I just read this news article in reaction to the Government's decision to allow courts to award the death penalty to those convicted of raping children up to 12 years of age. The government's decision comes in the wake of nationwide protests against child rape.

But as the article states, and I quote - "fear that with the death penalty, most people will not report child rapes, as in most cases the accused are family members. The conviction rate will come down further".

I have been myself thinking about this ever since I have heard of the law being passed. The problem in India has been the implementation of a law and not having a stringent penalty. I quote again - "We already have the death penalty for several offences and that has not led to any deterrence. If we are looking to create a deterrent, then we have to create it where it works."

The issue is not that child rape or any crime doesn't have stringent punishment but that conviction is low and justice takes so long to deliver that it's often akin to being denied. This is evident in several cases involving politicians and celebrities - Salman Khan was accused of killing people sleeping on a footpath by running their car over them. The proceedings took so long that Ravindra Patil, the key witness (who was the Police protector for Salman on that fateful night), died of severe ailments [and under mysterious circumstances] before the decision was arrived at. The case was won by Khan, but not without the fact that the key witness was NOT present in the courtroom to present facts. The case against Salman for the killing of the black buck, a protected wildlife species, was also decided 20 years after the incident.

I am not relating the case of Salman here as an unrelated rant, but rather to prove how judicial system is faced with severe delays and any form of stringent punishment will not help matters anyway if the sorry state of awarding justice continues.

We need to think of rather strengthening the system, making sure that police officers can discharge their duties without political pressure, the judicial system is also kept corruption free (which is otherwise ensured by the Constitutional provisions of judicial independence) but more importantly speedy and efficient in discharging justice.

On this count, the less noticed aspect of the government's decision is laudable - in addition to allowing capital punishment, the government has set the time limit for investigation as well as completion of the trial of all cases of rape as two months and prescribed the limit for disposal of appeals to six months.

As citizens, we also need to become more responsible - when you bribe the traffic constable with a hundred rupee note instead of paying the fine, you circumvent the law and strengthen the loop which makes the police system more amenable for manipulation than astute enforcement of the law. You do the same when you put up that Facebook post of Salman 'Bhai' being the kind-hearted human being and not an undertrial accused.

The judicial system does not work in isolation - as several cases in past have shown, public opinion and general behaviour of public play a major unwritten role in how judiciary looks at cases. If the public, in general, is content with delayed and subverted justice, leniency to politicians and celebrities - the judicial system will mould itself in the same general frame. But if we stop being malleable about justice based on our opinion and infatuations, the judicial system will gain strength to deliver justice faster and more efficiently.

Let us not just rant for stringent punishment, but rather a more efficient judicial system!
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Image Credits: Michael Coghlan via Flickr

There have been a lot of controversies of late - a movie which was claimed to have twisted historical facts, a caste-based protest, a politically influenced crime or the issue of sharing river water between two states. In all these cases, facts elude the public and the vote always remains is pretty divided and vitriolic because there are always two sides of every story.

It is no-one's guess that a filmmaker may have apparently taken a lot of liberties in historical depiction or that a particular law may have been misused or water or financial devolution could have been fairer or anything else. However, protestors have often gone wild with threats to kill or even cause damage to public and private property.

Sane voices argue that these non-issues keep people and media away from discussing real issues like the state of the economy, the rise of crony capitalism, deteriorating finances of the middle class or farmers committing suicide. So why is it that that large hordes of people keep thronging the streets. Why is it that the public today is paying attention to non-issues, why is it that "youth leaders" are spewing venom or announcing bounties on actors and directors or threatening bloodshed in the name of a river - when there are many other major issues they could pick up even if it were to win elections.

The answer probably lies in the role models which the society has conjured up to the masses - especially young people's minds. [Sidenote: It is usually the Young who control what gets discussed in public sphere, but due to the majority of the youth demographic, this is especially true of India].

Those of us who were (little) early to the Internet party would find the current forwarding and fake news culture on Whatsapp / Facebook similar to what ranting & flaming on newsgroups (e-groups) used to be in the early 2000s.

However, newsgroups, because their access was to a limited few, were also places where ideas were born, partnerships formed & organisations were created. But I find Whatsapp (or other forms of messaging apps like Discord or Telegram) not being so.

One probable reason for this, I feel, is the lack of long-form prose which email as a medium supported and which messaging as a medium shuns. Long form writing forces you to think deeper, engage in self-correction between various coordinated (or uncoordinated) parts of your own thinking and also help the reader absorb the context and message both.

To be sure, the long form thinking was not mandatory in an email, and so, there was reactionism, flaming and shaming on newsgroups as well, but that was also accompanied on the side by deep thinking and logical reasoning. Certain people or certain e-groups built a culture of not reacting by moderation which was a feature in these e-group systems.

Messaging apps of today, on the other hand, do not support any such features, you can't moderate even if you wanted to, the interface does not encourage writing or reading the long-form and it stresses reacting, sharing or instant response rather than careful, well thought and calibrated response.

Just to take a measure, how many of you reading this long-form post of mine have had the patience to reach this point of this text. Instead, if I would have sent this as an email, you would have.

An ex-Facebook exec, Chamath Palihapitiya, felt guilty of creating a time-wasting monster in Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg also feels guilty at times of fake news, and fake news I argue is not a phenomenon of its own, but rather its spread is a result of this instant reaction that messaging and Social Media apps encourage.

Its high time technology companies realised that their design decisions can't just be slaves to what 'users want' or what will make the platform more 'viral'. Facebook is viral enough, WhatsApp is ubiquitous enough. They need to now design for the more conscious audience or to improve the conscience of and thinking abilities of its audience. I hope Facebook and Whatsapp teams are paying attention to this.

Epilogue - results of survey

I had first posted this spiel on my Facebook wall and instructed people who read till the end to click the 'Love' icon and those who stopped after the first paragraph (which is previewed on their Fb timeline) to click the 'Sad' sign. The quick one day survey got 10 reactions - 6 loves, 4 Likes but no 'Sad' reactions. Mostly those who hit the like, just browsed past the first few lines and hit the 'Like' without even referring to the instructions - which all the more illustrates that we really don't pay 'attention' to the content of Social Media posts and react based on very flimsy reading of the content.

Title Image Credits Álvaro Ibáñez

Stepahnie Hurlburt, a Graphics Engineer & Entrepreneur has tweeted a very useful checklist for software developers releasing Open Source products and tools to help in their adoption. I think the checklist can be used by all product developers / marketers to improve adoption.


Here goes the list, you can also read it on this Tweet Thread here or go to Stephanie's Twitter handle here.

“Why isn’t someone using my software product or open source tool? It’s good!”

A checklist for you:

1. Have you described what it is and what the benefits are in a way a non-developer can understand?
2. If someone Googles to try to learn more about it, is this description easy to find?
3. Is this description easily skimmable? If someone looks at it for 6 seconds can they be convinced?
4. Do you compare your tool to other similar tools so people feel educated about pros/cons of yours?
5. If performance matters, do you have easy-to-skim benchmarks that include comparing it to other tools?
6. Do you have a demo? If it’s open source, are there well documented and easy to build samples/demos?
7. Have you spoken or written about your tool? Twitter, a tech blog, online communities, meetups, conferences, podcasts, etc
8. Have you pitched it in 1:1 conversations with developers who might be interested?
9. Have you talked with developers who may be interested to learn about why they haven’t tried it or don’t use it?

Key takeaways:

• Describe your tool in an easy to understand way
• Do not underestimate the power of informational interviews

Follow up Tweets:

• And if the tool is meant to be used by devs, still describe your tool in a way a non-developer can understand
• To learn more, read up on marketing/sales and talk to professionals. It’s a fascinating field and I have a huge amount of respect for it.

Checklist items added by others

1. Is there a list of active users so I can see if co’s I might trust have decided to use it...
2. Does it look like it’s got a viable community of contributors that might continue to develop it if main dev moves on.
3. Is the main dev succeeding at turning it into a viable biz so they don’t burn out.
4. Is a me-too library... too many options in a space means that many will turn into abandoned code. Image loading c to other lang binding sys

Jim Collins has been researching and writing about the Flywheel as a value of enterprises. For those who may not know, here his most famous illustration - the Amazon Flywheel.

Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further.

In another article, Jim writes - "those who drive companies into decline often abandon the big thing they already have, grasping instead for a new big thing, then another and another, falling into a doom loop of chronic inconsistency"

While not written in the article above, but my experience says that 'Consulting / System Integrator Services' is plagued by this particular phenomenon. Consulting firms are forced to move from one "next big thing" to the other constantly. This is not a fault of the company or the management but just the way services business is - customers call consultants or integrators when they don't have skills to do something internally. And since talent is usually available for most 'ingrained' work, consultants end up doing only - the 'next big thing'.

Some service businesses like actuarial, legal or accounting seem to be insulated from the 'skills' issue, but they too more often than not get pulled into managing change for their clients. [Ex. accountants need to help manage changes in taxation on an almost constant basis, lawyers have to help manage changing laws, insurance advisors often changing valuation methods and so on.]

Hence (professional) services firms never get a chance to scale "without" adding more resources to the revenue engine. Key is "without adding resources": resources here being people and their skills and hence paraphernalia like a management structure to manage people, office spaces, managing people churn etc

On the contrary, a product business has its flywheel - it can keep running faster and faster every week, month, year with the same effort [read: resources] you put in. What traction you build in the first week just gets reinforced with the second week's effort and so on. Not so in services where each relationship, each skill, and then each project has to gain momentum from scratch - they don't feed into a flywheel.

And so if you have 1 'Engagement Manager' managing 3 clients, you will need 3 to manage 9 relationships. In contrast, a team of engineers or designers can build version 1 of a product in year 1 and then add many more features to it in year 2 without losing the value of work done in year 1.

The last point - in "almost" all services, loss of human resources means 100% loss of IP. If a consultant leaves you, you have to recruit another as good or train another to become as good. But with products, the IP is (partially) captured in the product and so if a designer or engineer leaves, s/he can't take away the IP that got locked in the product. Though there will still be some loss of IP (because they'd take expertise in architecture, understanding the product etc), the loss would be less than 100% - how much less would vary from product to product.

This is one reason why it is harder to find too many billionaires who own services companies - the exceptions being the founders of IT Services Giants viz. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Accenture etc. Few of them have hacked the services model to productise their service; for example Michael Dell who converted 'assembly of computers' into 'manufacturing computers'.

Another class of services business which have bucked this challenge are restaurant chains where the service of providing 'food' is hacked into providing experiences. Branding and consistent ambience play a big role in helping such businesses make the transition from 'pure services' to 'branded services'. Big 4 consulting firms also have done this in professional services as have some legal firms and 'real estate services' firms like JLL and CBRE. The existence of these exceptions, however, goes on to prove the rule - most competitors of these services 'biggies' are much smaller and local players. They play on cost and not value and hence have another reason why they can never scale.

On the contrary, there are many 'product' players who have scaled in past with or without VC funding. This could be one of the major filters that wannabe entrepreneurs can use to select business ideas on which to stake their lives.

I have mentioned in past that "If the Indian constitution is a copy of the British and American systems, it’s the most intelligent and well customised copy ever made"

STV/IRV used in single-seat elections with more than two candidates. Instead of voting only for a single candidate, voters in IRV elections can rank the candidates in order of preference. Ballots are initially counted for each elector's top choice. If a candidate secures more than half of these votes, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the candidate in last place is eliminated and removed from consideration. The top remaining choices on all the ballots are then counted again.

This process repeats until one candidate is the top remaining choice of a majority of the voters. When the field is reduced to two, it has become an "instant runoff" that allows a comparison of the top two candidates head-to-head. IRV has the effect of avoiding split votes when multiple candidates earn support from like-minded voters

... the solution [to legislative gridlock] is not to scrap the checks and balances ... but rather to adopt new voting rules (like instant-runoff) [to] facilitate greater flexibility within political parties and hopefully the creation of viable new ones

Influence from Medieval Indian governance

Vivek Kumar Agrawal was retiring today, leaving behind an illustrious career at Coal India Limited and a model career path for his subordinates to look forward to. VK Sir, as he was called, was the poster boy of what PSU corporate executive should be - astute in his dealings, non-controversial decisions, well read from all worlds - VK would be able to recite lines from Munshi Premchand's novels as effortlessly as he would quote Phillip Kotler's management philosophies.

Yet, VK was wondering if he had indeed taken the right decisions since he left his father's home 35 years ago. VK was the youngest of 3 brothers born in a typical 'Agrawal' family in Allahabad, the family had been living in the "holy" city for generations - at least as many generations VK had heard about! And they were even typical in their commercial engagement - his father like his grandfather and great grandfather ran a Kirana store in the city. VK's brothers, the eldest almost 12 years older, were regular contributors at the shop ever since VK remembers.

VK had a razor sharp mind, just like his brothers, but he was quite different from them in other ways. VK loved reading, whether it was books, the morning newspaper, or even a pamphlet. In hindsight, he borrowed this quality from his father - who was an avid reader himself. In fact, as VK reflected on his upbringing, his life was a reflection of his father's dreams.

Ful Kumar Agrawal or Agrawal Saab as he was known in the locality, was deeply influenced in his growing up years by the Indian freedom struggle. While he could not involve himself into the deliberations, he idolized leaders like Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru who hailed from Allahabad. The incident of lathi charge on a peaceful protest by Lala Lajpat Rai and subsequent death of Lalaji left a deep imprint on him. He was just 21 then, married with his first child on its way; had it been a few years earlier Agrawaal Saab would have plunged into the freedom movement himself.

The longing to get involved with the freedom movement, never fulfilled in reality, pushed him to follow it by reading about it. He read almost all works of Lalaji and other leaders, even regularly scoured nationalist newspapers and had a collection of all the paper cuttings from 1920s all the way till independence. After independence and with advancing age and worry about taking care of his family, his fire to read slowly perished, though he would occasionally find solace in reading the daily newspaper and in later years, books by spiritual leaders like Swami Vivekananda.

For the young VK however, the collection of books and newspaper cuttings kept by Agrawal Saab in the attic, became the first tryst with 'voracious' reading. Agrawal Saab was also impressed by his youngest son's ability to be more involved in studies than the family business. Over years, his impression of VK's studious nature grew enough so that he not only prodded him to study harder, he made sure that unlike his elder brothers, VK was never asked to help in the Kirana shop unless he wanted to.

VK was the first in their family to get admission into an Engineering course and that too to the prestigious Motilal Nehru Regional Engineering College. At MNREC, VK not only outshined with academic excellence, he also learnt and demonstrated venerable management skills - the prodigal skills of managing money were anyway inherent in him being a 'Baniya'! In the last year of his degree, VK was a key student volunteer involved with setting up an industrial estate with 69 sheds within the college. These were also days when he got nicknamed as VK by his friends, a name which stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Soon VK joined Coal India as an Engineer trainee at the Ranchi township, this was a juncture where everyone, including his brothers, felt proud of VK - he was the ideal boy who's example would be quoted to every younger kid in the locality. Soon VK was married and started rising in his career at Coal India. He would however also remain involved with family's finances. Being the most educated of his Sons, Agrawal Saab would often consult VK on the expansion of the family's estate. The one shop had already been split into two by the time VK left for Coal India, but later, in fact on the insistence of VK, one of his elder brothers opened a new garment shop in a different part of the city which soon prospered.

Agrawal Saab was again impressed by VK's ability to suggest the right outcomes. Even though the youngest, VK could think strategically and long term, unlike his elder sons who continued to be mired by the day to day vagaries of business. Every time, he would meet VK, he would ask how he was doing in his job and prod him on questions of returning back to Allahabad and start his own business.

For VK however, his father's questions and interventions sounded uninformed or naive if not anachronistic. He felt that his father could not just see the world outside of the petty little business establishment he had seen. He often took his father around the Coal plant so that he could see the scale at which the plant operated and he would spend time describing his daily work to his father explaining the role he was playing in running the plant.

VK was on his way to becoming one of the youngest General Managers at Coal India. This time round, when his parents came to visit his family, his father got even more restless seeing the amount of time VK would spend in the office. VK had little time to attend to his parents - and he knew his father was feeling a little lonely. This time when his father brought up the question of moving back and starting a business of his own, VK got into explaining him about the hierarchy at Coal India and how he was rising very fast and that opening another Kirana Shop in Allahabad would be too small an enterprise for him.

Agrawal Saab was stunned at the response - he did retort that he never wanted VK to come back to the Kirana shop business, but to start something of a much larger scale and size which would benefit the city he hailed from. Nationalistic thoughts still prevailed in Agrawaal Saab even though he was too old to feel the heat of nationalism. VK cited reasons such as the inability of the private sector to take up projects at the scale like Coal plants or anything, and that was almost the end of the discussion. Agrawal Saab never brought up the topic again - he passed away a few years later.

After his father's demise and also given his rise in career and the time it consumed, VK's involvement in the family business reduced to almost nil. He did make a General Manager a few years later, but office politics and slow down in the Public Sector in general stunted his rise in subsequent years. He got transferred and while his overall stature kept growing, his career graph, in specific, plateaued out.

Given that his role in the family business was lost, VK also lost any de facto share he would have inherited in the family business. The ancestral house was already occupied by families of his brothers so he effectively lost out on any inheritance he could have received from the property. VK didn't mind - he had a handsome salary and the PSU lifestyle provided everything, a huge property to live in, decent education for his children and lifestyle which suited him. They had access to Clubs, movie theatres and shopping centres even in the remotest townships of Coal India. VK had two sons, one went on to graduate from NIT, Trichy and another completed his CA; life was running full and fulfilling.

What VK did not notice however was how his family, his brothers rather, had progressed in life. His brothers had expanded into multiple shops selling electronics and then took on dealerships of large electronics companies. While his sons toiled hard to crack competitive exams, his nephews had started working in the family business. By the time his elder son graduated from NIT, Trichy and got an offer from Infosys, his eldest nephew Aakash was on his way to opening a Honda automobile showroom in Allahabad and younger Simanth was laying out groundwork to open an Engineering college!

And then one day, in early 2002, the newspaper was awash with news of Bharti Airtel IPO. The paper had a detailed profile of Sunil Mittal, the founder. Sunil had started out as a cycle parts manufacturer in Ludhiana, moved into manufacturing push button phones and then suddenly catapulted into becoming a telecom operator when the government opened the sector for private players. That day, VK remembered his father's words - about going back to Allahabad and starting something of scale and size which would benefit the city he hailed from. He wondered if he would have taken heed of Agrawal Saab's words, he could have been someone like Sunil Bharti Mittal.

But alas, Sunil Mittal was the son of a politician, not that of just another Kirana shop owner from a non-descript background. But then he looked back at the commercial success of his brothers' sons and then compared what his academically illustrious sons had achieved till now. His elder son was working with Infosys and younger had just been selected to join PwC. But financially, they were both far from attaining independence while their elder cousins were running businesses worth crores.

Today when he retired with laurels and compliments from his superiors and juniors alike, VK looked back at the satisfying 35-year career at Coal India. The many achievements and the survival in spite of the PSU seeing few bad days. Personally, he had a great network and reputation among his circle of friends, fellows, colleagues and subordinates. He was well respected in his circle of influence. But was he financially where he could have been? But did financial success really mean anything without the kind of prestige his job got him? But again, could he have become an equally revered figure if he had started his own thing in his 30s while attaining financial success also? Would his children have had a better future? Should he suggest this to his children now? But being brought up in a typical PSU twonship culture, will they be happy doing a small business?

All these questions ran through VK's mind - the answers, of course, were lost in a disarray of dots that had never connected! 

I grew up in a typical suburban home, single storied, lush garden around it. Whether it was the nostalgia of living that life or observation of lower cost of living in a small city, till recently I used to idolise that life, yearned to go back to it - until I started my research into sustainable living!

Until I started researching on what "sustainable" living is, I used to assume that since the cost of living in a small city is lower, hence lifestyle there is less wasteful. And on the surface, it indeed was so in India, until a few years back. Until 2010s, most small cities did not have huge malls - the usual evening hangout would be a park or a single screen theatre; roads were much less crowded and small cars would outnumber guzzlers (SUVs) by a quadruple if not more; people bought fruits & vegetables from small shops who'd get supplied by local farmers.

Metros or big cities, in contrast, had big malls, roads were clogged - one wasted more fuel idling at the traffic signal than driving around, SUVs & Sedans were more common; you'd buy daily grocery and vegetables from the supermarket where everything was packed with 3 layers of plastic etc. Other utilities like sewage management were bad in both small and big cities, but big cities generated much more garbage than smaller ones where people's habits (due to a lower standard of living) were less wasteful. Extending the same analogy between small cities vs. rural landscape - poverty and proximity to 'traditional' or agrarian lifestyle made village life look more sustainable or less wasteful.

However, two things changed circa 2010 - first, the govt started recognising that India was urbanising and govt programs started targeting upgradation of urban infrastructure. And given that govt schemes were based on population statistics, Metros got a much higher share of this spending.

Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/india/disposable-personal-income

Second, incomes started taking quantum jumps in India, and people across the spectrum - villages, small cities and metros - started spending more money on luxuries. Malls mushroomed in Tier 2 cities, SUVs followed soon, poorer villages started seeing two-wheelers and prosperous ones upgraded to four wheelers (even if they were second hand used cars from the nearby town). Thus as metros started getting better sanitation, better public transport (Ex. Metro trains), life became (comparatively) less wasteful while small towns and villages started spending more, but lacked the ability to deal with the environmental consequences (more plastic waste, vehicular pollution or traffic jams, sewage) generated from this spending.

Parallel to this shift in India's landscape, my own study on the concept of sustainable living continued. Many articles, papers and solo thinking sessions later, (about 3 years ago)  I converted to believing that a life in the city is more sustainable because a city promotes clustering and clustering reduces the amount of waste per person. Studies on American suburbs suggest that cost of laying drainage, sewage and even electric and road connections to individual houses or even a cluster of row-houses in suburbs is much higher on the economy and ecology than wiring / sewering up a 30 storied building in the dense city. Add to it virtual death of the personal transport thanks to dense tube/metro networks which inhabit developed cities like London, the city (especially clusterized metro city) is a far more sustainable habitat for humans.

A major positive side-effect a vertically built dense city infrastructure is that large swaths of land can be freed for vegetation and animals. Plus within the city, we can build gardens which can be maintained at a much lesser cost per person, unlike the suburban home where each one must maintain their own manicured lawn and tend to their plants. I live in one such locality in Mumbai and can bet that my lifestyle is greatly enhanced by living in a cluster than if I have a row-house in a far away suburb of Navi Mumbai or a small city like Baroda or Indore.

In short, from a kid who revels and defends the suburban lifestyle he grew up in, I was almost converted to a city (metro) dweller who vouches for more people to move to cities and metros and leave alone the countryside for the few humans who engage in Agriculture and nature - forests, farms and animals who deserve to live in them. American suburban life or European small cities and their suburbs started looking evil and wasteful - more importantly unsustainable for the 21st century; and Tokyo (Japan) like lifestyle, while a little claustrophobic, started looking the most logical way we humans should imagine our future.

However, my reverie has been broken recently - thanks to Elon Musk and his onslaught of energy efficient equipment from the Tesla car, to Tesla batteries - which allow suburban homes to survive off grid for weeks - to the most recent Solar Roof which promises to allow homes to completely disconnect from the grid!

More on this in the next post
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