Weekends spend with people glued to the news channels after swine flu started claiming it first victims in India. Panic of the ‘aam admi’ who was denied adequate early testing facilities by the government designated hospitals and clinics. Frustration, chaos and fear for the little ones being adeptly captured and played on primetime news (only to be followed by the latest updates of ‘Rakhi ki Swayamvar’). Political statements leaving the entire govt red faced (atleast this time the BJP did not come out with statements like it was the Congress party which brought swine flu to India and the Commies of Kerala and West Bengal didn’t attribute it to a grand conspiracy theory by the American CIA. Oooo I miss those statements).

All in all yet again India’s reaction to a calamity is still…. predictable. Yet again we were -

1. Unprepared to handle the situation.
2. The reactionary steps taken to ‘control’ the situation are in the wrong direction.
3. Rest assured like the terrorist attacks in India, if swine flu were to resurface 5 yrs later, India would be found in the same situation.
4. Toilet journalism thriving on heart rending footage played in loop.

What if the hotspots of swine flu, in other words the source of this flu was India…. How would countries like the US, UK and Malaysia have dealt with the same situation… That I leave my readers to comment on…..

Filed under: India, India politics happenings | 1 Comment »

Flew on the Trivandrum Bangalore sector on Air India after a loooong gap of 8yrs. I was feeling particularly patriotic (conveniently so since they were offering the best fares for the day).  Was feeling a little uneasy not knowing what to expect when i reached the airport. To my surprise I found out that the vernacular language is the ‘one of choice’ at the checkin counter. So i resorted to malayalam with the airport staff…. Splendid malicious feeling thinking of non-keralite passengers. Some confusion regarding whether i could carry my guitar as cabin baggage or not. Finally the porter boys recco is what was decided on (That i could). Wouldn’t be surprised cos the staff at the counter thought my guitar was a violin !@%!@#!%!! Only the baggage boy identified the instrument.

Now I was thinking those legendary stories of the Indias carrier being perpetually late. But i found out that we took off 10 mins early and reached early too…. Looks like some things have changed over time.Pleasant.

Inflight experience is still ‘vintage’. The seats and cabin crew as expected look old and worn out except that the seats had stains from the ‘maharajas era’ itself. Evidently there is no cleaning done since i could see dust plastic and food particles that could have been atleast a week old on the floor. The inflight entertainment is restricted to visual since they don’t give headphones. Lucky me to have found one left unused by a passenger (thank You).

The food was an experience. I indicated a non-veg meal as preference silly me not knowing that they serve only VEG fares on this domestic sector. Was served and assortment of oily bonda bajji and rubbery paneer with some stale bread. The upside being the homely feel since it was being served by ‘motherly folks’. I was wondering… they don’t seem interested in serving it and I am definitely not interested in eating it. So…. why bother…

All in all, I think the service would be splendid if air india domestic goes the budget airlines way. They are already doing a good job of flying people on time so i think cleaner cabins and NO FOOD would make this an excellent budget airline.

Filed under: India, Reviews | No Comments »

Just watched ‘New York’ the latest offering from Yash Raj films from director Kabir Khan.  Being a person who selectively watches 2-3 bollywood movies a year this one was a BIG mistake.  This movie can be safely taken as a case study to prove that you cannot take serious humanitarian concern wrap it up in short skirts, muscles, hair gel and mirch masala and claim to have made serious films. Maybe if those detention centers still exist they would be screening this movie as the latest form of torture.

• A student (Neil Nitin Mukesh) who studies in New York State University for his masters is driving a cab in the US after 7 years. Could give a heart attack to the Indian students who are currently studying in the US.
• FBI agents who conduct interrogation in Hindi.
• Indian parents who have a kid who look absolutely phoren.
• John Abraham who is a US citizen spends 9 months in detention and what does he do? No, he doesn’t take the govt’al agency to court instead he becomes terrorist.
• After 9 months torture in detention, John can’t walk can’t hold a job can’t sleep properly but finds the time and energy to get his wife Maya (Kats) pregnant. Wowww….
• The Feds shoot John for being a terrorist and Kats for ….. God only know what.
• Joy, Sadness, Surprise, Anger, Love are all portrayed on Johns and Kats face via the same expression. Forget acting how weird would that look in real life.
• You get body frisked and your baggage checked but the plastic explosives, detonators and mobile phones mysteriously get into the building no questions asked.
• Kids in college watching 9/11 on TV and all Kats can say is… “Its awful”.
• They expect Indians to love the scene where John races a firangi to hoist the american flag and blows a kiss at it and thumps his chest.

Think Im too traumatized to write any further. Go ahead watch it

Filed under: Reviews | 1 Comment »

Im an avid tweeter… I mysteriously like to tweet but since Im not an expert on social media I’ve been wondering..

Why do I love to tweet.

What is the purpose of tweeting

Im hoping the people who know the social media business contribute to shed light on this since I know Im not the only person who doesn’t know. When I signed up on twitter for the first time I did not read the following philosophy of twitter:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Well thats what twitter IS philosophically. But what follows is what i find it to be now. After about 6 months on twitter, Im mutually connected to about 61 people of which I’ve met 2 of them in real life that covers friends, family and co-workers. The rest of the people who follow fall into these broad categories:

• Follower – porn perverts who think their dick was the next big thing (philosophically) that happened after the internet.AVOID
• Follower – Ad tweets and cheap marketing. AVOID
• Following – News media that are on twitter.
• Following – Certain celebrities and tech gurus.
• Following – Genuine twitter users who mysteriously end up following me or tweet interesting stuff.

That bought me to the question, everybody would want to know what a celebrity or guru is doing would anyone really care about knowing what I am doing? Cos I’m neither of the above nor an SEO or social media expert. And from what I’ve observe about other people who fall into my category I’m also not too keenly interested unless their tweet has some tiny URL wherein Im no longer interested in their tweet but what their pointing to. Well… That sounded to my like a more human,fun version of Stumbleupon. Woww…. S0 now at the end of the day I have no idea if any other twitter user is really interested in knowing ‘what Im doing right now?’  and I am not keenly interested in what they are doing right now unless they have a ‘claim to fame’ attached. Have we defeated the vision statement of twitter by use OR has twitter evolved to a level where Im not mature enough to appreciate it.

Still remember the odd times when someone DM’s me or RT after a personal tweet. Makes a novice like me feel on top of the world. For anyone who’s read till this point pardon my ignorance. If you know lemme know where is twitter going and where is twitter taking us?

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This is dangerous ground to tread on but i couldn’t resist the revolutionary in me so here goes…

There are certain age old realities that i need to pay obeisance to before we venture into talking about womens lib. The human male sub species has made the life of women a living hell denying their right to freedom of thought, expression, movement and their dignity. This is a fight that has been on since the evolution of mankind. To put it bluntly -

Men are the BAD, dominating, inconsiderate subspecies.

But what i have realized which scares me is that women who preach, promote and champion the cause of women strangely go over to the ‘other side’ after that great ‘phenomenon’ called marriage. I don’t know what it is about this ritual that suddenly makes a woman think ‘it all OK’.

Why do we have mothers who coax their sons into demanding dowry?

Why do we have mothers who think their daughters have to be dressed ‘modestly’ in accordance with the rich, kingly traditional pride and prejudice of her ‘husbands household’?

Why do we have mothers who think its okay for the sons to drink at social occasions but not daughters?

Why do we have mothers who think its okay for sons to ‘hang out’ with friends, drink up, smoke up, watch movies but for daughters that is prohibited?

Why do we have mothers who think that their daughters can go to work, work like donkeys, earn money but not mingle freely in their social circles at office and outside?

Why do we have mothers who think that there is only a subset of jobs which are ‘honorable’ for a girl while the boy is free to pursue his whims and fancies?

The above questions were just to get every woman reader of my blog thinking…. When us say that MEN ARE BAD which we are sadly… Always remember there was a mother who allowed it to be so, there was a wife who thought that it was ‘OK’. Else the so called dominant species of humanity would no have the ‘balls’ to demand dowry, ill treat a lady, covet their modesty, prohibit their right to liberty equality and justice. No judge in court would acquit a rapist if his mother had taught him that to covet the modesty of a woman was unpardonable offence. That is why the conviction rate for crimes against women in India is alarmingly low.

Not to the feminists, do not try to change the men you see around you. Change the woman you see within you.

These are solely my thoughts on it. Do feel free to comment on these..

Filed under: India | No Comments »

As an individual we are inherently prone to evaluating personal growth as opposed to team growth. So I began studying teams to identify what would characterize a ‘high growth team’. This is one of the things that are often overlooked by novice managers also. Some of the fundamental questions we would want to ask is how do we say that a team has grown or deteriorated over the course of a period of time (an year for say).

To tackle the easy part first, some of the false positives when it comes to identifying high growth teams are below:

1. A high performing team need not essentially be a high growth team.
2. A highly mature team need not be a high growth team.
3. A poor performing team…..

So now that brings us back to the question, what is the profile of a high growth team. We need to understand the characteristics associated with the word ‘growth’ to start with.

From wikipedia:

Growth refers to an increase in some quantity over time.

So for growth to be present, there has to be ‘increase’ of some ‘quantity’. Identifying the quantity and ascertaining whether it is increasing or not is the key to this evaluation.

To start with I take the teams current composition as a baseline, the management involved in the team is not considered to evaluate growth since that function is viewed as an organizational overhead rather than a value add & i get something like this:

Since we are discussing growth, we consider the base state to be ‘good’ and worry about how this changes progressively. We ascertain an evaluation window in which the team is given the opportunity to evolve, say a year.

Growing Team

Evaluation

This ‘good’ trending is based on an evaluation of the change in their skill sets & experience. The above trend shows a ‘growing team’ since it is getting top heavy.

1. For this to happen there has to be a downward flow of skills, leading to cross skilling of the team.
2. When this happens team members move up the experience ladder causing upward movement of team profile wherein senior members are created either through internal growth or external hiring.
3. The team is performing more specialized and highly skilled tasks as compared to their previous year.
4. This causes existing skill sets to mature and new skill sets to appear in the team portfolio.

Declining Team

Evaluation

The above profile is the that of a decaying team, wherein the team is growing towards becoming ‘bottom heavy’. This has many serious indicators associated with it.

1. Experience players have been leaving the team.
2. Skill sets are not being transferred downwards, shows that cross skilling is not happening.
3. The team has been degrading tasks to perform hence specialization is declining.
4. Low level players are being added to the headcount since team does not require high skill sets.

I would advice every manager to evaluate his team on a periodic basis on these trends and see if his team is high growth or low growth.  This exercise is very vital because a person grows only when he is in a high growth team and a manager is only as good as how good his team grows under him.

Filed under: IT trends | No Comments »

The world doesn’t need another search engine, it needs a decision engine

Well thats microsofts new search engine Bing’s USP from the tech preview. Yet another attempt by microsoft to foray into Google homeground…. Microsoft seems to have taken a huge gamble on the philosophy change from search engines that just provide information (organic)/promote information(adverts) to search engines that interpret information for users and channelize search results. As an objective user adoption would clearly depend on how good MS interprets and decides what i want to see across the spectrum of searches. If users start perceiving that the information ‘categorizing’, ‘cataloging’, ‘channelizing’ and all the other c-ings are not delivering healthy searches we would see a droves of users flocking back to regualar search engines.

There is also an inherent danger in letting MS do the choosing for anything that is not numeric, quantifiable since these searches are best left to the opinion of the user.

The noveau philosophy looks promising at the outset, hope they have stabilized the technology to backup the ‘hype campaign’. Would be amusing to see if ‘bing’ goes bang down the vista way to oblivion. Windows Vista was another of those products that had a phenomenal media campaign and ended up a disappointment. Well the bite is big… the chew better be good….

The official curtain raiser of Bing

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Recently colleges across India have seen a spurt in cases of ragging in India. I found a very sincere case study and initiative on ragging here. Deriving from my observations about students who rag from my college days I’ve attempted to draw out the socio-economic profile of such a person.

There is a clear distinction between students who ‘do it’ and students who ‘don’t’. The first concept to understand is that there is no concept of ‘positive ragging’. This so called social activity is a gross violation of human rights in every form.

• People who often engage in these activities are inherently ‘attention seekers’ OR ‘acceptance seekers’ on a campus.
• They will always be people who have an inferiority complex, (perceivable or non-perceivable).
• They will be people who lack self confidence and self esteem.
• They are people who are still struggling to gain acceptance and respect within their families.
• They will have no personal goals,targets beyond the mandate of their curriculum.
• They are people who fear fear itself.

The above is not a conclusive list of behavioral traits but a subset of the above will be found in students who engage in this activity. From a legislation perspective the act should be treated on par with the worst of human rights violations. Since I am not in favor of a death sentence such citizens are in dire need of social rehabilitation before they can be put into mainstream campus life.

Do add to the above list of behavioural traits to make this profile wholesome.

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What follows is a trend I have noticed from the years of watching the IT crowd in India and their way of work. If you take the vast world of the ‘collaborative internet’ gifted by web 2.0 and analyze the participation/ contribution of the Indian IT crowd we see that they are inherently ‘problem driven’ people. Majority of the posts/comments on tech blogs and forums by them are to address immediate problems that they are facing. This thought is further strengthened by the number of techies out here who actively blog or contribute to forum discussions being very minimalistic.

Being a person who has a techonology blog myself catering to Quality Assurance and Software development principals I’ve noticed that I have a pre-dominantly Indian visitor graph & the number of people who comment about an idea on my blog is next few and far in between. We do not see the value addition in publishing information for the world out there. The behavioural trend at the work place itself is one of ‘constricting the information flow’. Indian techies are yet to wake up to the realization that tribal knowledge is not very helpful.

From the myriad so called ‘tech summits’ I have attended and spoken at in India I’ve noticed that a tech talk is often reduced to a sad sales pitch or adv of how things are at the place they work.  I’ve often had to reject invitations to various seminars and workshops because the so called ‘subject matter expert’ that they have as a speaker does not have any established credentials on the www other than their profile on linkedin and maybe Orkut and they claim he has been doing the said thingie for ‘donkeys years’ (pardon me not the kind of stuff that impresses me).

An amusing statistic would be that if you examine the newspapers in India, the only time the word ‘techie’ is mentioned is in relation to a murder,suicide, divorce or robbery….

Filed under: IT trends | No Comments »