The right thing for the right reasons

"You will be measured by how many people turn up when you die" - An old 'wise' man conducting an Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) seminar in my college said. I had stepped into this class after being misled by a lecturer who decided that NLP was about Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks which was my interest at that time. 

I never believed or liked that statement because it meant the only way was to be 'nice'. And at the end of the day what if the people around are idiots? How can they be a better judge than yourself?

Being nice to people is tough. It means lot of time spent convincing others that you are nice. Why waste this little time on earth convincing others when there are more exciting things to do?

"You don't need to be nice to others. Just need to be fair" said the chairman in my previous company in one of his speeches. Phew. Now, this seemed a lot easier. 

Only now, the emphasis is on being fair. Which turns out to be really hard especially when there is a conflict of interest. In fact, it is harder than being nice.

How do you know the right thing to do with the right reasons? 

"I will give you this talisman. When you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away" - Gandhi

That answers everything.

Fooled By Randomness

The beginning of 2008 was great for Indian stocks. Reliance 'Power' IPO had energized the markets. A collegue who shared the cab with me to office was in total frenzy.

Call up the wife intermittently and make decisions on the fly. The wife would watch 'cnbc tv 18' all day and call back her husband whenever Udayan Mukherjee would make an interesting prediction.

Hey, he looks handsome and smart. How can he go wrong?

"Where do you invest your money" the collegue asks me.
"I don't know. I use what I need and pass on the rest to my Dad."
"Dude, You should invest in the stocks. People are getting 30% returns".
"Hmm."

My roommate, an IIM grad who writes financial reports for Investment bankers decides to get into action too after reading 'The Intelligent Investor'.

"Dude, I need some money. " he said excitedly. "Need to 'round off' my portfolio."

Now, the tides have receded.

The same colleague who was riding high is now in debt. No more calls to the wife.

"Dude, I need some money." still says the IIM grad. He needs it to invest more to 'average' his losses. So that he looks less of a fool.

'Fooled by randomness' is an excellent book on stock market dynamics and explains at great length the folly of investors who try to make a quick buck, 'riding' the stock market.

It is the same folly which makes people quit jobs, and invest their 'VRS' money on the stocks. The folly which makes everyday people switch on their TV's daily to financial news and act within the hour to make a quick buck.

The same people look like smart asses when they win but total idiots when they lose. Their happiness index often, a reflection of the Sensex.

Success really seduces a person into thinking he cannot go wrong.

to be contd..

Slumdog Millionaire is poor!

"Did you watch Slumdog Millionaire"? asks my manager in the US.
"Nope"
"Its a great movie. My wife and I saw it together and she was crying throughout the movie"

Now, after watching the movie, I am not very impressed by it (which makes me cast doubt on the relationship between the above 2 people :)).

The script is great. The direction was good. The length of the movie was thankfully just 2 hours. But to say that this is the best Indian movie ever is totally gross. Insult to other excellent Bollywood and Indian regional movies.

The Right Place

One of the feelings people from 'third world' countries surely get when they land in a developed country America or Europe is a sense of betrayal. That they lost out in the cosmic lottery of being born in the right place.

That is what makes people do things like make babies when on a foreign trip so that the baby gets foriegn citizenship. That is also why people do bizzare things like this.

Even Warren Buffett thinks so. "Buffett said his defining moment came at birth when he was born a white male in America. By the luck of that draw, he said, he was afforded opportunities billions of other people were not."

But I would beg to differ.

I would bet that 'truly' successful people would have been successful anywhere you put them. That is why you have the greats like Ambani,  Narayana Murthy etc who have made it on their own in India.

"Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for the county" as JFK said.

As an engineer, I am inclined to think of problems as oppurtunities. If you are an engineer and you dont have any engineering problems to solve, then there is no need for the engineer. 

And India has lots of problems to solve.

The most dangerous thing...

“A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities” has only one real defense, namely that “I do what I do because it is the one and only thing that I can do at all well.” wrote the great mathematician G. H. Hardy.

The most dangerous thing is not being able to justify your existence. Millions of people slack their lives, living on inheritance made by others, living off investments made on stocks alone, working without passion, working in something just for the money.

If you dont justify your existence, you are already dead. Only worse.

What has IT done to us?

People complain why India is not producing quality software products. Yes, it is does  a great job in IT services and custom application development. 

But when it comes to consumer applications, like say Microsoft Office or Blogger or a GMail, it is a totally different ball game.

Unlike IT work, the user interface design, the technology, the features  everything has to be designed from scratch. In IT software development, much of the design work has already been done by the client before it is passed on to an engineer. Also, enterprise software built by by IT cos do not have too much of a performance constraint. You can always throw more hardware at it to make it fast enough.

Modern programming languages like Java and .Net have evolved so much that much of the technology is abstracted and the engineer can just focus on converting business requirements into software. That is why IT cos like Infosys, TCS etc can afford to hire engineers outside Computer Science streams because it is easy to train a reasonably smart engineer in these skills. Because of the job availability, even Computer Science curriculams are getting focussed on IT related skills rather than core computer science skills which are more likely to be useful in product development.

So now we have most engineers becoming 'Jacks of all trades' and 'Masters of None'. Cyber coolies is what they call Indian IT engineers. 

Why do we need product companies if IT is doing good enough?

You just have to look at this to understand that. The market cap of product companies is not tied to the size of the companies. Product companies, the tenth of the size of an Infy make much more money than IT cos. For an Infy, the only way to make more revenue is to hire more people who are then billed $25 per hour if they get a project. Compare this to YouTube which was built by 2 people and sold to Google for $1 billion. 

And then, the other problem with IT is that the work is distributed solely on the basis of labour cost arbitrage. The day other countries like China, Vietnam and Philipines are able to provide English speaking engineers at a lower cost, the jobs will move out of countries like India. 

I think there is clearly a dearth in top quality colleges which can train engineers in skills useful for product development. And it can even be an evening course for working IT professionals. This will sow the seeds for hundreds of product companies which can innovate on par with global standards.

Mallu Land

Coming from a maddeningly crowded state, Kerala in India, I was very relieved to see the vast expanses of non built up land in the USA. Kerala is one of the densest states with the density being 3 times the country's which is best known for her people's libido.

The houses in Kerala are so close to each other. People can hear conversations neibhours make. What TV programs they watch. Too close for comfort. Travel the length of the state and you will be lucky to see a lot of unused land. The traffic freaks you out. They should rename it to 'traffreak'.

Compare this to the state of Utah in the US which is one of the least populated states there.

The impact of this literal space is huge. In Kerala, you literally touch each other when you travel on a crowded bus or a train. It doesnt bother you because you are used to it. But in Utah, stand too close to a person, people think you are gay or a pervert. A one arm distance is the comfortable space. Otherwise, you are invading his space, his privacy and his life. There are other behavioral impacts too which maybe another post altogether.

"Why is your country so populated?" asks a colleague in the US.

"Well, India is one of the oldest civilizations. So, it has had more shots at it. But I think the other reason is poverty. People literally bred kids in the earlier days so that they could use them as farm help. Also, infant deaths were very common. So, the only way to ensure you have a progeny by the time you die was to have more kids. Then you have some religions which allow polygamy. "

If you look at the densest states in India, they include West Bengal and Kerala. Did socialism have an impact on the population? I bet it did.

Land was concentrated with a few people in post independent India. The land workers were oppressed. What did these socialists do? Land reforms. Divide surplus land to the land workers. So, lets assume a land worker got 5 acres of land thanks to the distribution. Now, what does he do with it? He ain't have no money to bring in labour for the farm. Its too small to use modern farm equipment either. So, lets make kids and use them for the farm work!

Thank you so much, EMS and other Indian Marxian's!

"Land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts. It will come to you, this love of the land. There's no gettin' away from it if you're Irish." -- says a quote in 'Gone With The Wind'.

There's no gettin' away from it if you're Mallu either.

Don't Walk. Run!

Great leaders talk well. But more importantly they walk the talk. 

All eyes are on Obama now as he delivers his inaugaration speech which ironically we hope is the last of his rhetorical speeches. Its time for action.

How to stop doing work you dont want to?

We only have so much time. Why waste time doing stuff you don't really enjoy?

Like listening to advice from managers. Documentation at work (I hate MS Word). Attending inconsequential trainings. Meetings. Teleconferences. Talking to someone you don't like. The list is endless.

The solution is 'Strategic Incompetence'. When someone asks you to do something you don't like, do it so badly that he doesn't ask you again.

Some tips:
1. Argue constantly with people who bug you on Instant messengers till they stop it
2. Constantly ask inconsequential questions in inconsequential trainings till the trainer get tired
3. To someone who keeps giving bad advice, like managers, constantly argue with their ideas, till they give up
4. At work, if you are asked to do a lot of worthless documentation, do it badly so nobody asks you. For e.g. choose bad templates for presentations

The same link has some other excellent tips like 'hiding in an iPod', 'answering email less frequently' etc.

Like all other things, persistence is the key.

Caveat: You can lose your job if you try this too hard.

Black or White

Ever noticed that in most Indian movies the characters have only two shades? Black or White. Either you are good or bad.

And it is not just in the movies. As was expected, a CPM politician in Kerala is suspended for praising Modi's investor friendly policies in Gujarat.

Politics aside, is this an Indian trait that we do not look at people in shades of grey?

Maybe it is the reason why we worship our heroes when their star is high and literally bulldoze them when the make a mistake. And it doesn't have to matter if the mistake affects others directly or not.

Even animals can see greyscale. Why shouldn't we?

God's Debris

Life's questions continue to haunt us in spite of so many advances in scientific research. In fact many believe that those questions will never be answered.

It then takes someone like Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic to offer an explanation.

God's Debris is a 'thought experiment' which states that God at one point got bored running out of challenges and destroyed himself to see if he can comeback again. And at this stage, we are God's debris. Slowly but steadily, the debris that is the individuals are beginning to get connected and reach a higher level of consciousness.

As bizarre it may seem, it is an interesting and humorous read. Get it here.

Contrarian Minds

"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me." said Jack Nicholson in the movie Departed.

Most people are products of their environments and circumstances. Their joy and sorrow are so tied to external factors.

The famous Stanford Prison Experiment where students did role plays of prison life bears testimony to this.

The Broken Windows Theory is an example where this concept used in a positive way.

I think that was the true genius of people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mandela. They all determined that no matter what circumstances they are put into, their mind and actions need not be influenced by it.

Mediocre, but arrogant

"This year we saved Rs 15000 by removing toilet paper in our offices and Rs 10000 by reducing 'unnecessary' expenses on employees" said an IIM grad, a new hire to the finance dept of our company at an yearly 'Meet the Management' function. And we all had to clap at the end of his talk.

Doesn't this MBA realize that his savings for the year was a mere trickle for a company of this size and the very time he was wasting talking about his 'genius', itself was costing the company more than what he saved? And then, I am sure these saving would again show up in his annual appraisal which would again give him a nice fat raise. All for nothing.

My more than 4 years of working experience has witnessed many many such instances of management stupidity. New managers suddenly coming in, throwing in their ideas learnt from management books which do not apply to my field.

Sales managers trying to make a quick buck by promising the world to the client:

"We can throw as many engineers as we want at a problem and get the solution done" - Was the quote that one of the clients remembered from a sales manager who won a project for my previous employer but which ended by getting scrapped because of under-estimation of the project costing the company a loss of millions of dollars.

This sales manager clearly had no idea about Software engineering.

"Dude, you can't get a baby out of 9 healthy ladies in one month!!!"

If they are stupid with people, why do you need to be an MBA to become a manager then? After all, the decisions making skills are based on common sense and logic.

Being an MBA does not make you a good leader. It only imparts certain skills like Financial Administration or Organizational Administration.

I hope people realize this sooner and relieve us of their tyranny.

We are not rational. We only rationalize.

A conversation at a restaurant which a colleague and I frequently visit:

"I notice you keep ordering the Biriyani + extra chicken combo but don't end up eating the extras. Why do you order the extras then?" 

"Biriyani costs Rs. 60. With the combo, it is Rs. 70. Only more by Rs. 10.", came the reply.

So, here we have someone willing to lose Rs. 10 just to get the satisfaction of getting a better perceived value. 

Apparently, it is not a strange behavior.  

At an experiment in a college,  100 students were asked to choose between 

1. eBook for $15

2. Print of the same book for 125

95% chose the former. 

Later a different set of 100 students, were asked to choose between 

1. eBook for $15

2. Print of the same book for 125

3. Print of the book + eBook for 125

85% chose the 3rd option. Apparently, the notion of 'perceived' value affects judgement. 

Below is an eye opening video illustrating the above mentioned experiment.

Planning to test these concepts on my Manager for the appraisal :)

2020

"America is certainly the land of opportunity". An Indian gentleman I met at a restaurant in America, told me on the first day I set foot there. This IIT  graduate was a middle aged person who had settled down in the States with a firang wife and self owned booming software outsourcing company.

Since then, more people have said the same things to me. A Pakistani who owns a fledging cab service. A cab driver with ambitions to start a country wide chain of veterinary centers. 

You then think why can't India be the same? People say that the infrastructure, the job oppurtunities, the easier life all are the main reasons that make America a land of opportunity. 

But I think it is something beyond these things.

The thing that I noticed most among people here was that they all have  a dream. A dream to be better. To lead a better life. 

The dream that makes a 52 year old mother to learn about a new software so that she can get a better job. The same dream that makes a Help Desk person in my company to attend evening classes at a university. 

I think this is the key difference. In India, people work to survive. The bar for people in India is much lower. The enemy is within.

Why is this so? Lack of role models? Maybe. America was after all built by people who wanted change. In the earlier times, you could only get into this country if you had complimentary skills. Even now, the stringent Visa policy ensures that they don't take in parasites.

But the winds of change are slowly but steadly changing the course of India. New age entrepreneurs are teaching us to dream big. 

It is probably for good reason that I keep hearing on the radio in the USA that India will be the next big thing in 20 years.

UPDATE: My cousin pointed out that 2009 + 20 != 2020. I was aware of this and the title of the post is a reference to APJ Abdul Kalam's dream of Vision 2020.

Social Networks

Orkut, Facebook etc are excellent tools for communication. They are also excellent contact lists.

Because there is no body language involved here, one can 'appear' to be nice and 'cool' to others easily and everyone can be happy thinking that other people really like them or think that they are 'cool'. I think that in essence is the reason why people flock to social networks.  

But now, what happens if that 'virtual reality' begins to affect reality?

For instance, I know a case where a likely bridegroom prospect was dropped because of some 'status' on that user's Orkut profile. 

Employers are now scanning social networks to scan employee activities and profile new candidates. 

Maybe this means that people will be more genuine in the future but still, a person in a different generation can easily draw different interpretations about people when they read profiles. 

Thankfully, social networks are now giving tools to protect privacy by giving options to users about what to hide and what not to. 

Bicycle for the mind

Computers are like bicycles for the mind. Steve Jobs makes this point beautifully in this video. 

Come to think of it, the software that we write are intangible abstractions in the mind.

They are like castles in the sky but having some very useful purpose. That is what makes programming very powerful and interesting because the only limitations are the limitations of the mind. 

This is what excites me most and why I love my job so much :)

On NRI's

What is the easiest way for an Indian to make money? 

Either be lucky and win a lottery or work a little hard and get a job in a foriegn country whose currency is disproportionately stronger than the mighty Rupee. 

The people who end up doing the latter, save money by living a austere life in that foriegn country. Once they have saved enough (usually indicated by retirement age in that country), they get hieghtened notions of love for motherland and jump on the next flight to India with a dream to live the next years of life in luxury in their country with the disproptionate wealth gained by converting currencies.

What does this activity mean for India? 

Once these NRI's come back to India with their disproportionate wealth, their consumption of natural resources also increase, inflating real estate prices the most. Remember that these people have not paid taxes in their working years but now consume the resources that are available because of the taxpayer money.

So, the people who stay back in India either because of their incapacity to go abroad or because of their stubberness to do something good in the country itself are paying the cost of this disproportionate wealth earned by the NRI's.

That doesnt mean to say that NRI's do not contribute anything. NRI investment in India's Industry means a lot. But it just ends up making making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

What is the solution for this?

My thoughts are that the government of India should have a 'disproportionateness quotient' for each currency and tax that amount when people convert the currency. This money should then be used in invest in Industry.

No truth left in Satyam

'Satyam' means 'the Truth' in so many Indian languages. Yet, Indian IT company: Satyam Computers has now been named as India's Enron. This link has the resignation letter from the Chairman who did the fraud.

Apparently, the reason for the fraud was poor performance leading to concerns over share value decline and take over from other companies and therefore loss of control for the promoters.

The Chairman was someone who was seen as a role model for entrepreneurs having built one of the top IT companies in India.

Why would someone who is so successful and reputed do this? After all, rational people evaluate the cost of a lie before doing it.

But it turns out, it is the success itself which causes people to do this: “Success is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking they can’t lose” - Bill Gates 

The Right Response

More than a month has passed since the Mumbai Terror attacks and the government is still in PR mode with Pakistan trying to win points from US. The inaction has left  more people angry with the Govt more than anything else. 

One wonders then what the right response to these attacks is, especially in the light of the recent Israeli response to Palestine 

India cannot certainly afford a full blown war, both economically and the impact of potential isolation from the rest of the world because of the war. The right response then should be tactical:

Stop all trade with Pakistan - I cant believe trade and travel routes are still open with Pakistan. 

Initiate global sanctions to force Pakistan to handover the list of terrorists demanded by India.

Freeze assets of terrorist organizations.

Hang Kasab  - India is probably the only country which will look for appropriate 'legal services' for the only terrorist captured alive in its territory.

Invest in R&D for alternate fuel - Money from Oil is the primary source of funds for Islamic Militants. 

Is it worth it?

What does it mean when days go by very fast? Work days travel quickly because you are busy as hell in those 10 hours at work. Weekends run out even more quickly because there is always so much to do.

The speed is thrilling but when you look back you always think whether it was worth it. 

The only way then is to ensure that you do what you love.