Shrikant’s Blog

(via Indian Express) has a series on views of leading personalities on what India Empowered means to them. I was very disappointed that politicians made statements that were the most motherhood and apple pie and no substance. Of course Manmohan Singh and Abdul Kalam continued their NATO (No Action Talk only) statements. Also disturbed that Sachin Pilot and Jyotiraje Scindia were part of the series who have nothing to show except their inheritance, this was not expected from Indian Express to put them on the same platform as Nandan Nilekani, Subroto Bagchi, Azim Premji and Rahul Kumar Bajaj who really definied states that required every citizen to participate.

My feelings on politicians is further expressed by Dr Puri. The current series in Indian Express seems to be an exercise in megalomania. Pardon me for setting up a discordant note but the same people who claim the “potential” belong to the same group that existed 50 years back.

It was a dream that went sour and sacrificed at the altar of socialism; the policies directed in the name of helping the poor. A huge monolithic structure was set up, a leviathian and aging dinosaur which refused to budge from it’s stated position. Any attempt to nudge it was met with steadfast resistance.

This isn’t to deny the true place of this country in the world. Indians have made their mark- mostly out of India far from the encumbered system that rewards mediocrity. In all, we have forgotten our Hindu roots and savadharma. A nation that forgets it’s history and refuses to honour it’s true heros is doomed anyway.It is the legacy of the British Raj and Macaulay’s system of Education-Indians in India have refused to think for themselves. The vast majority of the illiterate people are only fodders for the vote bank politics rather than being productive assets to the nation. A “young and dynamic” population- with a huge young age is a clear reflection of the Population policy failure. The same “young population” 25 years down the line would be a burden; given the paltry Social security existent( with no signs of implementation in the near future ) it would be a HUGE liability. After all, for how long can we crow about the same?

I could go on and on and rebut the claims made by the “famous” people here. That isn’t the objective here and would be out of scope. The true energy can only be unleashed if we iron out the major flaws in the current existing system. Indians in India can prosper only if we move out of the narrow confines of small pressure groups and devise a system that rewards performances and achievements rather than those people at the helm of the affairs who claim proximity to powers that be.

In this scenario, the strangulating role of the fourth estate has to be done away with. The unholy nexus between power and supression of truth is holding the seige to this nation.

Indian Express has done well and good to highlight the various issues that can be ameliorated. Though clearly, it has become a vehicle for those who are responsible for the present mess in the system. Their own “vision” is opaqued to the present scenario and clearly at variance with the reality. Indian Express ought to elicit comments from those people who are directly affected by the present system.

If the object of the posts is to elicit honest debate, then so be it. If the purpose is to highlight what our “leaders”(illinformed,misguided and fossilised) have to say, then we are in for trouble! The newspaper isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Yet, being featured here on Indian Express gives it undeserved legitmacy!

Lets check some of the good ones.

When we begin to value those who do physical work by Subroto Bagchi

In Subroto’s empowered India, people will be valued not just for mental work but for physical work they do. People who perform physical work, will be paid respectable wages that make basic comforts in life as accessible to them as they are to you and I. One day, I got down at the Orly airport in France and was picked up by a cab driver. The man was as well dressed as any one else. We got chatting on the way as he was driving me to a hotel near Versailles where I had a conference to attend. Next to my hotel, stood an even more beautiful hotel and pointing it out to me, the man said, that is where his wedding took place. I was simply amazed.

All of us pushing the envelope in our spheres of influence by Rahul Kumar Bajaj

For Rahul Kumar Bajaj, a society moves forward when the capable and the deserving are supported in their desire to move ahead. A society that does not support its weak is inhumane and uncivilised, but the achieving societies that deliver a better life to their people are those that cheer their winners. As Blake said, ‘‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet, this is not done by jostling in the street’’.

Pandit Bhimsen Joshi once said, in a very different context, that what is good is difficult and difficulty is what one tends to avoid. We have to try to live by the higher than all laws, our internal moral law.

Most of us are paying 20 per cent or more of our incomes to the government and get little more than the electric lamp on our streets in return. Let us give one per cent of our incomes to those in need or trying to achieve something.

I have Tagore’s ‘‘Where the mind is without fear’’ in my office. I have yet to discover a better vision for our country. Each day I read it to get the strength to cope with the absurdities of today and to work for a better tomorrow.

Reducing knowledge gap between the ruler and the ruled by Nandan M Nilekani

To truly empower India, we need to reduce the knowledge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. Once the opaque veils on our state are raised, the citizen will be truly in charge. The sunshine that we bring to bear on the inner working of government will ensure that both the incompetent and the corrupt will have far less chance of getting away with it.

To do this, we have to bring together the two great proven successes of Independent India, our democratic tradition and our mastery over Information Technology. The process begins by using technology to automate and streamline the processes of the way we take decisions, use funds and deliver services to the people. This automation is usually seen as way to streamline processes, improve public delivery, reduce corruption etc.

Reforming our schools to chart social progress by Azim Premji

Azim quotes Swami Vivekananda: ‘‘Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making, assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library.’’

The other day in a nostalgic conversation with an Intel veteran, received a small complement that my blog is better than our CEO Paul Otellini’s blog. I was a little stunned at his remark and responded that I was not sure whether my blog was better than his but for sure I started writing mine two and half years before he started writing. Paul started writing his blog for an internal Intel audience, inside the Intel firewall this January, when the concept of blogs started about 3 years ago. It took Intel and its new CEO three years to figure out the power of blogs. In contrast Jonathan Schwartz of Sun writes one blog that can be read by everyone employees, customers and shareholders and anyone who has any remote interest in Sun, unlike Paul who prefers the cocoon within the Intel firewall. Jonathan in a recent interview mentioned that other that strategic plans there is nothing that cannot be shared. I have read Paul’s blog for 6 months and there was nothing profound he wrote that could not have shared with all the 3 audiences. Somebody even posted all the content on his site in San Jose Mercury News. Fear what ?, Paul needs to quickly align his blog with the brilliant Mission statement of Intel ” Do a Great Job for Intel’s customers, shareholders and employees ” before he does a good job in his new role as CEO, at least he can start communicating with them.

I generally need to travel from Pune to Bangalore at short notices of 3-4 days. With Intel it was on Jet Airways and the full return fare is about Rs 14,000. On Spicejet even at 3-4 days notice I am able to fly for Rs 5000 return. It would be much lower if I am able to plan my travel at least a month in advance. That’s a Rs 9000 saving for approximately 2.5 hours of flying time. Spicejet is a true budget , no frills airline, no newspapers, no TV, no magazines, no food except a bottle of water and a cookie. Even though it is a budget airline, it has not compromised on the basics, brand new air planes, a very user friendly web site, call centre with good diction and fast turnaround time with automated boarding. This has been implemented with a laptop and a barcode scanner connected to the USB port. Even full service airline, Jet Airways manually strikes out seats as passengers start boarding the aircraft. I have to date travelled 5 times and last evening the flight to depart from Bangalore at 5.40 pm was initially delayed by 40 minutes and first informed by sms at 2 pm. I again received an sms at 2.30pm informing me that the flight has been delayed by an additional 30 minutes. This allowed me to have an additional unplanned meeting and reach the airport at the rescheduled time of 6.50 pm. The flight left within 5 minutes of the rescheduled time.

SpiceJet is doing a great job in providing value and customer satisfaction. Note it has no fancy meals like Jet or Kingfisher, but it provides a safe flight in new planes unlike Deccan Air where some first time passengers have sworn they will never fly again, the web based booking system with a clean interface, unlike Kingfisher, which will flash the photo of its chairman on the opening page, it improves turnaround by ensuring the required passengers are on board with barcode scanning and no loading of meals and no time wasted to ensure other frills like newspapers, flight magazines etc. are in place.

I highly recommend Spicejet for whom money and time matters. A good example of how various technologies have been used effectively to provide value to the customer. They are redefining air travel with all the basics to scale in place.

(via Education Initiatives) Educational Initiatives offers products and services that help to accurately measure learning, promote self-learning in children and empower educators and school leaders.

A lot of “learning” that happens in our schools and children today, turns out to be rote memorisation with very shallow introduction to ideas. To contribute meaningfully in tomorrow’s world, students and schools need to shift from FACTS to SKILLS.

In a Comparative Assessment Study on Urban vs Rural Indian Child, the same Class 3 Maths test was given to students of classes 3, 4 and 5 of rural Andhra Pradesh in South India and urban students in New Delhi. While the urban students clearly outperformed their rural peers, it was found that unfamiliar questions seemed to stump the urban kids more! Also in some questions performance actually falls from class 4 to 5! more details ….

Red Herring released a list of 20 entrepreneurs under the age of 35. There was one Indian Anurag Dikshit but not a single Indian from India. My take on this issue is the explosion in the job market with Multi-nationals and Indian companies on a hiring spree. You have to be in some sense a radical to ignore the comfort of getting a job and jump into starting a company. Another personal observation, even though there are a lot of VCs in India there is an acute shortage of angel investors in India. VCs pretend to be angel investors and waste the precious time of many budding entrepreneurs asking questions and documentation to be provided that is actually required in the first round of fund raising. Many who pursue a business in India are the ones who get funded by family or informal channels. Many of the businesses are just filling up for infrastructure bottlenecks rather than building new products or services. Banks also provide loans only if you can provide collateral, so the ones that can borrow money are ones that have some property or have money. So our nationalized and private banks will only lend money to those that have money not innovative ideas. I really call upon high networth individuals with good management experience to allocate some money to pure angel investing and mentoring young entrepreneurs. Instead of putting all their money in fixed deposits or pushing up the valuation of established businesses in the stock market or fuelling the irrational real estate boom. In Pune lot of the social discussions are around real estate just like Silicon Valley was abuzz with tech stacks in 97-99 boom. So if you are young, with a good idea, no high networth relative, no personal collateral you might as well take up a job and make the Indian entrepreneur a rare species possibly extinct.

(via emergic) a brilliant summary of why mobilie phones have become ubiquitous and what lies in store for the future. Marko talks about the issues and future of the mobile business and bringing into its fold the next 2 billion customers. Some real good points from the article ….. The mobile industry grew on the fundamentals of social interaction, person to person voice communication and ability to text or sms. The other was device acquisition which had implied financing, most new subscribers paid monthly payments to the carriers with 2 year contracts. The last being personal identity, before mobiles arrived, landline phones had a family or home identity. In India many families got one after a wait of 4-5 years. It was common that a complete neighbourhood shared a phone. Mobile phones in India actually entered through the private and deregulated route. Also many functionalities like clock, calculator and camera have been integrated.

What are the challenges moving forward ? Extending reach via lower device cost, lower service cost, applications that improve lifestyles. Note we are talking about extending reach to the next 2 billion. In India how do we move from 50 million to 250 million phones.

The other issues include making the device seem off in a always on world. Personalization via providing building blocks that will let consumers chose and complete the phone offering. How do we enable more social functions that will enable better social interaction ( my favourite topic). How can instant communities be enabled on and off. In India many will have their first computing experience on the mobile phone, my daughter 5 years old sent me an sms the other day vs mine sent from a VAX mini computer worth millions of dollars when I was 22. For content producers it will require governments to implement regulation to ensure open access to the world wide web which will ultimately see the disintegration of walled gardens that telephone operators now control. Making the phones more easy to use will be key to expanding reach, so simplicity in the device will be key. In the words of bassist Charles Mingus: “Making the simple complicated is common place, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” Simpler and cheaper interface will be key for easy to use and compelling price point devices.

After leaving Intel buying a new mobile subscription or requesting customer support has been very interesting. My two experiences with the customer service departments of Dell and Bharti has been really bad business, pathetic experience, root cause being not trying to understand what I or customers really want, but just blindly following their bad processes to service customers. Good customer service requires real time sound judgement, empowerment to make decisions and getting rewarded for making the good ones. Today businesses just lack the data, tools and quality staff to predict the intent of the customer they are trying to acquire or service.

The one assumption everyone makes in this country is that everyone is dishonest. When I first applied for a Airtel postpaid mobile card, I had to pay a Rs 2000 deposit to enable India roaming, business critical since I spend a lot of time in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. Just before leaving for New Zealand, request for international roaming required me to travel to a local outlet and pay another Rs 6000 in cash to enable international calling and roaming. I decided not to pay and Airtel lost 10 days of business opportunity through my trip. Airtel is clueless for sure, for they could have got a clue from Bank of Baroda, HSBC or Citibank where I have banked for the last 37 yeaars. Airtel for sure is going to make some short term gains as the supply demand gap is bridged but long term their brand for sure will not represent good customer service.

After using Airtel for 2 years my wife received a phone bill for Rs 800, her usage amounted to 120 minutes, average prices are generally Rs 1 per minute. She never questioned the amount and paid the bill assuming Airtel is right. When I got to review the bill, it just did not add up. So I trekked upto the nearest Airtel retail office and asked the service representative to explain the bill. Of course he could not explain and requested to log into the billing system. After trying for 20 minutes to log into the billing system, he reported a call to a 600 number for 1 hour 20 mins that was charged rs 450. Till then me nor my wife had never heard of a 600 number, I was also told that one calls a 600 number for downloads etc. The sub-standard customer service rep could not smell there was something of an exception that had occurred. The call to this number was unique with no historical precedence before or after the call. He did not even try to investigate the situation, when I asked to cancel the connection he immediately handed me the cancellation form. Not for a moment did he realize that this is a INR 2000 revenue business from the same address. He was an inexperienced new graduate who of course thought he was smart with his partial shave and Shoaib Akhtar hairstyle with no appreciation or understanding of who really paid his paycheck. If he had waived the call I would be a sworn Airtel customer for life. Bottomline I have no credit respect or credit history or a starting point to contest the call.

(via Indian Express) This morning KV Kamath, respected banker and chairman of ICICI Bank, in the India Empowered section talks about why this country needs more credit penetration. He does not anywhere in the article describe how it is to be done. Someone honest has no place or standing in Indian society. How does a rickshaw wallah who has been honest for the last 25 yeras get an emergency Rs 10,000 loan. My last domestic helper after borrowing Rs 3000 disappeared to the village. On further investigation we discovered, loans taken from local money sharks at more than 10% interest per month when her husband was hospitalized for 3 months and passed away. When the loan sharks threatened to evict her from the house she stayed in, she appealed for a loan and I obliged. She had worked with us for a year and for the most part happy with her work. A good insurance could have covered the expense or credit rating could have definitely helped her secure a loan at a lower interest rate. When the most respected banker in the country gives his views we need his help to understand how credit reach can indeed be improved.

The issue very fundamental to this country, it does not reward honest people. It continues to suspect everyone with a microscope. If one has been a honest tax payer, not bounced a cheque, paid all phone, electricity and muncipal taxes on time, then the big question mark ? why this citizen is not given more recognition. Even Pakistan had special immigration lines for those Pakistan Non Residents who invested back in their country. Why don’t we raise the customs limits for those that pay taxes and get better service at the local government offices and police stations. The ones that get better service at police stations or government offices are the ones who bribe the local officers and not those that paid his salary with honest and timely income tax filing and settlement.

What should our general behaviour to this issue be ? Be nice to the sincere, tough with the suspicious and smart enough to differentiate between the two.

Dedicated to Sunil Mittal who can build an everlasting brand, P. Chidambaram who has started fringe exploitation of the honest corporate business houses and KV Kamath who needs to get out of his posh office and confront reality.

Please note I have taken Bharti as an example for I have experienced it. My friend Atanu can give you a earful on Tata Indicom. I am trying very hard to avoid the government institutions like BSNL, Indian Airlines, police stations, customs etc.

And lastly Dell I have not forgotten you. Some other time in another blog for sure.

ganesh-puja

Originally uploaded by My memories.

After more than 30 years we have moved Ganesh Celebration from my uncle’s place Rakhi Mahal, Mumbai to Pune.

We started the 10 day Ganesh festival by installing the idol at our place. We had a family puja at around 10 am in the morning. We will have Ganesha at our place for 5 days after which he will be immersed in the local river or well. Significance of what Ganesha stands for is explained in the letter to Medha and Rohan from their grandparents below.

ganesh

Originally uploaded by My memories.

Dear Medha and Rohan

Wish you a very happy Ganesh Chaturthi!

Ganesh Chaturthi, the birthday of Lord Ganesha, is celebrated every year in the telugu month of Bhadrapada on Chaturthi ( ie fourth day after the new moon ). This year it is coming on 7th September.

Ganesh was the son of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati. Originally he was a normal child. Accidently he is killed and the head gets separated from the body. Unable to see the grief of Parvati Shiva decides to bring the boy back to life. But he does not find the head of the boy instead he sees the head of a baby elephant nearby. Shiva fixes the head of the elephant to the boy’s body and breathes life into the boy. The result was that Ganesha had a head of an elephant and the body of a human being. Shiva blessed his son saying that whoever worships Him earnestly will not face problems and difficulties and will lead a happy and peaceful life.

Thus Ganesha became a remover of all obstacles. During any religious function first Ganesha is worshipped. Ganesha is also called Vinayaka, Vigneshwara, Vakratunda, Ganapati, Gajanana etc. Everyday students like you should worship him and seek his blessings as you prepare for another day in school.

Ganesh Chaturthi is an important festival for us. It has a special significance to students like you. Both of you should do Ganesh puja and recite the slokas and seek His blessings and do your best in school. During the puja today, along with flowers and other decorations, also place your books in front of the lord and seek his blessing for the coming school year. Lord Ganesha will surely shower his blessings on both of you and also on Mamma, Nana, Thatha and Nani.

With lots of love and blessings.

Amamma and Thatha