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Showing posts with the label Musings

Enron - Smartest Guys in Town

One of the best documentaries I have ever seen which analyses the Enron debacle from the the inception of Enron to its rise, eminent fall and ultimate crash. It outlines the role played by different characters such as Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow and Ken Lay but more importantly it brings to light how common employees were led into doing the most unethical actions while making them believe that their actions were completely legitimate. The documentary highlights how the actions of traders in Enron illustrates the inferences of Milgram Experiments , the only other live case study of them being the war crimes conducted by Nazi / German army officers during the WWII on Hitler's orders. The documentary raised a lot of questions in my mind ... Many times our actions look quite legitimate at the time when several contextual pieces of information are in our mind. For example, under a deregulated power rate policy in California, the actions of traders would have looked legitimate. As

An Email Letter

On June 7th, 2010 Arijit Ghosal - a close friend wrote this email commemorating 1 year of moving into his new apartment. It covers me as well, so I had planned to post it on my blog. Got time today to format and publish. Yesterday was June 7th. So what you ask. Looks like a pretty mundane ‘at least once a year’ date. More often than not, in the rigmarole of sustaining livelihood and keeping the EMIs on, we generally forget to keep track and celebrate that very thing which we all are chasing in some way or the other…happiness. It suddenly struck me and couldn’t resist myself sharing with those who were together in those moments and those who will appreciate it. It’s been a year now - June 7th 2009 and the few days prior to that are very special to me, and to Nikhil & Anoop as well, I would assume. June 7, 2009: I kicked my landlord and broker and moved in as the final addition to the list of the tenants at the legendary E 703, Bluefields, Powai. It was a Sunday evening. I re

Thoughts on a Sojourn - Part II

Continued from here . I did whirlwind tours of Bangalore and Chennai in December, went to Singapore to celebrate our first wedding anniversary and then to Ratlam to attend a wedding. Singapore deserves a separate post, but here are my thoughts on Bangalore, Chennai and sleepy Ratlam. Bangalore Bangalore is fast changing, my last lengthy visit to the city was in 2006 - in 4 years Bangalore has changed - the metro track running all along MG Road has changed the way the city center looks now. I could not recognize the square which I so often roamed around last time, until I noticed that the mall on the corner had 'Forum' written on it. Nice to see that the Bangalore metro quietly seems to be moving faster than its much publicised contemporary the Mumbai Metro.  And the 9km flyover that connects Electronic City to the city is an absolute charm - travel which used to take 2 hours can now be zipped in a cool 25 minutes! There are some things that still haven't changed or

Executive Class

In my job as a management consultant, the primary function is to interact with people – clients, product vendors, government officials, bankers, and of course other consultants. Most of these are executives and over a period of time, I have started developing certain classifications for them. I know this sounds a little profane because people are not commodities; and personally I am a follower of Gandhi in terms of treating people. Most of Gandhiji's ideas can be ascribed to some inner quality of his mental eyesight that kept him from seeing people as a mass. He never saw or judged Indians or Frenchmen or Christians or Muslims in millions. He considered each human being too holy, too important to be the mere instrument of a remote impersonal terrestrial power called state. So before I start the main agenda of this post, let me clarify that this is not an attempt to define people as a collection. It’s a more mundane exercise to define certain common characteristics I have seen in

Decision Making

There's an interesting discussion going on at Hacker News about using Reason vs. Intuition - but one of the answers to it is quite pertinent to any kind of decision making. I found it worth reproducing for the benefit of all of you to be used in any situation. There are three tools for discovering truth and making decisions: reason, intuition, and revelation. Revelation means ask an expert, read the documentation. It is most appropriate when you don't know what you're doing at all -- when you have no sound first principles to feed into the engine of reason, and no experience on which to build intuition. Revelation is fast but limited; you instantly gain a conclusion as sound as your expert, but you cannot improve upon or critique it. Reason is most appropriate when you have moderate experience in a field. Through revelation and limited experience, you have developed some sound, inviolable principles, and can reason your ways to new ones. You know what  must  go here beca

Intel & Microsoft of mobile phone market

If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. - Steve Job s May be we did enter a dark age, for almost 20 years, no iPod, iPhone or iPad came - no hardware manufacturer or electronics company launched differentiated products which people would aspire to buy, but the price of the PC dwindled over these two decades which in itself lead to a much wider proliferation of the PC. Had the PC remained the high price aspirational device which Apple wanted it to be, probably we would have had lot lesser people with computers in their homes. How did the PC price revolution happen? Apart from the lowering absolute price of hardware components, it happened as a result of breakage of the vertical integration model ( followed by Apple where it facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all its computers). Today's PC market is fi

The real life mirage

The 1936 classic " Gone With the Wind " by Margaret Michelle is known primarily for its depiction of Civil War America and its impeccable laying of the characters. I for myself liked the novel for its depiction of how individuals fall for 'real life mirages'. The protagonist Scarlett O'Hara has a lifelong obsession with Ashley Wilkes who (only) in her perception is one of the most 'manly' individuals - decisive, gallant, and chivalrous. Ashley is the man with whom Scarlett is obsessed. Gentlemanly yet indecisive, he loves Melanie , his cousin and later his wife, but is tormented by an obsession with Scarlett. His failure to deal with his true feelings for Scarlett ruins any chance she has for real happiness with the true love of her life ( Rhett Butler ). Due to her obsession with Ashley, Scarlett keeps ruining her every chance of getting true love from Rhett Butler. It is only towards the end of the novel that Scarlett realizes that she loves Rhett an

When (the online) God failed its followers

Its just a coincidence that Google and God both have the same starting letters - but sometimes for computer illiterate users of the Web, it is as much a fact. Millions of people in the world do not know about the Web before Google. For them Google is not just a search engine but the window to the web - to permit some exaggeration - the web itself. (Doesn't that remind you of Krsna's quote from the Gita - I am the world ..) So some such people were a couple of days back trying to log on to Facebook. Their modus operandi was search "facebook login" in Google, click the first link available. Even my father - who comes into the category of users who learnt surfing only AFTER Google - used to reach my blog. (If you thought this was incredulous, you are either a geek or a old-timer on the web who still relies on remembering URL's of sites you visit to reach them) With my father, this had once lead to an amusing situation when he was not able to locate my blog as it had

Making Peace!

The thought of death sparks a slew of emotions in one’s mind – grief, anxiety and sometimes anger - with me it also sparks a reflective mood. The thought of death makes you humble. Everyday we keep running to build our lives – achieve professional success, set up a home, innovate, change the world – Chasing Daylight. But death reminds you that none of this matters at the final hour – not the money you’ve earned or the number of people who know you (who would mourn you), or even what you leave the world as! Once you are gone – its all over, in one quick shot, its gone! Its too early for me to contemplate what one will be looking at when the final hour nears. All I can contemplate today is what if the final hour was to arrive now? Would I be happy? May be not. Would I be satisfied – may be ... yes. A book that I read a couple of days back – Chasing Daylight – made me realize even more that in our daily rigmarole to build our lives, its important to stop and take stock. The book was writ

Some thoughts on University Education in India

Recently Sam Pitroda recently mentioned that - "too much focus on engineering and medical education has created a situation in India where liberal arts really did not get the kind of attention it deserved." He said: "A good liberal arts education is important to produce leaders. India has now begun to recognizse that we need not only world class engineering education, we also need world-class liberal arts education. And, we agree that the model we have in (University of) Chicago or Harvard is a model that we need to look at , but it needs to be Indianised - it has to be of a local context." Clearly, Pitroda is talking about the skewed model of having competitive exams for professional courses only which has created a void in liberal arts education in India. Unlike US system, Indian universities do not have a uniform SAT for admission across disciplines – so while for entry to professional courses like engineering and medicine we rely on AIEEE/SEEE and PMT/CPMT’s bu

Death of the PIN Code

I was reading this GigaOm piece on augmented reality when I realized that we may be very near towards making the Zipcode (or Pincode as we know it in India) completely redundant in the next 10-15 years. The article talks about how location aware application - Layar delivers ATM locations, restaurant information and available jobs on the phone’s screen as users point the camera at their surroundings. This innovation is a combination of 3 technologies coming together - GPS (location awareness), persistent connection (ability to extract information on the move) and image recognition (point the camera and the phone knows where you are). The latter is probably a complicated and expensive technology to build everywhere, but the former two are now almost ubiquitous. As I have written earlier , mapping services are improving every day in India - already maps to smallest detail are available for most Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities in India. With ISRO's project Bhuvan , imaging information should

Hamara Dhandha

I have previously written about Prof. Prasad and his initiatives to promote student entrepreneruship through his National Center for student Entrepreneurship (NCSE) in the NITIE campus. He is courting students nowadays for his Hamara Dhandha initative. Prodded by him to come and 'lecture' the students on the idea of student entrepreneurship - I went to NITIE on July 4th - the audience was thin because committee interviews were going on. So not sure if Prof Prasad will get many volunteers ... I explained the guys the need for looking our of the NITIE universe - the PMG's and Placecoms - to work in stuff like Hamara Dhandha. The philosophy doing rounds in most B-school campuses (as it had been through our times as well) is that stuff like events, industry lectures, internal committees, paper presentations etc - are the major contributors towards a heavier CV which ultimately helps during placement. However, what this philosophy fails to notice is how the landscape in Busin

Pros and cons of being a Millennial

A scoop from Millennials as Entrepreneurs: Time to Grow Up Everyone is quick to point out the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of millennials, but I prefer other research which reveals some positive attributes from a business perspective, including the following: Confidence Goal and achievement oriented Multi-cultural Civic minded On the other side of the coin, there are some worrisome millennial attributes relative to the role of entrepreneur: Need to be scheduled Not ready for the “wild west.” Consensus driven Earlier post on being a Millennial

Random thoughts on rainy day

Image Credit phishpot from FlickR It's a beautiful sight - a lit up marketplace, cars driving through the lane in the middle with their own lights on, the slow speed making drivers push their breaks and hence a lot of red lights as well and rain falling from the above. I like night time - ever since my school days when we used to practice for our annual function at night in school. I used to love seeing the school building lit up. At night all the imperfections in buildings are hidden, the lights then highlight the best parts and shapes accentuating the looks. I loved roaming around my school campus at night, and the habit continued in college. Life at NITIE took my liking for night times to a completely new level - night time was for committee meetings, parties and chatting with friends - it was THE time. Night life is one of the hallmarks of the modern era; in the ancient times night was associated with darkness and hence fear of the wild, in the medieval it was the time of cri

Are prisoners not Human?

Seriously - national television is too bankrupt of good reporting - as I type this they are debating on IBN 7 whether or not Ajmal Kasab has a right to use a toothpaste and deodorant while in Jail!  However, reporting standards of national TV apart - I have had a lot of my friends and colleagues believing that there is no point waiting for a trial for Ajmal Kasab , leave alone granting him a lawyer - he should simply be convicted of his crimes.  Their argument is that everyone has seen Kasab - on CCTV's - more so he has been caught on the spot and so there is nothing left to prove in a court of law, nothing left to defend for the lawyer - so why the lawyer and why the trial? Simply execute him of the charges!! The recent debate on his age too is incomprehensible to most - how does it matter if he was 17 or 18 - he is guilty, he should be executed. Well I am not a lawyer - but a student of logic and I believe that we are all making the mistake of assuming that a court is need

Deceptive Appearances

Those of you who have not seen this video   from a popular reality show in the UK - "Britian's Got Talent" should watch it. This video in a short span has become the second most watched YouTube video of all time with 100 million hits already over a weekend, and will soon become number 1 when it crosses 118 million mark. And don't watch it completely at one go - first watch the first minute of the video; pause it and contemplate what the rest of it is going to be; and then watch the rest! Done it!! (No? Then watch it first ... don't read the rest of this post) I bet you can't say you knew this would happen! In the first one minute, no one would expect that Susan Boyle would sing like a canary in the next 5 minutes.  It goes on miles to say about how much our appearances affect our perception of people. This is what Malcom Gladwell has argued in his book blink that we often base our decisions on 'perceptions' - which is why you are more likely to find a

boys vs men

The three of them had met after 3 years; reminiscing the days when they used to stay together. It used to be exciting - newly found jobs, a new city to struggle through/survive in and new stuff to learn at the workplace. Bachelor’s life had been exciting. Sitting there in the restaurant, sipping on their drinks they all were brooding at the starter in front of them; forks and spoons in their hands playing with the vegetables. Sheon was thinking about the strife his life had become, torn between the girl he loved and his parents who would not agree to their relationship. Samit was lost in thoughts of saving his job endangered by the recession, his two year old marriage and how he would retain the comfort and balance of his life in these turbulent times. Naveen was pondering over his failed startup, contemplating on what he would do next to get out of his 9-5 routine job. In 2 years since they had gone separate ways, life had presented different set of challenges to each of them and ea

Are Indians Patriotic?

After I bought my car, one of the first things which was fixed in the interior of my car as a decorative was a Ganesh Idol - that was gifted to me by my dealer itself. The next thing which I wanted to buy was the Indian flag - I finally bought it when we visited the Wagah border. After I had put up the flag in my car, I started noticing the interiors of other cars on the road, and found that almost 80% of cars had similar Indian flags in their cars. Then yesterday (which was Republic Day), I found that even auto-rickshaws had flags pinned up inside. This led me into thinking as to whether this "flag thing" indicates that we Indians are a patriotic lot and whether after 60 years of independence, we have shrugged our apathy towards the nation and started taking pride in being Indians. Well ... I really can't say. To the skeptic, this could as well be because car accessory stores have flags as a decorative or say hawkers coax you into buying these at traffic signals, and fin

The Economics of Transience

Written Circa June, 2003 - inspired by a chapter in Alvin Toffler' s ' The Third Wave '  In the past permanence was ideal. Whether in handcrafting a pair of Boots or in constructing a cathedral all man’s creative and productive energies went towards maximizing the durability of the product. Man built to last. He had to. As long as the society around him was relatively unchanging each object had clearly defined functions and the economic logic dictated the policy of permanence. Even if they had to be repaired now and then, the boots that costed $50.00 and lasted ten years were less expensive than those that cost $10.00 and lasted only a year. As the general rate of change in society accelerates, however, the economics of permanence are - and must be - replaced by economics of transience. First, advancing technology tends to lower the costs of manufacture much more rapidly than the costs of repair work. The one is automated the other remains largely handcrafted operation. Thi

War as a technological engine

Written circa January 2003 Wars for long have been thought to be as bad omen. And every time somebody mentions War, pictures of mass destruction hover in front of our eyes. But history tells us that wars have traditionally been the powerhouse of technological revolution. The recent most world war, that is the Second World War, is the most flamboyant example of the above fact. Robert B. Young at the Stanford research institute studied the span of time between the first commercial appearance of a new electrical appliance and at the time the industry manufacturing it reaches a peak production of the item. Young found that for a group appliances introduced in the United States before 1920, including the vacuum cleaner, the electric range and the refrigerator, the average Span between introduction and peak production was 34 years.  But for the group that appeared in 1939-59 period, including the electric frying pan, television and washer and dryer combination, the Span was only eight year