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.