomes) are myopic and do not serve long term development goals.

Finally, managing government stimulus leads to sprawl of bureaucracy - again, let's take the example of SSA. Spending on education which otherwise would require the same government machinery at the central, state, district and village levels to implement nothing but regular education spending, now need to be replicated by setting up of a dedicated Program Management Units across the board for the part of the fund spent through SSA program. Add to it the infrastructure like offices, canteens and resulting manpower employed by them.

The point I am trying to make here is that Government stimulus should be the last resort to sort out systemic problems and used sparingly only for specialized one time activities requiring a last impetus from the government - one example would be Pulse Polio campaigns.
.

All heroic acts are foolish to your contemporaries!

2011-07-17T21:38:00.001+05:30

In the scène de finale of Die Hard 4 - John Mclaine (Bruce Willis) shoots himself through his shoulder to kill the villain in the movie Thomas Gabriel. Later when his daughter tells him - "Daddy, you’re out of your mind. You shot yourself!" he responds -"It seemed like a good idea at the time. Don't tell those guys [meaning the FBI] that I did this".

The parting dialogue illustrates one of the most fundamental truths of life - any heroic or courageous action is usually also an act of foolishness when it is actually committed. Often if you too do things at work or personal life which are acts of personal sacrifice or risk - you try to conceal the fact that you did them. Few of us usually find pleasure in publicizing such acts.

Think of any acts that we today honour and think of how these were perceived in their times - Copernicus or the fictional Phileas Fogg or even Bhagat Singh - all were considered courageous fools - if not by the whole world but definitely by the society in their immediate vicinity.

May be this thought would be a solace to those who are daring to do something different, something courageous and are afraid of being labelled fools by the society - the likes of Entrepreneurs, Social Activists and other change mongers!
.

Making India Work [contd.]

2011-07-17T14:45:00.005+05:30

Read Part I (book review) here.

We often criticize our bureaucracy of being slow and stubborn - frankly after working with them I realize that they are not so bad. These institutions are manned by more people who share the 'common man' space than those who form bourgeois - hence even they feel the need to decentralize governance and carry out reforms. But the number of stakeholders in the governance system in India is so humongous that matching everyone's expectations and changing the system monolithically is not an option.

And its not just bureaucratic mechanization which make the system unmalleable to change, but also the complexities and uncertainties of real systems. As an example, take the case of an earlier experiment to create planned cities - Chandigarh. The experiment failed for reasons partly known partly unknown and on the contrary Gurgaon - an unplanned city flourished but still lacks some basic amenities like public transport [Read full case study here].

Another aspect of change management is the sheer cost of change at the scale of a country like India. As this article suggests - a rights-based approach which argues for a minimum threshold level of food, clothing, shelter, health, education, employment, gender equality and so on - is the wrong approach for India. We simply lack the volume of resources needed to fund these.

Nanda Bissel's proposed models are also rights based - however he also proposes valuation of natural assets, and a subsequent redistribution of wealth from elites to poor, urban to rural etc etc. He believes that India has the inherent wealth to provide for basic rights of all its citizen - only that they are concentrated with a top few. He even gives examples by comparing shareholding patterns of top companies in India and the US (Page 60).

I believe the stumbling block though is neither funds nor mechanisms for redistribution of wealth - while we do need to create institutions to take care of these dynamics like setting standards, valuation of natural assets or exchange of these assets, but these mechanisms can be developed going forward. The key to any reform in India is decentralization of power.

We can speak of it passionately or logically - but decentralization is the need for India. Whether it is to empower local communities to take decisions beneficial to local population (ex. land acquisitions / redistribution), or to simplify the process of execution or simply to ensure that local authorities like police force or municipalities can be made accountable to the people whom they serve.

That apart, the system just needs a gradual shifts - mind you gradual does not mean slow - but may be bottom-up, step by step. One can drive a lot of different change engines across the board - but not engage all gears at once all the way to top. And spinning of such multiple engines is possible only when we decentralize.

To do so, we need new states to be created which would create a government nearer to the local population and in turn lead to empowerment of local governments. I earnestly hope Telangana movement succeeds for the larger cause of decentralization and fuels other movements such as Vidarbha and many others.
.

Making India Work [Book Review]

2011-07-17T13:33:00.003+05:30

On my recent visit to traditional outfit store fabindia, I spotted the book by its founder William Nanda Bissel for sale and I being me could not resist buying a copy for myself. Making India Work is an ambitious attempt to dream a new India - but may be its a little too ambitious.

Nanda Bissel talks about a complete revamp of the way India is governed - from its administrative divisions (46 Regions instead of 28 states) to the way ministries are organized and managed. It is quite easy for us to write off his ideas giving reasons like our politicians would never bring about such changes or because the bureaucracy would block all attempts for these ideas to succeed.

However, I have more fundamental differences with the proposals being made in the book (while I also concede that I like a lot of proposals made by him). Before we jump to them, let me outline a few of his proposals in brief:

National Division: Lots of proposals have come through for decentralization of power or in favour of smaller states, but William Nanda Bissel takes the idea to the next level proposing to create a community for every 25k population, an area for every 100 communities and a region for every 10 areas - making about 40-50 regions in the country.
Institutions: Bissel proposes to create various standards bodies for determining value of everything from fresh air, trees, power, water, waste, bandwidth etc. and exchanges for communities to trade them.
Government: Bissel argues for a radical change in the Government structure abolishing the upper house, leaving the Union government with only defense and foreign affairs portfolios and leaving all other departments with 'Region' governments.

The above 3 radical changes, Bissel claims that over time will create a balance as cities start paying for the natural resources they use and rural communities start getting the benefit of the same resources which they own.This will give resources to rural communities to develop basic amenities like paved streets and drinking water taps while on the other hand motivate urban communities to consume less, develop efficient means - for example substitute public transport for personal vehicles.

The above changes are quite apt for the new 21st century world where environment and technology are together paving way for new social structure and new set of values completely distinct than those of the industrial world. Some of them - such as valuation of natural assets - are applicable not just to developing economies like India but even developed ones in Western Europe and the US.

Bissel himself explains, developed economies have developed a wasteful lifestyle. An example was suburbs in the US which are made possible by roads which connect them to the main city - but the residents of the suburbs do not directly pay for construction or maintenance of these roads which is paid for by the government. The suburban spread is wasteful because due to low density sprawl, public transport is not feasible, so people use private cars - often gas guzzler SUVs; amenities such as water, sewage and mail transport are inefficient because low density means higher costs per capita.

All the above makes a lot of sense and needs to be implemented; however for someone of the experience of Bissel - its a little naive to propose a top-down change in fundamental systems when he himself claims elsewhere in the book that a bottom-up approach is needed to change the system.

Secondly, some of the propositions are far too simplistic - for example it does sound fair in principle that only defense and foreign affairs stays with the central government. But think about it - if we had only a regulator for telecom and no ministry - would it have been possible to catalyze the explosive growth of the telecommunications sector; or think of certain national assets like rivers and forests / national parks - if we do not have central ministries to act as mediators - there would be many more feuds like the Krishna Water dispute in the country.

Under Bissel's system, we would end up having as many 'regulators' or 'tribunals' for all such matters. And so, how different would Bissel's system would end up instead of the current system. Does replacing ministries with regulators make any difference?

Finally, the chapter on transition (Ch 8) falls completely short of one'e expectations - one starts expecting what public support, intermediate reforms needed to reach to the end state - may be a gradual division of states to reach the number of 46 regions proposed in the book, or subsequent decentralization of power to empower municipalities, creation of more panchayats and finally merging the two elementary governance structures to create a common structure - community. However, the transition starts with a call for constitutional amendment without talking about how to build a consensus for adoption of the altered system in the country.

Overall, the ideas proposed in the book are quite useful but they probably would have been more palatable and acceptable to the real change makers - bureaucrats and politicians - had they been presented in a form similar to Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India. In its current state, the book runs a risk of being written off as a pipe dream.

And I say this not just from a vicarious or academic experience of reading books on development - but from personal experience of working with government offices and public sector enterprises. I will elaborate in the next post.

[Read Part II here]

Is the Civil Society interfering with Parliamentary Process?

2011-07-04T23:27:00.002+05:30

A lot is being said in the Media about the recent crusade by Anna Hazare and team trying to subvert parliamentary process by becoming an extra-parliamentary body and "forcing" the government to agree to a "law" made by itself. The words in quotes in the previous sentence are of note as they are being used by the anti-Hazare brigade to bring what they call as extra-parliamentary processes to light.

The real question is - was the formation of a drafting committee comprising of the Group of Ministers and civil society activists an 'extra-parliamentary' step meant to side-step the parliament? Let's analyse the answer to this question by understanding how a normal law gets passed by the parliament.

Typically, a the process to form a law usually starts with the government ministry planning to form a law - the trigger may be a new requirement, directive by the courts or suo motto recognition by the ministry (minister). The ministry in question then forms a committee study similar bills from other countries / states, bring together thoughts from other ministries or departments within the ministry itself.

Such committees are formed mostly of bureaucrats from the ministry itself but also of experts in the field of the law - the government often solicits services of professors from academic institutions, representatives of the industry bodies (such as CII, FICCI, NASSCOM etc) and other eminent persons to become members such committees.

Now, take a brief look at the Lokpal process - the government has been dilly-dallying on the "proposed" Lokpal bill for the past 40 years. Anna Hazare's team decided that as citizens they had waited enough for a national ombudsman and not only started a fast unto death to force the government to take the bill to parliament, they also in parallel drafted a form of the bill which was legally airtight (thanks to being drafted by the likes of Shanti Bhushan).

But assume for a minute that if the law ministry had ever planned to take the Lokpal bill to the parliament - it would have had formed a committee of bureaucrats and eminent personalities like Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran bedi etc to refine the previous drafts of the bill before it went to parliament. How can then the constitution of a drafting committee be tainted as any attempt to bypass the parliament?

The parliament does NOT draft laws - it only debates and then passes bills presented to it which have already been drafted by the drafting committee. And not just laws - even our constitution was drafted by a 'Drafting Committee' chaired by Dr. Ambedkar and was only debated and then passed by the Constituent Assembly.

Its high time that the media stops playing at the hands of politicians and misleading the public and bring the right picture to the people.

How big is the Cloud Computing World?

2011-05-02T12:17:00.002+05:30

Click to enlarge

Via: Wikibon

Related Posts: Is 'Cloud' the future of Web2.0? | More posts related to Technology

The Remittance Economy

2011-04-24T02:29:00.000+05:30

I have briefly described the concept of 'remittance economy' in a previous post. At its basic the concept of Remittance Economy means that remittances by workers abroad becoming a significant source of economic activity in the country; I am extending the definition to remittance money being spent creates growth in large cities, which in turn results in workers in large cities remitting money to their families smaller cities, towns and villages - thus creating a growth chain reaction.

Consider this - Syam Sundar lives in San Francisco and remits money regularly to his family staying in Bangalore. Syam's family employs a maid, shops lavishly in the city's malls and employs a driver. The maid, the workers at the mall - from shop salesmen to cleaners all send money to their families in tier 2 cities, towns and villages in India. The family's driver Sreejeeth hails from a small nondescript town in Karnataka called Madhugiri. Sreejeeth sends money to his wife every month who in turn spends it on their daughter's education and on daily grocery needs. The money which started from Syam in San Francisco has until now traveled to a school teacher in Madhugiri's elementary school and a grocer in Madhugiri.

Consider more - due to several immigrants like Syam Sundar sending in money regularly to their families in Bangalore, the need for Banking services in Bangalore has gone up. Bank branches in Bangalore now need to employ a larger number of executives from Tellers to Branch Managers. Most these junior / middle executives hail from smaller towns like Tumkur or Gulbarga or Bijapur or even from Kanpur in UP or Mandsaur in MP. They often spend money when they go back to their hometown also resulting in increase in income of the shopkeepers in these towns.

Thus, we see economies of the smallest of towns and cities are now heavily plugged into the global economy. If incomes of executives in San Francisco fall across the board - this mega slump has its effects felt all the way to these small towns. Unfortunately, a dip in a software exec's salary in San Francisco means that he probably needs to forgo his quarterly outing to Napa Valley - for a small shopkeeper in Gulbarga, it may mean loss of livelihood for a whole quarter and often his family going to bed without food for days.

When you look at these effects of the remittance economy, you realize that such tight coupling of global markets is not desirable. Many would argue that the economies of western megacities and eastern towns are linked with such a long rope that by the time a rising or falling trend in one reaches the other, other economic forces closer home (such as interest rate cuts by Reserve Bank of India) will smoothen the shocks and moderate the peaks.

However, India and China are examples of large remittance economies, where there are many interbalancing forces coexisting. But small remittance economies such as Philippines also exist and these tend to be more vulnerable to being influenced by global economic variations.

As this article on Philippines states:

Critics, including many overseas workers, say the government has developed an unhealthy dependence on the remittances, turning a blind eye to their social costs, especially divided families and the reliance on them to pay for services while failing to build a sound economy that produces good jobs at home.

A similar case exists in Tajikistan [link]-

the funds camouflage the stagnant domestic economy and have created profound changes in the social structure of the country.

There are 2 important points here - social costs and over dependence. Most of what is discussed above is related to economic over dependence. However, the larger concern of remittance economies lies in the social costs. Remittance as the primary driver of growth means that there is a large scale dislocation of the labour force - people must migrate to earn a living and send back the money home. As a result, families break, children need to grow with single parents, parents themselves are put under severe mental stress, and prostitution and promiscuousness rises.

Governments across the globe - even in developed economies need to realize that reliance on remittance as the primary mode of growth has a far greater cost than the quick advantages it gives. It is far more laborious to create jobs locally, to spend on growth of smaller towns and cities and create a economic juggernaut with local forces driving it. However, such a course of action is far more sustainable than the quick fix method of letting remittance play a role in spiraling development.

India is fortunate to have a large local market which shields the country's economy from export-import shocks. While some industries like Software may get hit very sharply by global recession, other sectors like manufacturing, FMCG and entertainment are the cushion which keep the economy afloat. So we may not be exposed to the risk of over dependence on global economy for our growth - which is probably the reason we were not hit as bad by the global recession.

However, the social costs of running a remittance economy are slowly becoming visible in the country as restlessness grows, the economic divide deepens and moral compass starts shifting. The government must do its due to fund direct development of smaller cities and towns.

As professionals - this is also a call which we should answer - we go back to our hometowns and find opportunities to grow them - start new businesses for the local, national or global markets; pave way for educating a new breed of professionals suited to make a career locally; start restaurants, spas, health clubs and other lifestyle shops - create avenues for people to spend; most importantly inspire others by showcasing how one can grow while not uprooting himself/ herself from their local surroundings.

The remittance economy is not something to be proud of - it may be the serendipity which has made us realize the potential of the nation called India; but it is not the lasting elixir to feed our billion plus souls with! We need to enrich ourselves from our own ideas, our own ideals and our own efforts!

.
*Image Credit - Flickr user kthypryn

Is 'The Cloud' the future of Web 2.0?

2011-04-23T01:52:00.001+05:30

Web2.0 - the term coined by Tim O'Reilly gained a 100% acceptance in the 2008-2010 period; however the term Web3.0 never found a similar acceptance in Industry or Blogging circles. Of late the term -The Cloud - also referred to as Cloud Computing has gained a lot of popularity. With big and small names calling themselves Cloud Providers - it is the new buzzword for the internet economy.

Web2.0 was the name given to the new breed of 'websites' which came about post the dot com bubble which converted websites from mere information portals into interactive 'services' which could be availed online. Web2.0 websites had interactive (Ajax enabled) user interfaces and provided collaborative platforms. As explained in detail by O'Reilly in this article [http://oreilly.com/lpt/a/6228] - while Web2.0 is a combination of lot of factors; the key is to harness collective wisdom through use of interactive interfaces and by providing features as services to users.

The Cloud which essentially comprises of 3 models - SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - is an evolution over Web2.0. The SaaS component of the Cloud is same as Web2.0. PaaS and IaaS take the concept of 'service wrapper' around IT resources to the next level. Just like Web2.0 applications presented application features as a Service to users - IaaS presents hardware as a Service to subscribers and PaaS provides a development platform as a service to developers.

Apart from being a simple evolution of Web2.0, the Cloud has also helped widen the target audience for Web Based services. One of the big criticisms of Web2.0 was that while the Web2.0 services /apps were suitable to be used by SME's and individual users - they were not ready for the enterprise. This was mainly because large enterprises have made huge investments in developing IT systems customized for their needs and were not ready to give them up for newfound SaaS offerings. Moreover, there were several concerns over data sovereignty because under SaaS, all your data would be locked in an application hosted with a third party.

While the Cloud does not address all the above concerns in a direct manner - it does take some steps to help reduce the concern. Firstly, organizations who prefer to use their custom applications or versions can host these applications on IaaS platforms such as Azure or AWS to harness the 'service wrapper' potential of the Cloud while retaining their control over the application features, development and maintenance.

Then, there's the concept of Private Cloud - hitherto unheard under the older Web2.0/SaaS model - which can help address data sovereignty concerns by ensuring that a section of the Cloud is maintained exclusively for an enterprise and hence specific standards around data portability, maintenance and ownership can be specified in the contract so that the enterprise customer's concerns can be addressed.

Finally, while not directly related to the Cloud - the next generation of web applications which are being built also aim to be device independent (especially with advent of HTML5) - this means that you may no more necessarily need a PC/Laptop to gain access to services. You may access them on a tablet or a mobile phone or a TV or even a custom built device. Since many PaaS providers are using the ability of their platforms to create device independent interfaces as a selling point, we may as well credit the Cloud with device independence.

Finally, the term Web3.0 is often related to Semantic Web - however in the past 2 years the concept has shown itself to be more of a chimera than reality - just like space colonies or humanoid robots. I wonder if we will see the IT industry evolve a Web3.0 set of services (though Google's recent Prediction API is a step in that direction).

In the wake of the above, it does look like the train of the Web's evolution which was felt to be heading towards Web3.0 has now changed tracks and is slowly chugging into the Cloud station!

Should you drop out to become an entrepreneur?

2011-04-09T22:59:00.001+05:30

I have previously mentioned Prof Prasad on my blog - last time he had thrown open a question on Entrepreneurship education - this time he referred to the famous Stanford Commencement address by Steve Jobs [text link] [video link]- and asked questions regarding whether students need to follow Steve and drop out of their courses - here are my answers to his questions:

1. How many students despite agreeing to Steve Jobs follow him and drop out of the colleges? Is it a full proof method ? If it is, why not at least hundreds of Steve admirers not toeing to this? Is Steve approach is BEST for everybody and anybody?

It's a question of Eco-system; we have to recognize that a successful entrepreneur is one out of several failed entrepreneurs. The probability of an aspiring entrepreneur succeeding depends on the ecosystem in which s/he comes out of. The Stanford of Steve Jobs years was built to generate professionals and academics - it was never designed to generate entrepreneurs - so the probability of an entrepreneur coming out of Stanford graduates was less than the probability of an entrepreneur coming out of Stanford dropouts - because Stanford graduates were being groomed to become academics and professional and NOT entrepreneurs (For Ex. they were not being taught computer science subjects extensively in those days because Comp Sc was a still emerging and not a widely employable field). Hence, in Steve's days dropping out was a surer way of making your way to become an entrepreneur.

Another aspect is the "ability to take chances" - as a Stanford graduate there is a significant amount of investment you (and may be your family) have made in time and money in pursuing one of the chosen fields of your study. Hence, to experiment (which you have to do to become an entrepreneur) has higher stakes than the stakes for a dropout who has anyway chosen to drop-out of the regular fields of professional or academic practices.

However, in today's world the scene is quite different - the whole educational and corporate ecosystem realizes the power of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs - colleges have courses, clubs and associations around entrepreneurship; companies have intrapreneur encouragement programs and innovation drives etc. In such as case, often graduates may find that keeping enrolled in the regular educational ecosystem has a higher probability to expose you to ideas, trends and tools to become an entrepreneur rather than dropping out.

That said, the second factor - which is of higher stakes for professionally qualified professionals to experiment remains and hence if you choose not to dropout; you also have to keep building a lot of courage within yourself to ensure that in spite of higher stakes, you do not shy away from biting the bullet of experimenting with ideas and risking your career with entrepreneurship. But, professional qualification definitely gives you tools to better evaluate risks in ventures you are planning to undertake and hence make a more informed decision regarding when to leap and when to wait.

2. How many students avoid to spend all of their working-class parents’ savings for their college tuition fee? Why they continue to spend ? Is it avoidable ?

As explained above, today's educational ecosystem has a better probability of generating entrepreneurs against yesteryear's. Also coming to the point of risking working class parents' savings - we should not be no naive to believe that by dropping out and taking the route of entrepreneurship we are doing anything different!
Steve Jobs did risk his parents' lifetime savings when he dropped out - because he completely gave up the option of settling down in a fulfilling career had his entrepreneurial plans failed. Suppose, Steve would have bet his entrepreneurial plans not on the PC/Mac but on a computer company which made software for supercomputers? What if his company did not succeed? He would then have had no second option of making a living, more importantly taking care of his ageing parents etc.

However, it is important to recognize that we should know when to give up the beaten path and start experimenting! Also, what is important is to continue to take chances - whether you are studying or working in a job - this should not stop you from spending time trying out new ideas - give your weekends and evenings to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a pursuit of those who keep trying - and that's the only way to de-risk yourself from the possibility of you never making as an entrepreneur.

3. How many students despite not seeing any value in what they study try to continue with the same?

This is important - too many of us are like Peter Keating in Ayn's Rand's novel The Fountainhead, we evaluate our success through the standards set by others. We rigorously study subjects prescribed by our institute irrespective of whether we feel it shall provide us any knowhow to launch our entrepreneurial career. We strive to score the highest marks (or to pass) in subjects which have more importance in making a salaried professional out of us rather than an entrepreneur. We also spend time in participating in events which are designed by our peers who want to simply become salaried professionals. More importantly, in studying all this we ignore self-study, reading blogs, books, participating in entrepreneurship events, learning new skills (like programming in new languages or learning the cutting edge marketing skills).

We need to think like Howard Roark - be clear about our own vision, make sure to spend time in doing what we like, what will equip us better in starting up our business. Ignore - to the extent possible - what has been prescribed but you don't find useful for your life. Study it only enough to make sure you don't flunk the exam and get out of your course. Spend all the time available extra in doing things that lead to only one goal - starting your own company!

4. What is the surety that being Steve… ‘It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple’ successful like Steve Jobs?

This is a philosophical and recursive question! We know the qualities of Steve Jobs because he is successful. Had he failed, we would never have known his qualities - but would that have meant that he would then not had these qualities? I don't know. I don't have a definitive answer!

Take an analogy - if you are shown an ice-cube, you will be able to tell that within 1/2 hr it will convert into a pool of water. You may not predict the exact shape, but you can give an indication of the size of the pool of water also. But if you are shown a pool of water - would you be able to predict what was the shape of the Ice Cube it came from - it could have been round or square or conical or anything!

We must recognize that success depends not just on our qualities but also on several other factors like the environment where we grow up, work etc (Ex. imagine if Steve Jobs was born in India of the 60s with the same qualities - would he have made Apple?). Hence, we should not spend time and effort in contemplating or even learning the "exact" qualities that (supposedly) make successful entrepreneurs. I think the Gita puts it best - कर्मन्येवाधिकारास्ते माँ फलेषु कदाचन!

.

Heights of corruption

2011-02-09T20:40:00.000+05:30

Black money is ubiquitous in the Indian economy - and the real estate sector is probably the hot bed of black money deals. But I had never imagined that people will be so brazen to quote a black money deal openly on a website - check out the screenshot below:

For the uninitiated, 'cash' refers to money paid in cash but not accounted for as a part of the deal in a written contract - in effect this is black money.

However, I should applaud the seller here for his/her open mindedness - s/he is giving a clear option for you NOT to pay him any cash, in which case the property will cost you 61 lakhs (INR 6 million 1 hundred thousands). S/he is also giving a clear conversion factor - each lakh (hundred thousand) of black money gives you a reduction of 25k in the package.

The quote price 57 lakhs should as per the above be 41 lakhs agreement value and 16 lakhs in cash.

Enron - Smartest Guys in Town

2011-02-03T23:36:00.000+05:30

One of the best documentaries I have ever seen which analyses the Enron debacle from the the inception of Enron to its rise, eminent fall and ultimate crash. It outlines the role played by different characters such as Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow and Ken Lay but more importantly it brings to light how common employees were led into doing the most unethical actions while making them believe that their actions were completely legitimate.

The documentary highlights how the actions of traders in Enron illustrates the inferences of Milgram Experiments, the only other live case study of them being the war crimes conducted by Nazi / German army officers during the WWII on Hitler's orders.

The documentary raised a lot of questions in my mind ...

Many times our actions look quite legitimate at the time when several contextual pieces of information are in our mind. For example, under a deregulated power rate policy in California, the actions of traders would have looked legitimate. As another example, take the recent 2G spectrum allocation scam in India - under the then policy of FCFS, the allocation would have looked quite legitimate. Yet, both these actions look fraudulent in hindsight.

The second question is how political events of the present can change the way future looks at past. At one point in the documentary, Enron's Dabhol power plant is mentioned as one of the most frivolous bets played by the company without any due diligence. However, just imagine that if this one bet or for that matter any other bet played out and Enron would not have filed for bankruptcy, the Dabhol plant would today have been called visionary - Enron would have been credited with seeing the future rise of India as a potential market of billions.

The third thought is exactly the opposite of the second - that no matter how you play your political bets, a wrong deed can never return the right results. At the point where Enron was on the verge of a fall, Ken Lay's close friend, George Bush became the president; it was even rumoured that Ken Lay would be appointed the Energy Secretary paving way for deregulation of energy distribution in the whole of the US, and creating a big profit bag for Enron. However, even Bush's appointment failed to help the screwed up finances and cooked up books of Enron and Jeff Skilling sealed the fate by quitting Enron at the exact wrong (or may be right) moment!

Finally, business unlike what Investment Bankers or Accountants may like us to believe is very little about finance and almost completely about value - real value. This sentence has two connotations:

Finance is the fuel which runs the engine of the business vehicle - but this vehicle needs direction which for a business is the value system of the company. Without the value system, the greed to make more and more money can lead a business into an unending cycle where there is no regard to sustenance of business
Any business must produce real value to its customers - no amount of juggling with unreal assets such as exotic derivatives or energy trading can help the business grow unless there is an underlying real growth in value. We have now seen this twice - once in the specific case of Enron and again in case of 2008 market meltdown triggered by sub-prime asset bubble.

What do you think of the above? Do leave thoughts in comments ...

An Email Letter

2011-01-11T22:06:00.001+05:30

On June 7th, 2010 Arijit Ghosal - a close friend wrote this email commemorating 1 year of moving into his new apartment. It covers me as well, so I had planned to post it on my blog. Got time today to format and publish.

Yesterday was June 7th. So what you ask. Looks like a pretty mundane ‘at least once a year’ date.

More often than not, in the rigmarole of sustaining livelihood and keeping the EMIs on, we generally forget to keep track and celebrate that very thing which we all are chasing in some way or the other…happiness. It suddenly struck me and couldn’t resist myself sharing with those who were together in those moments and those who will appreciate it.

It’s been a year now - June 7th 2009 and the few days prior to that are very special to me, and to Nikhil & Anoop as well, I would assume.

June 7, 2009: I kicked my landlord and broker and moved in as the final addition to the list of the tenants at the legendary E 703, Bluefields, Powai. It was a Sunday evening. I remember Nikhil came with his iconic Wagon R and much to our surprise the vehicle managed the entire luggage by itself in a single trip.

But moving out of the clutches of landlord was not the only reason for joy and contentment (though it contributed significantly!).

On the back drop was perhaps the biggest decision made by me till that point of time. On June 5th2009, a Friday, with trembling hands, I had made the token payment of Rs. 1 Lac for booking the lovely 2BHK at Raj Legacy, Vikhroli West… my first own home! What a feeling it was, and what a feeling it still is.

Exactly a week before that, Nikhil & Anoop had made their big decision together and booked their flats with Nahar Amrit Shakti, Powai.

Much has happened since then to the three flat mates.

Residence

The three flat mates are now residing in 3 separate flats. Meetings are less frequent now.
There is no fight about who will bring the grocery. There is no choice.

Relationship status

Nikhil is no more single. Am really happy for him and Divya.
Anoop…is he single? Have my doubts.
Myself…will I ever be ‘not single’? Have my doubts.

Other developments

Nikhil has acquired a lot of furnishings at his residence. Hosts parties regularly. Is a very looked after damad…if his frequent visits to Indore are anything to go by.
Anoop has got a sedan. So very difficult to catch hold of him nowadays.
Have changed job. Lots of screwing happening…on me, that is.

But I guess very few things compare to the feeling of June 7th. After those innumerable home hunting trips to slum rehabilitations (we used to scoff at them) to the plushest of townships (they used to scoff at us), those data collection exercises, those long negotiations with owners and the brokers, those analysis paralysis about fixed rate, floating rate, stamp duty, registration, wealth creation….it does feel good to have a place of one’s own.

So this 7th of June, when I experienced the showers in Mumbai, looking over the rejuvenated hillock in front of my flat, enjoying a perfect cuppa tea and warmly ensconced by my French window, it felt, friends, that in our own small way, we have arrived.

Is there a simpler explanation to the rise of Chindia

2011-01-09T00:54:00.001+05:30

Another report claiming that "dominance of China and India [would] return to the historic norm prior to the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries" came through today. Its become so boring to read that India and China will re-emerge as dominant economies unless they goof up on their fiscal policies, urban development, educational growth, demographics .. the list is long!

I find most news reports and analyses engaged either in extrapolating the economic trends of the past decade or speculating by generalizing trends from certain sectors like manufacturing (China) and software services (India). The point is - has anyone been able to spot the root cause behind the rise of China and India? And is there any theory which can justify why China and India will rise to become economic super powers - without putting riders to the claim.

The reasons for rise of India and China have been different sectors, but the source of both their strengths is the same - cheap and plenty 'manpower'. The only difference is that China powers its factories with cheap labour, while India has a large pool of English educated workforce for doing the world's backoffice work. But in effect, neither India nor China are engaged in fundamentally altering the way business is done or improving the productivity and efficiency of business processes which they have 'insourced' from the West.

This brings me to my initial point - what is the guarantee that once practically the whole world's backoffice processes have been moved to India and all possible manufacturing processes have been transferred to Chinese industries - these nations will continue growing? Since they are not doing anything to improve productivity, how will they feed the aspirations of their ever growing urban population for improved lifestyle? Where will the money come to improve urban development, educational improvement and fiscal management?

What most analyses miss is the fact that both India and China have grown in the past 2 decades due to wage/cost arbitrage and existence of a "remittance economy". Money has been moving from the US/Europe to Chinese/Indian metros - from where it remits to smaller cities, towns and villages. With recession in US/Europe - another wave of cost cutting has emerged in these developed markets, creating another siphon of remittance - but how long will this siphon continue?

India and China need to work on 3 immediate things:

Control population growth so that living standard per capita can be improved
Improve productivity of their existing businesses and reduce the amount of manpower needed to create each Yuan/Rupee
Innovate! Encourage entrepreneurship! Increase domestic consumption!

Point 1 above will probably get addressed in China by as early as 2015, but it will be a huge problem for India all the way till it either crosses the 'developing to developed' divide or ends up failing to cross it.

Point 2 is dependent on point 1 - unless you control population, it will be difficult to push reforms or improvements which reduce the dependence on manual labour. If you have a large population - the cost of hiring two people ends up lower than the finance cost of buying a machine to do the same job. Hence the larger your population, the lower the inherent push to improve productivity per individual.

Its important to note that achievement of point 1 is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for point 2. Point 2 needs a lot more - preparedness of businesses to improve, low resistance from worker unions to automate, high acceptance in the society, higher energy production capacities etc.

Point 3 above is easy to achieve in India due to its democratic set up and very hard in China, unless there is a change of heart among the polity of the country.

The 18th and 19th centuries had agriculture dominated economies where manpower, skills and productivity - all 3 played important roles. 20th century was the age of industries where what mattered was how large industries you could build - how well you could deploy technology.

The 21st century is the knowledge economy where innovation in technology and people both matter - what needs to be seen is whether the West can continue to maintain a high education and research impetus to maintain its dominance in the economic markets, or whether as predicted the Asias rise to dominance once again!

Thoughts on a Sojourn - Part II

2011-01-03T19:47:00.001+05:30

Continued from here.

I did whirlwind tours of Bangalore and Chennai in December, went to Singapore to celebrate our first wedding anniversary and then to Ratlam to attend a wedding. Singapore deserves a separate post, but here are my thoughts on Bangalore, Chennai and sleepy Ratlam.

Bangalore
Bangalore is fast changing, my last lengthy visit to the city was in 2006 - in 4 years Bangalore has changed - the metro track running all along MG Road has changed the way the city center looks now. I could not recognize the square which I so often roamed around last time, until I noticed that the mall on the corner had 'Forum' written on it.

Nice to see that the Bangalore metro quietly seems to be moving faster than its much publicised contemporary the Mumbai Metro. And the 9km flyover that connects Electronic City to the city is an absolute charm - travel which used to take 2 hours can now be zipped in a cool 25 minutes!

There are some things that still haven't changed or rather gotten worse - traffic sense among drivers is non-existent, roads in the city centre are still made of tar - high time they were converted to cement. Finally, night life hasn't improved even a bit - pubs close at 11:30PM and so does the rest of the city! Wonder when Bangalore authorities would realize that a healthy nightlife makes a city safer than the other way round - something they ought to learn from Mumbai.

Chennai
Everytime I visit Chennai - I end up loving it for its traffic. Even the much notorious Old Mahabalipuram Road (or IT Highway) is better than most roads in Mumbai. The weather sucks though for those not used to it and I haven't heard of the term night life being used in connection with Chennai ever.

That apart Chennai has improved in terms of its cosmopolitan index - more people now speak Hindi in the city and acceptance to outsiders is now better than it was when I visited it last (again in 2006). I wanted to visit offices of Lets do Something - a company started by friends but none of them were in town during my stay there so could not.

Nevertheless, I was able to catch up with Sunil Vishnu - the cofounder of Evam and an inspiration for me since childhood. It was a wonderful chat knowing more about how Evam is doing, their latest play 39 Steps and the other new things in the fold.

LDS and Evam - two 'activity inclined' entrepreneurial ventures started in Chennai by close friends - make me feel hopeful that Chennai is as much the right place to start up something in lifestyles or cultural space as much as Bangalore is for tech startups. I wish the best of luck to both the companies!

Ratlam
Near the border of MP and Rajasthan is the sleepy town of Ratlam - made more infamous by the movie Jab We Met, but earlier more famous for the Ratlami Sev. It was a good 3 days spent in the town - mostly attending a marriage and a day lounging away under the Sun in the cool Winters of MP.

Everytime I visit such places, I feel they are better locations to ruminate over the more complex questions of life, universe and spirituality than bustling metros. No wonder literary geniuses such as Ruskin Bond, HG Wells, Shakespeare etc were often born out of such lonely abodes. However, the only problem in India is that such lonely places also lack good avenues of education and self improvement - hence talent in such places is often wasted.

If we were to provide high quality education in such 'sleepy' towns, we would surely have cultural and technical geniuses born from such factories.

Thoughts on a Sojourn

2011-01-03T11:17:00.001+05:30

I have been busy off late and here's why - for Diwali we (me & my wife) went to Vadodara and drove to Bhopal with my parents and brother, the last 2 days of Diwali were spent at Indore; on my return to Mumbai I made a trip to Shirdi and office work made me travel to Bangalore - Chennai lined up next. Posted below are my thoughts from my sojourns:

I have posted similar thoughts earlier under the same title. You can read them here. This time, I plan to restrict my post to a reality-check and not suggest any solutions.

Gujarat

Narendra Modi has been hailed for his development model across the country and rightly so - Gujarat boasts of fantastic infrastructure - urban or rural. From Expresshighways between major cities to BRT in Ahmedabad or roads in smallest of villages - Gujarat's prosperity is quite evident. This also manifests from the habits of Gujarat's rural folk who prefer commuting to cities on a daily basis than emigrating to them.

What I am not sure is that is political stability the reason for a sustained development or vice versa - more so, unlike most long term serving state governments, how has the Modi government kept itself from going into a 'absolute power corrupts' phenomenon - answers would be lessons for the freshly re-elected Bihar CM Nitish Kumar.

Madhya Pradesh

If Gujarat is an example of turnaround because of political system, MP is an example of survival in spite of it. When you enter MP from Gujarat, you are greeted by roads which are worse than those in Somalia or Uganda; one actually prays for absence of a road so that there would be patch of smooth ride on plain mud.

When Nandan Nilekani says - "India has a very small window of opportunity. It had this huge demographic dividend and this young population, but that demographic dividend could well become a demographic disaster if we did not make the right investments", he is speaking his mind for states like MP. With CM's such as Nitish Kumar, even states like Bihar (which were considered even more hopeless than MP) have started capitalizing on the window of opportunity, but MP still lags behind.

What worries me is more that the present government came to power two terms ago claiming that Digvijay Singh made MP miss the development bus - but on its own it is itself doing the same thing. Even though Shivraj Singh Chauhan's been granted a second term, unless he goes into a massive development mode for the next two years, his victory in the next poll is at best questionable.

Shirdi and the miracle of progress
How economic development of one city can catapult the whole region is a well proved case study across the globe. So many industrial towns led to growth of a large suburban sprawl and aided growth of the whole region.

Shirdi, however stands out - a religious movement resulted in the sleepy village becoming a town and the constant increase in the number of devotees is helping develop the whole belt from Nasik to Shirdi. Already a new railway line was laid and now the road is being redone into a 4 lane highway.

The growth of Shirdi into a national pilgrimage centre (like Tirupati or Vaishnodevi) is helping the whole belt from Nasik to Shirdi prosper. Its easy to see how better connectivity is helping improve the Standard of Living villages along the Nasik-Shirdi route. Farmers now have better connectivity to the markets, they own more comfortable vehicles instead of the rickety tractors only, those whose land was taken for the road development have been compensated handsomely and have loads of cash to invest - the benefits are numerous.

Endgame
The conclusion from the Gujarat or Shirdi stories simply is, building more urban/semi-urban centres - religious, economic, cultural or political - will result in rapid development of the rural hinterland itself. Governments - State or Central - must hence concentrate on urban enablement to aid rural growth.

Is the Blackberry a dying platform?

2010-12-18T13:37:00.002+05:30

Blackberry is headed for a decline – so says this analysis which was endorsed by Fred Wilson (a well known Silicon Valley VC). Indeed the analysis is quite convincing the graph does show that BB may be at its peak and on its way to decline as a platform. But I have 3 reservations for this analysis:

Its too early to comment – the subscriber growth drop is only 1 quarter old trend, not something to base a future scenario on
It ignores the power of network effect – while apple and android are growing faster than BB, we must acknowledge that blackberry already has a large installed user base and hence it’s not so easy for the whole platform to wipe out instantaneously. More importantly, BB users are primarily corporate users and it’s quite difficult for them to migrate away from the platform based on individual will and whims. The corporation must decide to change before the end subscriber moves.
The opinion is based on sample surveys – this objection especially applies to the ‘OS Preferences of People Planning to Replace Their Smartphones’ chart. I would again revert to my argument that the early adopters to BB services were corporate users who wanted pure basic communication to work for them, they didn’t (and to a great extent do not even today) want fancy tools and apps on their phones. However, the current crop of smartphone users are a completely different set who download and use a multitude of games and apps on their smartphones.

Microsoft has been subjected to this kind of analysis for years ever since the early 90s (when Netscape was roaring high). The emergence of the web changed the game for M$ as much as the Mobile Apps have changed the game for BB – however M$ fought back. Accepted that it might have used certain anti-competitive practices, but they wudn't have gotten away if their browser wasn't good.

M$ has reinvented itself with a powerful presence today in multiple platforms more so it’s staple offering – the MS Office suite – has gone from strength to strength and continues its market domination. It will take another decade for Google to displace M$ (even if!).

Given a similar situation, while BB may start getting restricted to corporate usage and fail to make inroads into the new smartphone market – it will still be a long way before RIM bites the dust, and that too if RIM fails to innovate and reinvent the BB platform.

Executive Class

2010-12-10T18:52:00.000+05:30

In my job as a management consultant, the primary function is to interact with people – clients, product vendors, government officials, bankers, and of course other consultants. Most of these are executives and over a period of time, I have started developing certain classifications for them. I know this sounds a little profane because people are not commodities; and personally I am a follower of Gandhi in terms of treating people.

Most of Gandhiji's ideas can be ascribed to some inner quality of his mental eyesight that kept him from seeing people as a mass. He never saw or judged Indians or Frenchmen or Christians or Muslims in millions. He considered each human being too holy, too important to be the mere instrument of a remote impersonal terrestrial power called state.

So before I start the main agenda of this post, let me clarify that this is not an attempt to define people as a collection. It’s a more mundane exercise to define certain common characteristics I have seen in people whom I meet in official capacity. More so, I am not going to generalize any association – so I will try my best not to tie any characteristic to say a Govt. Official or a Corporate Executive.

Executives can be clubbed into 2 broad groups (as a friend of mine put it) – those who manage the job that they do and those who manage the people who do the job. Some people (such as Team Leaders in IT companies) have a mix of the above two roles and more so are often aspirants to move from the former to the latter club.

Some senior executives who are in the role of being people managers are mentally tuned to behave as job managers. Such people often appear as bad people managers because they like to put a process to everything which is many times confused with ‘disrespect to individual’ or ‘stifling creativity’. Such people often may keep other job managers happy because of their understanding of processes, but will disgruntle a softer workforce which prefers a more human approach to work.

Contrasting the first kind are executives who are intrinsically people managers – these executives understand aspects such as what motivates people, how to manage different personalities etc. But one again finds two sub types of executives among these – one who only understands people, another who also understands the work that his people do.

Out of the 3 types – intrinsically job manager, intrinsically people manager who knows people, and intrinsically people manager who knows the job – the third category of people is usually the most liked by most subordinates.

A fourth kind of senior executive is the one who lacks both people and job management skills – often such people will have an impressive appearance and personality which is often the reason why in spite of poor talent, they move up the ladder (as put by Malcom Gladwell) . Such executives will often be glib talkers but will keep quite when a technical discussion is going on – sometimes by starting a parallel chat or else diving deep into their laptops / blackberry’s.

A fifth kind of executive is the smart, intelligent and often with impressive personality who know their subject matter. Most times these people are also aware of their ability to impress people with not just their appearance but also their knowledge and command over subjects. They talk the right stuff when they are expected to and hence are often trouble shooters for their organizations. One potential problem though with them may be that they may be bad people managers – sometimes also because their knowledge of their power to impress people makes them arrogant.

The sixth kind of executive is the concept guy – someone who plan ahead of the times, thinks a lot and is capable of building a model of thoughts. However, within this type you will again have two subtypes – the visionary and the Gyan Master :-). The visionary is not only capable of conceptualizing the high level concept, but drill down to process details – such a person is an architect for new horizons.

On the exact other side of the spectrum is the Gyan Master who mostly creates bubbles of hot air and has little ability to conceptualize details. Such a person usually cannot deliver solutions but his talk can be helpful to provide a feel-good factor. Such people are used when an organization is aware of a impending unmanageable situation is going to crop up and wants to instill some confidence in its people by glib talk. In such situations, usually a good job manager executive would be able to reduce the damage, but the Gyan master is also important to provide immediate relief as an emotional cooler.

You would realize that the above quoted characteristics are not mutually exclusive – they are often intermixed and also situational. For example a visionary can become a gyan master if the subject at hand is not his core area of work. Similarly, the good people manager may turn hostile if under pressure and so on.

Comments are welcome!

Decision Making

2010-11-17T21:32:00.002+05:30

There's an interesting discussion going on at Hacker News about using Reason vs. Intuition - but one of the answers to it is quite pertinent to any kind of decision making. I found it worth reproducing for the benefit of all of you to be used in any situation.

There are three tools for discovering truth and making decisions: reason, intuition, and revelation.

Revelation means ask an expert, read the documentation. It is most appropriate when you don't know what you're doing at all -- when you have no sound first principles to feed into the engine of reason, and no experience on which to build intuition. Revelation is fast but limited; you instantly gain a conclusion as sound as your expert, but you cannot improve upon or critique it.

Reason is most appropriate when you have moderate experience in a field. Through revelation and limited experience, you have developed some sound, inviolable principles, and can reason your ways to new ones. You know what must go here because you know what must go there, and you can figure out howthis works because you know how that works. Reason converges to truth slowly but inexorably. It will eventually get there. But it takes a long time to process a lot of input or to navigate a complex landscape.

Intuition is an appropriate tool when you have high experience in a field. Even presented with a complex problem, you know what to do. You just know that OO is the wrong paradigm for this, and that code must go on the server, and this bug is almost certainly caused by a mismatched type somewhere in the parser. Given time, you could probably justify it. Doing so would be equivalent work to writing a paper -- there's just a lot of stuff to consider and weigh. But the power of intuition is that you can decide nearly instantly, and often decide right. Intuition as a tool doesn't converge to truth; it quickly leaps, and then it either gets there or it doesn't. And even when does get there, you don't know immediately whether it actually worked or not. It always uncertain, being only as good as your necessarily incomplete mental models. But there are times when a fast guess is way better than a slow conclusion. And there are times certainty isn't possible anyway. One problem with intuition is that you can't improve its results for a particular problem. If it's wrong, it's just plain wrong. You can't doggedly grind on like you could with reason, or ask another source like you can with revelation.

The highest level of competence comes from using all three tools in concert. With a lot of experience, revelation is sharp: you know who the experts are and what they are likely to know. Reason is sharp: you know a lot of useful rules, and the fastest ways to check truth for certainty. Intuition is sharp: you have a feel for the rhythm of the hills and valleys in the problem landscape. You can guess the existence of a distant mountain the hill-climbing rationalist would take forever to find, quickly and soundly check the local landscape for its unexpected little pits and spikes, and borrow a good map to cross a desert quickly.

This engine of canny guesses and rapid checks and good borrowed maps is precisely what makes communities of hackers work so impossibly, frighteningly fast.

PS: Many thanks to Kalpesh Khivasara (http://twitter.com/kalpeshk) for sharing the link on twitter

PS: Arthavyavastha series will resume in a weeks time. Next Part: Vinimay Avsanrachana (विनिमय अवसंरचना).

Vinimay (Arthvyavastha - Part III)

2010-11-02T23:41:00.002+05:30

Anugam's tamrapatrak scheme received a phenomenal response - also because Anugam had offered his tamrapatraks at a discount to all the workmen whom he employed or bought his wares from. Saakshaat became the official scheme operator for Anugam also, and soon many more traders wanted to float their tamrapatraks. By the end of the year, two more traders had started tamrapatrak schemes, and many more were planning to launch in the next year.

Saakshaat then started training more and more young pundits on managing tamrapatrak schemes - he realized that this would be a huge business and efficient and skilled handling of tamrapatraks would make them even more popular. With more than one tamrapatrak schemes in the market, people often came to Saakshaat looking for advice on which scheme to put their money in. Some even wanted to surrender tamrapatraks from one trader and buy someone else's in exchange.

During these conversations Saakshaat realized that most people were not quite clear about how a tamrapatrak would 'add up' in the long term financial planning. Also, it was very difficult to advice people about buying and surrendering (selling) tamrapatraks while he was also the caretaker on the traders' behalf for all such schemes.

Finally, he felt extremely exposed if his advice to sell any tamrapatrak were to result in any loss for any individual. He felt that he was risking his personal relationship with his acquaintances by giving out such advice. More so, if a lot of people were to suffer a loss, he risked the matter being escalated to Pramukhji as a dispute. He knew that the tamrapatrak schemes had not met complete approval of Pramukhji and if many people escalated to Pramukhji, the schemes would look like some kind of a scam masterminded by Saakshaat.

So one day, Saakshaat met rishi Kalpak - his school teacher, now in his late 50s. Kalpakji was happy for Saakshaat's progress and also for the fact that Saakshaat found him worthy of being consulted in this regard, while everyone else considered Saakshaat himself to be an authority on Finance now.

Kalpakji suggested that the best way to deal with this trouble was to expose the situation to Pramukhji. Saakshaat was not so sure because he feared Pramukhji would take very restrictive actions. But when Kalpakji proposed that he would take Seth Pramanikji, Aaanglesh's father, into confidence before going to Pramukji - Saakshaat agreed with reluctance.

What Saakshaat did not know was that Kalpakji was secretly aware that Pramukhji was about to announce Pramanikji as his successor in the next month's mahapanchayat and that they both had already been consulting Kalpakji with matters similar to what had been raised by Saakshaat. They secretly acknowledged that tamrapatrak schemes had been successful with the community but were afraid that most people were investing in these schemes without realizing the risks and rewards associated with them.

Thus, the stage was set for a discussion between the elders and youngsters - this time as equals!
.

Tamrapatrak Vyavastha (Arthvyavastha - Part II)

2010-10-26T23:10:00.001+05:30

Saakshaat was the first 'tamrapatradhari' or shareholder of Aanglesh's trade - but many Saamanyas followed soon - it started with Aanglesh and Saakshaat's friends, then their acquaintances, some of whom were good friends of Aanglesh's father also. People saw Aanglesh's firm prospering, making more and more money with the growing number of tamrapatrakdhari's.

Most of the community's elders saw this scheme as a devious one - it was helping people earn money from money, without actually requiring people to work to earn their bread. This included everyone including Aanglesh's father who was a devout disciple of Pramukhji.

But the younger and middle aged Saamanyas loved the scheme, they put in every small bit of savings they could into Aanglesh's company. Aanglesh's was able to grow his trade beyond foodgrains using the money gathered from the sale of tamrapatraks.

But as more people bought tamraptraks, work around issuing, recollecting and reissuing tamrapatraks grew. Sometimes, people would need a lot of money to buy a large asset for their home or to build a new room - they would then surrender their tamrapatras to Aanglesh. But there was never a dearth of people who would want to put in money to get these surrendered tamrapatrak's.

Saakshaat became the caretaker for issue-reissue activity. His house became an office for all such activities and he had to hire a few assisstants to help him handle all the related paperwork. Aanglesh on his part gave Saakshaat and his team a regular pay for managing the tamraptrak work. Saakshaat himself also earned from the profit share from his own tamraptraks.

Then one day, Aanglesh brought another trader from the market - Anugam (अनुगम) - to Saakshaat's house. Anugam had heard about the tamrapatrak scheme from Aanglesh and wanted to float his own tamrapatraks. Saakshaat was thrilled and cautious at the same time - he listened to Anugam patiently, but did not commit anything to him.

After Anugam left, Saakshaat revealed his doubts to Aanglesh - first was a resurfacing of Pramukhji's doubts - there was limited money with people, if many tamrapatrak schemes were floated, money available for each tamrapatrak would get reduced. Second was a more fundamental angle - with Aanglesh Saakshaat was sure how the money would get used, but would Anugam also use the money fairly, how do we guarantee that he would not splurge on unnecessary expenses.

Aanglesh was quite fearless with respect to these things - first he felt that there were many people especially those closer to Anugam and not so close to him and Saakshaat who had not yet invested in tamraptraks who would get involved. Second, he trusted Anugam - more importantly, he said if Anugam did not spend the money wisely, he would not make high profits which would anyway force people away from buying his tamrapatraks.

In fact, Aanglesh felt that by having more traders float their tamrapatraks - it was possible to motivate every trader to do their business efficiently, because only those traders' tamprapatraks will be in demand who do business honestly and make more profits for their tamrapatrak holders. Otherwise, they would risk people return their tamrapatraks and buy those of other traders instead.

Saakshaat realized his friend was not just correct this time but this thought process described the true genius he was. Aanglesh may not have been the brightest of rishi Kalpak's (the village school teacher) students, but he was sure a clever mind!

Arthvyavastha (अर्थव्यवस्था)

2010-10-22T13:50:00.003+05:30

In a sleepy town, in ancient India named Arthvyaap (अर्थ्व्याप) lived a community of people called the Samaanyas (सामान्य). Arthvyaap was a typical setting, an elder was considered the head of the community - Pramukh, a group of traders, an elite crowd of intellectual pundits, and other workmen like farmers, cobblers, blacksmiths etc.

One of the young pundits was an extremely sharp mind called Saakshaat (साक्षात) who had such a sharp mathematical brain that even though he was just 17, everyone from the Pramukh to the traders consulted him in matters relating to finance and numbers. Saakshaat was also good friends with his childhood buddy name Aanglesh(आंग्लेश) who was the son of a not so rich but well to do trader. Aanglesh's father managed a large trade of fruits and vegetables in the town market and to ensure an early start for Aanglesh had allowed Aanglesh to start a foodgrain store alongside his shop in the town.

The economy of Arthvyaap worked quite homogeneous with everyone earning their fare share based on the work they did. The staunchly religious community worked on a credit-free principle as a rule - workers were paid a salary every month, traders bought goods out of their own savings and made money on selling them - there was no borrowing or lending existent in the community.

One Sunday morning, as Aanglesh and Saakshaat were lounging in the Aamrai (Mango farm) on the outskirts of the village, Aanglesh's expressed his frustration with the limited sale he could make in the town markets because he had a limited capacity to buy goods to sell, while the large dealers from the nearby villagers sold more than double his sale.

Aanglesh explained to Saakshaat how he had trained his men to sell more effectively and match the right produce to the taste and ability of the consumer. He explained that on days, his people were able to sell off all his stock in nearly half the day itself. Only if he could buy more - he would make twice as much money.

This account set Saakshaat thinking of the numbers and the chain which Aanglesh was talking about - he had learnt in his studies of Bhautiki (Physics) about how Anunaad (resonance) works - how a pendulum oscillates at multiple amplitudes with increasing amount of initial displacement given to it. Saakshaat's mind went racing the next week, as a plan formed in his mind.

The next Saturday evening, Saakshaat visited Aanglesh and explained him his scheme - Aanglesh would borrow a small sum each from all interested villagers for 15 days and return them the sum after 15 days with an interest at a rate higher than the estimated rise of prices (inflation).

Aanglesh would meanwhile use this money to buy more foodgrain and sell more of it in the town - since Aanglesh's cash cycle usually lasted about 3-5 days, he would use the extra money thrice or four times over in the 15 days of lease he had. He would thus have the enough profits to provide a good return to the villagers as well as a good margin for himself. Aanglesh, being confident that his boys would make a good sale with more money, was convinced at once to participate.

Now Saakshaat and Aanglesh went to the Pramukh to convince him to allow them to float this scheme in the community. Pramukhji was not convinced - he said credit was not allowed as per the age old traditions. Saakshaat and Aanglesh went back disheartened.

However, Saakshaat was not going to give up - he kept thinking, it was then that he hit the novel idea. The next evening after convincing Aanglesh, he went to Pramukhji again. He explained that instead of returning the money back with an interest, each of the contributing villagers will be given a Tamra Parta (Bronze Sheet) in return for the money.

Each fortnight, when Aanglesh returns to the village with his profits, each contributing villager will be given a share of the profits in proportion to the amount of money he provided. If the villager wants the original money back - he will have to surrender the Tamra Patra, or if he retains he shall continue to receive fortnightly share of his profits.

Saakshaat reasoned to Pramukhji that this was not credit, as no one was earning interest - rather they were becoming a part of Aanglesh's trade business. Pramukhji was not convinced - he felt that no one would give excess money to Aanglesh as they needed it to run their own households and trades. Saakshaat argued back saying, he himself had a pile of rupya kaudis (Rupee Coins) at his home from last week's puja dakshina where Seth Kirodimal had donated generously to all pundits.

Pramukhji finally relented - one he felt that there would be few takers for Saakshaat and Aanglesh's scheme and hence the boys would temper down with time. Also, Pramukhji had been a mentor to Aanglesh's father in his young days and knew his family as an honest trading family - he was sure the boys would do no harm.

(to be contd.)

Amitabh Bacchan on Sony

2010-10-11T21:05:00.002+05:30

Amitabh is re-delivering his famous dialogues on Sony right now ... go watch followed by KBC!

Below - a poem of Harivanshrai Bacchan he just recited ....

जीवन की आपाधापी में कब वक़्त मिला
कुछ देर कहीं पर बैठ कभी यह सोच सकूँ
जो किया, कहा, माना उसमें क्या बुरा भला।

जिस दिन मेरी चेतना जगी मैंने देखा
मैं खड़ा हुआ हूँ इस दुनिया के मेले में,
हर एक यहाँ पर एक भुलाने में भूला
हर एक लगा है अपनी अपनी दे-ले में
कुछ देर रहा हक्का-बक्का, भौचक्का-सा,
आ गया कहाँ, क्या करूँ यहाँ, जाऊँ किस जा?
फिर एक तरफ से आया ही तो धक्का-सा
मैंने भी बहना शुरू किया उस रेले में,
क्या बाहर की ठेला-पेली ही कुछ कम थी,
जो भीतर भी भावों का ऊहापोह मचा,
जो किया, उसी को करने की मजबूरी थी,
जो कहा, वही मन के अंदर से उबल चला,
जीवन की आपाधापी में कब वक़्त मिला
कुछ देर कहीं पर बैठ कभी यह सोच सकूँ
जो किया, कहा, माना उसमें क्या बुरा भला।

मेला जितना भड़कीला रंग-रंगीला था,
मानस के अन्दर उतनी ही कमज़ोरी थी,
जितना ज़्यादा संचित करने की ख़्वाहिश थी,
उतनी ही छोटी अपने कर की झोरी थी,
जितनी ही बिरमे रहने की थी अभिलाषा,
उतना ही रेले तेज ढकेले जाते थे,
क्रय-विक्रय तो ठण्ढे दिल से हो सकता है,
यह तो भागा-भागी की छीना-छोरी थी;
अब मुझसे पूछा जाता है क्या बतलाऊँ
क्या मान अकिंचन बिखराता पथ पर आया,
वह कौन रतन अनमोल मिला ऐसा मुझको,
जिस पर अपना मन प्राण निछावर कर आया,
यह थी तकदीरी बात मुझे गुण दोष न दो
जिसको समझा था सोना, वह मिट्टी निकली,
जिसको समझा था आँसू, वह मोती निकला।
जीवन की आपाधापी में कब वक़्त मिला
कुछ देर कहीं पर बैठ कभी यह सोच सकूँ
जो किया, कहा, माना उसमें क्या बुरा भला।

मैं कितना ही भूलूँ, भटकूँ या भरमाऊँ,
है एक कहीं मंज़िल जो मुझे बुलाती है,
कितने ही मेरे पाँव पड़े ऊँचे-नीचे,
प्रतिपल वह मेरे पास चली ही आती है,
मुझ पर विधि का आभार बहुत-सी बातों का।
पर मैं कृतज्ञ उसका इस पर सबसे ज़्यादा -
नभ ओले बरसाए, धरती शोले उगले,
अनवरत समय की चक्की चलती जाती है,
मैं जहाँ खड़ा था कल उस थल पर आज नहीं,
कल इसी जगह पर पाना मुझको मुश्किल है,
ले मापदंड जिसको परिवर्तित कर देतीं
केवल छूकर ही देश-काल की सीमाएँ
जग दे मुझपर फैसला उसे जैसा भाए
लेकिन मैं तो बेरोक सफ़र में जीवन के
इस एक और पहलू से होकर निकल चला।
जीवन की आपाधापी में कब वक़्त मिला
कुछ देर कहीं पर बैठ कभी यह सोच सकूँ
जो किया, कहा, माना उसमें क्या बुरा भला।

Winamp is still a great music player but ...

2010-10-01T13:02:00.004+05:30

I remember my college days when Internet access was only through the nearby cyber-cafe or the college labs. Home speeds were pathetic (thanks to dial up access - no broadband), where you would take 1/2 hour to check your mail and if you wanted to do extended reading you'd rather download the page, disconnect internet and read the document offline.

However, computers were still the primary forms of listening to music - hostel rooms used to buzz with all kinds of songs from dawn till late nights. There were no iPods but students used to carry their songs in USB drives and CD's. I even remember once removing the hard-disk of my PC, connecting it as a slave to my friend's PC and copying my 10GB music library to his computer.

In these pre-iPod/iTunes days - the music player of choice across the world was Nullsoft Winamp. Winamp was a pioneer in the 'app design' space. Unlike any existing Windows applications, it did not have a title bar, its colours were not shades of grey and its buttons were not like standard "Ok" "Cancel" windows buttons.

Winamp was as jazzy and colourful as a rocker's dorm room with ability to create skins et al. Long before Blogger or Firefox spread the community culture to design 'skins' and add-ons - Winamp had it all including a vibrant developer community. Check out some of the default Winamp skins from v1, 3 and 5. My personal favourite was v5 (perhaps because that's the last one I used)

With time however, Winamp's popularity has withered away. I polled a random cross-section of friends (& friends of friends) on their usage of Winamp - ALL of them remembered Winamp but only 25% were using it even today. 30% had last used Winamp 3-4 years ago.

The audience I polled was mostly in the 25-40 age group [break up]. If you too want to respond to the poll - you are welcome! Click here to respond. See all responses here.

Apart from the proliferation of mobile media players such as iPod and smartphones, another reason for the fall of Winamp is changes in consumption of type of media. Earlier, most time was spent only on audio - now people are spending as much time watching video. More and more time is also spent on social networking - which ultimately comes from the same 24hr kitty of a teenager.

Also older (non-teenage) fans of Winamp have moved on - I personally prefer a much less cluttered player called 1by1, many others who responded to my poll used either VLC or Windows Media Player. One of the respondents said that s/he "would still prefer Winamp if it can give me a complete package to play whole range of media like VLC does."

Frankly, while I look back at Winamp with nostalgia - I don't see much that can help the tool because several reasons impacting it are outside the purview of what Winamp team itself can do. Probably re-inventing itself as an iPhone/ Android app for music aggregation may help retain the brand - but its existence as a music player is unlikely to continue with the same vigour as it did in the 2000's.

So Long Winamp - we remember you but don't miss you anymore!

Will everything be okay tomorrow?

2010-09-29T19:55:00.003+05:30

This is the question in minds of gazillion Indians both in India and abroad - offices, homes, streets and cyberspace are full of muted discussions between the calm, quite and most importantly largely secular Indians about the fallout of the Babri Masjid court trial.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the High Court to announce verdict on 30th September 2010 - the date may be seen in future as a historical landmark. People, especially those who remember the 1993 riots which burned the nation for months (after the mosque was demolished by kar sevaks on Dec 16, 1992), are afraid that history may repeat itself - irrespective of the side the verdict takes.

There are some optimists also among us - those who think that India has changed. More than 15 years of liberalization, globalization and capitalist mindset has changed the populace which no more cares about religious animosity but is more concerned with progress. Hence, irrespective of the verdict - people will be much more tolerant and reactions may be much subdued as compared to 1992.

I would love to agree with these optimists, but I do not. The 1993 riots were not driven by people (who I repeat are largely secular) - they were driven by politicians - some to further their political ambitions, and others to expedite a political suicide (as they assumed) of their detractors. And politicians in India haven't changed as much - if some have become any less vitriolic, other have taken their place; if some are dead or senile, others have emerged to replace them.

More so, in a global minded populace - there is dearth of global minded politicians. Politicians still believe in winning the vote to rule the masses, than serving the masses to win the vote. The verdict may or may not irk these politicians, but it will sure create the same sentiment of opportunistic glare in their minds and God forbid, if the Government is not alert enough - they will not bequeath one chance to start violence.

The only saving chance could be if the court finds a silver bullet to weight the verdict in favour of none of the disputed parties. May be ambiguous verdict or may be an ingenious one. Such a verdict would indeed be God sent ... may the Lord win!

How Google could have saved Wave

2010-09-21T23:22:00.001+05:30

Google killed the Wave project on 04th August 2010, while promising to "extend the technology for use in other Google projects". "Wave has not", Google said, "seen the user adoption they would have liked".

Wave was an exceptional product, a revolutionary way to look at communication and documentation in today's world. As Lars Rassmusen, one of the brains behind the Wave said Wave was answer to the question - "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today". And it was not just that - wave was:

how a word processor would look like if it was invented today;
how a calendaring solution would look like if it was redesigned today;
how people's text-chat would get logged if it was logged today, and;
most importantly, how web-pages / web-apps would communicate with the server if the protocols were defined today.

The last bullet is important because Google Wave was not just a jazzy collaboration web-app but a platform in itself. "The Google Wave protocol [was] the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and [included] the 'live' concurrency control, which allow[ed] edits to be reflected instantly across users and services."

What was most important was the way Google Wave understood 'content'. When the Wave Team said - "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more." - they meant that:

No document in Google wave is considered to be restricted to a single user
Each 'action' on the document is indexed with - the user who made the change, the datetime stamp
Wave does not restrict users to include only specific type of content in a document like text or images, in fact the wave protocol gave developers ability to create plug-ins in wave to include new forms of content (say a flash animation file) into the document. These gave the wave an extensibility to include content types hitherto un-invented

Given the amount of time/thought/effort which had gone into the Wave, I think Google made a mistake by killing the project so early. The Wave was a technology for the future, I am sure the protocol would be utilized in all future collaborative environments (and no environment of the future will be standalone! Everything will necessarily be collaborative!).

More importantly, Google had some tools at its disposal to be able to put the Wave to test right away. For example Google could have integrated Wave technology in GMail, this could have been done in 3 ways:

Adding a 'Wave' tab in GMail, the way Buzz and Chat have been added (and we all know how much both these tools have gained from being 'bundled' with GMail)
Allowing users to convert any email into a Wave (or rather storing it as a Wave). This would have meant that wherever email was used for real-time or near-real time (differed) collaboration (for example friends in 2 different cities creating a document), people would have preferred Wave over email.
Storing all emails as Waves internally. This would mean that if I answered to an email as inline [click to see image], it would get stored in the Wave's inline format which stores timestamp/ user details. Those people using GMail or Wave compatible clients would be able to read the mail in that format, other would read it like they used to see the mail.

Of the above, the third is the most difficult to implement due to backward compatibility issues with other clients, but the first two could have been easily implemented.

A similar approach could have been taken to integrate Wave with Google Docs, so that users could convert their documents from GDocs format to Google Wave format allowing people to edit documents also in Wave format and using the Wave protocol to store the document.

Another Google property to use Google Wave technology was Google calendar - because Wave offers a much better way of inviting people, capturing responses real time while making changes to venue and time based on responses.

Finally, and the most compelling fitment-case for Wave is blogger and Google Sites - two tools meant for users to create personal websites. Google wave platform offered this amazing functionality to embed a 'wave' in a webpage. How would this have helped:

First, in wave it was incredibly easy to insert video / images compared to traditional blogger / sites
Second, if you edit some information in a wave, the wave would automatically get updated across all webpages / blogs where it is embedded
Third, content in a wave is dynamic (compared to normal webpages) - for example - photos can automatically be viewed as a slideshow in a wave without any coding / javascript / widgets to be added to the webpage or any extensions in the browser.
Finally, for webpages which were living documents such as software specs or user manuals, using wave would give the instant ability to 'playback' the changes. This would help people in understanding differences between different versions and updates made to the document.

Conclusion

Wave as I said is a revolutionizing technology, however, Google did a big mistake by launching Wave as an independent standalone web-app which did not have any integration roadmap to integrate with other services of the web. This was probably a mistake as big as what Joel Spolsky calls 'single worst strategic mistake' - rewriting code from scratch.

Google from the very beginning should have integrated Wave with its other platform products like GMail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites/Blogger. Even when Wave did not see 'adoption' as Google would have liked it - the best way to save it was to come up with an integration roadmap and slowly integrating the revolutionizing effects of the technology platform in other products which would also have prompted other players from using this technology in their products.

Unfortunately, rather than take any of the above courses, Google decided to kill the project. The only saving grace is the Wave codebase which will be available for other players to build upon or re-use. Lets hope that Wave codebase can be nurtured like the Apache Project! Amen!

Long Live Wave!

Intel & Microsoft of mobile phone market

2010-09-08T15:47:00.005+05:30

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. - Steve Jobs

May be we did enter a dark age, for almost 20 years, no iPod, iPhone or iPad came - no hardware manufacturer or electronics company launched differentiated products which people would aspire to buy, but the price of the PC dwindled over these two decades which in itself lead to a much wider proliferation of the PC. Had the PC remained the high price aspirational device which Apple wanted it to be, probably we would have had lot lesser people with computers in their homes.

How did the PC price revolution happen? Apart from the lowering absolute price of hardware components, it happened as a result of breakage of the vertical integration model (followed by Apple where it facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all its computers). Today's PC market is fierce in its price war because from Dell to HP to your neighborhood computer dealer- there is no dearth of assemblers of hardware and software into a PC.

The first hole in the vertical integration market was punched by Microsoft by creating DOS / Windows operating systems which were not tied to a given hardware platform and given the proper device drivers could work across a jigsaw of hardware designed and manufactured by different manufacturers.

The second hole was punched by Intel which provided a huge range of multipurpose microprocessors which could be mixed and matched with a variety of components to 'assemble' a basic PC. What Intel did was to change the game of innovation dependent price discovery into logistics dependent price determination. Computer companies (or assemblers) did not need to invest in developing processor technology - they could simply buy it off the shelf. The final price of the PC thus dependent on how efficiently you can procure and assemble the hardware rather than how 'expensive' (or cheap) your processor development process is.

Wintel as Windows+Intel model is called opened doors for players like Dell, whose core competence was logistics and not technology, to play in the field of computing equipment. The Wintel model was of vertical disintegration - many sellers (of hardware components), many buyers (of computer equipment and OS) resulting into happy consumers.

Recently the mobile phone market has also undergone a similar revolution. Till 2007, players like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung who followed a vertical integration model were monopolies in certain markets like India. However, according this article from the Forbes (source: IBN7), MediaTek a Taiwan based startup emerged as the Intel of mobile phones:

MediaTek offers a platform for these (local) brands to create ever cheaper mobile phones crammed with features. MediaTek realised quite early that the huge difference between manufacturing costs and selling prices for well-known phone brands — like Nokia — was not sustainable. So it cobbled together an integrated design-plus-hardware offering that allowed upstart entrepreneurs to literally dream up their own phone designs by mixing and matching off-the-shelf components.

Overnight, mobile phone technology went from being a differentiator for the Nokias, BlackBerrys and Samsungs of the world to a commodity available to anyone with a ticket to Beijing and a cheque

Thus local mobile companies like Macromax and Maxx in India were able to change the game from 'technology edge' to logistical and marketing edge. "In fact, the pendulum swung so far that innovation began to be led by the newer players. Unrestricted by global supply chain, brand or regulatory requirements, they could create phones for customer needs that a big company like Nokia would consider too niche or transient."

The question I asked immediately is - where is the Microsoft of the mobile phone world. And as this question was running through my nerves, I read this line in the same article: "Agarwal [Ajjay Agarwal - CEO, Maxx Mobiles India], meanwhile, is introducing Google's Android-powered smart phones in September starting at a price point of Rs. 8,000."

Indeed, the Google Andriod, the open source OS for mobile devices is the equalizer for small mobile phone 'shops' to assemble their devices and take on giants of the smartphone world. Apple is to the world of mobile lifestyle devices what Nokia was to phones. And just what Microsoft did to PC's, Android is doing to phones & smartphones. So Mr. Agarwal (quoted above) is bang on, he can destroy Blackberry, iPhone, HTC etc. hegemony by playing the Android game.

And it does have to end at phones now - this phenomenon will spread over to all kinds of mobile devices which Apple and the likes of it are planning to launch in the near future. For example, the successor to iPhone - iPad. What if someone combines the hardware from the Taiwanese company and Android OS - to come up with an iPad killer? Well, here are few companies trying to do this right now!

Soon we may have a flood of many small unbranded or 'local branded' (ex. Videocon, Voltas, Onida) coming out with their digital communicators, ebook readers, tablet PC's based built using Taiwanese hardware and running Android. To me this is another Cathedral vs. Bazaar [Catb] story unfolding - it may spell dark ages for Apple and Jobs, but I am sure consumers in India will be happy to see these low priced digital lifestyle products.

Related post: The Future of Laptops by Shubham Choudhury

Lead photo by Flickr user curiouslee

India Urbanising: A different Perspective (Part III)

2010-09-07T23:55:00.004+05:30

Continued from Part II
Having said that India needs to extend the reach of urban amenities like roads, electricity, cooking gas, safe drinking water (and education and internet) to the countryside, there is one major cog missing in the wheel – the pull for the above amenities in rural India. The need for high quality infrastructure in cities gets created by higher productivity and resultant income levels, the same applies to villages as well.

In most western nations where villages too have a much better standard of living are those where people in villages have earnings comparable to their city counterparts. In the west the low population density necessitated high productivity in rural activities such as farming or animal husbandry. Thus as an outcome farms became mechanized and villages got developed.

However, this is not true of a high population density country like India – even today employing 10 labourers in the farm is cheaper than buying a mere tractor. Farmland in India is extremely fragmented with the average farm size in India 3.3 acres [2] which makes mechanization even more difficult for the already poor farmer. Add to it the poor credit policies followed by Banks in rural India - upgrading one's farm is a nightmare for a common farmer in India.

Without improvements such a mechanization of agriculture the productivity of the average Indian rural household will not increase substantially, resulting in lower income for the community at large and thus creating a huge funding crunch for improving the rural infrastructure of rural India. Further, with years of experience with numerous “Gram Vikas Yojana” programs, we know that deliberate government funding cannot go a long way in improving this cycle unless the underlying need for such services is created in the rural sector.

There are many solutions to break this vicious cycle – most stemming from removing the underlying reasons for low productivity of rural India.

Corporatization of Agricultural sector: Experience in countries like Brazil has demonstrated that integrating fragmented farmland into large tracts of organized farming “mills” paves way for higher productivity. In the short run, such a move will definitely create political unease (or unrest) among the masses, but this will be an inevitable first step in unleashing ‘liberalization’ on the agricultural sector.
Forced Increase in wage levels: A recent study by The Economist revealed that Indian manufacturing sector was forced to automate itself because while labour was fundamentally cheap, tough inflexible labour laws in India made it an expensive proposition to maintain. Thus SME’s kept their labour requirements limited to bare minimum and grabbed every chance to automate and modernize (those who did not , like the textile mills of Bombay, perished with time).
The same may happen to Indian agriculture – if labour becomes expensive, it may force the farmer to adopt modern agricultural practices of mechanized farming. This is happening in some parts of the country already where, thanks to programs like MG-NREGA, labour is becoming more expensive than can be afforded by cheap ‘manual farming’ methods.
Cash Crops: A silent revolution has swept several parts of the country already where specialized crops like soybean, sunflower and sugarcane have increased the rupee yield per hectare of the farm land. Surgarcane is a classic example because it has lead to unprecedented increase in standard of living in villages of Marathwada (Pune-Nasik- Aurangabad- Solapur belt) region on Maharashtra.
Food Processing: A dream of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, rural India needs more establishments like Sula Wines or Mapro factory (Mahabaleshwar) wherein food processing units absorb the local produce, enrich it and ready it to be sold at a price much higher than that of the raw food product. This would also serve the purpose of increasing the wage levels (point 2 above) without the government’s intervention. Labourers employed in food processing plants would also become a source of ‘regular income’ earners in rural households improving the local savings giving incentive for the banking sector to provide more services in rural hinterland (without requiring the RBI or MoF to push them into financial inclusion projects).

I find point 4 above the most suitable to (more than the current govts favourite baby NREGA) as it would induce all the other 3 gradually – increase in wage, incentive to move to cash crops which can be absorbed by the food processing industry, and highly productive farms (which can only result from organized large scale farming).

However, the biggest obstacle to setting up food processing industry is the archaic land ownership records in India and our land transfer laws. Land reforms – which would make establishing ownership of land and also sale of land for setting up food processing units – are the most urgent need for rural India to develop.

.Concluded. Read the whole series.

India Urbanising: A different Perspective (Part II)

2010-09-06T22:53:00.008+05:30

Continued from Part I
'Mamata wants to turn Kolkata into London' - screamed the headline on rediff.com some days ago. Turning Kolkata into London is definitely a worthy goal - London is one of the most livable cities in the world. However, while the creation of (present day) London was in itself challenging, doing the same in India is even more challenging.

Let’s investigate Indian urbanization strategy in a more logical manner by identifying the challenges which India faces today. India’s urbanization effort is challenged by 3 obstacles:

A unique combination of large population with high population density never before encountered (in the parts of the world which have been fully urbanized)
An existing landscape formed during different periods of history
Large sections of populations who have never been exposed to an urban landscape
Lack of existing institutions

Of these only the last one had been encountered in countries which have previously attempted urbanization, and the first two have been encountered previously by very few countries (one of them being India’s rival China).

Population Density

If we decide to house all our population only in cities of the size of Mumbai (20 million), we would still need 54 such cities – meaning if we were to convert all our cities with a population above 1 million population (45), we would still fall short by 10 cities. And imagine the gargantuan amount of money only to maintain 54 Mumbai’s, not to mention the money needed to create them.

More importantly, the more densely populated an area, the more complicated the infrastructural development for it - more high rises need to be built, much denser sewage, and more meshed the required transport systems. While a denser system is cheaper on a 'per person' basis, it is much more complicated to develop.

Transform Existing Landscape

I have written earlier how India’s current cities are a juxtaposition of medieval, British and post-liberalization developments which has created dissonance and emergence of a confused landscape. The new cities India requires cannot do with such dissonance for long. This not only leads destruction of our cultural heritage, it creates cities with a disconnect between its soul and body.

Urban Exposure

Large sections of the Indian populace are still living in a world far removed from urban infrastructure - pucca roads, safe drinking water supply, persistent electricity supply, cooking gas connection - things which we take for granted in Indian cities. The reason why these services are still not available in villages is that they are 'expensive' to provide in remote locations. The only exception to this rule are mobile phones (and in future internet access through mobile phones) - which are services being provided already to rural folk.

However, most other urban amenities are expensive and they need a high productivity society to be able to pay for these services. This also means that the only (known) way these services can be afforded are by setting up of cities, towns, townships - which shall require some kind of industry to be present in these areas. Industries will require land and hence result in displacement of existing population.

Any potential displacement would result in opposition from the natives which shall not be completely unfair. Creation of a new city would mean loss of their livelihood and since most modern industries require qualified or at least semi skilled human resource, it is unlikely that the natives would be suitable to take up jobs in the "new cities".

If one can force the rural folk to accept this change - urbanization by creation of cities is a viable option; and they are doing it in China. But in India, democracy means that opposition by the existing population to displacement means a no-no to creation of new cities. India is not China, and frankly China's method of thrusting displacement on villagers for the 'greater good' may not necessarily be a great strategy.

The only solution in hand for India is gradual and ‘in place’ modernization which shall be geographically and culturally less disruptive. This would mean providing more and more urban amenities to rural areas without displacing them. Creating an awareness about better standard of living which awaits them, if they are ready to change.

The Stumbling Block

Providing urban amenities in rural India is not just a question of reaching the rural masses. As explained above, urban amenities are 'expensive' to provide and we need to create a pull in the rural society for these services. Part III of this series would focus on answering this question.

Lack of existing institutions

Gradual growth of cities in the west allowed development of institutions both public and private. For example, cities had strong mayoralties before they became metropolices; industrial institutions became local / regional brands before they aspired of becoming global MNC behemoths and local bodies had a well defined structure before they could handle huge piles of population.

As I have highlighted earlier, prior to the British invasion, Indian cities too were developing on a similar curve, but the Indian institutions were destroyed by the early invaders. When an independent India took reigns from British administration - most of these institutions were in shambles, while the population of our cities had grown.

Now that we are re-approaching urbanization, we need to gradually develop, empower and strengthen these institutions which can only be done by first building them at a local level and the transforming them into urban scale systems.

Read Part III or the whole series.

India Urbanising: A different Perspective

2010-09-05T23:25:00.005+05:30

I recently went on a religious tour to Tulzapur via Solapur and then to our ancestral temple in Narsinghpur, near Pune. On way I also visited our ancestral village Indapur 150 kms from Pune. While old Indapur still remains a village with roads just about wide to allow cycle rickshaws run through them, I was astounded to see the newly developed areas of Indapur which were no less than private colonies in Teir 2/3 cities in India. Having read Mckinsey’s India urbanization report just a day before my travel, Indapur’s development opened a new chain of thoughts in my mind.

Most urbanization studies about the developing world relate to urbanization as development of new cities or improvement of urban infrastructure (like mass transit, arterial roads, flyovers etc) in existing cities. For example McKinsey’s recent research titled “India’s urban awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth” [1] highlights the need for India to develop 19 clusters of cities (Page 150); it predicts a 2030 scenario of top 6 cities which will have more than 10 mn population - the study itself was based on current research done in top 66 cities of India.

These predictions may not be wrong, but they skew the perspective of urban development towards cities and ignore the development of the rural hinterland. And by development, I do not mean ‘rural development’ –infrastructural or cultural development in villages of India is not fundamentally different than what’s happening in our cities.

Also, the current perspective of urbanization strategy stems from the past experience of urban planning and development in the low population density economies of the west and ignores the fact that east is unique in its challenges, demographics and cultural aspirations of populace.
While the McKinsey report does mention the example of Germany where, “for instance, a large number of small and medium sized cities have grown up in parallel” and does liken the Indian scene to the same; yet the general tone of the study remains city centric rather than being wholesome.

The McKinsey report is quite instrumental in providing a comprehensive view on the subject – covering topics like funding required, governance reform, macro and micro planning effort; however the report bases its conclusions on data gathered from 66 top cities in India – which is a very small number compared to India’s urbanization requirement.

India’s urbanization will not result only from development of existing cities – it will result from providence of urban amenities across the country down to the smallest of villages. This would come in part from spread (and growth) of medium sized cities (Top 66 considered by McKinsey for example) to rural hinterland surrounding it; in part from further rise in population density of large metropolises; in part from emergence of new metro cities (from say among those > 1.5 mn population today); in part from conversion of earlier rural or semi-rural locations (like Indapur) into urban towns; and in part not from creation of growth of cities but ‘development’ of modern facilities in the rural hinterland.

Read Part II here. Read the whole series.

How to use the new Rupee Symbol in your documents

2010-08-01T11:42:00.004+05:30

The new Rupee Symbol recently was released by the Reserve Bank of India and the Government of India. While the symbol may take upto two years to get included in the standard Unicode set of characters, many new fonts have already come up to help you use the symbol in documents.

Already most publications have started using the symbol. So I am sure you too would like to use it in your documents too. Here's how to do that.

Download the Rupee font from there: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B-T0rtWq-0cxNTVhZDgyODEtZDRhYS00N2ZjLTkzOTktODNhZGQzOTBhMTQy&hl=en
Install the font on your computer by pasting it in the 'Fonts' folder (Controls Panel -> Appearance and Personalization -> Fonts)
For text documents made using MS Word or OpenOffice, just select the 'Rupee' font and type the `~ key (The ` character is mapped to the Rupee symbol).

Using the symbol in Excel shall require a different approach.

Install the font as explained above
On the cells you want to enter the "money" values, right click -> select "Format Cells"
On the "Number" tab select Custom
Enter [$`] #,##0.00 in the 'Type" box
For all such cells, specify the font to be used as "Rupee"

Done! You are good to go - if you type any alphabets in these cells, nothing will appear. Only numbers will appear in these cells. And the numbers shall have the Rupee Symbol automatically prefixed to them, just as the $ symbol is usually prefixed to cells which are formatted as "Currency".

Participation in the Rupee Symbol Contest

I and Shubham had also participated in the Rupee symbol contest. Our designs were very similar to the final winning entry - even our justifications for the symbols were quite similar to those presented finally.

The designs proposed by us along with the proposed rationale are below, we would love to know how you rate our designs, as against the design that finally won. Please leave your comments below:

Capital I in English Script, followed by the devangiri character "ra".

Rationale for the design:

1. Capital “I” represents India

2. "ra" in Devnagiri represents first character of rupaya or rupee. Devnagairi also represents Indian culture

3. The combined symbol created English R that stands for anglicised "R" in Rupee

Capital I in English Script, with a horizontal bar bisecting it.

Rationale for the design:

1. Capital “I” represents India and INR. It also represents the vertical Ashoka pillar.

2. The additional bar in middle creates 3 horizontal bars in total, representing 3 strips in our flag (and hence representing all that the Indian national flag stands for)

3. The simplicity of design represents the principles of “single living, high thinking” propagated by our founding fathers like Mahatma Gandhi.

4.This is a most simplistic design that can be drawn by anyone by hand easily

Parting Note: Even though none of our designs reached even the top 5, I am happy for two reasons - first that India finally does have a currency symbol of its own and second, the designs we proposed were quite similar and along similar lines as the final selected one. What do you think? Do leave your comments below.

Passing The Exam

2010-07-13T14:28:00.006+05:30

Reports go that the above song, Mehangai Dayan from Peepli Live has had offers from the political parties in opposition. No wonder with the so called 'strike' requiring the opposition to put all its goons to force, it is clearly evident that the UPA-II is difficult to defeat in spite of the current state of affairs.

Is the UPA-II performing too well for a government to sit at peace cooling its heals. Hell no! UPA-II is definitely a different animal as compared to a typical Congress Govt. It is far more dynamic, its ministers have new ideas - yet, it is reaping benefits of a global wave towards investing in the developing world, not to mention the benefits from momentum of past governments, Vajpayee's NDA govt included.

But what is making the UPA-II govt tick and lie in peace is a fragmented opposition which is busy infighting - whether its the NDA or the BJP within the NDA or the communists or the SP-vs-BSP feud.

Politics in a democracy is hardly ever about performance - its about playing strategic moves to meet the numbers. Democracy is not like a competitive exam where you MUST score more than all your rivals to make it to the top. Democracy is more like the qualifying exam where you just need to get past minimum marks in each subject.

To make a analogy more perfect, consider exams which require you to answer 6 out of 10 questions. You never need to know your complete syllabus to pass such an exam - you simply need to know enough so that you know answers to at least 6 most likely questions. Similarly, in a democracy, the ruling party must manage to get past the 50% mark in the parliament. With each major party having its own stronghold state - it pretty much boils down to who is able usurp the other in its stronghold.

The master strategists in each state also realize that even the above does not require support of 50% population in the state. All you need to win more than 75% seats in a state, is make sure to get the caste equations right in just 50% of your non-traditional constituencies. More so, your candidate in each constituency wins even if he secures (far) less than 50% of total vote. This is helped further if you have more than 2-3 contenders for the constituency - contenders who shall not win the election, but shall definitely snatch votes from the nearest challenger to your candidate.

Congress for years had some master strategists in it, who were able to exploit this "political strategy of pass marks"* to avoid falling below the 50% mark at the national level; and when it did slip away, there was no-one left to claim the spoils, leaving the nation twiddling between multiple coalitions.

In 1998, it was by a stroke of luck that the BJP managed to get past the 180 seats marks; it was then for the first time that someone apart from the Congress used the "political strategy of pass marks". BJP strategists forged deal after deal to bring about a government with BJP at its center. However, the key then was that - there was no deal making required within the BJP itself.

In the last elections, while the Congress did increase its share of seats and had an overall better performance than the BJP - its rise could be credited more to the weakness of the BJP and the absence of "pass marks strategists" in BJP (demise of Pramod Mahajan, inaction of Govindacharya and Kalyan Singh) that lead to this feat.

So, what's the conclusion? I believe that we need a stronger opposition and by stronger - its not so much about seats or the number of hours of Bandh (read: the number of Goons you have) that I am asking for; we need a concerted opposition which in effect requires master strategists in at least the large political groups to rally the rest of the opposition around issues which matter to the people. We need a Kautilya in the opposition who can "prevent the Government from running amuck". Let me end with a symbolic anecdote:

OPPOSITION, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

The King of Ghargaroo, who had been abroad to study the science of government, appointed one hundred of his fattest subjects as members of a parliament to make laws for the collection of revenue. Forty of these he named the Party of Opposition and had his Prime Minister carefully instruct them in their duty of opposing every royal measure. Nevertheless, the first one that was submitted passed unanimously. Greatly displeased, the King vetoed it, informing the Opposition that if they did that again they would pay for their obstinacy with their heads. The entire forty promptly disemboweled themselves.

"What shall we do now?" the King asked. "Liberal institutions cannot be maintained without a party of Opposition."

Source: ThinkExist.com

*PS: Interestingly, it is the same "pass marks" strategy that has played a role in the recent elections in UK to bring about the first Tory-Liberal coalition.

Invictus

2010-06-29T13:48:00.002+05:30

I haven't written a decent poem since years now. But occasionally I find a poem worth repeating to myself on the net. IF, by Rudyard Kipling was the last one I quoted here. Today, I am quoting another one - "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley - the title means unconquered in Latin.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

बिजली, सड़क, पानी और Broadband Power, Transport, Water and Broadband

2010-06-17T17:21:00.013+05:30

Just about an year ago Finland declared broadband internet access as a legal right and now BBC has come up with a survey that 80% people in developed world believe that internet access should be a fundamental right.

Image Credit: BBC, March 2010. Link to detailed results [PDF]

People equate internet to a fundamental right stating its impact on other fundamental rights [Ref: UN Declaration, Articles 18, 19, 26, 27 and 29] such as freedom of thought, conscience, right to speech, opinion and expression, and right to education and full development of personality.

The whole concept may look outlandish in the developing world where the basic necessities of food and shelter are still not available to all citizens, but for a large part of the "access enabled" population, the internet is becoming as fundamental to the very existence of modern lifestyle like banking services or water or electricity. For example, check out his conversation which happened late night earlier this week on facebook.

So here's my friend trying to figure how to restore electricity to his place in Gurgaon, when I sitting a good 1300kms far in Mumbai was able to help him sort the problem out. And if this use-case sounds a little extreme to you, check these cases out (most from the US, except the last).

The Garden City, Kansas Police Department started using Twitter as a free public messaging tool to send out information on events, missing persons and other community advisories, as did the Franklin, Massachusetts Police Department some 1,000 miles away.
Over 200 police related Twitter® micro-blogs, the largest being the Boston Police Department with over 2,100 followers.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has its own Twitter® micro-blog http://twitter.com/LLIS for best practices information for state and local homeland security and emergency response personnel
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) Emergency Preparedness and Response site uses Twitter as a mass communications tool and has over 2,000 followers.
The FDA has employed its own Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/FDARecalls to alert over 3,000 people of its recall of salmonella-tainted pistachio products.
In India, Delhi Police has a facebook page with an aim to "make the Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge" and Delhi Traffic Police has a twitter feed as well.

Already, twitter is becoming a very useful tool during calamities and disasters. For example, during a recent fire outbreak in California L.A. Fire Department was issuing frequent updates using Twitter[2]. During the Haiti earthquake relief workers used twitter extensively to issue updates helping people keep informed as well as providing information on ways to make donations. The cascading re-tweets even helped raise the number of donations for several organizations.[3] [4]

Just imagine if the internet were to become the harbinger of the latest alerts on floods, earthquakes or storms, access to the internet anytime, anywhere (for example to a fisherman on his boat in the middle of the sea) would become a matter one's life and death. No wonder GigaOm feels that we need a duplicate for twitter.

Clearly, the internet in its new avatar is blossoming from being just an information storage and dissemination tool to a 'real time communication backbone' for the world. In this context, it is becoming even more fundamental to human existence, than just being "one [of the] outlets for expressing free speech ... or becoming better educated [1]". Its high time we gave a serious thought to including "access to the internet" in the list of basic necessities like power, water and transport.

The real life mirage

2010-06-01T15:04:00.006+05:30

The 1936 classic "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Michelle is known primarily for its depiction of Civil War America and its impeccable laying of the characters. I for myself liked the novel for its depiction of how individuals fall for 'real life mirages'.

The protagonist Scarlett O'Hara has a lifelong obsession with Ashley Wilkes who (only) in her perception is one of the most 'manly' individuals - decisive, gallant, and chivalrous.

Ashley is the man with whom Scarlett is obsessed. Gentlemanly yet indecisive, he loves Melanie, his cousin and later his wife, but is tormented by an obsession with Scarlett. His failure to deal with his true feelings for Scarlett ruins any chance she has for real happiness with the true love of her life (Rhett Butler).

Due to her obsession with Ashley, Scarlett keeps ruining her every chance of getting true love from Rhett Butler. It is only towards the end of the novel that Scarlett realizes that she loves Rhett and never truly loved Ashley, but merely an idea of him[1]; by then however only its too late for her to reclaim Rhett's love.

Another similar 'real life mirage' is illustrated by Jeffrey Archer in 'As the Crow Flies'. Becky Salmon - one of the protagonists - falls for a good looking, handsome, charming army officer "Guy Trentham" only to realize about his unfaithfulness, but unlike Scarlett O'Hara, Becky's eye-opener comes comes early on in the story and she ends up marrying Charles Trumper - a husband who adores her for her life.

I have myself found to have been victim of such 'real life mirages' - one such got busted today. Since childhood, I had heard of Campion School, Bombay which was the namesake of my own Alma Mater in Bhopal. Campion School, Bombay was frequently found in the top league of school contests like the Britannia Quiz Contest anchored by the legendary Derek O' Brien. I always presumed that Campion in Bombay would have buildings and infrastructure much more magnificent than my own school.

However, today as I was going towards a client's office in Fort, I chanced upon two modest looking buildings and a small compound, and was dumbstruck to find the words "CAMPION SCHOOL" written on a plaque. Reminded of the huge campus I was used to calling school and the large buildings which we roamed around, I found Campion School Bombay dwarfed in comparison!

How Flickr helps cleartrip sell more travel packages

2010-05-24T22:17:00.004+05:30

Cleartrip.com - an online travel portal has started a new section called Small World. The feature showcases select destinations around one's residence or internationally. This a is really novel service - not only users get to 'preview' a holiday location, the approximate travel and lodging expenses are flashed immediately on the screen.

Once you click on a chosen destination, you are taken to a detailed view of the destination with a Google Map 'to' the location, a slideshow of photos from the destination, flight and hotel details arranged in 4 boxes on the screen. The flights with their prices are displayed in a calendar format while the hotels can be rearranged by their tariffs and traveler rating using sliders. The Google Map widget also has markers for Sites, Restaurants, shopping destinations and entertainment hot spots.

The fun part is that Cleartrip has partnered with Yahoo / Flickr and Lonely Planet - the slideshows showcasing are made using photos from flickr ... and are very captivating! This is one of the finest examples of blending Web2.0 (crowdsourcing, wisdom of crowds etc.) with real hard business practice to enhance the value of your product.

Also, while the new Ajax controls like sliders, calendar and slideshow are now commonplace, their integration on a single screen makes the package appealing! Go take a look!

6 years and going strong

2010-05-23T01:06:00.006+05:30

This blog was started on the same day 6 years ago - much has transcended over the internet and in my life since then. Blogging came, became a rage and slowly stabilized. The less serious bloggers moved to Facebook and Twitter while the serious (aka professional) blogs have morphed into full fledged content portals.

For me sitting at neither end of the spectrum- 7 years and 515 posts later - this place continues to live with increased enthusiasm. Nevertheless over the years, this blog has (I hope!) improved in content - less personal updates and more meaningful posts whether on Socio-Political matters, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Education, Management etc or literary experiments such as Stories and Poems or occasional Philosophical Musings.

In fact I have skinned the blog in the new template with an intent to make the site easily surfable and better presented in terms of the variety of content it offers. The blog is also reachable now from a new URL www.nikhilkulkarni.in - the old URL http://the-complete-man.blogspot.com will also continue to remain available.

I hope people continue find my blog interesting enough and I keep blogging for the foreseeable future. Do leave your comments for any suggestions, improvement etc.

A Simple Balance Sheet Example

2010-05-22T18:54:00.008+05:30

More than an year ago during an internal Training, my friend (also colleague @ KPMG) Glyn demonstrated a very simple example for 'books of accounts' namely the balance sheet, P/L statement, Daily Cash book etc. I found it the most effective way to teach accounts to someone new.

The sheet has remained on my desktop since then. I am putting this sheet on my blog for other's to view. The sheet is publicly shared on Google Docs - many Thanks to Glyn for this sheet ...

Slow Money vs. Fast Money - Part III

2010-05-15T17:02:00.006+05:30

The previous two posts [1] [2] which detail my analysis of slow and fast money clearly define that services which form the firmware of our society – infrastructure and utilities – those which are used as a public resource are targets for investment of slow money. Also, such investment is secure, usually subject to several controls and needs to be reliable and long term.

As a corollary such investments are also conservative in terms of the return, and hence not suitable for profit booking. As a result we often find government or quasi government agencies (such as NGO’s) investing in such services. On the other hand, individual wealth – whether in form of PE / VC funds or in form in direct equity – which is aimed at booking high profits is never invested in such fundamental services.

Hence, Banks and Insurance companies - because they form the basic fabric of public financial infrastructure - are also targets of slow money investments. It is for this very reason that Non-Banking Finance companies which usually involve themselves in riskier investments are regulated separately from Banks. Banks on the other hand represent peoples' savings and more importantly they form a part of the payment system through which debts are settled among companies and individuals [3].

However, in the mid 1990's - a lot of fast money started getting pumped into the Banking and Insurance companies worldwide. As a result, the expectations from Banks for their financial performance changed - infusion of fast money meant that Banks and Insurance companies were expected to take riskier bets in order to secure higher profit margins. This was, in my opinion, one of the reasons (apart from several others) which led to the massive debacles in the banking business in 2008-9.

This is probably not the first time that the Industry and the Government went into speculative frenzy. The first time this happened was in the Rail Mania when huge amount of public and private money was poured into Railways assuming it to be a hugely profitable enterprise - while it turned out to be a 'slow money' utility.

The next time this happened was during the much popular and recent dot-com bubble when telecos spent millions on laying wide spans of optic fibre networks.

The Government of India is also heavily trying to push infusion of fast money into infrastructure and financial services. Given the nature of these services / projects - this move may rebound badly. It is important that slow money (mostly raised from public debt) should be majorly used for fundamental sectors of the economy - especially those used to build public utility services.

.concluded

Slow Money vs. Fast Money - Part II

2010-04-22T16:22:00.005+05:30

Continued from here

It is important that both the country and its citizen grow at reasonably matched pace and growth of one does not outpace the other. If a citizen's standard of living increases faster than that of the economy - s/he would be tempted to migrate to an economy/country which matches his/her standard of living creating a drain (brain drain being one of the manifestations). On the other hand, if the economy outpaces the citizen's personal growth, it may often lead to rise in economic disparities leading to social problems.

Since, slow money contributes towards increase in the standard of the economy/country while fast money impacts the standard of individuals, it is imperative that both slow and fast money should coexist in the economy and in the right proportions. Also, fast and slow money should not be interchanged - otherwise it may produce bizzare results.

For example: under communism the state insisted on investing slow money into business leading to setting up of huge industrial houses. Since slow money is non-risky by nature these investments which grew much slower than their capitalist counterparts. More importantly, in countries like India it locked the economy and its citizen into the Hindu rate of growth.

But most importantly, slow money by virtue of being required to remain 'safe' required long winding approval processes and

On the other hand, now the government is heavily insisting on usage of fast money - equity money to be invested in infrastructure and utilities - an area marked by long return cycles and low ROI. Such investments often lead to massive losses in the short term and conversion of fast money into slow money - thus making 'riskworthy' capital even scarce in the economy - often leading to slowdown. The impetus to utilizing fast money for infrastructure has come presumably from the success of opening of telecom (considered a utility and hence target for slow money) to private players.

Indeed mobile phone and broadband networks look like exceptions to the rule which are a utility but across the world are funded by fast money. However, barring emerging economies telecom giants across the world are facing the crunch of slow growth. One should also note the great crashes of 1999 and 2003 when millions were wiped off the balance sheets of fibre optic companies. More importantly, as we are realizing fast, the people who are more likely to continue to make money on telecom are services which utilize the infrastructure - phone companies like Apple/Nokia or VAS companies which offer content over the mobile platform.

Read Part III (Go back to Part I)

Slow Money and Fast Money

2010-04-22T12:22:00.001+05:30

I am no economist, so I find the concepts of M1, M2 ... M4 a little tough to understand. However, based on my own thoughts, I have come up with a new kind of money supply classification - that of fast money and slow money (which overlap but are the same as private and public money).

Slow Money can be defined as money kept in form of long term reserves and used for projects with long gestation periods having assured but low rate of return. Typically, this is money kept in Fixed Deposits, Savings Bonds or other forms of Government borrowings. Such money is often used by the Government or its agents to build infrastructure or institutional framework for the country.

Fast money is typically investor money - invested in ventures with potentially high returns but as much higher risk and with short to medium term return cycle. Such money - as is obvious from its definition - is typically invested in equity or other risky assets like venture capital funds, usually used for ventures whose sustenance may not be assured but could potentially give very high returns.

It may be easy to confuse slow money with public money and fast with private, however - while there may be a lot of overlap - these are not exactly corresponding terminologies. For example, private equity invested in huge infrastructure projects like refineries or utilities may be slow money. The investors in such projects do not intend to withdraw their equity for a long time, but at the same time may not expect the same rate of returns which they expect for other investments.

The central idea in defining these monies is to emphasize that an economy needs both Slow as well as Fast money to grow. Fundamentally - slow money contributes towards increase in the standard of the economy/country as a whole while fast money contributes towards increasing the standard of individual citizens/investors.

Read Part II and Part III

Life after Marriage

2010-04-19T19:22:00.004+05:30

No! This is not a rant! Its just an update on this blog about my life in the past 4 months after my marriage. As expected, life after marriage has been busy marked by weekends spent either traveling to some place or playing host to parents / friends at our newly set up home.

Gudi Padwa at Home

Travel with my Mom-Dad to Sardar Sarovar Dam

In the backdrop - Sardar Sarovar Dam

Dad, Divya, Mom

In the Valley near Sardar Sarovar

My Brother (Abhishek), cousin (Manasi), wife(Divya) and me(Nikhil)!

My In-Laws: Mom, Dad, Wife and Sis-in-law (Neha, sitting)

Visit to Hanging Gardens Mumbai

Visit to Nariman Point

Me and Bro - Riding uphill in the trolley

at Champaran / Pawagarh near Vadodara

Climbing up the last few steps

My Brother: While Climbing Down

For more photos goto: http://picasaweb.google.com/kulkarni.nikhil/56Home?authkey=Gv1sRgCKTai57x8PT73gE#

My First Knol

2010-04-15T12:59:00.002+05:30

When Google Knol first came, it was considered a competitor to Wikipedia - but looking at it now, Knol has evolved into its own type. With facilities like Citation and 'Collect this Knol', Knol has become a tool for people to write articles similar to research papers. Knols may as well be called 'informal' research papers or research papers in draft.

I wrote my first Knol a couple of days back on the subject of 'Classification of tweets'. An excerpt below:

It should be practically possible to build a web application / extension to twitter which will tentatively classify tweets and display them to users in say a newspaper like layout. Thereafter it should also allow users to suggest changes to the classification if they think this is not a correct classification.

Read More

Breaking News: Reliance acquires Codemasters

2010-04-05T19:57:00.003+05:30

Well, not exactly an acquisition, but Reliance Big Entertainment (part of ADAG group and owner of Zapak Games) has acquired a 50% stake in Codemasters a leading British Gaming company.

Codemasters is a big player in European gaming circuit - in the US its content is distributed by none other than Warner Brothers. Codemasters creates games for a plethora of platforms including the leaders XBox, PSP and handheld leader Wii.

According to Zapak.com press release, Zapak will oversee the investment on behalf of Reliance. This is a great news for Zapak which is reaping the benefit of being a part of a larger group company. The development will have far reaching implications for the Indian gaming ecosystem.

Other gaming bigwigs such as IndiaGames too may now need to seek international investment and collaboration to stay afloat
We may see more international games of the PSP/X-Box/Wii family. Prices may also drop.

However, the Indian gaming scene is expected to see more action on the mobile phone based gaming rather than Gaming consoles. This fundamental difference also dampens the direct impact of international collaborations / acquisitions for Indian gaming companies.

Jobs and more ...

2010-03-29T13:26:00.010+05:30

Whether the topic is technology, entrepreneurship or corporate leadership - Steve Jobs is definitely a case study worth researching. His iconic leadership style, his resounding success with technology lifestyle products as well as animation movie world and his valiant turnaround of Apple - a company which he co-founded but was kicked out from.

However, Steve is also a case study for those of us interested in philosophy, self help, and spirituality. Jobs started as an arrogant, over-the-top young prodigy CEO. Everything about him was perfect from his cute boy looks to the elegant ideas he had. In those days, he looked no less than Tom Cruise.

But he soon found trouble at his doors when both his personal and professional life tanked. He was officially ousted from working on his pet project - the Mac, and was later relieved of his position as the chairman of Apple forcing him to quit Apple altogether. In personal life, his history of of LSD and hippy lifestyle, his failure to acknowledge parentage of his daughter Lisa often found more mention in media than his technology breakthroughs.

He is himself known to have said:

I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It’s very character-building. [ref]

What followed NeXT (pun intended) was a series of failure and 10 long years of perseverance which taught him above all else - humility. Bad health which compounded his troubles during these years made him loose not his steam but definitely his external appearance.

Finally when he tasted success again through Pixar - he was a much mellowed personality - his good looks replaced by a worn bearded face. What is remarkable thereafter is how Jobs recovered his position salvaging the dying Apple in the process. Also notable is that he still doesn't believe in being a stereotype, but creating a type of his own. Take for example his "official attire" of black turtleneck; his absolute allergy to business formals (which even Bill Gates embraced).

While not all of us may be lucky to return life's aces with the kind of success that Jobs has done, yet his story is not only full of learning, but an inspiration that even after you loose your everything - your own company, your good looks - you can still rebound in life.

As they say - Fortune favours the brave! There is no better example than Steve Jobs to illustrate this.

References:

Workaholism

2010-03-25T13:21:00.003+05:30

Here's a quote from the first chapter of the book Rework (latest from the 37signals camp):

Not only is workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve.

First off, working like that just isn’t sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes— and it will— it’ll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime.
Workaholics make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for “merely” working reasonable hours. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality—people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren’t really being productive.

If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth
extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

While I always find 37signals stuff to be a bit extreme, yet the above I completely believe when it comes to people who are habitual late-sitters in office. In fact, I would prefer colleague who insists on going home on time and hence tries his/her best to finish work before 5-6 PM.

Take a scenario - you have 2 tasks A and B to finish and its about 2 PM. The one who wants to go home on time will plan to finish Task A by 4 and get on to Task B immediately - s/he may not finish Task B by 6, but will definitely complete it by 7PM and go home.

One who says he plans to sit late to finish the work, will tend to overshoot the deadline for Task A, finishing it say by 5PM, take a snack break and then get on to Task B. Now, if he needs help from someone else for Task B, chances are that the other person will be driving home or at home - may or may not be able to help. Even if there is no dependency, your work efficiency will anyway go down after 8PM, its more than likely that if you get stuck, you'd end up postponing the completion of Task B to the next morning. Worse still, since you worked late today, you'd end up coming in late the next morning and thus Task B would probably be complete only by late afternoon the next day!

I guess, its a straight logic that people who insist on work life balance are usually the more productive than those who work late.

Some photos from my mobile

2010-03-15T17:37:00.004+05:30

Does the Budget Really Matter? Yes!

2010-02-26T14:44:00.003+05:30

Mahesh Murthy argues here that the budget does not matter any more - especially not to entrepreneurs. He laments that the booty being promised for special focus areas is not meant for genuine entrepreneurs but for those who are politically connected.

While I may not disagree with Mahesh on the fact that most funds outlay on Govt. schemes benefits the big co's and politically connected, I don't agree a wee bit with him that the budget does not matter to an entrepreneur. For example, here's how this year's budget announcements may help entrepreneurs:

Now you can hire an individual for upto 1.6 lakhs and forget anything about paying taxes to the Govt on his behalf - that's substantial admin cost savings for a small firm
If you are a bootstrapper, funding your business with your salary or of a spouse/friend - you have a little more cushion for your startup
If you are selling a service to end consumer, you know know that they have a little more money in their hands to invest/spend which you could attract to your product/ service
If you are a start-up in clean energy, the rising oil prices and tax breaks on CFL's help increase the sense of urgency and awareness (respectively) in the public in moving towards a cleaner alternative and reducing their fuel costs
If you are a small technology/ services company, you know that Nandan Nilekani's UID project will require lots of manpower and technology to provide for filling up a national database. So while the main software may be made by an Infosys / Wipro / TCS - you will still be able to reap the downstream flow of funds

There can be many more reasons depending on the sector which you are in - discarding the role of the government may be the biggest mistake that the intelligentsia of India can do! I prefer intellectuals like Nilekani and Tharoor who are going into the system to change it than those like Murthy who are just ridiculing it from the fence!

New Tax structure paves way for DTC next yr

2010-02-26T13:41:00.001+05:30

Budget Update:

From: http://beta.profit.ndtv.com/news/show/relief-for-60-income-tax-payers-in-budget-27658

FM prunes tax rates:

Income up to Rs 1.6 lakh - nil

Income above Rs 1.6 lakh and up to Rs 5 lakh - 10 per cent

Income above Rs 5 lakh and up to Rs 8 lakh - 20 per cent

Income above Rs 8 lakh - 30 per cent.

New tax rates would offer relief to 60 per cent of taxpayers, the finance minister said.

Additional deduction of Rs 20,000 allowed on long-term infrastructure bonds for income tax payers; this is above Rs one lakh on saving instruments allowed already.

Investment linked tax deductions to be allowed to two-star hotels anywhere in the country.

With simplification of the Tax regime proposed above by the FM in this budget, a way has been paved for a Direct Tax Regime - which the FM has confirmed will go live from next year (April 1, 2011).

What is Direct Tax Code (DTC)?

How Tolstoy inspired Gandhi's method of non-violence

2010-02-17T19:44:00.006+05:30

Here are quotes from Leo Tolstoy's "Letter to a Hindu" written to Mahatma Gandhi:

If the English have enslaved the people of India it is just because the latter recognized, and still recognize, force as the fundamental principle of the social order. In accord with that principle they submitted to their little rajahs, and on their behalf struggled against one another, fought the Europeans, the English, and are now trying to fight with them again. A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions.

Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?

When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy.

Is it not the same thing with the millions of people who submit to thousands or even to hundreds, of others - of their own or other nations? If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

If you clear any long winding sentences in this text - it begs to ask why the superior power of arms is at all a factor in controlling the masses. Read between the lines, Tolstoy is telling Gandhi to not fight the British Raj to its own strengths but invent new rules of the game which will enable Gandhi/Indians to play to his/their strengths.

He further writes:

As soon as men live entirely in [their] accord ... aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.

Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.

Tolstoy is merely hinting but gives a clear enough indication to Gandhi to develop a tool which does not embrace violence but uses love to defeat the enemy.

Read the exchanges for more insights if you wish.

When (the online) God failed its followers

2010-02-12T17:13:00.004+05:30

Its just a coincidence that Google and God both have the same starting letters - but sometimes for computer illiterate users of the Web, it is as much a fact.

Millions of people in the world do not know about the Web before Google. For them Google is not just a search engine but the window to the web - to permit some exaggeration - the web itself. (Doesn't that remind you of Krsna's quote from the Gita - I am the world ..)

So some such people were a couple of days back trying to log on to Facebook. Their modus operandi was search "facebook login" in Google, click the first link available. Even my father - who comes into the category of users who learnt surfing only AFTER Google - used to reach my blog. (If you thought this was incredulous, you are either a geek or a old-timer on the web who still relies on remembering URL's of sites you visit to reach them)

With my father, this had once lead to an amusing situation when he was not able to locate my blog as it had temporarily moved to #2 search result (for "Nikhil Kulkarni"). While this was quite harmless for my father, the same thing when happened to "facebook login" search term became a big problem for several users.

An article by ReadWriteWeb had temporarily replaced the Facebook homepage as the #1 search result. People hence landed on this article page, and some of them thinking that this was the new Facebook started putting in comments like:

I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all?
I was just learning,why would you mess it up?
This is such a mess I can't do a thing on my facebook .The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can't even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!
now that you have managed to mess up the whole system how do i get back to login?

While the geek community laughed loud on this matter, the blog concerned has raised a very valid question here:

If this many of them can't login to Facebook by typing that into Google and clicking on the first thing they see, it's probably not them that are wrong, it's Google.

Indeed - if so many users are now using Google to reach their sites, than remembering the URL, shouldn't Google be creating a new top result category. Any popular term will have to be associated with brands that it belongs to and a placeholder for the brand should be the "sticky" URL posted on the top?

On second thoughts, does this not make the Google homepage unchangeable? And is that something good for the web - does it not smell of socialism to freeze the Google homepage (and keep it bereft of innovations) just because some "challenged" users cannot understand how to surf the web? That's the philosophical angle to it :-)

What's wrong with innovation programs?

2010-02-11T12:45:00.004+05:30

Whether its TCS, Infosys or IBM - companies have at different times set up innovation cells and programs to encourage innovation. However, hardly any new innovations come out of such programs - leave alone transformational ones. The reason for failure of these programs - started with the most well meaning intentions - is highlighted in a talk by Google's CIO Douglas Merrill on Innovation at Google (video below).

The video is not about these companies, or a criticism of innovation management practices. It simply is about defining innovation and then describing how innovation is managed at Google.

The key highlight is towards the middle of the video when Douglas explains that innovation at Google is primarily chaotic. There are no committees to assess projects, no formal budgets, no approvals nothing! Here's what they do (PS: this is not a quote from the video):

Google simply lets its engineers spend 20% time on their projects - thereafter it monitors these projects based on simple rules - like no of users, or no of CPU cycles saved - depending upon the objective of the project.

If a project is doing well - then the engineer may be given more resources (which includes more than 20% of his own time and more engineers, plus technical resources like servers and stuff) to the project. If the project is doing bad then it may not receive these benefits, but there are NO PENALTIES.

This approach is in line with the most important statement Douglas makes in the video - "Reward risks and don't penalize failures".

There are other important aspects of Google's approach - 'listening to users' for their problems - Google does this by studying usage patters, conducting eye movement tests, receiving lots of email from users etc. Once the problems are identified, comes the next approach - crowdsourcing. The problem identified is thrown open to Googlers at large and crowdsourcing is used to come up with many solutions. Most solutions are tested on experimental basis and the successful one is implemented.

And finally, "East your own dog Food" - meaning all new Google products (or new features) are first released to Googlers inside - another form of crowdsourcing. This means that Googlers with their different sized monitors, different browsers, different settings and different intentions of using the product are able to quickly post a barrage of bugs from compatibility to use case testing. All this without the need for a "well formed process" of testing.

The above also means that Googlers are not just allowed but encouraged to customize their usage - a monitor, browser, settings etc of their choice. This is opposite of what Indian tech companies resort to: Standardization and that too Hitler style - "Don't visit this site", "don't use 'x' browser", "we decide what hardware you need" .. and so on. In several companies I know of, even the "Settings" menu on browsers is disabled.

It is towards the end that Douglas himself says that having an organized process like approvals, making of business cases, evaluation committees - only act as gatekeepers making it difficult for the enthusiastic risk taking innovators to even start their work, leave alone complete it.

I would recommend this video to anyone who is even remotely interested in innovation! (It's a long video though - 57 mins- see it in a quite time).

PS: 100% credits to Shubham for pointing me to this video

Democracy imperfect

2010-02-09T13:34:00.003+05:30

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time" - Winston Churchill, 1947

This Op-ed in the Times by Paul Krugman could as well have been written for India.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

Whether its a regional movie like Jhenda (also remember protests against Ashutosh Gowarikar's Jodha-Akbar) or a comment by SRK on IPL, any political party or son of a politician objects and brings half the nation's media to attention and sometimes even holds the Govt's policy decisions to ransom.

Just explains that democracy as practiced across the world is far from perfect!

Blogger FTP shutting down

2010-02-08T17:09:00.008+05:30

Following Google-Blogger's 22 January announcement that blogger will be pulling the plug for websites/blogs published via FTP through blogger, there has been a furore on the internet.

Without getting into criticism myself, I am trying to analyze the repercussions on sites using this service. For more details on who's impacted and blogger team's efforts to ease the load, go here.

Impacted Websites i.e. those using the FTP publishing feature like www.arbitmba.com, now have two options:

Move their Site to Blogger's hosting via the custom domain functionality or
Start using a different blog management software like Wordpress.org

In both cases you will have to perform a migration activity, but as far I have studied, neither migration is going be any more or any less painful than the other. In both cases some functionalities will have to be recoded.

Moving to Blogger Custom Domain

Pros

Hosting on Google's servers - no hassles of hosting provider
Blogger platform for eternity
New XML template, ability to add blogger / iGoogle widgets

Cons

Old functionalities coded for HTML version of blogger pages will definitely not work in new blogger. Bloggers may be able to recode few simple JScripts and find inbuilt blogger widgets for some others - but there will definitely be some loss of functionality to sites which were heavily customized.
By moving New Blogger XML based template bloggers will be limited by blogger supported widgets only. From future perspective if they have to add any functionality, they have to search an existing widget for that purpose. It will not be possible to simply code it in Javascript and add to the site unless you are well versed with the new XML based blogger template.
New Blogger does not support images - instead it provides a Picasa account for uploading all images. This means that all images will have to be stored on a Picasa account and will get embedded in pages from the Picasa album.
Loss of site URL hierarchy - As above, since images will be on Picasa and not the site, you will loose our site URL hierarchy also.
No PHP support - this is not a very important thing because most blogger based sites usually do not used much PHP on the site. If you were using PHP script to generate the Tag Clouds (because classic template did not support tags) - then don't worry as tag clouds anyway be available in the new blogger as a widget.

Check this link: http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html and search for "@eccentriclee" - and read after that for details on the "real" cons.

Move to other FTP/Blogging Software

Wordpress.org is a software which can be "installed" on our site to continue to host our site as you were doing using blogger.

Pros

Continued FTP support
Retention of site URL hierarchy as before
PHP support available
Old and new Javascripts etc and custom widgets can be used without need to recode
Content from any site can be linked (like a twitter box etc) as widgets using simple HTML inserts - you are not limited to any widgets made especially for blogger or any other platform
One Big pro is that wordpress supports static pages (link) a feature not provided by blogger FTP or custom domains

Cons

Continued dependence of your hosting service
Need to "install" wordpress.org on your website.
One has to take complete ownership of the site
Some existing functionalities and widgets like Tag Cloud will have to be recoded to be able to run on wordpress engine

Read some more here.

Conclusion

All other considerations apart, the most important aspect here is the URL hierarchy and ability to store images on your domain (to retain Google Juice) - if you move to custom domain, your images will be stored on a Picasa Album while in case of WordPress.org, they will continue to be stored on your URL. This means that if your images were appearing in Google searches directly, you loose that referral traffic on moving to Custom Domains.

Its clearly an IT Strategy decision for bloggers / amateur site managers, something like whether to stick to MS Office or move to OpenOffice:

blogger is like MS Office i.e. lock-in: It will provide full support and guarantee for its performance provided you stay within what it offers. You can't ask for too many customizations
Wordpress.org is like OpenOffice - you can customize it whichever way you want but you must do it all yourself. The product comes with no support service.

We at www.arbitmba.com have decided to move to Wordpress.org hosting. I am still researching on effective and simple ways to do this - this link looks good for starters. You can Google for more.

If you happen to find anything useful, or publish on similar lines, do leave your URL in comments.

Update:

Check this link on how to migrate to wordpress:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/361156?replies=8#post-1385976

and this one too! (don't forget to browse through the comments apart from the main post):

http://benfrain.com/notepad/2009/04/migrating-from-ftp-based-blogger-to-wordpress.html

Who is fighting for Mumbai?

2010-02-04T15:10:00.007+05:30

As I picked up the newspaper today expecting more information on what more steps the outgoing RBI Governor Subbarao would take to curb inflation, I was greeted to my utter distaste by a synopsis of the verbal duel between MNS-Sena-Congress.

For all the heat being generated in this Mumbai-for-Marathis and Mumbai-for-India debate, no one in particular is actually fighting for Mumbai's own cause. The MNS-Sena is fighting for rights of Marathis in Mumbai, Congress-RSS for rights of non-Marathis in Mumbai. But no one is addressing the problems of the average citizen in Mumbai - Marathi or non-Marathi!

The BMC announced its annual budget yesterday - a news which got buried, thanks to the cacophony on Marathi Manoos issue [probably raised on purpose by the Sena to avoid attention to the budget]. The budget at best can be described as 'barely essential' if not insufficient. The budget of Rs 20,417 crore has shown an increase of merely 4 per cent in comparison to last year’s budget.

No new projects will be undertaken and a few projects such as concretising of roads, reconstruction of hospitals and underground parking lots at Crawford Market have been postponed[1]. No new taxes have been introduced, but the BMC in spite of being the richest Municipality in the country is in deficit of Rs 6000 Cr only to complete existing projects [2]. It is noteworthy that this is in spite of most projects being Build-Operate-Transfer or Public-Private-Partnerships[3].

Mumbai is the metropolitan of the country - contributes most in terms of national income, houses most people, packing them to maximum density, is situated in one of the country most environmentally critical zones, generates most employment - and is the largest city. Cities of the scale of Mumbai need a completely different set of infrastructure.

Similar cities across the world are equipped with several amenities like:

High density Rapid Transport systems such as Metro Train and trams
Focussed and highly empowered local governments (ex. Mayor Council)
Advanced civic amenities systems
Huge Parks and other citizen friendly city layouts. [PS: The Mumbai Eye - to be built on the lines of London Eye - does not find a mention in BMC Budget this year.]

Mumbai with its 22 million people has hardly any of the above. In comparison, Delhi - whether because of the commonwealth games or because of it being the seat of Central Govt - has all of the above. The recent spat between the Sena (which controls the BMC) and the Congress - is definitely not going to help bridge this gap.

The only people who in some way are trying to improve life in the city are citizen groups. Some of them are working on cleaning the city, protecting ecology, saving water, some to educate slums and some to spread democratic awareness. Last year the Juhu Citizens' Welfare Group (JCWG) also announced a citizens' consensus candidate for the Andheri (West) constituency.

But infrastructure development and governance reform cannot be brought about by standalone citizen groups. Politicians are the only agents who can bring about such large scale changes.

Unfortunately politicians from Maharashtra (with exception of Mr. Pawar) have increasingly limited themselves to the state, limiting their ability to negotiate funds for the state or for Mumbai as a city. The state and the city's politicians would serve a much better purpose if they establish themselves more firmly in the national political corridors they rather than roar in Dombivili.

Making Peace!

2010-01-29T23:24:00.003+05:30

The thought of death sparks a slew of emotions in one’s mind – grief, anxiety and sometimes anger - with me it also sparks a reflective mood. The thought of death makes you humble.

Everyday we keep running to build our lives – achieve professional success, set up a home, innovate, change the world – Chasing Daylight. But death reminds you that none of this matters at the final hour – not the money you’ve earned or the number of people who know you (who would mourn you), or even what you leave the world as! Once you are gone – its all over, in one quick shot, its gone!

Its too early for me to contemplate what one will be looking at when the final hour nears. All I can contemplate today is what if the final hour was to arrive now? Would I be happy? May be not. Would I be satisfied – may be ... yes.

A book that I read a couple of days back – Chasing Daylight – made me realize even more that in our daily rigmarole to build our lives, its important to stop and take stock. The book was written by an ex-KPMG (US) CEO who was diagnosed with a terminal ailment just before moving to the uppermost echelons in KPMG International.

In the book he described how he spent the last few months of his life, how none of the professional success hadn’t meant satisfaction, and how he reconnected with people whom he’d touched during his lifetime to make peace with himself.

‘Making Peace’ – the term ‘made peace’ reminds me of a scene from the movie Forrest Gump when Forrest and his crippled erstwhile army officer Lieutenant Dang brave through a storm, trawl loads of fish and make lots of money.

At this point, Lieutenant Dang, after having lived through a very sordid life of a handicap, is finally happy having achieved something in his life. He for the first time thanks Forrest for saving his life, and swims away from their boat. Forrest is heard in the background expressing – “I think he made his peace with himself”.

‘Making Peace’ - with the world, with yourself – but not just before you die it's something one needs to do every now and then. Once you make your peace, you don’t mind meeting the final hour, yet you are even more ready to take on life!

Idiotic times

2010-01-19T15:54:00.006+05:30

3 idiots hit the theaters on the day I got married and is being hailed as the biggest grosser ever - while nowadays every new film which reaches even a decent box office milestone is hailed as the biggest grosser ever - 3 idiots is indeed a nice film.

Raju Hirani has developed this very unique ability to transform real life into drama. Which is why I feel that the next movie Rajkumar makes should be on entrepreneurs. Now that India's most successful entrepreneur Dhirubhai is already taken (Guru), he could pick up a Kishore Biyani (Big Bazaar) or Sanjeev Bhikchandani (Naukri.com). But my personal pick would be Steve Jobbs or Bill Gates - the only problem being that these characters may not ring a bell with the Bollywood audience.

Coming back to 3 idiots - there were a few scenes which I could relate to - one of them was the suicide scene, but its too vexing to talk about memories which it sparked.

The other scene which touched me was where Sharman Joshi's character faces the interview panel. While, I did not quite agree with the outcome of the scene - the lines of the character were veridical. The amount of hue and cry made about competition and the importance of scoring-and-being-at-the-top in the Indian society (schools, homes, friends) does scare the shit out of students.

I felt this fear myself and have even seen some of my batchmates breaking down under it. As Sharman's character explains - when you leave your school and enter an meritorious engineering college and find that each student there was among the top 5 in his respective school, you do feel intimidated and some students (especially those coming from humble background) may loose the hope of success thereafter.

Such loss of self belief is often a self fulfilling prophecy. For example: since, you do not hope to score well, you don't study hard in the first place resulting in a bad result. It usually takes a super-failure (like the suicide of Sharman in the movie or less dramatic failing a semester exam) followed by a surprise success which marks the phoenix like rise which breaks the I-am-not-capable myth for the individual.

And more often than not, once a person has come through such a metamorphosis, the confidence thereafter is too tough to break. Once you have come through a bottom-of-the-pit-failure-and-riding-to-success experience, you finally learn to believe that 'main kuchh na kuchh to kar hi loonga' as exclaims the character in the movie.

As I said earlier though, I did not quite agree with the outcome of the scene. A more fit outcome would have been Sharman being rejected in the interview and then going to start his own business and making a super success out of it - coming back to ICE for recruitments. Of course, this would have taken another movie for Raju Hirani and eroded the climax of the movie.

All in all - while the current success of the movie is clearly overhyped - 3 idiots does justice to the topic it tried to address and adds a lot of chutzpah to the dry discourse on the subject of 'need to improve education'.

Update

The acting credits are worth a mention ...

I liked Madhavan and Sharman more than I liked Aamir. You could blame that on over-expectation from Aamir, but frankly he has become too predictable now.

One name which deserves mention for the most authentic and brazen acting is Omi Vaidya - the 'Chatur' in 3 idiots. Not only his depiction of a mugging nerd in the first half is authentic, but the portrayal of slightly demented corporate honcho is purrrfect!

The Courtship

2009-12-13T23:32:00.004+05:30

I haven't updated much about my personal life during the past 6 months ... probably the most 'unusual' 6 months of my life. I met Divya exactly 6 months ago on July 12th (this was at the Oberoi Mall, Goregaon), and probably the first time I drove her back to her office in KulupwadiBorivali (also the locality where she stays .. till now).

Sidethought: I am feeling spooky about my life again! My courtship is ending in an exact 6 months (a limit I secretly desired for my courtship period). I got engaged on 15th August and am getting married on 25th December. Something is really spooky ... why does my life have so many 'perfect' endings?

Since then there have been numerous trips to Borivali - in fact averaging 2 per week - one each on Saturdays and Sundays. Today, as I was driving back on the Western Express, I suddenly felt nostalgic realizing the fact that today was the last time I dropped Divya off to 'her' home in Borivali; the last time I was driving back as a bachelor from Borivali to Powai; the last weekend of continuous trips to and from Borivali was almost over ...

I endured a lot on this road in the last 6 months .. the making of the Kandivali (Times of India) flyover and the resulting dreaded traffic jam, the loads of cars from JVLR to Malad moving at snails pace, the crappy cab and call center drivers, the potholed turning from WE Highway into the JVLR at Jogeshwari and numerous sights of Oberoi Mall - getting the butterfly in my stomach everytime I cross it.

In the meanwhile, Divya who came in my life as fresh breeze on a a newly discovered hillock has become inseparable part of my life - more so without letting me feel so much in the intervening period. My life which felt just about ok till I met her, now feels enriched and fulfilled by the voids she filled in me, which I never knew existed.

Another sopan in life comes to an end - while my bachelorhood ends officially this Christmas - practically, today marks the end of my courtship period!

PS: Do visit my marriage invitation website .. www.divnik.in

PPS: Related posts - the other sopans in my life:

How To Design A Website

2009-12-13T13:13:00.003+05:30

A presentation I gave at a 'mock training session' during an adult learning workshop organized at KPMG.

Do Contact me if you need more inputs than this presentation.

And Btw ... as many would know, I am getting married on this Christmas - the wedding invite is at the website www.divnik.in (which is the screenshot that you see below on the title slide)!

Do visit ... and comments invited.

How To Design A Website

View more presentations from Nikhil Kulkarni.

StRoKe of a Lightening

2009-12-13T09:47:00.004+05:30

There are some actors who are attractive, some who can act well and one in a billion that are StRoKe of lightening. Shah Rukh is a stroke. Even the word stroke has his initials. http://bit.ly/7mg4Xo

Some quotes from Retd. Col. R K Kapoor's interview (maker of Fauji) :

(During Audition for Fauji) I asked them to fight me like an enemy. I punched a couple of them really hard. But Shah Rukh, in his turn, gave me the punch of my life. He hit me so hard that I saw stars in the daylight. Then, I knew he had something in him apart from a charismatic face. I had found my Abhimanyu Rai.

What has worked for Shah Rukh is that he is universal. He is not an angry young man. Neither is he a `sanyasi' or a lover boy. He is all of them and still none of them.

Other SRK related posts: Chak De Review, OSO review

How to spark a ‘product innovation’ revolution in India?

2009-12-05T12:24:00.005+05:30

Continued From: Why doesn’t Indian startup ecosystem churn out product companies?

Let me start by picking up a few ideas from Paul Graham.

Not Buildings
If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings. But it's the people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings. I read occasionally about attempts to set up "technology parks" in other places, as if the active ingredient of Silicon Valley were the office space.

Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a silicon valley, because the key stage in the life of a startup happens before they want that kind of space. The key stage is when they're three guys operating out of an apartment.

So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a company. And to reproduce that you need those people.

Universities
The exciting thing is, [if] all you need are the people, If you could attract a critical mass of nerds and investors to live somewhere, you could reproduce Silicon Valley. And both groups are highly mobile. They'll go where life is good. So what makes a place good to them?

What nerds like is other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities. In theory there could be other ways to attract them, but so far universities seem to be indispensable. Within the US, there are no technology hubs without first-rate universities-- or at least, first-rate computer science departments.

Personality
… merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a silicon valley. To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town ... where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate.

Most nerds like quieter pleasures. They like cafes instead of clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings. ... they like well-preserved old neighborhoods instead of cookie-cutter suburbs, and locally-owned shops and restaurants instead of national chains. Like the rest of the creative class, they want to live somewhere with personality.

One reason why Bangalore could rise - though it is nothing close to Silicon Valley - is because it contains many elements described above. Bangalore when it started growing into an IT hub was a town of HAL, DRDO and other quasi-academic research institutions; it had a decent presence of educational institutions, and most importantly it was a city with Personality as described by Paul above.

The Bangalore of today (or the new Bengaluru) however does not continue to be the same city as it used to be in the 80s-early 90s. Its like any other Metropolis - Mumbai or Delhi. So while new businesses will continue to be incubated in Bangalore, so will they be in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai - I doubt if we will see game changers coming from here. Pune is a possible opportunity, but it has also been saddled with a huge IT Park in Hinjewadi and may soon loose the window of being the 'town of product startups'.

But what Paul has described in the elements of a 'Silicon Valley Ecosystem' is precisely what the PSU Townships of 70s-80s were - calm, quite, decent infrastructure and most of them also have good colleges / universities around them. In fact, one thing which I have observed personally is that a good number of corporate professionals in India today have had an upbringing in such townships - several corporate honchos and MBA's today are wards of PSU employees.

However, the major difference between an Indian 'Valley' (aka PSU town) and The Silicon Valley is - a risk taking culture and unbridled optimism. Most erstwhile PSU towns are shrinking or giving way to commercial cities as Government's investments reduce to a trickle, employee attrition combined with outsourcing reduce the number of people - the infrastructure in these towns is crippling for the want to maintenance. The 'optimism' is definitely going away , if at all it existed all these years.

So here's what I propose!

The location

Lets pick up one or more PSU towns in India with decent infrastructure and a University close by. Request the PSU / govt to lease out its ailing/dilapidated buildings, land, amenities for a cheap rental to build a startup park. These start up parks will offer cheap office spaces and infrastructure say using WiMaX to provide cheap internet. May be a few old employee quarters could be thrown in as residential suppliments as well.

Location Options: Bhopal (BHEL), Bhilai (SAIL), Rourkela (SAIL), Durgapur (SAIL), Tiruchirapalli (BHEL), Panvel (ONGC / JNPT), Korba (NTPC), Vadodara (IOCL / ONGC), Dona Paula - Goa (NIO), Noida (NTPC)

The operating model

Techcrunch has a mention of Freeman Murray's Y-combinator style venture funding model. I propose a group of industrialists, former entrepreneurs and some Govt funding could be used to kick start such a Y-combinator style fund (I know this is a tough part - but getting the Govt to agree to part with its PSU's assets would be harder!)

The Final Mix

The final mix to induce product companies needs to worked out with presence of efficient partners - entrepreneurs, technologists, visionaries - who will need to join an evangelization effort; who will also be out venture funding company's mentors. As techCrunch puts it:

The truth is India’s dream of building the next big fast-growing powerhouses will have less to do with angel money or Western venture money and more to do with getting around that ingrained fear of risk-taking.

Walking away from a prestigious and high-paying multinational job when you don’t have an angel to catch you isn’t easy, especially in a year when India has seen some of the first corporate layoffs.

Criticism invited!

Update:

I found someone doing it - he's chosen Chandigarh, not a bad choice I'd say! Way to go L-Pad - all the very best from me!

Why doesn’t Indian startup ecosystem churn out product companies?

2009-12-05T08:50:00.007+05:30

Look at most successful Indian startups or look at a broader area of ventures (including initiatives by large businesses) in general; Tech or non-tech - what is clearly evident is the abundance of success stories in the services sector and an equivalent dearth of product based businesses.

In fact, if I were to think up successful product venture from India - only 2 names come to my mind: PureIt from HUL in the consumer products space and Slideshare in the web space. (I am counting out Zoho here because the company is based out of the US and use India only as a ODC - essentially turning India operations as mere services arm.)

A quick Google Search on the subject will reveal few reasons for this; for example:

Lack of deep pockets of Indian VC's to fund serious research and hence Indian entrepreneurs can’t afford to take big bets
Failures are not welcome in India
Lack of 'optimism' in the Indian consumer - hence very sluggish adoption of new 'products'
Aping the west culture where only 're-engineering' of already successful products in the west are welcome in India

I believe there is one more reason which is not highlighted anywhere [except here] - the meteoric rise of Indian IT Services industry. Yes - a mushrooming services industry in India is a bane for 'product innovation'.

Product startups have a higher risk associated than services who are much more agile in changing their offerings to suit the market. If you are working on a product, you first need more time to reach the markets and you may have to wait for several years till its usage picks up.

Services are much easier to plug and play - you innovate on a services model, launch it quicker, if it doesn't work, you switch it off - but you can switch it on again quickly if ever the market re-emerges. This also makes services a much lower budget investment than products.

Now as services startups started growing more and more aggregate investment is going the services way. Even large business houses like the Tata's have concentrated on building a software services business and have hardly invested in 'building products' (TCS B@NCS - the core banking product was actually acquired post development from an Australian company FNS).

Now the causality is being tilted on its head and people (even successful entrepreneurs) are arguing that “small” budget investments are what are needed for Indian ventures. This perspective is literally a killing blow to product businesses in India.

Small budget funding is required for Indian ventures – agreed. Especially service based or those requiring only ‘local innovations’ like new delivery channels or new ways of using new technologies. Case in point are customized T-shirt websites which are sprouting in every city and town in India.

But these should just be (in an ideal scenario) 50% of the venture ecosystem. There are other kind of ventures, especially those which trigger sweeping changes in the way we work – Google for example! Or CISCO or Nortel - they require years of incubation and untiring commitment – high power brains – and sometimes expensive equipment too. All these need money – lots of it!

The other side of the story is the Indian domestic market being extremely price sensitive. So what do you do to spark a ‘product innovation’ revolution in India?

Will try to explore some thoughts in the next post ...

Some thoughts on University Education in India

2009-11-16T17:19:00.003+05:30

Recently Sam Pitroda recently mentioned that - "too much focus on engineering and medical education has created a situation in India where liberal arts really did not get the kind of attention it deserved." He said:

"A good liberal arts education is important to produce leaders. India has now begun to recognizse that we need not only world class engineering education, we also need world-class liberal arts education. And, we agree that the model we have in (University of) Chicago or Harvard is a model that we need to look at, but it needs to be Indianised - it has to be of a local context."

Clearly, Pitroda is talking about the skewed model of having competitive exams for professional courses only which has created a void in liberal arts education in India.

Unlike US system, Indian universities do not have a uniform SAT for admission across disciplines – so while for entry to professional courses like engineering and medicine we rely on AIEEE/SEEE and PMT/CPMT’s but for non-professional courses we rely on class 12th scores. This creates an imbalance in the evaluation criteria for non-professional courses because class 12th is a qualifying exam and not a competitive exam. It is a measure of one’s qualification in a particular subject and not his/her aptitude in general.

What is the result of this skewed mis-representation? The result is that, in India academic subjects are ranked in terms of the kind of people who opt for them. So Engineering and Medicine seem to come first, then would come other professional courses like Management and Sciences (especially Computer Science which nowadays ensures a good job in an IT company) and then come humanities like Economics and History, pure arts coming the last.

But is it that there are no great jobs in the field of history or economics? Certainly not, not in a country headed by an Economist! However, due to the socio-hierarchal status accorded to our study courses often people with high levels of aptitude are qualified only in engineering or medicine and not in humanities and arts. So you end up finding engineers heading economic/commercial institutions (For example S.B. Bhave who heads the SEBI) or educational boards.

Even worse, you may find people qualified but not with great aptitude heading institutions for want of properly qualified individuals with high aptitude (I confess this statement is a little controversial but its not a generic one I am making – this may happen only in specific cases).

This cycle is created because people with high aptitude are being forced by a flawed system to take up a certain type of qualifications and certain type qualifications being shunned by the society at large. It in fact takes a lot of personal daring to choose a subject of humanities even if you are a great student - and then too hear several noises of discontent from the society as to “why you are destroying your career!” - which is quite unfortunate!!

What needs to be done to solve this cycle.

A common aptitude test needs to be set up for entry to any course in any university in India
People need to be encouraged to take up all kinds of subjects
Corporate need to be influenced to recruit people with proper of qualifications for suitable jobs than with high aptitude only

However, recognizing the size of our population we also need to restructure our non-professional courses in order to ensure that talented individuals can find good ‘placements’ even without opting for professional courses.

One idea is to run every course in 2 modes: Basic and Advanced. People with high SAT scores can take up the advanced mode so as to ensure better “placements” and job offers on completion. This may be a bit unfair in the short run, but can be dismantled in the long run once the system has self-corrected itself and we have people with good aptitude choosing qualifications unabashedly.

Case Studies

The above ideas may look to be preposterous to most of us accustomed to live in a world where most of our peers choose engineering / medicine over commerce or arts. However, the corrective trend has been seen in the microcosm of the IT industry.

In the early years of the IT boom when most IT companies were recruiting heavily, they started recruiting students from all streams (from Mechnical to Civil engrs) of IITs/NITs for IT / Software jobs. However, as number of qualified people in the computer science, IT electronics engineering streams increased, this trend tapered. Now, mechanical engineers from an IIT are more likely to take up jobs which require their aptitude in their own stream than join an IT company which recruit them only to be retrained to code software.

Another case is that of the Armed Forces which ensure that all regiments of the Army are staffed with equally skilled officers by ensuring that IMA graduates are assigned regiments not merely by merit but by dividing them into different blocks by aptitude and distributing students from each block to different regiments.

Demise of a Bank*

2009-11-13T08:46:00.009+05:30

"It was his child - the bank, how could he let it die?" - these were the thoughts which reverberated in Gopaldas's mind on that cold winter morning as he sipped his morning tea before readying himself for office .... for the last time, he thought.

But had it not been for him, the Bank would have been sold out long ago. Samaj Uday Cooperative Bank was an ailing bank and so small in its operations that apart from its own depositors and borrowers, hardly anyone knew about the Bank. Started in the early years of Indian independence by a group of small traders along Gandhian principles - the Bank's main aim was to provide credit to small traders and businessmen.

Gopaldas had joined the Bank in September 1962, the month he remembered so precisely because it was the month India went to war with China. He had joined as a junior clerk but his diligence in the early years saw him rise fast and become an officer by the time he got married.

By 1984 he was among the senior management of the small Bank, also thanks to many senior officers who quit to join some newly Nationalized banks. He also by then had a small stake in the Bank itself, thanks to a policy set by the original founders of transferring ownership to upcoming management who were in due course to replace the older trustees.

But that was as good as it got. When the Bank was set up, its borrowers were from the same circles as the trustees and the founders - Gandhian in thought, they started businesses for the benevolent reasons like benefit of public, generation of jobs, proliferation of swadeshi etc. More importantly, they were also worthy creditors, paying their dues in time.

In time, while the Bank remained Gandhian, its customers did not - there were defaults by many creditors. Not only did the Bank's profits dwindle, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage its deposits and keep paying high interest rates. The Bank's term deposits became increasingly uncompetitive and depositors too started moving away. By 1992 the Bank's balance sheet had shrunk to a third of its size at its peak in 1984.

By now, Gopaldas was a full time trustee of the Bank and also one of the executive directors. Had he had any children, they would have been grown up by now. And had they been privy to the state of affairs at the Bank, they would have suggested liquidation or sell off of the Bank long ago. At least this was what the other 3 trustees told him about the opinion of their children.

While all trustees rejected the proposals of sell offs, Gopaldas alone worked hard to prevent it. Even though he was no more an employee of the Bank, he worked with the employees to identify and weed out defaulting customers, bring back enthusiasm into customer service, and prodded the management to come up with attractive deposit schemes.

But just as things started turning around in the early 90s, several private banks started rising who took away business from smaller cooperative banks like Samaj Uday. The Bank now had only few depositors - most of them small traders and shopkeepers who had their offices and shops in the same street as the Bank's only remaining branch.

Gopaldas was no more in the pink of his health to work harder for a second lap. More so as he grew old, his logical and strategic abilities were replaced by emotional outflows. He now felt that it was the Bank's responsibility towards its depositors - those small shopkeepers - to keep working and keep providing them with Banking services. The thought that these customers too could move away from the Bank in the next 2-3 years never occurred to him. After the death of his wife, the Bank - its depositors included were the only family he had.

But today, as he put on his Safari suit, he thought not in terms of fiscal prudence or even customer service - for him the Bank was his child and he could not let it be sold to a profit making entity who would take over the Bank's liabilities but also bump off all the relationships the bank had with its customers in a matter of weeks.

It hit then, a slight nausea and a sense of weakness, he called out to his servant as he sat down on his chair ... and then his hand fell lifelessly. Shri Gopaldas Mukadam, trustee and chairman of Samaj Uday Cooperative Bank died of a mild heart attack just the day when the Bank signed off its last balance sheet before being amalgamated into what was now the largest private Bank in the region.

*Disclaimer: All entities and characters in this story are fictional and any resemblance to real entities and people is purely coincidental.

Is personalized news a mirage?

2009-11-06T19:36:00.004+05:30

Having been personally associated with an attempt to create a 'personalized' news reader, it was amusing to read views of Eric Schmidt on the subject. Bang on target – Eric steered clear of what a personalized news reader should be, and just highlighted that the increase in the personalized (also mobile) devices which we use to consume info will automatically lead to need for personalizing the content itself.

However, looking at personalized news from someone else's eyes, I for the first time am realizing that for all the good efforts of the geek world – humans may not need personalized news after all!

By personalized news I mean, the news which I as an individual am interested in. For example some ways to determine the classifications for such news are:

All News from sources chosen by me
Any News related to the topics which I am interested in (Sports / tech etc)
News being read by people in my network (colleagues, friends, family)
News which relates to any entity in my life (my school / qualification, my city, my company etc)

But consider this – when you open the newspaper everyday, do you expect to see what's happening round the world or what's just happening in the limited span of your 'personalized world'? You may be a tech enthusiast or sports buff, yet you would want to know about what's the biggest news of the day, only then would you turn to your areas of interest.

Second, not everyone is a die hard sports buff or geek! There are people who read the newspaper just to read about interesting stuff. They possibly can't define their interests if you ask them, but would end up reading the Sunday Times back to back which talks about everything from politics, spirituality etc to cooking and travel.

This makes me feel that the more information (news) is available in the world, the more the need for good human editors. Machines can probably create filters or 'personalized' news but only for those who are:

professionals looking for updates on their field of interest (like Web programmers looking for tech news)
Editors themselves, looking for what could be a part of the next edition of their journal, magazine or website's homepage.

But definitely, personalized news cannot replace the traditional magazine / newspaper (print or online - any news source supported by a news editing organization as in reporters, editors etc).

So I guess all the 'personalized news engine' makers out there (Reddit, AideRSS, Me-Zine, even newsrivers like TwitMeme and TechMeme), need to rethink their goals, target audiences and appeal. Probably a combination of an automated news-filtering engine with a human editorial team is indeed the ideal choice.

That's my take! What do you think?

*Personalized news reader was one of our aims for Bloozle though we wanted to limit our sources to blogging world than include generic news sites also

Rise of Indian economy - Groundswell or Reactionary?

2009-10-13T23:36:00.004+05:30

Continuing the chain of thought from my previous post, I got thinking as to whether the changes in the Indian economy since 1990's have been top down and visionary or merely reactionary and ad-hoc. The conclusion which I have reached has been that they are a combination, but above all - they are based on a Groundswell from the masses.

While multiple sectors - IT, Retail, Financial Services and even manufacturing - have contributed to rise of the Indian Tiger; to illustrate my point, I would concentrate on the Financial Sector [related post].

Pre-liberalization, there were many shackles, like license raj, on the Indian financial services sector. But more gruesome were the factors of immature or absent regulatory supervision and resulting power of large investors to manipulate the free markets. The Banking sector meanwhile was dominated by PSU banks which were slow, bureaucratic and customer unfriendly.

Starting the 90s there were many top down reforms starting like Dematerialization of scrips, setting up if a fully automated National Stock Exchange (NSE), and complete eletronification of the Taxation system with the entry of PAN Cards and Tax Information Network (TIN). These were preceded by strengthening of regulators like SEBI setting up of others like IRDA. (The success of regulators in Financial Services also paved way for setting up regulators in other domains like TRAI in Telecom).

How did these reforms come into place? The strenthening up of SEBI and dematerialization of securities was a direct consequence of the scams in the Indian securities markets such as the Harshad Mehta Scam. These changes were actually demanded by the common people who lost their savings in such scams, rather than any government reforms dreamed by bureaucrats.

The next was the electronification of the stock exchanges - again, while the SEBI set up the NSE, it was the large scale movement of small investors to NSE which prompted the BSE also to modernize and match the NSE's transparent operations.

Similarly, the rise of private banks has been aided by migration of customers in hoards from the old PSU banks to private banks. As a result, PSU banks in India too have been forced to modernize themselves technologically and convert their operations from bureaucratic to commercialized.

On the outset, many of these reforms look as if they were pushed by regulators, but occasional public uproar and gradual but constant demand and preference for transparent and efficient systems has been the primary driver why these reforms have taken root in India.

While we may still seem to lament the lack of control we have on our own economic fate (ex. "I did not bring the recession - nor can I end it!") , but our intense aspiration to control our own economic / financial fate has brought about several changes which are keeping the Indian economy afloat in these recessionary times.

I believe the rise of the Indian economy today while seemingly reactionary is actually based on a groundswell of people demanding improvements in the system - which keeps me hopeful that we are not done yet and we may soon lead the world in further improvements to create the most efficient norms to govern the global Financial Systems. What do you think?

Atanu Dey is not always right

2009-10-10T15:07:00.002+05:30

I have previously pointed a lot of links [1][2][3]to Atanu Dey's blog, also praising his RISC model for development of Indian rural/semi-urban areas. However, this comment on his blog (by someone with an alias Human Blasphemy) sets out some very pertinent doubts on this model - reproducing it here:

Dear Atanu,

I heard you during your session on RISC at XIMB. One of the members asked you a question whether Rural Infrastructure can be developed through people’s participation and through microfinance. Which according to you is not possible, because large infrastructure projects have to be completed at one go. But the problem is that why will any private company invest in rural infrastructure? You only said that i dont know how it will be possible.

I believe you will agree that in future Microfinance will not remain microfinance it will become SM-finance [Small and medium finance. We have already seen the examples of increased limits of credit in Andhra Pradesh, where Mf loans have reached upto Rs5lakhs. Through Microfinance, we can go for rural infrastructure development through following 4 measures:

1. Framework for expanding contours of MFI roles and financial limits
2. Modification of Regulatory Framework
3. Integrating Private Institutions with MFIâ€™s and Community [venture cap n equity]
[SKS Microfinance is attracting VC, which can also be applied to RID]

=======================================
According to the theory of economic developement you suggested, the innovation has to be done at top level, then later on when competition will grow, it will be affordable to the masses. You also gave the example of Mobile phones.

I believe that this theory is successful for the technology sectors.When we talk about growth, we are also concerned with people’s development. YouR example can be negated by the fact that if we allow big companies to grow and capture the markets, the small and medium enterprises will never be able to grow. Big companies will not ALLOW them to grow once they see them as a threat. In that case the open markets will not become open markets, they will actually be the oligopolistic or monopolistic. And in the developing countries where large chunk of industries consist of small industries, the top down approach will not be helpful.

We have to allow small companies to grow and them many of them will become large companies. So the bottom up approach is successful if implemented properly. The reason of failure of this approach is not that it is flawed, but because it is not supported by those who are able to invest in it.

The example of Orissa can be given, where government is encouraging industrilization at large pace, but not able to develop people at the same pace. The result is the improper usage of resources [Economics deals with optimal usage of resources] and there are no rules or regulations in the state. If people are not ready and they are not able to use the resources the industries are generating, what is the use of industrialization. At the later stage the economy will be in a chaos and government will not be able to implement any regulations. People are already opposing such practices. Because they are not ready, or you can say they dont know that it will be beneficial. In such case first Bottom should be developed and not the top.

If you read Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India, one gets a feeling that most changes in India today were brought about by common people from the masses rather than a top down reform from the top. (While top-down reform was done, it usually followed some courageous and pathbreaking demands from the masses). I guess the commenter on Atanu's blog is hence quite right in his theory.

Death of the PIN Code

2009-10-04T00:56:00.004+05:30

I was reading this GigaOm piece on augmented reality when I realized that we may be very near towards making the Zipcode (or Pincode as we know it in India) completely redundant in the next 10-15 years.

The article talks about how location aware application - Layar delivers ATM locations, restaurant information and available jobs on the phone’s screen as users point the camera at their surroundings. This innovation is a combination of 3 technologies coming together - GPS (location awareness), persistent connection (ability to extract information on the move) and image recognition (point the camera and the phone knows where you are). The latter is probably a complicated and expensive technology to build everywhere, but the former two are now almost ubiquitous.

As I have written earlier, mapping services are improving every day in India - already maps to smallest detail are available for most Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities in India. With ISRO's project Bhuvan, imaging information should soon be available to a much minute detail for the smallest of villages and taluka's. Bhuvan being a government funded project, most of this imaging data will be available for public usage.

Combine this with availability of high-bandwidth persistent connection (3G / WiMax) in remote parts of India, it may soon be easier to pin point a location on a web-map than locate the Pincode for the place. The mapping location is essentially the GPS coordinate which is far more accurate a pointer than the Pincode.

The Pincode, introduced in 1972 is a 6 digit number so that there is one for each 3.29 sq kms of land in India (India's area is 3.29 million sq km). Within the 3.2 sq kms, the postman must now figure out the exact address of the recipient. On the other hand, if the sender can put the GPS code on the snail mail envelope, the post man (probably equipped with a GPS enabled mobile) can pin point the exact address of the recipient!

Given the above hypothesis, the government's plan to increase 2 digits in the Pincode is a completely redundant exercise. The department of post should rather spend money on equipping its postmen with high-tech devices and capture their tacit knowledge to develop detailed maps.

The department can engage a private player to develop special GPS enabled mobile phones for its postmen and collaborate with ISRO for imaging data from Bhuvan. The postal department could use this information not only for its own use but even sell it to private players and make some money!

My latest figure is 57-63-104!

2009-10-03T20:47:00.001+05:30

Follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/kulkarninikhil

My previous figure here

KPMG Thought Leadership Update

2009-09-14T12:48:00.001+05:30

Reshaping for future success

What's next for Private Equity in India

This report, based on research conducted in the second quarter of 2009, examines the impact of the global financial crisis on private equity in India and the prospects for the market in the near and long-term. The research, undertaken by KPMG in India in conjunction with Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center includes a detailed survey of 40 General Partners (GPs) and Limited Partners (LPs) active in the Indian market.

I hope that Thought Leadership update will prove to be a valuable resource for you.

Regards,

Download Report
(2,029 KB)

Privacy & Disclaimer

My Name

2009-09-13T02:05:00.001+05:30

Built using a Facebook app - liked it!

How Indian Finance Sector has matured

2009-09-09T16:48:00.003+05:30

I was Googling for some information on Financial regulations in India, when I chanced upon a few old news items from the early 2000's [1][2]. While reading those new items I realized how the Indian Financial sector has undergone a rapid transformation in the last decade or so.

India's financial sector has undergone a very rapid phase of transformation in the last 10-15 years. While scam ridden 90's brought in multiple regulators like SEBI and other related organizations such as NSDL and NSE, the private banks which grew brought in newer leaner ways of banking and infusion of technology - Core Banking Systems and Straight-Through-Processing.

However, it was only in the new millenium that these changes as an aggregate started hitting the psyche of the common man and the government / regulators together. This trigerred massive national level initiatives - many of these fueled by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Some of these were the introduction of Electronic Clearing (ECS), Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT).

The first phase of these changes ushered in transparancy in operations and funds movement in the country. However, speed for still lacking - for example EFT when first introduced used to take 4 days for settlement; it was also location dependent [More].

RTGS was the first exception to the speed rule - it broke barriers of money transfer for very high value transactions. Money would get transferred in a matter of hours (4 hours being max) and every day the RTGS books of all banks would close at zero balance.

The other funds transfer implementations are in their second phase now - NECS (National ECS) and NEFT (National EFT) - are unleashing a new wave of efficiency and speed in monetary transactions in the country.

While these changes look more institutional, Retail customers are getting benefited by these changes via the internet banking facilities introduced by Banks. PSU banks also, which till now have lagged behind in technology are also now implementing all these solutions and given their reach in the smallest of towns and villages - this should pave way for another rush of blood in the Indian financial sector.

Weekend Trips and Google Maps

2009-09-08T13:49:00.006+05:30

I am a self confessed Fan (yes with a capital 'F') of Google and its products - my GMail remains open on my laptop as long as it is switched on; I visit Google to reach every 9 in 10 websites I visit; I save most of my documents as GMail attachments or Google Docs; all the websites which I manage are managed through blogger.com; and almost every time I drive to a new place, I use Google Maps!

The resolution and detail on Google Maps for India has improved a lot since I first blogged about MapMyIndia version of Indian mapping software (incidentally, the makers of MapMyIndia now power Yahoo! India Maps). However, Google Maps has forged far ahead of Yahoo! Maps or MapMyIndia thanks to its colaborative features - most of the landmarks and addresses which I find on Google Maps are tagged or identified by users themselves. This kind of crowdsourced mapping info makes Google maps an ideal tool to find anything from businesses (say CD Shop in Powai) to picnic spots and weekend getaways.

My Google Maps habit has also been increasing with the same speed as Google's capability to map the Indian landscape. So much so that I Googled my way to the Borivali Railway Station yesterday before visiting it to double check on the one-ways round the station. On one incident, I had Googled for Kolkata's metro station nearest to the KPMG Guest House where a colleague was staying. I was doing this while she was in her flight to Kolkata, so that I could direct her to the guest house on phone after she reached!

Here's a Google Map I gleaned when I had to visit Viman Nagar in Pune on a business trip and I did not know the way.

Express Way To Viman Nagar

Google Maps has also of late become the most indispensable tool for me to plan weekend getaways in and around Mumbai. I went for a trip to Shirdi and Shani Shingnapur with my parents and brother in May and last weekend I went to Malshej Ghat.

But, the mobile signals in rural India are still not strong to rely on Google Maps on one's mobile. So I have devised a workaround. I chart out my travel on Google maps and then take screenshots of the map at a very high resolution. I paste all screenshots (which make up the complete route from source to destination) in a Powerpoint PPT and then transfer the PPT on my HTC Touch P3000.

Mumbai Shirdi Shani Shingnapur

View more presentations from nikhil_kulkarni.

My cellphone now acts as a handheld navigation device. Every time I cross a landmark or come across a diversion in the road, I open my PPT and check the route. Also, often local people may not know about the road to your final destination but they may know the shortest path to the nearest town on your itinery - so having a map of all major pit-stops on your way is handy. You need not then ask the 'shortest path' to Shirdi but you can ask them about the shortest path of Sangamner, Sinnar or Ghoti (see the Shirdi route map above).

My travel has become free of the hassle of figuring out roads in rural India and relying on the knowledge of local population which is often very unreliable given that most locals in villagers know only the way to the nearest town and often their advice may lead you to kaccha roads or longer and circuitous routes.

Here's the PPT form navigation map for trip to Malshej Ghat and Shivenri Fort

Mumbai Malshej

View more presentations from nikhil_kulkarni.

Motivating People

2009-09-03T10:06:00.002+05:30

Found this awsome list of statements on motivating employees here.

people don't do what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward
positive reinforcement is the most effective way to motivate people [Note that in a technology company, a reinforcer might be the freedom to spend some time working on a side project or a pet feature; reinforcement is broader than money or praise; it can be anything that the employee values.]
reinforcement works best when it is immediate, certain, and frequent (Daniels points out that kids that our public schools diagnose as having an ADD learning disability are able to concentrate for hours playing video games that provide 85 positive reinforcements per minute)
reinforcement doesn't work if followed up with a "but, you need to improve X, Y, Z"
monthly reinforcement only provides 12 opportunities per year to shape someone's performance; weekly is the minimum (the annual review and bonus is a joke, as far as Daniels is concerned)
many goals should be easy to achieve, thus providing many opportunities for people to get rewarded; rewards should not be competitive (no "employee of the month")
managers need to spend more of their time reinforcing the good performers than trying to deal with the problem employees
if you set a goal, people stop working as soon as they reach the goal (viz. typical schools and universities; students stop pushing themselves once they've reached an "A" level of achievement)
you need to come up with a good way of measuring achievement and make that measure available to the worker so that he or she can motivate himself (for a computer programmer in a software company, components of this measure might be "number of bugs fixed, with extra points for the severe or tricky ones" and "pages of documentation written"

Apparantly its from a book Bringing out the Best in People, by Aubrey C. Daniels

The day Could not have started worse

2009-08-12T11:38:00.004+05:30

Image Credit: deen
I took about 2½ hours to reach office today. Apparantly some truck has oveturned near Chembur and hence all traffic from the Sion-Trombay highway has been diverted towards the Suman-nagar flyover (where Eastern Express enters the Island city). This has resulted in a huge traffic jam at Sion.

The small incident explains how fragile the infrastructure demand-supply equilibrium is in Mumbai. The roads are just about sufficient to support traffic. So, if it rains or a truck/bus stranded on the road side - it creates queues of traffic kilometers long.

Image Credit: Marc van der Chijs

This is because of multiple reasons - first of course being that road-space is narrow. The others are like:

There are no alternate routes to reach the Island city apart from the arterial roads. The JNPT road remains unutilized even at the time of the traffic jams and natural calamities like water logging.
The Highway Maintenance services such as towing trucks to clear stranded vehicles are not sufficient.
There is no organized public warning system - apart from the fact that the huge LED hoarding put up by the traffic police are far and few, they anyway are used only to display public-services messages and little traffic updates are available on them.
There is little automation in Traffic management of the city. For the amount of traffic that Bombay has, all major roads need to have monitoring cameras which along with all major traffic signals should be linked to a common hub-station to coordinate movement of traffic across the city.
Lack of driving discipline; while I dare say that Bombay has the most disciplined driving in India - a lot still is left to be desired. Especially the taxi drivers (call center cabs included) and even some BEST bus drivers need to be taught some basic of lane discipline.

At the end of the charade, my day started as bad as good it had started yesterday. This has reduced my productivity throughout the day.

Leave alone the actual tangible hours lost by millions of workers in the city during travel - the subsequent loss of productivity, due to bad mood set by the harrowing morning experience, is costing us more. Just imagine, how much more productive the whole city can become if we improve infrastructure of the city and how much we may be loosing due to such teething problems surmounting.

The day Could not have started better

2009-08-11T14:16:00.005+05:30

Image Credit: Abhijeet Rane

I took the Bandra-Worli Sealink to work today and as I started on the Sea-Link the song "Yeh Tumhari Meri Batien" from rock-on started playing on the Radio. Reached office from Borivli to Lower Parel in flat 40 minutes - the day could not have started better.

Mumbai's infrastructure has been improving by the day. This city which looked "more like a conglomeration of many small cities from Ghatkopar to Andheri joined together" [ref] is now starting to take shape of a real megapolis.

In the past 5 years, almost all roads have been cemented, pavements redone and flyovers has been made on most major traffic signals. To add icing to the cake we have the first phase of Metro (Andheri-Ghatkopar) coming up by 2010-11 and at least 3 monorail (Bandra, Santa-Cruz, Borivli) coming up by almost the same time.

But a lot of this good work is undone by - hawkers who still occupy the pavements and footpaths (and often uproot the tiles on them to set up 'permanent' shanties), defunct taxis and goods carriers who park all along the roadside and the numerous people who spit all over the place. Anyway - I do hope this is a small issue and people will soon upgrade their habits and make most of the infrastructure being laid out in the city.

Older Similar Posts : 1, 2, 3, 4

My figure is 54-36-54!

2009-08-07T12:17:00.004+05:30

Yeah! That's my Twitter Figure. What's yours?