Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

If you have boarded a flight from Chennai's Anna International Airport and you can read Tamil, you might have noticed a sign " மெய்ப்புல அறைகூவலர் ". Ever wondered what it could be? If you can read English, then you can make sense of what this means - yes - it is " Physically Challenged ". I can't imagine who can come with such a dumb translation - that too from English to Tamil in Tamil Nadu. A physically challenged person who knows only Tamil has no use of such a sign board in Tamil.

I thought it was a joke when I saw the link with the text "Start a New Life with SecondShaadi.com". I thought one of the NRIs with a good sense of humor wrote a blog, making fun of Indian "match-making" aka dating sites. I continued to believe that this is a joke when I saw the Copyright note as "Pahwa KBS. All rights reserved." I thought the author is smart enough to coin a last name - first name combination that sounds like "bhakwas" - or rubbish in Hindi. After careful analysis, it dawned upon me that this could be serious business. The CEO is from some management institute, must have done his due diligence before starting a venture. Who knows, there must be venture capitalists who might have done their due diligence before funding it. It could be a simple number game. They must have thought - "About 10 million Indians get married every year. Of this, if 5% are remarriages, we have a business of 500K people who are looking for a ...

I read this article by Rajeev Srinivasan on Rediff - A whiff of the Manchurian Candidate. Rajeev suggests a few names for the President of India. Here is my serious recommendation: Rajini Kant - And here are the reasons. 1. Hardworking: Against all odds, he worked his way through to be the highest paid actor. (What's wrong in being an actor?) Even at the age of 57, he works to make money for the people who invested in him. 2. Integrity: The man is known for speaking his mind. Read his interview with Balakumaran some 30 years ago. He doesn't try to be some who he is not. 3. Simplicity: Ask anyone who has met him. 4. Hindu Values: Not the Bajrang Dal kind of Hindu values, but the ones like his respect for the land, values and beliefs. 5. Wealth: He is rich. Another reason in addition to the above for communists to hate him. That's also a qualification as per Rajeev. 6. Intellect: He knows at least 5 Indian languages. 7. A symbol of national integration: - a...

Where there is so much hype about Sivaji, The boss, Deepak Amin comes to our mind. Deepak's story started like Sivaji's. He returned to India after being a Technical  Lead with Microsoft for about 6 years. He returned sometime in late 90s and setup a software company called 'Indicus' in Mumbai. The web has many documents about the energetic CEO of the companies - Indicus and vJungle - both non-existent now. But I know Deepak as a boss and a great human being. He too tried to work with the biggies of Mumbai and Gujarat to do something to help the poor. The systems and the people running it believed in maintaining the status quo of corruption and exploitation. Read more of it in his article that inspired hundreds to return to India. By the time I began working for him, he had settled to a small business called Indicus and stayed away from the bad guys.  But even then, occasional hafta collectors and Ganesh Chaturti organizers would show up at office to collect ...

For the sake of quick reference, I post this much read article in my blog.  The person who wrote this was Deepak Amin - by boss at vJungle and Indicus.  It was written sometime before 1998 - that was when I decided to return to India and contacted him. "A quick background: I went to the US many moons ago (1987 to be precise) seeking the proverbial American Experience trudging the standard route of undergrad in IIT, postgrad in the US, summer job,H1, job in software co., Mexico for visa, etc. You know the schpiel. Worked at Microsoft for 6 years and decided to return to Bharatland in late 1995. Set up www.indicus.com and started churning out code from Mumbai. Been at it for about a year now. Returning to India: Having come back and ensconced myself very comfortably into India, and having met several others who have tried this, some successfully and some others not so successfully, I'd like to aver that there is one and only one thing that you need to have to pack your bags and ...

I got a link from Ram on his most recent blog; I began reading it and skipped a few paragraphs here and there. After I posted a comment to his article and re-read his blog, I realized I had missed some key information from his post earlier. Because of that my comment didn't sound right. I do not know how to edit a comment, so I left it as it is. This brings me to the topic of the day - what is the best size for a blog article? Most of my blogs fit within one page of the monitor with a resolution of 1024X768. My blog has links to the right of the article and a lot of blank space around. So, I'm a man of few words. Does it mean that my blogs are more of summaries of my views that details? Is it good to have long, multi-page blog? I don't know. I lose patience with online articles and emails that are more than a page long. It either means that the author uses too many words to explain something simple or that there is a lot of information which is irrelevant to me. Wh...

US techies 10-times more productive than Indian If the above link didn't work, here is the gist: Wipro's earnings is $50K per employee while top US IT companies make close to a million dollars per employee. First some questions: What is the ratio of expenses vs income per employee in the US and India? There may not be such a big difference in this criteria. When talking about IBM, Dell etc., does the statistics include their operations in India and other countries or not? Does the statistics include the contract workers or consultants for US companies? Would American companies have the same efficiency if the cost of outsourcing increases? I am fine with Indian companies generating less revenue per employee as Indian companies contribute a lot toward employment and overall spread of wealth.