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obvious musings
Friday, April 30, 2004
  Gmail !
Yes ! I have a gmail account now too..
Although the primary utiliy that I thought it had was that of the 1 GB space , I realize that it has a very cool interface too, many "bells and whistles" put in there that makes it a useful tool..
Some that come to mind are :
cool key board short cuts , messages are grouped together as conversations and not as individual messages , a very very cool autocomplete feature for email addresses ...
Me and my colleagues at work think its almost a different paradigm , for example you never need a ftp server now ..as you can store all your important files just on google mail (have to stress test with file sizes though )..we also did a back of the envelope kind of calculation whether the space is a big issue ..turns out it isnt..

 
Monday, April 26, 2004
 
Some of my friends have legitimately pointed out that there is no need to be so gush gush about "india shining" or whatever you might call it ..
The argument is that I only talked about IT and IT would directly benefit only about say at best 5 million people, a really microscopic number compared to a billion people that India's population is right now..
Further on, even those people who thought a step ahead , as in that there would be a trickle down effect and not sure about whether the trickle will turn into a flood , or still stay a phenomena which would benefit the only lucky few..
I agree with their concerns/comments , ofcourse IT is not the panacea of all evils and although i do believe the trickle down effect manifests itself in more ways than meets the eye and is stronger than is generally perceived I would again be foolish to think that it would have a far reaching impact..
However I think the point is not that at all.. The point is a bit more subtler than that.. The point is self-confidence and a belief that we can "get things done" ..this may sound corny but it is true.. I feel that Indians are like a man-eater that have tasted blood and the trickle down effect of this is far greater than one can directly measure... Its the image of the country , its how the world now sees us and in consequence how we see ourselves thats changing at a rapid pace and I believe that a large part of that was a direct consequence of our success in IT services. My american friends keep taunting me with statements like 'India is going to take over the world '..what the IT boom has therefore done is to give confidence to the rest of the world that Indians can inspite of all their problems build, create and manage projects on world class levels.. This will in turn obviously rub off ot other industries as well and is doing so..
When Naina Lal Kidwai was speaking at Harvard about India Inc.'s prospect in the future surprise surprise , she didnt speak about IT at all.. She spoke about other success stories, auto components , finance , paints ,telecom , biotech .. ofcourse the classical argument would be cost ..I would say the americans are no fools , they would stop using India for their services and product manufacturing if the quality was below par.. These things are not only cheap they are of superb quality too.. So from the fact that most major Indian IT companies are at CMM level 5 to Reliance having one of the best quality assesments in the world to Sundaram-Clayton Ltd., Brakes Division winning the Deming prize , indian products are no longer wanted for just being inexpensive..

So to summarize , why I am so optimistic is not because of the trickle down effect but the rubbing off effect to the other industries .. the value is , in addition to mrs Rao having a chance of providing lunch to the software enginners that live in her colony and mr murthy managing to expand his private bus business to a great extent because of the software engineers who need to get work outside the city , is 25 year old young mr . swami thinking that why cant he become the next azim premji of biotech ..

also check out tonnes of free online books at Guttenberg
there are some cool wodehouse books too , so I am happpy :) ..

 
Friday, April 23, 2004
  Reverse Brain Drain
I had come to the US reading books like Whats so great about america .. In this book, D'Souza trumpets the science, democracy and capitalism that he believes have led the West to global supremacy. This was then..

Now I just read this article by Thomas L. Friedman from The New York Times .. who has written widely read and appreciated books like Latitudes and Attitudes , From Beirut to Jerusalem and Lexus and Olive Tree .. and this is exactly how I feel about whats hapnenning in the US right know.. I couldnt have put it better..

"Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming to our shores. Instead, they are opting to study in England, Western Europe and even China. This is leading to a two-fold disaster.

First, one of America’s greatest assets—its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate—will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America’s standing around the world. "
Read the full article here


Boht Infosys and Wipro have joined TCS to become billion dollar IT juggernauts... Hoorah ! .. I was in TCS once upon a time and many of my friends have worked or are still working at these companies. So in some very miniscule way I feel happy about their achievements.. Google gave a 1000$ to each of its employees at Christmas ..oho big deal ..so did Infosys ..
Yes a 1000$ which is probably worth like 10000$ if purchasing power is taken into account , to each of its 25000 employees !
So while corporate America still has what is called a "jobless" recovery , in India its quite the opposite ..
Infosys is hiring BIG TIME,
and wonders of wonders so is AMD
I almost feel like what Pandit Nehru said on the eve of Independence is coming true now ..
"Long Years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge ...
A moment comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation,long suppressed, finds utterance... "

Ofcourse 25% of India is still under the poverty line , infrastructure is woefully inadequate.. but its a start ...
 
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
 
The obvious musing for the day is how this generation of indians is literally all over the world..
It just hit me today when I was talking to a buddy from college who I learnt is in Seattle. As it often happens when two old friends meet we play the "who is where and doing what" charade ..
Believe it or not almost 90% of the people were not in India .. they were in London , NewYork , a couple in Australia , Ireland, Singapore,Belgium, even in South Africa ..
And this is not only in IT , I was speaking to my mother this weekend and I was enquiring about all my childhood friends and no surprise there too , they are working in 10 different countries,not necessarily in IT .
All this when I thought that things were great in India and everyone would want to stay in India itself.. Ofcourse many of them are not working at these places as a permanent worker there but more on deputation for a project from an Indian company.
Also as far as those came to study in US the situation is a little different with many of my friends going back because of a very tight job market , especially for foreign students..However in US too, as I mentioned above, many of my friends have come on work visas sponsored by their Indian companies..
As I always say the rise of IT in India IS great as it has given every young Indian a chance to lead a better quality of life , which is fundamentally what development is all about in my opinion... Ofcourse it can have some unintended effects too..
 
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
 
When I read back my post from yesterday I realize that it is pretty convoluted and meanders in a pretty incoherent manner.. a friend put it correctly I guess he said it was your "stream of consciousness" .. He was probably just being polite .. I guess the writing will improve as time goes by..

One of the things that i have noticed is the so called Politics of Instant Messengers , I am not sure if anyone has done a study on them..

Firstly I am not so sure about people who are invisible all the time ..say everybody is invisible then how can anyone know who is visible ? You are invisible and so am I , then what ?? Why should I be visible ? Even I have pesky friends who I dont want to talk to sometimes .. How about the argument that I am busy and so I am invisble ? If you are busy then dont log on !!
And it gets worse , what about those people who are visible but have a Busy sign !!! :O :O ... what the hell ..are you trying to tell the world that you are busy ? If you are busy why are you logged in .. Ok one possible explanation is that you are busy talking to someone special , thats it..thats when you become invisible..
Aha.. maybe the scenario is that you are waiting for someone to come online and you dont want to talk to anyone else while you are waiting for them..But if they see that you are busy how can they talk to you ? maybe thats already been communicated ..

One more pet peeve ..one of my friends thinks that the messenger should be a minute to minute description of his daily life ..so he puts in things like "Cutting Nails" , "Staring out of the window", ..so on .. I am not sure why anyone would be interested in this kind of information ..

Also if you see that someone is online that you havent spoken to in a long time, should you make the first move , what if he/she doesnt respond ? Or the see it the other way , if you away for a short period of time and somebody sends a message , will he stop talking to you because you didnt respond ? will he take you as a snob ? Do you have to explain later ..
I am going and logging on messenger now .. You will not know though , I will be invisible ofcourse ;)
 
Sunday, April 11, 2004
 
So I have decided that I should start updating my post too.. The trouble ofcourse is that you have to remember the big flashes of inspiration or profound clear level head thinking that you get during your day so that you can write it down ..
I will try to remember them..
A current minor obsession is to figure out why is the "west" so economically prosperous and not the rest of the world.. In that context ofcourse the industrial revolution , growth of capitalism in England etc come to mind ..Reading a book called the Birth of Plenty , which basically says that there are four different factors , the offering of property rights, capital markets, means of communication and the scientifc method.. I am also reading a book called Culture Matters which mentions some other interesting theories though , looks like there was a person called Max Webber who came out against Confucius's theories that they were essentially anti-capitalistic and so China would never prosper.. the point here being that somehow the culture of a community is responsible for its rise .. not so sure about that though .. , as I have also read that later they were some other historians who looking at China's amazing new economic revival claim it to be attributed to values from Confucius !! .. However though it may or may not be true , perceptions do matter I guess. As Naina Lal Kidwai mentioned while answering a question at the IBC at Harvard Business School which I attended that the perception of the fast speaking, mathematically inclined , hardworking , computer programmer from India has gone a long way in improving its image.. But wether a particular culture is more suited for success as compared to the other I am still not entirely sure.. People might still point out at Latin America, but look at Chile.. its the new super star in the Latin American economic landscape.

I think that this argument is somehow like the argument given by people who believe in star signs.. I have frequently seen that they say that they are exactly like their star sign .. What they do is that they read what attributes are associated with a star sign and then try to match what they are with that , not the other way around..

Also reading a book called the future of freedom by Zakaria.. , interesting stuff.. he insists that democracy and liberty are two orthogonal concepts and too much of democracy is not necessarily a good thing..

I have much more to say on this topics.. I will keep posting stuff..

Been to a jagjit singh show , my obvious musing for the day is that I guess Indians become more Indian when they come out of India , they somehow clamour for whatever India they can grab at !

Also met some interesting people on a walk through Boston , a person at MIT's famed media lab , a microbioligist etc..this is what is fascinating in Boston that I get to meet so many different kind of people working in different proffessions ..
 
I post things which if someone else would start saying they would start by saying "obviously .. blah blah". Due to my limited and slow perception I usually realize things late, so it happens often that I suddenly realize something which the whole world already knows.. I post such late realizations here about society, culture, business, politics and economics..

Anirudh Garg, Boston, Software Engineer.

Past Musings
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
May 2005
June 2005
August 2005
September 2005
November 2005
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