Mind Sparks

LOST Finale - The Al Gore Version

2010-05-21T16:29:00.004+05:30

Well, as the finale episode(s) of LOST is going to be aired soon, zillions of fans across the world (including me) are waiting with bated breath. Of course one man has been consistent with his predictions for the climax of LOST, and he is Al Gore.

Between bites of his Burger King's Whopper and IHOP's Pancake combo he managed to tell me how he thinks LOST will end...

Evil villain from Bond movie comes to life...

2010-03-13T15:49:00.005+05:30

For all of you who ever rolled your eyes thinking that the villains in James Bond movies were over the top, unrealistic and comical here is proof that they do exist.

All Kim Jong Il has to do is remove his hands from the pockets of his mink coat, flick a switch, adjust a couple of dials and pull a lever... and Voilà! the floor will open and you will fall into a pool filled with piranhas or something, while deadly nuclear missiles will be launched targeting every capital city in the world!

One might make a mistake of saying 'Look how happy he is, he couldn't hurt a fly', but let me tell you ladies, never ever trust a bond villain, especially this one. Do you know his codename?

It is KjIl and the j is just a distraction...

(for more pictures of this bond villain, go here)

No smoke without fire

2010-02-24T13:50:00.005+05:30

The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina happened in the year 1982. I was born in that year and my only knowledge about this conflict comes from the various History Channel documentaries I have seen.

But this post is not about the Falklands War; its about how seemingly unrelated pieces of information from unrelated sources always has some some connection! There is definitely no smoke without fire!

This past Saturday, I read in the Mint Lounge (according to me, the best weekend English read) a travelougue by Wendell Rodricks titled "You need visa power: Ahead of a 51-day cruise around South America, the merry-go-round begins at home"

It was a good read which described both the awesome nature of such a journey and the idiosyncrasies of all the visa related hassles. But here is the thing, it had this one small piece of information about visa problems for visiting Falklands Islands.

Meanwhile, Argentina was throwing a fit: “Your ship is going to the Falklands. We don’t recognize that name. Reapply with ‘Islas Malvinas’.” I curse the Falklands War and reapply with newly attested fingerprints and affidavit.

I remember thinking about the Falklands War as I read this and wondering if there was some new conflict brewing these days.

Lo! And behold I read in the Times,UK today about rising rhetoric and tension about the Falklands! Here is an excerpt from 'Troubled Waters'

Britain is sensibly playing down talk of a new war with Argentina. Since the Falklands conflict in 1982, London has slowly but steadily rebuilt its relations with Buenos Aires, now an important trading and political partner. But the Government has made it quite clear that the islands and access to them are, and will be, defended in the face of any new threat from the mainland.
Argentina’s declaration that it will do all it can to prevent the drilling for oil in Falklands waters must be dismissed for what it is: foolish bluster, provoked by dreams of oil wealth under the seas and intended to divert Argentine public opinion from the failings of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s floundering administration

I am having immense (for lack of a better term) sense of deja vu about this. This smoke and fire quotation makes too much sense!
Also, the power of travelogues is immense, don't you think?

Horsing around...

2010-02-10T20:54:00.010+05:30

I recently got the opportunity to witness the Mahalakshmi Derby, out here in Mumbai, thanks to a friend who got passes to the event.

But more than seeing the horses and the race, it was the crowd which was fascinating. Here are the three typical characters.

#1, Major-ly into the betting, I-Have-To-Pee-Like-A-Horse-But-Need-To-See-The-Results types

#2, Hot chicas, Wonder-If-There-Is-Someone-With-A-Shorter-Skirt-Than-Mine types,

(BTW, Oh yes there were; this lady above was actually wearing the longest of skirts)

#3, Mr. RichDude Punter, I-Am-Rich-And-I-Don't-Care-If-The-Horse-Loses type

A good fun outing, I must say. Especially, if the filly you bet Rs. 10 to WIN has good odds, and you get back Rs. 50!

Jacqueline did win, although I did feel bad for Onassis - who like his name sake could not keep up with the foxy lady! :)

The Razzies nominations have been announced...

2010-02-02T20:43:00.001+05:30

(Click on picture to enlarge)

Giddy heights...

2010-01-23T19:01:00.006+05:30

My fascination for climbing tall building and looking down at the land and people below is an old one. I was already fascinated by buildings and had tried to reach the highest floor of tall buildings in my hometown of Bangalore, when I read the romantic interpretation of the skyscraper as an epitome of human achievement in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and I was hooked. There is something about a tall building that is surreal - it literally and figuratively takes you above and beyond the mundane and the trite.

This fascination for reaching the top floors of tall buildings continued, and when I was in Singapore, I remember pestering my friends to accompany me in trying to get to the top of some random skyscraper. One hilarious incident took place when I forcefully took a bunch of friends up the elevators of a tall building in the Raffles area of Singapore. We ended up on the topmost floor accessible through the elevator only to find that there was no view to be had, as this was the lobby of one of the offices in the building. Although, I was mildly disappointed that there was no 'view from the top' to be had, it filled me with excitement to feel my ears pop at the altitude! But, this of course did not satiate my need to 'reach the top' and towards the end of my stay in Singapore, my friend and I did manage to go up to the 71st floor of the Swisotel building, Singapore's tallest, to the New Asia Bar, and my glee was visible!

Another experience in heights was when I visited Kuala Lumpur and went up the Menara Kuala Lumpur, or KL tower. Although, shorter in height than the Petronas Towers, which I could not climb due to unavailability of tickets, it was nevertheless a tall building and I enjoyed every moment of being on top of it.

People who know me, clearly know my dislike for Dubai as a city. It is, according to me, very pretentious and tries very hard at being a tourist friendly place, but it is not. For a skyscraper enthusiast though, there can be no going around the fact that the tallest building in the world is now in Dubai and I am itching to go see it - from the top. I remember going to the base of the construction site of the Burj Khalifa in early 2009, when it was still being constructed and being awestruck at its height.

My inherent fascination for tall buildings, combined with this inspiring comparison about the Burj Khalifa's design being inspired from Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt Mile-High Illinois makes it irresistible to my skyscraper fetish. (Frank Lloyd Wright, who it has been noted by Ayn Rand herself, as being the inspiration for the character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, adds compelling incentive)

The Burj is American in another way. Most of the coverage of the Dubai tower has focussed on its height and its location, but it is also an interesting design. The form is not a minaret, like the Petronas Towers, or a stylized spire, like the Taipei Financial Center. Smith (who is no longer with SOM) and Baker have not produced an elongated cluster of shoe boxes like the Sears Tower, a high-tech-construction like Norman Foster's Hearst Tower, or a twisty sculpture a la Santiago Calatrava. Instead, they have opted for a distinctly unfashionable organic form, a sort of stalagmite. Many observers have noted the similarities between the Burj and Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt 1956 proposal for a 528-story state office building for Chicago's lakefront, which he christened the Mile-High Illinois. Wright's design is twice as high as the Burj, but there are distinct parallels. Both buildings are constructed of reinforced concrete; both have floor plates that reduce in area as the building rises, producing a stepped-back silhouette; both have a treelike central core that rises the full height of the building to become a spire. And both use a tripod design: The Mile High is triangular in plan, and the Burj has three wings that act as buttresses.

I'm not sure if the famously prickly Wright would have considered imitation the sincerest form of flattery, but he would have been pleased to see a version of his conception take shape in the Middle East, which was the site of one of his most spectacular unbuilt projects. In 1956, the government of the young king of Iraq, Faysal II, aiming to modernize the city of Baghdad, commissioned a number of leading Western architects: Walter Gropius for a new university, Alvar Aalto for the national gallery, and Le Corbusier for a stadium and sports complex. Wright was invited to build the opera house. The Old Wizard, as his biographer Brendan Gill called him, produced an astonishing interpretation of Scheherazade on the Tigris, a circular opera house surrounded by colonnades and water gardens, and topped by an open spire containing a statue of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp. Shortly after the design was completed, King Faysal and his family were murdered in a military coup, and the new regime abandoned the project. Fanciful proposals, such as the Baghdad Opera House and the Mile-High Illinois, are usually regarded as slightly off-key, the day dreams of a master in his dotage. The Burj suggests that the Wiz still has lessons to teach us.

(Read the complete article here)

Terrorist paragliders?

2010-01-22T22:02:00.003+05:30

My non-humorous attempt at coming up with something as awesome as the people at http://www.flyyoufools.com/ Well I can try, can I not ?

(Click picture to enlarge)

My gym guilt... sigh!

2010-01-22T18:35:00.003+05:30

(click picture to enlarge...)

"Girls are Strange...", 6th November 2009

2009-11-06T17:10:00.004+05:30

"Girls are Strange...", 5th November 2009

2009-11-05T19:54:00.003+05:30

"Girls are Strange...", 2nd November 2009

2009-11-03T20:22:00.002+05:30

Travel on my mind

2009-11-02T15:20:00.003+05:30

I can by no account be called a traveler, for I have been to very few places in this world; although in my mind, I am a wanderer, a person who likes to explore and a person who knows geography - as it is shown in maps and recounted in the numerous travelogues and history books, I have read.

But more or less, since the time I last posted on this blog, my travel quotient has been higher - I have had the opportunity to go to few places, and all these have left me with richer knowledge, unforgettable experiences and above all a great sense of being!

I do not know when I will get around to writing a travelogue for all these journeys, but here are some photographs which tell the story as well -

Journey in the Konkan - Ratnagiri, Guhagad, Ganapatiphule, Chiplun
In Durian Land - Kuala Lumpur
Amongst the Rajputs - Jaipur
Rooftop of the World - Leh
Beach cocktail - Goa

I came across this wonderful article by Pico Iyer (amongst many books, the author of The Global Soul; which I think is a superb book every traveler should read) about Somerset Maugham, titled The Perfect Traveler.

Here is a superb description of what I agree should be the characteristics of a perfect traveler, from this article -

The perfect traveler must be a perfect contradiction. She should be open to almost everything that comes her way, but not too ready to be taken in. He should be worldly, shrewd, his feet firmly on the ground; but he must also have the capacity to give himself over to moments of real wonder. He or she must be curious, observant, spirited and kind—ready to spin a spell-binding tale of adventure and irony at the Explorers’ Club, and then throw it all over for a crazy romance in the South Seas.

The above characteristics and an attitude as described by Robert Frost in "The Road not taken"(in its philosophical but also in its literal sense) are my prescription for a traveler!

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

If half the world were sterile...

2009-07-28T16:48:00.004+05:30

I came across this interesting article by David Brooks in the New York Times. It talks about a scenario where one half of the entire population of the Earth, is rendered sterile due to some hypothetical, freak Solar 'incident'. What would happen in such a situation? I tend to agree with the author that the fabric of society would disintegrate - majority of the human race lives on the premise that "I am living today, to make my tomorrow better". In a situation where entire populations of a continent does not have a tomorrow, there will not be any shards of moral fabric left in them, to help them distinguish between right and wrong.

I found this particular excerpt very powerful -

Instead there would be brutal division between those with the power to possess the future and those without. If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit that shares the same destiny.
.....
But, of course, that’s the beauty of this odd question. There are no sterilizing sunspots. Instead, we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.

It is in this context that we should view crackpot schemes which are usually proposed by crazy, dictator wannabes. It has been said rightly that "Power corrupts; And absolute power corrupts, absolutely". Those who are power hungry, even for the sake of the 'common good' (the main raison d'etre of most governments around the world) are easily corrupted by this very same 'common good'.

Distrust those who claim to offer these global panacea. There is a rot of corruption behind them.

Hat Tip: Marginal Revolution - where the discussion first started!

Identity politics...

2009-07-24T21:12:00.003+05:30

(Click on Image to enlarge)

Big government?

2009-07-24T20:38:00.007+05:30

(Click on picture to enlarge)

I am obviously not that great at pencil sketching... but metaphorically, this above sketch of mine came out right!

As Robert Samuelson rightly asks in this article, what are the consequences of this growing obesity of the government? Here is an exercpt...

The question that President Obama ought to be asking -- that we all should be asking -- is this: How big a government do we want? Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.
We face an unprecedented collision between Americans' desire for more government services and their almost-equal unwillingness to be taxed.

The State of the Blog

2009-02-16T19:25:00.005+05:30

It has been quite a while since I made a post and there are are a few of reasons for this. One - there has been way more significant work at office, and I haven't been able to devote any quality time on blogging/writing. Two - I blame twitter and facebook also for my lacuna towards blogging. While I am still new on twitter, it is addictive and I have close to 280 tweets in the past two months as compared to close to 98 blog posts in the past four years. Facebook on the other hand has been a good find - while I have been 'active' on facebook for over an year now, getting in touch with old friends and classmates, has started off now, more earnestly, as its been close to an year since I have been out of college now. And three - given points number one and two, I have become extremely lazy on the internet. Staring at the computer screen is not really what I want to do at the end of a hard days work, and hence blogging has suffered.

The basic premise of this blog has not changed - it will still be 'Wittily, for free markets' (although it seems, that only I find the witty part). Also, I intend to be more frequent in my posts (once, everyday is the dream!) - so I intend to make small opinion posts, instead of long well, researched articles - a development, arising surely out of the twitter addiction I have been having. But, it will defintiely be longer than 140 characters and will NOT have status message kind of posts (after this one, please)- I need to keep my twitter stream active as well.

In terms of content of the blog, as I have mentioned the main focus will be 'Free markets', but I wish to examine not only theory and numbers (stuff wehere I try to be a pseudo-intellectual, trying to decipher what economists are saying), but also focus on some real world examples I happen to see everyday. To quote an oft quoted phrase - "(Free Markets) are an idea whose time has come, and nothing is more powerful than that!"

On other developments which I want the reader to take notice is that, I have found that my hardly used wordpress blog- Idea Architecture - has always generated more comments than the more frequently-posted-at blog, here. But, this is the domain I want active - so I will be using the wordpress page as a surrogate. I will be cross posting every post I make here on the wordpress account with a 'click here' to read more link. Hopefully, I can bring all the wordpress readers to view my blog at this website. This won't be happening immediately, as I need to take care of a few things before I do that, but yes - it shall be done!

Well thats it then. Mind Sparks!

"Ceteris Paribus & in Hindsight, we were right!"

2008-12-22T12:20:00.013+05:30

Mint has an article today about an American journalist's perspective on how Indian banks avoided the global economic crisis.

The basic premise of the article is the author's 'mea culpa' reaction which Americans, the US Feds and specifically Alan Greenspan should have. The 'No regulation in the banking sector stand' which the above mentioned "culprits" had maintained, in comparison to the "prudent and timely controls" by the State (read RBI's ex-governor YV Reddy) in India, is the main reason why Indian banks are safe, while American and Eurpoean ones aren't.

The author interviews India's top bankers who are partayed as being very 'perplexed' about how the Americans could have been so 'greedy'. They compete with one another in having a 'our garbage don't stink' smugness when they gesticulate about how Indian banks are more regulated and hence - 'safe from greed'. They all seem to accept that had they been shown the carrot of deregulation, they would most probably have gone ahead and 'sinned' just like the American banks. They all seem to agree, that while they opposed RBI's stringent measures at the time they were being introduced, in hindsight they thank RBI that they did not have the 'temptation to sin'. One of them even goes on to say that the RBI governor saved them!

There you have it folks - India's top bankers agree that they are children who need to be 'shown the right way' at every step, lest they should fall prey to the evil, greedy temptations that are by the wayside!

I find this attitude revolting - but who is to blame for our apparent lack of morals and self regulation in the absence of a grand regulator? Well, the answer is simple - the regulator.

While the article gives due credit to YV Reddy's foresight of 'applying brakes too early than too late', I find the complete lack of comparing the two situations in the right context, apalling! One needs to compare oranges with oranges, after all.

The crux of the problem in the US economy is the government sponsored push towards increased home ownership. This push by the US state to over-promote homeownership has been the 'prodigal push to the stack of dominoes' which eventually lead to Fannie and Freddie becoming over aggresive mortgage lenders, to the over exposure to subprime borrowers, development of CDOs and all those other weapons of financial mass destruction. The important fact one needs to observe here is that the crux of the issue starts with government interferring in the working of the market. By artificially trying to boost homeownership, the government essentially lets loose excessive corporate risk taking - this is essentially what happened.

Robert Shiller in the book "The Subprime Solution" analyses this very problem and rightly points out that -

"Overly aggressive mortgage lenders, compliant appraisers, and complacent borrowers proliferated to feed on the housing boom. Mortgage originators, who planned to sell off the mortgage to securitizers, stopped worrying about the repayment risk. They typically made only perfunctory efforts to assess borrower's ability to repay their loans - often failing to verify borrower's income with the Internal Revenue Service, even if they possessed signed authorization forms permitting them to do so."

The reader, here would kindly note that a regulatory enviroment existed. The borrowers were essentially required to authorize the lender rights - to verify the borrower's ability to repay the loan. But in an environment where checking if a borrower can repay, would have hindered the mortage lender's chances of 'closing a deal', a lot was let slip between cup and lip. Afterall, there was the Big Brother State standing behind mortgage lenders like Fannie and Freddie waiting to write-off bad assets, you see.

Does my arguement here then mean that in India there is no government sponsored boost for home ownership? The answer is, partly yes. As one CEO-designate of one of the largest banks in India tells the author -

"Indian banks are not levered like American banks. Capital ratios are 12 and 13%, instead of 7 or 8%. All those exotic structures like CDO and securtization are a very tiny part of our banking system. So a lot of the temptations didn't exist"

Luckily, it seems that the Indian State has not got behind the 'increasing home ownership' bandwagon. While HDFC has been a private player (majority stake) in the Indian mortgage market it has not come under pressure from the government to boost home ownership and therefore no apparent need to take excessive risks by creating money out of thin air using CDOs and other weapons of mass financial destruction.

The housing real estate market in India has to a large extent grown due to growth in Indian economy, not due to subsidies given by the government. Therefore it has not been a 'government generated boom'. As Murray Rothbard elucidates - the 'bust' in the business cycle is usually causally linked to the earlier government generated 'boom'. The market economy is self correcting and will quickly eliminate the earlier government generated errors in investment, unless the process of adjustment is interfered with by government policies. (Source)

Also, one needs to evaluate the relative sizes and trend of the two economies being compared. I am currently involved in an assignment which is trying to study how Indian consumers are responding to the global recession - and the main problem I face, is ascertaining whether Indian consumers are in fact, facing a pinch like their western counterparts. The growth in the Indian economy and the new affluence which many Indians have witnessed as a result, is making the Indian consumer somewhat of a contrarian.

Considering many such differernt nuances about the nature of the Indian and American economies, I think it would incorrect to heap all the praise on the strict regulatory environment of the Indian banking regulators as the main reason why Indian banks are safe vis-a-vis American banks. That would be assuming that Ceteris Paribus all other conditions are the same between the two economies. Unfortunately, with the case of central macro economic planning, the only way to prove something would be based on what has, by luck, turned out to be a better strategy, in hindsight.

God forbid, if the same Indian bankers were asked by the government to start lending money to people wanting to increase home ownership, the same incentives which drove the 'greedy' American banker might tempt our bankers too. Would not happen in India you say? Read this.

"The government, on its part, also infused Rs 4,000 crore into the housing sector through National Housing Bank (one of the reasons for LIC Housing Finance cutting its rates) and forced PSU banks to slash home loan rates for new loans of up to Rs 20 lakh.

The steps taken by the government and the RBI were also aimed at reviving the housing sector which is struggling because of the slowing economy"

So it begins...

Three articles that are worth reading.

2008-12-10T17:44:00.005+05:30

Here are three articles I find very interesting.

1. 'Macroeconomics is Complete Bunkum' - by Bill Frezza: For a free market supporter and a strong follower of the Austrian School of Economics like me, this article rings as being very true. As the author mentions, it is only Hayek, Rothbard and other Austrian School economists like Menger who advocated the futility of the use macroeconomic statistics and its direct result - central planning. I say down with this macroeconomic, central planning nonsense! Viva Liberty!

MACRO-ECONOMIST: Voodoo Indeed!

(Hat Tip to Mr. Sadowski in the RCM comments)

2. 'Our Friends in Bombay' - by Christopher Hitchens: Staying true to my earlier call that people around the world need to be continually sensitized about the regular nature of terrorist attacks in India - the most by any standard, outside of a war zone - I find this article as a superb piece of straight talk by Mr. Hitchens.

3. 'Eye Spy' - by Priya Ganapati: Finally! Here is something I have always hoped would happen. A camera in the eye! As a photography enthusiast, one of my regular complaints is the fact that in the presence of a camera, people being photographed, stop being 'themselves' and pose. While I accept that it is a mark of a great photographer who can prevent his subject from doing this, I have hoped many times that the camera become invisible. Like an extension to ones' eye. Well, a camera in one's eye socket is the closest to this dream as can be!

My Story...

2008-11-30T20:28:00.006+05:30

It has been a long time now, and I have seen it all. I was born in early December in the year ninteen hundred and twenty four when the Nation I was born in, was still a hostage. It was hostage under an imperial dynasty which was weak and waning in its superiority around the world, and to make itself feel great, I was conceived. I was concieved in honour of a British King, but my favour has always been to the Grand City and the Nation I was born in. And what a Grand City it is, where my foundations are rooted - Bombay!

Ah! Bombay - the city of oppulence, the city of poverty, the city of trade, the city of love, the city of glamour, the city of an undying spirit and above all the city of dreams. The dreams of a scores and scores of my countrymen from the hinterland and scores of others from around the world. A coastal gateway to the magnificence that is India. This is the city I was born in and the city that I have seen grow to great heights, all the time being the very fuel feeding in to this vast nation's engine. And I have seen the strength which my country has gained.

I was there on the day our country gained Independence from the imperialists and I sighed a sigh of relief and of victory. I stood witness as the last regiment of the Imperial army beat a retreat past me, and sail away from the shores of Bombay, and away from the shores of India. I stood there that day with my grand elder brother - a magnanimous gentleman, who was born a few years before me, in defiance of the very imperialists who were retreating that day. And boy, did we rejoice that day - for we knew what a nation like ours could achieve in freedom.

We have stood, my brother and I, during all these years - witnessing our young nation grow. But we have also seen her suffer and cry out in pain; but we have stood steadfast in our patriotic duty to our nation - my brother as a great, grandeur host to all the leaders and businessmen of the world, with me welcoming all those who wish to enter our great city and nation. For the last sixty one years of our young nation's independence we have stood in service and have done so proudly.

During these years we have heard our city cry in pain when being subject to many atrocities against her. We have stood witness to many cruel and evil people try to undermine the very fabric of our city's gene - and also seen them fail. They have tried to demonstrate through thier impotent, evil and sinister ways that they can hold the enterprising nature of our citizens hostage. Through fear and terror they have tried to shut down our thriving businesses and disrupt the very way of our lives. They have repeatedly tried forcing us into believing that we will fail in our free enterprise and in growing up to be a thriving business market. It has always been they who have failed. Over these years I have personally seen the various atrocities they have tried to bring us on our knees. I have seen mindless riots acted out within yards of where I stand and also I have seen bombs go off in plain view. And I have seen the mindless impotence which has been thrust at our very faces, hoping that it will permanently discourage us.

But I have never seen my city succumbing to any of this. But instead I have seen my city resurgent always - I have seen it fight this terrible evil in a unique way; by proving to the evil doers that nothing they can do will perturb us from believeing in our capability to grow and be free. I have seen both the wealthy businessmen and the struggling street food vendor come back to the very places where henious crimes very committed and be guests of my brother's and my hospitality. I have seen throngs of people light candles and hold protest and also hold each other's hands in unity. I have seen young lovers looking at the vast expanse of the Arabian sea, eager to know what magnificence the future holds for them. I have seen old couples looking at the same expanse of the Arabian sea, thankful for the gifts they have earned through their long lives, gained through hard work. I have seen photographers capture the happiness of families on their vacations and of people marking the passing of their loved ones by strewing the ashes in the sea. And my brother and I have stood in the background of these memories, always happy to welcome all those who wish to come to our city and nation and partake of its greatness and for those who want to contribute to it. And all of them have looked upon our welcoming arms and thanked us for our graciousness.

But it is with a profound sense of grief that I stand this past week for I have witnessed a horrific scene. I have seen my brother's hospitality besieged and held hostage. I have seen his head set on fire by exploding grenades. I have seen evil men, dock their boats full of explosives in my dock. I have witnessed maniacs shoot weapons on the courtyard which cause loud horrific noises, where the loudest sounds usually is that of a group of cheering school girls on a vacation. I have stood witness as many of my city's guests have been brutally killed and my brother's furniture set ablaze. I have witnessed my brother's body burnt and scarred. I have witnessed my winged friends - the pigeons who rest in our courtyard, scared away by the sound of gunshot and blazing fire. I have witnessed the vile impotence of the men who perpetrated this henious crime and the sixty long hours they held my brother's hospitality hostage.

I have witnessed the worst days of my life.

I am in Mourning. I am the Gateway of India.

Ten suggestions to get out of this rut

2008-11-27T19:58:00.004+05:30

How to prevent this incident in Mumbai over the past two days from being forgotten in a couple of days time; when for instance, some starlet wears a blouse which displays her cleavage. Here are my suggestions,

Online Activism: Many journalists are net savvy and have large readership amongst net users. There should be blogs, twitter pages, Facebook communites which keeps the readers updated and provide opportunity to contribute to change
Media Persistence: I sincerely believe that people do not forget such things, unless a more atracting carrot is dangled in front of them. There should be a regular section on every primetime news production to update, everyday on the developments on the investigation of the case
Seek Foreign Interest: I saw a reporter on TV this morning saying that this will have a significant impact on the international opinion because foreigners have been targeted. Call me opportunist and biased, but we Indians have an affection when we are discussed by westerners and we should use tis opportunity to get the international community to see that there is no other place in the world, where there is a terrorist attack every week, and there is hardly a hue and cry. Apart from condolence messages and overtures about how two nations are united in their efforts to fight terror, nothing ever happens. Atleast the public does not know about it. It is time we know, because believe me when I say this, its not the government which is under trouble, its the common man.
Canvas to Think Tanks: Around the world and in India, the politician always has his political party and the idealogical party. The change in attitude needs to come from the idealogues. The idealogical party is the 'school' for politicos. These breed the new generation and they need to come sensitized to these issues. Both in India and abroad
Remove Economic Barriers to Trade: Terrorism is a symptom of the terrorist weighing his and his extended communities, opportunity cost. Humans are inherently self loving people. If we have an opportunity to positively influence our own lives through economic activity and trade we will choose it. It is only because of restrictive trade practices that some people don't see a profit motive and hence resort to other things. All the notions of freedom fighting is not relevant if it does not pertain to individual liberty. One man's freedom fight may be another's terrorism, but in fact it is each man's fight for individual liberty that matters in the long run
Be Apathetic to certian things: When the controversy over Da Vinci Code's blow to Christianity was being discussed, the author Dan Brown made a great observation. It was only since the publication of his book that religious groups started recognizing that their beliefs were under threat. He said that it was not his book that will kill religion, but apathy towards it. We spend time being apathetic towards the terrorists until they cause a commotion. We should be apathetic to irrationality and kill it, not apathetic towards the terror attacks.
Educate the Children: About the principles of Liberty. Every child should know that he can do anything he wants to; as long as he does not cause harm to another. "Your Right to Swing Ends Where My Nose Begins"
Educate the Children: About responsibility. Every man is the cause of all that he experiences. Most people have issues with others, with groups, with idealogies. But in the end it is how one individually responds and reacts to things that makes the difference. Teach them to adapt a constructive approach.
Educate the Children: That government is an abstraction for delegating responsibility of actions which individuals cannot influence. And it has been grossly overused. Each person can individually decide what is good for him in the market, about trade and commerce. The government should not have this responsibility, nor can it have a positive influence in the true sense. Governments should restrict themselves to their prime function - protecting its citizens from physical harm by others and protecting property rights. My actions cannot influence (in a big way, individually) when it comes to preventing terrorists from comadeering police vans and shooting at me. This I appoint a government to help me against. I can however decide how much money I need to save and how much I consume and how I price the intellectual capabilities I have, in free trade. I know what perception of value is, in an exchange.
Have Active Minds: We are told from the days we are born that we should have an open mind towards everything. Objectivist thought neatly points out that an open mind to everything is an open mind to even a bad idealogy - say for instance, racism. Have an active mind. It is only man's intellect which distinguishes him from the other animate creatures and he has to make use of this mind actively and 'Reason' it out.

Viva Liberty!

"The Crown Jewel on Fire"

2008-11-27T09:16:00.005+05:30

For Mumbaikars and anyone who has been to this historic city, a trip to the glorious site of the Gateway of India is like a pilgrimage. Not just another attraction in the area is the Taj Mahal hotel, overlooking the Gateway and the beautiful Arabian Sea. It is one of India's symbols of prosperity and enterprising nature. It is a symbol of all that is good about the wealth and eminence of Indian entrepreneurship.

Today, 27th November 2008, this 'Crown' has been set of fire. I have written before, about terrorists and the impotence which personifies their action, when my hometown of Bangalore was attacked.

And I think it makes sense to repeat that here.

"It should be very clear that the perpetrators of this heinous crime cannot hide behind any ideology since such attacks do not warrant any. It is weak cry by a few pathetic human beings whose only response to any form of competence is a blaring and violent display of their impotence. An impotence characterized by a lack of constructive capability, satiated by such pre-meditated acts of indiscriminate violence. "

I disagree with the call that Mumbaikars will keep taking things 'In their Stride'. It is a call which should be rejected outright.

People cannot be held at hostage like this.

In any case this is how I would like to remember the beautiful Taj hotel in Apollo bunder, in my favorite part of Mumbai!

'Broken Window' theory and Mumbai's litter problem

2008-11-26T16:24:00.005+05:30

I am guilty for I have littered. But its only because others did it too!

I use Mumbai's suburban railway network to commute to and from work everyday. I also eat the absolutely delicious chana, singg and other sinful treats which are served on platforms. I also face the problem of disposing the paper cones they come in, once I am done eating the contents . There are no dustbins in the trains. Sometimes I carry them home in my pocket and dispose of them in the dustbins there, but mostly I litter the platforms.

Like the rest of them.

I feel bad for doing it, but I say to myself - hey, there is so much litter and filth all over Mumbai that what harm could one additional little peice of paper do?

Does this sound familiar? If yes, we are all providing more evidence to strengthen the 'Broken Window' theory which a group of researchers from Netherlands have just proved.

"The idea that observing disorder can have a psychological effect on people has been around for a while...
...

It was this effect that his experiments, which have just been published in Science, set out to test.
His group’s first study was conducted in an alley that is frequently used to park bicycles. As in all of their experiments, the researchers created two conditions: one of order and the other of disorder. In the former, the walls of the alley were freshly painted; in the latter, they were tagged with graffiti (but not elaborately, to avoid the perception that it might be art). In both states a large sign prohibiting graffiti was put up, so that it would not be missed by anyone who came to collect a bicycle. All the bikes then had a flyer promoting a non-existent sports shop attached to their handlebars. This needed to be removed before a bicycle could be ridden.
When owners returned, their behaviour was secretly observed. There were no rubbish bins in the alley, so a cyclist had three choices. He could take the flyer with him, hang it on another bicycle (which the researchers counted as littering) or throw it to the floor. When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean."

Going by this theory, here is an answer to all those who think that cleaning up the streets of Mumbai is futile. If it were done, people would not see litter and would be that much more reluctant to be the ones who litter it.

It is high time. Lets keep our cities clean, then others will too.

"Government Spending to Save Businesses"

2008-11-26T14:47:00.007+05:30

Owing to the financial meltdown many businesses are affected. Due to the fall in sales figures, many business are cutting down spending. Some are in such a bad state that they are going with a begging bowl to their governments for 'bailout' money. Automobile companies, banks, airlines - most industries have been hit badly and are pandering for major bailouts by the government.

In such a time of crisis, fearing a sharp decline in their sales and revenue streams, and fearing that they may be left out of the 'bailout money' handouts, the Mistresses and Extra-Marital Lovers Union (MEMLU) has approached the government asking for a bailout. Armed with a study by Prince and Assoc, the general secretary of MEMLU demanded that the bailout is necessary to keep the industry afloat.

Cost cutting by their consumers has been quoted as the major reason behind the industries woes. According to the survey,

"More than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances. Still, only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons "

Experts from the government on the subject, however rejected MEMLU's demand citing improper estimates in the survey. "The survey has all its calculations wrong", said one government official, "We at the government are in touch with the consumers and the fall in demand is untrue; in fact my colleagues and I are confident that we can stimulate this market ourselves".

In response to a question about how the government is going to boost the souring demand in the business he said, "Government spending. Our government firmly beleives in Keynesian theories of spending by the state during a downturn and it is no different in this case." He also added that goverment officials will "personally ensure and step-in to help the industry not see the bad times".

Hat Tip to Greg Mankiw

The Valedictorian Administration

2008-11-24T19:54:00.004+05:30

As Obama assembles his cabinet and his administration team an interesting observation has come to light. The new administration is going to be one which has a large number of very highly educated members. David Brooks, an op-ed columnist from the New York Times writes,

"Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law)."

For people like me who wanted Obama to lose the election, because of his left leaning, 'Socialistic' policies, this news of the centrist (atleast!) intelligentsia being at the helm of the administration is appealing. But for the sake of it, I can't resist poking fun at the new administration which looks like a reunion or alumni meet of the very best from the top Ivy League colleges in the World. In fact the same columnist also has this to say.

"If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed"

I should give more credit though to these 'Achieveatrons', after all, closer to home here in India we have some very well qualified people leading us - Dr. Manmohan Singh (Cambridge, Oxford. PH.d) and P. Chidambaram (University of Madras, Harvard MBA) - and we are not doing so bad! Right?

But, one more thing that comes to my mind is this - did you notice the number of lawyers who are there in the administration? Including the president-elect and the first lady, the count is 5 out of 9 members listed above. The actual numbers may be more. This reminds of this famous scene in the movie "The Devil's Advocate" with Al Pacino, the Devil Incarnate rants that he chose the profession of a lawyer becuase "The law puts us into everything." He goes on to say that there are more lawyers in law school than practising lawyers in the US and that "We are coming out. Guns blazing!"

Hmmm. I wonder if this is the actual second coming of you know who!

The Messiah or... ahem...

On a serious note, it is heartening to note that president elect is not veering so much to the left as many had feared/hoped he would. But still, there are some shortfalls in his selection of candidates. According to Mark Cuban, there is a lack of entreprenuers advicing Obama on his team. He writes,

"There are a lot of great minds on the list.
“Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Laura Tyson, who served as Clinton’s top economic adviser; former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson; Time Warner Inc. Chairman Richard Parsons; former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman William Donaldson and Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Officer Anne Mulcahy.
Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Roel Campos, an ex-SEC commissioner, and Warren Buffett are also on the advisory board.”
Notice anything missing ?
Not a single entrepreneur. Yes Warren Buffett started a business, but he will be the first to tell you that he “doesn’t do start ups”. Which means there isn’t a single person advising PE Obama that we know of that knows that its like to start and run a business in this or any economic climate. That’s a huge problem."

This is absolutely true. It is only thruough entreprenuerial vigor that one can see this battered economy regain its past glory and such calculated risk takers need to be fairly represented in the administration.

But then again, will entreprenuers want to get into politics and waste their time? They might be more interested in taking the 'worthwhile risks' in the Market rather than in the political arena!

SearchWiki by Google!

2008-11-21T19:25:00.004+05:30

Google has launched a function called SearchWiki, which lets people customize their searches. Now, what it basically does is that it allows users to rate and 'rank-up' the search results based on their preferences, for personal consumption. While it does not affect the way others see the search results, it is an option to help users customize thier search results. The details of this is explained in the video below.

This is an interesting option and lets me customize what I want to see on the top of my search results, and a move towards a 'social networking' way of customizing and sharing my searches (and the comments I have about the content and relevance of the search results). But it still does not let my preference influence the overall search results others see. Nor does it help give me more targeted content. I have blogged previously about how a synergy between StumbleUpon and Google search results can help give better targeted content and advertising. You can read it here.

I agree with TechCrunch's call that this new addition, while being a move towards making it more interactive and social, will essentially be a test platform to see how to make searches better. Here is Michael Arrington saying,

But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.
My guess is they’ve made the changes to see what kind of data they get, and how it can be used to make their overall search results better. So when Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches,” I think they’re only being half-truthful. All this data, in aggregate, will certainly be used to improve Google search results in general.

This can also be a move towards changing the search paradigm from traffic based popularity ranking to a more content and page view friendly approach to search results. For instance, Google could use the data from SearchWiki to observe and rate websites which are 'ranked up' and based on the quality of comments make subjective, qualitative decisions about the popularity of content. While I don't forsee dramtic changes in search technology becuase of SearchWiki, it is an interesting development!

Up in smoke!

2008-11-21T16:20:00.005+05:30

India's beedi makers are in trouble because of the smoking ban imposed by the Government. Mint reports that beedi makers have forecasted a job loss of 1 million in the industry because of the ban on smoking. The situation they find themselves in is funny.

“Things are looking quite bad. At one point, we even wanted to close down [production facilites] but that is impossible on account of the tough laws pertaining to closure. This (smoking) ban has made life quite difficult,” said [Ramesh] Patel

Thanks to the smoke and mirrors law which prevents smoking in 'public' places, the beedi industry is experiencing a fall in sales. But wait, thanks to the communists whom they pandered to before the smoking ban to help them 'compete' against the big tobacco companies, they are now not even able to cut their losses and bail out! The 'tough' laws preventing industries from retrenching its workers when experiencing the 'downturn' is a pet project of the CITU [Centre of Indian Trade Unions].

What makes their situation hilarious is that even their erstwhile supporters seem to have also ditched them. Mint reports,

"Pandhe, also the president of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu), however, said the trade union will, however, not lend its support to beedimanufacturers. “People will smoke indoors if they want to and this will not impact their sales,” he noted "

There you have it. The very idealogical banner of protectionism has now come back and bit the beedi industry's behind!

I am not a smoker, but I think the ban on smoking is nonsense, simply because there is no way it can be implemented in a country such as ours. I daily see innumerable number of people 'flouting' the rule on the streets.

But, if you think this arguement is contradictory to the 'falling sales' arguement of the beedi manufacturers, think again. The market unfortunately runs on cues from the government. While the ban may not be effective because of it cannot be easily implemented, it has an impact on the industry value chain. The industry works because on various interconnected cogs. Farmers grow the tobacco, the beedi maker rolls the beedi, the distributor channels it and the retailer sells it. Due to the ban, while the consumer may not stop purchasing (the government argues that smokers will smoke at home and hence sales will not fall, although this may not be entirely true) the cost of making a beedi will rise. The farmer may not want to harvest tobacco fearing a fall in demand, the distributor may not channel it fearing fall in demand and the retailer may not stock it fearing that people may not buy it. This will eventually cause a fall in sales. Hence an entire industry value chain will fail.

I think the ban on smoking should be repealed. Instead a Pigouvian solution should be sought. It will make the industry either abandon a product which causes negative externalities, but still make it available for those who can 'afford' the negatives and pay for offsetting them. A market solution to the negative externality of smoking can be the only true solution.

What kind of person does this blog make me?

2008-11-20T12:04:00.007+05:30

Remember Organizational Behaviour subjects from college? With all the 'profiling' of personality types and group exercises to help understand psychological motivations, it used to almost seem like one was being racially profiled! Anyway, one of the types of profiling that is famous is called Myers Briggs Type Indicator. I was classified as INTP - Introverted iNituitive Thinking Perceiving type. I mostly agree with the classification and a website which specializes in predicting personality type by analyzing one's blog has also confirmed this. Here is type of person my blog makes me..

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

I just love the bit about how difficult I am to understand. Now I know why my colleague finds me so difficult the understand!

Hat Tip to Greg Mankiw for the website.

Bias...

2008-11-07T14:04:00.004+05:30

Open Source Code

2008-10-22T16:31:00.004+05:30

I came across this wonderful statement on the ideology behind the Open Source revolution from an interview, in Mint, with Bob Young - one of the founders of Red Hat:

"Only in the software industry, the vendor had control over the way the consumers use the product. Imagine you buy a car, and the dealer who sold you the car had the key to the hood of the car. If your engine starts making a noise, he can say that it is not a bug, but a feature."

Brilliant! Read the whole article here. I particularly like the way he says that he is not a free software exponent, but a free market exponent!

What is bound to happen...

2008-10-20T23:30:00.008+05:30

This is a simple explanation of the financial crisis and the current response towards it.

Illustration 1 shows the global financial system as it existed until very recently. The lenders deposited with retail banks which gave them back interest on the capital. The retail banks invested in the stock markets where the investment banks underwrote stock equity for the various businesses and also made loans out of the capital invested with it. The central banks and government officials had a significant say in the whole system; they dictated the interest rates (kept them low => Caused a bubble) but they also followed a misguided monetary policy based on fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. Life went on; but behind the balance sheets, the investment banks were betting on toxic assets, and the retail banks were making loans to individuals and organizations with bad credit histories.

Illustration 2 shows what has been happening in the global financial markets since early September 2008. The investment banks and retail banks are going bankrupt because of toxic assets - that they have been bundling and selling - on the stock market, not giving them any returns. The stock market has crashed. Lenders are spooked and are diminishing in confidence and are unwilling to lend money to banks hence causing a credit crunch, which is impeding the way retail banks function. Now, the government official's and central bank's role in the economy is large; they are continuing the misguided monetary policy and still 'banking' on fractional reserve banking and fiat currency systems. They are now buying assets in toxic and underperforming businessess and financial institutions, while still knowing that they are worthless assets. This is having no impact on the confidence of the retail investor who still does not trust his money with the banks, further worsening the credit crunch. His assets are also wiped out in the stock market fall denying him the ability to even lend back to the banks if they regain his confidence.

Illustration 3 shows what is expected if the increased role of the Central bank continues the way it is. The nation will become a toxic asset and this would have been caused by none other than the most toxic asset of them all, which is called 'Government Intervention'

Don't believe my prediction as depicted in illustration 3? Why not atleast listen to the scholar who knows more than any one alive about monetary history - the 92 year old Anna Schwartz! Here is an article where she has made the simple arguement,

"Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich."

Shop Names, Indeed!

2008-10-19T20:59:00.007+05:30

All these three shops have interesting names, dont you think? And all of them are in Irla, Parle-West, Mumbai. They are here just a part of an ongoing project of mine - capturing another of those uniquely Mumbaiyya of things - Funny Names everywhere!

Cat Moss

Kate would be impressed?

God gifts babies. We gift wrap them

A little creepy, if you ask me.

Rani Nani

Queen Mother I have heard of, but Queen Grand Mother?

Capitalism - Still an Unknown Ideal

2008-10-14T16:48:00.005+05:30

While I was chatting with a friend on the phone this past weekend I was asked a question. "Has Capitalism failed? Now that everyone is questioning the lack of regulation which has led to the near collapse of the global economies, isn't it time to rethink the primacy of Capitalism?" Both of us - let me mention upfront, are laymen; salaried employees who are not experts at economics. But ,we have studied economics and its many theories as part of our MBA course. Both of us are still students of economics and are learning to appreciate the many nuances which each theory in economics poses to the interested mind. But when it comes to the debate between which solution - Free Market Capitalism, Keynesian Economics or Communism should be at the helm of the commanding heights of the economy, one of us - me, is not open for debate. The solution has to come from Laissez Faire capitalism. I may have doubts about how a free market solution can be achieved to a particular problem, even profess the need for certain degree of policy regulation, but it is irreconcilable to me that such a solution can be better than one which a free market can provide - in the long run.

The problem, I think, which leads people to end up believing that Free Market Capitalism is bound to fail, or has failed is the undue importance to human greed which people attribute to an unregulated economy. It is common to hear people say of the collapse of Lehman Brothers that "Isn't it obvious? When you let people indulge their greed unabatedly, there is bound to be such failures. We should restrict their blatant freedom!". But this is a knee jerk reaction. One which casts a doubt over a system based on the symptoms of the affliction ailing it, and not the cause. This is beautifully described in an article by Quinglian He, a chinese economist. When asked "Does The Free Markets Corrode Moral Character" she replies "No" and rightly points out -

"Ofcourse, the market economy is not a perfect system. But the market's flaws stem from the actions and motivations of its human participations rather from its design"

Free markets allow us to be what we are. It gives all of us a playing field where we compete based on merit and the rewards are directly proportional to the level of risk we are willing to take based on the merit of our judgements and capability. Free markets nurture the individual's rights and allow him to pursue his goals. It is also a test to his character and as Tyler Cowen points out,

"By placing more wealth and resources at our disposal, [free market] tends to boost and accentuate whatever character tendencies we already possess."

Ayn Rand wrote in her book "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" about the form, nature and purpose of government as being a means to protect man's right - protecting him from physical violence. It is from the person who is bound to utilize the unregulated free market for personal corruption and greed, that the government needs to protect others from. Not regulate the system itself. Any other interference by the government in the functioning of the market is detrimental. But most people find this line of reasoning a hard pill to swallow. Today when governments around the globe are bending backwards to come up with plans to 'bail out' underperforming financial institutions, it seems a far cry for anyone to keep believing in the merits of 'unabated capitalism' and the extent of greed of people who are not regulated.

But, this is again a case of assigning blame to the symptom and not the cause. It is a mistake to point blame at the capitalist ideaology for the current financial industry meltdown, because it is not under a purely capitalist system that these financial institutions functioned. Observe the conditions of pseudo-capitalism which has been at the commanding heights of every major economy in the world today. There is always an ever present creditor of final resort which each of these countries have - a central bank. As rightly pointed out by this article,

"Additionally, the only reason why the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to guarantee nearly $5 trillion in home loands with merely $100 billion in net equity is that both their management and other market operators knew that the government would step in if things took a turn for the worse. Acting as lenders of last resort, the Federal Deposit Insuarance Corporation (FDIC), the treasury department, and the Federal Reserve Bank fueled the crisis by encouraging a decade of careless lending"

A classic case of a Moral Hazard where the proper functioning of a free market does not happen because the players are tempted to risk more than what their judgements and analysis lead them to believe, because a pseudo net is ever apparent to cushion their fall. Free markets punish those who make unwise decisions and reward only those who take calculated risks. Free market success stories are those which exhibit fundamental growth and true value creation as against a 'sentiment' based growth.

There are many opinions about the bailout plans which are unfolding around the world - most, even pro-libertarian ones are saying that maybe a bailout was inevitable. But interventionist solutions are unfortunately never better than what a free market can come up with - in the long run. It is almost uncanny to see how the 'bailouts' have started popping up across the world after the US Treasury department came up with the $700 billion plan. It is seen as the repercussion of the failure of the 'capitalist bastion' of United States of America and leads many an undecided mind to disbelieve the essential efficiency of a free market.

To such doubters, I can only say - please observe where you cast the shadows of your doubts. The world may not be facing this problem in the first place had the true ideals of Free Markets been adhered to. The question of greed and favouritism does not hold too much merit in a free market economy because, like Milton Friedman said,

"In a capitalist society, it costs money to discriminate, and it is very difficult given the impersonal nature of market transactions"

Viva Liberty!

Co-opetition, collusion and free markets

2008-10-08T14:12:00.006+05:30

Co-opetition is when traditional competitors in a market form a pact and offer a single product, service or an experience to the consumers in order to avoid splitting the market shares. It is optimal when the market is saturated and further fragmentation is not beneficial to the players involved.

Can co-opetition be a good solution all the times?

Consider the case of the flower vendors outside Dadar railway station in Mumbai. The small lane where the sell their flowers is a key artery which all the pedestrians use to get to the railway station from workplaces in the Dadar area. Come a festival season, this street is so crowded that getting to the station for commuters is nearly impossible! Now, assume that people who regularly use this street all decide to work out a deal with the flower vendors.

Assume that deal is simple - the flower sellers will sit only on one side of the road thereby allowing the commuters to freely use the other side of the road. In return, the flower sellers who are displaced could be incentivized monetarily or sell their daily quota to other flower sellers who sit on the side of the road where they are not displaced at prices slightly higher than what they would sell to consumers. All these transactions are facilitated by a small association formed with participation from the flower sellers and commuters. There is no involvement from the law enforcement agencies or the government.

Unfortunately, although I am a firm believer of free markets and voluntary regulations (like the one mentioned above), the following concerns pop into my head immediately:

The above system will work when the monetary incentive which the displaced flower sellers get is more than what they can make in the free market. It won't be business sense to be party to such a scheme if the flower seller ends up making a loss. Hence, the value of the incentive would essentially need to be above the profit of the most profitable flower seller. A threshold price which will need to be borne by the commuters.
How would the consumers distribute the cost of bearing the incentive given? As the commuters are not a homogeneous community and there would be many who would not be willing to partake any financial cost and not mind the madness.
Where does co-opetition end and collusion begin? The displaced and not-displaced flower sellers can soon start forming cartels and look to make profits in the arbitrage thereby offsetting the commuter's costs.

And the problems I can forsee are many more. Some trivial and some profound. What about enforcing the framework of the law on those who default? It is when I see such situations where the market is so dense and players innumerable that I feel that regulation from the government is the only feasible way out. One overarching rule which all people have to abide by and enforced by the government. Although I hate myself for admitting this, I doubt free market mechanics to be able to handle such a situation when the market players are compelled to make a profit by any means possible, so that one can feed oneself the next day.

One mega solution would be to privatize the entire suburban railway system in Mumbai. This would force the private company to make the surroundings, entries and exits to the station commuter friendly to keep up business. This would involve costs, which eventually would have to be borne by the commuter, atleast initially - and given the fabric of current Indian society, such a plan would face severe opposition. So we are stuck in between a rock and a hard place. Bold plans like privatizing the suburban railway system in Mumbai would never get off the ground because of the opposition, and even small bottom up approaches like voluntary self imposed regulations by the people who are involved in the matter is also doomed to fail because of the immense number of variables. One would need to impose a very strict 'Police Raj' to see that all these variables are harnessed - which is defeating the very premise that it is a voluntary.

What really bugs me is, how then can a society like that of India be, even gradually moved towards a free market economy from its current socialistic bent of mind. Top down, mega projects would fail because they would never get off the ground and would have to be championed, ironically by the government itself, and bottom-up approaches which would act as shining examples of how efficiently a voluntary free market regulation can work, showcasing it so that it can be adopted in other situations, also are doomed to fail due to the sheer number of hurdles it needs to overcome!

'Ugly' Brands

2008-09-30T19:08:00.007+05:30

As an exercise in understanding branding and its impact on human psychology, I am interested in knowing names of Brands which have a negative word in them. For example - 'Ugly Stik' is a popular brand of fishing rods. I would like to know what kind of products generally use negative words as part of their names to gain extra 'connect' with their target audience; one product category which does this comes to mind is Deodarants and Perfumes. Example - 'Axe Vice'. These examples are of sub brands which have a negative word in them. Such examples are okay as not many primary brand names will have negative words in them. I would prefer examples with negative English words, but if there are examples in other languages it is also welcome - please give a translation of what the word means. This post will be a running theme and will be regularly updated in my other blog thread at Idea Architecture at the 'Ugly' Brands Page.

Here are some examples:

Ugly Stick - Fishing Rods

Axe Vice - Deodarant

Fat Bastard - Wines

Three Dimensions of Photography

2008-09-29T16:31:00.006+05:30

A recent article by Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair, commemorating the culture magazine's 25th anniversary since its relaunch in 1983 narrates the story behind the famous photographs which have graced the magazine pages over the years. The author writes, during the course of the essay

"To have once or twice worked with photographers like James Nachtwey is to have appreciated the way in which - contrary to a once cherished belief of mine - the photographic image can possess a moral weight greater than words"

Photography to me, is an exalted art form. Never in the past four thousand years of human existence had an art form come close to the pinnacles which photography has reached in the past two centuries. Photographs as chronicles of our times are a medium par excellence. Great photographs over time have captured in mind blowing detail every aspect of our lives - from daily mundane activities to avant-garde expressions of human exisitence. But the beauty of photography also lies in the abstraction they so easily impress upon their viewers. Literature poses a level of abstraction which is presented in the tone and style of the writer's language. Painting delves into a level of abstraction which is presented through the palette of the painter, sculpture in the chisel of the sculptor. These art forms are essentially two dimensional. They are either seen from the perspective of the writer, the painter, the sculptor or through the perspective of the reader and viewer. The characters of literature are moulded by the style of the writer. The painter's brushstrokes paint the emotion of the subject and the sculptor's chisel shapes the subjects form. It is only photography which allows for three dimensions in perspective - that of the photographer, that of the viewer or audience and that of the subject which is being captured.

It is true that the influence of the photographer on the subject is critical and the photograph may be in essence what the photographer 'intends' it to be. But essentially, photographs are capsules of time and essence which necessarily include in them an additional variable - the implicit nature of the subject. Be it a 'capture' of an animate character in a portrait or a 'capture' of an inanimate object like a building, the very nature of the subject is never lost in the photograph. It remains despite all external perceptions, all superimpositions it is subject to - it remains in the texture, it remains in the film grain and it remains in the exposure.

From my collection - August 2008

The story of a photograph can be told through three distinct narrations. One is the story of the photographer, who through the camera in his hand tries to capture for posterity what his eyes see. He considers the camera to be an extension of his sight, hopefully invisible to others. He hopes the photograph to be an extension of his thought, made visible outside his mind. The second story is that of the viewer. He considers the visual stimuli of the photograph and tries to fathom the meaning of the frame of time. He considers the opinion of what has been captured by the extended sight of the photographer. He tries to understand the nature of the subject. The thrid story is that of the subject - who may never see the photograph or might not have the capability of sight itself, but nevertheless has a story to tell which is expressed in the way the subject is captured at that moment in time.

I was once asked to come up with a quotation to describe photography, to put down in words what a photograph stands for. After much deliberation and thought I came up with the following-

"Look into my eyes, you may know what I see; Look at my photograph, you may know what I think!"

I won much praise for this. But I still believe that, just like prose is two dimensional in the way it can be understood, explaining what a photograph is - in prose is two dimensional and therefore incomplete. Hence even this essay here is also incomplete.

Better Humor

2008-09-25T17:37:00.004+05:30

Humor is a rare gift among humans. The above cartoon is hilarious. Had the comic artist storyboarded it with a minor difference it would have been excellent. Here - in text - is what I suggest.

Frame 1: Employee on his bed, waking up late, on the phone telling the employer "Good Afternoon Sir! Horrible Traffic Jam Sir. Will be coming in late for the meeting, Sir"

Frame 2: Employer actually stuck in a traffic jam as depicted in the cartoon above saying "hmmm... we are waiting for you. Make it fast!"

That would really make this hilarious!

Human Anatomy and Web Traffic

2008-09-25T16:47:00.009+05:30

There has been discussions on websites about the leading activity by people on the internet. Recent statistics show that Social Networking (on sites like Facebook, MySpace etc) has replaced Porn as the most popular activity on the web. Read More.

Historically, based on the major trends in the internet - this is a significant change. Porn and promiscuity has ruled the web ever since its inception. But, come to think about it - this might be because all the sexual predators from porno websites have now 'moved' to other hunting grounds like Social Networking sites where they have many easy targets. (Hat tip to Freddie)

Despite all this though, one thing is certain - Sex is still what makes the website traffic soar! My colleague recently had a post which talked about the popularity of human anatomy in Hip Hop songs and the particular affection these songs have for the privates. The post had a picture which depicted which body parts were popular, and this of course featured the privates. And Voila! the number of unique visitors to his blog in one day has been more than most previous occasions! I just did a small survey of the search terms which brought visitors to my blog URL and it is no surprise that a photograph of a G-String clad female bottom which I had posted in one blog post, which came out to be the search term most likely to bring most traffic!

In light of this, maybe this blog should carry more content which depicts whats described in this photo...

(For better photogrpahs... search the Web)

Hype Cycle of Emerging Technology and Me

2008-09-24T17:30:00.001+05:30

Research Firm Gartner has recently identified five technologies which are about to reach the peak of the hype cycle. Hype Cycle according to Wikipedia is the

"Graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies"

I was just wondering how many of these have an impact or application on my life today.

Green IT

While I am very interested in this topic and would adopt a Green IT product if I had an option, my contribution to the 'Hype' or its impact on me (directly) is not significant. Green computing is the study and use of computing efficiently and the only exposure I have had to this are chain emails which warn us about the amount of power that can be saved by switching off the computer when it is not in use!

Cloud Computing

This is something I hear about very frequently. But despite being among those considered to be 'tech savvy' I have in the past made the mistake of thinking of Web2.0 and Cloud Computing are one and the same. Even as I write this I have not yet read Wikipedia articles about them to clarify my doubts. This according to me is a situation where innovation or 'invention' in the IT/Internet domain don't really have the same impact as 'inventions' in the classical hardware scheme of things. I recently purchased a digital transcriber which allows me to capture in digital form what I write on a paper, using this device. I am fascinated by the technology behind this and consider this to be groundbreaking in its utility. But a similar innovation in the IT/Internet domain would not be a tangible, physical product. Its utility will be manifest as an improvement in the way data is stored, retreived etc. This would result in downloading and uploading speeds to increase. Great! But the pace at which it happens has an inherent incrementality to it, which steals the shock and awe of a physical invention!

Social Networking

Now this is one emerging technology which I agree as having significant impact on my daily activity. Social networking has been pretty popular now for the past 3 years and I have been involved in various social networking sites and have actually found it to be useful in helping connect me to old friends. But if Hype Cycle peak is acheived when business application of the emerging technology becomes apparent, I fail to see this happening yet. I haven't been influenced to purchase anything yet as a result of being part of this social networking sites. Although, I can understand that information about me that the webmasters of these sites have access to, can be used to market products to me, I think I still haven't come across a such a proposition.

Video Telepresence

This is a very attractive technology, But I haven't yet been exposed to any business application which helps me use this effectively. I did see advanced prototypes of this in HP Cooltown in Singapore back in 2007, but have not had any business application of the same. But this is one technology which I can see being very prevalent, atleast in the near future - especially aided by the growth in cloud computing!

Microblogging

While I blog regularly in its traditional sense, I am yet to get onto this new phenomena of Microblogging. But some aspects of this seem odd to me. Earlier today I had an arguement with a colleague about the whole need to broadcast 'What I am Doing Right Now' to others, which is one of the main drivers behind the Microblogging buzz. I can see it as a superb tool at the workplace to replace old systems like sending memo. It is mainly facilitated through the mobile phone technology, using which most people Microblog. India with its already booming mobile telecom market is I think poised to get on the Microblogging bandwagan. I might just do so too!

Going by my dialog above, one can currently conclude that I am not really Tech Savvy. This I guess would be a victory for my colleague Freddie who claims I am an old relic who does not understand the impact of technology!

Chalta Hai...

2008-09-23T18:13:00.009+05:30

I recently finished reading Khushwant Singh's "Train to Pakistan". I had heard about it, read the reviews, read the sunday supplement commentaries about it and seen the trailer of the movie - but never read the book itself. The thing that struck me most about the story is the fact that it is poignant even today, 60 years after the brutal partition of the Indian Subcontinent. Khushwant Singh's prose is easy to read and almost like a screenplay unfolds to the reader and comes alive. The book was also accompanied by photographs of Margaret Bourke White, the renowned Life photojournalist who covered the horrors of the great partition. The horrifying photographs of vultures feeding on the carrion of human flesh and other such, helped bring the context of the prose in morbid detail.

The characters of the book are not all perfect and there are no true protagonists or antagonists. As the prose makes very clear, "The fact is both sides (Hindus & Muslims) killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both raped", almost every character in the book has some or other shade of grey. As I read through the book and was introduced to feelings of the various characters, another thing struck me as being very true. The character of Hukum Chand, the local magistrate and most influential person in the story is according to me, representative of our collective nature - of the people of the Indian Subcontinent - the fact that we do not have high standards for ourselves.

Hukum Chand's character is one of a lackadaisical, unkempt person who does not have very high standards for himself. He is corrupt and given the circumstance and the power that he wields, guilty of not doing anything constructive. He is also stuck in a moral conflict with himself - he recognizes his ineptitude and the bad that it is leading to, but is unable to compel himself to do anything better. He ends up rationalizing that "life is like that" and one has to go on with it. This is probably the most damaging kind of rationalizing a person can do and the mojority of the populace of the subcontinent is guilty of doing this throughout our lives. We have the "Chalta Hai" attitude - which is the anchor tied against our legs.

Back in college a professor asked us - a batch of soon to graduate MBA students, a question - "What is holding India back?". After some debate about population and restrictive government policy and other such like, the professor answered his own question. He showed us students the need to be fiercely demanding in improving the quality of one's life, a spirit which he had found in people struggling to survive in post-war Cambodia - and in juxtaposition, the lack of the same spirit in the Indian psyche. Most of us were moved by this and spent sometime debating and discussing this topic. But soon the hullabaloo of the topic waned and we were all consumed in the pursuit of academic requirements. Most of us now have comfortable jobs and are settled in the pursuit of monetary rewards and the topic is all but lost as one good presentation during the MBA course.

As I read the book, I have realized that it is the nature of Hukum Chand and truly that of the majority of our populace is the main cause of our being backward and toothless. And toothless we are. Consider the issue of our national security. A few colleagues and friends of mine were recently having a conversation about the spate of bomb blasts which has hit our metro's in the last couple of months - Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Delhi. Soon we realized that there is probably no other part of the World today, apart from Iraq where there is a full scale war, that there are bomb blasts every other day and the response or the action to curb it is not even registering a blip. We as a nation have come to accept this sorry state of affairs as just another incident and "Chalta Hai" attitude is manifest.

I live in Mumbai and commute everyday to office on the local suburban trains. The passanger carrying capacity these trains according to estimates is around 1700 people. A recent survey estimated that more 5100 people occupy the space meant for 1700 people during rush hour. The conditions of the trains are bad - one is barely able to find a foothold into the train at most times and many people hang on precariously at the edge and on the roofs, but very few people are committed to do anything about it. One soon realizes that there is no other viable alternative for getting from one place to another, without burning a hole in one's pocket or loosing a lot of time. The traffic is so bad that one ends up rationalizing that travelling for a short time with one's face directly in the next person's armpit on the local suburban train is better. According to statistics around three people die everyday in cases related to the Mumbai suburban train system and the effort to solve this horrendous situation is hardly visible. The number of people falling off trains and getting seriously hurt are innumerable - I happened to witness one such incident earlier today morning - but we hardly are bothered to improve the situation. In fact, the reaction one is more likely to hear about the Mumbai suburban railway is, that it is amazing that despite all these problems, it still manages to run and ferry millions of people to their destinations everyday1 The "Chalta Hai" attitude is manifest here in the fact that we dont have demanding standards and the alternatives are so bad that we are okay even with the despicable conditions.

And this attitude has a the same nature as a contagious disease. We are 'okay' with people defecating all over the railway tracks and footpaths - afterall these poor people do not even have a place to stay - and we are also 'okay' with our kitchen refuse to be thrown just outside our own front doors. We have only recently started getting water in our taps, so we need to adjust if the government cannot organize garbage disposal yet. And this attitude also makes us accept multiple bomb blasts as something borne as a result of India's muti-ethnic populace. We always seems to be under the misconception that we need to adjust with what we have or what is thrown at us - but fail to realize that once we have accepted this, we will always get only what is thrown at us.

Another thing which is common to our response to all the bad things that happen to us is a display of rage - usually misdirected. I can recollect an incident of arguement with my friends over an alleged case of racism against us Indians in foreign countries. The reaction to such a situation was rage and anger directed at the foreigner. The arguement which I had to this reaction was that, rage against a racist remark is futile and it was as if "I can't do much about the fact that I am being racially abused, but as long as I can react to it by being angry its okay". This for me is another manifestation of the "Chalta Hai" attitude as being angry and retorting to someone will not help solve the situation.

The crux of the problem with the pschye of a majority of Indians is that we do not set high standards for ourselves. We are in moral conflict with ourselves because of this and to make up for the lack of standards we have developed a pseudo sense of bravado which demands us to react to situations and expect some counter reaction. All the time we are hoping that something or someone will step up and make the case for us and show us the path to betterment while always accepting what is thrown at us. This according to me is the main cause of India's backwardness.

Sad demise of the 150 year old Brothers...

2008-09-15T18:41:00.001+05:30

From the Economist:

EVEN by the standards of the worst financial crisis for at least a generation, the events of Sunday September 14th and the day before were extraordinary. The weekend began with hopes that a deal could be struck, with or without government backing, to save Lehman Brothers, America’s fourth-largest investment bank. Early Monday morning Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It has more than $613 billion of debt.

I think this photograph is heart wrenching.When whole financial systems are crashing based on investments in dubious assets, this small time trader finds his most valuable asset - the people who are his main customers, lose their lunch money! Sad, sad day! (The article here)

Push Cart Coffee Guy in front of Lehman Brothers HQ in NYC

Sugarless Women, Sugarless....

2008-09-14T13:04:00.001+05:30

Health conscious men can now rejoice! Look what they are selling in supermarkets of Mumbai!

Of Nude Women and Gullible Men!

2008-09-11T23:06:00.001+05:30

The Times of India today has an article about scientific research which now proves that men are blinded to price tags (and everything else) when they are confronted by a nude woman. Advertisers have indeed always known this and have used this very effectively, but always lacked the scientific backing to prove this common sense. Now all those naysayers who said women are being objectified in advertising can be shown this research and told, "Here, see this... what we are doing is scientifically proven. Ha..ha.. Even you would'nt dispute sceintifically proven facts, would you?"

But marketers and advertisers are not always smart. You see, nude or scantily clad women make men gullible and help sell the products without bargaining for them, but the products should be those which men would use or atleast buy frequently. The people over at the three billion blog have an interesting point to note about a 'marketing malfunction' when it comes to selling male and female undergarments. Sample the websites of Calvin Klein Underwear for Men and the WonderBra for women and tell me who are the respective websites designed for.

Even if I buy a hypothetical arguement, that men and women buy underwear for their partners, it would be difficult to beleive that these two websites are designed to market to the right sex. As the threebillion blog rightly points out, the WonderBra website looks more like something out of FHM and would defenitely be more attractive to a man than a woman and vice versa for the Calvin Klein website. The famous 'Only The Balls Should Bounce' ad for WonderBra featuring Anna Kournikova atleast had an humurous angle to it - so while it got the attention of the men for sure, it also appealed to the women.

While I am thankful for the professor of Economics at the Flemish university who conducted the study about men's gullibility to nude women, unfortunately advertisers are still not that smart to make proper use of it, especially the ones who designed the Calvin Klein Underwear website. My advice to them would be that they should make the website more attractive to the target market of their product - men; and the simple way to do this is to make use of what the Flemish University study has scientifically proven - only then can they see their sales increasing! As for the WonderBra website I say, keep the current design - but as the article says, the target market here respond better to physical stimuli than visual - so you need to find some way to build in this service on your website! *wink*

An Example of Perfectly Competitive Market Condition

2008-09-11T18:28:00.001+05:30

A market condition where no buyer/seller has market power - ability enough to influence the price at which a product/service/experience is sold, is called a perfect competition. Such conditions are not very common as there is a tendency for cartelization and the market condition usually becomes a oligopoly. But, I think there is one market which is a superb example of a perfect competiton example - the festival offerings market near Dadar Station in Mumbai!

The Ganesh Festival is currently underway and everyday as I walk to office walking amidst the bustling market which sells everything from flowers and incense sticks to toys and sweets, I cant help but be amazed at the number of buyers and sellers who throng these markets. There are many 'firms' which are selling 'homogeneous'- identical products and innumerous buyers. Also, anyone who wants to sell flower garlands or homemade wicker baskets can find a spot on the road and set up shop - very low entry barrier; well, there is a threat that some goons or a police guy might object to you sitting in that particular spot - but finding another spot nearby will not be difficult. All these conditions indicate towards a perfectly competitive environment.

I did a small dipstick survey to test this hypothesis the other day. I went around asking prices for one yard of a flower garland. The market can be classifed into three distinct geographical locations- as the sellers who are close to the entry of the rail station, those who have set up shop under the flyover and those who are on the pavements on the roadside. The price was uniformly in the range of Rs.6 to Rs. 6.50 for one foot of the flower. This price was probably on the lower side as I asked the questions in the evening and the quality of flowers was not as good as in the morning. Those under the flyover whose product was safe from the rain and sun during the day asked for Rs.6.50, but the number of people buying from them was much lower (This could also be because the area under the flyover is limited and the crowds feel suffocated). The ones near the station entry had poor quality products - dried out flowers. Probably because of the sheer number of people who move in that area during the day and the heat. The ones on the roadside pavements had the bulk of the business and uniformly charged Rs.6 for one foot. I asked quite a few people on the road for the price and all of them concurred with this amount.

I tried demanding, for a foot of flower, to be sold at Rs.4 and found nobody willing to sell. Market information is also high among the producers (another classic condition of a perfectly competitve environment) and they know that no other in that market would sell to me at Rs.4 and they are willing to forgo my business not offer an attractive price (Although, the quantity I was consuming was very small, I doubt if they would have budged from the price had I mentioned even a bigger volume of purchase). On the other hand, although there was no way for me to test it, the information of price and quality was high among the buyers also. Most of the people buying were women who are streetsmart and have an 'andaz' (right estimate) of what needs to be paid for the product.

This is an interesting market to study economics in. The dynamics of the market are purely competitive. I wish I could have spent a longer time in the market to see how the price transition from Rs.10 per foot in the morning (estimate), when the flowers are fresh to Rs.6 in the evening happens and where amongst the three geographical sections of the market does this happen. Is this price an equilibrium price which comes after fluctuations or is it a straight drop in price. This could be an interesting school assignment on economics if someone is willing to spend sometime in all the grime and brave both the rains and sunshine!

Some more interesting links!

2008-08-21T18:37:00.001+05:30

Have been reading many different stuff these days. Some links are below, which I found worth commenting on.

1. The Dark Knight was a superb movie. I have blogged previously about Heath Ledger's superb performance in the movie. This link discusses the concept of Game Theory through the medium of the plot in the movie. Those who have seen the movie would agree that the opening scene of the robbery is simply brilliant. The author of this article has described the concept of game theory that is prevalent in that scene.

2. Usain Bolt. This man is a genius. He has set the world record in the 100m and 200m atheletics events at the Olympics. A small survey of the world records shows the magnitude of his achievement. He ran the 100m in 9.69 seconds, an amazing 37 km/hr. Donald Lippincott in 1912 covered the same 100m in 10.6 seconds. So, it basically means that to remove around 0.9 seconds of the world record, it has taken mankind 98 years! This shows the magnitude of competiton that exists in the event and the intensity of physical and mental preparation the athelete needs to go through to acheive this. But, the IOC chairman Jacques Rogge, a 'sports functinary' and a kind of person who spends his time admiring modern art and literature, doesnt seem to care too much about this. Sample this,

“I have no problem with him doing a show,” Rogge said in an interview with three international news agency reporters. “I think he should show more respect for his competitors and shake hands, give a tap on the shoulder to the other ones immediately after the finish and not make gestures like the one he made in the 100 meters.”

What a load of Cr*p. I think the chairman needs to focus on being a sports functionary and not worry about how world champions react. I think he is no better than our Indian Politicians who claim that they are responsible for helping our Indian Atheletes win medals!

3. Always wanted to have your own shop? If you wanted to become a Dukaandar here is your opportunity. This is the Dukaan of the web kind, but still its kinda interesting. This website offers you a chance to create your own web store, where you can sell products from other websites and also make money in the process. What will you be selling you ask? Anything for that matter. Even Lemonade maybe!

4. Imagine sitting with your headphones on, disconnected from the world listening to your favorite music. Is it pretty much a solitary experience which helps you zone out? Does music helps you get a high? Yes. And it can get you rather stoned apparently! These are called Digital Drugs and they supposedly synchronize your brain waves with sound and move them to altered states of relaxation and alertness. Hmm, I wonder if all the musicians are getting high on dope or music, actually!

Assorted Links I Find Interseting!

2008-08-18T19:44:00.001+05:30

Below you will find a list of assorted links which I think are interesting. I have made a small summary of each of these topics also which you might preview before you click on the link and read/view the original articles/website. Hope you find it interesting!

New way of searching on the internet - "Searchme Visual Search": You think Google is the ultimate search engine? Think again. What do you think contributes to the cult brand status which Mac enjoys over Windows? Its the visual superiority. I have blogged about the Cuil search engine before and the way it presents data to the searcher. I came across this Visual Search engine. Human civilization and communication in the stone age was all visual - hand signals, pictorial. Then slowly language developed and 'text' which is an abstraction of the visual communication gained precedence. But with the advent of electronics in the early 20th century, the visual medium (television, cinema etc) is making a resurgence. This is one of the reasons why print medium is facing a decline around the world. This trend is also prevalent in the web world. First it was text, then came images and now the most popular sites are video and flash sites. Hence why should'nt the search engine medium be 'Visual' too? Nice website...
Will the tall man dominate the world? So thinks this article which actually suggests toungue in cheek that "Short People Got No Reason to Live"! When the 6"5' Usain Bolt 'bolted' in the track field in Beijing and set a world record of running 100 m in just 9.69 seconds, the author claims that short people lost their final stronghold - ability to run fast!
Here is another giant of a man! Micheal Phelps! Eight gold medals... Individually! India as a nation in 108 years of Olympic history has won ONE individual gold medal. I know about all the debates which talk about the lack of infrastructure and all that. But this man Phelps is on a different dimension! He is defenitely a super human! Check out these cartoons about this man! Awesome... Really!

And finally, what do people on Indiatimes.com read most and email? not surprisingly its about Sex! I remember Khushwant Singh saying what a sex-crazed, voyueristic nation India was, and this I think is more proof of this. Compare what is read most and emailed most. This seems to indicate that we read all genres of news, but the most emailed topics are concerning the happening in the bedroom! I can imagine these emailers who find it interesting to 'share' these topics, hitting the email button while gleefully with dazed eyes drooling over the saucy content! Hey, afterall - even I am blogging about it!

More soon!

Hey, Stop Stealing My Jokes!

2008-08-13T20:23:00.001+05:30

Remember those moments back in college or at work when your friend or colleague 'stole your thunder' by quoting your joke? You had come up with this brilliant funny piece about the new lady professor's dressing sense and had done a small dry run with your friend, but the rascal upstaged you by telling the joke when both of you are in a larger group of peers? Or when you came up about a good imitation of the client's reaction and wanted to score some brownie points with the boss, but your cubicle mate overheard you and mentioned it in the review meeting before you. Now that we know that humor is a great way to attract the opposite sex, this kind of 'humor piracy' just got costlier.

So some people have decided that this needs to be dealt with. This article studies "The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms in Stand-Up Comedy". And before you think that it is all a big laugh, sample this;

Copyright law does not provide effective protection to stand up comedians, a fact made clear by close look at the business of stand-up. Despite what appears to be a persistent practice of joke stealing among stand up comedians, there have been few lawsuits asserting copyright infringement in jokes, and there is little evidence of threatened litigation, settlements, or indeed public dissatisfaction among comics regarding the weakness of IP protection.

This is very true. The only instances which comes to my mind are Sienfeld's irritation that Banya (a stand up comic character in the hit comedy sitcom) is stealing Seinfeld's thunder by working the crowds right after Seinfeld's bit or Russel Peters 'making a joke' about the many 'Bast**ds who are sitting at home downloading' his comedy routines. Both these are instances of preventing the 'piracy' of content by mooching of another's popularity. But these are not instances where the comic is worried about somebody else using his or her content. In fact, humor is something which we never seem to associate very much with the comic, apart from the way each person delivers the humorous routine; I would for instance find a Yo! Mama joke just as funny if I read it on some comic's internet website or if a friend had it as his gTalk tagline!

This brings us to the crux of the issue. Should 'humor intellectual property' be protected? While this is similar to a situation in the music industry where the creative content is being pirated and the creators of this content are not able to reap its full benefit, the humorous intellectual property arguement at first glance seems funny! Now, don't get me wrong; I am sure the comic needs to be protected from just as many negative externalities so that there is incentive for him to remain funny, but maybe the humor industry is more similar to the fashion industry (And no, I do not mean that the fashion industry is a joke). Going by Tyler Cowen's arguement that fashion is a status good, and the 'rip offs' syndrome in fashion is a stimulus (or incentive) for creating new fashion, the Humor 'industry' can also be a status good. Humor afterall is an indication of physical and mental wellbeing (hence attracting the opposite sex to the one one who possesses good humor). Hence, the more humor is ripped off or 'stolen' the more the incentive for the comic to come up with a better joke.

But there might be a catch in this line of reasoning; if I go and buy a Gucci rip off at a much lower price, I (the consumer) still aspiring to be seen in designs which have a likeness to a Gucci design and thereby gain a positive aura. At the same time Gucci's brand grows in my mind. But when a comic steals another's routine, the original comic does not get the recognition from the consumer for his intellectual creation. And this is not funny at all!

The Sunset...

2008-08-04T18:04:00.000+05:30

Ah! The euphoria of young love is very well documented indeed. The excitement, the fascination, the need to explore and above all the need to be in each other's company are all the things associated with this. The need to be in each other's company and experience the beauty of the world in the presence of the other, is such a compulsion that many a hitherto difficult things become passe! Afterall, what could be better than being able to watch the orange Sun set, sitting at some quaint cafe on the beach, sipping cool ice tea all the while clasping onto his or her hands! Even if this means that one needs to brave the rush hour traffic and make it across the congested city roads from opposite ends of town, through the grime, the dust and sweltering humid heat.

Ah! Such is young love, indeed! Where all things external are forgotten, except for that one moment when one can experience the beautiful Sun rise in the company of one's lover. The experience is always even more maginficent if the sweat and grime of the sun set can be avoided and it is the cold early morning breeze that makes the eyes water, instead of the smog filled pollution. Even if this means that one needs to make elaborate plans to get to the beach early in the morning, sneaking out of hostel rooms, helping one's lady sneak out of windows to avoid being caught by fathers about to take the dog for its early morning walk!

Ah! What euphoria one such couple recently must have felt as they managed to sneak out of their respective abodes early one morning in Mumbai, without being noticed by any nosy third party, with evil accusing eyes; or without being chased by the house pet, let loose by the enraged father at the sight of his eloping daughter. Ah! What ecstasy to be with each other on the waterfront on the vast Arabian Sea, eager to spend the few treasured moments, waiting breathless, to watch the magnificent Sun Rise!

SCREEEEEECH!

Ah! What the Hell! Such is the buzz of young love, that one tends to forget that the sun rises in the east and that the vast Arabian Sea is where the Sun would rather set in a magnificient orange blaze of glory!

Ah! What tragedy the Sun demands these young lovers to toil again in the smog filled evening to view him subside?

Ah! What ... are you sure this time......

Where and what I have been eating!

2008-08-02T13:34:00.001+05:30

Blogs about food and eating joints are very common and usually written by true foodies. I am not someone who claims to be gastronomically inclined, and infact most of my friends disqualify my culinary existence as being irrelevant - as I am a vegetarian. But this does not mean that I do not enjoy my food. The variety, the tastes, the experience, the presentation, the ambience of the surroundings and ofcourse the company, do hold a lot of importance in my eating.

Having experienced a bit of both Singapore and Dubai, but having tasted very little of what they have to offer the foodie, as a consequence of being a vegetarian, living in Mumbai now, has been an explosion on the taste buds. Mumbai has, amongst the best restaurants in India which showcase a variety of cuisines from around the World. But what Mumbai also has, is a unique culinary charm of its own. From eating the famous Jumbo Vada Pav for Rs.7/- at Dadar Station or the sweet, sour and spicy Papdi Chaat at Kilash Parbat near Juhu, the city is a haven for people who enjoy street food.

Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution recently rated Paris and Buenos Aires as the best places in the World to be explored by walking; and I am sure if a poll was taken about the best places in the World for street food, Mumbai would rank at the top.

Apart from the street food, what Mumbai also offers is a dining experience which is steeped in popular culture. Like any bustling metropolitan, its restaurants and cafes are unique to the city and have a bunch of loyal customers who are both influenced by and contribute to the building up of popular culture around these places. Over the last few weeks I have been ‘eating around’ the city at some of these unique places and savouring the delights they offer.

First up, Leopold Café in South Bombay. This café is on the famous Colaba Causeway, a bustling alleyway in the southern sections of Mumbai. A bustling little place with its unique ambience, dim lighting and the whole Shantaram hustle. Even without its newly acquired importance among foreign tourists who come to soak up the experience from the book, Leopold nevertheless serves good grub. I had a superb cheese omelette and some cold ice tea, and was nostalgically reminded of Koshy’s in my home town of Bangalore. Both these places cater to our Indian hangover from the British Raj and I, for one am not complaining.

Next, I recently had lunch with colleagues from office at The Sports Bar in Lower Parel. Located in the Phoenix Mills shopping complex in South Central Mumbai, this hangout is a good place to chill out with friends on a lazy evening. It is made up in the likenesss of famous European sports bars, where rowdy crowds drink lager beer and cheer for their soccer teams. With televisions showing cricket matches, sports memorabilia in shelves on the walls and a worn out pool table, this is also a place for the advertising crowd from nearby offices to hang around. I went there on a Friday around lunch time and found the place bustling with activity, mainly an office going crowd who were celebrating promotions and discussing business over a beer. They have a good buffet served at lunch time and the pasta chef insists on sprinkling a whole lot of grated cheese on your pasta, instantly giving the place my thumbs up!

Lastly, the famous Chowpatty area in Mumbai is know for its eating hangouts. I haven’t been to most, and I intend to do so very soon. But I did hang out with a few friends at the New Yorkers restaurant in this area recently. Getting to Chowpatty from the Grant Road station, one does come across a Café New York on the way and some of us mistook this as the designated meeting point. But once we all made it to the place on Chowpatty we had a good time. To be frank I wasn’t very keen when my friend had suggested this place, as the New Yorkers in Bangalore had failed and closed down. But, a purely vegetarian restaurant on Church Street in Bangalore was not a good idea to begin with. I was not disappointed by the Mumbai version. Mexican food was the order of the day amongst us friends and we ordered stuff which had names like Tostedoes Ole and waited for it to be good when it arrived, and it was. Achar (pickle) Pizza, a fusion food on the menu also turned out to be something really worth trying. But what finally took me to sheer eating pleasure was the Sizzling Chocolate Brownie we had for dessert. Chocolate Brownie with Vanilla ice cream, on top of which a sizzling, smouldering chocolate sauce is poured is hardly something a chocoholic like me can withstand, and I greedily dug in.

This hardly qualifies as a blog post on the variety of culinary experiences one can have in Mumbai, but rather just a small appetizer. As and when I try out more, I shall definitely write frequently on this topic because I have realized as I write this piece, that writing about food lets me experience the same pleasure I had while eating! And then again, maybe not SO good after all…

Scrabulously Wrong!

2008-08-02T12:38:00.001+05:30

The Open Source revolution is here to stay, say most internet and computer experts. The open source revolution which has spiralled from writing operating system programms like Linux to application ‘widgets’ for various we based applications is currently in vougue with most programming savvy people indulging in. The advantage of the open source revolution is volunatry sharing of user generated ‘open’ source codes for the applications which can be sold at a price if the developer so intends, but essentially is a free to be upgraged, modified and marketed by any user if he or she is also into coding. This is a tremendous opportuity for millions of computer programmers around the world who are able to use thier coding knowledge to build better models of a basic functional tool and market it for profits.
But there are many, for lack of a better word, discrepancies in the open source revolution. Take for instance a situation when an open source program creates an application which replicates a patented real world product, service or an experience in the virtual world. What are the rules which govern this? Is it in violation of the patent rules? This is exactly what is happening in the case of Hasbro vs Scrabulous. Scrabulous, developed by two Kolkata residents, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla is the virtual version of the hit word game Scrabble which is a patented product owned by Hasbro.

Read On...

My weak attempt at Political Humor....

2008-08-02T12:34:00.002+05:30

WTO talks collapsed after India and China clashed with US… Article

Whats in a name?

2008-08-02T12:22:00.001+05:30

Today, I tried the new search engine which is being positioned as a competitor to Google. Its called ‘Cuil‘ and is supposed to be a word which sounds like ‘Cool’ or more so ‘Kewl’. I was disappointed. The first thing I tried searching on Cuil was my name; ‘Anand V Rao’ and unlike Google which shows search results which lead to my blogs, Cuil came up with links about somebody’s husband who had a name like mine. I am still very much single. You can call me a narcissist that the first thing I searched for was my name and when I did not find it, found the website disappointing. But hey, I am not the only one. Others also have seem to have done the same thing and have had the same results.
Read On...

"Joker arrested trying to steal Batman" (and he succeeded!)

2008-07-29T15:19:00.001+05:30

I came across this headline "Joker Arrested Trying to Steal Batman", on an Internet news website and for an instant thought that someone had written a movie review! I saw The Dark Knight this weekend and was amongst the many who was left spellbound. It is a good movie for all comic book superhero buffs like me; and it is also a good movie for other general audiences who want see a good entertaining flick. Christian Bale reprises his role of the caped crusader, Batman from the movie batman begins. But, the true Dark Knight of the movie is the character of the Joker played by late Heath Ledger.

This post is another one among the numerous blogs about which think that the Joker, and Heath Ledger have literally stolen the show from Batman. Ledger's portrayal of the psychopathic maniac who is least interested in anything other than destroying the very fabric of society is superlative, and I am not saying this to be sympathetic towards Ledger's untimely demise. The character is truly a villian and the kind which cannot be negotiated with. The painted face and constant lisp which the Joker has are but comic book rendering of a facade behind which the maniac thrives, and Ledger does superb justice portraying all this.

There has been speculation in the movie press that Heath Ledger deserves a posthumous nomination atleast if not an Academy Award win for his portrayal of the Joker. Irrespective of whether this happens or not, one thing that is certain is that the Joker has defenitely stolen Batman, and incredulously the actor's life was arrested!

Olympic Mascots...

2008-07-29T15:14:00.001+05:30

Why do the mascots for the Olympic Games suck? Most of the the mascots for the summer Olympic games fail to impress me. As a hobby, I follow mascots for various sporting events around the world. The mascots for the 2008 Beijing Olympics are called ‘Fuwa’ - five mascots which represent traditional Chinese elements of fire, wood, water, gold and earth. But I just don’t find these five interesting or cute enough. Read On

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Singh is King! The throne is his too!

2008-07-27T16:32:00.001+05:30

So the UPA government has survived the no confidence motion. Whether the Nuclear deal is good for the country or not, is not something the common man can easily decipher. Many magazine editors, notably Vinod Mehta of Outlook has been strongly against the deal, saying that the deal ties India’s hands despite not being among the countries which have signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

But for the common man, I think all that matters are issues like increasing fuel prices due to the inflation. I for one am happy that Dr. Manmohan Singh’s government survived and we did not have a mid term election. Or even worse some Third Front had come to the forefront and India had a Prime Minister from one of the many ingreidient parties!

So, Singh is King!
Read On...
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It lands, creates a buzz... then disappears!

2008-07-24T15:14:00.001+05:30

I have been doing a study on the outdoor advertising industry in India recently as a part of a consultancy assignment at work, and one of the catch phrases which people in this industry use to describe their business is

In outdoor, the medium is the message!

Interestingly today, I came across this article about a 7500 square foot ad which has been commisioned for Chanel. It is a whole mobile art pavilion which looks something like this...

Designed by a London based designer, this futuristic looking building has been commissioned by Chanel. And voila! amongst one of the many description of the building, one of them goes as follows,

The most important piece of art is the container itself!

You know, you are in Mumbai when....

2008-06-30T18:50:00.001+05:30

You know, you are in Mumbai when.....

Let there be 'G'

2008-06-25T08:48:00.001+05:30

And then he said, let there be 'gLight'; and he never had to shine light on anyone ever again (they just searched for it!)

Yes people, the world is taking on a prescript - the letter 'g'. And it all started as a search engine called 'Google'. Soon we had all kinds of g letter words - gMail, googleDesktop, gGears, gToolbar, googleReader, gNotebook, gMaps and even googleEarth and googleSky! Already, words for many human verbs are becoming prefixed with the letter 'g'. It has already started; people can 'gTalk'. Soon they will be able to gWalk and gSleep. Also, maybe we can even gEat soon; once that is accomplished, gGod knows what else we can do!

It is almost like one of the teenage code languages where children usually prefix or suffix a letter or a sound with every word of the sentence. "Pwhatwy piswy pyourwy pnamewy?" - when spoken can sound cryptic, especially if you find two young people happily conversing in this way. This language my friends is a 'p-wy' or peewee language; where every word is prefixed with 'p' and suffixed with 'wy'. But this is all in the past! Now the key to most cryptic puzzles is the letter 'g'. "Hey I will send you a geemail" says my friend, "Or we could just geetalk you know, its much more easier. You can post the document on googleDocuments and I will download it from there."

Already, our clothing is taking on a gColours. Gone are the days of Kanchevaram and Mysore silk sarees. It now a gSaree!

Soon we are going to have a gPhone and people may be able to gSpeak with anybody for free! All one will need to put up with is a whole bunch of guys listening into the sweet nothings you whisper in to the pretty young thing's ear - over your gPhone, ofcourse. Soon there will be a gBot - an all encompassing, all powerful robot with the g-power and that will eventually lead to the creation of gMan!

String theory, dear readers is supposed to explain the universe and why we are here. It contends that in the minutest sense, everything can be represented as energy strings. Speaking of strings though, what the scientists have not realized yet, is that Google has gone back into time and had already put its stamp on the theory! And it is called a gString!

Soon, we will all be living in a search engine; and searching for the g-Spot may be as easy as typing and clicking!

Autorickshaw vs The Free Market!

2008-06-24T18:21:00.001+05:30

Again, the autorickshaw driver refused to give me conveyance from the suburban railway station back home. I was late in the evening and maybe he was winding up for the day and the direction he wished to go was opposite to where I wanted to. So, I was stranded at the railway station, tired after a long day at work, with a daunting task of having to walk 5km back home. Should I curse the free market system? After all, it is this system which allows these autorickshaw drivers to decide if they are going to accept taking me as their passenger, based on the overall benefit they see in the transaction. Right?
I think not... Read on

StumbleUpon a pot of Gold!

2008-06-20T13:15:00.001+05:30

I have recently installed the now famous Stumbleupon toolbar on my internet explorer, and man! is it addictive! All I have to do is indicate what my preferences are and voila! I can be directed to very interesting websites I never knew existed! This works very well when you have sometime to kill; you have finished reading all the updates on the regular sites you usually visit and don’t know what to find on the internet. (Ofcourse, Stumbleupon is not a substitute for going outdoors or reading a book, when one has time to kill; but it defenitely makes sense when its pouring cats and dogs, especially in Mumbai, where one dares not venture far from home, during the rainy season)
Stumbleupon is a very powerful tool according to me. Google currently makes money by... Continue

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Smaller State? No, Smaller Government is Better...

2008-06-17T16:37:00.001+05:30

The American magazine has an interesting article on the topic of Geopolitics and how maps are being redrawn. The article titled “Map Quest” talks about the continual flux in the way the various nations of the world keep changing in their ideaologies and with it the economic conditions leading to different postures in foreign policy. Economic changes and the ambitions of the people of a nation always seems to have some kind of correlation. What seems to be interesting is the fact that this economic upswing and downswing seems to be of a cyclical nature.

Take for example the case of India and China; some three hundred years ago, the Indian and Chinese economies were the dominant economies in the world. America and Japan were nothing more that third world countries. During this period, most products that originated in the subcontinent and China were held in very high esteem. And true to the famous saying that ‘imitation is the best form of flattery’ the western businessmen actually copied the articles from the oppulent orient and sold it in their countries for a premium. Ceramic is a classic example of this kind of a situation. It was a product of China and some European entrepreneurs perfected a process to make cheap imitation ceramic and sold it to the western nations. Today, when the US is the dominant economy, we see a reverse situation. Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs are the one becoming competitive by manufacturing western products in a cheaper and better way! Continue...

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Krypton-86 vs The Infinite Wisdom

2008-06-16T16:29:00.001+05:30

Jug Suraiya has an interesting article in The Times of India dated 14th, June 2008. It lambasts a research/survey which claims that atheists are smarter than theists. When I read the first few lines I was appalled; how could good ol’ Jug Suraiya do this. As an agnostic myself, I was offended that Jug Suraiya thought that Atheism/Agnosticism did not need intellect.
But after completing the whole article I was in splits. Jug Suraiya contends,

Atheism requires no special brain power. It’s as easy as falling off a log. It’s believing in a God who — omnipotently, omnisciently — creates all these horrors, and more (Hitler, Hiroshima, Mao, Pol Pot, the AIDS virus, sickle cell anaemia, Alzheimer’s, polio etc, etc), which requires adroit intellectual footwork

This indeed is funny stuff. But, however agnostic/atheist I am, there is a seed of doubt. For a believer, there is the blanket of blind faith which covers for all questions; for non-believers on the other hand, there is no such prodigal blanket of faith... Continue

UPDATE:

It is almost fascinating (as if by intelligent design!!) that I came across an article in today’s edition of The American after writing this post, about the culture war between believers and non-believers. Peter J Wallison, in the article titled “Lets declare a truce in the culture war” argues on a similar premise that both the believer and the non-believer are basically unable to prove or falsify the other’s belief. To quote the author,

To the extent that they believe in the correctness of their own position, both sides are simply relying on faith. The only truly rational position is that of the agnostic, who says there is no way to know and probably never will be

I very much agree with what the author contends on this topic. All the rhetoric from both the believer and the non-believer about the correctness of his personal belief and more so the incorrectness of the other side is unfounded and wasteful.... Continue

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Constraints, and the way to approach issues

2008-06-14T16:24:00.001+05:30

Manangement techniques and aproaches argue that there are constraints which govern any business model and the businesses need to exploit their available resources to the maximum extent therby achieving the best possible outcome that is ‘allowed’, as defined by the limits imposed by the constraints.
A thought came to me when I was travelling on the local suburban trains here in Mumbai. Amongst the three suburban rail corridors which run in Mumbai, the Western Railway system is considered to be better than that of the Central Railway and the Harbour Line. Not that the Western Railway is any less crowded, but what one observes is that rakes on the Western corridor are better maintained and rattle and sway less, literally!
I was being thrown about on the Central Railway earlier today, between the Currey Road junction and Victoria Terminus; and this dichotomy came to my mind.... Continue

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Whose Plate is Half Full?

2008-06-13T16:21:00.001+05:30

The Financial Times has a lead article on India’s rising inflation. The wholesale price inflation today (June 13th, 2008 ) hit a seven year high of 8.77%. This figure has crossed the anticipated figures by most economists and has got most policy makers tied up in knots over the impact on the economy. The major cause people attribute to the inflation is the rise in crude oil prices and to the rise in food prices. The increase in food prices in India has followed the international trend with around a 30 to 50% increase in the prices of commodities like rice, lentils, vegetables and milk.
The global food crisis which has been in the media for a while now has prompted many reactions from across the spectrum of observers. Policy makers in the government have gone on to increase price controls on food commodities to control the spiraling food prices leading to greater regulatory architecture coming into the market. Other reactions which have come to the media, mainly because of their comical nature, is the assertion of President Bush that food prices around the world are increasing as Indians are eating more!

One intriguing argument .... continue

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Green Marketing

2008-03-26T16:19:00.001+05:30

An idea which has come of age is that of ‘Green Marketing’. This consists of the marketing of products which are environmentally friendly. The scope of this includes not only the communication process which needs to be specially focussed on promoting the product as being environmentally friendly, but also the necessary product and process modification so as to actually make the product ‘Green’. Today, awareness about global warming and eco consciousness is at an all time high. With the massive deforestation of the rain forests and the rapidly eroding greenery in our cities and countryside the eco systems of our neighbourhoods are changing for the worse. Under such circumstances, ‘Green Marketing’ is a way for companies to at least partially follow a ‘blue ocean strategy’.
To quote an example, consider the case of electronic component manufacturers in India who are a part of a global supply chain. They are suppliers to various companies in Europe and America, where it is now illegal to have electronic items which have certain levels of hazardous chemicals. The electronic product manufacturers are governed by directives like RoHS which stands for Restriction of use of certain Hazardous Chemicals. This law which came into effect on 1st July 2006 prohibits any electronic product to be sold in the market which fails to comply with the standards as described in the RoHS directive. In an industry that is dependent on the assembly of components sourced effectively by the diverse supply base, these laws have implications which are far flung. These and other such laws also offer a unique opportunity for companies to gain competitive advantages over others by being the first to organize the supply chain to be able to cope with the requirements. Many Indian electronic component manufacturers, who previously found themselves in a tough position wrung by all the proverbial five forces described by Michael Porter, in the wake of stiff price competition from Chinese manufacturers, have used this opportunity to find themselves a ‘blue ocean’ to regain their market competence.
‘Green Marketing’ is essentially a way to create a point of differentiation for one’s products. Companies which can successfully brand themselves as a ‘Green’ company and at the same time successfully integrate their supply chains to cope with the requirements of producing a ‘Green’ product can gain a sustainable competitive advantage in the market place of the near future. This will require significant investment in research of both product development and supply chain integration and also in effective communication strategy. An example of this would be the investments made by Toyota Corporation in the hybrid cars division.
Unlike many horizon planning strategies which are followed by companies, where the investments in research for the future may not always be passed on to current customers, the scope and scale of investment required for ‘Green’ products may necessitate such a measure. Successful ‘Green’ marketers will be those who will be able to identify the opportunity costs involved and avoid making the current generation of customers bear the costs for those of the future; although it might be in the interest of the current generation of customers in the long run to do so!

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The Decision Maker

2008-03-25T16:16:00.001+05:30

The famous economist Adam Smith once noted “having money gives one the ability to ‘command’ other’s labour”. This is a succinct way of explaining purchasing power and is very relevant for anyone who is trying to chart a career in marketing. Why? The answer is simple; marketing works best when those who you are marketing to, have the purchasing power, i.e. the ability to command your labour in exchange for their money.
But for marketers, is it sufficient to target those that have the money, to make a sale? Again, the ‘invisible hand’ theoretician had wise words for us. He warned us not to ignore the thrifty housewife’s contribution to the economy as she compares prices at a local store. For instance in India and most other countries of the world, men are the income earning members of the family and have the control over the expenditure of this income. But it is not difficult to observe that the majority of what the household spends on is decided by the women. So, as a marketer it makes more sense to catch the attention of the women and thereby influence those who have the control over the strings of the purse, rather than the men who may be the purse bearers. This need to capture the decision maker’s attention is a refinement over the traditional target audience definition which marketers identify while developing their strategy. If the traditional market segmentation is done based on demographic variables like age, gender, income bracket etc, the emphasis on targeting decision makers requires the marketer to create a special value proposition to those who may not be the end users, but rather the key influencers in the buying process.
Examples of this can be seen in the advertising schedules of many products and services. Advertisements for Star Cruise vacations are actually broadcast on channels like Cartoon Network and Pogo to catch the attention of children who then influence their parents to go on these vacations. The creative for a medicinal product which aids in the reduction of male pattern baldness actually addresses the woman, negotiating with her to purchase the medicine for her husband!
This emphasis on the decision maker also necessitates a different approach to the metrics of media plan. From a traditional Opportunity to See (OTS) measure of exposure to the target market segment, marketers are now moving towards more experiential marketing platforms. The experience which the decision maker has of the product or service becomes of paramount importance and media planners now look for Opportunity to Experience (OTE) components before deciding on the marketing plans.
For example, when Financial Times (FT), position themselves as a paper read by the CEOs, by organizing symposiums of global leaders, they are essentially conveying to their advertisers that the ‘Decision Makers’ are reading their paper and endorsing it; and hence add more value to their product. Gone are the days when the circulation and readership numbers of the newspaper, among target demographic audience could have helped attract more advertisers. If ICICI bank uses the catch line that they are ‘the most preferred bank’ among younger corporate decision makers, it is because they want other such people with high disposable incomes to bank with them.
And thus the value of the ‘Decision Maker’ is the critical variable in a marketer’s formula. Market research firms like AC-Nielsen ORG MARG now provide companies (like ICICI bank) with a Decision Maker’s Survey (DMS) to aid them in identifying the ideal channels for communicating to the ‘Decision Makers’ directly!

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Private Labels

2008-03-24T16:12:00.001+05:30

Private label pose the biggest threats to branded FMCG businesses. The normal margin structure in a typical FMCG supply chain today is as follows. The margin for the carry and forwarder (C&F) is ranges from 1 - 4%. That of a stockist ranges from 4 - 9% and that of the retailer ranges from around 8 – 17%. Also as the channel of distribution has gained prominence in the consumer’s mind due to pervasiveness of their reach, the retailer increasingly calls the shots. In such an environment, consumers increasingly face the pinch of higher prices. Hence, the best way for the retailer to add value to the consumer would be to remove the price burden he bears. The solution – creation of private labels. This makes good economic sense too as is indicated by the following table

Just as an indicator one can observe, that private label business of Wal-Mart is USD 126 billion. This figure is greater than that of the total sales revenue of Nestlé’s which is considered as the largest FMCG manufacturer brand in terms of sales.

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"Dissolve like Sugar in Milk" ... Ideas for FMCG

2008-03-24T04:09:00.002+05:30

What is important today in terms of branding in FMCG products? With the clutter of products on display and available for consumption, there is increasingly a trend of consumer indifference towards your product. When the product life cycle is also very short, what becomes important is creating a sustainable brand. One solution for this can be explained with this story.

Legend says that when the Parsi immigrants from Iran landed in Gujarat, India many centuries ago, they approached the local King to seek permission to stay in his country. The King who was not very keen on letting foreigners to settle in his land showed the Parsi leader a bowl of milk filled to the brim and said that like this, there was no space for more people. The Parsi leader not to be outdone mixed some sugar into the milk and told the King that his people would dissolve into the society like the sugar and while remaining invisible, sweeten the whole experience!

Similar to this, what is required to help reduce consumer irritability towards FMCG products is that they need to become less in your face, but at the same time be give the consumer a sweet experience!

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The Beginning of Idea Architecture...

2008-03-23T20:51:00.000+05:30

Idea Architecture by Anand Rao (Me!)

"Branding the Zeitgeist" - Trends and implications for branding in future markets

2008-03-23T16:02:00.001+05:30

The word Zeitgeist means “Spirit of the Age”. It is the adjective representative of the cultural ethos of the generation and is used to express a world view which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression. It is an illustration of what is popular within the social context and deemed as popular culture. Brands are amongst the best symbols of the generation and branding as a faculty has also been an integral part of the creation of a generation’s identity. This has had a profound impact on the emphasis of marketers in their branding efforts. The method of marketing to a specific generation is affecting the way we promote and sell products and services. Each generation has its own characteristics and these are leveraged by marking these targets by marketers. Branding efforts for each generation is unique in its essence, and are so designed to not only suit a particular market niche but also in their wake create a market by means of contributing to the popular culture of the generation. Consumer behaviour which is a study of how, what, when and why people buy is also significantly influenced by the zeitgeist. The practices of studying trends always focus on understanding the shifts in preferences in consumer behaviour and seek to maximize the impact by pre-empting them. Each generation has created its own unique trait when it comes to consumer behaviour and marketing has always had to adapt to these changes.
Popular culture has been represented in the art of the generation and this is the focus of this paper. From painting and graffiti to comic books and music; design has evolved in parallel with the generations and with advance in technology has now moved into the virtual space with the boom of the global animation industry.

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Interventionist solution to the Subprime Crisis?

2007-12-13T01:14:00.001+05:30

Some time ago you might have come across a news peice that the president of the US, George W Bush announced a major plan to help those house owners in the US now in serious debt due to the sub-prime lending problem.

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article3231191.ece

The plan entails significant tax exemptions and aid packages to be offered by the Bush government to these afflicted house owners. Now, this was, to put it in a subtle way, a 'radical' move. Firstly, because this was a major shift in the Republican Party policy, which is a mainly conservative. Moving away from a policy leaning towars the free market, laissez faire approach; to a more government intervention based Keynesian policy. Typically, the Democrats are more Keynesian in their approach. Secondly, on further analysis of the new plan, it becomes clear that this tends to constitute what we learn in a Basic Economics course, called as a 'Moral Hazard'. Think about it, by giving tax cuts and aid to those sub prime borrowers (those who have a poor credit rating) and bailing out those sub prime lenders (banks and money instruments which did not sufficiently investigate the credit worthiness of their borrowers) what the plan intends to do is reward the people who made the mistake once by allowing them to wipe their slate clean. This might even encourage them to think that such a bail out might happen in the future too, thus constituting a moral hazard. This is counterintuitive to the 'let there be a market solution to the issue' approach of laissez faire capitalism.

Exactly 100 years ago in 1907, the famous and wealthy banker, J Pierpont Morgan bailed out the US government during a credit crunch by committing his personal finances to save an economy slipping into recession. What happened soon after in the early 1920s when JP Morgan was not around anymore is for you to guess! Similar speculation ensued, but the US Federal Reserve did not support the banks this time around and issue more currency to help against the bank runs, leading up to the Great Depression! Now this new plan to resolve the sub prime crisis is being touted as the 'Paulson Plan' after the current US treasury secretary Henry Paulson. I recently had a chance to attended a guest lecture by Dr. Shailesh Jha, Director, Credit Suisse. He predicted that a global recession was looming large in the near future mainly due to the slowing down of the globalization pace. I feel that the Paulson plan will act as a catalyst to that end! 2008 is election year in the US and politicians need to be forgiven for pre election jitters which cause them to take up such policies.

But then it is a chicken and an egg story. If the politicians did not have to govern masses of people who find it difficult to believe in the mechanics of the free market, they will have to yield to such interventionist policies to assuage the 'vote banks'! 'Vote Bank Politics', does this word sound familiar? This is again a similar situation in our own India but the contexts are defined differently. I think it is imperative on us educated Indians at least to get our Economics right! If you think that a market economy is a better option and need more 'understanding' I suggest you browse the various clips on and by 'Milton Friedman' on YouTube. Its good learning! I particularly like the lucidity of his explanations.

I also found this interesting article on the 'Paulson Plan' which is sceptical about the new policy, but gives it a much more credit! But a balanced view may not always be the right one!

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/12/17/071217ta_talk_surowiecki

Evolution: Is it Progress?

2007-10-01T02:31:00.001+05:30

The following dialogue is a conversation I had with a friend of mine over the internet. She had written an article about the need for uplifting the status of women in Indian society where she positively advocates affirmative action. The way this dialogue developed into a very fruitful conversation and how interestingly it got us both to think about so many related topics was fascinating enough for me to present it here. I have edited out the smiley characters and certain irrelevant details usually associated with an online conversation, but maintained the overall chronology and flow of thought. It makes interesting reading for me every time I re-read it!

ME: Hey, I was reading your article about women’s plight in India and the need for equal rights. Do you actually believe in affirmative action??

FRIEND: yes

ME: Hmm… I see.

FRIEND: Why do you ask? I also believe that the world tends towards undoing itself

ME: Explain?

FRIEND: I mean that in any given environment things break down, rather than fix themselves

ME: They tend towards chaos you mean?

FRIEND: Right. But society is a different ball game, and that’s why we need affirmative action. We're animals after all!

ME: Why do you say different ball game?

FRIEND: Oh! I meant different from nature.

ME: So u mean to say chaos theory does not apply to society but to nature... hence in society we need affirmative action. Am I right?

FRIEND: Yes! But I am just a simple wanderer

ME: Wanderer where? In what realm?

FRIEND: In my head, silly!

ME: Oh! Hah ha… but your assertion isn’t it counterintuitive though?

FRIEND: How so?

ME: When you said "I also believe the world tends towards undoing itself" do you mean society or nature with regards to the word ‘World’?

FRIEND: I mean nature, sorry I should have specified

ME: So if get your reasoning right, in nature things tend towards chaos rather than fix themselves.... and in society it is the opposite? If so why do you need affirmative action in a society?

FRIEND: No, society does not naturally tend towards anything.

ME: Oh!

FRIEND: When I say society I am talking about society guided by a force. Are you getting what I am saying?

ME: No actually, I see a few contradictions.

FRIEND: Where?

ME: Wait; let me understand what you are saying properly. You are saying that nature tends towards chaos and that society is not opposite but rather it does not tend towards anything, so to push it towards non-chaos you need affirmative action. Have I got it right?

FRIEND: No. To push nature towards non-chaos you need affirmative action. Society is guided by a set of rules; nature is not (except by the supernatural force of course)

ME: So the supernatural is guiding nature towards chaos and mankind through acts like affirmative action is guiding nature towards non-chaos, which in its guided form is called society?? Is this what you are saying?

FRIEND: Yes. See, it is like a kindergarten and the children that go to it. The kindergarten is the world, the children are the people and the teacher is the government. During the break the children are left unattended. What do you think happens?

ME: I see. But why should mankind go against the supernatural and natural scheme?

FRIEND: Mankind doesn’t but society does go against it, because society isn’t part of nature. It is man made and by the way when I say society, I mean government-led groups of people.

ME: Wait a minute. So is there a qualitative factor when you differentiate society and nature. Is one a better form of the other?

FRIEND: Ok let me explain. For example, do you think we were made to be monogamous?

ME: No, it is by individual choice.

FRIEND: Yes. Society is a civilised form of nature. Like what John Nash said, we can’t ALL have the best, so we have to compromise with just what is good. That’s why we need society! Other wise the stronger and more equipped could just go around killing the rest!

ME: So is civilized form of nature a better or worse state than nature?

FRIEND: It is better, because of our highly developed brains. We have the power of judgment which makes us want to improve things around us.

ME: But if so, why do you then say that we are all animals anyway? Animals lack the power of judgement don’t they? Also animals cannot appreciate pleasure, while they maybe able to experience it. It is hardwired in their brains; what is good and bad.

FRIEND: I said we are all animals AFTER ALL because our psyche can be divided into two things - instinct and judgment. They are completely different. Society controls instinct and makes us pay a price for doing what we truly want to do and make pleasure seem bad.

ME: Isn’t appreciation a form of judgement?

FRIEND: Yes

ME: So why do we aspire towards society if it makes pleasure seem bad especially when nature in its unguided form does not pose these problems?

FRIEND: Because we don’t want to follow the principle of survival of the fittest, this is paralysing evolution if you ask me. We're trying to make room for all.

ME: But aren’t you, in the pursuit of ensuring equity towards the weak, denying the gifted the utility of their natural endowments?

FRIEND: Yes! Exactly! That is why I said it paralyses evolution in its natural form. But there is a problem in this whole thing; the problem is we can think. And that may not actually be a problem, but a part of evolution in a larger sense.

ME: Hmm… Can you explain what you mean when you say "problem is we can think and that may not actually be a problem"?

FRIEND: Think of it this way time goes on no matter what; and we as humans are on top of the pyramid, right?

ME: Ok.

FRIEND: Now our brains developed through evolution?

ME: Yes

FRIEND: And society had nothing to do with it.

ME: To a large extent.

FRIEND: So isn’t government and making room for the weak also part of "natural" evolution in a larger sense? Let’s face it, if it is on this Earth... its NATURAL

ME: But wait! Isn’t that a contradiction? When you say "so isn’t government and making room for the weak also part of "natural" evolution in a larger sense" then by your definition of society being constituted by government, shouldn’t the policy of making room for the weak or “actions of society" be moving away from the natural order of evolution and survival of the fittest etc ??

FRIEND: Yes! That is what I said. What I am saying is that isn’t this moving away from the natural order? A part of evolution in a larger sense?

ME: Hey! But isn’t that a contradiction?

FRIEND: Ok, let me explain. Do you think civilisation would have happened anyway? Or is it a permutation or combination of several factors?

ME: No it would not. Civilization is a process of refinement... of evolution

FRIEND: But no, could it not have happened differently?

ME: No! Because it is following a natural order; survival of the fittest.

FRIEND: But, how does society promote survival of the fittest?

ME: Ok tell me, in a society is competence rewarded? What happens to the incompetent or the unfit?

FRIEND: yes it is. But incompetents are taken care of. They are given chances.

ME: Not at the behest of the competent but!

FRIEND: Then how do you explain taxes? Why do I pay my money for the betterment of the poor?

ME: That is why in the future with more evolved societies economic policies will tend towards laissez faire and the anti Robin Hood will prevail!

FRIEND: But you have to admit this is paralysing evolution in its narrow sense.

ME: According to me, evolution is like a scatter plot there are 'experiments' on either side of the trend line, but the trend in this case is towards refinement. A Society based on communism is one such experiment, where the fit person is expected to pay for the unfit person’s survival. But as communism is being phased out so will other counterproductive societal influences.

FRIEND: Are you saying that as a whole we are average in to refinement?

ME: Yes.

FRIEND: So you are saying that we are getting there, our children are getting smarter and so on. And if so what is perfect?

ME: The trend is towards superior intellect.

FRIEND: Then how will society erase the lesser mortals?

ME: Alvin Toffler in his famous book "Future Shock" says that more has been achieved in the last 3 generations than the whole 800 lifetimes of mankind.

FRIEND: But isn’t this acceleration in progress largely due to technology?

ME: Considering that average human life is 60 year, we have had approximately 800 ancestors, as Homo sapiens. Consider this, 750 of them were spent in caves, only the past 50 have lived in society. Only the last 5 that have seen the printed word and only the last two that have understood electricity! So to answer your question, society will not erase the lesser mortals, it will create through the progress of the competent few, enough to make the lesser mortals better off. To give them a chance not through subsidizing or through affirmative action, but through improving the overall standard of living! Not by giving the man fish, but rather by teaching him how to fish.

FRIEND: Do you really think so?

ME: Yes.

FRIEND: But technology is making us do less!

ME: Exactly! By providing us with something which even you mentioned keeps on moving, irrespective of anything else. Time.... time to better utilize our mind for other productive things.

FRIEND: But that is for a fraction of the world’s population the rest either live of these few people or have enough money to buy their way through and there is a whole class of people who lose out in the bargain

ME: When u say that there is a fraction of the worlds population that is enjoying the benefit consider this. John D Rockefeller who is considered the richest American ever to live did not even have the luxury of using electricity in his house. None of the creature comforts we have today which we take for granted. Simple medicines for common ailments even! Despite his $200 billion estimated wealth! Aren’t we better off than the richest American of all time?

FRIEND: But Rockefeller did not need these conveniences at that time.

ME: Are you denying that there has been any progress altogether?

FRIEND: No. I am denying the fact that we're better off now! Tell me, do u measure progress by the things we can afford?

ME: Is the ability to take the cholera vaccine to remote parts of Africa better than not being to?

FRIEND: Yes but what is technology helping us to have? A better life in what way-medicines when we need it? But does modern society allow for equitable distribution of medicines? Only the rich can afford medicines for cancer and HIV.

ME: Through the advancement in technology the basic standards of living are improving. In the past there were the super rich and the super poor. And even the super rich lacked basic comforts of life. Coming to your question of AIDS and Cancer vaccines and the lobbyists who are working towards preventing the poor from getting these easily; think about when penicillin and anaesthetics was discovered. They were premium products and only the super rich could afford them. Over time and with the technological advancement even poorer people can afford them now. It is like in the scatter plot example I talked about; there will always be deviations, failed 'experiments', but slowly it will tend towards affordability for the poor and eventually like polio or plague... may even be wiped off the face of the earth!

FRIEND: So are you saying that we are moving to an age where everyone will be able to afford everything?

ME: NO! There will always be a hierarchy.... the fit and the unfit... the competent and the incompetent. Because if there is no dichotomy.... there will be status quo and no progress!

FRIEND: But if so where is the progress? And for whom?

ME: Consider this, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"

FRIEND: Ok?

ME: When you ask for who is the progress, I'll ask u this question, which is better?
Increasing the share of the pie ... increasing the market shares by actions which help the weak at the behest of the strong.... equitable distribution or letting the strong increase the size of the pie... the market size itself through their competence and capability thereby helping the weak enjoy a better quantity of the pie in all?!

FRIEND: Hmm... Tricky one!

ME: Aha! So have I CONVINCED you about this?

FRIEND: Yes

ME: Yahoo! I win; I win; I win!

FRIEND: Oh! How presumptuous! Dude, no you didn’t convince me! All I meant was that I accept your points. That’s all!

ME: Who? What? How? Why?

Catalyst

2007-09-09T01:28:00.001+05:30

Why does the Superglue not stick to
the tube in which it comes?

When a friend recently asked me this rather ubiquitous yet ambiguous question, it got me thinking; about Catalysts. The simple textbook answer to this question would be that, the chemical in Superglue requires moisture to harden and as moisture is not available inside the tube, it does not harden and does not stick to the walls of the tube. Here, moisture is the catalyst for the reaction which causes the ‘trigger’ leading to the chemical bonding and hence when the superglue comes into contact with the moisture in the air, adhesion takes place.

A catalyst, as defined by the dictionary, is a person or thing that precipitates change. A catalyst also aids in the speeding up of a reaction thereby causing the change to take place. Deconstructing the question on the verbal elements I observed that the question had an adjective-Super, for glue. Would this question have made the same impact on my mind, had my friend not added this adjective? The adjective added potency to the question, which in itself was the catalyst to my thought process. Common glue also requires a catalyst to trigger the process of adhesion but because of the adjective ‘super’ the question assumes a rather nagging dimension. Does something superlative also require an external aid to help it achieve its objective? The adjective also necessitates the question about the quantity of the catalyst required.

Moving away from the realm of glue and adhesion, to the implications of these questions when posed in a human context? What triggers humans to achieve what they set themselves as targets? As moisture in itself is not responsible for the adhesion, this discussion here is about external catalysts, and will not delve on the topic of essential requirement of the ‘chemical’- the target which the human wants to achieve and will to do it, but only on what triggers this process. Motivation, appreciation, recognition etc can be considered as some examples which usually are cited as the catalysts which trigger performance among humans. It is also evident that companions and teams play the important role of catalysts for most men and women. Connecting with the right companion, or working in a right team is many a times a very significant performance trigger for humans.

But just as the adjective ‘super’ necessitated the question of the amount of catalyst required, this questions also pops up when superlatives among men were involved. There are an exceptional few, who among men have the unique distinction of being able to command the adjective of being super. If these superlative few also require an external catalyst, what is its nature and what quantity of it is required when compared to normal men and women?

As an answer consider this unusual twist. The chemical compound out of which Superglue is made out of also has moisture (the catalyst) in it, albeit in a different chemical form. All it needs is that little extra of one of its own ingredients to be realized externally to create the superlative adhesion. Similarly, the ‘ingredients’ which constitute supermen, already have all that is required within them, and the only catalyst they require for their superlative achievements, is to find that little bit of themselves (or their greatness) in others!

Acquired Competence or Instinct?

2007-07-02T22:56:00.000+05:30

“How Hardwired Is Human Behaviour?” asks Nigel Nicholson, professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School in a Harvard Business Review article (July-August 1998). The theme of the article analyzes aspects of evolutionary psychology and its implications on “how the human mind came to be constructed”. It contends that the evolution of the human mind through the ages leaves behind ‘traces’ of the dominant psychology of the era, and how those behaviours manifest themselves in current day organizations and society in general.

So, it contends for example, that the reflexes developed by the human mind as a requirement of the physiological situation during the Stone Age are still remnant in our minds today, and that we are born with these qualities, pre-programmed into our brains.

After being introduced to this article and subsequent discussions on the same in the classroom during an Organizational Behaviour course, I have been trying to resolve conflicts in my mind about this. Its implications bother me, as it does not gel with my personal views on one the fundamental tenets of philosophy; epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, which studies man’s means of cognition. “Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses – or is it fed by innate ideas, implanted in man’s mind before he was born” asks Ayn Rand on epistemology. And, being a strong believer in the advocacy of ‘reason’, as a basis of understanding, the idea of being hardwired seems incorrect to me.

Photograph courtsey Amartya De

I watched the tribal dance show put up at the Singapore National Zoo today, and observed reactions of the audiences’ fascination of the performer, who (during the show) accurately managed to puncture balloons from a distance by shooting darts through a ‘pea-shooter’. It got me wondering if this concept of ‘hardwired brain’ also extended to the realm of ‘skills’. Are we naturally gifted with certain kind of survival skills or does man have to gain these through the employment of sensory stimuli to a rational exercise of practice?

It also got me wondering if the audience would appreciate the performer being naturally gifted with these hunting skills, or if he had gained the same through practice. Personally, I believe it should be the latter, appreciation for competence gained through the application of reason, rather than it being available as an innate pre-programmed instinct.

References:

1. “How Hardwired Is Human Behaviour”, Nigel Nicholson – HBR July-August 1998
2. “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, Ayn Rand

"It's just so perfect!"

2007-07-02T09:47:00.000+05:30

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour
- Arnold Toynbee

Given my limited travels around this world, it’s in this harbour city of Singapore, that I have realized how true this above statement is. But hang on, one will need another adjective when it comes to Singapore, and that would be “Synchronized Movement”. The sheer scale of this synchronism boggles the mind! Call it culture shock or an alien milieu, for someone who comes from beautiful chaos of India, this place presents a paradigm change. So much so, that one feels a sense of aversion for the perfection; as a friend commented,

Why would you want to stay here? It’s just so perfect!

Singapore harbour as seen from the cable car

Rose for your girlfriend, sir?

2007-02-21T00:53:00.000+05:30

Church Street, the narrow road between the Brigade road and St. Mark’s road; parallel to MG Road in Bangalore’s bustling up-market area. It is late evening on a dry summer’s day. The sun has set and the light from the many buildings, billboards and the street lights illuminate most of the street, but still leave certain sections of the street, dark.

The lady, who sells assorted dry fruits on a push cart by the parked cars, is counting the day’s earnings. There has been a good sale of the cashew today but the walnuts, chestnuts and almonds are not sold. Her daughter has not persisted in pestering the Chinese couple who had bought some cashew that afternoon to buy other items. She looks for her daughter now and realizes that it is evening and the sale of ‘rose flowers’ must have started.

A shapely young girl of about 22 years stands waiting on the narrow pavement, beside the pushcart with her back to the two wheeler parking lot of a dingy, cream colored six storey building.

Her fair complexion, accentuated with generous amounts of make-up causes the crimson lipstick to stand out. She has shoulder length brown hair with streaks of gold recently colored into them. Her ears sport a light weight, yet prominent designer ornaments which almost reach up to her shoulders.

She is wearing a knee length black skirt and a sleeveless zebra stripped top. She is a tall girl, but still wears dainty little black shoes with three inch heels. She is clutching a black handbag close to her body with her left hand, even while the strap of the handbag is slung over her shoulder. Her right hand clutches a black Nokia mobile phone.

It is getting late and he has not even bothered to call, yet. The two service messages she got from her network provider turned out to be false alarms. Her face betrays the irritation. She jerks her head away from the sight of a couple walking arm in arm.

At the other end of the street a young man on a purple colored ‘macho’ Pulsar motorbike turns into Church Street from Brigade Road. He is tall, sports an unshaven look and is rather muscular. He wears a brown leather jacket. Despite the helmet rule imposed by the government, he does not wear one; rather it is hung on his left forearm. It is uncomfortable, but it is at hand and if a police man decides to move towards him, it can be worn at short notice. More importantly, he wants to avoid ‘helmet hair’.

His face is lost in deep thought and there is a sense of urgency on it. But, somehow he is not able to bring himself to ride any faster. He pulls over to the left and is lucky to find a narrow parking slot. He manages to maneuver the bulky motorbike into the narrow space between whole rows of tightly parked two wheel vehicles but is unable put the side-stand, let alone alight from the motorbike. Irritated, he looks for someone to come help him hold the motorbike while he alights or make space for him to do so.

Another man wearing a red cap, un-tucked brown check shirt and with grease stained hands comes and starts moving the vehicle to the right of the young man. The young man can now alight, but still with some difficulty especially as he does not want to stain or tear his khaki trousers. He gives the man with the red cap two rupees and reaches for his mobile phone which is in a small leather pouch hung from his brown trouser belt.

At the other end of the street the dry fruit lady lifts her head from the counting as she hears an attractive jingle. She can’t recognize the tune which is from Mylo’s ‘Drop the pressure’, and just looks for the source of the sudden melody. The young girl looks at her mobile phone and is relieved but she waits a few moments before answering it.

“Where are you?” he asks in an Indian language before she can say ‘hello’.

“Hello!” she replies with a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “It’s been 30 minutes, you know!” then she continues in vernacular “Where are you? I am in front of Kaati Zone”

“Kaati Zone? Okay. I could not find parking space.”

“Are you still looking for parking? Why didn’t you come here directly? I told you, I would be waiting here, in front of Kaati Zone”

“No. I just found a space. I’m walking towards Kaati Zone now.” He replies leaning against his motorbike.

The guy with a red cap who is still moving an adjoining vehicle looks in the direction of Kaati Zone, searching for someone. It is quite a distance, he wonders. If only his daughter knew that this guy was going to walk all the way there, she might be able to approach him on the way.

“Why are you walking till here? Where have you parked? Anyways, come quick” she hangs up and reaches for something inside her black purse.

The lady selling dry fruits, who’s been distracted from her counting by the ringtone, now wonders how many roses has been sold that evening.

The young man is now walking towards Kaati Zone. He is now feeling very uncomfortable. He is wondering if it was worth all this. She had actually asked him to send her a Valentine day’s card by post on February 14^th, even though he had met her that day! “I mean, who does that” he thought. He had half a mind to stop at the vendor selling pirated books by the street side and delay reaching Kaati Zone some more time. “I wonder if she has ever read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull” he wonders as he sees the book. He continues walking.

Meanwhile, “I am sure he will notice it. He always notices this kind of stuff” the young girl has got a Maybelline Moisture Extreme lip gloss and is contemplating if she should use it. “I am sure he has discussed how luscious my lips look, with his creepy friends.” Instead, she gets a tissue paper and deftly starts removing the gloss from her lips. “Creep!” she thinks aloud and discards the tissue paper.

He notices her standing from a distance. “Wow!” he thinks, his face shows the exclamation. “Nice choice of clothes, madam!” he thinks and hastens his pace. “What was I thinking? Someone, this ‘interesting’ has to be given more consideration!” he chuckles to himself. “And besides, she is one hell of a dancer. And look! No ugly shiny lipstick also today!” Finally!

“Hi!” he says grinning cheerily, approaching her from behind.

She has noticed him coming, but turns a little slowly and maintains a poker face. With one hand on her hip she asks him without blinking her large eyes, “How come so late?”

“Sorry, sorry!” he replies eagerly “Friday evening is bad for the parking scene, Madam”

“Madam!” she is amused by the way he always calls her that. “So what?” she asks.

“He did send me two Valentine’s Day cards, and did not act smart about it when I asked him for it” she is thinking “Surely, he would have had to stand in the queue for an hour at Archie’s gallery to buy those cards”

“Sorry, sorry. I got a little delayed and thought it would be best to park my bike in the first spot I could find. Did you wait long?”

“Hello! It has been one hour, been standing here” she vehemently argues.

He looks lost. “How stupid of me, I was worried if she read some lousy book” he thinks “How am I going to salvage this?”

“Rose for your girlfriend, sir? Red rose, Sir. Please buy!” a noisy voice interrupts him. A little girl of ten is standing between them looking up, holding a bunch of red roses with small thorns still in their long stems. The lady selling the dry fruits is looking at them with unabated curiosity.

Both of them look at the little girl and then look at each other. He looks inquiringly, she avoids his eyes and tries to look away.

“How much?” he asks the little girl.

“Just fifteen rupees for two, Sir.” She replies looking at the girl. “How many you want madam?”

She looks at him with a mischievous inquiring look. “How much are you going to buy for me, ‘Sir’” she wonders.

He hesitates. “How many do you have?” he asks the little girl in all earnest.

“I have ten rose, Sir. That will be seventy five rupees”

He shifts his focus from the flower girl to the ‘madam’ who is now giggling. “Give me the ten!” he says to the flower girl and the ‘madam’ bursts out laughing.

The dry fruit seller smiles at a person wearing a red cap who is now standing beside her.

The giggling is now interrupted by the ringtone again,

“…… gonna drop the pressure”.

‘Madam’ waits for a moment and then disconnects the call.

Laissez Faire Capitalism: Political Freedom to Economic Freedom

2006-11-22T01:34:00.000+05:30

“In a capitalist society, it costs money to discriminate, and it is very difficult given the impersonal nature of market transactions.”

If there ever was a pithy answer you could give to all those who advocate communism & reservations to counter the apparent discrimination in a free & capitalist economy, Milton Friedman’s above statement would have to be the one!

In the family tree of advocates for a Laissez Faire capitalist economy during the 20^th century, Milton Friedman was amongst the most prominent. An heir to the theories of economists like Adam Smith and Ludwig von Mises, Professor Freidman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, for his achievement in the field of consumption analysis.

From being an advocate of John Maynard Keynes’ theory of a mixed economy during the WW-II years, Professor Friedman changed his views favoring the free market economy in the post war years.

His book “Capitalism and Freedom” originally published in 1962 is recognized as amongst 50 best books of the 20^th Century and has had profound influence on the economic policies of nations around the world.

As early as 1955, Professor Friedman in a memorandum to the Indian government, wrote

“The great untapped resource of technical and scientific knowledge available to India for the taking is the economic equivalent of the untapped continent available to the US 150 years ago”

Professor Milton Friedman passed away on November 16^th, 2006.

Reference:

The advertisement is selling you!

2006-11-21T01:58:00.000+05:30

Selling a product, a service, an idea can be rather complicated. One must actually know what is being sold, what its applications are and who would find these products, services, ideas and their applications interesting.

Selling “those who find these applications interesting” to the seller, so that he can sell his products, his services, his ideas, to them can be even more complicated. The latter is what I have been trying to do for the past ten months.

You might by now be wondering what this profession is where I am apparently involved in selling people to another seller. Before you get all confused, angry and repulsed about the profession I am in and decide not to ever read anything written by such a disgusting person, I will tell you what this profession is. Its Advertising!

“Advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor” – Definitions Committee of the American Marketing Association

Now, here is the question. Through advertising is a person or an entity actually selling products, services & ideas; or are they selling people to these products, services & ideas?

I think it is the latter.

If you are a marketing grad you would surely have had your professors and others tell you that “Advertising is a mass medium tool aimed at disseminating brand information”; or if you are an average Joe with a cable TV connection, you would have probably seen the show ‘Storyboard’ on CNBC-TV18, where guys with French beards, orange streaked hair and ear rings tell you stuff about target audience, product planning, branding, channels of distribution etc in relation to advertising.

At first instance, both the marketing grads and the average Joes amongst you might point out (to me) that, what the definitions committee, your professors and the French beard guys are telling, contradicts the “selling people to the product” idea.

But, voluntarily or involuntarily, what they are actually telling you is that Advertising is more of selling people to a product, service or idea, rather than the other way round!

Am I just stupid to continue asserting this, or is there some slinky, cunning meaning to this?

Well, you guessed right. Logical fallacy or not, consider the following reasoning.

You are a toothpaste company trying to sell your brand, through advertising. Once you have identified that your toothpaste is orange in color, you next go about identifying all those who find this an invigorating color for toothpaste. You then release an advertisement extolling the benefits of orange toothpaste in whitening ones teeth.

This process can also be understood as follows. Finding out the interested audience; application of this audience and the toothpaste’s interest in it, in context to the advertisement, is its purchasing power; and your goal for the advertisement is to “make a sale” of this audience’s purchasing power!

In effect, what actually is getting sold through an advertisement is the interested audience’s purchasing power for the product, service or an idea. Hence, there is a focus on target audience, product planning, branding, channels of distribution etc from the French beard guys and the focus on the masses that are being sold through the medium of advertising in your professors’ definition!

Make sense? Or, do you think I am saying this from an advertisement salesman’s (or more aptly, response executive, as we are known in my organization) perspective? To make your job easier in making sense of this, I will leave you with this further thought to chew upon. If my job it is to sell an advertisement to a toothpaste company wanting to sell their toothpaste, what will I be trying to “make a sale of” through the ad?

The toothpaste, the toothpaste company, the ad itself or ------------------------------------------------ your purchasing power for the toothpaste!

Three Cheers to Angelina!

2006-06-23T01:03:00.001+05:30

This post is inspired by the recent CNN exclusive that I saw, titled “Angelina Jolie: On Her Mission and Motherhood”. I am not really a great fan of the charity and philanthropy brigade, who go about claiming to be pseudo saviors of the down-trodden and the backward, but something about the profile of this sultry screen icon as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador seemed genuine. I have previously taken a stance that, charity and philanthropy should be consequence of individual’s judgment and not something as dictated by the society, and this was exactly the impression I got when I saw and heard about Angelina’s mission.

What is it that drives this sinfully beautiful Hollywood celebrity to take such an active interest in the lives of the refugees in Africa or Afghanistan or Cambodia? Surely it cannot be for publicity, she cannot have enough of it as a result of her celebrity life. Is she competing in a beauty pageant where she is being judged on her “Charitable Quotient”? I am confident that all men and most women would not disagree with me when I say that Angelina Jolie, would win any beauty pageant hands down, irrespective of her having a “Charitable Quotient” or not!

Whether it is adopting children who have been orphaned because of AIDS affected parents or supporting the cause of Afghan refugees during the height of post 9/11 Anti-Afghanistan frenzy, Angelina Jolie has stood her ground against the barrage of criticism. Criticism, for the fact that her philanthropy was based not on what society deemed fit, but based on her judgment.

I will conclude this post with a linguistic alliteration. As I saw the television documentary on Angelina, and saw the pictures of her amongst the malnourished and petrified natives of a suffering African nation I could not help but wonder if they thought of her as someone who had descended from the heavens, their own ‘pretty little angel’ which when translated into French would be ‘Angelina Jolie’ !

“We want the industry to do it voluntarily!”

2006-06-01T01:16:00.000+05:30

A book called Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. I read it in 2001. There were two kinds of people in the book, the people who were pure evil and those who were unparalleled in their goodness. I thought, when I read it that this was a very unrealistic view of the world. In the book, the evil people scheme unrelentingly with a façade of doing a great help to the society and the good people initially bear these obnoxious atrocities without batting an eyelid. I thought, when I read the book that the ways of the world was not so "black and white", and that there have to be many shades of gray in between.

Over the past five years, one by one these shades of gray have started disappearing. But still, come on! There are still shades of gray, right? I mean that book was too much! Take for instance this court scene in this book. There is this brilliant industrialist who is single handedly capable of keeping the economy afloat and he is being prosecuted for something as stupid as selling his product to another company when there is some government regulation which prohibits this. Here is a small excerpt from this court scene “drama”

… He noted the stillness in the room. By the rules of complicated pretense which all those people played for one another’ benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none, they sat still; they understood.

“Do you mean that you are refusing to obey the law?” asked the judge.

“No. I am complying with the law – to the letter. Your law holds that my life, my work and my property may be disposed of without my consent. Very well, you may now dispose of me without my participation in the matter. I will not play the part of defending myself where no defense is possible, and I will not simulate the illusion of dealing with a tribunal of justice.”

“But, Mr. Rearden, the law provides specifically that you are to be given an opportunity to present your side of the case and to defend yourself”

“A prisoner bought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognized by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke. The law, by which you are trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well. Do it.”

“Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle – the principle of the public good.”

“Who is the public? What does it hold as good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it – well, so does the burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”…

{A few paragraphs and dialogues later}

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

“But the law compels you to volunteer a defense!”

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

“That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen.” Said Rearden gravely, “and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do; I will do it at the point of the gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there – I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine – I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.”

Although this may seem out of context when read here, what the excerpt conveys is a logical fallacy. The judges are unable to pretend about the righteousness of their "laws" when the victim refuses to recognize the crime. If the victim refuses to voluntarily accept his “guilt” the tribunal is unable to interpret its own laws. I thought, when I read the book, that this was very unrealistic. I mean, what’s with all the volunteering? Surely, nobody would want another to voluntarily accept a noose around his own neck?

Today I saw an interview of Ms. Meira Kumar, Honorable Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, conducted by Karan Thapar on CNBC TV18 on the topic of Reservations in the private sector. I would like to provide another excerpt, but as I do not have it verbatim, I will try to provide the gist. (*)

The topic revolved around the subject of whether the industry should be forced into accepting the reservations for SC/STs. After many instances of when the honorable minister shouted her way away from answering many of Mr. Thapar’s questions directly, there came her way a question.

Karan Thapar: “Minister, if the captains of industry (whom you have asked to come back with details of how many SCs and STs they have on their rolls) come back and tell you, that they do so in sufficient numbers what would you do then?”

Meira Kumar: “That’s too hypothetical a situation”

Karan Thapar: “But you want to base your decision to impose reservations on hypothetical data, which even your government data shows to be wrong, but here you do not want to answer a hypothetical question.”

Meira Kumar: “No, I will have to apply myself to this”

Karan Thapar: “Would you be verifying their data?”

Meira Kumar: “No, you are making it out that as though I am suspecting the captians of industry. I mean I will have to apply myself to this. I will have to look at what course of action I can take.”

Karan Thapar: “What would be your response to this after you have applied yourself to this. Would you then impose this reservation? What would be the course of action you take?”

Meira Kumar: “I don’t have to disclose every action I intend to take on television. It was I who told them [the industry] to check that they may already have SCs and STs on their rolls. Don’t be averse to having SC/STs on your rolls.”

Karan Thapar: “Yes, and if the industry has sufficient numbers already, then?”

Meira Kumar: “No, I will have to apply myself to this. I cannot say what my course of action would be. We don’t want it to be forced; we want the industry to create reservations in their rolls voluntarily.”

That’s when I realized that one more shade of gray had forever disappeared. This debate was very similar to the prosecution of Mr. Rearden in that book. This was not only about imposing reservations to some backward caste, tribe, class, sect etc in private sector. This was also about wanting the industry to voluntarily do it. Voluntarily hire people based not on the merit of being able to do the job, but being born in a backward segment of society. Voluntarily put a spanner in a running machine and pretend it is in the effort to administer justice. Voluntarily put a noose around one’s own neck and pretend it is the highest principle - the principle for the public good.

I realized that amongst my gray shades of doubt, one hue had become black. It proved the existence of a kind of rot in society which wanted others to volunteer guilt where none existed. It has also made me realize that I must look for those who when faced with such a request would react as Mr. Rearden reacted in the book at the end of that trial, by saying,

“… If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their mood requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!”

Notes

(*) Please note that the dialogue posted here between Ms. Meira Kumar and Mr. Karan Thapar is not the exact transcript and has been written in my words, about what I heard transpired in that interview. If anybody can provide me with the actual transcripts I would immediately replace the same here.

References

1. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Signet Books, 1957

Rear Window

2006-05-29T00:46:00.000+05:30

Any search on the internet for the best crime/mystery movies will always link somehow to Alfred Hitchcock. And among his many movies two stand out: “Psycho” and “Rear Window.” Both these movies are cult classics mainly because of their superb story telling in archetypal Hitchcock-ian style. After seeing the History Channel’s montage on Hollywood villains, and after being bitten by the bug, I decided to rent a Hitchcock movie, on a recent rainy Sunday afternoon.

Rear Window, based on Cornell Woolrich’s short story was released after Psycho with a punch-line which read “See it! If your nerves can stand it after PSYCHO.” A classic crime noir fiction, Rear Window is a story about how an invalidated shutter bug with a nothing much else to do as his leg is in a cast, sets about trying to solve a neighborhood murder.

What sets it apart from the macabre Psycho is the humorous undercurrent in the entire movie. The lead character, L.B. Jefferies played by James Stewart is uncomfortable about his plight, but is nevertheless indifferent about it. He is going through his six weeks stuck to his wheel chair and his situation is an apt example for the proverb “An idle mind is a devil’s workshop”. Not only does he spend his time looking through the window and into the lives of his neighbors, he also starts doubting if his fiancée is the right woman for him!

Rear Window is also a romance in its own right. The fiancée played by Grace Kelly is a popular socialite. She, according to James Stewart’s character, who as a news photographer travels to the distant and unknown parts of the world, is too high society for his comfort. Part of the movie is how Grace Kelly’s character proves to him that she is just as adventurous as he is.

Written by Cornell Woolrich, who has been termed as the father of noir fiction, and directed by the great Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window is a great picture for crime movie buffs.

A Low Waist Melodrama....

2006-04-12T11:43:00.000+05:30

{This was written when I was in Engineering College... I related to ads then too...}

Just as I turned to descend from the highest floor in the e-department of MSRIT, I found myself a couple of steps behind a rather shapely creature of the female kind. As the flight of stairs in these high regions of Ramaiah College are rather steep, and for no other reason did my mind invent the feeling of vertigo and made me want to trip down a couple of steps. But unluckily, I managed to hold my balance.

The shapely creature did not notice this and by now had reached the bottom of this flight of steps. It was early afternoon, during one of the rather erratic, deserted and lengthy lunch breaks, not very uncommon in our illustrious e-department. This left the empty, descending flight of stairs all for us. The shapely creature was a typical kind inhabiting the vast ruins of Ramaiah land, and characteristically trudged down the steps in a rather slow, ambling descent. The voluptuous anatomical references swaying in a forced motion ahead provided me ample time for coming back to being just a couple of steps behind.

Now descending down to lower altitudes, my eyes shifted to lower altitudes too. Even by Ramaiah standards, the jeans’ on the swaying anatomical reference was alarming. Especially because just the previous day, I had seen the advertisement of this particular kind of new “low cut jeans”, that had been unleashed on the market. For the uninitialized, I strongly recommend reading of the supplement of the Times of India, which carry these ads regularly.

Unluckily, I again managed to control my new found sense of vertigo as we reached the third flight of steps. The shapely creature took notice for the first time of my existence, but continued trudging along uninterested. Not that what was in front of me was quite as attractive as the ad, but it got me thinking, whether the shapely creature wanted to emulate the other shapely creatures in the ad. I wondered whether shapely creature fancied herself to be a Neha Dhupia or a Vidisha Pavate (both models very visible in the ad).

Just about then my train of thoughts was interrupted by the sudden appearance of two male characters, as different as the sun and the moon, from another flight of steps opposite to us. As people who daily visit the vast ruins of Ramaiah land will know, flights of stairs are everywhere leading them everywhere else and into vast catacombs and caves with statues of garland holding female gargoyles.

One of them was another typicality of MSRIT. The largely built, carrying “copies” in there hands and with the cult unshaven look emulating none other than the oh-so-famous Hrithik Roshan. The other was just as unique. Effeminate, wearing round glasses and carrying a large school bag, which sagged from the weight of the heavy library book inside. The former took immediate notice of the shapely creature who was now running her hands through her colored hair, but the latter quickened his pace down the steps pretending to not even notice the primary subject of this melodrama. The former now was in between the shapely creature and me as we descended the final flight of steps together. The latter had taken a turn, which probably led to a laboratory with many noisy cathode ray oscilloscopes.

As I reached ground zero, our path was cut across by a bevy of female lecturers moving in the direction of the distant oasis called canteen to probably get some idly-sambhar and coffee. Their male counterparts where nowhere around and I guessed they were in one of the caves as usual engulfed in heavy nicotine smoke. One of them heading to the oasis did notice me and from her eyes, I could see that she was cursing my very existence.

By now with the constraints of the narrow flight of stairs no longer curtailing our movement, the little entourage had dispersed. Hrithik Roshan headed towards the catacombs of Ramaiah hostel and Neha Dhupia towards the e-department notice board. I predictably moved in the same direction, but even before I could get back to closer proximity, she swayed away towards another shorter, giggly and not-so-shapely creature. As for me, sensing danger continued towards the notice board keenly looking to see what archaic message was put up.

Thus ends this lunch break melodrama which left me thinking about the weather, the war in Iraq, my new problem of vertigo and my dismal performance in my exams.

{Melodrama: In melodrama there is constructed a world of heightened emotion, stock characters and a hero who rights the disturbance to the balance of good and evil in a moral universe. (Source: Wikipedia)}

Market Research and the Media

2006-03-11T00:39:00.000+05:30

{Also cross-posted at the Indian Media Bash Blog. Read Here }

Having recently joined the media advertising industry, I now have to deal with an overwhelming amount of data pertaining to various market data. In the print industry certain figures hold a lot of value; they are the Audit Bureau of Circulation figures called the ABCs and the National Readership Survey figures called the NRS-es. These data provide an estimate of the number and habits of people reading newspapers and magazines. This is very relevant for marketing the newspaper or magazine to the advertisers because most decisions about media buying are based on these figures. It helps the advertiser ascertain the kind of readers who will eventually see their advertisements and if it will provide them with expected response.

Targeting the Decision Maker

With the demographics of India showing a considerable skew towards a youthful populace and as youngsters with larger disposable incomes become independent decision makers, more and more advertisers are now very interested in knowing the habits of these decision makers. While the ABCs and the NRS-es give the data about the reach the media instruments have, the DMS or the Decision Makers Survey, now presents a very important value proposition to the advertiser. What this mainly describes is the kind of readership the publication has among decision makers, whether it be in terms of corporate decisions or day to day household purchase decisions. For instance FMCG companies selling a product like Sunflower Oil would rather advertise in a family channel like Star Plus which is watched by a large number of household purchase decision makers, the housewives rather than CNBC which is watched more by business men.

Experiential Media

What is also relevant in the media today is a shift towards more experiential platforms of advertising. Advertisers today are looking at providing the customer with an experience with their brands and not just the product. This is based on the psychographics, or attitudes and behaviors of the consumer. It has been ascertained, for instance that due to the rising attention deficiency syndrome amongst readers of a newspaper the time spent by an average reader with a newspaper is significantly lower than before. What this means is that, the print advertisements although reaching the audience indicated by the readership figures of the NRS-es and ABCs, are not actually providing brand connect. Hence it becomes imperative for the advertiser to look for media which does not only provide an Opportunity to See, but actually an Opportunity to Experience.

So its market research then?

So it is clear that market research and surveys is an integral cog in the wheels of the media decision vehicle. But can all decisions be taken based on these surveys? Although generally when one is presented with such a question, we usually disagree and say that not all marketing decisions can be taken based on market research; there are very few arguments which disapprove of it as a useful tool. But, I was recently introduced to a rather potent argument about how market research is not all powerful as claimed by the statisticians and hardcore data junkies. Consider a scenario where a toothpaste company conducting a market survey about its product, poses various questions to its users about the taste, smell, color, package ergonomics etc. The kind of response which can be expected could be about wanting a higher mint flavor, a fresher smell, a greener color and so on. But what the argument contends is that by conducting such a conventional market survey, what the toothpaste company is getting are only incremental improvement suggestions for their product and not very significant experiential changes. For instance, because of a restrictive question set in the market survey pertaining to the past and current experiences of consumers about the product, the company loses out in tapping aspirations of the consumer for newer experiences like that of a teeth protecting chewing gum.

Capturing Relevant Audiences

This above situation is a very relevant discrepancy in terms of a market research exercise because of its reliance on past and current experiences as the basis on which the future is to be extrapolated. While these suggestions are predominantly incremental improvements in nature, what is more relevant today is capturing the experiential aspirations for the future. Also important is the need to make the advertising reach the relevant audience more than anybody, and with values becoming more and more embedded in experiences than in just the product, market research has to be redefined from being survey figures to being portals to experiential aspirations of relevant audiences.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference