Making money - 'The advertising way', Will it last long?

Internet is amazing! Web 2.0 rocks! I can get anything and everything I want in the internet for free. How do you get a host of services like free e-mails, free music and information to the extent of every Sodium atom that goes into the making of common salt? Well, the answer is a no-brainer. It’s because of advertisements, the overtly ambitious companies which pump-prime a huge sum of money for its marketing spends.

We see dozens of Web 2.0 companies mushrooming every day. Ask them how they’re gonna make money. You’d not be surprised if everyone responds as advertising. Are these models sufficiently succulent to yield juice for another decade? Well, my prognosis on the future of such businesses is not rosy.

Let’s briefly look at how this digital advertising business evolved. Advertisers are by and large extremely smart. They grab opportunities; rather create opportunities where they find a remotest chance of doing so. When they found internet to be an emerging media used by a lot of people about a decade or so ago, they started the party. Though the initial few years were not great, their prognosis came true. With the advent of Google Ad-Sense, Ad-Words etc, digital advertising reached its pinnacle. We are talking about the generic ads here.

In the last couple of years or so, there has been a lot of emphasis on ‘Web Analytics’ and the marketers want to target the right segment(Google the following to know more - ‘Adzilla’ , ‘NebuAd’). For instance, if you log in to google and search a lot on the car you want to buy, you’ll be shown much of Car ads. This has been termed as ‘behavioural targeting’ and this is evolving big time. Evolving in the sense, the level of customisation of such specific ads is zooming up.

But hold on, how many of us still click the ads on google or any website that we visit? From my personal experience I have realised that, my mind is trained to ignore the ads when I surf the pages and this is the case with a lot of my friends. So even if someone runs a behavioural targeting algorithm and places an ad of a car in front of me, when I’m on the look out for buying a new car, will I notice and benefit from the ad or rather the other way around, will the company benefit from showing the ad to me? My basic question is whether these marketers are connecting effectively to the changing mindsets of customers. Are they effectively tracking the psychological changes the customers are going through at a rapid pace?

This leads to the most fundamental discussion of what advertising is all about. Well, a lot of us tend to lose the sight of the bigger picture when we hear the word advertising. We tend to think of ads ONLY as those creative banners or posters or the flash clips we see around us. Advertising Science fundamentally is a tool of communication and good advertisers are those who can effectively communicate what values their products can add to their targeted customers. Advertisers need not draw the attention of the public by banner ads or flash ads of their product alone, but they can resort to any innovative technique. History shows that advertising techniques have evolved faster than the human psychological changes. Has the time come to think of completely crazy and wacky ways of communicating to the public? My answer is a big yes.

This leads to another fundamental question. What will be the revenue model for the e-businesses in the near future, assuming that the current wave of advertising would lose sheen? One of my friends Sumit strongly believes that you would be paying for each and everything you do on the internet in the near future. Well, I do believe in that to a certain extent, but more importantly I feel that you’d also be payed for every thing you contribute to the web. I have a crazy feeling that you’d even be paid for every useful post you make on a community like orkut or may be on a blog. So the net effect would be that you get richer by spending time on the web. But who would pay you for all this? Advertisers? Well, the answer may be yes, if advertisers come up with some crazy ways of web-advertising (read: communicating values) and I strongly believe in the prowess of Advertisers!

This would lead to a lot of money transaction on the web. Even the conventional concepts of money and finance behind these transactions might change. Crazy, isn’t it? There would be a huge business opportunity not only for these wild gaga marketers, but also for the finance guys since web transaction finance would get really big.

PS: If you are a PE investor or a PE manager aspirant who happened to stumble across this post, think twice before putting your money in the so called evolving ‘web analytics’ companies (for short term, it’s really brilliant though). For whatever change the advertising would undergo, it’s certain that web based transaction finance would be the next big thing and think of putting the big bucks in such ventures.

The INR 2.5 Sugarcane Juice and Consumer Spending

This afternoon when I was walking by JP Road, Andheri (west) I saw a crowded shop. My curiosity led me to that place which I saw was a sugarcane juice shop where it was written in bold all across the shop - “Full Glass Rs. 2.5” I happily drank a glass of sugarcane juice. While I was walking back to my college, I had an interesting thought. I remember drinking a glass of sugarcane juice for 5 bucks 16 years ago. My memories went back to those balmy days in Delhi when I used to go to a nearby park, play cricket and gulp a glass of sugarcane juice in a shop near the park.

Suddenly I asked myself when inflation averaged more than 5% for the past decade or so, the price of sugarcane juice should have increased from Rs 5 in the year 1992 to somewhere close to Rs 10 ( in the shops of same kind of course!). But I remember drinking sugarcane juice for 5 bucks for a long time and now it’s 2.5 bucks! What is causing this anomalous reduction in price?

We see a lot of products whose prices come down because the products are associated with some technology and it is common wisdom that enhancements in technology can reduce the costs and hence the prices. But the sugarcane juice vendor doesn’t seem to be blessed with any technology and he uses the same old machine driven by an electric motor. In fact the real estate prices have escalated greatly and that too running a shop in a place like Andheri West should in fact increase the overheads and hence the price. But we are seeing the reverse.

There are two reasons I can think off. The first is that the transportation and logistics has improved big time as compared to a decade ago. This means cost of sugarcane supplied to a shop does not increase much from that a decade ago. The second and most important reason is that there is an increase in consumer spending across all strata of Indian society. This leads to a lot of people drinking sugarcane juice as compared to a decade ago and hence the number of glasses of sugarcane juice sold per day increases which considerably reduce the overhead costs (land, electricity etc) per glass of sugarcane juice. Hence increase in consumption is one of the most important factors that have reduced the price of many items.

Increase in consumption spurs the GDP growth which leads to better economies of scale. This leads to reduction in price. But this price reduction can’t happen on a continuous basis. Let us analyse why. We saw in the sugarcane juice case that the costs could be minimised by increasing the efficiency of the game. The shops have increased the number of glasses it could sell per day. It can sell more as people buy more. But it can’t produce more than its capacity. To technically put across, all these years the sugarcane shop has been moving towards achieving a higher ‘utilisation rate’ or ‘utilisation capacity’ or in other words increasing its efficiency to cut costs. Prices will fall till utilisation of resources is maximised.

World’s top notch Management Guru CK Prahalad believes that for achieving sustainable growth, corporations should look at ‘Inclusive Business Models’ (co-creation!). The fact of the matter is that, as explained above increase in consumption should lead to increase in GDP which should again lead to increase in prosperity and consumption in a merry go around way, but the bottomline is that for this cycle to be sustainable the consumption should be ‘Inclusive Consumption’. By ‘Inclusive Consumption’ I mean the whole India including those at the bottom of the pyramid earning and spending more. A recent McKinsey report suggests that India will be the 5th largest consumer market by 2025. All these signal very interesting times to come!

In pursuit of 'Rationality' ( A 'Probabilistic' Explanation)

"All the World's a stage and we all are actors" said William Shakespeare. When I read this poem way back in my 9th grade, my understanding of this was totally different as against my current interpretation. Most of us are not true to ourselves. We are not truely rational though we proclaim so. Why is it so?

A child is born with certain numerical abilities. Even before mathematics is formally taught to a child, it can count the number of toys it has with it. It can add the number of toffees it has even before the mother teaches 'addition'. The logical explanation for this characteristic is that the child has genetically inherited such a trait. Man has been playing around with mathematics for tens of thousands of years and hence he is genetically strong.

I have always loved mathematics till now and so have many of my friends. But I have observed one peculiar behavior. Most of my friends including me are pretty strong in Algebra, Geometry, Numbers but most of us are dreaded by the chapter 'Probability'. Most people I have observed are not very comfortable with 'Probability' and 'Combinatorics(Permutation and Combination)'. What can be the reason for this? The most common answer I get from people is that 'Probability' is tough. But why is it tough?

It is an intrigiung fact that though Geometry, Algebra, Numbers had been in use for thousands of years, 'Probability' is one branch of science which was popularised only post 15th century when some gamblers wanted to estimate their return from the game of chance. Probability is relatively the new kid on the block of science. So the element of 'Probability' is not strong in our genes. And it would still take hundreds of years before genetically, the mankind is comfortable with probability. But what is the implication ?

'Rationality' is strongly related to 'Probability theory'. One way of looking at rationality might be choosing the right path from a given set of alternatives. Such a choice can be termed as rational decision making. Decision theory was popularised by the 18th century mathematician Thomas Bayes (of Bayes' Theorem fame). 'Decision Theory' applications are indispensable tools for the rational decision making by managers(My MBA friends would agree with me on this fact). But we don't use decision theory beyond our professional life. Do we draw a decision tree for our day to day decisions? A lot of our decisions are taken not from our minds but from our hearts. We are not perfectly rational simply because we are not genetically coded so. Nevertheless we are in pursuit of rationality.

It will be a really interesting proposition when more and more of rationality creeps into the society. It'll be a whole new world. Marketers can't allure customers by 'Buy 1 get 1 free'! Investment Bankers and other traders would no longer successfully underwrite European Options! Insurance industry would rewrite its business equations (FYI Insurance Rationale is very much based on Bayesian Probability theory)! And students would say 'Probability' is a piece of cake!!

US Slowdown and its impact on the Indian IT industry

Recently there has been talks of a slowdown in the US economy. Business Gurus opine that it will affect the Indian IT industry because the majority of the Indian IT revenues come from the US. I would beg to differ. I feel that all this is noise created by the media. And the stock markets react to it adversely.

In an event of US Slowdown, some economists argue that companies would get into the cost cutting mode and reduce their IT budgets and hence outsourcing revenues will reduce. But there is another way of looking at this. A lot of companies would feel that developing in-house IT capabilities would be a high cost proposition and hence outsource more. These companies will temporarily stop its in-house IT plans and outsource more to low cost destinations like India. Hence I would argue that US Slowdown would relatively benefit India.

The bottomline is that it is for the time to tell what would happen in the future!

What is common between CAT and capital markets?

I’m writing this article exactly a year after my CAT 06 results had come and when a lot of my friends are eagerly awaiting their CAT 07 results. When you are attempting the “all elusive” CAT for the first time, then the day of result is one which you can never forget. My memories are fresh even after a long gap of 365 days. I was eagerly awaiting my ‘Verbal Ability’ scores because my scores varied with each and every ‘Answer Key’ published by various coaching institutes. I still remember my various scores. My scores as per PT, CL, TIME and IMS keys were 31, 26, 16 and 16 respectively. Finally I got a shocker of my life when I got 6.25 in the ’IIM’s (Decider) Key’ (0.25 was ‘grace!!’ score since they had eliminated a question since 2 options were not printed for a question)

Let me delve a bit upon the capital markets at this juncture. I was thinking about investing in the markets and was analysing certain options. I was thinking about the returns of the mutual funds and that of the equity markets themselves. For those who don’t know much about mutual funds let me explain a lil on that. Mutual funds, in short are those funds (funds of ‘aam’ junta) which the “smart” fund managers invest in the equities (most common instrument) in the capital markets. There are funds like the ‘blue chip’ funds where the fund managers invest only in the blue chip stocks of the BSE sensex (India’s popular stock market index). When I was looking at the return on these mutual funds, I was in for a surprise. What I observed was the mutual funds on most occasions gave lesser returns than that of the markets themselves. Then I convinced myself thinking about fundas like diversifying the portfolio and risk mitigation in mutual funds and stuff like that. Generally mutual funds invest in debt and equity instruments and hence the returns are lower. But the funds that I observed invested only in the ‘sensex’ blue chip stocks and still gave lesser returns than the market’s return indicated by the sensex. Why is this happening? This is scenario not only in India but across the globe. Then I realised that markets as a whole comprising millions of traders are better of than the fund managers. It was a hard fact even for me to digest, but again this is the reality and power of markets. Collective wisdom is far superior to an individual’s intelligence. For those who want to research more into this you can google on topics like ‘behavioural explanation for stock market fluctuations’ and stuffs like that. In fact behavioural finance itself is a wonderful research area.

Coming back to the CAT stuff, what IIMs should have done when there was so much of an ambiguity in the answer keys? I bet even if all the IIM profs are separately asked to come up with the keys, there would have been at least 10 versions of the key. What IIMs should have ideally done is to evaluate all the answer paper on the basis of all these 10 versions of the keys and then look at the distribution of scores across the 10 keys and should have finally selected that key which gave a better 90 percentile cut off score. It was very sad to know that the 90%le cut off was around 20 last year. And doing this in definitely not a laborious process since all the answer sheets are initially fed into the system and the responses of the candidates are digitised. It takes time to feed these answer sheets into the system’s scanner and evaluating doesn’t take any time. It takes hardly a few hours to evaluate once the responses of the candidates are scanned and digitised. The logic behind this is very simple. Collective wisdom is always better than that of an individual’s intelligence the same funda of the mutual funds and markets. This is applicable to cases as that of CAT 06 English paper where different experts came up with different answers and all the CAT 06 takers would agree to me with the fact that the answers were very subjective and not objective. In fact there are a lot of statistical distributions which can be used to analyse these 10 keys. For simplicity I’m not getting into those nitty-gritties, but a simple way would be to choose that version of the key where the score corresponding to the 90%le mark is the highest. I had been thinking about this for a year, but I thought about the correlation between this aspect and the mutual funds – markets paradox and this CAT stuff helped me getting more clarity on that paradox.

For those God level profs in the IIMs who teach statistics and those mighty fin profs who are an adept at behavioural finance, please put in your thoughts in solving a real time problem like this where careers of thousands of serious aspirants are at stake! All the very best to CAT 07 takers who are eagerly awaiting their results!

Equilibrium is Disequilibrium

Well, you might wonder what a stupid and paradoxical title is this:'Equilibrium is disequilibrium'. It completely defies whatever we have learnt in our high school physics. But to look from from a holistic view point, it is the disequilibrium, which leads to an equilibrium.

Let me substantiate, what I exactly mean by this. For quite some time now, I have been pondering about the sustainability and feasibility of the northward moving growth rates in India. With the increasing 'Paretisation'(I'm talking about the Pareto Distribution skewness), the sustainability of double digit growth rates is questionable. This is where the issue of 'inclusive growth' crops up. All said and done, we want everyone to be happy. Of course, this is a good thought.

But suddenly I thought what would happen if everyone lives in Utopia. Everyone is having equal wealth. Everyone is 'happy' from a materialistic point of view. Is that happiness? We'll be bored of happiness that we'll get sick of the so called happiness. Here comes the question of what defines happiness. It is the differences that exist leads to the thrill in life. You want to go up and up and up, and you love intense competition. You might fail, but it is the thrill of competing and fighting that gives happiness. I might be wrong in saying that. Honestly, I don't know. That is why probably, we have this inequality which in turn leads to happiness. It is this disequilibrium which is in realty, the equilibrium. I think I'm getting too philosophical.

Coming to some real time fundae, most of us know how markets function. Market functioning is based on the conflicts of opinion that exists in our mind. Take stock markets for example; a stock can be traded only if some in the market feel that the price will go up and others feel that the price will fall. If all feel that the price will fall and start selling, markets can't survive and this is what we call as the multiplier effect market collapse. This is the disequilibrium(difference of opinion) what leads to the functioning of markets. The funda of futures and options/derivatives market is also the very same. Perhaps, the example of derivative markets will drive home my idea in a clearer way.

We say that the concept of derivatives tries to minimise the risk of market as a whole(this is what I call equilibrium). How does that happen? Let me give you a practical case of hedging. Some in the market, hedge their rupees against dollars thinking that the rupee would appreciate and others thinking that the rupee would depreciate. At the end of the day both the parties have a win-win at a small premium of course, because for Indian exporters, if the rupee had appreciated, it would have lead to bigger troubles and for the importers it is the other way around. You, hedge because you want to play it safe. It is this difference of thoughts and logic that leads to the concept of hedging, minimising the overall risk of the market.

For water to flow, you need difference in levels of height, pressure to be more precise(Funda of pressure P=hdg) and water flows fromhigher level to lower level. Similarly for the current to flow, you need difference in voltage levels and current flows from higher voltage level to the lower one. If in the world, all the water height levels and voltage levels are same, there will be no rivers or any concept of flow of electric current. It is this disequilibrium which in turn leads to equilibrium !!

I support Hon. PM Dr. Manmohanji

For the last coupla weeks or so, there has been intense, mind you, very intense speculation on what Manmohanji meant when he addressed the CII conference with a 10 point agenda. The debate hasn't stopped yet. I was seriously pissed off when I saw two noted columnists(Swaminathan Aiyer and Shobaa De) in the today's Sunday Times voicing their concerns on this issue after weeks of intense debates. Both of the columnists, for whom I have very high regards, have addressed this issue pretty lopsidedly(Nevertheless,the two articles were good and Iyer was spot on in his 10 point agenda to the netas). You can play the blame game upon politicians for social inequality and also ask politicians to restrain themselves before advising the corporates. Certainly any logic driven person would agree with this. 100 % true.

And as a matter of fact PM was addressing a bunch of corporates and not politicians and obviously he can't speak of the restraint in political spending(man, he can't comment on politicians b'coz he has very limited powers in the UPA regime and he's trying to use it for the betterment of the country) and by the way personally Dr Manmohan Singh is known for his modesty and simple lifestyle.

But the question is was Manmohanji spoke something so bad that it has evoked such a response from all quarters?


1 Manmohanji was asked to address the CII conference, which in the first place, was held to discuss the 'inclusive growth' which addresses how should all the people in the country grow? Growth in our country as all of us know is specific to a few sectors. When 6/10 households in our beloved country do not have water in their premises and 1/2 households in rural India, ie the villages don't have electricity, inclusive growth is certainly the most important issue

2 Most of us know that Manmohanji was one of the few people, who have made India, one of the fastest growing economies in the world. He has certainly created the opportunities for a lot of people to become the CEOs of various corporate organisations in India. It is only because of liberalisation that a lot of middle class 21 yr kids today find absolutely no hassles in finding themselves cushy jobs.

3 I'm not talking about the past glories. Think from Manmohanji's perspective. He has certainly pushed India into the high growth trajectory, elevating the status of a lot of middle class Indians, by his liberalisation move. Next thing in his mind should be to elevate the poor class. And that's obviously on the top of his mind. And that's what is achieved by inclusive growth.

4 It was the CII which invited him to address the issue of Inclusive growth and as a world class economist, he came out with his views. The issue of 'conspicuous consumption' and 'Cap on CEO salaries' was just a small part of his entire presentation and not the crux. Don't view him as a prime minister who's addressed the conference. View him as an economist and he's certainly capable of addressing any international conference on such topics even if he were not India's PM, but as one of the best economists living on this planet.

Content of the speech: Flawed?

Let me just get into the crux.

1 A lot of people fail to understand that being a business leader doesn't always mean that one can be a good economist. A country can't be viewed as a firm as such. Business leaders may be good at managing firms but macroeconomics is something different. But no one can deny the effect of macroeconomics on a firm run by a CEO. To put it in simple terms, concept of firm and microeconomics is an open system concept whereas macroeconomics is a closed system.

2 Any macroeconomics expert should have a very very sound understanding of social behavior pattern, political philosophy, moral philosophy, political history and a bit of law. Take Dr. Amartya Sen as an example. He's a Nobel Prize awardee in economics, but he's got a very sound understanding of not only economics but also of all the above mentioned subjects.

3 The study of macroeconomics is complete only if one has a very good understanding of Social behavior pattern and other such subjects mentioned above. But Business specialists who typically run the firms do not need to have such a level of expertise, just a basic understanding is sufficient. The logic is not difficult to decipher: Running a firm depends on macroeconomics and macroeconomics in turn depends on social behavior pattern. So macro economists have to go a level deeper.

4 When there is a growing inequality, there is a social tension and if it breaks out bigger, all of us are gonna lose in the long run. And the advent of media has made events like Abhi-Ash wedding very public just for their TRP. This is just an example. Many such programmes and sops which portray luxury, reach the nook and corner of the country. Just think this way. A small boy in the village sees the TV and regrets the fact that he can't wear good clothing or eat good food. So definitely it'll affect his mind and to make the matters worse media telecast programmes without minding the social impacts. We or for that matter even biz-specialists can't appreciate well, what would happen if a boy watches luxury stuffs and how his mind gets affected. But a person who's good at political and moral philosophy, historic behavior pattern et all can appreciate it well because he'd have read about revolts and what lead to the revolt, the economic impacts of the revolt and how firms were affected by it. So obviously this is a critical issue today and that's what Dr. Singh wanted to address.

5 Coming to the next issue of salaries,Cap on CEO salaries may be not the proper way of putting it. But the point he wanted to make is that the salary levels of all the employees, not only the CEOs, are rising too much when compared to that of the poor people. The gap between the rich and the poor is increasing and something must be done about it. You may ask me why he was very specific about CEO salaries. You might even say that it has political motive. But the same issue of CEO salaries is discussed worldwide including the US, so prolly he referred to the wording -'Cap on CEO salaries' which was an issue in the US,as merely a pointer to drive home his point of how the income disparity is a serious issue worldwide. He prolly wouldn't have meant it.

See we need to address this issue immediately. Only then we can achieve sustainable growth. The rich poor gap is becoming alarmingly wide. And corporates have definitely a greater responsibility in the remedy measures. Not because they are generous, but it is necessary for them in the long run to survive. In other words we call it 'Long Run Profit maximising behavior'!! Perhaps this is why Adam Smith is really fantabulous!!

So let the distinguished columnists like Swaminathan SA Iyer in their columns (his column 'Swaminomics' appears every Sunday in Times of India) , discuss the solutions for bridging this divide rather than criticizing and mocking the PM.


Above all just think about the pains to prepare agendas to address a CII conference. And we stick to a small aspect of it and criticize. Can your regional neta address such a conference? I know for sure that the malaichamys and muthukaruppus of my state don't know what inclusive growth is or prolly what's the growth rate of India is. But come on, they know how to prepare a cuppa Masala Tea.

'Pull' Strategy - (Management is not rocket science!)

In my previous post I had written about my biz plan. That was a perfect example of a 'pull system' strategy (which I realised later). In this post I'll try to explain pull system strategy.

Any company requires resources. If the resources are pushed into the system, we call it a push system. Most companies follow this kind of a push approach where they would predict the demand and stack up their inventory by pushing the resources onto it. It has been a very successful model till date. This is a structured approach. A good example of this push system is the biz model of the Walmart's apparel division. Walmart always looks up to standardising its apparels supplier. Walmart generally abstains itself from dealing with multiple suppliers when it comes to apparels business. But as a matter of fact Walmart has not been very successful in this apparels segment.

Ideally in the current market scenario,Walmart should try to 'pull' in from different suppliers who would have their own unique style of apparel design. Managing your supply chain becomes a lil difficult but still the benefits over weigh your costs. This is what I mean by the pull strategy. You don't push your stocks from a single supplier alone but you pull different resources from different suppliers

It's not the story of the Walmart alone. There are very good examples of companies which have thrived well by adopting this strategy. Amazon.com is one beautiful example. You can buy any book you would like to read on the face of this earth. Amazon.com pulls is from a lot of suppliers.

Another case is our own baazee.com, now ebay.in, which is a very fitting example where you enable p2p selling. Even traditional p2p websites like limewire adopt this pull strategy. e-choupals of ITC is also a wonderful example.

What we do when we blog? We pull in knowledge from various resources and present it for others to easily appreciate. To put it in a better way, corporates are now resorting to corporate-blogging where ideas are pulled in from all the employees.

Lean manufacturing system focused on eliminating wastes or making the inventory management better. You did not push in your inventory. Rather you pulled in when there was a demand. This was probably the first instance of pull systems, tho' I'm not very sure of it.


See I'm not trying to undermine the push systems which have been erstwhile very successful. But in this changing market dynamics, pull systems have evolved well and would definitely rule the roost in the near future. This is not tough to comprehend. What happens when you earn far more than the amount you can afford to spend in buying the costliest car in this earth? You would like to order a car which is specially manufactured for you with your own preferences. So the manufacturer can no longer push his inventory. He has to cater to certain special orders like that of yours. If there are 100 people like you, who'd ask the Mercedes to manufacture customised cars think what would happen? What if there are 10000? Slowly we see that the car manufacturer who was pushing his standardised raw materials into his inventory can't do so anymore. There are people who order special cars and the number of such people keeps changing. So he has to alter his quantitative as well as strategic modelling of his supply chain. This is what we mean by the pull strategy. This may be a hypothetical example, but this is how the world's buying behavior is evolving. We have strong growth rates and huge consumption levels. When the bottom section of the pyramid rises to the top, think what would happen to the top? You'd see a lot of Nokia-Vertu kinda phones in the future.

We see that in contrast to push strategy which is highly structured and resource centric, pull strategy is modular and highly innovative. Mathematical modeling of your processes become slightly tougher but that's the way it works. My take: Pull strategy mixed with push strategy can work exceedingly well.

What we call as pull strategy is something all of us can comprehend and probably think of(like the biz model I had thought of). I never knew the existence of all this push and pull strategy then. Management Strategies are not rocket science. They are something which lies within us. It is just that certain management gurus give it a proper framework. Just think why pull strategy evolved? Just because of the karma of free market economics. The buying power of the junta has increased. So you gotta change your biz strategies to survive. Thus evolved the pull strategy. As simple as that. We call the guy who probably understood this market economics and gave a structural framework to this approach as an innovative entrepreneur.

My final word on this: Whenever you read something try to give them an analytical and strategic framework. Who knows, you might end up as one of the greatest innovators on this earth because innovations are not rocket science. Just think about what it takes to fit a mirror in your bureau. You don't have to spend for a dressing table!

The Entrepreneurship bug

As it happens to a lot of wannabe MBAs, I have also been bitten(Slightly tho') by the entrepreneurship bug. Of late I have been thinking about a lot of business models. From 'niche food chain' biz model to some web based models, I have been doing some biz analysis.

We are living in the midst of a very powerful information revolution. Knowledge Management based and KPO kinda biz models have started being received well by the Venture Capitalists for at least a coupla years in India and about for half a decade in the better developed markets.

I thought I came up with a good biz model(happiness short lived!!). Let me explain my model very briefly. It's all about a lot of young naive consultants and market researchers, being hired by my portal at a relatively lower price, each of them with some special domain knowledge and being relatively naive at it. They might be students or employees working elsewhere who'd be willing to work 'part time' for my portal right in their house sitting in front of their desktop powered by high speed net connectivity. Companies would outsource low end 'Knowledge work', to my company, which can't be outsourced to niche consultants, who would in the first place not like to work in the basic lower end market research based problems and secondly, demand higher price. So companies would outsource such work to my company.

Advantages:

1 People can make quick money by working from their houses.

2 Online jobs are already available in India but still most of them are not too good in terms of the 'challenge of work' and the pay package to be taken up by the emerging 'knowledge class' of India( hmmm and yet another class, coined by me!) whose power or competency levels can't be ignored in times to come.

3 Information revolution has peaked in India with 2 Mbps connectivity no longer a dream

I don't want this blog post to be a writeup of a biz plan executive summary, so stopping here and not going into the nuances.

Again this is an optimisation of a biz plan I had drafted about an year earlier, where the sorta work was not Knowledge based, but kinda BPO work like documentation, lower end software work et all taken up by poor college students in a part time basis sitting in front of their desktop. To cut the long story short that plan targeted the (fortune at the)bottom of the pyramid, whereas my current modified plan targets a slightly different set of people.

I thought that my new plan was kinda unique in the sense that it targeted a separate class of people, who in the past have not worked online in spite of having credentials. When I was doing some web searching to further my plan, I stumbled across this company 'InnoCentive' which more or less performs the same kind of work that I had thought of. It posts challenging pharmaceutical problems with cash incentives for an innovative solution. I was a lil sad, but I learnt quite a bit. Management gurus call this kind of an approach as 'pull strategy' where the resources are pulled, as in our case where the resources are different people working from different parts of the world. I'd explain the crux of this pull strategy and how this strategy would evolve as a powerful strategy in my next blog post...Do read it if you feel that you haven't gained much insight in this post.

Kurukshetra 2007

Kurukshetra, guruchetra, kurukchetra, kuruchetra, gurusetra, kursetra.....this is what you can hear from the various quarters of our college for quite some days now. Well, Kurukshetra is the national level techno-management fest conducted by CEG, Anna University. We are doing an event in such a magnitude for the first time. Well, with the topline (lol!) around 25 lakhs and prize money around 9 lakhs, its definitely worth the whizz it is generating. Undoubtedly Kurukshetra is a product of the unchallenged commitment and efforts put in by our guys to conduct an event in such scales. For more info log on to www.kurukshetra.org.in

Does modern day Tamil music make a mockery of art?

Most of us in the college, at least those in the boys hostel of CEG have this debate: who is better-AR Rahman or Ilayaraja. I have been an AR Rahman fan for 15 years, right from the day I heard his album-‘Roja’. I still vividly remember my English teacher Mr. Balu (one of the best teachers who have taught me till now) explaining the meaning of ‘child prodigy’ in my 8th grade and the examples he gave for child prodigies were Sachin and AR Rahman. Undoubtedly AR Rahman has revolutionized Indian music and taken it to greater echelons. When people from richer sections of the society alone could enjoy that western style of music with all that rocking effect, treble and bass, this man took such music to the masses with all that high precision computer effects, the first of the kind in Tamil films or to an extent say even Indian Films (I ain’t that technical when it comes to music-the point I want to make is the way AR Rahman differed from others in 90s).


Over the years, what has happened is that most music directors have followed the Rahman route. But the sad story is that the all these modern day music directors have given more importance to the sound effects and computerization of music but miserably failed when it comes to the lyrics. They have a name for this kinda music: they call it so live and happening music.


In one such Rahman Vs Ilayaraja debate, one of my friends asked a very pertinent question regarding the Tamil songs which we often hear –“machan, apart from the latest flicks, whose play list do we generally hear when we are free da is it Ilayaraja or AR Rahman?” If I were to answer this question honestly I would say that I hear to Ilayaraja’s music more than that of AR Rahman’s because most songs I hear these days are the Rahman type in modern cinema and for some variety I go for Ilayaraja or for that matter any old song (PB Srinivas rocks). But Rahman’s songs are really good when it comes to lyrics, just that since more of the modern day songs are like that of ARR (general style) I prefer Ilayaraja jus for a change.

I tried to analyze why people (especially me, these days) tend to hear Ilayaraja’s music more than that of the modern day music directors. When you hear a song like “Dailamo dailamo….kaleleeekku raathiiri meee kaathaleeiiiii” what happens is that you (not me!) prolly tend to like that song initially when the album hits the market. What happens eventually? You forget that there was such a song in a matter of month or two. What I personally feel is that the most important attribute of a song that makes it evergreen is the lyrics and the music of course.


Music is an art. I feel that art becomes an art only when it is intellectually stimulating. Here by intellectual I don’t mean calculus or relativity but something more bigger, something that relieves your stress, or something which makes you feel comfortable, something which sets your mind in action without you really knowing that you have kindled your thought process, something which only be felt and perceived and can’t be put in words. When you hear songs like “Nallathor Veenai Seithen” or Thirthakaraiyinile therku moolaiyil…” or “Irandu manam vendum” or “Thoongathe thambi” or “Yeh jo des he tera, swades…”or say even a romance song like “Kamban yemanthan” or “kabhi kabhi mere dil me” or “Ehsaan tera hoga”, you get that feel good factor which I tried to explain.


These songs represent a wide gamut of philosophy, values based, romance.. but the common factor which all of them share is simply superb lyrics apart from some brilliant music. I ain’t trying to say that the film songs these days don’t have good lyrics. Some certainly have, but it is only a few in number…When it comes to AR Rahman, I‘d say that, this man is brilliant in all his albums, be it music or lyrics or digital effects or whatever. But in the current scenario since most directors try to imitate the way Rahman did that too with crappy lyrics, I feel whenever I hear such music I don’t get that feel good factor. In turn we people feel that old songs are better. The modern day Tamil film songs don’t represent good art; rather they are core-commercial. Music Directors want to make some fast moolah so they give some numbers like “appadi podu…” How many of us will hear that song after 10 months? But still we turn our ears to songs like “En mel vizhuntha pani thuliyee, ithanai nalai”, “pachai nirame” or “Netru illatha matram(sad version rocks! “Ilaigal veeznhtalumee kilaiyil thuli ullathu…iravu theernthalume innum nilavullathu…pathi uyir poana pothum meethi vazhvullathu…”). So I would say that as long as you have good meaningful and thought provoking lyrics, you can beam that song to be evergreen. From the reigns of GN Balasubramaniam to G. Ramanthan to Ghandasala to MS Viswanathan to Ilayaraja to AR Rahman lyrics was given importance but now, its mere mockery of art……Hope things get better.(Exceptions are always there…)

How things can change in a year

Einstein is a genius. Well it might be a clichéd as it is a universally acclaimed fact but at times you personally cherish the great man’s work. Last year had been one of the fastest years in my life. I don’t know the reason but yes, the whole year for me had moved in a speed of at least 2X compared to that of the previous years. Coming to the point, I had the hostel re-admission process today for the forthcoming academic year. My previous year experience had really pissed me off.

Today I entered the place at 8:30 am. The things started on time. No waiting business or token crap. We were allowed inside at 8:30 sharp, given the apping forms and a soul was explaining how to fill the form with the help of an LCD projector. Then we moved on to the next room and the whole process of fee payment, room allotment and other stuff that took just a few tens of minutes. Another awesome aspect of this year’s admission process was that we were given the option of staying in the same room that we stayed in the previous year. I came out at 9:10 am. Goodness gracious, I didn’t have the problem of shifting the whole thing up to another block. What took nearly 13 hours last year just took 40 min this time? No kidding.


Coming to the bigger picture, why is this sudden change? Who revamped the whole crappy process? Well it was not a difficult thing to guess. We saw the same old faces but for one man, Dr Srinivas, the new Associate Warden of CEG. Man, he is smart as a whip compared to the other Profs who handle or manage such things. He led from the front and challenged the hostel admission history. Great work indeed!


What CEG has taught me over three years? If I have to say the answer as Electronics then prolly I am wrong. I know electronics concepts to a decent level but CEG has no business in it. Then what else? I should say CEG has taught me things that are big. It has taught me the way of life though the path that had never been not a bed of roses. It has taught me the hard way, the way to live and survive. It has taught me management (at most times how things shouldn’t be managed!). What I saw today was real management and the credit goes to the Associate warden. My words of advice to those people who are peeved in joining this college and lamenting about college doing nothing for them:

“There is a learning opportunity in everything, provided you keep your eyes open”

Happy Birthday to my blog! – My blog turns 1

When I was going through certain comments on my blog, suddenly I noticed that it was exactly a year before, I started blogging. It was on 23rd June 2005, when this blog entered the web space. Now, when I look back its simply nostalgic. When I started blogging, I never thought about all these milestones. But now it really gives me an A-one feeling when I look back.

When I wrote the first blog, I had a sagging feeling. I started blogging on vague end of my second year, just before the beginning of the third year. I was in Madurai then. I had been preoccupied with glum thoughts of my college reopening. But now exactly after a year, just before the start of my 7th semester, I am looking forward for the college reopening eagerly coz I am damn bored here in the hostels. This vacation had been pretty long (two and a half months). Hope the days to come are enthralling and challenging

Are Educated Indian Women Greater Losers?

Today(yesterday as per the time now lol)was an eventful day for me. I got up at 4:30 am for filling up my ‘placement registration form’ and switched on the internet before brushing my teeth. I entered the address of the registration website. The message flashed ‘The operation timed out’. I checked my connection (mine being a cdma wireless connection, I don’t trust my connection speed, but still for a hostel in anna univ this is cool) for sufficient speed and found that speed was good enough. I tried desperately for an hour or so. I got pissed off with all this shit, and finally came out of my room for some cool air, brushed my teeth, took bath and finished off my prayers. I had a good brisk walk in the cool morning not for the sake of it (I am a lazy f*****) but for going to the bus stop, catch the bus and attend a function in my uncle’s house.

I met some of my close relatives and the usual stuffs happened. My parents couldn’t come all the way from Madurai, so I represented my family. After all that piece of advice and crap about my forthcoming placements, one of my aunts started asking me about myself having a girl friend or not and stuffs like that. I know what they meant, I was really embarrassed. Fine, she told me the news of one of my distant cousin sister who is 3 years elder to me, getting married. I have heard of her to be really brilliant though I haven’t spoken to her much. She was famous in our family circle for her rocking performance in some all India science essay competition. She had a good AIR in that. Some crap. Above that she wanted to become an entrepreneur it seems. When we used to say we want to become engineer, we wanna become doctor, she used to say I wanna start a company like infy. She was always a topper in her school days, got pretty high scores in her 10th grade, scored okeyish in her 12th grade and joined Amrita CS. Ironically; the poor girl got placed in the same Infosys, the prototype in which she wanted to establish her organization.

After working for a year in Infosys she’s opted for the West Coast. Lemme make this point clear. When a decent looking brahmin girl from a decent family background finishes off her engineering and works for a software company for an year or two, there are just two options for her to settle in life-either East coast or West Coast. Sometimes it is a tough decision to make. Come on, west coast is technology hub with its typically Indian silicon valley. East coast is the finance capital of the world-simply put either an engineer groom or an MBA groom. Might sound good for boys to have such girls but when I think of girls I really feel sorry for them.

When such a girl grows, she has lots of ambitions and zeal to make it big in her life. At the end of it, everything goes shattered. Wedlock at the age of 22 or 23 is really horrible, unimaginable. Finally the girl might have all that comforts with a Porsche or a bungalow in Silicon Valley or a $100000 pa family income that a boy can’t have at the age of 22 or 23, but is it really satisfying? Life is something more than just getting settled comfortably. Life should be full of anxiety, thrill, fun and all that. I don’t mean everybody should become entrepreneurs. Come on, what is life without ups and downs here and there. Life should be enjoyed for at least 5-10 years without wedlock. IMHO I d say that women are bigger losers than many men. Men always enjoy their lives more than women. Most of the Indian women in the US are housewives in spite of being well educated.

I was really stunned to hear that this girl is also following the good old route. Where is her entrepreneurship spirit? Where are her dreams of starting a technology company in India?-Buried in the Silicon Valley.

I am not trying to say that all girls end up like that but at least many girls in my family with sound academics have ended so. Ironically I was discussing this with my friend when he told me that, today he met a 26 year lady from Calcutta who came to Anna Univ to market some instrumentation stuffs. It seems she owns an instru company and she has come all the way to market the product. There are people of this kind also, but the number is really less. Most of us know Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Nainalal Kidwai, Indra Nooyee, Chanda Kochar, Shikha Sharma, Renuka Ramnath, Lalit Gupte……the list might go on for some more lines. But considering the total women population in this country this is no where significant. Exceptions are always there but....

Here in this post I’m not referring to the empowerment of the women as a whole in the society. That is matter of obvious fact that women empowerment in India is an alarming need. I am sampling a particular part of the society which is supposed to be well progressed. But still the results seem shocking. The greatest irony is that, all these girls who waste their lives are from sound family background with good education. The high attrition rates of women in the software industry would add some salt into my argument.

Is Indian Astrology a Farce?

I‘ve been blogging quite often these days. The reason behind all this is not my passion towards blogging or rationalistic ideology crap. The prima facie reason is that I am jobless, jobless to the core. So I am compelled to blog.

Since ‘campus placements’ is round the corner, we are supposed to fill in a registration form or a kinda resume- a crappy one. The registration has “supposedly” started (After coming to this “mighty” anna univ I am using this double quotes too often). I told this to my dad. On hearing this he told me that, I should fill the form in some auspicious time. In spite of his busy work schedule these days, he took pains to see my astrological details from the ‘panchangam’ and suggested me an auspicious date and time. I still doubt if I can complete the registration on that prescribed time (damn anna servers!).

Fine, I would like to justify the science behind astrology. As I often say, I seriously don’t know if all this is true (same old dialogue!). I feel that, the essence of astrology is the famous Newtonian law of masses which goes something like this- “Between two masses, there exists a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of distance between them”

As we know, astrology is basically a science which is concerned with the influence of heavenly bodies on us. The most important factor of determining one’s ‘jatakam’ is the place of birth and time of birth.

What mighty Indian astrologers might have done originally is, basically create a database, where they would have charted out the position of various heavenly bodies that are worth influencing planet earth, for thousands of years in precision up to seconds. For eg. On June 6, 2006 at 17:30:40 hours the planet x might be at this place, planet y might be at this place, object z would be in this place and so on and at what angular position they are with respect to each place in earth. That should have been the first task.

The second task would have been to apply the Newtonian law but not in the way Newton proposed it but perhaps in a much more complicated manner. I’ll tell you why. I’ll explain with a specific case. Assume that a man is born in a place at a given time. So there must be some force between his 1.6 odd kg mass and the various planets which would be at different positions. Obviously there must be some force exchange between bodies of different masses. What these great astrologers would have done is to precisely compute the various forces due to masses at different angular positions as a generalized case. We would falter at a simple mechanics problem from I.E. Irodov (the book from which IIT JEE physics questions were lifted, I donno about the current scenario) involving a few force distribution models. Come on, and then think of those great Vedic astrologers who would have had to factor in a large number of forces, compute the resultant force and then finally computing the table. That is the table which we use even today. What astrology software today does is to get the date and place of birth and compute the ‘jatakam’ based on that table. No one is quite sure as to how that table was created by ancient Hindu astrologers even now. That remains a mystery. (Please don’t confuse yourselves with the conventionally used one, but I mean the one that relates what would happen if I am born in this place and time, I just don’t want to go into the intricacies for the sake of simplicity. For the time being assume it to be a table.)

One might very well ask, “I was born in the same hospital as Bill Gates was born and at the same time. But I am no where close to him”. So what can be the solution? Here is where the theory stutters. But lemme try explaining this phenomenon.

Let us take Mr. X to have born at some place. The forces would influence his motion, lifestyle in such a way that he would move to another place when he is 5 years old, again completely different planetary positions and again his lifestyle changes. So what happens is that progressively, the resultant force changes, and so his lifestyle changes but all that change in motion would have been influenced by the previous planetary positions. When his son or daughter is born, obviously their astrological map is influenced by his astrological map and hence we can conclude that even if two people are born in the same place and time, their life needn’t be the same and this chain continues across generations. What astrology broadly does is to generalize the case. The thing goes like the famous Fibonacci sequence where in every term is the sum of previous two terms. Astrology is very much similar. Every move of us is influenced by the previous move, akin to the manner we compute the nth Fibonacci number using the first term.

When, astrologers tabulated their calculation, probably the population was very small. So the probability that many children were born at the same time at a given place would have been very less, ergo the success. But now, since there is a huge population explosion, I feel that the table should be updated factoring in some more aspects to enhance the accuracy. But the hard reality is that we can’t even figure out how the table was created, so damn fools we are compared to the greats, there is no question of enhancement. I’ll tell you precisely where the problem lies. We know that planets are in continuous motion at a great speed and jus think how fast the resultant force and its angular position would change and it is really elusive to think of this as a problem to be solved in physics.

So what I am trying to say is that astrology is one of the most elusive branches of physics and not something to be mocked at by the “so called rational” fools. If they can, they should try to understand the physics behind it or rather shut the fuck up instead of mocking astrology.

All this is purely my imagination. I am not saying that I’m right but this is how I convince myself when I think “Is astrology really a farce?” This is just 1/nth of what astrology is and how it would be like. I have never delved into the aspect of what kind of force is that and by what property does it influence one’s actions. I’d definitely update this post with more inputs and ponderings.

Every aspect of this world is driven by Science. If something is beyond the scientific explanation, then the realty is that you are scientifically backward.
Long live Metaphysics.

“Gunguna rahe hain bhavre….Aradhana”

Yesterday I downloaded one of my MOST favorite songs of all time “ghunguna rahe hain bhavre” from the Hindi movie “Aradhana”. I am listening to this song after 14 years. Yaar, Lata Mangeshkar’s voice is so captivating. This used to be my favorite song, in my LKG and UKG days. My father is a big fan of Kishore Kumar and so I am. This film features 2 of the all time great songs of Kishoreji. “Mere sapnon ki rani” and “Roop tera mastana”. But somehow I always got hooked on to this melody. We had an audio cassette of that film and my father says that, I listen to this song “ghunguna rahe hain bhavre” at least once a day. I don’t remember all that, but what I know is that I used to love that song better than any other song. The cassette got lost somehow. Then as days passed by, I forgot all that. Suddenly when I was listening to my kishore playlist in my comp. suddenly I thought of this song, the tone and lyrics of which I could barely remember. I searched the mighty web typing “Aradhana” and to my luck, found the song. But the problem was that the website didn’t have an option of download, I could only hear it on the web. I was on gtalk and suddenly my friend Krishna came to my mind, IMed him and asked him to check for this song in their IIT LAN, and he found this song and mailed me immediately (IIT LAN rocks man!). Thanks to globalization, technology boom and of course IITM.

When I double clicked that song, boy-o-boy I really got nostalgic. Images of my jim dandy childhood in Delhi started popping out of my mind. Those days were awesome, indeed. Life was full of fun. I am really fortunate that I spent a good amount of my childhood in Delhi and I’m 100 % sure that I wouldn’t have enjoyed as much if I were in Tamil Nadu.

I would come back from my school at 1’0’ clock in the afternoon and freak out for a game of cricket or bittu(the marble game). When kulfi wala comes, I used to run into my house, literally beg my mom for money and finally after all that advice and scolding my mom gives me the money. Then again play..play…Phatak then comes challi wala (corn stuff), again running into house for money, same advice and at the end of two minutes, convincing my mom, that this is the last time and all that- my sweet mom giving me the cash again. Then bhel puri wala…..lol. Finally at 7 or 8 pm I reach my house just before my dad comes back from his office and start learning my school stuffs. I was always a brilliant chap and my grades were always good so my parents didn’t bother much about the large amount of time I spent in playing. More special were the days around holi, diwali, Independence Day (we used to fly kites for a month or two and all that comes to a halt on the Independence Day). Life used to be rocking then. I can very proudly say that I don’t have bad habits, I have never bunked (in the sense, without the knowledge of my parents) my school for going to theatres etc. Coz if I wanted to watch a cricket match, my parents would allow me to cut the school. Thanks to the large extent of freedom given by my parents, I am in a good position now. I was brought up in the right manner- that is how children have to be brought up. I have no regrets now.

Though college life is supposed to be fun filled, it is not really as it is projected (curse Indian films!). We do last minute cramming for the exams, vomit the crap and finally hold on our nerves on the day of our results. This holy shit happens four times in a span of six months (semester lol). Sometimes I feel that this kinda stress is also fun, no denying this fact, as it is a part of our lives. Still those balmy days of childhood were simply unforgettable and adventurous. If we had a Rewind option in our life, it would have been fantabulous. Come on man, INNOCENCE IS BLISS.

Am I an atheist? - My Metaphysical musings

Spirituality is omnipresent. Where ever we look into, we see spirituality. Right from a CAT/GRE RC passage to newspapers like Hindu/ET we read about spirituality. Most of us believe in some religion, existence of God and so on. I always wonder at these complex conundrums of being and so I would like to present my views on this and hence this post.

Axiom in my theory:
Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. However it can be transformed from one form/being to another.

I classify energy into two types
1. Positive energy
2. Negative energy

I would associate positive energy with optimism and negative energy with pessimism.
So what is God? - Simply positive energy and nothing more than that. Importantly God is unconditional in his love. He (if there is a person as God) never puts anybody into task

Let me define optimism before delving further. According to me optimism is an extreme level of belief in something, which may be a person, an inanimate thing or whatever. Bhakti is nothing but belief/optimism/positive energy.

The immediate question is will God punish me if I do something wrong?

The sad answer is a big NO. Because there is no such thing/person called as God. I associate God with the sea of energy and nothing more.

It is only the fear (or negative energy which I call it) or the so called guilty consciousness which punishes the wrongdoers.

Osama Bin Laden is successful because, prolly he would have been very positive and satisfied with what he is doing, with no element of fear. His confidence level must be at the zenith. So he is not caught. If he feels guilty about his acts, then he would necessarily be jeopardized.

You might find it ridiculous but the hard fact is that, there is no definite discrimination between good and bad. What you might feel as good might be bad for another. But it is very difficult to do something wrong (as what most people perceive) without having fear or guilty consciousness, I would say it to be absolutely difficult. Can I reach that state? Yes, through meditation and practice we can attain nirvana where we are not bound to this earthly being, so it is said that such people can attain anything which they want. Who knows Osama might have attained nirvana! Lemme put the same info in a better manner. We know that as per Hindu mythology, there were innumerable Asuras who got boons from the God. At the end they were put to task by God himself. What does it mean? Asuras by means of concentration gained more energy. After getting that energy, they did something which we call devilish. They feared for their deeds and consequently faced death. On the other hand rishis used the energy they obtained by means of penance positively, lived contently and attained the real nirvana. Don’t see them as rishis and asuras, see them as two normal individuals who after getting energized used it in different ways and hence now called differently.

Hinduism very strongly says that God is there within you. What does it mean? Have you ever wondered? It is nothing but the positive energy within you. SO EVERYONE IS A GOD, just the degree of Godliness differs. There is a tamil saying, “Anbe Shivam”, which means that love is God.

Why religions portray the other way, saying that there is God and he will punish wrongdoers?

This was just said to convince the large masses that they should live with honesty, love, truthfulness failing which the God’ll punish. Just to convince the rural masses, puranas were created and different men were portrayed as God. I ain’t blindly denying that Vishnu existed or Shiva existed, but what I am trying to say is that great men of the yesteryears personified many concepts for the easy understanding the rural masses. You can’t make the meek understand all this metaphysics when even we in this 21st century still call it metaphysics and not physics. So the truth was put in an easily digestible manner.

Then why I’m praying to Hanuman or Shiva or Vishnu?

We people pray. I pray sincerely. What happens when we way pray? We completely put all our faith on the so called God and concentrate. In this process of concentrating we relieve ourselves of our mental ills. The real thing that happens is the process of energy transfer.

Is idol worship foolish?
DEFINITELY NOT. If you ask me how Vishnu or Shiva attained energy if basically you doubt the existence of them? When millions of devotees concentrate on the so called idol of Vishnu or Shiva, the energy of the idol increases. Poojas have been performed for centuries. So the idol gets its power. When you go to the temple and pray you gain that extra bit of energy by the process of energy transfer.

I am a serious devotee of Get-well Anjaneyar in Tirunelveli. It gives me a great mental peace if I go to that place. I feel really relieved from stress when I close my eyes and concentrate on HIM. I find my resonance with that place. It is nothing but science, or the wavelength match. I know that there is no person by that name. Just it is a scientific phenomenon.

What about greats like Vivekananda?
People like Vivekananda had the capacity to completely trap their inner energy by means of meditation. For them going to temple would not make a big difference. People like him are more Godly compared to us.

Can we become a great man like Vivekananda?

Certainly yes. But the bottom-line is that we must be 100% positive in whatever we do. The first and foremost mantra is that you must be confident of yourself and hence after no stopping you from the gates of success.

I’ll give you an example. Assume that you are very determined to get a 100 percentile in CAT. The first thing is that you must COMPLETELY believe in your potential. There must not be a speck of fear or doubt. Then certainly your inner God would automatically make you do the things which are required for you to get that 100 percentile -Just a scientific process. It might be very easy to say this but this is very difficult to implement. Allaying your fears off is the toughest thing in the world. That is the sole reason why we still live in this world. It is that fear which keeps you in check. The only way we can keep off our fear is to develop that attitude of optimism and self confidence. That is why time again in all scriptures importance of positive attitude is stressed. Getting rid of that last speck of pessimism is a Herculean task, but certainly possible. Examples are people like Vivekananda, Paramahamsa etc.

What is meant by reaching the God?

Every religion stresses the importance of reaching the God. What does it mean? Well I’d say that during your death all your energy will again be transferred to the sea of energy or what I call as God. It is as simple as that.

Why we follow certain religious practices?
Here I’d like to say that all religious practices are not true, some by means of superstition crept in, but many practices have a scientific background. For example, when we prostrate before our elders a process of energy transfer takes place and hence we prostrate.

See, the basic thing which I want to drive home is that everything in Hinduism at least, is science driven. Mahabharata and Ramayana are just not stories. They have many scientific intricacies. It is the way we see the truth. Truth is there everywhere. From now on when you do something think why you do that and try to put in science into it. You’ll get brilliant results.

P.S.
1. Here in this post, I couldn’t write my complete theory, which I fear, might go for pages. I have tried to simplify as much as possible. The sequences in this post might be desultory; well I’ll try to make this in a better presentable form sometime later. What I wanna say is that please don’t differentiate science and spirituality. They are one and the same. Please contact me for further queries on any religious practices or controversies. I might clarify.

2. We have scaled only a part of science. There are still many concepts of much more complexity than that of relativity which have to be explored. Now for many people metaphysics might sound ridiculous, but come on every great man was ridiculed when he came up with new ideas.

“Oh Physics! Preserve me from Metaphysics”- Sir Isaac Newton.

Long Live Reservation Policy-Why we need reservation for another 150 years

A kinda disclaimer:
All the views presented below are of my own research and intuition. I am not saying all this is correct, because I am not a bio-technologist but I have a strong gut feeling for the correctness of my theory. Well, if you find my theory fine, then it’s fine for me too! If not comment on where my theory is flawed or curse me lol. After reading this if you feel like thrashing me, then I can’t help but saying that please KISS MY ASS.


Before I start this let me say a few words about me. I come from a Brahmin family where we follow almost all required/logical customs seriously and I support reservation system wholeheartedly. I came to know about this reservation stuff in educational instis during my 9th grade. One of my cousins missed out his desired seat in the college of his choice and hadn’t reservation been there he would have got it for sure. He had to get a payment seat and now he is well off and that is a horse of a different color. He described his anxious moments of admission in counseling hall-how seats vanished before his eyes and all that crap ...TN guys know this, but definitely not, my college guys!

Even some of my close upper caste friends, peers lost their seats; some had to get a payment seat. Still I’d say that I’m pro-reservation. Honestly speaking, when my turn of ‘engineering admission’ came, I had no problems and I got the most coveted branch in the most coveted college then (2003). The % of seats for the OC is 31% in Tamil Nadu, rest 69 % is reserved. Even if the percentage for OC was 0.83% instead of 31% I would have obtained the same seat!!(Total no of seats in ECE is 120).

I support the government’s stand of the 27% reservation for OBC. I know that it might lessen the chances of my MBA but still I am for it, coz I have realized the truth. I have always been intrigued by a question-“Why is that always upper caste people shine better than the lower caste people in education/learning?” Some might say that all this upper caste and lower caste theory is crap. If a boy is given good primary education, nourished food, and bestowed with good standard of living, then he might study well, irrespective of the caste which he belongs to. In other words, a boy from a decent economic background, with the mindset to study well would do well irrespective of the community he belongs to. So people, who support ECONOMY BASED RESERVATION, use this case to drive home their idea. I don’t deny this fact completely but would like to provide a subtle variation to this theory. I want people to look into the bigger picture.

Let me put forward some facts before I proceed. A case rather (case based learning- IIMA rocks). A boy is born in a middle class upper caste family. At the same time another boy is born in rich family (so called lower caste family). This second chap’s dad is an IAS officer (yes, he used his ‘SC quota’ to become an IAS officer). Both guys go to the same school. In fact the former guy’s standard of living is below that of the latter. But still this upper caste guy’s dad gives him all facilities he can afford to. Both guys are serious about their studies. They play together, work together; spend their time together in school. In short they are close friends. But this upper caste guy scores ahead of this lower caste guy always. Why does this happen? Both are from good family, both have the same facilities, good nutritious food and above all both have the same inclination towards studies. At the end both ended up in the same college, same class irrespective of the fact that the latter scored far below the former. Thanks to reservation.

This is not the only case. I have seen N such cases. So I say that the genes play a major part. It all depends on how nourished your gene is, irrespective of the caste, creed, religion. When genes determine your height, personality, character it is an obvious conclusion that genes determine your brilliance.

Again one might ask what a gene to do with caste. Here I’d like to say something, with reference to Indian history. If you see in the past for thousands of years IN MOST CASES the so called upper caste people had been involved in intellectual work and the so called lower caste people had been, in the bull work; also the so called upper caste people had been living rich and the so called lower caste people had been living poor. Their food habits obviously differed. So genetically speaking the so called lower caste people are weaker, in most cases.

What is the fault of a child to be born, genetically inferior? Can it determine its gene? Is this equality? I would swear that every individual is NOT BORN WITH THE SAME LEVEL of intelligence. Who is to be blamed? And this is the general pattern; upper castes are born superior to the lower castes. The reason can be attributed either to the following

1. The suppression of the poor by the rich for thousands of years

2. A chain which always continued in the past. Son of a farmer was a farmer, of that of a cobbler was cobbler, of that of a teacher was a teacher. I don’t know how flexible the society was, whether a person had his own choice in choosing his career or not. But mind you, what you have been doing for thousands of years does count in the form of genetic strength.

Whatever may be the past; in this flat world I believe there must be equality. The first and foremost goal of India should be the well being of its hundred crore + population. When the whole world is progressing towards superior technological advancements, every child which is born must have the same intellectual capability. For this to happen there must be a minimum of 150 years of the same kind of caste based reservation system. Then the whole country would reach SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM.

Here’s another case to drive my point. I personally know a few Brahmin guys who are extremely intelligent, can crack CAT without preparation, but are rogues. Yes, they are rogues in the sense that, they booze like hell, eat non vegetarian stuffs, smoke badly, shag badly and all that crap which is against the Brahman Dharma. I ain’t saying that eating NV stuff is bad, boozing is bad or shagging too much is bad, but it is bad for a Brahman. Coz his gene is not adapted to this culture for thousands of years. When there is a sudden change in his lifestyle, it might adversely affect his genes and that might be reflected in the intelligence levels of his future generations. He is now intelligent bcoz of his ancestors and their lifestyle (most cases). If he indulges in this “Sanskruti Brashtachar” continuously he’ll lose his entire genetic legacy. Let that happen, I don’t care. But I‘d love to live a true Brahman all my life.

What is Equality? All I am trying to say is that if a person works really hard, he should get what he deserves. Genetics should not come in the middle and hamper. We unfortunately don’t have the power to meddle with our genes to a larger extent. The only way we could provide the correction is by means of reservation. I am not saying that reservation will be beneficial to all. There might be genetically inferior Brahmins who would suffer and genetically superior lower castes that would have undue advantage (as I said standard of living determines the genes and in most cases upper castes were rich and lower castes were poor, with some exceptions- the ones mentioned in the previous point) but, by and large this current reservation policy would benefit the majority. Till every soul in this Bhoomi is born with the same intellectual capability, the reservations should continue. Long live reservation system - at least for another 150 years.

PS:
1. The problem in this current 27% reservation move is that there is no well defined way in which people are grouped into FCs and OBCs in our diverse country. What I mean here is that in TamilNadu number of so called FCs is lesser compared to that of North Indian states. It doesn’t mean that N India is better progressed, but many N Indian castes are classified as FCs compared to the numbers in Tamil Nadu. So this will give an undue and unfair advantage to TN OBCs. Hope you get my point.
2. If my theory is wrong, then I would emphatically say that there is no purpose of this reservation system in the country and the reason stated by the GREAT MEN (politicians of course!) for reservation is f****** lame.

Why did I blog?

Reliance rocks!! Eventually I got an internet connection in my hostel room, and so I am invading this blogging space again. Most of us know about blogging, why people blog so on and so forth. But honestly I have this question, a million dollar question (who knows this expression might one day become karod rupya question worldwide-India and its economy rocks man!) - Why Should I blog? Do I have really readers who read my blog? But honestly I started blogging for various reasons, some of which I have listed below.

1. Most IIM aspirants blog.
2. Blogging gives me a feeling of moving up the flat world.
3. I know I write crappy English on my answer scripts just for the heck of writing my exams, and I fear my English would be in soup if I write my exams-what I actually mean here is that, to cover all the points, I actually write just phrases or blocks of words in my answer books. Another aspect of driving home the idea is the way we write SMS’-the bullshit way. So by blogging I m still in touch with writing good English (I wonder!) or I fear I might forget grammar.
4. Initially I blogged to just use some words which I came across here and there.
5. It gives my pleasure to read my own doodling.

Honestly I don’t know if I’ll be an active blogger or not, but I would say that definitely my next post is something that all readers might find interesting.

After aeons..

Well I m writing this after a long time in this blogspot. I had a wonderful time in between...no kidding.. Lots of unforgettable moments, a great semester and so on and so forth. Seeing this year's CAT paper I thought horsefuckinshit .. I shd have born an year before, well the kinda paper I thought that shd appear in 06 appeared in 05.

I felt I was comfortable with the kind of paper with 90 ques which required some commonsense, intellect,Question Selection management(QSM as I d put, who knows well this term might become popular like CRM, TQM ...lol...coz already the number of CAT takers is sizzling ooozzzzz.. and this business of CAT coaching instis is running crores of turnover)...Yes what is critical about CAT is the skill in choosing the questions.As my friend maravar (as we lovingly call him- a rockkkkkiiin entertainer and a philoCAT..lol) puts it " The toughest CAT paper is that of the next year" it is true that the questions standards are going higher every year.So what is critical is the question selection for slaying the CAT

I shd say that I have been going for a CAT coaching center since July 05, a whooping 6 months, the change I could feel in my knowlegde level is subtle, I haven't learnt anything new or so but I 'd definitely say that yes.. my QSM has certainly gone up ( expecting a greater increase by Nov 06)and I feel that is the key to unravel the great world ahead.Well I see a paradigm shift in the attitude of my fellow class mates towards this exam.Yes the buzzword in my class at the moment is CAT. A lot of guys n gals are now CATting it !! Sometimes I wonder , well all these chaps are smart but why is that only say 3 or 4 out of 70 in a class of the so called creamy layer of the state(TN), clear CAT. Now I think I found out the answer, the key is just some smart QSM.

Coming out of all these CAT stuff I wish all my friends a belated !! happy new year and advance happy pongal..