Google Devta - this is an internal slang we use among our group of friends. Indeed for some of us 'Google Fans' - Google is akin to God. It serves most of all online needs: want to surf the net - use Google Search, want to check email - use GMail, want to read blogs - use Google Reader, want to write a blog - use Google Blogger, want to find out how many INR is $1 - use Google Search [ Click to know how ] , need data from a French website - use Google translator, want to calculate "4 + 4" - use Google Search again! [ Click to know how ] But I am sure none of us is a freak enough to propound that Google can take over the internet. However, it seems there are much more die hard fans of Google on the net who feel this way . So much so that there are now debates hosted on popular blogs on this subject. I guess, such kinds of 'extremist' views have been propounded even in past but in this case they have been coming to light because of the easy accessibility of in

I wrote about making India the land of Opportunity in a previous post ... another related thought that has been revolving in my mind since a few months now, is the priorities which a 'new age' political party in India should have. Given that India is home to 1/5th of the world's population and host to the world's largest ever young population - I think a political party of India needs to have 'Human Development' on the top of its agenda. To detail the priorities should be: Healthcare and public hygiene - abundance of clinics - high regard for cleanliness and hygiene in public places Concern for environment - this is closely related to hygiene - this is also inline with 'Indian Culture' Human development infrastructure - Primary Schools - Secondary schools & colleges - Vocational training institutions etc Physical Infrastructure development - national and local train network - Highways & city roads - dams, canals, waterways The following posts vi

While gazing around in the train back home today, I suddenly realized a striking difference between Mumbai local interiors and London Tube interiors. Apart from the more obvious differences was the kinds of Advertisements which are put up inside the coach. In London the most common advertisements inside trains were - Online Gambling/ Gaming, Tours & Travels and Mortgage & Loans - in that order. In the Mumbai local the common adverts are - Medicines, Spiritual (Baba X's or Amma Y's Adhiveshan) and Career - in that order. Speaks of the priorities of people in the two cities quite aptly ...

Fortune [link via Rakesh Jain ] writes: "India should put aside pride about its growing economy and concentrate on improving the lives of average citizens. India is not a superpower, and in fact, that is probably the wrong ambition for it, anyway. Why? Let me answer in the form of some statistics. 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted. The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name. Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector. The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not. About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world's hungry live in India. More than a quarter of

Just back from Delhi after attending the wedding of two of my closest friends - M &A - to each other! As Shubham put it quite aptly on our way back from Chandigarh to Delhi – "Hamare jeevan ka ek aur parv sampann hua" ! Indeed, this wedding actually marks a ceremonial moment - not just for the couple - but for our whole group of friends, in the gradual transformation we all are going through. [In NITIE, we had christened our gang as G-7 (actually a gang of 8 – a counting mistake while choosing the Yahoo Groups identity of the group created this name!). Among G-7 – only I, Shubham and Sabyasachi now remain the un-married and/or un-committed ones!] Today, as I was returning through Saki Naka towards my home, a sudden feeling of nostalgia gripped me and left me wondering as to what the nostalgia was all about? These two friends of mine just got married, but they are not going anywhere, they are still going to be around! Then what was the nostalgia about? I guess deep inside

If there’s anything that has been hard to come by in India – its opportunity! You have to fight out everywhere to get the ‘opportunity’. Whether it is a chance to speak out in the school assembly [ Ref: Turning Point ] , or to get entry to one of the top engineering or management institutes in the country! I recently heard from my cousin that even MBA training institutes are allowing students with interview calls from only top-10 institutes to participate in mock-group discussion sessions. The others must only watch! I have been a bit fortunate to have got a lot of opportunities early in my life in the area of personality development. My school provided lots of platforms – from the morning assembly to the school election – of public speaking, stage performance, and other personality development activities (like writing). Our local community (mohalla) too was an encouraging platform for such activities and we had a lot of enthusiastic people in there. However, apart from these, other o

On my last day in the London, I was watching the morning breakfast news on BBC. In the LSE pre-opening briefing, the major item on agenda was the Tata’s Bid for Corus. The BBC report made me swell with pride wherein they called the Tata’s as one of the most respected companies worldwide and their compassionate attitude towards workers of Corus. They were termed as the best suitors among a plethora of multinational giants in fray then for Corus. So, when I read that the Corus auction on Tuesday night, I was anxious to know the results. When I woke up in the morning yesterday, my immediate instinct was to check the newspaper. But since the bid closed at 7 AM IST, there was no update in the newspaper. I immediately navigated to indiatimes.com through my mobile and literally jumped with joy on seeing the headline. Read: ' How financial Engineering made the deal possible ' The growth of the Tata’s is testimony to India’s attitude of embracing new cultures. It all began in the 17th

Ok ... Here’s a tip from TATA indicom - how to weaken your market position as a new entrant by scaring away new customers ... It so happens that I am planning to buy a data card and have 3 options – Reliance, Airtel and Tata indicom. Since I own a Reliance phone I wanted to try a data card from a different provider ... so I went to Google and typed ‘Tata Indicom data card’ – the link I got was for tarrifs of the service. Thereafter I went to ‘Contact Us’ section and after selection of 3 dropdowns I got a number for their wireless service: 022 55990121 On dialling this number I get a message that this number has changed .. kindly visit 9223001951 to obtain the new number ... So I go to 9223001951 and got the new number 022 67990121 On calling 022 67990121 I was informed that this number was only for wifi services and I need to dial 9220000121 for wireless services (they don’t even have an internal call transfer mechanism!!!) On dialling 9220000121 I am routed through 2 option sequences

The two articles [ 1 , 2 ] could not have been any more different – one on Poland’s tilt towards anti-communist Catholicism, and the other by a Communist leader in India about the relevance of the first battle of Indian independence (this year marks 150th year of the 1857 mutiny). Yet, both represented the failure of politicians to separate religion from politics. The first article describes, how, in post communist rule Poland, Catholicism is being equated with anti-communism, so that when the newly appointed archbishop was accused (and conceded guilty) of having helped Russians as a spy, there is a paradox of kinds. However, by getting the archbishop to resign, the politicians have scored a point that might just help them win the next election. On the other hand, Sitaram Yechury starts the other article, by making a hero out of Bahadur Shah Zafar who was the (notional) head of the 1857 revolt. By posturing Zafar as a Mughal ruler and quoting RSS’s anti-Muslim stance (in a completely d

In the previous post I had emphasized on how ‘Wealth Creation’ is the only long term solution to alleviating the marginalized ‘ other India ’ and I also talked about how it creates certain chain reactions. However, in another post I had lamented about the sheer number of people that one finds in corridors and hallways in Indian offices. While these two might seem unrelated rants – they indeed are related. Wealth creation has always been misconstrued (especially post Indira Gandhi politics) as creation of jobs. Sometimes I feel even the new fangled corporate sector gets carried away with this. Many times when I might raise concern to some data centre managers about lack of security for the data centre and the need to put in place sophisticated mechanisms like biometric scanners – the usual immediate response is to propose an increase in number of security guards instead. Similarly I find the policy of having too many cleaners around objectionable. I remember learning about the concept