Season's Greetings and Happy New Year!

Wishing all our friends all the very best this holiday season and in the new year! Click here for an animated greeting.

Reverse colonization -India's growing economic clout in Britain

I have recently been testing my hypothesis with various friends that what we are looking at now is a reverse colonization. I don't have all the facts on my fingertips here, but what is well known is that quite a few of the richest people in Britain today are of Indian origin. Now with Tata's of India taking over he only two remaining British automobile icons - Jaguar and Land Rover, the hypothesis is getting an additional shot in the arm.

Click here for details from Autoblog.

Independent Hindi Movie - Chappad Faad Ke

My friend and neighbor - Aman Boparai has been working diligently over the last 4 years on his dream project - an independent hindi comedy based in USA. A Software Project Manager by day, and director/producer/cameraman/editor by night - it's a remarkable fruition of his relentless pursuit and a great study of the multicultural environment we live in.

You can get more details on his website http://www.cineglobal.com - be sure to look at the trailer and songs. I would really appreciate if you could help spread the word and mail out this link to all your South Asian friends and others who may be interested in an offbeat hindi comedy.

Thanksgiving and Turkey - a holiday classic based on a sound economic foundation!

Like most traditions, this one has a sound economic foundation - Turkey was cheaper by the pound back in the 18th and 19th centuries and it had little other use. Beef was expensive - cows were more valuable for dairy products than for meat and chicken laid eggs.

Well, hope you all had a great Turkey day.

Service sector jobs - the new panacea for the Indian masses

Here's a well researched report from Wall Street Journal on the growing impact of the service sector jobs - particularly retail jobs - but it raises another question - one reported some time back in Fortune - namely, the demise of small retailers.

Yes, it seems that the coming of big retail to India will generate a lot of service jobs - but perhaps a lot of these service jobs shall be the only options left for small retailers and their employees. The real question still remains - is this trend of service jobs in India just a lateral trend - a shift from unorganized, small business sector to corporate, large business? Not that there's anything wrong with this - India is perhaps a couple of decades behind other Asian countries where this has already happened. However, a deeper analysis of the economic impact is required before we start raising hopes of millions of Indian masses.

What do you think?

The Indian $2,500 car - 30 years too late

The time for a people's car in India was way back in the 70's. At that time, a genuine attempt but by a corrupt political administration resulted in a prototype - kinda based on the Citroen and Volkswagen model after the second world war. However, it really came to fruition in the mid-eighties when Indian government collaborated with Japanese car maker - Suzuki to start the largest car manufacturing plant in India. The price at that time was maybe around $2,000 - but the real wages at the time were very low - making it seem like a princely sum.

Anyway, had we built a cheap car then our economy would have turned out different. But hindsight is always 20-20 :-) Building a $2,500 car now is nothing but a time bomb - India, unlike US has very little oil reserves - almost all crude oil is imported - making it very vulnerable to oil price changes. An economic policy with incentives for energy efficient transportation - in form of mass transit, electric and hybrid, etc. would be critical for India to keep its momentum. I think we should tax the hell out of all cars - including the Tata $2,500 car and put that money in cheap, heavily subsidized mass transit.

Moderate magnitude 5.6 earthquake in San Francisco Bay Area

Just experienced a moderate intensity earthquake here - I was watching the end of the democratic presidential debate - nothing earth shaking there - so I was kinda surprised when the earth literally started shaking :-)

I think this was the biggest shaker that I've felt here in the Bay area - during my 8 years here. But really, out here in Fremont, it was mostly exciting than frightening. I guess small shakers like this might actually do some good - in that they remind us to be prepared for the big one. I guess emergency kits will be flying off the shelves at various Bay Area stores in the coming days.

Did we do that?

Tom Friedman is at it again - posing a question that's nagging us all - Did we do that? Did human activity result in climatic changes? Enough to explain the recent events - like Hurricane Katrina, California Wildfires, and Friedman playing golf in Washington DC in October when the temperature is a basking 70 F?

There is another question that is also brewing in our heads at this very moment - Are we losing our economic and thought leadership in the world? Seems like since 2001 USA only makes it into news worldwide for all the wrong reasons. It wasn't always like this - we used to make it into news for all the right reasons - the best economy, the most effective democracy, the first man on the moon, Internet, the WWW, the first computer, the first cellular phone system. Now a days, those type of headlines come from outside of US - the first mag-lev train - built by Germans for Chinese, the tallest building - being built somewhere in the middle-east with money generously donated by US citizens paying record high gas prices.

Now, I don't want to sound gloomy and I know the situation is not really like that. But like in everything else, perception is reality! What we need right now is some highly optimistic leaders - with qualities last demonstrated by Kennedy and Reagan. We want to be "that shiny city on the hill" that everyone looks up to.

I hope the candidates we end up with after the primaries from both parties are representative of that optimistic spirit. Got any names in mind - do leave a comment.

Brand new ghosttowns - fallout of the downturn in house prices

Once the buyers bid on the houses - 10% over the listing price - in a not so distant past - do you remember the time? Well, they are bidding again - starting at half off list price!

Be worried, be very worried - this one's a hundred miles away from Bay Area - but I won't be surprised if this starts hitting closer to home in the coming months. Specially since any economic recovery isn't likely to happen till a new administration takes charge in 2009 - and then it won't happen overnight.

Click here for the story from Mercury News.

This is my second one on personal outsourcing/offshoring today - seems like there's a lot of this in the news. I am kinda undecided on whether this is a good trend or bad so I'm posting it here and see if any of you respond to my poll in the sidebar.

Offshoring: At your beck and call

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/09/2007

You, too, can offshore a chore: Sandy Mitchell on the rise of 'virtual assistants’ – long-distance elves who magic away the boring bits of your life

Who leads the most pampered existence? Victoria Beckham, Elton John or me? Probably me, on reflection. Victoria and Elton will sizzle with envy as soon as they hear about the gilded life I have enjoyed this past week, with a team of willing elves working day and night on three different continents to satisfy my every fancy and idle caprice. Not one of my assistants - Donna in America, Shashi in India and Sergei in Russia - has uttered a word of complaint at the crescendo of my shrill demands.

	'Send your chores to Bangalore,' one company advertises

While Mrs Beckham must spend a mighty chunk of husband David's earnings to have countless assistants fetch and carry at the click of her fingers, I have laid out less than £50.

Stress has vanished from my life in a week, my dreams have become sweeter, my forehead smooth. And before the urge to wipe the smug smile from my face overpowers you, I should hastily add that anyone can enjoy this supremely spoiled level of luxury at the same absurd price. All you have to do is outsource your life.

Outsourcing, or "offshoring" as it is also known, is a trick big businesses cottoned onto years ago when they realised how much money they could save by employing staff to answer telephones in low-waged English-speaking countries instead of at home.

Now we can use the same principle individually to our advantage thanks to the internet. Online agencies on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere have popped up to offer their services as "virtual assistants" (VAs) to anyone in Britain with a few quid to spare - housewives, students and lazy so-and-sos like me. "Send your chores to Bangalore," one such company advertises. Who could resist?

My life, like that of most people, is littered with urgent little tasks I have found a way to put off indefinitely.

Didn't my wife ask me to book a couple of restaurants in Cornwall for our holiday? Wasn't I supposed to find a better deal on our car insurance? What on earth can I give the godchildren for their birthdays? And, blimey, I forgot to chase that man about delivering manure for the garden.

The list was longer than I realised, but outsourcing promised that at long last - hallelujah! - I could tip the whole messy barrow-load of my personal chores on to someone else, and someone efficient at that.

Before I leapt headlong into this mesmerising virtual world at the start of the week, I asked others who have experimented with "personal off-shoring" how it worked for them.

Was that a note of crazy devilment that entered the sober voice of Michael Barrett, a property lawyer in central London, when he began to relate his experience? Barrett has been using a virtual assistant in India at a company called getfriday.com for a year and a half.

He began by asking her to do mundane office tasks such as proof-reading legal contracts, until one day he happened to go to Selfridges to buy a new pair of his favourite trousers. The store had sold out. He sighed and would have left it at that, but an imp took a grip on him.

Back at his desk, he tapped out an email to Bangalore asking if his VA could find him an identical pair of trousers in stock at any other shop in England. "I don't know how she did it, but she found a pair in the wilds somewhere and sent an order off for me." The imp tightened its grip.

Barrett, who lives in the Barbican complex of flats and arts venues in London, discovered soon afterwards that he had run out of the rubbish disposal bags normally supplied by the estate office. Instead of calling, as he usually did, at the porter's office on his way to work to pick up more, he emailed his VA in India to contact the estate office for him and arrange for the bags to be dropped off at his flat.

"It was partly that I was amusing myself to see how extreme we can get," confesses Barrett, who pays £50 for 10 hours' help a week from his VA, about a quarter of what he would pay for equivalent help in Britain. "To me it is a smallish payment for an awful lot of drudgery."

Myriad possibilities began to shimmer before my eyes as I envisaged how much of my life I could shunt on to a VA - and that was even before I spoke to Derek Timothy, who lives with his family in Livingstone in Scotland and who discovered a completely different use for outsourcing.

Timothy likes to make up bedtime stories for his children and one of their favourites was about a boy named Robbie Rubber-bum, proud possessor of a bottom with magical powers. "The kids kept saying: 'Tell us the story again.' I got fed up saying it, so I wrote it down. Then one of the wee boys told his primary school classmates about Robbie Rubber-bum and they started asking for the story." Timothy thought he might as well have the tale published privately, until he discovered the cost of commissioning the essential illustrations would be a prohibitive £10,000.

Timothy turned to the internet, where he quickly stumbled upon an outsourcing website that introduced him to an illustrator in Ukraine. A week later, he had a full set of colour illustrations of a quality he describes as astounding. And the cost? Not the thousands of pounds he was facing in Britain, but just £410.

The only snag was the culture gap. "The illustrator's English was very good, but he struggled with the humour of the story. It is very British humour and I had to explain how this little guy's bum changes shape."

By now I was itching to outsource my entire existence. I used getfriday.com's toll-free international phone number to call its Bangalore offices, where one of the senior managers assured me, in ornate Victorian English, that he would be delighted to be of assistance, even though the company's 50 employees were almost overwhelmed with business from their swelling international roster of 400-plus private clients.

Right away, an assistant would be made available to me six days a week, 24 hours a day. But I must feel free to call the manager in person any time on his mobile, he insisted, because (poor mug) he works British hours despite the time difference in Bangalore. At this point he handed me over to my dedicated VA and Shashi entered my life.

Not since I was a baby in nappies have I felt so completely cared for by anyone. Within two hours, she had resolved the tangle of our family car insurance, with its assorted speeding endorsements, vehicles and drivers, saving me several hundred pounds a year on premiums.

She also gently hounded the reclusive local farmer who was supposed to deliver the manure, phoning him relentlessly over several days to leave imploring messages, and whenever she went off duty she handed over to her colleagues on the late shift who continued to chase him into the night.

Meanwhile, she slickly selected a list of presents appropriate for the ages and sex of my godchildren (most of which were ideal), providing me with weblinks so I could purchase them at the click of a mouse. And a table at both Rick Stein's seafood restaurant in Padstow and Jamie Oliver's Fifteen outside Newquay now awaits me later next week.

When I told my wife I had cleared my backlog of chores, she looked at me with the love-light bright in her eyes.

Altogether, these tasks took Shashi five hours to complete, for which her company's fee amounted to £25. (No international phone calls are charged to clients unless a task requires more than 50 calls, apparently.)

Then, out of the blue, something happened that threatened to ruin my virtual love affair: I was hit by a pang of ethical unease about exploiting India's cheap and oh-so-willing labour. Shashi is a graduate in computer science, after all, and vastly over-qualified.

To appease my conscience, I contacted Vivek Kulkarni, a former Indian government official who was responsible until recently for establishing Bangalore as the information-technology and outsourcing centre of the nation. "There are two million graduates coming out of our universities every year. All jobs are welcome," I was reassured by Kulkarni, who now runs his own thriving business-to-business outsourcing company, brickwork.com.

That was good enough for me. And suddenly one virtual employee no longer seemed enough: it was time for me to recruit a small army. The place to do it was the website guru.com, which claims to link 650,000 freelances around the world with anyone with work to offer.

I had just the job in mind. Some recordings that I made a year or two ago of my elderly relatives talking about their lives and our family history had been mouldering in a bottom drawer and I knew I would never get around to transcribing them. Why not blow the dust off those discs and toss them into cyberspace, trusting that someone out there would take on the crushingly dull task of listening and typing for several hours?

I decided to offer £5 an hour for the job, about a quarter of what you would pay in London to a typical stenographer with buffed nails and a well-thumbed Hello! magazine. Then, having posted my job on the website one evening, I returned to my desk the next morning and blinked with disbelief to see my inbox alive with 19 bids for the job, from all corners of the globe.

There were six from different states in America, three bids from Pakistan, one from France and one from a professor of linguistics in Serbia who went to enchanting baroque lengths to impress me with his suitability for the lowly task. All but a few of the bidders posted immaculate CVs, along with beautifully worded personal introductions.

Here is an excerpt of a typical reply, from Saleem in India: "I would like to submit a bid of $8 per hour less than you mentioned for this project.

"I am a very organised person. Moreover, I am always open to learning new things and like to put my maximum effort into accomplishing a task.

"I would like to assure you that I am not the kind of person who wastes time and complains about the load of work. Quite the contrary, I always welcome more work."

His hunger for hard labour was humbling, embarrassing and alarming. I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice, hopelessly overwhelmed by the multiple forces I had unleashed. And the bids kept on coming until, with sweaty palms, I finally awarded the job to Donna in Virginia because her references were so impressive that she should forget her job as a legal secretary and run for US President.

There was really no rush to get the job done, yet Donna promised to finish it within 48 hours. A day later, she sent an unexpected and anxious message: "I am finding some portions of the recording inaudible, which I personally find distressing, but I am doing my best to get you the most complete and accurate transcript I can." Another day passed, the deadline arrived and the transcript arrived. It was flawless.

This left only one more mess to sort out and one more recruit to find. The task was long overdue and involved sorting the thousands of digital photos languishing on my computer, destined (one day, never) for the family albums.

Sending such personal mementoes into cyberspace gave me serious pause for thought, but reassurance came from various quarters. One of the managers at guru.com put me in touch with a second-year undergraduate at Oxford who had used the site to find a website designer for the New College May ball; a young composer in Belfast who had linked up with a company in China to produce a CD of her electronic music; and a father in London who had used someone to design an online game that would teach his children their times tables.

Their first-hand reports were all glowing, so now nimble-fingered Sergei in Russia is busy editing and laying out our family photographs.

By now it was Friday evening. I had endured an utterly exhausting week sending all those emails around the world and the only thing that remained to do before opening a bottle of good red wine was to read the children their bedtime story. So I emailed Bangalore. Could Shashi choose a suitable story and read them to sleep?

The phone at home soon rang and the children sat entranced in front of the speakerphone as they listened to a voice with a lilting Indian accent telling the story of a monkey and an elephant that loses its heart. But what I also heard as I listened was something quite different - it was the sound of the future, because outsourcing is surely set to change our lives radically.

It seems that what I have witnessed this week is only the very beginning of the revolution. "A very high percentage growth rate is likely in personal outsourcing, with increasing invention and many different services being offered to consumers," predicts Duncan Aitchison, managing director of TPI, a consultancy specialising in corporate outsourcing. Already, he notes, outsourcing has spread from India (the largest offshore provider) to Eastern Europe and South America, driven in large part by cheap internet connectivity.

Of course, as the National Outsourcing Association points out, the growth of outsourcing will always be hampered by concerns about security of information and the barriers of language and culture that arise when sending projects to another country.

But where might all this lead? Showing the way is Timothy Ferriss, an American entrepreneur who has taken what he calls "geo-arbitrage" to the limit, as he explains in his new bestselling book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

He has arranged his life so that he can be based in Mexico and use the internet to manage his food-supplement company, which operates in the US, and employ virtual assistants in India to handle all the routine tasks thrown up by his personal and business life.

He reckons he has reduced his weekly workload to four hours' worth and says: "Fun things happen when you earn in dollars, live on pesos and compensate in rupees." It seems to be that outsourcing can infect your mind with a degree of megalomania.

But I wanted a second opinion on that, so I went to the person best qualified to judge, Shashi. She agreed, addressing me in the style that I have asked all my apprentices in the expanding empire to use. "Yes, Sir Sandy," she said, before bidding me good night and a happy weekend.

Bangalore Chores

Getfriday.com's Virtual Assistants undertake some unusual tasks…

Remind clients to wake up, make the bed and take exercise Pay speeding fines and urge clients not to drive too fast Read bedtime stories down the telephone Oversee diet plans and buy relevant food Collect homework information from teachers' voicemail and email it to parents Purchase underwear Apologise to spouses and send cards and flowers on clients' behalf

Outsourcing Your Parents

Here's this story on the latest trend in healthcare outsourcing making the rounds on the WWW. What do you think about it - do answer my poll in the sidebar.

"Some families finding cheaper care for elderly relatives overseas

By LAURIE GOERING - Chicago Tribune

PONDICHERRY, India — After three years of caring for his increasingly frail mother and father in their Florida retirement home, Steve Herzfeld was exhausted and faced with spending his family’s last resources to put the couple in a cheap nursing home.

So he made what he saw as the only sensible decision: He outsourced his parents to India.

Today his 89-year-old mother, Frances, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease, gets daily massages, physical therapy and 24-hour help getting to the bathroom, all for about $15 a day. His father, Ernest, 93, an Alzheimer’s patient, has a full-time personal assistant and a cook who has won him over to a healthy vegetarian diet — so that he longer needs his cholesterol medication.

Best of all, the many drugs the couple require cost less than 20 percent of what they do at home, and salaries for their six-person staff are so cheap that the pair now bank $1,000 a month of their $3,000 Social Security payment.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a solution for everybody, but I consider it the best solution to our problem,” said Herzfeld, 56, a management expert. He made the move to India with his parents, and now, as “care manager rather than the actual worker” has time for things like bike rides to the grocery store and strolls in the botanical gardens with his father.

With the cost of nursing homes, home nurses and medications painfully high in the United States, the elderly and their caregivers have long looked abroad for better solutions. Many families now drive regularly to Mexico or Canada to buy cheaper drugs, or hire recent immigrants to help them look after frail parents.

A growing number of aging couples have bought retirement homes in Mexico, where help is cheap and Medicare-funded health care just a quick drive across the border.

Herzfeld never thought he’d be headed abroad, too. When his mother broke a hip in 2004, he drove down to their home in Pompano Beach from his home in North Carolina, figuring he’d stay a while and help his parents get back on their feet.

But like so many other caregivers, three years later he found himself still on the couch in his parents’ spare bedroom.

Herzfeld began investigating nursing homes, but found that the $6,600-a-month cost at the cheapest one he could find near family members would quickly bankrupt his parents. He also was worried about the quality of life they would have in a nursing home.

So when a friend one day suggested that Herzfeld consider a move to India, “I said right away, ‘There’s an idea!’” he said.

Herzfeld, who is single and a longtime follower of transcendental meditation, had previously spent five years in India. He quickly realized that the graceful town of Pondicherry — a haven for aging hippies from around the world — might just work.

They still are working out some details. India, where life expectancy hovers around 60, lacks physicians who specialize in aging. The family keeps in touch with friends and family by e-mail and videophone, but hasn’t persuaded anyone to visit.

Yet when Herzfeld looks at the bills — less than $2,000 a month for food, rent, utilities, medications, phones and 24-hour staffing — he feels he has done the right thing for his parents and himself.

“It can be done,” he said. “This is working.”"

5 Cars That Became Metaphors (deserved or not)

Great article on automobile history - interesting part is how all these experiences contributed to the development of the automobile industry as we know it today. The author talks about the following five:

• Ford Edsel = Failure
• Chevrolet Corvair = Unsafe
• Ford Pinto = Volatile
• DMC Delorean = Overhyped
• Yugo = Shoddy

You might want to add your own. For example,

Honda Civic = Sensible
FIAT = Fix It All the Time
Dodge Caravan = Soccer Moms' car

A pearl of Wisdom

I's been a while since I posted anything - what with the kids' summer vacation and my own travel to India, I haven't had much time. Also, I guess I hadn't come across anything particularly exciting - what with the media completely bogged down in same old presidential politics. This pearl of wisdom from Dr. Dean Edell's program on KGO during lunch time today broke the long spell:

A wealthy man decided to go on a safari in Africa. He took his faithful pet dog along for company. One day, the dog starts chasing butterflies and before long he discovers that he is lost. So, wandering about he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the obvious intention of having lunch.

The dog thinks, "I'm in deep doo-doo now." Suddenly, he notices some bones on the ground close by, and immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat.

Just as the leopard is about to leap, the dog exclaims loudly, "Man, that was one delicious leopard. I wonder if there are any more around here?"

Hearing this the leopard halts his attack in mid-stride, as a look of terror comes over him, and slinks away into the trees. "Whew," says the leopard. "That was close. That dog nearly had me."

Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree figures he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So, off he goes. But the dog saw him heading after the leopard with great speed, and figured that something must be up.

The monkey soon catches up with the leopard, spills the beans, and strikes a deal for himself with the leopard. The cat is furious at being made a fool of and says, "Here, monkey, hop on my back and see what's going to happen to that conniving canine."

Now the dog sees the leopard coming with the monkey on his back, and thinks," What am I going to do now?" But instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers pretending he hasn't seen them yet. And just when they get close enough to hear, the dog says, "Where's that monkey. I just can never trust him. I sent him off half an hour ago to bring me another leopard, and he's still not back!"

700 Miles on a Kawasaki Ninja 250

What an inspiring review - made me actually go out and buy the Kawasaki Ninja 250R last year. Oh how I wish I could do this run down the California coastline - hopefully someday in the near future. Meanwhile, you can probably catch me on my Canary Yellow Ninja Junior in good old downt0wn Fremont.

Click here for the full review.

Yesterday once more - Lambretta, Vespa, Scooters and Carbon Footprint

John, Rob & Ritchie, guests on the show about scooters and scooter culture, and their Lambretta and Vespa scooters
Originally uploaded by Jim Hawkins, BBC Radio Shropshire

It's very interesting when you look at the history of scooters in the post WWII Europe - an answer to the need for mobility in economically distressed times, they lost in popularity by the 70's when everyone in Western Europe could afford a car.

Today, due to a difference set of reasons it may be the time to revive two-wheeled transportation. the reasons being energy conservation and environment protection. Considering that a vast majority of Americans drive alone, wouldn't it make much more sense to ride a motorcycle or scooter?

But not Harleys or other big beasts. It makes no sense to ride a motorcyle that gives you less mileage than a regular Toyota Yaris with 5 passenger capability, air conditioning, etc. I am thinking city bikes with 50 cc engines and freeway legal bikes with 250 cc engines.

Probably the best index of the real impact of gas prices on standard of life

You've gotta read this one -

"The S/W FI is generated by measuring the consumer-cost of a gallon of gasoline against the hourly minimum wage, multiplying that by the fuel efficiency of the average car (expressed as a constant) and expressing the result in miles."

Chris Kelly is no economist but this probably explains things a lot better than the inflation linked indexes that economists come up with that explain away the impact of higher gas prices by using a mix of inflation, increase in wages in dollar terms and so on.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/sw-fi-freedom-index-hi_b_48226.html

It happens only in India

This is so surreal - but it ain't no Photoshop mashup. This one's for real - even though it's from Bollywood - where imagination runs wild (in between the 10 songs).

This is the story of a stranded airplane on the streets on Mumbai - how did it get there? Read on.

Earth Day, Going Green and the Little Things

The Earth Day went by this week. Lots of people talked about lots of big ideas and initiatives - good soundbytes, little action. Everyone's talking about energy related issues - the extinction of cheap hydrocarbons, the lack of progress on renewables, etc.

One of the thing that amazes me is the low attention that another environment issue - which is at least as important if not more - that is the amazing waste of water and drought affecting most of the highly populated metropolitan centers around the world.

At the same time, the green crowd goes around drinking Evian and Dassani and Perrier.

Drinkable tap water is a great asset that any developed nation has. USA has had the advantage of having this resource for over a century now. Yet, there is no stopping the trend towards bottled water. Most of it is driven by high visibility advertising that has made bottled water a part of the fashion cuisine. And it's partly driven by fear mongering - creating scare about municipal water; even though in many lab tests, tap water usually beats bottled water in all areas - not only purity but also taste.

I think the Dutch have the right idea about it - there a voluntary agency is selling empty bottles branded as Neau - patrons buy these empty bottles at about the same price that they would pay for a Dassani and then they fill up with refreshing tap water. The money generated by sales of Neau is being used to provide basic potable water infrastructure in poor countries.

http://www.finewaters.com/Newsletter/November_2005/Neau_-_No_Water.asp

http://www.slate.com/id/2165124/fr/rss/

Outsource the Government

You could see it coming for a long time - someone had to do a good satire on this in public - and who better than Scott Adams to attempt this!

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/04/outsource_the_g.html

Scott's post displays both a frustration with the level of incompetence in our Government today and also his well-established history of incisive, yet humorous skepticism of outsourcing as the answer to everything.

Unfortunately, some people seem to have taken his post too seriously. But it does make for a good piece of humor on a Friday and provokes some thoughts about public policy at the same time.

Stephen Colbert - The Greatest Living American

This one is too good to be true - I am sure it won't last too long.

When you search for "greatest living american" - Stephen Colbert's fans' website - http://www.colbertnation.com tops the search results. Obviously, this is the result of Colbert's huge fan following in the blogosphere, some of whom figured out a way to bomb Google. You might remember another Google bomb from a couple of years back when searching for "miserable failure" led to George Bush's website. It lasted for some time before Google tweaked their algorithm. I guess they couldn't make their algorithm foolproof - so we have another Google Bomb now.

Click here to check the search results yourself on Google.

An interesting reflection : Slow Down Culture

This one has been making the rounds on the Net - has already been published on various blogs, etc. I don't know where it originated - if you have any clue, do leave me a comment. I am posting it here 'cause I found it very thought provoking. Thanks Mohit for sending me this email.

"An interesting reflection : Slow Down Culture

It's been 18 years since I joined Volvo, a Swedish company. Working for them has proven to be an interesting experience. Any project here takes 2 years to be finalized, even if the idea is simple and brilliant. It's a rule.

Globalize processes have caused in us (all over the world) a general sense of searching for immediate results. Therefore, we have come to posses a need to see immediate results. This contrasts greatly with the slow movements of the Swedish. They, on the other hand, debate, debate, debate, hold x quantity of meetings and work with a slowdown scheme. At the end, this always yields better results.

Said in another words:
1. Sweden is about the size of San Pablo , a state in Brazil .
2. Sweden has 2 million inhabitants.
3. Stockholm , has 500,000 people.
4. Volvo, Escania, Ericsson, Electrolux, Nokia are some of its renowned companies. Volvo supplies the NASA.

The first time I was in Sweden , one of my colleagues picked me up at the hotel every morning. It was September, bit cold and snowy. We would arrive early at the company and he would park far away from the entrance (2000 employees drive their car to work). The first day, I didn't say anything, either the second or third. One morning I asked, "Do you have a fixed parking space? I've noticed we park far from the entrance even when there are no other cars in the lot." To which he replied, "Since we're here early we'll have time to walk, and whoever gets in late will be late and need a place closer to the door. Don't you think? Imagine my face.

Nowadays, there's a movement in Europe name Slow Food. This movement establishes that people should eat and drink slowly, with enough time to taste their food, spend time with the family, friends, without rushing. Slow Food is against its counterpart: the spirit of Fast Food and what it stands for as a lifestyle. Slow Food is the basis for a bigger movement called Slow Europe, as mentioned by Business Week.

Basically, the movement questions the sense of "hurry" and "craziness" generated by globalization, fueled by the desire of "having in quantity" (life status) versus "having with quality", "life quality" or the "quality of being". French people, even though they work 35 hours per week, are more productive than Americans or British. Germans have established 28.8 hour workweeks and have seen their productivity been driven up by 20%. This slow attitude has brought forth the US 's attention, pupils of the fast and the "do it now!".

This no-rush attitude doesn't represent doing less or having a lower productivity. It means working and doing things with greater quality, productivity, perfection, with attention to detail and less stress. It means reestablishing family values, friends, free and leisure time. Taking the "now", present and concrete, versus the "global", undefined and anonymous. It means taking humans' essential values, the simplicity of living.

It stands for a less coercive work environment, more happy, lighter and more productive where humans enjoy doing what they know best how to do. It's time to stop and think on how companies need to develop serious quality with no-rush that will increase productivity and the quality of products and services, without losing the essence of spirit.

In the movie, Scent of a Woman, there's a scene where Al Pacino asks a girl to dance and she replies, "I can't, my boyfriend will be here any minute now". To which Al responds, "A life is lived in an instant". Then they dance to a tango.

Many of us live our lives running behind time, but we only reach it when we die of a heart attack or in a car accident rushing to be on time. Others are so anxious of living the future that they forget to live the present, which is the only time that truly exists. We all have equal time throughout the world. No one has more or less. The difference lies in how each one of us does with our time. We need to live each moment. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".

Congratulations for reading till the end of this message. There are many who will have stopped in the middle so as not to waste time in this globalized world."

Of Cynics and Idealists

"Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves."
- Robert Anton Wilson

So which one are you?

YAHOO GO FOR WINDOWS MOBILE REALLY SUCKS

Has anyone tried this abomination called Yahoo Go? It really, really sucks. Seems like Yahoo can't get anything right these days.

I need a miracle to recover my investment in Yahoo. Anyone out there who expects it to touch 35 AGAIN?

Indian hopes dashed - nation eats humble pie

A nation is crestfallen today. The high flying "Team India" had to eat humble pie as the Lankans handed them their return tickets.

I hope they will do away with this "TEAM INDIA" nonsense. Why can't they just call them the Indian cricket team?

And while they're at it, maybe they can stop using the term "India, Inc." in the Indian business media too. Let's relearn the basic Indian virtue of humility while we're still at the top of our game.

*This entry was posted from my Windows Mobile phone.

The Worst Cube-Dwelling Offenses

For me this one takes the cake!

Nuclearization and Indian National Identity

A very good analysis of the Indian identity that resulted in nuclearization and the subsequent impact of nuclearization back on the Indian identity. Do listen to the .mp3 file that is available on this page.

Hazy view of Mission Peak

Hazy view of Mission Peak from my Fremont office

Thought of the day

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." - Sam Walton

The Dilbert Blog: The Specialness Quotient

The Dilbert Blog: The Specialness Quotient: "One type of intelligence that I never hear discussed – and might be the most important one – is the degree to which you believe you are “special.” Or to put it bluntly, the more special you believe you are, the stupider you are."

Is Scott the most insightful person of our age? He comes up with such keen observations on life and people around us - things that are bothering you but you're not quite able to put them into an intellectual argument.

You must subscribe to Scott's blog if you haven't already done so. I think his comic strip is great but his blog is sometimes beyond amazing.

technorati tags: dilbert, scott+adams, special, psychology, philosophy, stupid

If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

If telecommuting is so easy, why do we travel for work more than ever? - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine:

Tim makes some excellent observations in this piece. His analogy of the unfulfilled telecommuting phenomenon with the pipe dream of a paperless office really struck home.

I truly agree with him that mobile phone and email are not a substitute to face-to-face meetings but a complement to it.

Here's to our Airlines Miles!

technorati tags: airline+miles, travel, telecommuting, paperless+office, mobile

Brain Teaser

Imagine you are in a room with 3 switches. In an adjacent room there are 3 bulbs (all are off at the moment), each switch belongs to one bulb. It is impossible to see from one room to another. How can you find out which switch belongs to which bulb, if you may enter the room with the bulbs only once?

Leave your answer in the comments - I will post the solution in a couple of days.

Learn Your Kids' Language

Finding it difficult to understand what your kids are saying on SMS, IM, etc? Well, here's a quick cheat sheet:

http://www.ebuddy.com/lingo.php

CIO (Check it Out) :-)

Sensitive data dumped at recycling center by Indian Consulate in San Francisco

As if the incident itself was not bad enough, the consulate officials went on to put their proverbial feet in their mouths with quotations like:

- "As we see it, the documents are not confidential," said B.S. Prakash, the consul general. "We would see something as confidential if it has a Social Security number or a credit card number, not a passport number."

- At the Indian Consulate, Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.
"In India, I would not be alarmed," he said. "We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number."

- Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they're no longer able to store.
"In America, you cannot do that," he said.

At a time when Indian IT and BPO companies are going out of their way to assure their customers that their intellectual property, customer data and other confidential information is secure with them, this will come as quite a shock.

But to blame it on Indian culture is outright dumb. We expect much better judgment from our foreign service officials.

Index of Economic Freedom - Wall Street Journal

This is the kind of crap you get when you take on such research based on so called "objective" criteria. I mean, how do you justify Saudi Arabia having more economic freedom than India? And Pakistan? And Tajikistan? And Cambodia? I mean, "Freedom" is an alien concept in most of these societies.

You can download the full report card here.

technorati tags: economic, freedom, wall+street+journal, india, pakistan, saudi+arabia