Whatever...

So what does a creative person do? Or rather when would you call a person creative? What is the qualifying criteria? The simplest answer would be someone who creates content. But what I observe around myself is that there are more channels than content. In fact, channel as a resource is unlimited now. And what happens when resource tends to infinity? Efficiency approaches zero! From my own example, I have an email address on every possible free mail hosting service. Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, LikedIn, Flickr, Picassa, Photobucket ...the list is endless but I have an account in all these places (and yes, Blogger!). Where I have failed miserably, is creating worthwhile content. Neither do I write much email (personal 1 to 1) to people, nor do I receive much of them. All my mailboxes are flooded with spam and forwards from people that they have not put any heart into. Channels have become fads and we keep moving from one to the other. But we are not adding any value to these channels befor...

It has been more than 6 years since I have started working. I have worked in a bank and a couple of IT companies. I have had my share of good times and bad times. But last week or so has forced me into reflecting on the question 'what constitute my work values or work ethics?' If you have a look at some of the top performers in different fields - Sachin Tendulkar, Big B, Aamir Khan, ARR, APJ, Ratan Tata, they all have a strong set of work ethics that they strictly abide by. This has only made their character stronger leaving no chance for anyone o point fingers. I have learnt over the last 6 years that this is something absolutely necessary. Having a set of rules for yourself helps in making decisions when in doubt. Over the next few days, I am going to create a set of rules for myself. Some of them may be trivial, but they will help nonetheless. I plan to limit the number of such guiding principals to 10. May I ask each reader to suggest one distinct 'though shall...' ...

While on our way to office, I and Bijou had an interesting conversation about freedom without responsibility. The discussion was sparked by a traffic jam around us. :-) What we got on 15/08/1947 was independence; to run this country as our's, toil for it's progress, restrain for its dignity and stand for its defense. What we would get in return was freedom. Freedom of expression, speech, religion et al. Freedom to exercise our fundamental rights. But this concept of independence should have been engraved into every Indian by the leaders of this freedom struggle and their ideological successors. Instead what the leaders chose to do was to only stress on the rights of every Indian. There were social movements of very large magnitude for the rights of an individual or a group of them. But there have been no movements so far in 'independent India' that have made us realize our responsibilities. How many of us have thought about progress, dignity & safety of our country ...

There is actually no reason to manipulate the title of the post. The post is actually about why we bought the Ford Figo . Let me begin by confessing that I am more of a biker than a car guy. So when it came to choosing a car, we started by seriously considering a Hyundai Santro and moved all the way till TATA Indigo over a period of 2 months. The economics turned in favour of a diesel mill and it was decided to shortlist a few. The ones that were thrown off the list were: 1. Swift - Overpriced in my opinion. No air bags & ABS off showroom. Long wait (3 months) 2. Indigo - Tdi Engine is old now. No safety features. Poor quality of interiors. 3. Ritz - Unattractive shape. It finally boiled down to the Indica Vista Quadrajet Aura+ with ABS. The engine felt peppy and we decided to overlook the quality of plastics for lack of any more choice in this price band. Just then a cousin recommended we consider Figo and strongly insisted we test drive it before booking any car. A test dri...

Yesterday I donated blood platelets at the NTR Blood bank at Banjara Hills. I had responded to a post on my company's bulletin board asking for help. Then, they had enough donors.But fortunately they had kept my number and called me again when they needed. The process is pretty simple. First your blood sample is checked for a healthy match. This takes about 45 minutes. After this comes the real process which goes for about 60 to 80 minutes. In this process, a needle is inserted into your vein. The needle has 2 (or 3, I don't exactly remember) pipes to it. In an engineers simple language, one pipe is suction and the other is delivery. Both of these go into a 'washing machine' like equipment. The equipment has a touch screen on which the technician simply sets how much of platelets he wants and what should be the suction and delivery pressure. Once configured (IT consultant jargon - beat that!), the process is initiated and a progress bar appears (like the one appears w...

Not being able to dedicate enough time at home to blogging, I have decided to try out an alternate approach. The time required for blogging is more for thinking and putting the thoughts into words than actually typing the content. So, the first part will henceforth mostly happen in office in a diary. The second part will then be at home - a quick go at the keyboard. This should hopefully help me in more ways than one: 1. Practice writing - as in real 'pen on paper' writing. 2. Second look guaranteed - I will go through my writing at least one last time while I type it. 3. Load balancing - If I don't find the time to type the post when I get home everyday, I can club multiple posts and type them all on the weekend. Thus the thought won't be lost (hopefully!). 4. Standard portions - I will try to limit the posts to a standard size. For now, I will stick to the size of this notebook page I am writing o. This will help me say stuff effectively. Poke me when you think I am ...

<I may have written about this earlier>   As I drove to office today, like any other day, there were hordes of people on the road breaking traffic rules. Overtaking from the left, changing lanes without indicators, disobeying traffic signals…all of it. This irritates me the most (well second most, if you count ‘scratching nails on a blackboard’). Why is that we need policing all the time to obey a set of simple rules? Why aren’t we civilized enough for this simple thing? Breaking all rules may take me to office in 25 minutes instead of the usual 30 minutes. But it increases chaos on the road manifold. It also increases the chances of an accident. And I am not even counting the stress it causes. We Indians being the wisest in the world, why have we failed to apply this simple logic? Though I see this situation to be a lot better in Goa, it is not certainly ideal. People there have a lot more civic sense. Not out of education, mind it. It...

How to make the best of the time you have? Like this! While I cannot post from my office, Blogger allows me to post via e-mail. I don’t know whether this works or not; but since you are reading this, I guess it does. So many thoughts have crossed my mind while I am in office. My employers IT policies, slow data services on the phone are some of the things that have stopped me from sharing these. I am wondering how I can overcome this … any ideas?  

My work over the last few months also involves intensive people management. I lead a bunch of 10 souls of different age groups, not much variance there though and the oldest member of my team is not older than me. I have realised that the following facets of human behaviour need to be considered by anyone in leadership position. These must have been definitely written in some book on leadership, but I have learnt them the hard way: Ego - Mostly observed in senior team members who have as much work experience as you. These people could have been in your position but for some bad appraisal. Such team members mostly do not take any work allocation lying down. Typical responses are 'I will see what I can do' or 'Let me see'. And by the way, these people may also think that you have 'sucked up' your way into leadership. Incompetence - These people may not necessarily be dumb. They may be acting dumb to avoid work. Or they may have earlier worked in a place where comp...

दुनिया सिकुड़ते सिकुड़ते मुझ तक रह गयी है कभी दुनिया का मतलब होता होगा मनुष्य, प्राणी और जीवन जात लेकिन कुछ साल पहले दुनियाने अपना रूप बदला ...और थोड़ी अपने आप में छोटी हो गयी मेरी दुनिया मेरा देश बन गयी तब सोचा न था कि इससे भी छोटा कुछ हो सकता है मेरी दुनिया के लिए जान देनेकी तक बातें हुई थी तब लेकिन फिर और बटवारा हुआ और मेरी दुनिया मेरे मजहब तक आ रुकी मजहब से फिर गाँव, मोहल्ले, गली और घर तक का रास्ता ज्यादा मुश्किल नहीं था अब तो मै खुद ही मेरी दुनिया हूँ, बस कुछ ही दिन की बात है जिस्म का हर पुर्जा अपनी आप में दुनिया बनने वाला है और खुद की दुनिया बसाने के लिए, दिमाग, एक दिन, दिल की दुनिया उजाड़ देगा

I took this picture on a Sunday afternoon at Chandanagar MMTS Station. The kid in the background, at a railway platform, noise, dusty & sunny was sleeping peacefully. Looked like the street dog watched over. It made me take the picture and think ... what zindagi (life) the kid has???

My Photography Workflow 2009 Hat Tip: Bijou

About a couple of months ago, I shifted to Digital Photography. Earlier, I used to shoot on film using my Nikon FM10. But because of the labour involved in getting the film developed or sharing these photographs over Internet , I chose to take up digital photography. Having bought a Panasonic FZ 35, I have realised that I have shot more photographs in the last 2 months than I have shot in 5 years of film photography. This comes with it's own set of problems. I now have hordes of pictures (and videos!) taken with different purposes at different times which should have their own life cycle. There are some really good pictures which I have lost already! Lot of junk pictures that are eating into digital real estate! So what now? The answer seems to be lying in discipline...or workflows ! Each picture or video should have it's workflow . They all should go through consecutive filtering and land up in different buckets based on classification criteria. How to decide these criteria is...

I have been reading this Book for many months now. Interrupted by work load, travel and general laziness, I wouldn't actually describe the book as un -put-down-able. I picked it up at the Strand Book Store in my office campus when I was casually browsing through the new arrivals there. What compelled me to buy the book was that it was written by a young writer, almost my age. Though buying the book was an impulse decision, I had minimum expectations. My experience with new age Indian English writers wasn't very inspiring. But Aatish Taseer's Stranger to history has been a pleasant surprise. It is very difficult to classify this book into a genre. It is part biography, part travelogue, a bit of world history and much more. Aatish uses his journalistic experience to describe places, situations and societies. But more appealing is his ability to express himself - his precise emotions, dilemmas and idiosyncrasies of people and groups of various nationalities and faiths. The ...

We all know what the Internet has done to content generation. Everyone with a streak of writing in him has taken to the Internet. Blogs, twitter, personal pages, flickr accounts galore! Even I am one of them. I get a kick out of the fact that my creations always have an opportunity to be seen. They are out there if someone is interested to appreciate. There are no gatekeepers between me and the world that is hungry for content...there are no editors! The other day I picked up a book that was published about a decade ago. There was a stark difference in the quality of work I see around me today (including mine) and this book. Mind you this book was edited, by a gatekeeper. Then I started thinking, may be editing is necessary. Editor, the one person whose solely responsibility is to ensure that the content that passes through him is of highest quality, and coherence. Yes he was biased at times, he did behave like he owned the place. After all, the print was a scarce commodity. But not to...

There are 2 ways to do anything, be it business, job, a hobby or just about anything. The leech way and the butterfly way. The leech way is just to stick it out. Be patient, resilient, determined (and sometimes even shameless) enough to be the winner. You may not be the best choice, but you can emerge as a leader just by the virtue of your determination. Being a butterfly on the other hand, you develop qualities that make people want you. Most of these qualities cannot in fact be developed but you need to be born with them. You need to be so good at what you are doing that people should 'want' you to be on their side. India is becoming more of a country of leeches than butterflies. What are you?

Very recently I have been following Jason Fried's posts on 37signals.com. I am impressed by his minimalist thoughts and the whole idea of customers 'growing out of' and 'growing into' your product. Per Jason, there are just a certain simple features that customers really want and a product company should strive to be the best at those features. But beyond these features, your customers will always have some desires and will keep asking for more features. One should learn to say no to such demands and crowd the Product with features that only a few of your customers will actually use. These frills not only hamper the performance of the product technically, but also make the Product manufacturer waste a lot of effort in the form of product support and other allied activities. This seems to have been working for folks at 37signals.com and many more such companies (SFDC, Flip Video recorders etc.) I then started thinking of this philosophy in the context of Indian IT co...

Some time ago I had post on a couple of business ideas . That is when the question of monetization came up. There was this portal I had envisaged where tenants and landlords could rate each other and the question was how does one monetize this? Thinking a little deeper on this, I came about thinking to myself - ' I have an idea which I think people could find useful. To make this idea a potential business activity, how could I make people pay for it?'. Then it struck me that one should think the same way about one's talent(s). We all have a talent. That is a given. Singing, dancing, painting, acting, photography and so many more like that. If we can deliberate sufficiently at monetizing at (making people pay for it, or finding people who will), we convert our talent into business. That is when your interest becomes your work and work becomes interesting! Shouldn't be tough ...isn't it?

Last weekend, with a lot of enthusiasm (and people) I went to see Rajaneeti - A Prakash Jha film with some of the best names in the Indian film Industry. By now all of you must have seen the film, so I will not get into detailing the plot or the storyline. Let's straight get to the point - did I like it? No. It was OK! But when Prakash Jha makes an OK movie, it is not acceptable. I would have liked an OK Ram Gopa Verma movie but not PJ . Probably Shool & Apaharan ( I have not seen Mrutyudand ), built up a lot of expectations. Rajaneeti , needless to say, is better than many of the recent films like Teen Patti, MNIK and what not. It has more substance than a one liner and the effort into story and screenplay shows. PJ has spent enough effort (and money) on casting with brilliant characters drawn from Mahabharat . In my opinion, nowhere else in the whole world, is there a characterisation like there is in Hindu mythology. None of the characters are black or white and a...

For the uninformed (you can't be if you are on Facebook ), I bought a Royal Enfield Standard 350cc motorcycle on 25 th Novemeber 2009. This has been the fulfilment of a long (8 years!) cherished dream. Here we are... After exactly three months I faced my first breakdown on my way to work on a Friday. The throttle cable snapped. Thankfully I had a spare at home and I was pretty confident I could replace it myself. Having lived with a 1984 model Bajaj Chetak for 5 years, I was in the habit of applying first aid myself. This wasn't as easy as seemed though. I manage to get the handle side of the throttle cable out. But had issues with the engine ( carb side). I checked with fellow biker Aravind (who also owns a Standard 350 that is as old as him). He said it was a pretty simple process and promised to join me in 30 mins . But once he came, we realised, RE had done some changes that had lead to this problem. Here is the issue - If you refer to the picture above, I was suppo...