Old postcard from Philadelphia

As i was rummaging my email archives for my frequent flyer number, i came across an email i had sent about my first international trip. Spawned recollection of a few memories. and made for interesting reading. Don't mind the wordiness though - i was just out of college.
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Subject: Postcard from Philadelphia...
Sent: 10 Apr 2001

Hello junta!

A googol thanks for your best wishes.

Reached here on Sunday at 4.30 p.m. local time i.e. 2 am (Monday) IST. The route was Delhi-Amsterdam-Detroit-Philadelphia.

The highlights:

Surprised (pleasantly) by the smooth going at the New Delhi airport.

A breath-taking birds-eye view of the Amsterdam football ground under lights(or was it the Rotterdam).

Mesmerised by Dutch beauty at Amsterdam airport.

And then blown to smithereens by Dutch hostesses.

Stunned by the casualness of Detroit.

And finally soothed by the serenity of Philadelphia.

Overall, a long, grueling but educating journey that inspired a plethora of emotions.

I am put up at:

325-C, South Morris Avenue,

CrumLynne, Philadelphia,

Pennslyvania - 19022

Phone: 610-833-2830

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The morning after... Budget 2008

Its sad that one of the most pragmatic national budgets in recent times has been branded as populist by the media. Really, there is nothing wrong in being populist. The problem starts only when populism belies wisdom or medium term good. And there was little in the budget speech that was bordering on either.

Consider the stage on which Mr P Chidambaram had to deliver. With the US economy on the verge of correction and the EU and Japan failing to deliver the impetus, the world is looking at China and India to drive the immediate future. Any move by the Finance Minister to undermine the growth trajectory or domestic demand would have had a ripple effect on the world economy. And we are not even talking about the political pressure.

When in doubt, go back to the basics. Thats what the Harvard MBA did. Health, education and social security - you can do little wrong by increasing the outlay on these. Add to that the focus on developing skills that new-age India needs and you have the perfect recipe for sustained and inclusive growth. But wait theres more!

Taxation is always a tricky matter. You could either reduce the tax exemption limit, thereby increase the tax base and reduce the tax rates or you could heighten the tax exemption limit, thereby reduce the tax base and increase tax rates. But the lawyer chose to do even better. PC decided to reward the tax payers for the 15% excess over estimated tax collections and almost double growth in the last 3 years. He increased the tax exemption limit and kept the same tax rates. He hopes that the chain effect of bolstering the purchasing power of the masses will help corporates increase margins and hence saw no need to cut corporate tax.

But what about the farmers who are bleeding under the pressure of accumulated losses and loans and compelling one farmer to commit suicide every 8 hours? To them Mr P Chidambaram offered a loan waiver costing Rs 60000 crores. Now thats a huge amount. Thats over half the defence budget and almost 5 paisa of every rupee the government plans to spend this year. Moreover, this is completely unaccounted for in the budget. Fiscal imprudence? Probably. Short term relief measure? Yes. Populist benevolence? Certainly. Unnecessary? Certainly not. Lets agree, this was a crisis situation. Repeated crop failures and inability to meet the rising cost of cultivation has affected over 4 crore farmers. Thats almost 4% of the population. Desperate times need desperate measures and this was one of them.

Then there were corrections to past anomalies. Like the double taxation caused by the dividend distribution tax laws and the restrictive cash withdrawal tax. Both have been done away with.

The days of big-bang, dream and reformist budgets is gone. Having unleashed the third stage of economic reforms, all India needs are correcting kid gloves to ensure direction. And i guess, the most influential - if not powerful - economist in the world has done his job well.

Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2008

1. Green IT
The effort to reduce power consumption, carbon emissions and other environmental impacts of IT

2. Unified Communications (UC)
Integration of voice, e-mail, instant messaging, applications, IP-PBX, VoIP, voice-mail, fax and conferencing

3. Business Process Management

4. Metadata Management
Management of diverse information repositories on diverse media by referencing to the location of the data

5. Virtualization 2.0
Also tied into #1 Green IT

6. Mashups & Composite Applications
Combining data and/or functionality from more than one source into a single integrated web application

7. Web Platform & WOA
Software as a service (SaaS) and REST(Representational State Transfer)-styled SOA. This could be a topic for another blog so I'll it at that.

8. Computing Fabrics
Evolution of server design to allow several blades to be merged operationally, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades

9. Real World Web
Real world objects with local processing and networking abilities like GPS navigation

10. Social Software
Injection of Web 2.0 offerings into the enterprise

Chart toppers

It's that time of the year when everyone who matters (and some who don't) start producing top-10-of-the-year lists. Here is a series of my favorite top-10 lists, starting with Symantec's Top 10 Internet Security Trends of 2007.

1. Data breaches
2. Windows Vista security concerns
3. Spam
4. Professional attack kits like WebAttacker and MPack
5. Phishing
6. Exploitation of trusted brands
7. Bots
8. Web plug-in vulnerabilities
9. Sale of vulnerabilities
10. Virtual machine security

The clear trend is the professionalisation of cybercrime.

Thanks!

Woman - She’s so close to you, yet at times she seems almost alien. You feel you know her well, then she surprises you. You try your best to understand her feelings, her thoughts. You love her, respect her, cherish her. Today, we thank her for making our lives a bit more bearable.

Happy Woman's Day!

Solar Fidelity

The internet revolution has galvanised the world and is being billed as the great leveler between the developed and the developing nations. However, its reach continues to be limited to the urban and semi-urban sections in India due to issues of cost and availability of connectivity and electricity.

An nonprofit organization is to start a pilot project for cheap, solar-powered Wi-Fi network in three schools in Uttar Pradesh, where one of the schools has a cable connection.

Each node in this Wi-Fi network consists of a battery-powered router and a solar panel to charge the battery. The nodes are mounted on rooftops, and the network's Wi-Fi signals are transferred over a grid using a wireless network standard known as 802.11b/g.

The solution also has an elegant degradation system that would function under variable weather conditions depending on the charge level of the battery and the amount of incoming sunlight. The users are split into categories, with everyone initially able to connect. If the power level drops a bit, certain groups are cut off, leaving access only to specific school grades or teachers. When even less power is available, the system limits their bandwidth--users can send e-mails, for example, but not watch videos online. Finally, the hours of operation can be restricted to the opening hours of the school. All this is managed through a simple Web-based interface.

If successful, this standardized, relatively inexpensive and simple to deploy networking solution can revolutionise education by bringing internet access to schools and remote villages.

Details here

Survivor

December 1992:
Communal riots broke out in Mumbai after the demolition on the Babri Masjid on December 6.

I was at Nagpada on December 7, one of the most sensitive areas in Mumbai. Yet... I survived.

March 1993:
A series of bombings struck Mumbai's stock exchange along with trains, hotels and gas stations in the city, killing 257 people and wounding more than 1,100.

I was at home recuperating from illness. I survived.

December 2001:
Militants attacked India's Parliament in New Delhi, leaving 14 people, including several gunmen, dead.

I had come on a vacation from Delhi to Mumbai. I survived.

August 2003:
Two taxis packed with explosives blew up outside a Mumbai tourist attraction and a busy market, killing 52 and wounding more than 100.

I had gone back to Delhi after my vacation in Mumbai. I survived.

July 2006: Seven bomb blasts on Mumbai trains killed more than 140 people and wounded hundreds more.

I was on the road not on rail. I survived.


For how long can we ride our luck?

Meri Jung

Came across a friends fascinating blog and then eventually was led to take the Jung Typology Test.

According to the Jung - Myers-Briggs typology people can be classified using four criteria:
Extroversion - Introversion
Sensing - Intuition
Thinking - Feeling
Judging - Perceiving

Different combinations of the criteria determine a type. For example I turned out to be ENTJ - Extroverted Intuitive Thinking Judging. Precisely, it said I am:

* slightly expressed extrovert
* slightly expressed intuitive personality
* slightly expressed thinking personality
* moderately expressed judging personality

It then proceeds to give a pretty detailed description the typology and that made for some interesting reading and ego boosting.

ENTJ type description by D.Keirsey
ENTJ type description by J. Butt

So far so good... here comes the party-pooper. It says I share my personality with Jim Carrey... scary!

Reservation and Conversion - Conreservation

Two issues that are rocking the parliament and the nation these days are - The Reservation Bill and the Anti-Conversion Bill.

Here is a raam-baan solution for the addressing both issues of reservations (affirmative action for socially, economically and educationally backward classes) and religious conversions (prohibits conversion by force, fraud or allurement)... Its called Reverse Reservation or Conreservation.

The idea is that instead of reserving 50% of seats for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes (SC/ST/OBC)... 50% of those students who get the seats should convert to SC/ST/OBC.

I know this sounds radical it first, but give it a few minutes and let it seep down. The heart of the matter is inequality... and this policy will ensure that over the long term, all Indians are equal.

The selection
So how do u select the 50% who will convert... because everyone would want to be in that 50% to be on the safer side?

As always, it will be the bottom of the meritious pack who will bear. The last 50% who get in will have to convert.

The policy is, "if you want to get in, top the merit list... else convert". Every college would publish 2 lists. The first list would be of the top 50% students who dont have to convert and the second list of the bottom 50% students who would have to convert to SC/ST/OBC to get admission.

This could throw up intersting scenarios - an upper caste candidate might get into Civil engineering on merit but to get into the Computer stream he would have to convert.

Link to conversion and equality
This would also preserve (or in a way reinforce) the freedom of conversion. Over the years, a bulk of of the Indian population will be SC/ST/OBC obviating the need for reservations and ensuring equality.

Extend policy to jobs
This policy could be extended to job reservations too. 50% of employees would need to be SC/ST/OBC... either by birth or through conversion. The issue here would be how do you select the 50% that need to convert to get or keep the job? Performance analysis?? What do you think?

Debon-Air India

It wasn't my first trip to the US. In fact the fifth, and the third one in the last 12 months. But there were two things about this that left me a bit anxious. One, it was my first stay away from India after being engaged and two, I was traveling by Air India.

The first one is a topic of another discussion and I cant really discuss it at a public forum without prior bilateral approval. So I will stick to the second one.

It didn't strike me at first when the news trickled that we are shifting from our usual preferred airline, Delta Air, to Air India. It was only when people (most of whom were not traveling) ran upto me to me trying to console me that i realised the gravity of the situation. It seems Air India doesnt really have an enviable track record of safety. And the fact that there was another mishap the same day didn't help my confidence much.

After all efforts to have the flight rescheduled back to Delta had failed, i (and the rest of my co-travellers) embraced the fact that we had go through this ordeal.

It helps to have low expectations. It prepares you for the worst and it pleasantly surprises when those expectations are exceeded. The latter is what happened with me as i embarked on my maiden Air India flight from Mumbai to Chicago.

Infrastructure

Contradictory to what I was warned about, the aircraft was quite clean and the legroom wasn't any less that that of Delta or Northwest-KLM (the other carrier which has had the privilege of flying me to the US). The flight took off quite comfortably and confidently from Mumbai and apart from a couple of bounces, that can be attributed to the poor weather at Chicago, the landing was quite graceful. There were no personal entertainment sets on the Boeing from Mumbai to Chicago but they were in place on the journey back. The variety in entertainment though was not as varied as that in Delta or NW/KLM.

Staff

I was asked to expect to be greeted by ladies in sparkling saarees, an artificial smile and patchy makeup trying to hide the pain of the grand old age. Everything apart from the sparkling saarees turned out to be false.

From DespAir India to DebonAir India

To be continued...

Doodlings...

While chatting to a family friend today, I doodled something interesting. See if this makes any sense...

"Life is a constant struggle between aspirations and inclinations...." - Tejas Lagad (circa 2006)

Does it?

My betrothal invite...

Its a once-in-a-lifetime occasion... well, in our part of the world it usually is... and it demanded a special invite too. So here it is.

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When: 12 March 2006, 7.00 p.m.

Where: Sri Vile Parle Patidar Mandal, Sardar Patel Baug, Parleswar Mandir, Vileparle East, Mumbai - 400057. Phone - 26194564,26194565

Why:

Back in 04 AD, the Romans started a tradition of exchanging rings to be worn on the fourth finger of the left hand. The Romans believed this finger to be the "vena amoris" (vein of love), the vein that leads to the heart and so used it as some symbol of love and commitment between a man and a woman.

On the occasion of my betrothal with Dr Sonal Thakare, we plan to follow this succulent Roman tradition. And as we look forward to a life of caring, sharing and love, we request your presence on our engagement to share in the happiness.

See you there...

-tejas

PS: Those who miss out on this bash may miss out on an invite to my planned autumn wedding in Seychelles. And I plan to include a return air-ticket to Seychelles with the invite.

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The last line really worked ;-)

7 steps to success

STEP 1:

* Believe in the journey! Know that you can do it!
* Plan BIG: Recognize early that you can not get on top of or over the mountain if you can't even see it.
* Condition yourself to Become Evolution Focused - focusing on the evolution of your business at all times - will allow you continually move forward.

STEP 2:

* Research the marketplace.
* Understand who your customers really are by knowing how they communicate, what they want and where they go to get it.
* Watch, listen and survey wherever possible.
* Evaluate the competition - and exploit their weaknesses.

STEP 3:

* Create products according to your customers desires.
* Serve them - so they will serve you.

STEP 4:

* Communicate in their language.
* Emphasize features and benefits.

STEP 5:

* Let them know that you FINALLY have what they want!

STEP 6:

* Create a sense of urgency for it.

STEP 7:

* Ask for the order.

Synergy...

Came across an interesting piece on building partnerships... an excerpt.

2 plus 2 equals how many?

2 + 2 = 3

Overlap, duplication, waste; competition not partnership

2 + 2 = 4

Co-ordination, co-operation and collaboration produce efficient working

3 + 1 = 4

Not so good; More of what one partner wants, less what the other wants; unequal power, no difference overall

2 + 2 = 5

Synergy; joint working produces more effective working between partner organisations

2 + 2 = 6

Synergy plus leverage, as joint working generates extra special funding for the neighbourhood from a third party

2 + 2 = 7

Synergy plus leverage plus main programme bending, as the big organisations adjust their own programmes

2 + 2 = 8

Synergy plus leverage plus mainstreaming plus influence, as partnerships influence national policy

Sick of the blue screen?

M sure many of you will benefit from this... How to solve Windows system crashes in minutes

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/041105-windows-crash.html

.

Sensexational

If you had Invested Rs. 5000 with BSE Sensex every month for the past 25 years (1980-2004) in all the stocks in the sensex in the ratio of their weights in the sensex, it would have yielded Rs. 1.48 crores @ 15.2% p.a.

(Data source - CRISIL)

Disruptive Technologies - An evolution

A year back a blog on Disruptive Technologies was published on the TechScribes blog that I infrequently contribute to.

Over the past year, the concept of Disruptive Technologies has hardened a lot. A very good sign of the concept gaining momentum and feasibility is that analysts have tracking this as a separate technology market segment. Even the finance sector came with up funds that primarily invest in companies that develop disruptive technologies.

In September this year, InformationWeek and Credit Suisse First Boston launched the Disruptive Technology Portfolio to track the emergence of companies that are driven by innovative and radical ideas. A look at the performance of this portfolio ever since shows that it has outperformed the broader indices consistently and outrightly. This is surprising since the value of such companies is difficult to estimate. A great 'concept' might never materialize into a marketable product, and even the leading edge product might not translate into shareholder value.

What is also surprising is the list of Disruptive Technologies companies in the Disruptive Technology Portfolio. Apart from the expected biggies like Novell, Red Hat, Google, Texas Instruments and Apple who are known to drive innovation in the market, the list also includes Indian offshore outsourcing firms like Infosys, Wipro and Cognizant.

Quite an achievement!

Swift vs Getz

Now that it has been a while since the launch of the Maruti Suzuki Swift and the whirlwind created by its razzmatazz launch has settled, lets do a comparative analysis of the Maruti Suzuki Swift with the Hyundai Getz.

The Jurisprudence

Swift Positives

• Looks
• Performance
• Ride and handling
• Features
• Price

Getz Positives

• Interiors
• Space

Comparisons apart, both cars are a great value for money. Both provide plenty of standard equipment, solid body, crash protection, precise gearbox action and a simple, efficient dash layout.

And ofcourse, both have a common set of woes as well. The braking and engine leaves a lot to be desired. The brakes lack power and progression and the engine needs revs to perform. But then, what more can you expect sub 2 litre engines.

The Judgement

Its evident, Swift seems to be the outright winner. Unless your only considerations are space and refined interiors. If not, go getz the swift...

Independence - The Power to say No

Yesterday as I was watching a documentary on the second world war, a prisoner of war made a statement that redefined my understanding of the word Independence.

The Dutch soldier, now perhaps in his late 80s but still poignant with past memories, was caught in the midst of Japanese occupation of west Thailand. Thrust into insentient slavery including the construction of the infamous bridge over River Kwai, he was eventually rescued by an American submarine when the Japanese surrendered.

Among the multifarious feelings that he experienced on being freed, limited by those his eyes and words could now express, he mentioned a striking ordeal. He said, "I could now say No when I disliked anything".

The Power to say No... could that be the definition of Independence? Could the state of feeedom or the power to act / speak / think without externally imposed restraints be manifest through this simple condition? And if so, is this a necessary or sufficient condition for independence?

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that the answer to these questions was - yes. And that realization was gripping.

Think about how many times we say Yes when we actually want to and urge to say No. And is that disconnect between our thought and actions rooted in the fact that we dont feel independent?

Organisations have too realised this innate inability of humans to say No. Management thinkers suggest appointment of an Abominable No Man - a tall, furry, mean looking man on Board who will never answer "yes" to a question. All impervious and unworkable, but potentially rebellious if rejected, suggestions are then redirected to this person who promptly rejects them. And over time the Abominable No Man gains such notoriety that even the mention of his elysian self gives enough indications of the future of the budding idea to nip it right there.

The realisation of this power of No is gripping. Gripping because as we analyse the social and political state of our world, we realize that we are not yet truly independent. We still do not have the right to say No to the things we do not like. For instance, we do not have the right to reject a candidate in elections. We can vote for another candidate in the ring but thats still different, and a very poor alternative, to being able to say No to a candidate. If we cant say No, can we really call ourselves an independent polity or at a more personal level an independent people?

No?

Retrospeculative

Its been a year now since I left my previous firm. And like all anniversaries, its a good time to look at where you were and where you stand now.

As I embarked on this journey through my memories, the first piece I looked at was my adieu letter at my last firm. Here it is... verbatim.

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As a kid we dream a lot about what we want to be when we grow up. And those dreams keep changing after every experience. By the time we finish school, we have eliminated some possibilities and the dreams start to take a definite shape. When we graduate, we have a clear idea about where we want to be and have charted out a path to pursue the dream. But amidst the daily rigors that follow the dream gets lost somewhere.

Today is my last day at UGS and I am out to find my lost dream. They say you’ve got to let go of the good for the best. I am perhaps leaving the best for the indefinite. But then what’s a man without his dreams.

Chase your dreams!

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