NRI's to get the right to Vote : How much of an impact is this ?

I've seen several posts on this subject over the last few days. Some are aghast at the thought - simply because they've seen or have been subjected to "sermons" from their NRI friends and family that illustrates all the "ills" of their homeland. Some are thrilled as they think they can be a major influence. If you ask me for my opinion - the first reaction is that of confusion and the question "why" ?

Why do we think this is a good option ?
Is it because this gives a "feel good" factor for the NRI ? Do the small number of votes really matter when it comes to a decision ?
Is it because this will allow the government to raise a "tax" at some time in the future ? I mean, if you want to exercise your franchise - should you not pay a small bit to the country that gives you this franchise option ?

In all probability, there is a much simpler answer to the question "why ?" - maybe it just DOES NOT make a difference ?

My first reaction to the book - Connected : The surprising power of socal networks

Last week, I got a surprise pack from my friends over at Accel (a venture capital company). In the package was the book by Christakis & Fowler which as a best seller for 2009.

The book is titled Connected : The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. A long title, but, will probably be referred to as they do in their website connectedthebook.com

I think this is an extremely well researched book in the sense that there has been an attempt to cover linkages / social networks from both a behavioral aspect and a media / tool aspect. While some of the analysis result seems to be quite obvious (maybe my Asian - relationship oriented thought bias is showing), some are quite revealing.

There were 2 major "current news" items that kept flashing in my mind while reading the set. The first being the H1N1 scare that most of India saw a few months ago with the media feeding in a frenzy for the first few days. I guess saner minds prevailed over the news channels from day 3 of transmission.

The second news item was much more recent and "topical" - this was the scare in a textile unit where people were driven off to the hospital complaining of dysentery and stomach ailment.

Apparently, there was no problem with the water (infact, most people I know tend to carry water today), there was no food distributed and the air was "normal" ?. We are not talking about a couple of people here - the total was closer to about 70 individuals with only one being retained in the hospital for a "real" cause ?

Seemed like a touch a "socially" stimulated disease ?

Catching up in 2010 : More frequent posts ?

Last week was filled with some news that means I need to catch up with a single post with 3 sections.....
The first news-item that I wanted to comment and blog on was related to Justice Santhosh Hegde winning the Times, man of year for Bangalore. Well deserved indeed.

I think that the public is tiring of the political and other value loss and is looking for "role models". Justice Santosh Hegde aptly fills this void. While I'm sure there are a lot of people around who'd like to emulate him but will come up with tons of excuses as to why they cannot do so / or why their line of work will not allow them to do so, he'll continue to be an example of the axiom "Walk your talk". Kudos to him for highlighting what is possible and more strength to his cause.
___________

The next 2 posts are related by death :-( ie of Dr. Vishnuvardhan and C Ashwath.

IMHO, Ashwath's death was overshadowed by the the "noise" around the demise of Kannada theatre's "Sahasa Simha". I've been a fan of both, but, was hurt with the repeat madness that the cities showed. Am convinced that this is not a "fan" or "following" issue, but, larger motivation as a mechanism to hoodlum-hood.

It is aptly evident from the fact that most of these are an urban phenomenon. None of the millions of fans in the rural belt have gone out and created trouble. They've chosen to pay homage in a personal manner and have behaved in a much more dignified manner. I'd like to think that their silent tribute is more meaningful ?

RIP gentlemen : You can rest in peace with the knowledge that your volume or work will remain as a testimony to your talents. You've certainly left deep footprints in the sands of Kannada's time

End of an Indian Scooter Era : Bajaj not to make scooters

One of the middle-class status symbols of India circa the 80s' is gone !.

I read the article that Bajaj is going to stop it's scooter production in favour of motorcycles with some bit of nostalgia and a lot of "OMG - I'm of a different generation" thoughts...

In the late 70's and the early 80's, the scooter was actually the middle class dream vehicle for the new family. In some ways, it was the urban "made it" symbol !

While I used to favour the "Lambretta" as it had a centered engine, as against the "Vespa" style of engine on the right. These used to be cult vehicles in college. Next, came the Vijay's and the like. However, my guess is that the Bajaj (esp the Chetak) was the mainstay in lots of families.

These were so sought after that you could easily make a killing in the allotment and transfer game. If I remember right, there used to be a USD only booking option also with some hugh sum that had to be paid as advance (does 10,000 sound right ?).

Truly an end of the era event.

Today, looking back, I'd love to buy off a "Lambretta" from the open market if someone has one for sale ?

Supreme Court asks of MontBlanc's Gandhiji Pen : Is it mightier ?

Read with glee the questioning by the chief justice and the other justices of MontBlanc's "Mahatma Gandhi" special pen today.

Quote from ET "Can Mahatma Gandhi be the poster boy for driving home the message that a super-expensive Mont Blanc “pen is mightier than the sword?” To this question of a PIL petitioner, the Supreme Court on Monday sought responses of the Centre and the retail outlet of the pen-maker in Delhi"


Way back in Oct (just past the Jayanti), I had made the following post

http://inatech.blogspot.com/2009/10/time-off-on-gandhi-jayanthi-is-it-right.html

and my anguish came from the fact that the company was peddling a USD 25000 pen in the name of the person who shunned ostentatious spend all his adult life !

Would love to hear what the response is ? How will they justify this ?

Bangalore's Street Art : New Impetus

Treading on the same path as my previous post - there is another welcome change in the street art scene in Bangalore. Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat (CKP as it is popularly known as) is now putting some art pieces ie. Metal murals etc on it's fence.

The art school used to be a great "poster" for the movie ads and now will show some real art.

Other than some street art in front of the ING building on Bangalore's MG road - there has been little movement on this front and CKP's new initiative is a welcome change.......

Let us hope that others take this up as a clarion call and get to more street art. This, IMHO, will help build Bangalore's character

The new street art in Bangalore : BBMP sponsored paintings on the roadside

There has been hectic activity by BBMP over the last month where there have been teams "painting" the walls across the city.

In a welcome move, BBMP seems to have sponsored a new form of street art that is a BIG welcome difference to the various "movie" posters that used to adorn these roadside wall-space.

The motif seems to be from a wide range of topics - eg. Animals (Elephants etc) in the region to the cultural / heritage sites (Halebid, Gol Gumbaz etc) and natural scenic sights (eg. Jog falls).

What I really liked with this is that for a lot of people (esp. Children) is that this provides a welcome diversion during the infamous traffic jams.

Maybe it is an intentional distraction ?

Catamaran : Not another Hotmail style rush ?

I read bemusedly this morning's news "flash" on Mrs. Sudha Murthy's Infy stock sale and announcement on it's intended deployment into Catamaran ventures.

I just hope that all the aspiring entrepreneurs (esp. in Bangalore / KA) etc do not think that these amounts of money is available for the "taking" ?

While I do know that there is a huge gap in the valuation expectation and actual reality when it comes to startup, am reminded of the time when Sabeer Bhatia made the millions on Hotmail. Almost overnight, I saw every Mani, Swamy and Shah walk around with a harebrained dot.com idea on their lips. Everyone seemed convinced that their idea was worth a few million at the very least........

I agree with the vast majority that in India, real "angel" and "seed" funding has been sparse, but, what it has also done is enhanced our ability to leverage "Jugaad".

People need to remember that a very small bank balance is a very high leverage on sales effort :-)

The announcement of Namma Bengaluru Awards

Just got a email in my inbox - calling for nominations ....
The list of people who are going to be judging is both impressive and looooong ? So, how are they going to rate the feedback ?
Am wondering if one person's feedback in a certain area would matter more than another - simply because that individual may know more about that area ?

Conceptually though, I think it is a very good start. Simply because it fills up a gap that I've often expressed in these blogs - ie. "Role models". We, in India certainly lack role models especially when it comes to public life ?

Will be interesting to go through the complete list of nominations though ?

Banning Small metalized plastic pouches : welcome measure !

I read this mornings news, a small piece stuck in one of the inner pages, that the Indian government is planning to ban all small "gutka" pouches with great satisfaction and a new set of expectation.

Some months ago, I spent time on a couple of postings related to this menace (and it is a big menace in India). The so-called "smart packaging" and "bite-sized" dosage revolution that is being discussed by the marketing folks so eloquently is growing to be a MAJOR ecological issue.

Any walk in the hinterland (not just the cities) will show tons of small "paan" and "gutka" packages lying all around. These are too small to be collected and deposited / segregated. They are collectively big enough to form a major portion of animal feed if we do not take care.

A few years ago, we'd have people commenting on the quantum of cigarette packs, gum wrappers etc. Today, all that is completely overshadowed by these "smart" packs.

It is time we shunned this "smart" pack .....

What should governments be involved in other than governance ?

For this post - am not writing a new set. This is a cross post from Sikshana.blogspot.com

There is growing concern about PPP model in the secondary education (proposed).
Please see this posting :

http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2009/10/ppp-in-secondary-education_11.html#links

My comments on the post being
_____________________________________________________________
Dear ESR,
Long ago (while I was still fresh out of Ayn Rand readings), I was asked what should the government be responsible for. This was for a debate. I still remember that after much thought I had come down to the crux of governance and social equality that would be covered by
a. Defense
b. Law & Order
c. Healthcare
d. Education till 10th

Over time, having seen the power of government sanctions (where LAND and Industry allocations / grants are made) and having read the farce of boards eg. WAKF etc, I've come to add another item to this list and that is "livelihood". My guess is that the NREGS is possibly a close example.

Why the background - IMHO the government has NO business running the road business ?

Your concern on secondary education is very valid and is something that we need to discourage actively !

We, as a nation, are only growing to address the growing rural-urban divide by taking schools / hospitals and livelihood to the rural areas and NOT by allocating "x" % of seats in urban schools to the BPL section ?

Let us see how we can bring this under the bigger "urban-rural" divide discussion as that may have better traction / purchase ?

Time off on Gandhi Jayanthi : Is it the right thing to do ?

I'm sure people all around have been exposed to this "timely" debate. I saw a twitter like snippet off Shashi Tharoor and a longer debate over the news hour.

I'm surprised at the level of hypocrisy in the debate .vs. actual demonstration of thought.


I heard Tushar Gandhi ask for social work to be given time off while picnic/ timeoff be marked as absent. I'd like to ask him a question :What would his inaugural attendance of the Mont Blanc pen "Gandhi special" be termed as ? Would that qualify as social work ?

For the un-initiated : there are 2 "luxury" brands who've released Mahatma Gandhi specials - one is LLADRO with their figurine. See picture below


and the other is the Pen from Mont Blanc - see picture below (Mr Tushar Gandhi releasing it)



Again for those who've not been watching the news. The Lladro figurine costs USD 700 while the limited edition pen costs USD 25000 ! (yes, that is right, there are 3 zeros at the end and it is in USD)

What a change from the edict of simple living and high thinking ?

Atleast, people like us (the Aam Janatha) do not preach on simple living as we do enjoy the occasional high living. I wish I could state the same for the thinking side too ;-) when I generalize ?

I: Post partition blues - Are we going to re-write history ?

First, I guess, my prediction on the new "hot" topic went down - damp squib....
It seems to have been overtaken by the BJP issue of the version on national identity, which made me think - what is the identity that we are talking about ?

Historically, I'm told that Md Ali Jinnah took the name "Pakistan" only because he thought Pt Nehru would choose "Bharat" as the name and not "India" ?

India - the name itself (I'm told) comes from variously, Sindhu (river) / Hindu (and therefore Indus). Interestingly, "India" finds no mention in any of Indian script / history and it has always been "Bharata varsha". The Indus meanwhile is out in current Pakistan. So much so, the Aryan heritage post the Mohenjadaro / Harappan settlements are also in current Pakistan ?

Time to think back to the only Emperor who was truly Indian - Ashoka or should I say "Devanampiya" ?

I'm sure that there are tons of "Dravidian" thinkers who'd state that even Ashoka has a "Aryan" heritage that could be foreign ? But, we need to stop at some point and stop re-inventing the history.

IMHO - Ashoka's "DHAMMA" is probably the closest we have to a truly secular, value based community and adoption should get closest to the proverbial "Rama Rajya" ?

The newsweek article : USA :Everyone is a Hindu now

I'm sure this one article is going to create a buzz - atleast in India !
The only reason it probably has not already created a buzz is that no-one in India today has time for anything in the papers except for H1N1 :-)


http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155 is something I'd like you to click on. This actually captures the spirit of Indian hinduism - very benign, follow what you may attitude to religion

I remember talking to people in the midwest of US (YES - in LDS land)
One of them commented about my whiteshirt stating that it reminds them of their preachers. I replied stating that in a way we have a lot more in common !.

Hindus have always believed in re-birth, in the concept that god speaks through humans, in the concept that every living / non-living thing in the world is a manifestation of god and also to NOT believe in all of the above is ALSO a hindu belief !

Let us see how the article gets accepted by the world - that will be a true reflection of the belief ?

Is a long life essential for developing an intelligent being ?

I was reading some material on sea creatures during the weekend and one of the things that struck me was that apparently Octopus is considered a very "intelligent" animal.
This, I found easy to relate to given the size of it's head / brain as a % of body mass. What surprised me was that for me- this was news.

I had heard how the "other" animals in the list eg. Dolphin, Whales etc were smart, but, for some reason Octopii were not in the same classification ? These were generally clumped under the squids etc and seen as best on french cuisine / calamari !

That got me thinking.....

Given that the normal life-span of an Octopus is only 3 years (yes, it is true), maybe, they never get enough time to make it to the intelligent list ? After all, human kids of that age have still had not "learnt" a lot of things ?

So, maybe, if we extended the life-span of a Octopus, we could teach it to sing & dance ?
Hmmm.....

Is "affordable housing" the new fad or the genuine article ?

Last week I was in UAE and contrasting their residential building market (esp. Dubai) now and a few months / quarters ago. Today, as against a building frenzy a year ago, the market seems downright down in the dumps. The talk of the town however, continues to be how "upscale" properties are now available at 60% of the earlier rate rather than how "affordable" housing has been !

Seeing the numerous ads in the local newspapers made me wonder if there is commercial merit ?

Let us face it, in terms of building affordable housing, the key cost factors of land, material and labour have NOT changed significantly except for land. Given that most of these builders probably have a land bank already and are not making "cash" payments today, what really has changed ?

Is it just that they are going to be using "cheaper" materials and giving up on higher margins ?

Dont' you think that there is some "herd" mentality going on esp. given that default and cost of money has probably gone up ?

If the builders were really looking at "affordable" housing, then, IMHO there should be a grounds up review of the market. Today, the housing market is mixed with 1/2 and 3 bedroom apartments that do not actually leverage the target model.

In my view, if a builder actually did a grounds up building to cater to "similar" target market and then worked on efficiency, there would be better throughput. As an example, I'm sure there is a market for bachelor "pads" with ample two-wheeler parking PLUS utility for single occupants. These utilities would range from food outlets to possible a video rental to a dhobi/laundry.

The ground floor would then generate enough "maintenance" funds and let the occupants in the higher floors (all single occupancy) to work out an efficient cost model ? Dont' you think ?

I'm sure we can think of similar setup for various target users ?

Google Sqared : Getting search to be multi-dimensional

I'm not sure if people have watched the announcement or realized the value / potential of Google's new release of search - Google squared. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this now has a few features that I've always wanted and had some individuals do a bit of development on the side to evaluate the APIs.

Here is a quick recap of the press release "Google Squared does not provide a list of links to Web pages, like with a traditional Google search, but presents information derived from a query in a spreadsheet-like grid called a "square." Users of google.com/squared can then build, modify and refine their "square" through further Web searches. Unlike a normal search engine

, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic -- instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet"

The press release may sound confusing, however, here is an example that I ran. I did a google square on the word "coke" - which threw up a series of results in a grid - ie. rows + columns.

I then tweaked what I wanted to see in rows and what I wanted to see in columns.
Next, I added "Pepsi" to the sqare to generate a new set.

The kinds of things I added was "Started from" which told me when a particular product like Coke Cherry was launched. This still has a way to go - simply because you'll see that the "Sales" did not return anything significant.


Now - I'm sure someone is going to ask me about Microsoft Bing - Have I used it ?
NO, and I'll wait till the buzz dies down atleast .....

The 10K Marathon in Bangalore :Great participation

I've been off my blog for a couple of weeks - I guess it is the writer's block !.
Not that there has been a shortage of topics to comment upon - we've had the new government and Congress's landslide (of sorts) victory. Then, there has been the racial outrage in Australia not to mention the earlier SriLankan victory over the TTs......

More importantly, I guess, there was a certain level of weariness that had set in and I needed something that'd help me get over my writers' block. That boost came in yesterday with the Sunfeast 10 K run. The surprise at the participation as indeed pleasant.

It was wonderful to see so many people participating in the various "run" categories - I was running with my daughters and was in the Majaa run. We actually joined up the 10 K open category at it's finishing stage and then did the Majaa run.

There certainly was a lot of colour and gaiety. I understand the organizers lost count at the 23000 mark on participation and I was also witness to dozens of "un-registered" runners, in the race just for the fun of participation.

I saw whole groups of people - from NGOs, from Corporates, batchmates from a college etc, chatting and in a jovial mood that the run itself seemed a very pleasant and relaxed event. The camaraderie was certainly visible in all their faces.

The countdown on Indian Elections : high volume data processing

Starting very early tomorrow (May 16), India prepares to count the electoral votes post the elections. I'm sure enough has been said about the world's largest elections - however, am not sure if people have spared a thought on the sheer amount of data processing that is going to be used.

First is the result computation. The entire vote bank split on an average of 11 different ways (I'm told that the average number of candidates inclusive of the independents is 11)

Then, the psepologists that will get onto the TV and media. We are talking about 5-6 major media groups and about 50-60 regional groups, all slicing and dicing the numbers !

While elections probably started the computing revolution with the early counting machines, I think for sheer volume, this election is probably a record !

Tech Mahindra + Satyam : A tale of two...

As most people (atleast the IT folks in India) would know by now, Tech Mahindra has won the bid for Satyam. While, the current debate on valuation is expected to continue for a while, I thought, I'd just pen my own SWOT from a Tech Mahindra perspective.

Given that I own a few shares of Tech Mahindra (although NEVER did for Satyam), this may be seen as the "informed" view of an industry outsider ?

Strengths (read Advantages)
- TM has traditionally been in the telecom vertical and is perceived as a "vertical industry" player. This has meant that for a while, TM has been missing out on the broad "general business" areas of Retail, distribution, manufacturing, services etc. This would add considerable breadth
- Satyam supposedly has a fairly strong "fixed price" model (profitability unknown :-)) that should be good for TM
- Satyam's reach in both the middle east and AUS / NZ markets

Weakness (read Disadvantage)
- Management /Thought leadership : Especially in the areas of Packaged applications (SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics), Custom development (non-product) and managed services
- Culture : Not sure how they'd be able to reconcile the bottom load model of Satyam at cheaper rates to the vertical strength model that TM has
- Parity : This just has to do with employee status and relationship management ?

Opportunity
- The biggest opportunity for TM would be the opening of the horizontal "multinational" enterprise - ranging from Travel industry to retail to pharma/healthcare
- The opening of the COTS (read as ERP/ CRM) market

Threat
- Client / customer and account retention (and this one needs no elaboration)
- Cost advantage ? (esp. given that most of the contracts that Satyam needs to deliver on would be on a very aggressive P&L) and the market perception / environment

However, what is very clear is that this is probably the start of a clear sign of consolidation.