The Pulse of India

The summer has almost arrived and in a few days its going to be the time which all the children will be looking forward to: the summer vacation. Every year during these times I take a nostalgic trip to my school days and those summer vacations when our street used to be my second home and where I used to spend whole days in the mud playing with my marbles, tops, gulli danda, gully cricket, swimming in the canals of our sugarcane fields and when you get tired all you had to do is just to uproot a sugarcane and have your lunch, when our holidays were spent visiting our relatives or they visiting us and it used to be big festival where all the cousins meet, I can go on and on about it.

I have preserved my collection of marbles that I have won to this date and who can forget the days on our terraces spent with flying our kites made of newspapers and held together with cooked rice which acts like a glue.

Now when I look out of the window of my flat during these holidays the street is marked by the absence of children who are busy attending tuitions/coaching classes for the next term, whose spare time is spent in front of TV, or with the latest game consoles or if nothing else a trip to the local mall or even a select few may be preparing themselves for the reality shows on TV.
The times are changing maybe these children will have a collection of game’s DVDs instead of marbles and they also get nostalgic about their PS3s and Xboxes and I would trade everything that I have today for putting some water boats in the rain water poodle in the playground of my school.

Those were the days !!!

The month of February of 2009 may as well be called the pink month. Its pink everywhere, from millions of pink slips being handed over to employees world over to the pink panties that are being sent to Pramod Mutalik the cheif of Shri Ram Sene in India as a mark of protest against his stand over valentine's day celebration.
Though lots of women/men support this kind of protest some say that it is not a dignified way of protest. Now for the kind of outrage that this gang of thugs committed there can be no so called 'dignified' way of protest. You can't reason with the unreasonable, you can't be logical with the illogical and you can't be diginified with perverts.
Whatever the nature of this protest is,its a lot more decent than the protest that these hooligans carried out in the name of saving the 'Indian culture'.So go ahead ladies and send all the 'chaddies' you want to send them.Go paint the town pink.After all its not 'andar ki baat'

This year NDTV presented its Indian of the year awards which was decided by a jury which consisted of people like Shashi Tharoor and I tend to agree with their selections for most of the categories except for the lifetime achievement award which was presented to Lal Krishna Advani. This was the worst selection the jury could have made. What kind of achievements were these people thinking about? Here is a person who came to limelight on only one plank…communism, divisive politics, hatred against one particular community or is it just a simple (safest) case of selecting the senior most politician that we have in active politics now that Atal Behari Vajpayee has retired (not that even he deserved this award).

Let us list out few of his events in his political life… The most important one is his Somnath to Ayodhya rath yatra which resulted in the demolition of Babri Masjid and the subsequent communal riots in rest of the country and his party came to power solely on the election promise that his party will build the Ram mandir and when they did occupy the treasury benches then they conveniently forgot about it to remain in power saying they were following coalition dharma but in fact were being following the dharma of hypocrisy.

Now when he was in power first as a home minister and then as the deputy prime minister there was a genocide committed by his party in Gujarat and what did he do to prevent it ? ZILCH.

Also Mr.Advani never gets tired of calling names to prime minister Mr.Manmohan Singh accusing him of being soft of terror and it was his government whose mishandling of the Kandahar resulted in the release of so many dreaded terrorists from India and it was during his tenure as home minister that terrorists attacked our parliament and the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat…

Indeed it has been a lifetime of achievements……. Mr. Pranoy Roy hope you do a good job next time….

One of the inevitable fallouts of the Satyam saga has been the way almost every private sector organization has been indulging in blowing their own trumpet about how much better they are in terms of corporate governance. The Satyam crisis has become a PR exercise for almost every company portraying themselves as the mascots of clean management and hoping this branding will get them some new projects from the same clients whom they shared with Satyam earlier. During this entire episode unfolding in front of us, the question that is foremost on my mind is, is corporate governance only about having clean account books or does it also involve having impeccable business ethics? Mr. Mohandas Pai of Infosys has been spending more time in TV studios than his office saying how unethical Mr. Raju has been all these years. Now this is coming from a person who belongs to a company whose very foundations are surrounded by dubious business ethics when the great Mr. Murthy walked out of Patni Computers along with its best talent and its client. Was that ethical Mr. Murthy? What makes Mr. Murthy more vulnerable to the accusation that Infosys is based on an unethical business decision is his reluctance to come with the truth about those days of his Patni to Infosys transition. Mr. Murthy also says Infosys will not take Satyam employees because it’s in the interest of Satyam but they will not hesitate to take its clients. What will the Satyam employees do if you or other IT majors take all their clients, who will these employees, cater to?

Another corporate bigwig who has been talking about this is Mr. Kamath of ICICI bank. Now open any consumer grievance web site and check and this is the bank against maximum complaints are registered. The way it employs illegal means to recover its loan by hiring goons and this has even resulted in a person’s death. Is this your definition of good corporate governance Mr. Kamath? According to me this is the most unethical bank in our country today and yet no one talks about this. Infosys and ICICI are the best examples of some great PR. They must have some very talented people working in their PR department. The need of the hour is that all corporations realize that clean governance is not only the absence of any fraud or cooking of account books but also providing your products/services to the customer in the most ethical and transparent manner. Only then these people can boast that they are really different from Mr. Raju. All this brings to my mind a Urdu couplet which goes like this:

Is basti mein kaun hamare aansoon paunche ga

Jisko dekho uska daaman bheega lagta hain …

The capital city of our country rocked again not from the crackers of the Ganesh festival but from the serial bomb blasts. When the news start filtering in of blasts many of us think " Oh God !!! it happened again!!!" and within seconds hundreds of lives change forever and within minutes our politicians start politicising the issue.
We had just recovered from all the violence that happened in Jammu and Kashmir and then this happened. There is no shortage of solutions offered by people and experts on how to tackle this issue. We should have tougher laws for terror, a federal agency which will look into such issues, we have to look into the root cause of such terror acts, are some of the solutions offered. But if these are the solutions, then why these solutions are not implemented? If we have tough laws for terror, can we trust our politicians with such laws and hope that they will not misuse it for their own gain. We have seen this happen with Ms.Indira Gandhi using MISA to arrest opposition leaders during the emergency and other leaders (mis)using laws as TADA and POTA. I think the real solution is a combination of all these suggestions, we should look real hard into issues and not just have some committee appointed and give them infinite extensions (Liberhan Commission) or when such a committee submits its report , reject it arbitrarily (Sri Krishna Committee) we should also have a federal agency on the lines of the Election Commission of India which is not answerable to any government (state or central) and also a tough anti-terror law with enough safeguards against misuse against an individual or a community. But I sincerely hope by the time we come up with these solutions or any solution for that matter we will not lose any more innocent lives.
There are a lot more such incidents that have in the last few months that have affected thousands of lives... we will talk about more such issues later....

The whole world is acknowledging that India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The story of the rising middle class of India, spending power of Indians is being told again and again but what is not talked about are manners which come along with these products and which are not listed in the user’s manual.
Everyday on my way to office in my company’s bus I have to go through the torture of hearing people’s problem who can’t seem to talk softly over the phone and sometimes they will be speaking so loudly I end up wondering do they really need to the phone since the other person can hear him even without the phone? The person has bought the phone but what he is not able to buy is the etiquette for using the product.
How many times have we seen on our roads that someone gets down from his car and relieves himself by the roadside or someone spitting from the window of his car or the honking of a car in front of a school or a hospital?
I always dread overtaking a bus on the roads fearing that I will be showered by someone’s saliva.
So what makes to behave us in this manner? An honest answer is that I do not know maybe we are like this only.
As someone had rightly said, the hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

We will talk about some of the myths about a certain breed of humans found predominantly in India and especially in Bangalore region who are called as "Software Engineers".

Now tell any layman that you are a SE and the first thing that comes to his mind is that you earning big money.
I read a news item in Times of India about the salaries of a software engineer in India. A couple of days before this article appeared in the paper we were having a chat about the salaries of freshers in our company and some of them were telling me about how grossly underpaid they are and that their take home salary is around Rs.12, 000.It is only after a couple of years of experience that a person starts earning a decent enough salary especially if his first job is in an Indian service provider company and that too if he switches jobs. Maybe that is one of the reasons for high attrition levels in this industry: low salary for entry-level positions, but we will talk about the topic of attrition and talent crunch in IT industry some other day.
The second myth is that every software engineer is a "software developer". Now nothing can be far from truth than this because SEs work at different levels of a Software Development Life Cycle and development is just another part of this process. If you are working for a large IT service provider then chances are that you might be working in a product support project where you just support the product developed earlier. For example: If the customer is using a software and he faces any issues with it then he logs a Trouble Ticket and you solve his issue; in another words you just troubleshoot the product.
Another strange myth, strange to the extent of being funny is that every SE has to go onsite and if it happens that the client he is working for is a domestic one or if he is working for a product company where there are very little or no chances of going abroad then he is not a good SE or not "techie" enough.
Well if I think about any more myths about our brethren I will come back with another post.
Till then Shalom.

I wanted to write about our driving habits for a long time now but was feeling lazy. This video from You Tube solved my problem more than adequately. Sit back and enjoy the video.

Starting where we left off last time I had mentioned that too much is happening on our TV sets to cover it at one go.
Our discussion will not be complete without mentioning our 24x7 news channels especially the Hindi news channels where just about anything passes off as news. If there is no news then out of sheer desperation a non-existent story is cooked up like Dawood Ibrahim has shaved off his moustache or Saddam Hussain is still alive even after the US hanged him!I remember how the movie "Da Vinci Code" was hyped by the TV channels during its release time and we had numerous discussions about the validity of the protests and thinking about various such trends I almost forgot to mention the stand up comedy shows and the effect of the popularity of these shows is that even news channels started beaming them!
I can understand that the producers of these channels cannot "manufacture" news 24x7 so we started our own programs on the lines of Top Gear, Yes Minister (looks like originality is not our forte) then started a series of shows about food and now almost every channel has one show about food.
While concluding I would also like to talk about something that is very world class and that is our advertising which is most of the time very original, highly creative and imaginative. Our advertising is truly at par with the rest and best of the world.

If you are just a channel surfer in India (you don't have to be an avid viewer) you would have observed a few trends that have taken place on our desi idiot box.
The most popular is the saas/bahu sagas which started I dont' remember when and I do not see an end to it in the far distant future. I think Ekta Kapoor should rename her serials as "Kayamat se Kayamat Tak".
Then came the KBC craze which took the whole country by storm. The Big B in his new avataar became a crorepati himself while helping others in becoming one.
The most recent TV shows are the singing competitions and this was started by the Indian idol talent hunt. The irony is after finding the Indian idol he has disappeared into oblivion after a very ordinary album.
Another such show was the one in which a TV channel was hunting for a child singing artist and the whole nation went wild sending SMS voting for different kids. God knows how I have suffered because of this (a friend of mine used to use all our gang's phones to vote for one of them).
A gang of few have beens were collected in a glass house and kept under observation to see how they react in front of a camera (because they had forgotten how it feels being in front of one) and the results were quite awful.
A few of my friends are huge fans of a program where a group of music directors chose a few singers and make them sing on stage and then fight among themselves to choose the best of them.
The most pitiable thing about all this is that none of these programs are original in idea.
The daily soaps were "inspired" by the daily soaps like The bold and the beautiful" and "Dynasty".
Indian idol is a copy of American idol, the idea of KBC was stolen from Who wants to be a millionaire so on and so forth...
There is so much to talk about what happens on our TV in our drawing rooms that I have to come back with another piece on it..
So long then.....