What about Hygiene Mr Lalu??

The Rail budget is out and everyone is cheering for Mr Lalu and why not??He achieved what was once thought to be impossible, bringing Indian Railways back in the black. His aam aadmi budget has brought in cheer for everyone in the country.

One question that i feel remains to be addressed in any discussion regarding the IR is that of hygiene and cleanliness in the trains and at the railway station. If we really are to be anywhere near the top railways in the world we need to do a HUGE clean up act. Its neither the super fast A/c coaches nor the dedicated freight corridors which are going to make Indian Railways a common man's friend but the Hygiene factor.

One walk down any Indian railway station will reveal whats the real problem. The stations are stinking with urine smell and there is human excreta everywhere on the tracks. This is not the fault of Mr Lalu and his railway department,but the aam aadmi himself. We don't have any sense of public hygiene or health hazards arising out of the lack of hygiene. We litter the stations and use them as public urinals. Also even though its specifically mentioned in all coach toilets NOT to use the toilet when the trains have stopped at a station,people end up doing there business right when the train stops.

I still don't understand our mentality of spoiling our own country by throwing litter in public instead of the garbage bin,spitting pan all over the walls, making ones love public by writing on national monuments etc etc etc....and how these very people when they enter Singapore, Japan or UK are following every rule to the 't'. These very people never do any of the above things in these countries.

Please don't tell me that its the uneducated poor people who do it. This behaviour is common all economic classes. It just as common to see a rich babu spitting pan out of his posh car as it is of seeing a poor guy using the road as a public urinal.( In fact the babu is doing a bigger demeanor as the poor dude might not be having a home let alone a loo.)

So its high time i think we Indians woke up and stopped considering our country as the world biggest garbage dump and started cleaning up our country. Everyone of us can make a difference.So next time you see that plastic bag on the ground put it in the nearest rubbish bin.

Save Indian Railways,Save Indian Roads,Save India.

PS: Keep up the good job Mr Lalu and don't forget to use your container for spitting the pan.

Think Simple

Found a blog link that reminds me any amount of analytical thinking bullshit doesn't really explain things as clearly as this...

http://indexed.blogspot.com/index.html

Beggarnomics...

I recently got this as a forward. Even though i feel the sum mentioned in this article is grossly overstated its still worth a thought and maybe some more first hand primary research.Who knows maybe i can sell it to Madhur Bhandarkar for his movie Traffic Signal.

Be a Loser??

I read today's editorial page of TOI and came across the Be a Loser article in the Devil's Advocate column by A Srinivas and i must say i was shocked to say the least. He starts with Australia's crushing 5-0 ashes victory over England and goes on to ask, doesn't Ricky Ponting and Co get tired of winning?? According to him winning at all times is dehumanising. The real victors in sport or life need to taste defeat at some point or the other to be decent folks. He even goes ahead to state articulately that there is exquisite delight in defeat and misery even if it concealed in the loneliness of success.

What a load of bull i say. Especially coming from a newspaper that's been tom tomming about India Poised for 2 weeks now. Is this how Indians will take over the world.By being exquisitely relishing defeat in all areas of life? Does he think we will produce the next World Champions or World Business Leader by accepting defeat as the right thing. This world only remembers winners and not the also rans.

Everyone knows Charles Lindenberg crossed the Atlantic first,can anyone tell me who crossed it second? I think the author is confusing aiming to be the best at everything you do with letting success get into your head.These are two different things.Anyone who lets his /her success get to their heads will fall down hard and fast in today's world. But one who keeps his head inspite of his successes is the real champion.

Does defeat make me less arrogant and help to to love and to be more tolerable? Does defeat make you more mature,human and able to enjoy life's little happinesses more than someone who have tasted victory?Should he be ashamed of his victories? Should he be ashamed of having done something better than anyone else is able to do consistently over a period of time? Should Ricky Ponting be ashamed that his team beats the crap out of every team in the world?

The answer is obvious but I must say we have really hardcore Indian cricket team fans out there who would find such an article inspiring. Go on Indians who are poised,taste defeat and become a forgiving saint. I personally would like India to savour victory.

Starting of a Brand New Year

So heres to this new year...Let it bring India's 10 % GDP growth, reduce prices of petrol and all other essential commodities, pristine roads to Pune, World Cup victory for India, more jobs for the unemployed,excellent monsoons for the farmers, no tsunamis, more need for marketeers etc etc etc and finally bring me loads and loads of George Washingtons.....

Had a the laziest 3 days of my life in Goa for New Years...Cheers

Blogvertising- End of blog purity ?

Well i guess it had to come some day or the other...We have all been sharing all sites we love or things which interests us on the web through our blogs. Ted Murphy the founder CEO of Payperpost has through his site launched a barge of bloggers onto the web who will now be advertising for companies registered on the website to promote their products.

HP and Fox are few of the high profile companies enrolled. HP is gonna use this method to make its latest camera model popular. One thing though,HP has required all those posts made to be shown as sponsored posts if the bloggers post is accepted by the website. So has Fox confirmed this disclosure.

Another website ReviewMe has gone a step further and tried to include only those blogs that have some amount of traffic by checking for blog quality too.This then takes care of those just out to make a quick buck.

So what does it mean to the pristinity of blogs? Well i think people will still avoid those blogs which are being reviewed by those out to make a buck and read only the true bloggers reviews. For eg: David Ponce ,one of the bloggers at ReviewMe is also an editor of a techblog OhGizmo.com on one of his blogs reviewed data recovery software Handy Recover and started with saying that he was being compensated for taking his time to review this item and ended his review by saying that this software was anything but Handy.

So i guess people will still continue to read bloggers who are true to themselves so whats the problem if they make a bit of dough while they are at it.....

Web 2.0 @ work!!

Well i have been looking up Web 2.0 for some time now and i thought its about time i posted something about it. We all know the now very famous and popular sites like Wiki,del.ici.ous,last.fm etc but id like to talk about a couple of other relatively lesser known cousins. Cause this is where the future of the real e-commerce lies according to me.

For all of the late nineties talk abt e-commerce becoming the new face of business we didn't actually see a more than a mere speck of the it. I believe it was the way businesses were designed that led to the initial failure of e-commerce. Websites merely aped the offline method of doing business instead of creating new business models. This became all the more obvious in the dot com bust.

But now with people realsing that there needs to be a completely different way of doing business on the net, the Web 2.0 model has come into being and more and more businesses are trying to take advantage of it.

The first business id like to talk about is the way clothes are being sold today. They are a few prominent businesses like Spreadshirt and Cafepress which are doing really well for themselves and giving the so called branded clothing a run for their money. Basically on these 2 sites everyone can be a designer of their own clothing and whats more set up a free shop online without having to worry about the usual hassles of maintaining inventories, distribution channels or advertising expenses. From a top designer to a kid wanting his name on his t-shirt everyone is accomodated and thus taking care of the Long tail of designing. You can set up shop and get paid for every shirt you sell. Spread shirts made it to the no: 5 Spot on BusinessWeek's Europe's Hot Growth Companies list and has sales of about $ 10.3 million at last count.

An even more interesting site i found was Kiva. It seems to be the future in investment banking. Rather than entrepreneurs having to get angel investors or venture capitalists for seed funding they can approach potentially every single person on the planet for funding.

Kiva offers funding to entreprenuers in the backward economies of Africa for starting their own small businesses. Its like microfinance but instead of a bank giving them the money its people like you and me. If you believe in some business then you can lend some money and earn interest on it. The repayment period is generally short and so is the seed money with the minimum amount coming out to be only $ 25.

This idea can be extrapolated to funding entrepreneurs all across the globe on a much larger scale. Convincing a few seed funders for a couple of millions is much tougher than convincing a million for a few dollars if your idea is sound. I think someone would already have begun thinking about such a business model or is already having one. It seems the next natural step. Anyways my point is ,on the face of it these business models seems so damn simple that we might be forgiven to feel like kicking our butts for not coming up with the idea ourselves. Thats the beauty of Web 2.0. Im sure this revolution of e-commerce is here to stay...

Brand Bangalore to Bengaluru??

If there is one Indian city that is today etched in the mind of any well read person across the globe it is Bangalore,i'm sorry Bengaluru....Bangalore has fallen the way of Bombay,Calcutta and Madras.
Mr Anandamurthy and Co have achieved what they had set out to do by the official name change from yesterday Nov 1st onwards. They say its an apt start to the Suvarna Karnataka year(Golden Jubilee year).I say its the worst possible start. What does such name change achieve except an awful amount of waste??
I would love to hear the costs to exchequer for the name changes for the previous cities. I can imagine it will be a one huge bill. Just imagine all the government documents that are kept in Karnataka,Central Govt or Foreign embassies across the world will have to be trashed to incorporate the name change.All the sign boards on roads,shops etc will have to be changed. I'm sure here are a million other things that i haven't thought of.
So all these money is wasted when it could have been used for much useful purposes like decongesting the choking roads of the Garden City.
I don't understand how in a democratic system like ours a few personalities for their 15 seconds of fame decide to change the names of our cities. Mr Shashi Tharoor once mentioned in his article when Madras was changed to Chennai- "The weather will be just as sultry in Chennai as it used to be in Madras. But are we Indians so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free?"
The self declared champions of culture can claim the fact that Bangalore's name change highlights the city's origins - Bendakalooru means `boiled beans' in Kannada. I don't think even Scott Adams could have come up with such a joke. IT silicon valley city to City of Boiled beans. When everyone moves forward we Indian's love to go back centuries. After all we have a rich heritage. Prove that in action not in useless resource wasting name changes. Is name changing the miracle solution to solving a city's problem. If yes ,then by all means go ahead Change every damn city,town and village name in the country.

I have a new strip to contribute to Dilbert. A caricature of Mr Anandamurthy beating the hell out of Dilbert,Dogbert, Wally and the Pointy Haired Boss for using the word Bangalored - "Its Bengaluru-ed you dumbwits !!!"

Wikipedia 2.0 ??

Well there seems to be a new wiki about to come into this world....Its christened Citizendium. Currently they are under construction and about to start more like a mirror of Wikipedia and then maybe look to improve on the articles on Wiki....It seems one of the original authors of Wiki has undertaken this work...He believes that Wikipedia was only half of the original idea of both Nupedia and Wikipedia,where Nupedia was more of a closed academic project and Wiki was the free wheeling side project...
He wants to bring abt a lot of changes in Wikipedia ,basically errors he thinks exist in Wiki.
Honestly as of now i don't see the utility of the project as they are not improving on the concept of Wiki at all and may just succeed in diverting a small amount of traffic from Wiki....I believe right now the creator just wants to have a wiki which has full control of which was not so when he was working on Wiki...Let see the concept take off publicly and then i guess more comments will be in order....As of now I'd call it only a Wiki 1.1 in progress, if so at all and not a Wiki 2.0

Watch out Amazon...Zinio is here!!!

In this new era of doing business the entire way of producing,selling and buying products is undergoing drastic changes. We also see that in value chains, how Amazon has replaced the earlier brick and mortar book stores. Everything is under a state of flux and even this new value chain that Amazon has made is under improvement.It would now be possible for the publisher to delete all the middlemen altogether between him and the customer(basically that means
bye bye Amazon too).

One of the major troubles with Amazon is that a person can't get his book instantaneously even though he pays for it upfront. However strongly we argue in class we all know that we as customers are never happy to pay for something which we will get in the future.Well someone has just taken care of that major headache for us and how?? By changing the very way we read
books and mag zines.E-books have been available for some time now in the markets ..But it never feels like ur turning a page and reading...So we have a cure for both...We have a digital way of buying books online and read them exactly in the way we read a magazine,Looking at and spreading the centrefold model poster included!!! This is the Zinio way...

Zinio a Digital Magazine reader with a difference.You can purchase any of the publication magazines which are tied up with Zinio online and as soon as you pay u can download the magazine to your comp to read it at your pleasure like a normal magazine. What's even better is that because its digital the costs are drastically lower to the publishers who are selling the same
editions in hardcover magazines and this lowered cost is transferred to the customers.
You can download the Zinio reader software for free here http://www.zinio.com/GetReader?pm=yes and there are a lot of magazines to choose from (Including the favorites for adolescent teenagers(wink)...) More seriously you get a lot of free publications which gives a lot of useful info.Pretty soon im sure all magazine will be available like this.

Currently i guess it allows only magazines but i guess books are the next logical step. Looks wise the graphics are cool and its pretty simple to use.Another negative factor is the lack of feel factor which is true with every digital format.But it is available for download in Tablet PC format too...and many readers of Tablet PC e-books say that they feel good when they read
their books on Tablet PCs, as it feels like they are holding a book.So i guess that might be true for magazines too. So all those readers who just want to read their magazines and don;t feel like waiting for Amazon's ultra slow 3 day delivery period(Comeon in this age 3 days is too slow man),heres your alternative....