Just Like That!

Blogger top level domains changed

2012-01-31T10:52:00.000+05:30

I had an alert from the SEO team today morning - top level domains for some blogs appear to have been changed. I quickly opened up my blog (this one!) and sure enough, Google has decided to change the URL of my blog from .com to .in.
I resent that, but thats only my opinion. What if I had printed a t-shirt with my blog's URL on it.
Funnily enough, the older url - saurabh-kumar.blogspot.com also returns a 200OK server response, which means that technically, that address also exists.

This is slightly shady of Google. Matt Cutts has been preaching all along about migrating websites properly and not having the same content on 2 pages and so on. I think that today, my blog exists on two URLs - http://saurabh-kumar.blogspot.com and http://saurabh-kumar.blogspot.in.
I wonder if this has something to do with the IP used to update this blog. What if I now move back to the UK for a few years -will my blog then be on saurabh-kumar.blogspot.co.uk. Will I need to change my blog URL every time I move? Will all my readers (5 of them) need to keep a track of my location before they can read my posts?

Everyday fun.

2011-12-29T19:11:00.000+05:30

Mail from Contact Us form on the website:

Name: ********

Email ID: ********.y2k@gmail.com

Telephone: 92********

Message: i want like yatra.com website given details to me as soon as possible.....

Reply sent:

Dear Mr ****,

Thank you for contacting Envigo.

To build a website as specified by you the design development charges except that for all flight related booking paths will be Rs. *****.

For more details you can contact me on the numbers mentioned below.

We would prefer to communicate with you on your official email id.

Thanks & regards

Next email from ***hotel@gmail.com

Dear Sir Madam

i want full details for Quotation to me...

Reply sent:

Dear Mr Naidu,

As company policy we do not communicate on personal email ids please write to us from your official id and we shall get back with the details.

Thanks & regards

It gets funnier after this. But I will behave like an adult and shut up.

Baba 1922 - 2011

2011-10-12T00:38:00.002+05:30

My Baba passed away peacefully on 29 April 2011. He was 89. He had been married for 68 years. He will be missed by his family, which includes his wife, 3 sons, 1 daughter, 12 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.
He was a simple man, not a man of big words and grand plans, but a man of simple thoughts and careful action. He was born in Mastichak (Saran dist, Bihar). After he got married and had a daughter, he moved to Chapra, a town which is close by. He left Mastichak because he wanted to ensure the his daughter got a good education. He had four more kids - he was able to educate them well. In Chapra, he built a house. His sons and younger daughter were married off from that house. He retired as deputy Postmaster, Chapra.
He was a man of habit and was a very punctual person. He was straightforward in his dealings. He wanted everyone to keep in touch with him through letters. He used to write letters full of instructions, questions and news to his family, including me. In his letters to me, he would admonish me for not writing to him, fill me up on news from the entire family and ask me to write back to him quickly. Reading his letters also meant turning the blue piece of paper around a few times, as he would write on all possible surfaces of the letter if he needed to. With his letters, he was able to keep himself informed about his family, which were present far and wide - California, New York, South Carolina, Delhi, Mumbai, Patna and Darbhanga. This was just his direct family - I am sure he had a good idea about a lot of cousins and acquaintances which do not make the list above.
When he used to come to Delhi, he used to take a bus and go to Chandi Chowk. This he did till he was about 76-77 years of age. He would have a list of things to get for Chapra but would also ask my mother if she needed anything.
He was a dedicated husband, to the point of being irritating to my grandmother. He would take constant care of her - constant really means constant. He would give her her medicines 4 times a day, check on her food and make sure she eats enough vegetables and fruits every day.
He was an amateur homeopath and read up books and kept medicines. I used to pretend to fall down and would promptly get Arnica 100 from him. He also always kept a Hajmola bottle and gave me 2 tablets (never more) every time I asked for it.
As he grew older, he became more careful about his health and that of his wife. He never ate any food which had not been freshly prepared. He would feel very cold and wrap himself up in a bundle of warm clothes at about 20degrees centigrade. On being asked why, he would remind us of his age.
He used to like eating meat (chicken, fish, mutton) but turned vegetarian a few years ago. When he was young, he used to cook his meat himself as his wife was vegetarian and would not cook meat for him.
I had not realised that I would miss him the way I do sometimes. I wish I had spent more time with him when I had the opportunity.

the end of everything

2011-05-04T13:47:00.001+05:30

There is a lot of literature on topics around death - the afterlife, moksh, rebirth and of course, the Geeta.
So, I am not even going to try and examine the philosophical angle here.
However, there are some things which I want to record for later.
First off, I think that I miss Baba more now than ever before. I think about him much more than earlier. I miss him. I think that even at home, we talk about him more.
Next, you need to be very careful about what you say to your loved ones. It is very easy to be mean to them. Once a person goes away, what you have said to them can never be undone.
Parents are special. They will always care for you - no matter what.
Three days after he passed, there was a function at my uncle's house to remember him. All of my father's brothers and cousins showed up and stood shoulder to shoulder. I realised the power of family. I had never thought of it like that.

Watching time zip by

2011-04-22T12:26:00.000+05:30

Just under a third of the new year is up and here I am still getting used to the idea that we are in 2011 - pausing for a second while writing the date and so on. Things are going on fast - Envigo is growing, Sugandh and I have been busy working and busy planning for a few trips we are going to do this year.
We just got back from a quick trip to Dalhousie. The place was nice - I am sure there are prettier hill stations. What was nice about the place was that there were such few people, few cars, a very slow pace of living - all of which were a welcome change from everything around us.

Gurgaon is just the opposite. More people, many more cars - everyone is in a hurry. We were stuck in a traffic jam yesterday in Gurgaon, which happens only because people do not obey traffic lights. As the pileup becomes larger, you have 4-5 lanes of cars facing each other. I was walking down lane number 5 (2 more than what fits on the right side of the road) and was asking people to get back to their side of the road. The blue-collar folks - taxi drivers, drivers etc were all smiling sheepishly, knowing exactly what they were doing was wrong and acknowledging it. The car owners - the businessmen and the executives - all made excuses. Some of the gems were - 'I wasnt sure whether this was a one-way or not', 'I am lost, I dont know where I am'. It is sad to note how the education does not increase civic sense.

So Envigo is growing. We need to be very careful and take decisive steps - I think very soon we will be at the place where we can either get into a trajectory which will take us close to 100 mark in 2 years from now. If we fumble, we might be stuck where we are. There are good signals from customers and from employees. As always, macro factors are in Envigo's favour.

birthday number 3

2011-03-02T21:28:00.000+05:30

Envigo turns 3 today. I am not sure if we are doing better or worse than expected, but only because there was not much of a plan, which I had to beat. I am sure I need to start planning - Planning and tracking are important.

I learnt this at ebookers. The results speak for themselves. Before that, ebookers was famous only for the wrong reasons - for lack of corporate governance, for buying something for $70mn and selling it back for $15mn, for being sold at 3x of fair valuation and so on.
Post-Orbitz, we started having daily meetings in which MTD and YTD numbers were compared to plan.
It was a very simple thing to do - it seemed magical because I was seeing it done for the first time. ebookers is now one of the fastest growing OTAs and is profitable to boot.

Even at Envigo, we need to plan better and anticipate business better. I am still under the table there - fixing computers, working with accounts. I need to be out in the field a bit more.

A lot of twists and turns are happening elsewhere. I hope and pray for the best for my parents, my sister and my wife.

Papa's birthday

2011-02-17T20:19:00.000+05:30

My surprise party score is now tied at 2 all. 4 parties attempted in which in two, the target remained in the dark till the very end. Papa was an easy target - completely clueless till the end to all the deception that was going on.
There are some snaps, but before that, I am attaching a video which was made by K and S on this occasion.

Generally.

2011-01-22T12:03:00.000+05:30

It is a beautiful day here in Gurgaon - a slight winter chill, bright sun and nothing to do. It could have almost made me want to look forward to the shopping expedition planned for later in the day, but maybe not.

I need to figure out the other movie which was there with Masoom on its audio tape.

Snow snow everywhere....

2011-01-05T14:02:00.000+05:30

All my friends and relatives who have visited us this year from the US/UK have tales of heavy snow. Given that the grass is always greener elsewhere, I would like one week every year in India when things would S-T-O-P. No work, no travel - no movement. Just sit at home and eat and drink and try to think about the year gone by.

The wife has made an excellent collection of photos of the year gone by - she wants to get them printed - the debate is ongoing. Eventually we will run out of space. We already have I think, without even printing those pictures. This is an excellent example of the 'hindu ~~rate of growth~~ way of thinking'. An American would probably say - whoa we need a damned room in the house only for them photos... lets go get some wood. My middle class brain says no. Practicality has ruled my life, especially if I have to impose it on someone else.

2010 went by in a flash. It was a simple year - work, home, movies, travel but simple.

2011 has started off with Yoga and a determined effort to work harder. Interesting times ahead!

E1 memories

2010-12-26T21:01:00.003+05:30

I wanted to write a post about some of the things I don't want to forget. This post is going to be a 'dear diary' post.
I was just talking to KK the other day (who by the way is expecting a baby in March - yay!) and could not recall the area in which most of my friends in London stay. 3 years since I moved out of London and I was never good with names in the first place. I was in London in September 2010 and I did get lost inside tube stations and had to resign myself to reading the noticeboards (such a tourist-y thing to do).
Back to the topic, this post is about my stay in London. My closest friends stayed next to Tower Hill station - zone 1 - but right on the other end of the circle line from my high street Kensington flat. There was a communal garden on the first floor which was the scene of a few summer parties and ~~some~~ a lot of random wine drinking.
My birthday was celebrated there - number 26 - I wanted to go home and sleep and was wondering why all my banker friends who had to be in office (much) earlier than me kept hanging around for no apparent reason. I realised soon after that there was a cake to be cut which happened only at midnight.
There was a flat in the Pump house mews which was vacated only recently by its distinguished occupants now happily multiplying in Wimbledon. This flat was just under two minutes away from this garden. I remember one completely mad party at this house - once when the hosts were respectably drunk even before the first guest arrived. I made a fool of myself at this party (quite happily if I might add), insulted one or two people and then fell asleep only to wake up a few hours later still wanting to rejoin the party, which had moved out into another flat in the same complex.
Most of my weekends were spent here in E1 in 2005. I honed my cooking skills here - scrambled eggs and omelettes and chicken were cooked and devoured with great tenacity here. I am just an average cook, but my friends made me feel like a chef (in substantial measure because of the fact that I was happy to cook). Because of my hostel upbringing, I used to see things between friends in a very tit-for-tat manner. Every exchange had to be equal or it would be resented. However, I saw that people were extra nice in London - not only to me, but to each other as well. I was taken care off and it felt nice. Taking care of young ~~men~~ boys meant having patience for untidy and unruly behaviour, an ability to cook a lot of food and watch it being gulped down and constant leg-pulling and so on... doing all this every weekend and sometimes even during the week showed a depth of character much beyond what is encountered in some of the 24 year olds I meet today. I had lucked out. .
Summer in London meant long walks longer sit-ins at parks. The park in front of my flat in Camden, Hyde park, Green park, Greenwich, Battersea park - none were spared. There were long meandering walks - a few of which ended in the Beer garden (not so) near Sloane Sq. station which served huge pitchers of LI Tea (made in about 15 seconds flat).
I remember having dinner at the Masala Zones and experimenting with places like Andrew Edmunds. I remember listening to unending cribs about the rain and the cold and equally nonstop stories about the fun during the summer.
I remember watching a movie called Polar Express when 3 out of 4 of us were asleep and a musical called Les Miserables (2 out of 4 here too). Movies which fared better included Sarkar (with 'angel' written on Katrina Kaif's T-shirt who appeared wearing this for a milisecond but was long enough for two of us to spot it and agree on the words) and Swades (We loved Gayatri Joshi and the songs were touching).

*I need to report a few strange dreams (with one particularly abstract dream just after watching black swan) but am going to park that for now

Nitiswa

2010-11-25T15:56:00.001+05:30

Bihar has said it like never before. No caste, only 'vikas' (progress)

Nitish was quite subdued in his media appearances yesterday. Part of the credit for this landslide goes to Laloo also. In a state which continues to be ranked at the bottom of all human development indices, Nitish can rightfully claim that he has improved things manifold.

That says some thing about Nitish. He has worked hard etc. It says a LOT more about Laloo and the way he had dragged Bihar down.
From Wikipedia -" Per capita income in Bihar grew by 2.45% during the 1980s, against 3.32% per cent in India as a whole. In the 1990s, per capita income grew by 0.12% per cent in Bihar, as against 4.08% per cent in India. The growth rate in agriculture was 2.21% during the 1980s against India's 3.38%, during the 1990s it was 2.35% in Bihar while at the all-India it stood at 3.14%." (the emphasis is mine)
This is Laloo's legacy. He might have earned a few billion rupees while he was at it, but what is even bigger is the money Bihar could not earn during this rule. Those who could left the state.
While the rest of the country was getting its act together, Laloo paralysed an entire state.

The result also says something about India's average ruling class. They are corrupt and lazy. In comparison to them, a straightforward CM who is applying himself to the job shines out.
BSP fielded 241 candidates and won 0 seats. If I was a CM today up for re-election in 2-3 years, I would have a long think about this election result. For my country's sake, I hope that some of India's CMs think about it as well.

My reading list

2010-11-25T15:08:00.000+05:30

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.
There are a few books below which I have read many times - dont ask me why - To kill a mockingbird, Catch 22 and HHGTTG.

Bold - Read completely - 21
Underlined - Partially read - 6
Changed colour - plan to read - 2

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - 1/2 (currently reading)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
5 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - william makepeace thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Life of quality

2010-11-25T13:56:00.000+05:30

Parts of India are worse off than quite a few poor African countries - poor life expectancy, access to healthcare, water and the like. It is saddening and speaks about the mediocrity of thought and the corruption in action of everyone who is anyone in India - the political elite and the bureaucracy, the middle class who doesn't really care and is too busy enjoying the fruits of India's prosperity.

The middle class should care - but more on that on another blog post. Right now, we are busy having fun.

You don't need to do much. Things happen without moving a muscle. Every household can expect to provide employment to about 5-7 people directly and many more - indirectly. When you stay in Gurgaon, you will need a 2-3 part time maids, one full time servant, at least one driver, one or two part time errand boys. Indirectly, you are a source of income to tailors, electricians, plumbers, civil work contractors and labourers. At the third level, a middle class family is providing fuel to India's economic engine - by consuming services like banking, credit cards, mobile phones, insurance and so on.

What are the problems we worry about -
- Full time maids are in short supply and the agency will charge Rs. 15000 as hiring fee.
- When will I finally afford that BMW and where the hell will I park it?
- Why don't I find about any one of them scams before

Come to think of it, not much else...

Pay for three, get two.

2010-10-03T23:33:00.001+05:30

Marketing messages and ads in general usually try to insult your intelligence. There are washing detergents with magical molecules like ultrons and dirt-punchers which clean and bleach new white shirts into white shirts. There are hair models who have digital enhanced hair which would put Lara Croft and the Tombraider animation gang to shame.There are fairness cream ads (a uniquely Indian proposition) and pimple removal cream ads with women, who after using the cream, get a) married, b) become beauty queens and now with the market research teams capturing the changing aspirations of a nation, c) become wildly successful careerwomen.
IF this is not insulting to women, I am not sure what is.

You are always saving more and more and getting much more free for improved products, while spending more and getting less. There is always an asterisk at the end of price points.
I write these posts over a couple of days. The CWG 2010 inauguration telecast just got over on TV - I regret not going there. It was great and filled me with pride. To see the entire stadium get up when the Indian team walked in made me well up a little bit. I should have bought more tickets. Instead, I bought only 2 and my father and sister ended up going. They tell me that it was even better inside the stadium. Everyone was happy and the crowd was judicious in their behaviour - cheering Manmohan Singh and Sheila Dixit and booing Kalmadi and ignoring Prince Charles and his wife.

*What if more marketing budgets could be allocated to product research or better distribution arrangements, which would either increase company profitability at the same prices, or maybe even pass some benefits to the consumer.I think that there is a bit of game theory going on here as well. If Firm A is advertising, firm B also has to advertise else is loses out, even if the products are similar. Thats positive ROI at a firm level but it might mean a less than optimal ROI at a market level. At the same time, if I advertise my cola, I am sure I help all the other colas in the market. Therefore, my behaviour and decisions affect the others and there is a global maximum (or two) and local maximums. Hmm.

The next generation

2010-10-01T00:13:00.000+05:30

This year has been a year of babies. There has been at least one new baby born every month in my circle of friends and close family and this will continue till the end of this year. We end up visiting all those who are in Delhi and try to keep in touch with those in Mumbai or elsewhere.
Every time I see a new baby lying there, in his or her cocoon, surrounded by glowing parents and grandparents, I feel the love such events generate. The parents are relieved at the end of the pregnancy but the overriding emotion is love. And hope. Hope for all the best things in this world for their newborn. In the small hospital rooms where we usually go to, we end up being part of this envelope of love and hope.
I was born in 1979. The world has changed. The ozone hole was creeping into public limelight while the oil shock was slinking out. The Soviets entered Afghanistan and the US was just waking up to its role of arming its proxies to take on the Soviets. India was resettling in with Indira Gandhi at the helm, after a few unsettling years of Emergency (imposed by her) and the subsequent Janata Dal government. 1984 was still in the future. So was MS-DOS and Bill Gates's fortune. Life is definitely better in India for a lot of people than it was in the 70s and the 80s. But there are things which have changed for the worse also I guess.
Everything will change only faster now. Al Gore's documentary is depressing. So are the flavours of terrorism - homegrown, imported and vigilante. Will our children see a world where the ice caps will be a 'winter thing'?
Or will we manage to put them through wars - wars about water and land if not about religion and energy resources?
I know that a lot of these scenarios are because of watching disaster movies. But what if one of them is right?

Time flies...

2010-09-30T23:27:00.001+05:30

Time Flies. You Can not. They fly too fast.
This is a puzzle which my father posed to me many, many year ago.
There were a few such puzzles.
There are 9 balls, out of which 8 are of the same weight while one is of a different weight. There is a balance which can be used thrice to isolate the ball with the different weight.
The above remained unsolved by me. I had to go back to my father for the first one and I got the second one solved by someone else in 2007 in London.
The third one, which is actually a class 9 physics question.
If there is a tunnel along a diameter of a planet and an object is dropped into it, what will happen to it.
This one I got in class 9 itself. It took a lot of work though.
The only reason I am reproducing this here is to record it lest I forget it. I do not think I will ever forget it because I did not solve the first two. My father had to solve it for me. I wrestled with it for many years off and on and eventually gave up. I am not sure if my father was disappointed with me - I have not thought about it until now.
I think that it is common for children to admire their father. Your father is probably the second person you start to recognise. He is not always there, adding to the allure. He is strong, dependable, full of love, always busy with work and taking care of the family and knows just about everything a child might ask. As a child grows up into a young person, he might start to see some chinks in this image. As time passes, the parent shows up more and more as a human with a set of strengths, weaknesses and limitations.
I live with my father now. I have always admired him.I am a few years away from the age he was from when I remember him. With this comparison at hand, I admire him even more.
He has always taken care of everything I have needed. More importantly, he has always heeded to all that I have had to say - keeping him awake when I was young and wanted to know everything about trains while traveling overnight to Patna till now, when he wants to listen to me talk about my business every week. He has been like this with my mother and my sister. He might have his physical limitations, but his mind has always been something different. He rarely loses his temper or control over what he says. He has always been fair - a good husband and son and parent.
As I become a man of my own right, I realise that on this planet, just being a decent human being is gradually inching towards the superhuman.

Post post

2010-09-07T13:30:00.003+05:30

Regular writing has definitely been impacted since December. I am not sure why.
Theoretically, I do even less work at home than I ever did - if that was possible. But seriously, everything is taken care of. Every day, I am home by 8pm (at the latest) and then go to sleep after 11:30. I am reasonably busy during this time but have nothing to show for it.

This is an often repeated problem I have.

I have spent chunks of my life without earning a bullet point for my CV. In 2001, due to some kind of calculating or administrative error, I was invited to apply for the Aditya Birla Scholarships. This scholarship is given to 20 students every year from the country - 10 from IIMs and 10 from IITs. I remember the exact moment I realised that the scholarship was not even a very long shot. It happened like this - We had a session where the last years scholarship winners were to guide us with filling the form. There was a bio-data + achievements form to be filled along with a statement of purpose. I had no achievements to speak of (except for the admission and scholarship invitation I guess). I wanted to ask them how bad would it be if I did not have national or international level achievement to speak of (I did not have any state or district level achievements as well, but the form did not ask for those). Thankfully, the seniors did not let me ask this question. Instead, Magic Mittal asked the seniors if he could add additional sheets given if he ran out of space. They answered yes. A few heads nodded in that room. That was the moment.

IIMA did not give you a lot of time for introspection. Both years zoomed by - the first learning the tools of the trade and the second in using substances to forget the first. However, that moment stayed on with me. I always wonder about it - how did everyone else manage to have a few sheets of achievements while I had nothing to show for the 22 years spent in getting there.

I was a geek quite early on.

I used to tinker (and break) electronic toys. I built an audio amplifier (no innovation here - used a circuit board from a hobby kit which came with instructions). The amplifier's loudness depended upon the potential difference it was given - which was related to the number of batteries given. The reverse side of the carrom board at home had a wooden frame which could fit batteries in. I used to play video games with the audio routed through these speakers.

I built a paddle ship which did not work (I had not discovered torque) and tried to build an aeroplane which would use diwali rockets in multiple stages. Like some of ISRO's older rockets, the project never took off due to lack of funding and political (read parental) interference.

I had also built a small dam in the garden. I would flood the entire garden and then run all the water through a paddle linked to a small motor which would act as a dynamo and generate electricity at a low AC voltage. I never thought much about hydel power as I had to empty a drum of water to light a bulb.
There were rumours that a particular pond had a turtle and I wanted to build a periscope to investigate it. However, a periscope was too easy and I was too lazy.

I also managed to get a video game at home on which I played Mario and Contra. I played Mario quite well. A few people used to sit and watch me play whenever they could. My cousins used to hate me for it as they did not get to play if I started a game. Anyway, that was quite a waste of time I guess.

All this happened between 1988 and 1991.

I joined DPS Mathura Road in 1991 and lost the means to do much of this - no garden to flood, no carpenter to command etc.

From 1991 onwards I avoided any and all competitions. I tried to get into the students council in school but was not good enough. I did not attend or win any quizzes or make my presence felt at a city/district/state/national/international level with any dance, drama, debate, elocution, poetry, piano or even sports (I did run quite fast at school level but that was that). I was asked to apply for the post of a house captain by a housemistress - had I been asked by the correct housemistress, I would not have avoided her for the rest of my time in school .

Energy counts more than talent when it comes to achieving something in life (There is little of either this side of the post)
Hats off to the ones with the energy - they shall inherit the earth (along with the meek).

The Common-Wealth games 2010, New Delhi

2010-08-01T23:09:00.000+05:30

The common-wealth games has helped make a lot of people rich and might help India make a gigantic fool of itself. Depending upon which paper or newschannel you pickup and time of day and day of week, the amount of money used for the commonwealth has been anywhere between 5000 to 40000 crores and initial estimates have been from 400 to 1600 crores and the number of times the spend has gone up is between 8 and 17.
There are all kinds of deadlines, none of which are met usually. The deadline for project to go into testing, the deadline for the project to be handed over from the MCD to the IOC to the CWG are all there for us to shake our heads about. The TOI reports that none of the quality checks (not even one) for a series of stadiums seem to have been done properly. They further report that the external agency retained to do the checks seem to have managed doing them without ever visiting the facilities being developed.

For some reason today, I want t register my cribs about the TOI also.

On any given day, the morning paper (Times of India) has most of the below topics -
1. Stories on commonwealth games related delays and corruption
2. Stories about rain related problems and the obvious corruption and apathy of the MCD
3. Stories about Pakistan and the US and India. If they have nothing on terrorism, then they try to write about 'Aman ki Asha' . To my mind, this is a P2P publicity initiative designed for socialites who are bored of appearing on page 3 in the Delhi times and now want to get some footage in Lahore.
4. The TOI has a new paper called the 'Crest' - I might be wrong but for the life of me, I can not be sure about the name even though there is a light green shaded section every few days on the goodies which are going to be published in the 'Crest'. It is a paper which is supposed to get us to the bottom of the news and give us real analysis - I wonder if I am naive in believing that any daily newspaper aspires to provide that for its readers.
(I checked on Google - somewhat hard to find, but the name is Crest)
So they say that the Crest is not a paper, it is "a journal that allows us the luxury of the 2,000-word piece that’s as rich in style as in substance. One that is serious and stimulating, but quirky and enjoyable too. A paper where good writing heightens the joy of reading."

5. Apart from the types of news stories, there is a section embedded in some stories called 'Times View' (Again, I don't vouch for the name). The section is usually a set of issues or questions which the user should be asking which are relevant. It reminds me of a 'Tool tip' in Microsoft Excel. The auto help feature has long held its position in the list of the first few things I turn off when on a new PC. The tool tip inside a news article makes me feel as if I am reading the News for Dummies.
6. There is another section inbuilt into a lot of news stories in the TOI. It is that part of a story which reminds users how they read it first in the TOI three weeks ago. Or how the government has responded to the TOI story and then taken steps. Or how the TOI's coverage led to a simultaneous public demonstration and is now leading to a windfall of justice. I think that the paper tries to remind its users that through its pages, they are part of something bigger - an unstoppable juggernaut of a central vigilance commission. News maybe not, but emotive marketing - right on!!!

7. I have always read dated stories in the TOI. Let me clarify. Not all stories are dated, but there have always been stories (Especially from foreign lands) which can be read on Google news today and will appear in the TOI day after tomorrow.

Well even I read the TOI every day, but only because the HT and the Hindu though more serious as newspapers manage to get boring. I guess it is a sign of the times. Boring is not cool. Not cool is out.

Pins and needles

2010-07-03T19:59:00.002+05:30

So there are times when I listen to music and the lyrics that give me a funny sensation on the back of head. Sometimes, a song can makes its presence felt all the way down my spine. Sometimes the song is just very apt.
To explore this a bit more, I wanted to document it. It happened a few times today.
I was happy. I think that this is a prerequisite. I am going for a wedding. We are family friends with uncle and aunty for over 20 years now. That is how old the girl who is getting married is. I remember the day the first time Aunty had gotten her out of the house. That was the day my family would have met her. That was 1987 I think and this girl was 3 months old. Should I be feeling old? I was 8 then. I am 31 in three weeks. I was thinking about the four of us sitting together in a room in Assam watching TV - my sister, this girl and her elder brother. We were such kids. The eldest (me) is married. And tomorrow the youngest will get married.
I was also thinking about our parents. I remember quite a few things from the time I was in Assam. He was running a factory which had over 600 men. There were excise inspectors and forrest officers to contend with. The ULFA insurgency started around then.
My father was 36 when we went there. I am 31 (almost) now. Compared to what I remember of my father, I am still growing up. I guess the remaining 5 years will do the trick. You never know.
Back to the topic. The mood has to be good. The lyrics have to be apt. If the music system is nice. The eight speakers in my car do the trick.
There is an expression - music that touches the heart. I think that when music touches my heart, I get pins and needles.

bkid = A070305397

Closure

2010-06-26T00:58:00.002+05:30

Both of them were present, albeit with their new families. They were acutely aware of each other. They had played this game in their heads many times before, one of them had. They could have looked into each other's eyes and exchanged a lifetime of stories. This is what they had always done. This is what had drawn them to each other. Stories.
The beginning was long removed from the present. It was a summer and an half from half a lifetime ago.Simple kindnesses were shared. There was always a shudder when things which did not make sense ended up happening. You wanted them to happen. You made them happen. Even though it did not seem that way, it was meant to be. Closest friends could not tell the difference. Even their own heart was not let on into the secret.

There was always the real world. There were always threads. From the past and the present, from near and from far. Thread which tugged and threads which pulled.
The real world finally caught up. It cut the lifetime back to its summer and a half frame.
When it finally happened, nothing actually had to happen. No one walked up to reassure anyone. It was not required. The smile said it all.
_________________________________________________________
My attempt to sound like an Indian origin author. No theme easier than this one.

Carbon neutral blogging

2010-06-17T12:07:00.000+05:30

My blog, amongst the billions of others, will take about one tree to negate the effects that this blog is having on the environment. There is a website that does just that - With one post about the initiative, I will get a tree planted. I might be too late as they were planting trees in spring 2010, but I am still trying.

How can you take part?

Just write a short blog post about our programme “My blog is carbon neutral” and include one of the buttons below on your site (ideally in the sidebar). Send the link to your blog to CO2-neutral@kaufda.de and we plant a tree for you, neutralising the carbon dioxide emissions of your blog. The trees will be planted in the spring of 2010 by the Arbor Day Foundation. For more information about how and where the trees are planted, see the NEWS section.

Just a few easy steps to make it green:

Write a blog post about the initiative + insert your favourite button
E-mail the link to your post to CO2-neutral@kaufda.de
We plant a tree for your blog in Plumas’!

Note: We plant a tree for each domain. Please copy the html-code and paste it in your blog. Make sure the carbon-neutral button works, the html-code must not be changed. Use the carbon-neutral-white button for a white background or the carbon-neutral-transparent button for different colored backgrounds. If you need help, please contact CO2-neutral@kaufda.de. We are looking forward to planting your tree!

The end of hope

2010-06-05T16:31:00.000+05:30

I have been reading more about the middle east that anything else in the recent past.
I also happened across the historycommons website. Now that I have seen it, it is quite an obvious use of a wiki for making a timeline using publicly available and referenced information. It is very exhaustive. For example, the complete 911 timeline on this website starts from 1968 and has 6318 (and growing) articles.

The current book I am reading is The Great War for civilisation, written by Robert Fisk. It is quite a formidable volume, but I think that everyone should read it. Much as everyone should read the Catch 22 and War and Peace. I have always thought of how someone can walk into a market and explode a bomb tied to his body and die peacefully. This book shows me that I can never understand it. This is because I have not gone through some of what has been going on in some of these places.

The word "free" has a new meaning for me from now on.

Planned growth (or a random walk)

2010-04-12T00:13:00.000+05:30

If the stock market is to be believed, India is out of the recession. It has grown by about 60% in the span of a few months leaving quite a few economists with a sheepish grin on their faces and their complete inability to provide an explanation to wtf is going on.
There are some who made a lot of money here. Some of us exited the market at 9000 and congratulated themselves at their superior sense of timing and heard their lower jaw hit the floor when the market breached 15000. It hit 18000 two days back.
There. I needed to vent a bit about the 'unearned income'.
I have not been able to post for a really long time. Some of it is because of being busy -
Last time this time was about - A very hot summer with power cuts, an office move, some more clients, hiring new people, meeting new companies and getting a bit more serious about what I have to do and where I have to be... and some of it is about not finding too much to write about. More accurately, not being able to decide what to write about..
This time, some of last year makes a reappearance. We are still hiring - this time for growth and not due to attrition, we have an office but need to plan an expansion. New things this year include the fact that Envigo is offering more services now - we have started to dabble with mobile applications and facebook games and social media marketing.. we are working for two French websites.

Personally, life is moving in a nice little routine with the two of us. We got ourselves a new car and are planning a few new road trips. Let us see when and where.

We took the car and went straight to the pandit - keeps everyone happy - Mother, wife and may be even God (in that order of importance). Below is a snap from April 9th... a nice evening spent at Olive with a bottle of wine, good food and decent weather....what else is there? (Planned as a surprise by the wife.. which made it all the more fun)

repo 105

2010-03-13T03:31:00.000+05:30

The internet is ablaze today with repo 105. Everyone is searching for it and twittering about it. "Repo 105" is one of the top 100 searched terms on Google today.
The world of high finance - with its exotic products - has to fall back upon simple lies to dress up its balance sheet. Lehman's financial pundits did basically this - 'sell' something toxic off their balance sheet every quarter with a guarantee to buy it back soon after. It appeared as a sale, when it was actually just parking. You had to do more and more of it every quarter. Oh yes and the CEO was not aware of it - not $50 billion worth of it.
Ernst and Young were ok with it - they reported for numbers till nov 2007 that the numbers were fairly presented inspite of whistle-blowing by an insider.

I would love to retain E&Y any time I need help with the HMRC. Oh yes and Linklaters as well.

Crooked E and PWC have company now. And given the similarity of events, this line will only grow longer.

1942

2010-03-13T03:01:00.003+05:30

I was a 20 year old bachelor. I lived in Mastichak,a village close to Seetalpur, just north of the Ganga. The independence movement was getting restless. So was I. Youth is a wonderful thing - it lets you dream and it makes you act.

My father had died when my brothers and I were still young boys. Responsibility at a young age had made my elder brothers very cautious. They decided to get me married. They hoped that a new bride will calm me down and keep me at home. I got married to Ms. Rajkumari on May 6 1942. She was 18 years old. I remember this date because of the events which were about to happen.My wife thinks otherwise and is equally sure that we were married in June. After 68 years of being married, it is hard to remember.

On Aug 8th, Gandhiji had asked us to ' Do or Die'. The country shook into action. every day, we heard reports of arrests and torture. All Congress leaders were jailed. The movement however continued and gained in strength.

Kilometers of railway track was uprooted and laid waste. Telegraph and telephone lines were cut. In Ballia, a small town closeby in UP, the British administration was overthrown. The jail was broken into and everyone was released. A local leader called Pandeyji led the revolt at Balliia.

There were rallies, sit-ins and speeches everyday. We hoisted the national flag on a police station. The district administration caught us in the act and we made a run for it. The DC was sympathetic. He ordered the police to fire in the air and not at us. There was a police investigation nonetheless and my house was visited a few times by white policemen. I went into hiding for a few weeks. My sister-in-law's husband went to jail during this period for some time.

In 1947 my country was liberated. It was a humbling experience. We were elated but saw the horrors of partition. I was at the Gandhi Maidan at Patna on Aug 15 1947. It was as if all of Patna was also there. The air rippled with excitement. We did not know what would happen next, but we were free.

I wanted to take part in the first Congress session of free India. I took leave from the Chapra post office. My supervisor thought I was crazy as I was not even a member of the Congress then. I took a loan to pay for my travel. I boarded trains, buses and bullock carts and made my way to Jaipur. I was there. I saw everyone -

Acharya Kriplani, Nehruji, Sitaramayya, CR, Azad, Patel. India seemed safe in the hands of these men. The crowd was even larger than Patna in 47.

Now that I look back, I am amazed at the times I have lived through.

I did not go to jail pre-1947 because of which I was not able to claim being a freedom fighter.

Had I been one, I would get free train tickets, which would make my wife happier.

___________________________________________________________

As narrated to me by my grand father who will turn 88 this year.

Siamese Saga

2010-02-28T13:08:00.003+05:30

The wife and I packed up our bags and left for Krabi via Bangkok on the 12th of December. I was only too happy to leave - there were too many people all over the place and she was also the centre of all attention, which is bearable only for about 5 minutes in real life.
Our flights ensued that we stayed awake for about 36 straight hours, so by the time we were on our last leg, she was nodding off constantly. Krabi airport reminded me instantly of Mohanbari airport (Dibrugarh) - the single runway and the greenery all around, but the airport itself was a miniature version of Mumbai airport - spanking clean and modern. Krabi is one of the lesser developed provinces in Thailand for this part of Thailand, but the roads were smooth and undulating. (I will rattle off facts thanks to the 900 page lonely planet which I bought). As a normal red-blooded north Indian, I was not very happy to note that even countries so close to home and so looked-down upon in India (development is supposed to have happened only in the US, UK, Western Europe, Australia) are better off than us.

(Mr and Mrs and our shiny black SUV in the corner)

Our itinerary for Thailand was as follows:

Ko Lanta (6 days), Ko Phi Phi Don (2 days) and then Bangkok (2 days).

Ko Lanta was exactly as isolated as I had wanted it to be - a private beach for the resort but not isolated enough to compromise on any of the comforts.

Phi Phi has been made famous by 'The Beach' - a movie which is about a secret beach. The beach in 'The Beach' is Maya beach on Ko Phi Phi Leh, a smaller island close to Phi Phi Don.

(approaching Maya Beach (above) in a long tail (see below))

The coolest parts of the trip:

3) View point #2, Ko Phi Phi Don - This was a 45 minute staircase trek to the topmost point of the island. The island, which is actually a paid of islands joined by an isthmus, with giant limestone rocks, was quite imposing. We timed it well so that we were there as the sun began to set. Also, we could not find the camera and used the mobile instead, only to realise later that we were in fact carrying in the camera.

2) Snorkeling aoff the island of Ko Rok - We snorkeled at 4-5 different places but the best by far was the first one which took us to Ko Rok. There were no jellyfish, the coral was colourful, the water was clean and most of all, there were plenty of fish of lots of different colours. The best by far, for sure. We had lunch and got to laze around on Ko Rok for a couple of hours - we took pics during that but not of the snorkeling as we did not have a waterproof camera.

1) Emerald cove, which was an enclosed beach which could only be reached after swimming through a tunnel of water for about 80 meters.

(The mouth of the tunnel and the inland beach at the Emerald Cove)

A parked long tail below

Sugandh and I

2010-02-02T20:36:00.001+05:30

I have the wedding pics finally. I also have a macbook which is brand new. I have gotten it for envigo, where we are going to be building facebook applications now.

Below is what happens when I get a Mac.

A few pics from the Baraat

and then the wedding itself...

and then the reception ...

As I wait for the rather large baraat video to load on youtube, I will record my thoughts on my wedding for posterity. I think that it was a lot of fun, important things to note were as follows:

1. The disappointment of not too many of my friends making it ... which was made up quite quickly by those who did.

2. A series of four top secret get-togethers, which happened every night from the 4th till the 7th were an excellent buildup for the functions.

3. Family gathered from all over and every breakfast, lunch and dinner was an event in itself for 3-4 days.

4. The bigness of the deal that a wedding is was driven home when I looked up after exchanging garlands - an entire field of people were looking at the two of us.

5. Bihari weddings are torturous for the couple, especially the bride, who gets to sleep only for about 5-6 hours in two days (and nights).

6. The sheer delight felt by close family, especially parents, at this occasion and being getting reminded all over again about how much I get pampered by my parents and my sister.

At the end of it, everyone who came left 1-2 days after the wedding. The kitchen, which was feeding around 70 people a day for 3-4 days was disbanded. Even Sugandh and I left for our honeymoon (yes, thats the next post!) by the 12th. (The wedding took place on the 9th). Both my parents and my sister had a very bad throat and a cold. My mother in law fell ill soon after for 2-3 days.

What is left with us - apart from each other - is a smorgasboard of memories - extending far beyond the few days of the wedding itself - an entire memory map of relatives and friends and how long and how well we know and how much they mean to us (and we to them).

It is quite incredible and humbling to have so many people pause their lives for a few days and come to be a part of this celebration called a marriage.

Ten years and counting

2009-12-31T11:49:00.003+05:30

In the dying hours of 30th December 1999, 5 idiots bought general class train tickets from Suratkal station to Madgaon (After stocking themselves and their bags up with ~~some~~ lots of rum). The trip which followed is hard to explain in any rational or irrational manner. Over the next 40 hours, the following things were done or undone:

1. Sharing of 60 ml (nahi nahi 40 ml) of a drink with strange friendly boy - no
2. Nattu had to turn off the ayshee - yes
3. Papa asking us to take a helicopter to Goa - no
4. Seeking Shah on a train from Gujarat after speaking to his mother at 5am- yes
5. Finding a lot of Shahs on the train - yes
6.a. Finding our Shah - no
6.b. Finding two friends from school who recognised you - yes
7.a. Putting yellow paint on trousers - yes
7.b. Going through the motions of getting a hotel room - yes
7.c. Walking out of a hotel when deemed too expensive - yes
8. Getting drunk by 1pm - yes
9. Puking on one's self while lying down faceup on the beach - yes
10. Ushering in the new year with a drink - no
11. Nursing a hangover at 4pm - sunset - yes
12. Drinking water only after asking friend to borrow it from topless middle aged woman - yes
13. Eating Tandoori chicken - yes
14. Going into Tito's (stag entry - rs. 1800 for everything, girls could enter for free) - no
15. Mysteriously vanishing for a few hours - yes
16. Sleeping around a bonfire - yes
17. Cursing odd looking boy with hot looking girl (and wishing him dead) - yes
18. Almost dying in the cold - yes
19. Sleeping on bus back to goa to be woken up by conductor - yes
20. Sleeping on bus back to station to be woken up by conductor - yes

Addy/Goldie/Rao/Jazz - I am touched to note that we are still in touch.
Everyone else at baccmavs - We have done 50% of 'bees saal baad'

Mama's wedding

2009-12-28T11:17:00.000+05:30

I am a married man now since Dec 9th 2009. More on that in a separate post, very rarely do things happen in my life which I want to write about so I do not want to loose out on them and stick to the order.
About two weeks before my wedding, I took a flight to Mumbai on my way to Trivandrum via Mangalore. The plan was to visit KREC for a day and then take the train from Mangalore to reach Trivandrum the next day for two days of fun and frolic at Mama's wedding. My flight from Mumbai was preponed and I missed it. I spent the night at Chaku's house (who is also from KREC and was planning to come to college with me - bag baggage missus and son) and all of us took the flight the next day to Trivandrum.
We were in Trivandrum one day early. I was a bit worried about getting bored, but then I had Sid for company (more on him below) and by the end of it, I really liked my stay in Kerala. Everyone we asked about what to do in Trivandrum and the answer was - go to Kovalam. Kovalam was the daytime and the nighttime capital of anything we wanted to do there... so go to kovalam we did. The first evening, we ended up in the Leela Kovalam, which has a large infinity pool (you can see it in the closing shots of the movie Rock on) overlooking the Arabian sea. We planned to have a massage but turned it down in favour for their nice buffet dinner, which has authentic kerala cuisine (all 6 items) and a lot of north indian fare (tandoori chicken, aloo gobi and so on).
Early next day, we took a cab and were back on the beach by 8 (I think). The cabbie shocked my by his timeliness. He arrived exactly at 7:30. I think that I am so caught up with all the trappings on living in a big city that small city life never fails to please me.
Some pics below from the fun I had that day - Chaku + Deepti + Sid + me + Kovalam. The day started with a few hours on the beach - the early sun and the fishermen pulling in their nets. It was followed by a nice oil massage. Chaku and Deepti took turns for their massage so that Sid was not left alone. I ended up alone with him for a bit as Chaku was taking his shower while Deepti's had started. I was scared imagining Sid bawling for his Papa or Mummy but Sid remained the happy and sunny child that he always is...

After a bit, we dragged ourselves to this place called the German Bakery which is also on Kovalam beach.
(Kovalam beach is a series of beaches - by themselves, they are not very long, but the beach is perfect. They are shorter than many other beaches, including the one at KREC. However, the beaches are perfect. Clean sand, gradual inclines into the water, decent waves).

Later, quite a few others made it to the same bakery. Riju (flying in from Delhi), thePingus, the KCPs and so on. Below - Sid at the bakery, the lighthouse (on the lighthouse beach) which looks very similar to the view on KREC beach and a pic of almost all of us (Except for Chaku and Deepti) towards the end of the day at the German bakery.

I really liked the functions I got to attend. The functions were straightforward and uncomplicated.
On the eve of the wedding, there was a simple function with the groom's family and friends (us) where Mahesh's brother's availability as a single man was announced. The function had a bartender who insisted on leaving very little space for any thing other than Chivas, an excellent meal and great fun.
Even the wedding and the reception were very to-the-point. Lots of things were done with minimum of fuss.
We arrived at the church at 11:15 and got seats which were somewhere in the middle. By 11:35 the groom had walked in and soon after, so did the bride. By 12:30, all was done - the wedding as well as the sunday (?) mass. By 1:00 pm, we were all at the Trivandrum club for the reception. At the reception as well, both the families were introduced, from great-grandfather down (5 minutes), along with the bride's and groom's current education and employment status. The groom's younger brother's availability was announced to a larger audience (about 600 people). With all this out of the way, the lunch layout was explained. By 1:45, there were a group of about 20 IIMA friends + spouses ready to go home and fall asleep after carefully stuffing themselves with chicken/meat/beef/pork :).

Overall, it was a great wedding to be at, made more fun by Sid and so many of my friends who could come.
It was a nice way to spend my last bachelor weekend, not really for any last gasp 'bachelor' activities, but a reminder of how things are with friends - laughter, lazing and lunacy.

Five year plans

2009-12-02T22:31:00.000+05:30

How important is a planner to the plan? If the plan outlives the planner or if the plan and the planner are no longer in the same frame of reference, then what. I do not think I am making any sense...

I have made plans all my life. Here is an example of a plan for things to do before I turn 35:

1. To get married
2. To travel to Peru, south of France, Morocco, Egypt, New Zealand and Kanha national park
3. To have one or more child
4. To own a house/home/flat
5. To donate 50 computers to Netarhat school
6. To be fitter than I am
7. To be connected to friends and family

There are instances of co-planning, but the conspirators are far removed from my life now.
Life will always be about planning and I have a long term co-planner moving in just over a week to live with me for the forseeable future and beyond :)
I just hope and wish that the plans are fulfilled to varying degrees of success. I hope even more for more and more planning...a plan captures the present, future and even the past within itself.

Getting married

2009-10-15T14:30:00.002+05:30

I am getting married to Sugandh on the 9th of Dec in New Delhi. There are going to be a few functions around it and the dates are below.

~~4th or 5th December: - Cocktails (Club 84, New Delhi)~~ Not happening due to lack of quorum

6th December - Engagement (Taurus Mess, Delhi Cantt, New Delhi)
7th December - Tilak (PWO housing society, Gurgaon)
9th December - Wedding (Great India celebration, Noida)
10th December - Reception (Taurus Mess, Delhi Cantt, New Delhi)

Climate change up close and personal

2009-09-27T01:13:00.002+05:30

One of my parents old friends visited us last week for about half a day. They used to live close by to our house in Ledo, Assam for about 7 years and have kept in touch ever since. They have since moved to Calcutta. Uncle has worked in tea estates all his life and continues to work as a director for a tea company with estates in northern Bengal.
It is always great fun to meet them. Some of my father's friends are from Telco, Jamshedpur or earlier. I was around 7 when we left Telco, which is why I dont remember any of them. However, with Raghu uncle and Shiela aunty, it is very different. I remember meeting them for the first time as well in Assam and most of the time I have spent in their house. They had a typical tea planter's bungalow. As with many tea bungalows in Assam, all of this had been built long before independence - a time when all the tea managers were British.The bungalow had 2 lawns, each the size of two tennis courts, a vegetable garden the size of a football field, a temple and a swimming pool. There was a separate cooking area and two staircases, one for the sahibs and one from the back for the servants. I was taught how to swim in this pool. Every summer, the pool would be cleaned and filled up. I would reach their house soon after breakfast and swim for a few hours with their son - Akshay. We would break for lunch (heavy) and an afternoon nap(deep). We would be in the pool again in the evening. Uncle and Aunty would also join us later in the evening. At times, even my parents joined. Those were long, happy days.
I asked him if he had seen any changes in the climate in the years in the tea plantations. His job is very close to nature. Tea grows in Assam well because of the climate. It needs a lot of rain (about 100cm a year) in well distributed installments, in a somewhat cool climate and needs great drainage so that the rain water does not settle. Because of this, the entire industry is also a dedicated climate watcher. Tea estates keep detailed daily records for rainfall and temperature. He said that the changes were very, very visible. The temperature regularly crossed into the 40s, where only ten years ago, the yearly maximum used to be around 37 degrees. Rains are now less predictable. He also said that animal habits were changing. Wild elephants and bisons strayed more often into the estates as their forests are getting encroached upon. Entire species of birds were vanishing. Some of the estates used to become a resting place for bees. Every winter, thousands of bees would fly in from Sikkim and make over a hundred hives all through the estate. They have not returned for over two years.
There would be millions of such stories of people who feel a tangible impact of climate change. I cant help but notice that city dwellers like me with oil powered cars and oil powered electricity feel only a negligible impact of climate change.
Speaking of earth-shaking changes, I have a big personal one to add.
I am getting married. The dates are not cast in stone yet, but the person is. She is an absolute delight to be with. I will upload pics when I have some. All my readers (all 5 of you) are invited to the wedding. More details to follow.

Diditz @ DEMO

2009-09-23T11:35:00.000+05:30

Diditz made it at Demo today. It is an app made and financed by a few friends of mine. It comes as a standalone social network as well as a facebook application. It links up very well with existing communities and walls on facebook and helps organisers tap into search engine traffic to promote their events.

I think it is very cool. TC missed covering it but it still looks to go places.

I dreamed a dream....(the same dream again!)

2009-09-19T11:40:00.001+05:30

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high and life worth living...

(Susan Boyle sang it out and swayed so many people - me included - I had heard this song for the first time with some of my friends falling asleep on my shoulder in a theatre in London and impact was no where close to Ms. Boyle on a 14" youtube window)

Then I was young and unafraid
Dreams were made and used and wasted.....
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

I had a dream my life would be
So different from what I'm living....

Anyway, this post is about a dream but somehow thinking about dreams and i started thinking about the last few lines of this song. It is not a repetitive dream, but there is this particular theme (se1) around which I dream about everytime there is going to be some change in my life. I have mentioned this earlier (here and here). In fact, given my lucid dreaming tendencies, last night, when I was having another one of these dreams, I was not even surprised. It was more like a "here we go again" moment for me. But I thought I will write about it to make sure that I record this for future introspection etc.
Why this dream?
If my head was a personal computer, remembering something is like accessing a hard drive and then playing it after decoding the file. A dream is also about accessing the same hard drive, but using more fuzzy decoders and maybe even about accessing different parts of the hard drive. The point is that this is a closed system. There is nothing new going in, especially if you are dreaming about the past. The only inference is that such points in my life always activate this particular set of memories in my head.
Or not even that.

My Home Theatre PC - Oh yeah! (Part 1.5)

2009-09-08T00:48:00.001+05:30

It has been over just over two weeks and things are looking very good so far with the system. My parents and my sister are getting used to it and I am very happy to note that even my mother is using the system as a PC to check emails and surf the internet.
The things left to write about are the power supply, TV card (not yet purchased), Software and final configration. I think I can not really write about all this just yet because the TV card is not here yet, the different software are being tested and the final configurations need DDR2 1033Mhz memory chips which I have not been able to get yet.
I went to Mumbai for the weekend and came back. The main purpose of the trip was to meet NK - even though that did not happen, I ended up having quite a good time. I met VM and some of her P&G gang, Chaku + Chaki + Sid (who is the friendliest kid I have come across so far), spent loads of time with Mama and also met up with the Pingus and the Aruls. It was a nice lazy weekend with both days beginning with a hearty breakfast at Candys and both evenings ending with a whiff of Laphroaig. Mama was good fun as always and I will miss him a bit when he gets married - though I am hopeful that things dont change much and I can still pileon as and when I want to.
I guess half of the men get married because they fall in love ( and with the six people involved being all in agreement at the same time) and the other half of men get married because they have no one left to hang out with.*

I like Bandra in the rains. Mama's latest pad is just off carter road on Pali hill and it is a very leafy and spacious (yes spacious) neighbourhood. I could reach the sea without encountering any sunlight, long stretches of the road completely covered with leafy green trees on both sides. People were all caught up in their own acts studiously trying to relax and unwind by lazing around, meeting friends, lounging at the promenade, walking slowly in the constant monsoon gusts.

I had to meet a potential future client at the Taj Lands end and the security at the gate reminded me of the Nov 29 terrorist attack. How quickly life has moved on since then for us, the audience, while the survivors would be having trouble facing each day. (posting a link for a well made documentary which was aired by the BBC but did not receiveany media coverage in India).

We did a quick drive of the new Bandra Worli sealink with Mama cribbing about how India always thought small and never over the top (As the sealink has only 4 lanes while it should actually have 16). All in all, a great trip. I think I am going to be able to visit college also thanks to Mama's wedding in Kerala end of November. It might be a trip with Chaku and co which should be great fun and I am looking forward to it.

*I have tried to be in the first category but I guess I will end up in the second.

My HTPC (internal pic - 1)

2009-09-03T11:29:00.000+05:30

You will say that this does not deserve a blog post of its own.

I beg to differ.
In the picture, a top view of the motherboard, the hard disc (centre bottom) and the cdrom cabinet (right bottom). Also visible are the 2 cabinet fans and the CPU fan (which covers the CPU).
Yay.

My Home Theatre PC - Oh yeah! (Part 1)

2009-09-01T12:10:00.004+05:30

My home theatre PC - or the centre of my world is finally up and running. It is a very long story and I will only give you highlights.

The aim was to own a PC which would do the following
1) Play movies/DVDs/CDs and also TV
2) Play music
3) Be a living room centrepoint and not a study room artifact (aka Look cool)
4) Be silent
5) Surf the internet
6) Have a remote in place of a mouse and a wireless keyword
7) Download everything
8) Record everything including TV shows (without ads)
9) Cost less than $1000
10) Run on open source but without any compromises

(Note how gaming is missing from the list above)

It took me 18 months to finally decide upon what I needed to buy. After that, I needed about 4 weeks to get everything in one place and about 5 hours to assemble it.This is what I came up with.
There is a lack of many such options in India except for some boxes which I saw on ebay. They were usually intel based and were not really close to the kind of system I had in mind. I was also not able to find too many systems in the US which I liked, though there is a lot of choice. I found this where the computers ranged from $429 to $3299, all were Intel based (nothing against intel but I think you can get the same computing power for lesser on AMD), had things which I rather not pay for (touchscreens, warranties, expensive video cards) and did not have things which I would have wanted to have.

The writing was on the wall - To get what I want, I had to make it myself.
I had to assemble my own computer. Computer engineer I am, but I am and have always been concerned with bigger issues
(Always tended more towards the later Vinod Dham and less towards his earlier days when he designed the pentium chip) and have been able to live for 4+8 years (college,since college) without assembling a single computer. In any case, I had to do what I had to do and I dived in for quite detailed research on the following items:

Motherboard and chip
You have to decide on the motherboard and the chip together. Gone are the days when all chips went into all motherboard for a particular type (long long gone). AMD and Intel both have their own families. Motherboards do a lot nowadays. They have on-board sound and video cards (which means that if you like, you dont have to buy these cards separately), support for a lot of input and output formats (HDMI, DVI, VGA, Stereo, Digital Audio and so on) and give power to cooling fans, Hard discs etc.
I chose an Asus motherboard - not top of the line, but with excellent reviews and with support for a 3.0Ghz AMD chip. The motherboard has three features which I really liked
- You can surf the internet, listen to music, play DVDs without loading windows if you like
- You can shut down parts of the CPU if you want to cut down power consumption
- You can run a memory chip of speeds upto 1033Mhz
The chip I selected was the AMD quad core Phenom 940. (What it means is a quad core chip with a speed of 3.0Ghz)

Cabinet
The PC cabinet has to to look good, make less noise, dissipate heat and support a remote while housing a lot of things inside it - chip, motherboard, power supply, hard disc(s), CD/DVD/Blue ray drive(s). The cabinets can only support motherboards of a particular size and form factor (ATX or miniATX) and also have a fixed number of hard disc and drive bays. They also can house a power supply of a given size and have a fixed number of fans for cooling. They have to have a particular design and noise absorbing components.
I chose an Antec cabinet - dull black, with separate internal compartments for power, HDD and motherboard, 3 fans, a small LCD display, a volume control knob and an i-mod remote.

(Still to write about - Power supply, TV card, Software, Final configuration)

London, Scotland, Bizdev and other stories.

2009-09-01T01:00:00.000+05:30

All of a sudden, this one is one of three blogs which I have to write on. There is a blog on Envigo and I have been asked to write on a website called asiaonlinemarketing.com which is a novel way of subjecting a new set of unsuspecting audiences with my writing.
A lot happened this week and I am still figuring it all out. A lot has been happening in life overall as well. I was in the UK for two weeks - with a short holiday to Scotland in the middle. It was my third trip to Scotland. However, this time, I hiked and also went to a whiskey distillery (called Dalwhinnie) - things which I had somehow not been able to do earlier.
London summer was fun - though quite hectic because of the work. I have decided to visit London more often as I always end up getting some work from the UK for us.
Bizdev otherwise has been slow - sort of flattening out. I am speaking with NK - figuring out a way for some more work to come my way with him.

Would you change anything?

2009-07-28T12:00:00.007+05:30

Today is the last day of me as a twenty something. It is vaguely depressing.In fact, it is quite depressing. I remember a conversation from five years ago. I had been in London for about 6 weeks and found myself having drinks with the few friends that I had from office. One of them was a very pretty, absolutely dreamy looking content writer. When she found out it was my birthday, she asked me how old I was and shared her age with me. She expressed surprise at my age (always wonder why) while I felt a bit sorry for her becauseof hers.
Tomorrow, I will have a significant amount of pity and sorry-feeling for myself.

A few days back, RG and I were at drinks at SS's place, when he asked me if I would like to change things in my life. I took a deep breath and started talking about all the things I would like to change. He stopped me and said he wanted a longer term view. Were there things in my life I would do differently?
It is quite a lethal question to answer for a thirty year old. A 'yes' means that you are not happy with 10 years of your life - which is pretty much most of all you have got, given that life begins at about 15 years of age. And you can not really say no, because that would mean having a perfect life.
There are plenty of things I would like to change in my life. I would have tried to be less lazy (though I think such things are hardwired biologically and I am not to blame for the genes I possess), been a bit smarter during college and MBA, taken certain decisions differently soon after, listened more to my parents and less to myself, used my time at ebookers/London more wisely and overall played more sports.
At the same time, I would not like to change broadly where I am at now with all the non-ideal bits as well. I just hope that such questions let me learn what I need to from the past without pulling me down!
That is what I answered - No.

And I found this, so I feel much better in the fact that I am not alone.

(image courtesy - Sirdrinkalot)

And it all came pouring down....

2009-07-27T11:30:00.004+05:30

Rainfall and I have something going. I am sure Assam and Meghalaya had some record breaking years between 1987 and 1994 when I was living there. I won't be surprised to find out that there were record south westerly monsoons when most of it used to fly over my head during my years at Suratkal between 1997 and 2001. Similarly, I am certain that the repeated flooding in the UK in the past few years was no El nino.
(There was a character called McKenna in the HHGTTG who was the rain god and had similar characteristics, his hit rate was 100%, I am not anywhere close thankfully).
With such a history, when people talk about strange weather and untimely rains in Delhi and Gurgaon, I just shrug. The monsoons are in full swing now, so rains are not unexpected, but the 18mm we got yesterday was close to an all time record.

I think that Delhi looks very pretty just after the rains stop. Waterlogged streets with water receding, traffic reclaiming the streets, the freshly washed look of everything and so on. So many things happens at once. Traffic moves through like a stream - It is an obstacle course and it finds the path of least resistance - punctuated with pools of water, groups of two-wheelers waiting out the rain, broken down cars and buses, parked animals and so on. Last night was great that way - my personal traffic stream was undulating as any but the traffic was light and I was home in regular time.
So many things happening at once - this is life... and living in India during the monsoons is life at its fluctuating, pulsating, vibrant best.

(Images courtesy: soumik, evrensahin)

(The tone of the above paragraph would have been much different had it taken me a few hours to get home while walking through waist deep slush, but I did not)

An individual's life is sometimes only a by-product of so many macro changes that have happened or are happening, so much so that it would be depressing as it leaves little to no credit for him to relish and relate to his friends.
My entire life reads like one. I have parents who were educated in institutes set up at the eve of this country gaining independence. My father found employment in the 70s with TELCO (now Tata Motors) building trucks and then with Escorts (building tractors). In the mid 80s, we found ourselves in Assam with my father working in plywood. Economically, India was also just about chugging along with a hindu rate of growth and very little political initiative. (I think that the fifteen years from emergency onwards were a colossal loss for India). We then moved to Delhi in the 1990s which was the roaring decade for India's manufacturing sector and my father was back into the thick of it. I also went to colleges set up by the government in the 1950s - now coming of age and having a vintage respected widely in industry both in India and elsewhere. So many of my friends moved to the West (very able and products of some of the most competitive exams in the world, educated on government subsidised education, all of them will do well - their competence will enrich India only as remittances and not as managerial or entrepreneurial inputs). Some of us came back for very personal reasons, but also because economically, India now offers much more fun and opportunity than some of the countries in the west (me included). My penchant with rainfall I think can be explained by this cute little thing we call climate change.

Updates

2009-06-13T20:43:00.000+05:30

A post has been due for over a month or so now. Business picked up somewhat and we are moving into a new office which also has added to the work. I had a trip to London planned and ticketed etc, but I had to cancel it because I fell sick. It was diagnosed as viral (wrong) and then as chicken pox (right). It has been a week in the passing and now I am feeling much better, just that I am still infectious and have been confined to a room.
Such forced rest is great, though frankly, as of now, I am over-rested.
There is not much more to write about - I read somewhere that the best blogs are those which have frequent albeit short and messy posts. In my mind, that sounded like blogging tending towards tweeting... bleeting anyone?

Ubuntu and cool stuff

2009-06-03T12:07:00.001+05:30

Ubuntu and cool stuff

Shared via AddThis

Superbly mediocre or then some.

2009-04-24T13:46:00.002+05:30

I look back at life and I know that I have wasted time, no matter how much I try to justify things. As a result, there are things which I could have done or should have tried to, but never did and now will not be able to.
Life for me had been a constant attempt to maintain a straight line - the shortest distance from one point to the other. (I have failed miserably at times in that as well)
Sure I can learn to play an instrument or come up with a fancy hobby now but I should have done it when I was younger and I did not. It is not as if I was under too much stress from studying that I could not do any of this even if I wanted to.No.
Even now, things are not getting any better. I should have saved more and spent less, should have gotten married by now (not for not trying this one though, but still), should have travelled more, exercised more, listened more, made more friends and known more people and so on. It is not that I have had a super busy job and I have been denied all this. No.
People say that one should stop to smell the roses. I am the guy who falls asleep next to the roses every day but never smells them.
Never has circumstance given me the excuse for any of my behaviour. It is only the way I am.
The silver lining - I have started to look back and regret and maybe some day I will regret enough that I am moved to take some action.
At business school, I was selected to apply for a scholarship with 20 others. There was a form which had two pages and most of it was about the academic and co-curricular state, national and international level achievements which an applicant would like to share with the interview board. I wanted to ask our mentors what my chances were if I did not have much (anything) to write about. Someone else, who later went on to become an investment banker at GS, asked his question before me. His question was whether he could attach extra sheets if the space was not enough.
I did not bother asking my question. I also did not get the scholarship.
The point is not about missing the scholarship. I think that it is one of the best scholarships in the country and even getting that chance to apply and failing to get the scholarship is the definite highpoint of my academic career. The point was that how was it that someone with a similar background and education had so much more to write about than I did. That day I realised that I had never even thought on these lines ever before. Life for me had been a constant attempt to maintain a straight line - the shortest distance from one point to the other. I have failed miserably at times in that as well.

Lessons for the future -
1. As my project partner from final year (MSA) used to say, "mukman, try to do round-trips in circles, never in straight lines"
2. Hurry up with everything!

Tube power

2009-04-19T12:05:00.001+05:30

This is the week when Susan Boyle happened. She did not get much attention in the Indian press (I really need to write about the Times of India soon, they are beginning to piss me off more and more now) or even on TV, but she looks like swooping over the UK and the US. Google News today had over 3000 stories in the global English language media about her. Her youtube videos have over 35 million views in just under a week.
The clip is a short one - seven minutes - but it is quite a roller coaster. You can click this link if the video above does not load. I found the link on facebook and I had a look. My emotions went from to pity to contempt to shock to disbelief & guilt to joy and wonder I guess.
It is rare that so many find so much joy from such simple things in life. I wish her all the best. I think that there are only 35 million or so viewers (at least) who are tracking her from the world over and rooting for her.

Wind of change

2009-04-11T23:29:00.000+05:30

Delhi has oppressive weather. It is hot from April till October, with the rainy months being very humid. The rainy season is short and the winter months are chilly. Personally, only the beginning and the end of winter, which are the months of November, February and March which are pleasant.
The past 12 months have been better. The rains lasted much longer in August and september. The winters were mild. There was also some rain in April this year (which never happens). I think the weather is changing. (Since it sucks so badly in Delhi, any change is for the better). The weather change is also depressing. I think these are our very local experiences of the global climate change.

I wonder if we will be able to mend our ways in time. The only piece of good news is this - more and more people are scared now about this than ever before.

I do not think that we can ever comprehend how rare and precious life is. Humans are even more so. Actually, I am not sure about that. Humans are definitely numero uno on this planet at this time. However, we are but the latest episode in a gigantic evolutionary soap opera which has been on air for the past 4 billion years on this planet. Can we assume that we are the end of the evolutionary chain? I do not think do. Other species too have been on the top of the ecological pyramid (I have seen Jurassic park), but humans would probably be the only species who are directly contributing to their own downfall. Anyway, humans could and should be just in a long line of species who made their presence felt for some time and then subsided.

Words can't express the irony well enough - 'the smartest species was dumb enough to skin its own goat'

On a lighter note, election fever is here in this country. Envigoman is of the opinion that we had predicted a lot of things two years ago which are close to correct. I need to read that post again.

Stretching coincidences

2009-04-05T20:41:00.002+05:30

I am not a superstitious person. For me, a coincidence is a random event which, out of randomness, is linked to past or present events in such a way that causes further thought or excitement.
I am also somewhat lazy and need to fill up some of this time when I am not doing anything with thoughts. I take every excitable coincidence and analyse it to the limit. It is like connecting random dots to see if a picture emerges. The catch is not in how the dots are placed. The catch is in the number of dots. If you have enough dots, you can draw whatever you want.
What happened was this - I met someone (s1) who reminded me very strongly of someone else (se1). The funny thing is this - every time I have something new happening in my life, I experience an se1 event. Usually, it is a dream or an email. This time it was an entire person. It has been quite a while since se1, so I am not sure if I remember things completely/correctly, but still, it was quite close to what I remember.
So yes, stretching it is what describes it completely.
So, envigo.blogspot.com was visiting this weekend along with wife. I got to meet wife's sis envigo's brother. Overall, it was a great weekend except for one unpleasant incident.
The things we talked about included:
1. My life
2. His job
3. His future plans
4. The recession
5. Why I like living in India?
6. The case of two/three Indias in existence today and the overall apathy of everyone involved (us included)

The last topic was depressing, a bit more than I would have imagined. I will definitely have to write more about it.

Recently acquired the complete monty python series and have to go through it. I still have not managed to get the last four episodes of house season 4.

The first copies of my Nana's book got sold - envigo.blogspot.com being the first customer.

Couture chai

2009-03-21T00:35:00.000+05:30

We finished a year and after we finish March, we will be able to do our first YOY comparison. Things are looking up with some big boys speaking with us for the first time and so on, and work is exciting.
I got to watch a fashion show for the first time this week. I did not expect much but I thought that it was something worth capturing in a post.
It all began with SS. She was shocked to find out that I had not ever seen a show, while I was shocked to think that something like this was shocking. I claimed (correctly) that none of my friends had watched one either. So there I was, at the Delhi fashion week which was being held quite close to the office.
You need to be a designer, a model, a member, guest, staff or hired help of the FDCI to be allowed in, or you need to know the right people (unless of course, you are one of the right people).
We waited for a bit for the show and lots of people seemed to know each other. Air kissing was the norm. In some cases, they also had stuff to say to each other. We entered and managed to get decent seats for the show. They were two rows away from the ramp and located just about midway from each end.
I noted/wondered about the following:

1. All of us who have seen tonnes of fashion TV know that models walk with their legs crossing over to the other side. I also found out that all models walk at a 10 degree backward slant to vertical. Apparently, this is called walking like a horse and this pose 'pushes your chest out, tucks your ass in' and gives a good form/shape to the clothes you are wearing.
2. There were often two models on the ramp - one going back and the next one just walking in. Personally, i thought that it was very distracting.
3. The hall was well lit. I realised that a lot of the audience were checking out the audience more than the models on the ramp. So was I.
4. The man to woman ratio here was amazing. It was better than expected. I have come such a long way from KREC. Amen.
5. There were almost no straight men.
6. 4 and 5 make such events heavenly for all straight men lucky enough to be there.
7. All the shop owners were standing in the corridor. All of them. Not a single one was inside. They were all just standing there looking at the crowd throbbing past them.
I even made it to the lounge which was like a small vip area with complementary snacks and beverages (yes, even the good stuff!). SS never fails to impress. Anyway, so we had a cup of tea there.
I felt like a child reaching a big city for the first time. Everything was new and not familiar. Every one was full of energy. Every one was pretty and well dressed. The air smelt mysteriously of grass every 20 yards or so. I loved it.

Ps: Someone asked me for recent pics. Please add me on facebook.

Confessions of an Entrepreneur

2009-03-11T09:50:00.001+05:30

This should be simple but I am actually scared to write this one out completely. Here goes:
1. I still wonder if I qualify to be an entrepreneur. In my mind, an entrepreneur has to do something uniquely. Either the product or the service offered are unique, or the delivery is unique. In my case, it is a little bit of both, but only a little bit.
2. I miss being in an office - a huge big office with all kinds of bells and whistles. Coffee machines and snacks and sandwiches, I miss having the office in an office district, with all its eateries and bars.
3. I miss being treated as an equal. Right now, I am always right and only those things happen which I think of and those dont which I dont agree to. There were quite a few times at ebookers when things happened despite my vehement opposition and they all panned out well. At envigo, free will exists (but only if it is aligned to mine). I am not so much of a dictator and I always try to encourage people to get an opinion. My hit rate is low.
4. I am always in a state of excitement (except for when I am sleepy/sleeping). Tiny things excite me - the higher beta of a running a business is quite evident in the way my mood changes. It is very important for me to smoothen out the edges - not getting too excited at good news or getting too depressed at bad news. I can see why people who run a business can have a heart attack at the age of 45. I need to start exercising.
5. I sometimes get this urge to earn a lot of money very quickly. However, I also realise that the same time that I am very happy where I am and I look forward to every single day at work. I am sure this is not very common.
6. I understand cost structures better now. Not that I can understand why someone would expect me to pay rs 3000 for a meal for two in Delhi...
7. Time passes faster now. I can remember days and days from ebookers when time dragged. Now, time gobbles up weeks in a go.
8. It is a strange feeling to know that you are completely responsible for what happens - no bosses, corporate strategy, colleagues to hide behind for big and small failures. It feels like a rush of blood standing at the edge of a dark abyss.
9. I understand the value of working in a team and getting a team to work more than ever. It is funny because entrepreneurship is almost talked about in a context of an individual.

I guess that is it. I know I have not posted in a while, but this post took thinking.

The cable guy

2009-02-20T10:31:00.021+05:30

My father often speaks with our cable company. The conversation which I get to hear usually runs like this:
"What boss, it has been 4 days since xyz was released in the cinemas and you still have not shown it on cable? (silence) tell me this, do I have to go to the cinema to watch this now? or wait for the DVD release? (silence)And make sure the print is good. Like Tata sky", including the last bit to remind him that he remains a fickle customer and knows about competition arriving now in India.
I am always surprised by cable television in India. There are about 120 channels which I get, including about 30 regional ones. Almost all of them are junk, but then I can get this junk for about $4 a month, compared to about $50 in the UK.
And yes, the movie which is asked for, is featured, especially if it is a new one. I do think that this is completely legal, but I am not sure. Increasingly, these cablewallahs are also getting more tech savvy. This one in Gurgaon has an interface where he shows the program for the next day. He also plays background music and shows movie trailers between two movies. Quite a far cry from about ten years ago when a cablewallah uncle went to prison for a day or so. He was playing a movie, which was recorded on top of an adult movie. So when the movie finished, the tape went on to play a full fledged adult movie at 3pm in the afternoon. Prime time for senior citizens (unhappy), school boys (very happy, jumped at the mute button), school girls (shocked) and school mothers (tearful). I am not sure how many people complained, but many did.

(Why does it feel like today is someone's birthday? Ok so thanks to facebook and orkut i have a list of 200 people, let me check.hmm)

Sharat

2009-02-12T23:32:00.110+05:30

Sharat was a friend of mine from Netarhat. Netarhat is a residential school located in the Chotanagpur plateau about 100 miles from Ranchi. After finishing my schooling in 1967, I went to the Engineering college in Sindri (BIT, Sindri) to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering. It was a five year course and as was quite usual in those days, the course took just under 6 years to get over. I was interviewed and accepted by the Tata Engineering and Locomotive company (TELCO, now known at Tata motors) and moved to Jamshedpur in 1972.
My parents were based in Chhapra, which is about 50 miles from Patna across the Ganges. The bridge across the Ganga at Patna had not been built. To go to Chhapra from Sindri and Jamshedpur, one had to reach Patna by train, cross the Ganga by steamer at one of the ghats and then take a bus to Chapra. Every year, a significant part of the outgoing batch from Netarhat school would move to Patna. They would either study at the Patna Science College or at the Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH). Because of this, I had a number of friends in Patna. I made it a habit to stop at Patna for a few hours on my way to Chhapra and back. I got married in February 1978. My wife's family was based in Patna. Because of this, my links with my friends who were in Patna continued as we stayed for a part of the holidays each year in Patna.
Sharat wanted to become a doctor. He moved to Patna after being accepted by PMCH into their MBBS program. He came from an illustrious family of Patna. His sister was married to Dr. C.P. Thakur, who was one of the most renowned doctors in Patna and a gold medallist of his batch from medical college. Sharat was a good looking young man and had a pleasing personality. His family was well established in Patna and he lived with his sister and brother-in-law on Fraser road which was quite close to the station.
Every trip home from Sindri or Jamshedpur involved meeting Sharat. I would write a letter to him to let him know of the date on which I would be crossing Patna. He would wait at home for me. He had an old scooter which would be used at the occasion. He used to ride it at about 20 kmph, which was slow for a scooter, even in those days. We would have sandwiches, then go to another one for tea and then top it up with Paan from another place. The three shops never changed and were not particularly close to each other. However, they formed part of my itinerary during every trip due to Sharat. We would go to the college hostels to meet friends. I would then get dropped off at the station. At times, he would not be able to be at home because of his classes. On such days, I would make my way to the college hostels and meet my friends before heading to the station. Sharat would unfailingly meet me at the station a few minutes before the train left. He would have a Paan for me.
My son was born in July 1979 at the Patna Medical College & Hospital. There were not many good doctors in Bihar at that time. Every city had a few established doctors, but it was rare that such a doctor was also a good doctor. I always asked my doctor friends to refer me to a doctor. It was like using insider knowledge in the stock market. By this time, Sharat was a doctor and was working at Dr. C.P.Thakur's clinic. He wanted to study further as well. I was advised by Sharat and a few other of my friends to ensure that my wife and child spent as little time as possible at PMCH. They warned of possible infections at the hospital. Sharat also advised me to meet Dr. Jaiswal. We left the hospital less than 24 hours after my son's birth. On our way back from the hospital, we went and met Dr. Jaiswal. He checked both of them and prescribed two shots of a gamma globulin injection for my newborn son. He also gave one to me and asked me to get the second one done after a month. Sharat offered to give the second injection. My wife and her parents were going to have a small get-together so that our friends and family could come and see the new born baby. Sharat offered to get the injection on that day itself.
Sharat did not turn up for the party. It was unexpected and also mildly irritating. I got someone else to give the injection. I waited for him to show up for a few days. After that, I made my way to his house.
Sharat had been missing for about a week. He had left a letter telling his family not to look for him and that he would not ever come back. Till this day, he hasn't.
I still wonder what made him take such a step. None of our school friends who knew him then were aware of any reason why he would take such a step. He was a good person and people liked having him around. He was a doctor and would have led a comfortable life.
Dr. Jaiswal remained my son's physician till we moved to Delhi.

______________________________________

This story was narrated to me by my father on the eve of his birthday. I realised that I did not know too much about my father as a person. The other thing worth remembering about his birthday this year was that four people forgot about it till 10am in the morning - my mother, my sister, yours truly and my father.
The last thing I wanted to mention here is that I have added a Suggestions box on the side. You can either leave suggestions about future posts or vote on someone else's suggestions. Have a look at the section labeled "Tell me" in the right bar

TV lows

2009-02-01T20:36:00.041+05:30

After watching TV in the UK for a few years - big brother, x factor, fear factor et al, I had honestly believed I had seen it all. However, a chance encounter with something called "Roadies" on MTV changed all that for me.
I know very little about the roadies - there are two teams and they play different games and there are eliminations and a 'winner' emerges in the end. I am not sure what the winner is supposed to be good at, but he is an MTV Roadie and he gets a lot of money and usually also gets invited to take part in Big Boss, which is India's version of 'Celebrity Big Brother'. One of the essential qualifications for appearing on Big Boss is that this lot were able to block out 90 days from their calendar without batting an eyelid.
I am not sure what career options are available to Big Boss winners.
So, there I was gorging, on lots of chicken tikka and roomali roti at RG's house, where we were all treated to all the roadies getting very excited about someone getting kicked out, a slanging match between two girls (one of them was wearing very large and very dark glasses indoors) and then the game. The game was as follows - all of these early 20 somethings were let loose with Pushkar animal fair in the backdrop, with the glorious task of collecting animal dung. That was the task - collecting shit with bare hands. The dung was divided into two categories - fresh and not-so-fresh, with the fresh variety getting a higher weightage in the final score.
I am not really sure why I am disgusted - quite a few things rush to my mind, but I I will let it be for now.
With the realisation that I had hit a new TV record which would be hard to better, I resumed dividing my attention with RG, SS and Chicken Tikka.
The universe had other plans.
Roadies returned, with its infinite capacity to surprise, with a bang!
This time around, the two teams were participating in a quiz. The questions were to be answered by the girls of each team and correct answers would get them points. In case of an incorrect answer, one of the boys of the team would get hit by a paddle on the balls.
Apologies, but this had to said as there is no other way of saying it.
Oh yes, the quiz questions were about translating words from English into Hindi and vice versa. As you can imagine, there were a lot of wrong answers and lots of bats and balls being connected.
So yes, I know that I have seen all that there is to see on TV. (As long as I dont watch roadies again).
I feel bad when I see such television. I feel worse because I could see that this program is very popular (every commercial break had about 5 minutes of advertising). I will not get into comparing how things earlier, but I think that a few such data points can help us extrapolate where things are headed -
- where TV is headed
- where public acceptance levels are headed
- where education levels might be headed
All we know has been taught to us - from teachers, parents and friends. Of course we read, but then it is our peers and soceity which decides what are the first few things we read, or even that we start to read. Media plays an ever increasing role. Reading and discourse probably leads to opinion and action and so on.
What if an entire generation of teachers, friends and parents are brainless, wont the succeeding generations lose out on a lot and would have to reinvent the educational and cultural wheel? I like to think that such things have happened before - for example, the ruin of the various south american civilisations (I guess we dont even know how long it will be before we understand their abilities completely) and their replacement by the Europeans.(Funny how the Europeans called labeled all these civilisations as barbarians. The sense of humour of this universe knows no end.)

Drastic change of topic -
I also got to see "Luck by chance". I liked it. It is a good movie.
Since SS has threatened dire consequences for talking about it on the blog before she gets to see it, I will just say that a murder mystery of such finesse is very rare to come by.
Also, for all of you who read my blog, please wish me luck. There is something up for which I need all your wishes.

Neemrana Palace and Hotel

2009-01-27T23:10:00.028+05:30

I went to Neemrana (palace and hotel!) over the Republic day weekend. It was my second trip there and I noticed how the new wing which was being built was now complete. I was also taken aback by the entry fees - Rs. 500 per person. Just as a comparison, entering the Taj costs Rs 20 (for an Indian, Rs. 750 for a foreigner). I was not very happy and promptly turned back. I have been inside and I know that it is not worth Rs. 500.
The other thing about Neemrana I remember from last time around was that their dinner was overpriced.
Anyway, enough with the cribbing.
I love driving through this bit of Haryana and Rajasthan. You get to see a country on the move. There are villages with electricity and irrigation and fields full of a mustard crop, which shine bright yellow in the sun. (Remember ddlj?). The fields give way to industrial parks, which again are bright new things. The ride is smooth and fast.
All this is quite a big change from 10 or so years ago. Now would a nice time to run through a list of thens and nows, but just one - my favourite one - internet speeds from 1991 (zero) compared to today!
I wonder if it is only our generation or every generation which thinks that they have seen the 'old' and the 'new'.

Jai Ho Slimdog*

2009-01-12T15:52:00.007+05:30

Watched the first show of the movie here in Gurgaon yesterday.
Technically, it was the premiere show, which was a first for me. I think that this movie will get a few Oscars. I will tell you why I think so. After the movie got over, the song 'jai ho' started playing while the credits rolled. Not one person got up. Usually, the last shot marks the beginning of the race to the exit, then to the stairs and then to the car park. The end-of-movie race is a 'working model' of the rat race. All defining characteristics are present. It is not ex, every one else is your enemy and there is no real payoff. But race is always there to be played and participants take it very, very seriously.
This movie paused the rat race in this small movie hall by about 5 minutes.
This is why I think it will win.
The movie was about India, had only Indians in it, was very mainstream and still was not Bollywood in the least. I did not think such feats were humanly possible.

* Oh yes, I want to be a Slimdog. (Thanks Ved!)

2008

2009-01-12T10:37:00.002+05:30

2008 was a blur. Too many things happened -

- Coming back and setting up
- Trying again and hoping and then giving up and hoping for the best
- Hiring and firing, winning and losing
- Working hard and hardly working
- Setting up processes and then rubbishing them (I would not know a good process even if one hit me on the head)
- Driving around and then being driven
- Meeting tonnes of new people a few times
- Meeting fewer and fewer people more and more (aka, nt=c) (I love it when life can be expressed as an equation)
- Partying and then deciding that I am too old and fat for it
- Gaining weight and gaining more weight...
- Shaving my head
- Spending tonnes of time with my parents and sister (after about 16 years)
- Trying to get married
- Trying to figure out if relinquishing control is ok
- Getting used to Delhi
- Getting used to Gurgaon!
- Getting back the nonchalance which is required to read the papers every day
- Writing more, reading more, reading less nonsense
- Looking back at life in London, not regretting moving back!
- Loving it

12 months, 10 trips, lots of friends, countless conversations and memorable moments - I hope and pray that 2009 is as eventful as 2008.

Winter cheer

2008-12-18T10:52:00.003+05:30

Snap. A year went by. One year ago, I had just finished packing for moving back to India. I was saying my goodbyes to my friends, colleagues and to the city and was getting done with that as well.
I knew I would come back often. I knew that my time in London will never come back. Memories are made with the place, the people and the present. Each one of them changes constantly, people changing the least I guess and the present changing all the time. I miss my time there - From Camden to High St. Ken to Hampstead and even the time spent in the Docklands - there are things about each place which I miss. Each place I stayed there had its own flavour. In the beginning, it was all about settling in and roaming around with my IIMA friends 100% of the time and learning how to cook. It changed into numerous cookins, anda-paranthas, walking up the hill with Nautanki and haggling like two middle-aged housewives, the Heath and the village. It also meant finding new friends and reading new books as older ones got married or got busier. West Hampstead had the flat screen TV and playstation and snow and weekday night outs followed by dreadfully long days in office.
Moving back to the present, the wedding season is in full flow. Almost all my friends are married - RG is my only hope in ensuring that I am not the last one to get married - which is also not a bad thing. It is not a bad thing because if something is so good to spend your entire life in it, it must be good enough to wait for. Also, I love my (almost) complete control over my life and space and interests, which I think reduces a bit with marriage. As AS tells me – “You will lose all the controls. But you will like losing them.” If he was not married, I would believe his intentions but not his veracity. Since he is married, I doubt his intentions.
Any how, my ex-manager from ebookers has gotten me in touch with some new companies - we should be able to last out this recession with such friends, but let us see how this story unfolds.

NK ties the knot

2008-12-08T18:37:00.004+05:30

So this one is going to be about NK - friend, counsellor, 'ex-gamer', foodie, gymboy and fat-mate, super-geek and/or misplaced CA....

Friend - A few years ago in London the three (AT, NK and I) of us colectively endangered our livers in our quest to make me see light at the end of a tunnel. All I could see during this time was an unending stream of Jack and diet coke (of course!). Both of us believed in compartments of information - it was a lot of fun to let him into a few compartments and for him to share a few with me. it is even more fun when you meet someone else with an access to other compartments of NK's life and you get to exchange notes. So much fun. NK listened when he had to and said stuff when he had to. I remember him helping out when AT had a back problem and stopped moving for about a week - NK moved in with us to ensure that AT was moved around - not something which any person can ensure easily. He has supported quite a few of his friends with his work, brain and even money. He has lost some money in the process but has continued to do so. That is rare in today's world.
Counsellor - He started off by radical suggestions like flying down to New York on New Years eve. Other highlights included trying to make me read the Game, subsribing me to various email alerts and weekly journals which varied from job alerts to dating advice.
Ex-gamer - There have been many an occasion where NK' s way with the ladies has floored me. His way has done much, much more with the ladies in question. NK's work was an inspiration, in the way the sun is an inspiration to travelers - it shows you the way and gives you your bearings. It shows you things you never thought were possible. What was very cool about all this was also the fact that he believed that this was an a talent which can be taught. After reading the 'Game' and other books referenced from the 'Game', he came to the conclusion that such talents could be learnt and taught, much like the way you learnt to become a doctor or an engineer. I understand this bit. At the same time, there are always doctors and then there are good doctors. NK was a good 'gamer'.
Foodie/gymboy and fat mate - there is picture of AT and NK from one of these jack and coke sessions on my phone. My sister refers to both of them as flat mate and fat mate respectively. NK likes food. His consumption is not governed by demand but is constrained by supply. He was a staunch supporter of my cooking - good or bad and a good end point as well. His love for food and his regular gym sessions were a delicate equilibrium - a steady and constant struggle between two equal and opposite forces. His gymming continues unabated in Mumbai even today, only to keep up with his nutritional tendencies.
Supergeek, misplaced CA - He is good with his work - thorough, well organised, consistent and persistent. I do not think that there is anything he can not do. He is not a nerd - anything he reads is for a purpose and to "add value". I love the way there is a reason behind every thing he does. He manages all this without appearing to be a stuckup idiot or a bore - which is something he should be proud of. He is a web 2.0 enthusiast - there are so many thing which I use on my computer due to him. Given that he is a CA and from SRCC, and I am from KREC, I should be somewhat ashamed and I am. I only feel better by praising him for being a supergeek.

He had a super wedding - I was only too happy to be part of it and share the happiness with him, his wife and his family. I danced at a public function under normal lighting - which was a first for me. My movements were coordinated and any complaints for the same need to be forwarded to our choreographer. NK also managed to get his sister married the very next day - every thing went to plan and there were no mixups. I loved every bit of it.

Congratulations NK!

Symptoms of complacency

2008-12-04T16:01:00.000+05:30

I had an interesting conversation with RG and am summarising it here. I am back in India for almost a year now. My life is repetitive. I can predict where I will be and what I will be doing given a time and date with a large degree of accuracy. Office, Client office, car or home will explain 100% of my weekday. During the weekend, most client offices are closed.
Of course, there are times when I meet friends - but someone usually is getting married for that to happen. Such is life. Strange thing is, I am happy.
Free will has led me into this and free will is keeping me here. Some common indicators of happiness - money, partner, career are all missing. If a few years back, if I would be told that I would have almost no money, no body to share anything with and no real career, I be very scared. Right now, I am living it and am happy.
This brings me to the main topic - Am I being complacent? I have a long and varied history of being complacency. Complacency is second nature to me. In fact, it is my first response to anything. However, this time I have my doubts. I have doubts both ways. It is irritating.

Raj uncle

2008-12-04T14:49:00.001+05:30

A thousand words. Done.

Loose ends

2008-11-30T11:54:00.000+05:30

My list of unanswered questions:

1. How many terrorists were there? Have we been able to recreate their steps that evening?
There were statements made that there were anywhere between 10 and 26 terrorists. In the end 10 are accounted for. There are so many unanswered questions or maybe I have just missed this in the media? I for one would worry about this no end, because it takes 2 people and a few guns to wreak havoc.. do we know for sure that there are no many in this city?

2. What are we going to do about this?
Barkha Dutt is wailing about the ceasefire on the LOC being withdrawn and a troop buildup. A troop buildup will scare Pakistan, but Pakistan I think has been scared of India since it came into existence. I for one do not believe that a troop buildup alone accomplishes anything. A troop buildup would make much more sense if India takes a stand that it is now going to take care of terror camps on either side of the border and the troop buildup is to support that. Similarly, India should go after Dawood if he is involved - I wonder if bribing the Paki army could do the trick. Can India be a little brash for once? Can we not throw some muscle around? Can we not hold our own?

3. Will the media ever behave?
We all have been subjected to inhuman stupidity, insensitivity, callousness of the media lost in a blind zeal to track the tragedy. Did we need all the details of the commando operations - knowing that the terrorists would also see it? Do we need all the sentimentality on TV - can we not feel the way we should without any handholding by the media. I think that the media is setting lower and lower standards for itself to beat. India TV was flashing information which was given to it by the terrorists over the phone call (Assuming that whoever had called India TV was actually a terrorist) as News. If the terrorist had said that they were from Bangladesh, that is what would have been flashed.
Barkha Dutt was getting a high shouting herself hoarse and coaxing exactly what she wanted to hear from everyone she interviewed.

Bombay

2008-11-27T22:39:00.000+05:30

This is a page just to record this day. There will be plenty written about this and all of us will remember what we were doing when this happened.
I hope for the following:
1. More resources and political will behind counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism
2. I think that our existence lives is a pendulum between minority and majority excesses -
Babri Masjid - Mumbai riots - Mumbai Blasts(1)*- Godhra** - Train blasts - Serial blasts serially in cities - Mumbai attacks

Will we able to break out of this bizarre game of ping pong. What we need is not magnanimity... I think we need to ensure justice - fair and time bound. Not for this attack - but also for this attack and for all such attacks on India. I think that is one way we can break out of this ping pong.

Its only a name

2008-11-05T15:48:00.002+05:30

Saurabh happens to be quite a popular name for people my age. My mother wanted me to have a name like Amit (full marks for uniqueness). My father advised against this as this would put me me at the beginning of every roll call and every lab exam (roll numbers are usually alphabetical). During engineering, I have uttered many a silent thank you for not being in the first batch going in for practical tests and viva.
I have always had people with the same name around me. There was a time in DPS when there were two others with the same name in the same class - Saurabh Khanna, Saurabh Kumar Das and yours truly. Many a time, we used to be called for each other's doings - be it exam scores or pulled up for bunking classes. The confusion was usually only mildly irritating but had its high points as well.
Once in class, a teacher who had just received a piece of paper from a peon, asked me to stand up as she read it out to me. I was expecting a visit to the accounts department as they were supposed to refund my hostel fees. The teacher, smiling mildly, read this out, "Saurabh, you are hereby suspended for 2 weeks and are asked to stop coming to school from tomorrow." Even though my behaviour was on an average somewhat unruly, I was not sure why the school was taking such a strong exception to this. After about two hours of tracing the root cause, I came to know that it was my hostel warden who had volunteered my name. Apparently, he knew that some Saurabh had done it and he remembered my name.Real culprit - Saurabh Sachdeva (ofcourse yet another one).
There has also been a time in life when I had the right name but was the wrong person, but there are better tales to share here.
With the internet ofcourse, things have become more interesting. I have received the following emails:
1. Dear Saurabh Sir, please find attached the production and attendance report for yesterday
2. Dear Saurabh, the amount in your account is Rs. xxxxxx.
3. Dear Roopshree, your shaadi.com profile has been updated.
4. Congrats Roopshree! there are three people interested in you.
5. ALERT! A cheque of Rs. 5000 has been debited from your account.
6. Saurabh, please submit the cash tomorrow as I need the money urgently
7. Saurabhda how is australia?
8. Saurabh, congrats on joining the naukri.com mailing list. you will now get 100 emails every day with suitable job openings.

Ouch!

Thanks to my name (or actually my email address on gmail), I get occasional glimpses of someone else's life.

I wrote an email to my bank when the bank emails started coming to me.

This was their reply:
This is with reference to your e-mail dated October 17, 2008 regarding e-mail alerts.
We request you to provide the below details to enable us to assist you:
1. Account number or customer ID
2. Copy of the e-mail received by you as attachment.

Warm Regards,
Bhavya XXXX
Customer Support

Next email from them after I provided the above details:
Dear Mr. Jain,

Thank you for your confirmation.This is with reference to your query for the e-mail alerts.
Your query is being attended to. We will revert to you within 5 working days.Looking forward to your co-operation and patience in the interim.

Warm Regards,
Bhavya XXXX
Customer Support

My obvious reply to them was somewhat disturbed:
I am not MR. Jain.
I am saurabh kumar

To which they replied:
Dear Mr. Kumar,
Thank you for writing to us.
This is in reference to your earlier e-mail regarding insta alerts.
We are sorry for addressing you incorrectly

And then, their parting shot -
Dear Mr. Jain,
Thank you for your patience and co-operation.The necessary rectification has been done. Hence forth you will not received the alerts of other customer.We regret the inconveniences caused to you.
Warm Regards,
Bhavya XXXXX
Customer Support

Interesting times

2008-10-30T10:25:00.003+05:30

It is amazing how everything has an angle without which nothing happens. Raj is out to do what uncleji did long ago and the congress is OK with it as it weakens uncle and splits the vote. Who cares what this means and whether it might have repercussions in a country where the dialect changes every 100 kilometers and the local script changes at every 500 kilometers. Why will the government not act? It stands to lose more votes in Maharasthra than gain a few in Mumbai.

India is almost as alien to exist as a country as the United States of Europe - only with 600 million more people packed in an area which is a third of Europe. Europe has had such a colourful existence up until 1945 and it took about 70 million deaths for Europeans to shed their expansionist ambitions, appreciate the value of peaceful coexistence and learn to behave themselves.

India was luckier.
In spite of the chaos which existed - the brits leaving, partition, princely states, hindu kings with muslim kingdoms and vice versa, 300 million people, famine, floods - we were able to pull through. It took at likes of Sardar Patel, Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and the sheer force of their ideals and their power over our collective imagination which held this country together.

We are not so lucky today.
Today, we are a country which is so short of political charisma and excitement. A good example was when we were at the mercy of the good sense of Ms. Gandhi to turn down the prime ministership of this country which had been handed to her on a platter. Every person in power has a base derived by his identity. Identity has always been important to Indians - probably because there are so many identities one carries. For example, I am a Hindu, Srivastava, From Chapra, Upper caste, Bihari, North Indian. Each one of them is something I was born into and not something which I have any control on.
I am also an engineer and an MBA. But does anyone care if any one of these MPs are even literate? Do we even know? Had I been in politics, my identities would subsume my capabilities.

I wonder if universal suffrage is a such a good thing. How would this country be if only graduates could vote (due credit to SS for talking to me about this) ? Should we have tried out "each one, teach one" before universal suffrage?

"May you live in interesting times" is apparently a Chinese curse. I did now know that till quite recently. In fact, I have included it in greeting cards. Looking at India today, I understand this chinese nugget better.

Dark humour

2008-09-30T16:38:00.000+05:30

An example from the economist -
"Perhaps fittingly in an economy that is in danger of sliding into depression, the only stock among the 500 in the S&P index that finished higher was Campbell’s Soup"

I have not been able to write anything over the past few weeks - general lethargy due to bad scheduling is to blame.

Credit Crunch in a screenshot

2008-09-22T14:35:00.002+05:30

Lesson number 1 -
If you screw up, it is your problem. If you screw up big time, it is your boss's problem. If you screw up really well, big time, for a long time and make a lot of money in the process, the US Fed will take care of you.

Lesson number 2 - Greed is always good.

Have a look at the news article below, and then take a look at the ad which captures the essence of the "sub-prime" mess brilliantly..

Inertia, innovation, evil, implosion and I-am-too-cool

2008-09-13T17:15:00.001+05:30

This one is going to be a roll call of things in my head.
Inertia - The head count at office has stayed put for just under two months now and that is depressing. The fact is that we got a very big new client but an existing client reduced business due to internal issues so our numbers remained constant, because of which our head count did not change. Now with September almost over and the Diwali madness about to start, I am not very certain of hitting 20 people as planned earlier. Basically, if we do not hit 20, it would mean that I was wrong twice. Earlier, I had forecast a headcount of 10 by the year end. Given that we got there in June, I then re-forecast and thought we would now do a 20. To be wrong twice, by a large margin for a small business is not very impressive.
Innovation - Take a look at diffen.com - it is a wiki based website where you can find out the difference between Bourbon vs Whiskey or between a Nokia and an I-phone. If you want to, you can add your own pages or contribute to existing pages. My friend has built this website - he owns it and codes for it. He has a regular job and this is something he has gone on weekends and in the evenings. There is no advertising and the website generates more visits than some of our clients! I had noted the somewhat above average size of this boy's head when I had met him for the first time in 1997, I had known that this boy will go far.
Evil - The launch of chrome by Google is evil. Will it not be picked up by people who try new browsers? Who are these people - these are the people who use firefox today. Wasn't Google supporting firefox? Would this not hurt Firefox more than Microsoft? Does Google even care?
Implosion - Large banks in the US. The financial services sector in the US is slowly but surely imploding. Stock prices of all major banks have fallen. Quite a few banks have closed. Bear Stearns went without a whimper. Lehman seems to be the next one. Quite a few people I know work in this sector, out of the UK and US. They have seen some very good times and I guess what is happening is cyclical. I wonder how long will it be before things bounce back.
I-am-too-cool - My candidate for this year (and for the past few years as well) Farhan Akhtar. He made Dil Chahta Hai. He topped it up with Rock On. The movie looks good, feels good and sounds good. This man sings, writes, directs (not for Rock On) and produces. When he is producing, he lets the director have his way. Loads and loads will be written about him and the movie. I will only add this - Notice the way he says "Yeah" in the movie! Also, Please watch it.

Holiday

2008-09-03T12:49:00.005+05:30

The last time I had a proper holiday was 20 months back. It does not mean I am a hard worker and have been really busy. Envigo needed as much capital as I could muster, so that meant that post the decision to quit my job (Aug 2007), I did not plan a holiday. Now it is August 2008 and I feel jealous with every one making plans and every one sharing pics on flickr and facebook.
SM went to Peru, Brazil and Argentina and then went to Zanzibar and some other equally exotic places. It is hard to keep track of this one. Other friends of mine visited Greece, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Indonesia, Spain, Iceland, Norway and so many places in India, while I shuttled between Gurgaon, Mumbai and New Delhi. (Actually I did go to New York for 2.5 days, but it does not really count and I came to London for a week in April and am there again, but then again, not really a holiday)

There are so many places which I want to see - Barcelona and Seville, Scotland (again and again), Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, Kerala, Leh and Ladakh... the list is a long one. I wonder if and when will I be able to do some of this.Some of the most fascinating places I have been to include Cornwall, Prague, Scotland and even Wales. I would like to go to each one of these places again... especially Scotland. The place and the people - both the ones you go with and the ones you meet there make a holiday memorable (making such a nobrainer is like saying that the sun rises when the sun rises).

Came across a cool website thanks to RG - www.diditz.com. It is another "share your experiences" kind of as website, but they have put quite a lot of attention to small details and it makes the overall experience quite nice. Lots and lots of travelling to do before i can contribute meaningfully to the content.

Post candidates

2008-08-27T02:01:00.001+05:30

Writing is much tougher than I thought. What keeps me going are visions of grandeur and fame and unabashed adulation by the teeming millions.
But seriously, there are things about blogging which are irritating.
Writing ideas and plots have a bad sense of timing. In the sense that they occur almost always when I am not in front of a computer. I forget half of them by the time I log into blogger.
Also, You know that there are some people (besides your close friends) who might be reading your blog. But you don't really know what they want to read. There is an absence of structured feedback. I miss it. (Even in running a business, I sometimes miss having a boss. I wonder if that makes me a very sorry entrepreneur)
I thought I will make a list of things I want to write about and then write them as proper articles later.
1. Our parents' generation - I often wonder about the "good ol' days". What were the good things to do then? I wonder what were the things my parents did to kill time? And my grandparents. I watched Mumbai Meri Jaan and there is a clip in which they show about 60 years of Bombay - starting with independence and the first international flights from Bombay and ending with the life and traffic today in "Mumbai". Such clips always make me think about the immediate past - How were things in the 50s and the 60s in India - was there hope and confidence or had the current apathy already set in? I think writing this one will need some interviewing (jobless that I am)
2. The rise (and fall?) of Google - There isn't much to talk about in the rise - everyone has seen it happen... but it is increasingly tempting to discuss a potential fall - continued dependence on Adwords, poor quality of natural search results despite algorithm changes, anti-trust issues and so on.
3. The ROI of road repair - Is there another way than hoping for the MCD/NDMC (damn them!) gods to smile and come and repair your potholes?

Ha! I thought that writing about posts and not writing an entire post about anything in particular was a smart idea.
The only thing that could go wrong was if all my post ideas dried up.
Thanks Murphy!

Bachao Haseeno se...

2008-08-19T01:05:00.009+05:30

So the movie was ok, but I think there could be more interesting endings.The original plot is here for those who have not seen it and don't want to.
Part 1 -
This part of the movie remains unchanged - Raj (RK) meets Mahi (ML) [song] and then moves on - Sleeps and then runs away from Radhika (BB) - Meets and then falls in love [song] with Gayatri (DP) [This point in itself was a good ending for a somewhat pointless and hence an average movie. However, Gayatri says no to Raj and this is something he can not handle. Raj wants to apologise to every one he has ever hurt with his wily ways. Given the length of the list, he decides to apologise properly to the top two he had hurt the most. He sets off to apologise to Mahi and Radhika.
Part 2 -
Mahi:
Raj finds out that Mahi has a husband. He meets Mahi who has her parents visiting her at her house. She does not recognise Raj. Raj tells everyone that he is a friend of Mahi's younger sister's fiancee. There is a wedding going on and there is singing and dancing [song]. Mahi's father recognises Raj takes him to meet Mahi. This time, Mahi is able to place Raj and remembers the incident. She calls her husband and the two of them have a laugh about it. Raj asks for forgiveness. Mahi does not understand and Raj explains his reasons. Mahi can not believe that Raj is being serious and she and her husband have another hearty good laugh.Mahi realises that Raj is quite serious so she sobers up and tells Raj that her life was not affected for more than a few hours after that day at the airport. Raj leaves. [no song]
Radhika:
Radhika is a regular Rakhi Sawant, who does item songs for a living. She is a b*tch as a boss and she fires secretary just after an event [item song]. Radhika holidays alone (!) in Italy and Raj has to go there to meet her. Radhika offers the job of her secretary (read servant) to Raj on a whim, to see if he is really serious about apologising and he does. She gives him a tough time running errands, but Raj works very hard. Radhika has a soft spot for Raj quite quickly, but continues to give him tough errands. There is a party where Radhika flirts with a few men [song] and tries to see if Raj is getting jealous . After the party, Radhika tries to seduce Raj [song] but Raj resists. Radhika is impressed and tells Raj that they can start a new life together [rain song, Radhika trying harder!] and that she has forgiven him. Raj apologises for not feeling the same way about her and leaves for Australia. Radhika curses Raj.
Gayatri:
Raj comes back to find out that he has been fired. Raj also needs to leave the country as his work permit will expire in a month. He tries to meet Gayatri. He finds out that Gayatri was heartbroken after he left and Rahul (enter Abhishek Bachan) supported her. One thing led to another and Gayatri and Rahul are now dating. She has completed Bschool and plans to start a new video game design company with Rahul. She also wants to marry Rahul as she thinks that she wants to settle down and have a family. She tells Raj that Raj had met her when she was "very cool" but Rahul met her when she was completely miserable and yet took care of her and has brought her back to normalcy. Raj sits in a plane for Italy and remembers Radhika's curse.
Movie ends.

Bin-dra, done that!

2008-08-12T00:46:00.002+05:30

Every one knows by now about this, but just wanted to record this moment for posterity and as a portent of things to come....

(Image courtesy - wikipedia)

(There has to be a model by which one could predict medals per country - independent variables could include media density, per capita state spend on education and/or sports.
Random thought - if every one wants to work less, why dont we have 4 day weeks and 3 day weekends?)

The Bombay Plan

2008-08-11T11:04:00.005+05:30

If you know your history, you will know that the Bombay plan referred to a plan which called for rapid industrialisation of India by using a large infusion of public funds. The plan was backed by prominent Indian industrialists including JRD Tata and was circulated around 1945. Surprisingly, it was formulated by leading businessmen and industrialists but it called for substantial state intervention in industrial development. Historians say that the first few five year plans were based largely on this plan, even though the plan did not gain any official backing or recognition.
However, my Bombay plan was very different. It involved running around bombay for two meetings, which went ok. It also meant meeting most of my IIMA friends under one roof with a few notable exceptions, and not doing anything significant other than resting and eating for two days. I think my plan was more successful than its illustrious older namesake.
Five years since I passed out and a large majority of my friends today are those I met at campus. I wonder if it this is something to be worried about or take inferences from. Does it mean that I have stopped meeting new people? Does it mean that I am boring and have not been able to make new friends? I think I am ok in making new friends.I have made new friends, but not so many of them and I do not hang out with them in the same way as I hang out with my campus friends.
At the same time, I think that I like to spend more and more time with them is because even though we might not share similar thoughts, we share similar attitudes. There have been numerous situations where a very demanding task has been confronted by an equally demanding disregard for all things important and critical. I think campus did that to us. The laid-back-ness of such gatherings,therefore, is awe-inspiring. (About ten of us could not arrange for ice cubes and we could not also decide where to go on Saturday night).
The whole of saturday turned out well as well. (With all of us every thing has to turn out in some way. Notihng is planned). A full English followed by rest (RG - I dont need to sleep, I just need to lie down for a while; MM - I have stuff to do in the house) followed by some biryani and some playstation. Always hits the spot. I think life in bombay is a bit like life in London - every one stays away from family and has plenty of time over the weekends.
Bombay, on the other hand, never ceases to amaze with its traffic, congestion (such a mild word compared to what actually happens in Bombay) and rain. Each one of us had our traffic tales for the day and week, but it was all soon forgotten. Kebabs from Carter road and single malt from Dubai soothed our jarred nerves and restored our faith in humanity. I wanted to stay on on Sunday as well, but it was my sister's birthday back in Delhi, so off I went.

What's the Catch?

2008-08-06T16:22:00.005+05:30

It was love at first read. The first time I read it was in college. It helped me during my MBA entrance interviews as well, as it played the part of my favourite book, favourite author and also the last book I had read (it probably was). There is something about the Catch because of which I keep coming back to it. So do a lot of others it seems. It has been voted one of the best novels of all times in several surveys.
Someone once told me that one of the reasons I was not floored by "Catcher in the Rye" was probably because I did not read it at the right age. With Catch 22, I think I got it right.
What did I like about it?
The humour. Black and dry and variations of the same.
The confusing narrative, which jumped from place to place and person to person and forward and backwards in time - all in the same sentence some times.
The characters - Yossarian (the anti hero, ofcourse!), Ex-PFC Wintergreen, Milo (The capitalist) and Dunbar. in fact, all the characters were like different possible roles one acts out in real life. Many a time, I have spotted Wintergreen, Cathcart, Yossarian and Dreedle in real life.
The book is also a melting pot of so many underlying themes - the arguments of one person's welfare versus many, the sanity inside insanity, heroism and the lack of it, the absurd extremes of bureaucracy, the absurd extremes of normalcy as well, love versus lust - it never fails to excite.
Heller also made disguised references to earlier works and usually let his characters take the opposite position. For example, Yossarian is the opposite of Achilles all through the book when he always chooses his life over others. He is also the opposite of Jesus, when he choses to make a deal with the colonel.
I used to have a very worn out copy, which had survived the college hostel, numerous train rides between Delhi and Mangalore and long rainy evenings in London. I got another copy as a birthday gift a few years ago. Getting something you really like is nice. Always.
The next book which comes anywhere close is "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel. But that is another post.
(Also, blogger sucks!)

The Lawyer

2008-07-31T12:11:00.004+05:30

This is about a friend. She is one of the brightest and funniest people I have met - a budding writer, a human rights lawyer and a child at heart.

I met her in London, where she was on a scholarship (of course!) to do a one year post graduate course in Law and Literature. I did not know that these two things could be or needed to be taught together. I still have limited ideas on the subject. This was the cool thing about knowing her - she came from a very different background. She thought differently and had a different approach to life. All my friends were mainstream professionals - engineers, MBAs, bankers and the odd CA. Most, if not all of us were in it for the money, more or less. It was nice to get to know someone who cared enough about things to devote time in it. Someone who read things and then went there to help. She had lived and worked and taught in refugee camps (At the same point in time, I was in a campus about 4 kilometers away with nothing much to do). She had lent a hand when dams were to be stopped from flooding villages. Her job after law school was with a firm which worked on gender and sexuality issues. Someone just posted a comment about how we live in our shells and tend to forget how bad things can be. This one was different. She always wanted to be in the thick of things.
She was the kind who could give a 20minute rem on Freud (very contextual, because I used to live in a house right opposite Freud's home) and make it quite interesting with examples and subtexts. She taught me words like poco (which is short for postcolonialism) and new words which were used in poco literature. For some reason, she used to think, rather strongly believe, that I am (or people like me were) homophobic(s) (I really wish there was a milder word for this). I had never thought on those lines, nor do I think I am one, but still, it remained quite a discussion point for us.
What were the things we had in common - interest in lots of food and lots to drink, making merry and chatting about all and sundry Other common traits - laziness and chaos. Trust her to miss a lecture (she used to have about 2 in a week) because of all kinds of reasons. Chaos - this one was worrying sometimes and she did surpass me. Missing deadlines, rocketing phone bills, dropping things.. She had this knack of finding things which did not belong to her (like she once found a cheque which she then returned after locating the owner).

Here's to the lawyer chick. Happy Belated Birthday.

Life and times at L 326

2008-07-28T19:06:00.000+05:30

I work at Envigo and love it, though I will be accused of being biased. There are about 12 more people here - the number keeps changing (increasing) though this month is the first month this number has not changed till now. They may not share my opinion, but chances are, that they will.
There are a few simple things which make Envigo a good office -
- work timings are not emphasized, work is
- there are clear and mutually agreed upon appraisal documents
- client work is rotated amongst the team and across functions
- there is ownership of performance - both good and bad
- analysis is emphasized upon, reporting is only an enabler
- the food is good and there is beer once a month
There will be some profit sharing, once there are some profits to be shared.
More than an advertisement for a job, this post is a snapshot of the way things are here, in what will be referred later (if there is one) as the "early days."
What are the things which need to change -
- Documentation of a few processes needs to be improved
- Mind numbing carelessness by the promoter has to be tamed
- A good agency person needs to be hired - we can learn a lot from such a person
- We need to move into better premises

Democrazy

2008-07-24T18:30:00.001+05:30

A large part of my day was spent as below:

Gurgaon Sector 43 to Sarita Vihar - 31 km - 2 hours
Sarita Vihar to Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon - 40 km - 1 hour, 10 minutes
Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon to South City 1 - 10 km - 1 hour, 30 minutes

It is sad because Gurgaon is a new city - it did not have 50% of its currently built up areas 10 years ago. All of Gurgaon is planned - there are broad rectangles of land cut across by roads. The growth was probably not expected. But how could they miss out on public transport? That is not a recent invention.
Every one has to have a car. Last week, I went for a walk with my parents just outside the gated community we live in. We stepped out to buy ice cream. I realised that it was the first time I was crossing a road on foot in Gurgaon. I also realised why. The traffic is incessant and there are no pedestrian friendly features. So, we have city which has a zillion plots worth about a million times more... did we forget that people will live in it? Some, at least. It is a city meant for the double-income-no-kids, I-spend-half-my-time-in-the-US IT/ITES family who have one car per person and are supported by an army of servants.
But surely not every one can own a car... how will they manage?
Is that even a question we need to ask? Is that a question any one asked? If you travel across Gurgaon at rush hour, you wont be blamed for thinking that no one did remotely think of asking this question. Large parts of Gurgaon were developed not by the perennially blundering government agencies - HUDA divided the land into sectors, but the sectors were developed by dynamic companies like DLF (remember the largest IPO ever in 2007! now trading at a 30% discount to the issue price) and Unitech. There are no provisions for buses or taxis inside the colonies. No body really misses these provisions, because there are no buses.
Why does any of this happen? Why does not any one seem to care?
The rich get richer and do not really care about anything. Every couple of days, they complain about the country going to the dogs while staring into their single malt. The educated middle classes are breathlessly emulating the rich. They spend more and save less. And since there are about 200 million of us, the average Indian family looks quite bling and sits happily every time there is a power cut or a traffic jam.
What happens to the not-so-rich?Caste and religion decide that there is someone who will stand up for you, so what if the issues are economic or welfare oriented in nature. No wonder the parliament touches new lows only now.
Democracy ... of the people, for the people and by the people.
We can only get what we can come up with! Someone should have thought about this earlier!

Have a look at the below - Omar Abdullah (from the NC) making the Left (who is now in bed with the Right) squirm!

A good day

2008-07-17T12:44:00.006+05:30

Today was a good day overall. Good days for me mean two things -
- things falling into place
- being able to realise it
Most of the day was part 1 from above and this blog is a way of cementing part 2.
So what were the things which went right today -

Woke up somewhat late, but was able to leave early by getting ready quickly, less traffic on the way to work, was able to sleep during the ride into work and reached office by 10
Did a lot of work - finished some long pending work, called up potential clients, tackled a few small issues for the team and for one of my clients
Billable work started for a new client (thanks to a 15 page NDA, I can not tell you which one) - From the time you meet a client, getting to the getting paid bit is a long way. It involves meeting them over and over again, making them understand how we might be able to help them, draft a contract, negotiate over points, get a signoff from them, wait for them to get a signoff from their bosses, start billing, raise an invoice, chase up with accounts and finally opening a letter to see a cheque inside. Start to finish can take anywhere between a few weeks (god bless such clients) and a year! however, once billing starts with a new client (as in, the meter on how much work we do for a client project starts) usually means a lot of pain is over.
Emails from old colleagues is always nice. I spent almost 4 years of my life at a new place - and a large fraction of the total number of people I knew in London was due to my work place. Now that I am in Delhi again, it is nice to get emails from them.
Chit chat with friends all day - AR was sending mails at the rate of 5 an hour which is always fun
At about 6, thanks to facebook, I was part of a plan to go to a nice lounge/bar with two friends. I had been thinking that my social life was testing new lows this week and this plan hit the spot. What I also liked about the plan was that it started early and had the potential to end early and seemed harmless enough. I panicked for a bit at the fact that I had signed up for a singles night, but then realised that this was Delhi and such a plan would mean 15 men and 2 women. Since I was going in with two women, I already was on talking terms with them and my worries of having no one to talk to were put to rest. There was surprisingly less traffic and I was a few minutes early to pick up my friends. Thankfully, they were ready to go and we were at the place on time.
So the singles night out turned out as expected - 3w + 8m. What was nice was that even the men, except for Pappu (about whom I will soon), were nice people, and they were ok to hang out with. All of them had interesting jobs, interesting lives and were also great for conversation. Soon, the group had managed to locate common friends and acquaintances and the drinks were flowing.
It is always nice to spend time with YS. I have known her for so long now and she is the same - chilled out, no hangups, great sense of humour, lots of stories to swap and a common list of people about whom I can bitch about to her.
SS as well is really nice. She can hold her own, no matter the audience. Like she spoke for a bit to Pappu, who had also come for the singles night. He was the kind of guy who gives Delhi a bad name. Rich and showing it, somewhere between little and no class (depends upon how charitable you are feeling), no respect for anyone, loud mouthed. Of course, very rich, with a few acres of prime land in his name with a few factories sitting on them.
Post-Pappu (he left quite soon) and post-dinner, on the way back, we realised how much we all felt about Pappu (Especially SS, who politely bore the brunt of his attack) and we talked about him for quite a while. Such cut and dried real life caricatures are very useful in making friends and getting to know people - you get to know what the others noticed about him, which gives you an insight into how they think and what they are made of...
Finally, as I dropped my fabulous company and was driving back alone, I was happy to note that there were no police checks, which can be a pain after three glasses of wine.
As I came back home and switched on the TV, Forrest Gump was on. It was the part where Gump walks out after getting decorated with the medal of honour and walks in to an anti war demo. he is asked to give a speech at the end of which he says his name and gets to meet his all time love Jenny again. I like this movie a lot.

As I write this (late night and then early next morning), I am thankful to the powers to be...
I think that as most of us are busy climbing mountains, it is good to sit back every once in a while to enjoy the view. You might not be at the highest point yet, but you are high enough to get a good view most of the time.

Country Living and taking it easy...

2008-07-15T18:06:00.000+05:30

The first reaction my father had when I told him about my plans to leave my current job, move back to India and set up a small online marketing agency of my own was some thing on the lines of - we better come to the UK once before you leave.

My father has always supported me. I have tried very hard not to take it for granted, but sometimes I do. I think that is why now, that I am running my own business, I am somewhat less scared than I should be.

During college placements, my father was not even bothered. My mama was in the hospital just before my placements and that had kept the entire family occupied and the first conversation I had with my father about my job was after getting an offer from Novell.

At IIMA, I realised a few months before the placements started, that my chances of getting a job I liked were slim. I would not get interviews with Indian finance companies (not that getting an interview would help too much), I did not want to work in FMCG (aka sales and marketing roles) or do BD and project management in IT firms.
What were left were three possible openings:

TAS - One of the general management roles available on campus
Crisil - Good backdoor into the financial sector
Pharma companies with openings in Strategy etc

In short, it was a long shot.
I told my father all this and also said that I really did not want to take up a role I did not like. He took about 2 seconds in saying that it did not matter and that I should come to Delhi without a job if that is what it was.
I would like to take some credit for getting a job I liked on campus, but the fact that my father was ok with me not having a job out of campus did have quite an impact on reducing overall stress levels.
Anyhow, my parents came to London and spent two weeks with me. It was nice. The house was huge. They traveled all over London and we went to Oxford. Thanks to someone we know, we also drove all over the west of London. We went to Windsor and Eton and took narrow roads and tramped around all over the countryside. It was just amazing. Papa and I both decided that buying a house in the west of London is something one should aspire towards... Thanks to this trip, I also understood why so many of my colleagues spent hours commuting from their homes out in the country to their workplace, while I used to secretly gloat about my 22 minute commute from West hampstead into Aldersgate. There would be very few things which would make me want to live anywhere else.
I have done six months in India now - I always wonder how things would have been different if I moved back earlier. Would I be better off in my personal life? Would my business take off in a similar manner? Am I better off in moving back when I did, or should I have stayed on for a few more months/years? Should I have moved back earlier? I hate such unending option generating decision trees. RSH (ex batchmate, ex flatmate, ex colleague) used to be very good at this. It used to drive me insane. RSH did move back to India. And then moved back to London.

India - Long time, no see

2008-07-09T16:27:00.003+05:30

There is a new series called ‘Kahani mahabharat ki” on TV.

“Kahani” has a few extra a’s and e’s to use the great power of numerology to make mythological serials popular in India. I was looking forward to seeing this fantastic story again on TV. I have seen the earlier one and quite liked it – the story and the characters makes normal actors look better)

The spellings put me off. The tired look on the actors turned me off. The background music was tiring.

The cameraman is on E, because he is never tired in showing zoom ins from weird angles. Again and again. The script seems to have been written by some panwallahs in their spare time. Overall, this team of unimaginable collective talent seems to have succeeded in converting the Mahabharat into what seems to me like a saas bahu drama in costumes. Maybe that is what they intended.

There is a show on radio called “Tu sabki Baja” on a radio channel which encourages people to “Bajate raho”. I remember getting slapped for much milder language while in school.

Looking around, I think I grew up in a different country.

I grew up in the 80s. (Some people tell me that the process is not over yet).
I grew up in an India where an evening out did not mean drinking. It meant going out for a “picture” with parents, then having south Indian or Chinese food and coming back home with a kulfi. Even into college, it meant a movie, dinner, conversation and a walk. Maybe I was just very uncool and did not know about it.

Entertainment was one channel and a VCR. Mahabharat and Ramayan meant finishing everything before 9 on a Sunday, which happened on its own as you woke up at 7
Actually, a TV producer today needs all the help getting Mahabharat to work on TV (hence the extra a’s and e’s).

I wonder if my kids will not understand me. I don’t think they will like me too much. On a positive note, I think I understand my parents a bit better with every passing day. I think I am still growing up.

Field Marshals and something else...

2008-07-08T17:10:00.004+05:30

Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw passed away a few days ago. I read about it in the TOI (see below) and also was pleased to note that the economist wrote an endearing eulogy for him. I had read a bit about his temperament and was not too surprised to read about his retorts to Madam Gandhi (about whom I have a lot to say, but will not, given the recent case of Gandhi versus Vaid, I will keep my opinions to myself)

It also gave me the opportunity to read a bit more about him and about the only other Field Marshall the Indian army has had - Field Marshall Cariappa - who was at the helm of the armed forces during 1947. Reading about him, I felt that he was quite important in the mindset with which the Indian army was born with (in 1947) and developed it. The army prides itself (again very little data) for its secular credentials and a little part of it flows down directly from Cariappa.

Cariappa, after retiring from the Army, was made the Indian high commissioner to Australia. He was not very keen about this, but Nehruji insisted. As a result, he found his way into Canberra's high society. I do not think anyone could really handle him - a war veteran who had fought for the British and had been instrumental in stalling the Japanese (Which in turn helped keep Australia safe), highly learned and well versed in poetry and philosophy, while at the same time, with a tendency to speak his mind (a somewhat unnecessary skill for a diplomat). He travelled all over Australia and soon knew a lot more about Australia than many native(?) Australians. Australia had a white only immigration policy at that time (which is quite a laugh now, given that the Aussie government now is prepared to spend Australian tax payer dollars into attracting indians into settling there - highly skilled ofcourse). What angered him as a soldier was that with a white only policy, Italians and Germans (countries which Australia fought against in WWII) were welcome to settle in Australia, while Indians, who had fought on the same side as the Australians were not.
I am not sure why I am talking about him - have meandered from Maneckshaw but reading about this time and some stories about Maneckshaw and Cariappa were fascinating.
I dream of a day when the demand for Indian work permits outstrips its supply.
Or you could just walk in into the country via Bangladesh!
Topic change.
Dramatic topic change.
I noted some very interesting things on Google analytics.
I will observe it for a while before sharing it here, or probably I never will. It made me deliriously happy.
Because of that, I need to bring this up as well - I might have talked about this earlier on this blog - that for me, a large part of companionship is about having a witness to my life and for me to bear witness to someone else's. It is about knowing that what I face in is known to one other person, and that person sees all that I feel and go through and think and so on...
So, yes, I think I have found a rather long-range witness. I think I have always had one.
(no romantic angles need to be explored here please)

Traffic management

2008-06-18T10:02:00.005+05:30

option 1: Option 2:
Option 3:
I think that the government here is trying hard with number 1 (massive infrastructure investment), but what is really needed is number 3. That is all I have to say about that.
I have not been able to come up with something very interesting to write about for the past few weeks, may be that is just a reflection of life these days. Staid, plain, mundane, routine are the words which come to mind.
Workwise, things are ok. A few clients and a few potential clients. The gathering inflation rain clouds have managed to take the joy away from the early showers / timely monsoons. Things will get worse from a business point of view as the government takes steps to dampen demand. However, since we are a tactical marketing arm and not really into branding, we should be hit at the end. When tactical spend is getting hit, things are going to be so bad anyway that it wont matter.
Personal life wise, things are just about ok. Things are moving and not moving and all I want to do is to do the right thing. Doing the right thing implies taking a decision. Decision making, by my definition, is 1)selecting option out of many, 2)based on a predetermined set of criteria, 3)using the best possible information.
The information can only be best possible, because perfect information would mean that there is an equation which has to be solved, not a decision to be made.
I guess the reader and author both by now have realised that the author is in a rut!

Tips to save energy!

2008-06-02T13:29:00.003+05:30

I went through some information on energy saving on a US website here, and have contextualised it for an Indian audience below:

The energy we use at home accounts for quite a bit of India's contribution to global warming. As incomes rise and consumption increases, this energy and co2 will only increase.
This means making smart choices at home matters, not only for saving on utility bills, but also i helping reduce global warming.

Heating and cooling
This is a top home energy user, with the average household producing about four tons of heat-trapping pollution a year (in the US, data for india not available) . It is heavily influenced by weather. Warmer summers increase greenhouse gas pollution from heavy air conditioning use.
Even as the weather varies, your choices can help spew less global warming pollution.
• In summer, keep shades drawn to keep the cool in.
• In winter, open shades to let the sunlight to help warm rooms.
• Use water coolers in the first few months of the summer when the humidity is not high. An air cooler is much more enery efficient than an air conditioner and it saves you electricity bills as well
• Buy air-conditioners whic have an energy star rating only
• Buy air-conditioners which can be programmed to be at a particular temperature.
• Temperatures of upto 28 degrees are comfortable. Every degree higher will translate into energy savings, less electricity consumption and Co2 reductions.
• Clean or replace the air filter on your air conditioner.
• Plant trees around your house to cut cooling costs in summer if you can. They help the local water table (which can reduce the cost of water pumps)
• Insulate your walls and ceilings.
• In case of a house, use a light-colored or reflective paint on the roof.

Appliances
After heating, refrigerators and freezers are generally the home's next two big energy eaters. Other appliances follow closely. Together, these items account for nearly eight tons of heat-trapping emissions per household per year.
• Upgrade to Energy Star products. Not all appliances are equal. Whether you're in the market for a new fridge, toaster or air conditioner, look for Energy Star choices, which offer the best energy savings.
• Size counts. When in the market for an appliance, make sure you buy what suits your needs. Items too large or too small waste electricity and your money.
• Unplug. Your electric meter is often adding up kilowatt hours when you don’t think you’re using an appliance. Unplug toasters and cell phone and other chargers when they’re not in use.
• Use power strips and switch off the whole strip: Cable boxes and video game boxes, and to a lesser extent TVs and VCRs, use almost as much energy when they're off as when they're on. Make it easy to turn them all the way off—plug them into a power strip and turn off the whole strip. Consumer Reports also offers more detailed ratings and green buying guides for appliances, from vacuum cleaners to laundry machines.

Lighting
Lighting accounts for about fair amount of enery consumption after heating and cooling have been accounted for. In terms of heat-trapping pollution, that means the lights in the average household produce just over a ton of carbon dioxide each year. Here are a few steps to lower those numbers.
• Use energy-efficient lights. Changing just one 75-watt bulb to a compact fluorescent light cuts roughly 1,300 pounds of global warming pollution(Again a US number, but I think that apart from power cuts, the number woul be the same in India). They also last up to 15 times as long and save you money.
• Turn off lights. A good chunk of lighting expenses is from rooms that stay unnecessarily lit.
• Use natural light. Open shades and use sunlight to help light rooms.
• Install motion-sensors so that lights automatically turn on when someone is in the room and turn off when empty. (A very US oriented tip, however, such technology is now available in India and is cheaper than you think!)
Other energy efficient choices for your home
• Use the energy saver cycle on your dishwasher and only run it when full.
• Wash clothes in warm or cold water, not hot.

And a really big one:
Raising animals for meat is more co2 intensive than using the piece of land for crops.
Going vegetarian helps the environment as it cuts out the middleman (Meat!). This one will be a tough nut for me to crack.

Oh Calcutta!

2008-06-01T09:30:00.003+05:30

So I went to 'Oh Calcutta' yesterday for Lunch. There were four of us and I was the first one to show up, so I had some time to look around. This one is built opposite the Satyam at Nehru Place (which is a new movie theatre built on what used to be a parking lot) and has quite an expensive parking lot (Rs 50 for 2 hours). I parked outside on the road and then made my way inside. The maitre'd was nice and quickly got me a table. He was quite helpful. I had mentioned that I was waiting for three others, and I saw him ask quite a few groups of three poeple they were looking for Saurabh.

Back to Oh Calcutta!

What were the other things nice about the place:
- the restaurant is well spread out and they have not tried to cramp the place up
- there are various seating options - tables for 2/3/4/5/6/8 (I think!)
- The service was prompt. They did try to upsell (regular water or bottled water and the like), which is something I personally dislike, but managed to sound very genuine.
- The prices were reasonable. Actually, I do not really know as my friends paid for it (A resounding round of applause to the Jains and to AR). But I think the buffet was around Rs600 (including taxes)
Some astute readers might have realised by now that the restaurant review has overlooked mentioning the food so far. Good point, I will say. Well made, I can add to that. The central theme here is Bengali food. Since I have not had too much Bengali food (all my bong aunties used to make sure they were well stocked in chole-bhature every time I went to their house), I can not be an authority of the quality of the jhol or taste of the steamed Hilsa.
However, since many a large meal have passed through me, I know a good one when I get one. Overall, the meal was fantastic. It was very mild and had the taste/look/feel of home-cooked food. I had the fish curry, the lamb and the prawn curry. The prawn curry was labeled 'thakurbadi', which means that it had been cooked as it used to be cooked in Tagore's kitchen.

I would recommend Oh Calcutta! to people who like normal north indian food - rich in variety and flavour, low in oil, lots of courses etc.

Monsoon Beddings

2008-05-20T12:46:00.004+05:30

Delhi has been a refreshing surprise early in the summer. After a couple of weeks of ever increasing heat, there were almost two weeks of rains. Even though the rains meant a complete breakdown in traffic, I was still happier because of the drop in temperature...

I added Google analytics tracking on this blog. I wanted to note some of the interesting facts it revealed:
- I have had visitors searching for "ecommerce authors in india" as well as "Personal yoga teacher vasant kunj" visit this blog. Google might have a hand to play in this, see this.
- They an average of 2 pages on this blog.
- About 1 in 5 are regular visitors, while the rest are searching for yoga teachers and the like (see above)

I wonder how dangerous is it to have data like this with Google. But then I guess, if the big G really wanted this data, they could just buy a few of these companies to have a look-see.

Do no evil, as they used to say ... wonder if they really stick to it now.
What about automatic matching on keywords in adwords? Or the content network with only a button to control it for a few years!

What about ecommerce in India?

2008-03-29T16:14:00.005+05:30

So then I have been around for about two months now and I have a laptop full of presentations made to CEOs, Marketing heads, product veeps and so on... I have met quite a few people in the internet space - actually the people I have met are more from a marketing background and less from an internet marketing background.
This is a good thing for those in the business of knowledge arbitrage. But is it?
I think that it is best if a company which can spend Rs. 50 crores on online marketing spends it. It does not matter if Envigo - online marketing par excellence gets a share of this money or not. This seems counter-intuitive, but it is not so. The reason is this - A big corporation (or a small firm with VC money to burn) will spend this kind of money only when it sees positive, sustainable and reliable returns. It will adapt its systems and delivery mechanisms to deal with such kind of additional volume. Apart from the marketing funds, such money would also drive further investment within the company. In other words, it is not easy to deal with 100% more bookings overnight. So, the investment and the effort behind it will mean that the company is going to stay in the online arena. Even if Envigo does not get to see the money directly, eventually the benefits will trickle down. The benefits will be in the form of greater acceptance of this media and a general willingness to try this out. It will also be in the form of competitors lining up to replicate such successes. It will mean a gradual reallocation of funds towards online channels - for the firm and for the industries in which the firm operates. That is how it begins to start looking rosy for Envigo.
A lower ROI - because of sub-standard agency work or simply because of cleverly negotiated contracts does not help anyone except for the agency negotiating such contracts. And such joy tends to be short-lived. This is because the client will wisen up, with agencies not eating such low hanging fruits more than eager to educate the client .
This is why a great team of people, who may be in different online marketing shops, delivering exceptional results in a consistent fashion is what is needed. The online marketing pot is supposed to grow and grow - read this. It needs to grow faster. Such a team will generate that confidence and make client pockets deeper.
The good news is that in a lot of firms, the internet is the next big source of customers. This is because the customer is increasingly adept on this medium and she demands and expects to engage with her basket of brands on the internet. Things are very unorganised - Where to drive traffic from, how to measure returns, which channels to use and how much to pay an agency - but such things are a necessary companion of early stage growth. (For example, when the railroads were growing in the US in the 1800s, there was a time where you had to change your train 8 times between Philadelphia and Charleston - a distance of about 800 miles - because of different rail gauges).
In such a scenario, with rapid growth, unorganised service providers and service seekers, what should a marketing agency try to do to become bigger and better?
Not surprisingly, the same factors would help an agency which would help any other company, say in manufacturing. What is key - Motivation, Innovation and Agility. Self-driven employees who strive for personal improvement and client satisfaction, an open culture which supports cooperation and fosters innovation and an overall nimbleness in the way work flows in the organisation to deliver client requirements on time and show results.
Growth, in my opinion, will be delivered not by superstar business development (sadly, this is my current job at Envigo) but by a robust sales funnel and client management - all supported by well designed processes.
Processes are the oxygen at Envigo today. After closing the first round of business development, we are now taking stock of what went right and wrong and are writing out what to do next time around.
All the best to us!

What is online marketing?

2008-03-18T16:20:00.006+05:30

Every few days, I meet someone and have to explain what I do for a living and it gets a bit irritating because very few people seem to get it.

a1: so what do you to?
a2: I work in an online marketing agency.

a1: (blank)
a2: Well we advise clients on how to spend money online...

a1: (Eating something and looking away)
a2: It is like how a regular marketing agency works - Suppose a company has a million dollars and wanted to spend it in selling more soap. They would go to a marketing agency and ask them for a media plan. The marketing agency would tell them how to market their soap, which TV channel and programs to use for advertising and how much to spend where. An online marketing agency that for an online audience, with a website owner as a client and online audiences as a target audience.

a1: so you are selling soap online? (between mouthfuls)
a2: we can help a client sell whatever he wants to

a1: Hmmm. So what do you do then?
a2: (imaging a car crash in slow motion) grr.,..

I get to play a2 about 50 times a month.
Below is an answer with the eloquence it deserves.

Online Marketing is a set of activities undertaken on behalf of a client or an employer to:
1) help drive online actions
2) in the most cost effective manner and
3) to track and report online actions.

Online actions could vary from a Purchase, Lead generation, email quote request or just viewing a website or a banner.

Cost effectiveness would mean:
3) What was the cost of buying traffic from this specific traffic source (How much did the click cost?)
4) How much did it cost for a given source to drive an online action. Remember that traffic is not bought for traffic's sake (not any more) but for driving a particular online action.
5) How much money was made as a result of this online action? (what was the value of the sale which happened?).
6) If 5) is greater than 4), then we turn up the knob for the given traffic source. If not, the knob is dialled down.

To make every one a bit more calm, there needs to be a system of accurate tracking and reporting:
7) Such reporting would provide data for questions 1 to 5.
8) it would also help us do 7) for every single link, website and campaign.
This set is the set of things an online marketeer does. It has a certain deterministic appeal to it. It also has a real world uncertainty about it. Every campaign shows a diminishing marginal return after a point. Every campaign has an elasticity - price, volume, conversion all change. Thankfuly, every campaign has its own predictability as well.

The interface with the client involves providing answers for the following questions:

1. Which set of online mediums/websites to be used?
2. How much to spend on each such website?
3. Which kind of commercial arrangements to be set up - Pay per click, pay per view, pay per action and so on...
4. Which creative formats to use?
and 5. How to track and run reports so as to measure what is going on?

What makes a good online marketer:
- To understand the nuances of reporting systems
- To have a good eye for detail
- To be a natural flair for analytics
- To be able to work in a team

This, in a nutshell, is online marketing. This is what we do!

Road rage!

2008-02-11T13:12:00.003+05:30

This post is going to be a long crib - a vent about life, justice and anything else that might come into my head as I write this post.It all started because of something else, but then I had to drive about 250 kilometers over the weekend, all in and out of Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Greater Noida (Yes, even Greater Noida).
I have been thinking about a post on the traffic, but thought that it would be too much of an ex-non-resident thing to do. But then, this weekend tippeth the cup over.
There are so many things wrong, I am not sure where to start.
I will list some of my favourites:
- Red light jumping
- Red light creeping
- Wrong side driving with lights on
- Switching on headlights to tell the other side that they are coming first
- Selecting an incorrect lane on a red light
- Speeding
- Selecting an incorrect lane on the expressway
- Not stopping when it makes civic sense and common sense to stop
- Blocking the left lane at a red light

The main problem here is that there is no incentive to conform, no disincentive for misbehaving and strong incentives to misbehave!

Are these not the kind of things which the government is supposed to set right?
- The Gurgaon expressway cost Rs. 7.5bn (or Rs 10.0 bn), however, travel times which had fallen have shot back up thanks to the toll bridges. The Toll bridges take an average of 15-20 minutes to clear up.
Reasons:
- Bad design - no clear signs, no punishment for people found in the wrong lane (Cash payers in the tag lanes and so on)
- Bad behaviour - people always try to get into the shortest lane
- Bad planning - Toll costs are Rs 16, Rs 49 etc which few people carry. the toll booths do not have the forms for the getting a tag

I feel sorry about this. For a few reasons in no real order of importance.

I go to Delhi using the MG road. The traffic on this road has gone up because of the toll being implemented on the expressway. Was the expresssway not supposed to be a boon to all traffic heading out of Delhi into Gurgaon and beyond.
Secondly, is this not a very sad waste of money if the travel times actually go up. Long ago (1996), my dad had an interview with someone at Gillette who told him that it took him 50 miutes to go from Vasant Kunj to Bhiwadi. It takes someone about 80 minutes today to get to Bhiwadi (and there are 6 more lanes to play with than in 1996).

A small fraction of this is my money. And some of it is yours. If anyone I knew spent my money in such a bad way, I would take my money someone else (Is this what immigration is all about?).

I wonder if we could make the NHAI sweat a bit more for such blunders.

Moving on the brighter things, I have a personal yoga instructor, India still being one of the few places in the world, where such luxuries will not burn my pocket. Anyway, she has exercises for everything. The usual objectives are boring - weight loss, tone-up, stamina - she has exercises even for hair growth, sleeping better... I wonder if she would have something for "I dont know what to do now" or with love. Imagine going to the yoga teacher with a broken heart, hearing her reply to your query (with the strings of the sitar being strummed in the background), “Do surya namaskar and the pranayama along with these other allied asanas five times every morning at four am.” Wonder if such a thing exists in Yoga. It would make Yoga more popular than all the self help books about life, love, relationships, rebirth redundant. It would help reduce icecream sales. It would also give gyms and other fat loss related money making schemes a run for their money, the link being: heartache > icecream > weight gain > weight loss programs > new boy > heartache.
If only...

A Noteworthy Journey

2008-01-25T16:12:00.005+05:30

Thanks to the Virgin Atlantic online checkin and also because a colleague who was supposed to get me upgraded had a baby daughter, I ended up on a window seat and in economy on my way back from London. After dinner and a few hours of sleep, I woke up and looked out of the window.
I like looking out of train windows - this habit started early with a lot of 2nd sleeper journeys while travelling around Bihar, Assam and Delhi. There was a brief interlude when my parents started booking the 3-tier AC sleeper and staring out of the air conditioned windows is no fun, even in the day. I was back at the looking out of windows in college , which was 40 hours away by train from Delhi and had some of the most interesting landscapes on the way with tunnels, bridges, valleys, mountains, creeks and even a stretch of sandy beach. I will dig around for pictures and post some, but the best way of seeing this stretch of rail is by traveling by 2nd sleeper in a non-rainy month (which are only a few and the best months are just after the rains!) from Kurla down till Mangalore. My father likes to say that nature comes in four varieties - hills and hills, hills and forests, forests and hills, forests and forests - and this route has each of the four in plenty. However, the best sight I have seen was even before the Konkan started and going to Mangalore from Delhi used to take 53 hours, as the train used to take a gigantic U turn and works its way back up through Kerala. I remember one morning, when we were passing through Kerala and were in the middle of the mid morning bathing. All the men had left and gone to work, while all the women were washing their clothes and bathing. It was quite a sight for the young testosterone being transported right through the middle of god's very own country! Amen. I want to add another variable into the natural beauty equation - women.
Cutting back to the journey at hand, I saw a huge city to the north next to some water. It was Teheran, which is to the south of the Caspian Sea. It was very peaceful - the time probably being around 5AM local time, the time when a city is usually most asleep than others. (In any case, I was too high to notice any movement). For a passing moment, I thought about Ahmadinejad and some of the things he has written or said, but the view tore me away from such things. I went back to just taking in the view of the city, albeit from 10 miles up, which has been habitated for the past 8000 years.
Gradually, the scenery became more interesting. We crossed the Zagros mountains as the sun rose and the scenery only improved with the Hindukush ranges coming into view. It was a goegraphy class in fast forward - glaciers, ravines, valleys and rivers - all in quick succession. What was interesting was how some rivers seemed to cut right through a mountain range - as if they had existed all along and the mountains rose afterwards. This is what plate tectonics also suggests - that the earlier continents were very differently shaped and located and they have drifted away from and into each other leading to the current continents. In the process, they created the Himalayas. The Hindukush is located approximately where the western edges of the Indian island would have rubbed against the Asian landmass and would have led to the mountains slowly rising out of coastal plains. Hence, the rivers.
May be.
This was also the age old route to India over which I was flying. Iranians/Aryans/Persians/Greeks, Scythians, Mongols and then the Arabs all have had their go at my precious and till very recently, a predominantly benign (read lazy and fat) country. I could see all the hell they were willing to go through to reach the pot of gold which was India. Every father west of the Hindukush who had a particularly headstrong son would rear him with his head towards the east and his mind full of a tales of gold in India. On the plane, the entire horizon was filled with lethal looking mountains and passes - and while I was flying over them, all kinds of adventurers had made a highway across this landscape for India.
Faith can move mountains. Greed can get you across.
The tremendous sense of calm is worth a mention. On sea level or thereabouts, every problem seems bigger than it really is. Religions (all of them), countries, economies, commodities or the lack of it have all been invented by humans over the past thousand years or so. The mountains and the planet have been changing, but have moved by a few inches in the past 10000 years. They are all that matter when you are ten miles up. They are all that you can see.
Maybe all of us should just chill a bit more and takes ourselves a bit less seriously.
Just for a bit.

Whatay Whatay fun!

2008-01-21T14:39:00.000+05:30

About time I started writing again, there are just too many things happening and I want to document all of them. This blog will remain my personal blog inspite of earlier plans to find another domain... so now I need to think up of a cool new name for an industry expert(!) blog. The last few days in London and the trip back deserve one blog entry each - it will be nice to store these memories in text format.

The online marketing agency - UK and India started its operations in Delhi with a small team and small facilities but with big ambitions. Initial work includes search, consulting, affiliate management and some web design.

Bombay and Delhi are fun - there is just so much energy all around. The food tastes good, the women are prettier and crazier, my low bar seems just right (for those who know). I went partying but what happened after the partying was more memorable.

I was taking a new phone connection and I was asked how many I need for the new company. The guy then went on to ask me if I had already hired these new people, or if he could help me get a few. "It is easy sir.... Marketing people are easy to find!"
Imagine that - Orange and Vodaphone providing head hunting services while you are filling up a form for a new phone.

Mobile rates are low and are getting lower. Internet speeds are getting faster - 8MB broadband is there for the taking. Flights are full, on Sunday mornings at five am and on Thursday afternoons as well. I booked a Bombay to Delhi flight, when I was actually trying to go from Delhi to Bombay and supplied some entertainment to the ticketing women of Simbldy Deccan.

I do miss London. I miss my space. At the same time, I love my space being squashed out of shape by those in my life in India now. The title of this post is from a radio jingle which plays on one of these FM channels and I can't help but smile at how well this captures some of what I feel every day. So what if I have to spend two hours in a car every day.

The country of my birth and the land of my people, Welcome back into my life!

Changes

2007-10-31T16:44:00.000+05:30

Times change and we change with them.

This blog also, is going to change.

The URL here will be kept for a blog related to my line of work. There will be another which will be for me to spout the kind of random musings I seem to specialise in.

Watch this space!

Saurabh

emarketing@ota

2007-10-24T15:51:00.001+05:30

Oct 6 2003 to Dec 21 2007
Good guy, worked hard and hardly ever worked hard
Great friends, good times...

Dinner delights

2007-10-12T13:23:00.000+05:30

Moved to the east end of London, as they say, with the monstrosity below right opposite the river.

(overturned cockroach, balding porcupine)

Bad thing - see above.
Good thing - Nice house at a reasonable price - 3.5beds+blah+blah+blah+room with enough space for a ps2 and 10 friends
Bad thing - No neighbourhood
Good thing - Some good neighbours (read PV,AV,TG,SG)
Bad thing - A daylight robbery store called Budgens
Good thing - Clean everything
Bad thing - Wont stay for long

I also wanted to capture the whole dinner thing that I have going. I like to call people over, cook for them, feed them and send them back. My parents are horrified at this behaviour. Why do I do it - well I like cooking, for one. I like cooking when there is some company even better.
Anyway, had two such dinners this week - TG and PKnV and it goes without saying that it was great! Wonder how much of this I will be able to do in Delhi.

Delhi is a city of distances - especially if one stays in Sarita Vihar. You hardly walk to a friends house. You drive to it, and quite often, you plough through chunks of traffic to get anywhere.
I will miss that about London. Going from A to B while reading a book and looking out through the bus window. Wonder when we will have such buses in Delhi.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

2007-10-03T16:43:00.000+05:30

Digboi and Back

2007-09-25T15:45:00.000+05:30

Well I am stuck in something I can not say what and I have 38 minutes till I am free again. So I thought I might as well take this time to talk about something nice happening after all.
This website, which had been dormant for a bit and I had been facebooking for my social networking daily fix, came alive when I got in touch with ST. ST, for those who dont know me well enough or even very well, used to be my bets bud when I was about 10. We have done some of the craziest things together. One evening, we decided to pay a visit to this river which was in the neighbourhood. We cycled for about 35 minutes which was a reasonable distance for ten year olds, especially when we were not cycling but walking with the cycle, reached the river, bathed and came back. Neither of our parents noticed two slightly dirty boys going off into the woods and coming back looking somewhat cleaner.
Ledo and Bargolai and Digboi and all these smaller towns (?) were wonderfully magical places which I had the good fortune of living. You could post letter to my father, with only his name and Ledo, Assam written on it without an address. It was so small. It was nice and laid back and sleepy and tucked away in this corner of the country where there were hills and rains and rivers and more of the same all over. Now that I live in a big city, I sort off understand why people here want to head off to the hills or spend six months in Africa. I did my nature stint while growing up and never really understood its value till my city stint started (and is not going to end for a while)
Back to the original point, I got in touch with ST. And thanks to the child of connected graphs, low programming costs and cheaper internet called social networking, I got in touch with loads of others from school - RP, TD, CP, GSG and so on... It was nice. The fact that they also remember me was nicer. I always used to wonder if they would, and now I know.
It is a nice feeling to know that someone else also is witness to your life. and old parts of it.
There... have run out of time, but can end this post now.

The Tale of Three Cities

2007-08-12T18:55:00.000+05:30

The good thing about blogging irregularly is one has plenty to write about. At the same time, since one blogs after long intervals, one might miss upon some of the things once had decided to write about, because of a fickle memory.
Let us call this the rate of buildup b and the rate of decay be called d. The decay would also be proportional to the memory buildup. I can sniff a differential equation now onwards and I will keep my mouth shut on this topic now.
Anyway, there were quite a few things to write about. I visited Gurgaon, Mumbai, Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon, London, Chicago and New York in that order...
Gurgaon is a testbook case in how to grow very fast in the worst possible manner. From being a sleepy little town about ten years ago, it is the outsourcing and ITES hub of North India. To be fair, such growth would stretch the infrastructural muscles of any city, but it has overwhelmed Gurgaon. There are roads, but the roads exist only for cars and more cars. There is between little and no public transport, depending upon where in Gurgaon you are. As a results, cars and more cars is all you get. There is an eight lane expressway between Delhi and Gurgaon, but it has kilometre long pileups...
Mumbai is now my favourite large Indian, probably because I really enjoyed the time I spent there (which had nothing to do with the city). Anyway, my two bits about Mumbai is that the people seem nicer and are more down to earth and polite. I also get this feeling, which I absolutely love, that I am part of a Hindi movie when in Bombay. No, the movie is not about me or about anyone I know. I am more like that person in a movie, who is crossing the road in a movie where two people have just fallen in love, or the guy who gets out of the lift, while the hero gets in on his way to his office, and things like that. It is this perpetual peripheral movie feeling which I can not kick off and absolutely love. I used to think that I have not watched too many movies, but now I am of the opinion that I watched enough.
Mumbai, or rather one of its new residents, did give me a parting shot, which I will not forget for a long time.
New York... ah New York. I loved it. I was there for about 50 hours, and I loved it. I got to watch the US open, went to the WTC memorial website, lost the camera with which I took pictures, walked on the Brooklyn Bridge, heard, spoke and ate American and so on and so forth. There were times when I felt the same peripheral movie feeling, only this time the movie was in English, but I pushed it away. There was so much to do and see. New York is a world city - there is everyone from everywhere there. No matter where you are from, you would find your neighbours from back home in New York. Such things make a city a great place to be, not only because you find your own roots there, but you get to see everyone else's also I guess. I think this is what makes Mumbai and London a cool place to be too.

[Housekeeping - My site got a PR upgrade to 2. Let us see how this helps this.]

What Abouts India?

2007-06-02T20:10:00.000+05:30

Have a look at what is happening in Pakistan today -
- Strong influence of religious inspired forces in political and social issues
- Targetting of womens rights, eradication of womens education
Pakistan politics and underlying social factors have been slowly but surely heading towards this abyss of social mayhem for quite some time now. The slow deterioration of law and order is a testament to the tendency of the politics of religion.
India, sadly, is not far behind, although the flavour here is different. The minority feels threatened. Godhra did not help. The riots after that and the continued apathy of the government, the resounding victory of Narendra Modi in the next election - every thing went like one reinforcing nail after another that the majority has grown teeth. To assert our weight is fine - but denying access to livelihood and justice is not. Driving 12% of our population to desperation is not. It is just plain foolish.
I do not think that this amounts to, or has to amount to appeasement. What it does amount to is re-estabilishing the rule of law - people like this (The Gujarat ATS cop) should be made an example of. There should be tighter laws passed for mixing religion and politics - segregation, inciting people, rioting et al. Again, not appeasement, but simple Math. (Earlier, the minorities had this going, now about 84% of 1.1bn people are a target market, so tougher regulation is the need of the hour).
Hinduism and India are both essentially plural in nature. This is what has made both exist despite all odds. Hinduism is a bunch of different things to different people. For my mother, it is the bedrock of her existence and is part of her daily routine. For many of my generation, it is a way of understanding our culture and our parents without being overtly religious. What I believe to be true and ironical is this - India would not exist very well as a Hindu state, because it would end up like Yugoslavia or dozens of other such example. India exists and confounds critics no one asserts his identity as anyone - a hindu, a muslim - sometimes not even as an Indian. When that starts to be replaced by millions of people clamouring to stand apart, India as a whole falters and falls.
The outlook of a generation is shaped by the prior generation. Most of what I know and think to be right or wrong is a sum total of all that I read and talked about while growing up. If we all worked very hard on our children, they would each turn out to be like Mr. Modi or blind Anti-Modis. My point here - we could quite easily lose this good thing which have going here - democracy, rule of law, separation of state and religion, army under civil rule and so on... (the ITES miracle comes further down the list)
How bad can it get? From a few thousand terrorists/freedom flighters in Kashmir, to about 10000 Taliban causing mayhem in Afghanistan (at its peak, when they won the country), imagine a vast land with about 100 million angry and wronged citizens.
How to get to such a place from here and now - 20 years under systematic appeasement of the majority and dismantling the fabric of this country.

Scary eh?

Shootout at Lokhandwala

2007-05-28T15:45:00.001+05:30

I could also call it - The Ambush at The Trocadero... because I felt physically hurt as I walked out with envigoman after watching this movie.

You can find the plot details here but nothing can prepare you for the mess that the director and the scriptwriter have concocted. The cast of the movie had its highs and lows - Amitabh Bachchan, and Sunit Dutt but also so called heroes like Suni(e)l Shetty and Tus(s)har Kapoor. The plot is based on a 14 hours shootout which happened in the early 90s in a residential suburb of bombay, where 6 goons were shot dead by the police. The story, being a real story, is real enough here too. (I like saying positive things about a movie, I need to be balanced in my approach).
Bad things about the movie -

1. Music
2. Tushar Kapoor + Vivek Oberoi + the other four goons - they looked more like high school bullies from a boys only school who then get to meet women for the first time.

Overall, I am not sure about what the director was trying to achieve - Was the movie about police brutality or about how the police has had to evolve to counter the new breed of criminals? Or was it just some cash rich produced who wanted a tax writeoff? Amitabh for the whole movie was mouthing one cliche after the other, the encounter sequence had exquisitely bad screenplay, the movie had songs in the flashback and if I remember correctly, even had a dream sequence :)

Avoid this one more than plague - the plague can only kill you.

The sinking of the bank holiday

2007-05-27T15:34:00.000+05:30

Three days of holiday. Three days of uninterrupted rain.
I had the super idea of checking up the weather map and heading out into that part of the country which does not have any clouds in the satellite picture.
This is what I saw.....
£$%$@~@~#'#'#'@@#!!!!
All hail the gloom!

To enable with energy

2007-05-17T18:04:00.000+05:30

One dream. Two people. Three ideas. Four weeks.

We had decided to call it envigo, and then angelboy opened a blog.
was thrilled when I got the opportunity to create Envigo all over again
Below is an excerpt - This boy is really cool.
"Present is all we have. Past is lost. Future is fiction. Nobody fails. Nobody ever fails. Our plans fail. Too often we confuse our plans with our being. This confusion is the source of our frustration. When our plans fail, we start believing that we have failed."

Enjoy.

Travel ... These days!

2007-05-14T16:37:00.000+05:30

We are going to be launching a travel blog - the idea being that people working here travel a lot and research their travel well and also go to unusual places, ,or go to the usual places but do unusual things, usually - so why not let our dear customers read about it and maybe even teach us a thing or two.
Getting blogs was easy enough and so was the design and development, however, this is the first time that my team is making something which is on the website and IS customer facing. Therefore the butterflies.
I caught a really cool movie over the weekend - Life... in a Metro. According to the movie, the following are true:

The world is very small - everything is interrelated
Almost all married men have affairs
Married women are less likely to have one, , compared to men, but for the right man, why not
Men are not emotionally involved in an affair, all the involvement is to ensure the woman does not bale out on them
Women are always emotionally involved in relationships, whether they realise it or not
Kangana Ranaut is hot, though she can not speak English very well. (Who cares - reminds me of "Talk!!!! who wants to talk!?!"

The music works wonders - Pritam (composer) and Syed Qadri (lyrics) reinforce their comfort and command over this genre of music which has been the domain of Pakistani bands. The songs take place in the movie, with the performers visible, but not part of the story with the characters going on with their lives.
I love Hindi movies!!!!
PS - So when you listen to "In Dino", remember where you first heard about it

My Life

2007-05-13T14:37:00.002+05:30

I wonder if I have a life which is particularly interesting or that every one else has one like this. This trip to India had (note the past tense) suddenly opened up a lot of possibilities. There was a particularly intoxicating smell of possibilities in the air. I had to look away from the past and look towards the present for a fresh start and I managed to pull it off, only by focussing on what could lie ahead (
Alas (and apologies for the simile), what lay beneath blew up in my face, or rather, on the phone.
If there was a square one, I passed it so fast in reverse gear that I am not even sure how far back I am in the scheme of things to be.
(I know I am speaking in riddles, but this blog, apart from entertaining millions of readers all over the world and filling them with hope and contentment, also serves as a diary, and I need to jot things of importance down in some way)
What do to I now - this very moment, today, tomorrow and for this month?
Where will I end up?

The Heat is On

2007-05-13T04:33:00.000+05:30

I saw the trailer of "an inconvenient truth" a few weeks ago and it has been nagging me. I will watch it as soon as I can get the time... In the meantime, there are a few questions which I wanted to put to paper .

1. How bad is Global warming? Is it really happening or is it periodic/episodic?
2. Can normal people like you and me make a difference?

I guess that short answers to the questions above would be:
1. Very. Yes it is happening. Does not matter if there is something periodic. We are definitely hastening it.
2. YES.

I think saving power, water, gas, fuel, food all add up in a big way. I wish I had numbers to show this, but this is the example which I can think up of -

Imagine the water that flows from the tap while you brush.

It has been sucked out of the ground, filtered, treated, pumped into the mains and then onto the supply and then to the overhead tank to the tap. And I let it flow. It then heads back through sewage, pumped again to be filtered and treated on its way to the river/sea.
Each of these verbs - sucked, filtered, treated, pumped has a carbon footprint because of energy needed to do them. The energy required per litre of water might be quite small in absolute terms, and CO2 produced might sound even smaller.
However, multiply that number by 3 times day, a lifetime of 25000 days and 3bn people, who live in urban areas and the factor is not ignorable any more.

The above example is something which people fail to realise. Given the number of people and the innumerable conveniences of modern living, there is a lot of energy being used up. By being careful and smart and just a little more responsible, it all adds up.

1. Saving water (look at above) by using the sun to dry clothes, using the dishwasher only when it is completely full (or better, cleaning them in the sink). My score - 4/10.
2. Saving electricity by not keeping gadgets on standby, tubelights or LEDs instead of bulbs, climb stairs instead of a lift, motion sensitive lighting in offices. My score - 2/10
3. Eliminate waste and recycle (this is something I do not do at all and need to work at). My score 0/10.

(By the way, whats with keeping shops and offices lighted long after business hours. Have a look at here and here. This is something we as consumers should make businesses realise - that a dark carbon neutral store would shine out more. always. I am proud to work for a firm which encourages recycling at the workplace and the lights are switched off at night, I would be proud to shop at a shop which does the same.
In Delhi, long long ago, they started charging for shopping bags at the cooperative stores. That made people reuse polythene bags. The trick was to price the bags high enough for it to matter to people.)

Update - Read another post about the same, hits closer to home- about developing countries and climate change here

Unrelated comment - Life continues to be more like some light with a tunnel fast approaching!