Sexperiment

Its not what you think.

Few days ago, I decided to embark on an experiment which I will call social hibernation. Accordingly, I totally abstained from participation in social media, with the exclusion of access to newsfeeds and twitter feeds. Even on these sites, I refrained from contributing/ responding/ sharing anything.

What happened? Many things.

Last several days has helped gain distance with this social media and with distance came perspective.

With social media, I believe there are 3 different roles.

• You play subscriber, when you read/consume information.
• You play contributor, when you contribute original articles and thoughts to the network. Sending comments/feedback also count.
• And then you play the relay, when you do things like forward emails, RT tweets etc…

In my opinion, people should subscribe 60%, contribute 20% and relay 20%. This helps maintain balance of roles, increase S/N ratio and ultimately achieve any level of usefulness.

Unfortunately, I believe people relay 75% of times, subscribe 20% of times and contribute 5% of times. The numbers I am using are subjective, but you get the idea. This increases clutter, confuses people, deters new entrants and leads to big misconceptions about what social media is all about.

For example, people still believe twitter’s sole purpose is to provide minute-by-minute status of what they do, their ramblings etc...If you are one of them, I invite you to read the 10 things you need to stop tweeting about. Cusswords, proverbs, personal statuses – I submit – should be banned from Twitter. Twitter is a launchpad for something more descriptive and useful. Which is why you should blog, not just tweet. If you need help starting a blog, there’s plenty of help available, such as this.

Being informative, creative, purposeful is important. Even with the lack of all these, just be sure to not create noise.

As an epilogue, if you are a busy social netizen, constantly distributing your time between the 3 roles, especially if you playing less of the contributor than you should, I suggest you take a break like I did. May be you will have valuable wisdom to offer after the exile.

Trip down the memory bus

With blogs and other tools, publishing is much easier than it used to be. I believe there is still a lot of scope for publishing platforms to become more idiot-friendly, but lets see what I had in place of kuppurao.com about 10 years ago.

Buying our own domains was a big deal. Especially for personal websites, getting a sub-domain or a webfolder itself was considered good enough. If I told somebody my email ID was xyz at kuppurao.com, people would say "Give me a real email ID my friend". A real ID had to end with hotmail.com, yahoo.com, rocketmail.com or lycosmail.com)

Once you get your sub-domain or webfolder, you will immediately be granted access to a FTP server to which they will give you UID/PWD/IP Address. There were very few GUI tools for FTP. So you had to know command line FTP, basic HTTP, strong sense of what your folder structure etc...There were no WYSIWYG editors (MS FrontPage was very expensive).

Hit counters, graphics, web-parts (like survey, poll, link-list and other cool things we do with our blogs today) had to be written from scratch or bought for high $$$. Oh yea, RSS hadn't been invented yet and analytics were extremely rudimentary. The older brother of RSS - BBS/UseNet was very user-unfriendly. The information was free, but the connectivity costed money.

I first had a website at http://members.rediff.com/sathesh. Did not know what to write about - overwhelmed by technology and suffering from identity crisis, used to write lines about myself, my family, my father, music etc... Check the rediff link above, it works even now and it now hosts a "This site has moved" page. This page supposedly redirects to a domainvalet sub-domain which doesnt exist today.

What completely surprises me is, the concept of URL shortening existed as early as 10 years ago. The rediff link above can also be accessed by http://fly.to/sathesh. fly.to was never heard after the 2001 times, URL shortening concept itself disappeared for several years before people like tinyurl came and now the concept is going through another cycle of adopt and give-up. fly.to exists today, but I believe the business has changed several hands.

No, the intent of this post is not to announce my age, neither did the above stories happen too long ago. Really it is the last 5 years that witnessed explosive growth in internet, especially in two areas - user-friendliness and the culture of free.

Lets talk business - Part II

In the first part of this article, you may remember I discussed at length about return policies and pricing models. At which point, I decided to postpone 2 more topics to a later part. And here you go.

Mail-in rebate (MIR) is one of the most successful pricing strategies in retail industry. My curiosity for MIR started long before I ever started using it. Back in the 90s, my brother bought me a spindle of 100 CDs. When he told me he got this to me for nothing, I went, “This isn’t making sense. Who will hand you things for free?”

Have you wondered why sellers do MIRs at all? So, for starters:

• MIR is a great strategy when you want to discount the price of a product for a limited time without compromising the long-term price-point of the product.
• You basically want to attract the customer because it’s off-season (to make the customer buy when the product isn’t necessary), to make it competitive (offer low price to crush your competition, after which you can spring your price back) or when you genuinely have lower production cost and would like to pass that on to customers (rarity)
• MIR also helps the seller drive top-line

But, really MIR concept survives because of these behavioral assumptions. As with any behavioral theory, you should apply the 80:20 while reading this.

• Consumers will be ready to pay premium for a product if it came with MIR. What I mean is, a consumer will buy a $100 product for $120, if it came with a $30 MIR (net price $90)
• Consumers are lazy. A non-insignificant number of consumer wont even take it to the submission stage
• Redemption rules are complex – cut the UPC code, send original receipt, no more than 1 per person per home per color per whatever, send it by some specific dates etc…strive at reducing the success rate of a submission
• Usually, incorrect/insufficient submissions cannot be corrected by the consumer

Beyond all this, they usually take between 2-4 months to refund. What you have paid is cash. Even in the worst case, the business makes interest money for the 2-4 months.

Studies say that 40% of rebates go unredeemed. With this trend, some of the news I have heard about IT companies making MIR an electronic process, hardly makes sense to me.

Cashless business: Is it viable?

I don’t want to write a long story here – but with the cost of minting, printing, re-printing (average bill life-span is less than a year), fraud control, logistics, research effort into making innovative bills and coins – are we anywhere in the vicinity of readiness to a cashless world?

I have seen institutions that have begun not accepting cash, albeit spotty. Don’t see why this cannot become a norm.

What do you think?

the mac. to buy or not to buy.

There are two characters in this drama. One is called E and one is called AE. E for Ego and AE for Alter-Ego. Context is E wants to buy a Mac and AE.....well.....just see what AE has got to say.

---------

E: (locking the main doors of his house and heading out) tak...tak..tak...tak...

AE: hey buddy, where are you headed?

E: dont stop me this time....i made up my mind....i am headed to the apple store and will be back in a jiffy...with a mac, that is!

AE: sure thing buddy, but why a mac?

E: i told you not to question me....i am done explaining....mac is fast, there's no virus, its sexy, i want to look cool sipping coffee at starbucks....but most of all, fuck windows 7!

(both standing next to the car)

AE: sounds like you've made up your mind.....neways, which model are you buying? surely you are not buying 17" macpro, are you?

E: not a 17" macpro. 've got to figure out....not even sure about 15"...for $1699, its the price of 3 PC laptops....thinking of 13"

AE: dude...thats like buying a BMW with cloth seats and not having keyless entry

E: ac...(AE interrupts him and goes on)

AE: for that kinda dough, you should look at an iMac....you get 7" more and 2gb more.....

E: but with an iMac, i am stationary.....and if i am stationary, i might as well buy a 27"....its $1699, but hey, its larger than TVs most people have....

AE: watch what you are getting yourself into…

E: i know, but its a cadillac....for 4-6 months of structured credit card payments, i become the hottest dude in my circle...you know what? today is nov 1st....apple's just come out with quad-core iMac....

AE: how much is it?

E: not much higher than the other option (mumbling to play down the price of $1999)

AE: that's digital glutton. that's more than how much you used to make in a year, few years ago. you know what, i am done talking with you (tries to walk away)

E: help me decide, will ya?

AE: do you need a mac today?

E: no, not exactly. i mean, when do you ever need a mac?

AE: relax buddy.....its okay to indulge.....do you want to buy the $999 version? has all the basics?

E: nah....nothing like the macpro....

AE: but imacs are a.....

(both walking towards the house)

E: screen is so cool

AE: you should wait it out

E: the new mouse is uber-cool

(the conversation grows indistinct and fades, after which E gets back into the house and logs on to his Windows XP laptop)

Humming now #6 - Grand Episode

What I am about to write about in this episode is more than just humming now. This is more like “humming forever”. I am going to write about 3 ragams, which may be different in their nuances, but are very close to each other and hence for somebody like me, hard to differentiate. And since I am writing about 3 ragas as opposed to my usual 1, consider this a grand episode with more details and more selections.

The ragams in focus are: Dharmavathi, Gowri Manohari, Madhuvanti

My favorites:

Fav #1: There are not many keerthanas in Madhuvanti, since it is primarily a Hindustani ragam. But there are some amazing recording available of Alaap, Gat, Thumri (conceptual equivalents of RTP in Hindustani) from people like Shiv Kumar Sharma, Bismillah Khan, Ali Akbar Khan etc…However, one nice song in Carnatic is Kanda Naal Mudhalai.

Fav#2: Dharmavathi RTP Jugalbandhi between U Shrinivas and Ustad Sultan Khan

Lite#1: Thathithom (Azhagan, Maragadhamani, Dharmavathi)

Lite#2: Vaanaville (Ramana, Ilayaraja, Dharmavathi)

Lite#3: Dhoorathil Naan Kanda (Nizhalgal, Ilayaraja, Gowri Manohari)

Lite#4: Malare Kurinji Malare (Dr.Siva, MS Viswanathan, Gowri Manohari)

Lite#5: Meendum Meendum Vaa (Vikram, Ilayaraja, Madhuvanti)

In addition to this, one of my all time favorites is a Zakir Hussain composition by name Bell’Alla in a Shakti album called Saturday Night in Bombay. With stalwarts like Debashish Bhattacharya and U Shrinivas, this is an amazing Gowri Manohari. The Zakir improvisation towards the end is to die for. Also in Gowri Manohari is a soothing melody in the Global Fusion album by L Subramaniam, called Harmony of the Hearts.

If I am wrong in any of the technicalities, let me know. I am learning.

For my earlier posts on related topics:

Humming Now | Ilayaraja | My initiation with Shakti

If you are interested in watching the pyrotechnics of the Gowri Manohari composition by Shakti, please watch the following video.

Humming now #5

When I published my #4 on this series (Shanmukhapriya), Adithi had pointed out that all of my "lite" mentions are composed by Ilayaraja and that I am being partial. I promised to take that feedback and include non-IR songs as well.

But hey, I am writing about Kalyani. It is only fair that I not only include IR songs, but dedicate this whole post to him.

Since I am not trained, I can only visualize and provide a structure to the raga through emotions of my own, often unexplainable in words.

Perhaps I can do a poll on which is the best Kalyani created ever. Of course, all 3 options have to be IR compositions.

Kaatril Varum Geethame (from Oru Naal Oru Kanavu)

Vandhaal Mahalakshmi (from Uyarndha Ullam)

Janani Janani (from Thaai Mookambigai)

Please vote by comments :-)

Spellbound

I decided to re-christen the "Indexed" series of blogs to the new name "Spellbound". Here's the latest on Spellbound. For the previous Spellbound posts, click here

It does help

Early last week, I had opened a survey to some of my friends asking for opinions on k.com

Knowing I got minimum critical data to make meaningful conclusions and knowing people are not going to respond to it anymore, I decided to conclude the survey today.

The message from the survey responses is clear. Branding is good, format is good, and subject matters are good.

Need lot of work on 2 things – frequency of people visiting is not quite what I thought and effectiveness of referral enablers (twitter, facebook, reader) is disappointing (esp reader – it’s at the bottom)

One of the main things I wanted out of this effort was to know what people thought about creating separate sites for different interests. To which the response was to keep writing on a singular blog, because the variety is what keeps it interesting.

Thanks to those of you that took the time to let me know what you think. It did help.

But regardless of the survey, there were some changes I was contemplating for a long time. Recently I managed to do them and you should now feel the newer and hopefully better look.

Future of little things

I happened to introduce a friend of mine to this great new concept of URL shortening, which sky-rocketed in popularity after micro-blogging sites like Twitter came into existence.

An extremely simple concept, done fairly well by most players (tinyurl, bitly, omly, twurl, isgd), but is missing a key component – revenue!

There is atleast one service which has plans to shutdown, ostensibly because it couldn’t sustain a revenue-less operation.

Why revenue-less?

Inspite of valuable features (reporting, trending, usage statistics, custom short URL, password protection) in addition to the obvious purpose of shortening, it never pushed the end-user far enough to make him give his credit card number. Even if it was a tenth of a cent per click or something like that, it would have offset some of what it takes to keep these bandwidth suckers up and running!

Future of shorteners

I highly doubt if this will exist as a product/service. It will become a feature. Word processors, IM tools, web-authoring tools will all automatically trim the URL (like TweetDeck does today). I am not sure if there is IP/patent for this service, but that will be bought or open-sourced.

Lighter side

What is the theoretical limit of URLs?

Of course, it depends on number of characters, but 4-7 is standard.

Bitly uses 6 characters and they are treated based on ASCII equivalents – what that means is “k” is treated differently from “K”. So a character can have 62 combinations (a-z, A-Z, 0-9). Since we have 6 characters, the theoretical limit is 56 billion something. If they use it all up, all they have to do is add a character and the new limit is upwards of 3 trillion.

I would like to propose “like twitter and bitly” as a new addition in the metaphor/simile dictionary. What say you guys? My friend would say something else for this J

Lets talk business

This is the first part of the (hopefully) 2-part article I have been thinking about.

-------------------

I am a very curious person. That’s what keeps me going. Whether it is a quick wiki check or spending hours/days in pursuit of information, completing the missing pieces of puzzle and having personal “wow” moments can be very gratifying.

Throughout the time I have been in the US, I have wondered about several things, especially with relation to a developing country, which is where I come from. The vagaries can sometimes be perplexing, bizarre and one that (if pursued correctly) answers multi-dimensional questions. One thing that makes me go crazy is the trade practices here. Time and time again I ask myself – how does this work? Does it really work? Are they really making money?

Let me talk about a few things I have experienced and put my ideas in a perspective.

1. Starbucks – I can’t remember the number of times I have bought a drink and after I drank/tasted, did not like it. The SBUX staff gladly offered and made me another drink I’d like. This is not a one-off experience; Very recently, I ordered something, tasted it, and did not like it. The staff made me something else and I did not like it either. Staff made me something else and not only made sure I was satisfied, but also gave me a coupon for a free drink, apparently because she “was sorry I wasn’t satisfied” the first time around.

2. Walgreens – I had been there to take passport pictures of mine and based on MY request, she had to print a few different sizes, because I was not sure what I wanted. Ultimately, I picked a size and she charged me just for what I took home.

3. Return Policy – I don’t have to explain this. Return policies in this country are lenient bordering on ridiculous. Some stores don’t even check the condition of the (returned) item.

The first 2 points above not only have to do with good customer service, but also to do with pricing models. Generally, I can conceive 3 pricing models for anything that can be sold. Cost based, demand based and experience based. As you can see, Starbucks is clearly exercising experience-based pricing model and so was this specific transaction of Walgreens.

Cost based pricing model is what most of us have been used to. It costs $1 to make something. I need 30% profits. So the price has got to be $1.3. The mechanics of the price are almost transparent to the customer and to the business, growth is linear.

Demand based pricing model takes advantages of customers’ desperation or overall supply-demand situation and by sensationalizing the demand for the product.

Experience based pricing model is where the customer pays for what s/he experienced. Developed countries tend to have “satisfaction” (a function of the customer) as a policy standard and developing countries usually have “quality” (a function of the product) as a policy standard.

I continue to research how these pricing models influence long-term growth and impact short-term survivability (margin).

Now, coming to return policies. That’s my favorite. Return policies can have such profound impact on both on the consumer and the business. Until I did my homework, I was assuming that return policies are definitely a negative for the business. But research documentation reveals that return policies are always a win-win for the business.

Research shows that net sales is higher with returns policy, than without return policy. The more lenient the return policy is (longer grace period, less paperwork, 100% refund, unconditional), the higher the initial tendency to commit the $$$. The underlying behavioral concepts are explained here.

While that’s revealing, its hardly surprising. Here’s the real kicker - research also shows that “full returns policy always raises but does not reduce the retailer's unit profit” (Chang and Pao, 2007) (see excerpt here)

I want to conclude by asking another question to you all: Are there other challenges in implementing alternate pricing models and (relaxed) return policies in developing economies like India?

I’d be delighted to hear what you think, while I am putting my thoughts together for the Part II of this article which will cover two topics – doing business cashless and mail in rebates.

RT-ing is the new FWD-ing

Being in IT, I know better the extremes people took email–forwarding to.

Weather forecast? Forward it. Boss fired? Forward it. Friend pregnant? Forward it. Promotion e-mail? Forward it. No promotion? Forward it. Water leaking in workplace toilet? Forward it. Unknown person suffering from unidentified disease? Forward it. That unknown person needs financial help? Forward it. Activist email? Forward it.

It does not matter what the message is, whether it is good or bad, credible or not, audience-fitting or not – people forward emails like it is some higher, holy, Jihadi purpose.

Guess what? Re-tweeting is the next generation forwarding. Re-tweeting is nothing but tweeting again something that has already been tweeted. So, why do people re-tweet? That’s part of the problem.

1) Do not RT something to tell people that you’ve read it or you appreciate it

2) Do RT something if your followers are different and/or a larger group from that of the person who tweeted this to you

3) Do have something to offer at the end of the message (like your short comment). As a follower, sometimes I look forward to those 2-word comments as much as the message itself

4) Do seek value proposition. Lots of articles are 10% material and 90% skirting around. When you forward it, you want your followers to appreciate that you value their time

5) Do remember the big difference between email forwarding and RT-ing. With email forwarding, you cannot “unfollow”

Tourism and US

I have no pre-conceived notions or biases on this subject. When I read this article that US govt is taking steps to promote tourism, it struck me as something really first-of-the-kind. Here’s perhaps why:

1. US is generally perceived by world countries as a heavily fortified, generally security-obsessed, visitors-unwelcome country. To some extent, this is true.

2. It is geographically a very large country with few attractions of historical significance. Even the non-historical attractions are few and far between.

3. The visa system makes it an elongated and complicated process to get a visa.

This is not to say they don’t embrace tourism. Most tourism campaigns are restricted to TV commercials, which are – at best – national. These commercials are mostly at a state level and it is very surprising for me to now see an effort to lure international visitors to the country called USA. Ironically, they are taking the initiative but taxing the visitors $10 to fund the very organization, that is supposed to facilitate and promote tourism.

Interesting how this will unfold.

Quiz:

1) How many visitors does the Times Square attract annually?

2) For how many years has Grand Canyon retained its most-visited-destination privilege?

Looking back

1990: When my father died, one of my brothers was living in the “distant” city of Chennai. Though we were only 250mi away, reaching out to him was a nightmare. We did not have phones. Utility services (telegrams, public phones) were stalled because of some type of a union activity going on.

1992-94: I still did not have a phone in my house. I remember people that had phones still used to use something called “trunk calls” apparently because STD (long-distance calling) was still a big deal.

1995-96: I was very much a “snail mail” guy during this time. I used to eagerly visit the admin office of our college hostel every day and come back empty-handed 9 out of every 10 days.

1998: People had pagers during this time. This is also the time public phone booths picked up big time. Why? People that got pager beeps had to call back and needed a damn phone.

1999-2001: After numerous follow-ups, bribing officials and waiting infinitely, I got my first phone – 4733337. Every time there was rain or somebody chopping trees around the block, I would hope nothing happened to the phone. Because if it did, I have to call the phone company and guess what – the service department still sucked.

I am sure these types of family stories (like the first TV) are not just mine. The older you are, the more nostalgic the story will be. If you are the type that lived at one address throughout your life, you probably had a phone. Anyways, let’s fast forward to…

2009: Two months ago, Vonage announced all-you-can-eat calling to around 50 60 countries around the world for $25 a month. What’s more, the company has recognized people buying Vonage and using the service from countries outside the US. So, it’s now official.

Picture this – newspaper industry is extinct in US. It will be extinct in all other countries that can afford a phone line and a computer. I don’t think the phone industry will extinct in foreseeable times. The legal ramifications are too great. Plus the big players aren’t just going to sink their investments. They are going to delay the process of extinction by lobbying and such. But none of these would stop the world from talking to people across the world. So, will the following ever happen?

????: Phones and calling people have nothing to do with money.

What if we had wings?

Utter the word “technology” and 8 out of 10 people – whether they admit or not – are thinking about computers. This is not without merit, because what computer and communication technologies has given to a common man has equaled – if not surpassed – many of the inventions that do not involve semi-conductors. In the last quarter-century atleast.

As a younger boy, I have spent lot of time awed at how much technology has given us. No, I am not necessarily talking about computers. Man’s unending quest for doing things faster, cheaper and doing impossible things has resulted in many inventions such as the electrical dynamo, morse code, flights, several innovations in chemistry etc…

Of particular interest to me are things that redefine what a human being is capable of. SCUBA helped us discover – without being capsuled – what’s under water. Flights helped us realize something we couldn’t have done otherwise. But 100 years of invention and innovation wasn’t enough for this gentleman, who must have been thinking, “Shit, this still doesn’t feel like flying”

And friends, I am talking about Yves Rossy – who has pushed the limits of human beings’ flying capability even further. Rossy developed a lightweight jet-engine based “wing” you can attach to your own back and guess what – FLY!!

He controls the speed of the flight like the throttle of a motorcycle and maneuvers the flight with body gestures (remember Segway?)

Best part of this innovation is that the concept is still very much individually owned by Rossy, who flies commercial planes when he is not actually flying.

I am sure there are limitations. Like the maximum flying altitude cannot be more than it is for sky-diving (15000 ft neighborhood). Speed is limited to 125mph. Maneuvering is too sensitive – small mistakes can lead to what they call “spin” (you wont die bcoz you can give up anytime and become a regular sky-diver)

Sometime before I become too fearful, I hope to see this technology relatively idiot-proof and I hope to fly by myself (of course, with the jet wings)

If you want to see it for yourself, google “jetman” or “yves rossy” and watch the youtube videos.

Human limits

Nothing can stop the world from the effort to digitize everything. Digitizing books, audio, video improves accessibility, conservability and collapses boundaries in lots of ways. This however does not stop us from a truly rewarding experience of reading a book or listening to music in it's traditional form.

Anyways, I picked up a book today and learnt where the human limits are, with respect to scarcity/abundance of something. While you read this, it must be obvious to you that the numbers here assume you are a average human being with no equipment. Here you go:

107.6 degrees F or higher of body heat will result in fatal stroke

30 mins or longer in water temp of 40 degrees F or colder will result in death

10 mins or longer in ambient temp of 300 degrees F or hotter will result in death

15000 feet or higher will result in loss of consciousness

60 ft or deeper (trainable up to 282 ft) will result in a black out

2 mins without oxygen (trainable up to 11 mins) will result in death

Loss of 30% or more of blood will result in death

45 days or longer without food

7 days or longer without water

I personally think the limits are "push"-able in some of these cases. What do you think?

Thanks to National Geographic.

Do we have the cure?

It has been my strong and long thought process that meat, sugar and dairy products are the cornerstones of unhealthy eating. We are not to blame. Not directly, that is. Our body is wired to respond to certain types of food in certain ways and this behavior is actually a lot similar to the behavior of a – say – cocaine addict or a heroin addict. Industries have been exploiting the “senses” of the common man to deliver more meat, more sugar, more dairy products on to the dinner plates, resulting in all conceivable well-being problems beginning from obesity to diabetes to blood pressure to heart problems to Alzheimer’s to 1000s of other problems.

I am a meat-eater myself and I can’t say I don’t like sweet things or milky (and cheesy and buttery) things. But it is the amount of obsession people have to these addictive agents (as can be seen in TV commercials and restaurant menu cards) that made me more research on this topic and hence this blog-post.

Actually the thought process started when I happened to talk to somebody at work who mentioned about a “club” of “reformed” eaters who completely got illnesses like cancer, diabetes, obesity completely out of their systems. Pretty amazing.

Imagine a see-saw (or a teeter-totter, like the Americans would like to have it) – different food products belong to different ends of the see-saw. Most importantly, meat and dairy belong to one end of the see-saw and sweets belong to the other. When we have lot of meat and/or lot of dairy, the imbalance created in our body causes us to crave sweets. And then we take too much of sweets and you know what happens after that.

Anyways, I am not here to prophesize vegetarianism as a philosophy, but tell you meat-sweet-dairy eating is more than a philosophy.

Every time I sit down and watch Iron Chef America, I tell myself to take the initiative to ask ICA to create an episode with the secret ingredient (pun) being the lack of one or more of these three.

If you are interested, spend about 30-40 mins watching this video from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

I used this Wellsphere article as a reference, but ironically I did not find many other articles on the web. I also suggest you visit Chooseveg if you need helpful tips.

PS: I forgot to mention. (In the context of FDA for US), the rules that are laid out for publishing nutrition information on the labels are set by a finite number of people (like the film censor boards), who can be and who are heavily influenced by meat and dairy industries.

Humming now #4

In August of 200&, I first blogged announcing the new series of blog-posts called "Humming Now" which would strive to appreciate the beauty of carnatic music, one raga at a time. I never really kept with it. I would like to revive it, so here you go:

Raagam: Shanmukhapriya

Fav#1 Vilayada Idhu Nerama - Maharajapuram Ramachandran

Fav#1 Parvathi Nayagane - Kunnakudi Vaidhyanathan (jugals with Zakir)

Lite#1 Kaadhal Kasakkudhaiyya (Aan Paavam / Ilayaraja)

Lite#2 Takita Tadimi (Salangai Oli / Ilayaraja)

Previous:

Vasanta

Hamsanandi

Kaapi

About the series: One of things I mentioned early on about this series is that this wont be a bot. I only post things that are lingering in my mind. That doesn't mean there's been no music in my mind for the last 14 months - there's always music in my mind :-)

Not so fast

WSJ Article | Nandu's post | Vidya's post

I hardly had began reading the WSJ article, when I saw the blog posts from Nandu and Vidya. And went "what am I going to say about something 3 people have talked about". And here it goes:

I think we all are smart enough to understand that this momentum cannot be continued forever. Sooner or later, exhaustion will kill individuals, but the system will continue to derive its energy from newer people.

1) The timeline perspective - I hardly believe it could have been true that our parents and people of the 50s and 60s would have had a balanced-life. Even if they did, they probably did not know it and certainly was not an effect of careful planning. This is akin to the classic Vajpayee-Clinton joke of wireless communication. I think people of the 50s-60s worked harder than we ever will, finding every opportunity to bring an extra loaf of bread. Lets not forget that until very recently, we had 6.5 day weeks.

2) The cultural perspective - I really think this has a lot to do with culture. Some countries react to giving up work-life balance better than others. Try making a British, American, Indian, Japanese and an Arab work during a time they are not required to.

3) The economic perspective - I think a lot of this also has to do with the economic priorities. Like Buffett said about stock markets, the world is driven by "fear and greed". The eco-system of the new economy - namely investors, share-holders, managers - has to make more money and quick money. They will do anything legal to accomplish this and this pressure will directly translate into promises to the customer and expectations from the employee.

4) The individual perspective - Do you think there is nobody enjoying life - one sip at a time? Absolutely, there are. There are 3 sub-types of these types of people.

Type A: People who positioned themself accordingly by virtue of education or wealth or privileges. This represents a small % of population, so let me not even talk about it

Type B: People who are incapable/given up

Type C: People who chose the "slower" path in favor of family and life

Look around you, you will surely be ahead of Type B and Type C people you at one time considered peers. In a dog-eat-dog world, individual efforts to adopt "slower life" will only result in individual failures.

I think the solution for "slowing down" can neither be a result, nor can it be triggered by individual actions, whether the individual is 1 or 100. This has to be systematically driven. Ironically, the people who devise and implement these systems have no reason to do so, because they are paid by the same investors and managers they pay you and me.

If you agree with everything above, read on.

I think the trick is to treat a high-stress career like a project with a definite goal and definite timeline and definite exit criteria. (This should not a new concept for many of us, especially the bankers)

Achieve your goals, get out and have a life.

All the best!

If you have managed to read all the way up to here, please leave comments on what you think

How to save yourself from email addiction

Everything I said about Blackberry below is true of any mobile email device. "BB" is just a placeholder.

1) Have only one phone - I have seen people having different combinations. Two BBs, one BB and one phone, two BBs and one phone etc...From my own experience, I can tell you reducing the number of phones to 1 can by itself reduce stress big time. I did this and I really experienced the freedom.

2) Have only one email account - I am not talking about personal emails. Try as much as possible to have just one work/business related account. Multiple email accounts can increase stress because of the need to manage two calendars, two email streams etc...

3) Establish soft rules - Depending on what your work rules are, establish a time where you cannot be expected to answer phone calls. Of course, you can never say this to your colleagues and customers, but configure your automated message to say something like "please leave a detailed message" and you can manipulate people's behavior by only returning calls where they leave a message. For those that dont leave a message, meet them or call them on Monday morning and say something like "I saw you tried reaching me on Saturday afternoon, but since you did not leave a message, I figured I could talk to you on Monday"

4) Turn off audible notifications for new emails - I think most of you already do this. Earlier I used to have new emails "beep" me when they arrive. Guess what, BB was becoming my evil. Which is when my own boss told me "Are you crazy?"

I got what he was saying. Make it a discipline to check BB every xx minutes (like, say, 30 mins for biz hrs, 3 hrs for non-biz hrs (except when you sleep), 12 hrs for weekends). That way, you control when you see it and you dont let the devil dominate you.

Remember that BB is convenience to you to be able to check/respond to emails when you are away from a computer. By no means does it require you to be doing so, any more frequently/constantly than if you had just a computer. (However, if your boss believes giving you a BB is the perk for staying online constantly, it's time to have a conversation)

5) Don't do the things you dont have to do (using your BB), just because you can do (using your BB) - We install so many things on that devil, which only ensure we glue ourselves to the device all the time. This includes BB clients for different things

6) If you are tech-savvy, you can use Google Voice to control moderation of incoming calls, but that's really not required.

If you just spent a weekend not worrying about where the phone was (and assuming you didn't have unhappy bosses/customers on Monday), thank yourself :-)

Indexed: Retirement

The best things in life aren't free

Long before Google announced Analytics, I started using the free version of ClustrMaps for tracking geography-based readership of my blog.

Apparently, they are refreshing my map (which basically means I start from scratch). So here is the last good map.

I will also be removing ClustrMaps, since Analytics has been doing the same or better for me.

Twitter

It wasn’t sudden realization. It wasn’t peer pressure. It just happened.

I consider myself an opinionated person – I have an opinion (mostly strong, I must add) about just about everything. Have been watching the internet trends for the past 6 years. Have been blogging since 2004.

Somehow, the idea of twitter never did catch my attention. Put it another way, I always thought twitter was some type of hyper-action that couldn’t really be a medium of communication. Certainly not for me, because I tend to be verbose. I listened to several people talking about twitter and how that’s the in-thing, but was never convinced, not even when Sukumar wrote a post on tweets and blogs on my own blog.

Park that for a moment.

I have noticed in myself that I have not been keeping up with Google Reader for a couple of weeks now. Lack of time could have been a reason, but I think mostly it is the need for me to sift through 300 feeds to find the handful I really need. Often times, I would open Reader and just do “mark as read” (no, I don’t do that with my work emails :p ).

I have had a twitter account for sometime now, but did not really use it. Hours before, I just tried posting couple of links on twitter as well as picked up couple of links from people I follow, for reading them. It just seemed all of a sudden convenient to think that I don’t have to spend time and effort to be well-read (so to speak), which I would have had to do, sans twitter.

Like Scott Peck says, relationship is a process cycle of falling in love, falling out of love and then really loving it.

For now, I have fallen in love with Twitter. I think.

Ilayaraja

Every now and then, I have to keep writing something about Ilayaraja and his wealth of contributions to the musical appetite of many of us. This time I am not going to write anything, instead invite you to read this post from Suresh Kumar. Suresh's capture of the details, grandeur and context is next to nothing. Please.

Battle of the Century

Dubbed by some as the Battle of the Century, Google’s Chrome is already picking up heat waves from analysts, technologists and enthusiasts alike.

Google has departed from its mission of “organizing world’s information” and started doing things that would give them a market share of commoditized businesses – like Gtalk, Android, Chrome (the browser) and now Chrome (the OS)

In this age of innovation and competition, one would expect new entrants compete with the incumbents from the get-go. The market is not tolerant to waiting for niche products to go through their innovation cycle.

When the ICQs and Yahoo Messengers of the world were far ahead in terms of maturity in their products, Google launched Gtalk with the primary USP being it would be client-less. Later Google bit the bullet with a client-enabled version and added voice and video capabilities years after the big guys did.

Android was somewhat of a unfocused product. They started off saying it will run on any hardware, but ended up tying up with HTC for hardware and T-Mobile for the service. The G1 looks Neanderthal. It is going to be several years before they match the competition in terms of functionality, usability and end-user experience.

Chrome was a good product, but did not offer anything the other guys did not. Tabbed browsing, searching from the URL bar, maximizing usable (window) area are all things competition was already doing or released immediately after Chrome did. I have yet to see the difference in how Chrome utilizes memory better than their competition. End result: they have not even come close to giving IE or Firefox a run for their money.

Now it is Chrome, the OS. You might have seen when Chrome got Sep 1 2008 when I blogged that Google will soon to hit the OS market. Now we have started hearing rumors about Chrome as the next desktop OS and later clarified that it will be a NetBook OS, not a desktop OS. I will wait to see what Chrome has to offer, but I’d have to guess that it is going to be similar to Android/Talk in terms of evolution.

All this to say that Google’s strategies are somewhat inconsistent with their mission and they are not learning from their mistakes. Google just cannot afford to start their life from 1995 when others are making products for 2015.

Here's my indexed version of where Google is going:

PS:

1) All opinions are my own

2) The exhibit is my work product (and therefore my opinion) and is relative

Has Twitter Killed Blogging and How to blog in the age of Twitter?

The following post is written by Sukumar Rajagopal

---------

This is the 250th post on this blog. Thanks to RK for giving me the honor of writing this milestone post. RK and Divya have been blogging for the past 4 years. As someone that just completed 5 years on our blog, I can I understand how difficult it is to maintain a blog over so many years [my 5 year post] . Only a few people realize that blogging is an endurance test.

Congratulations RK and Divya.

Last few days, I struggled to find an appropriate topic for this post. Couple of days back, it dawned on me that, writing about blogging itself could be a good topic. Of late, I have been contemplating the role of Twitter in the world [Why Twitter maybe at the vanguard of a tectonic shift? ]

In the age of Twitter, it seems as if blogging has taken a huge hit because people are able to express themselves easily because it doesn't take too much effort to write a 140 char tweet.
When I observed my own blogging pattern, I realized that I am not reading blogs that much these days. I couldn't understand why? Hold on to that thought.

I decided to survey my twitter followers and asked them whether twitter has had an impact on their blogging habits? In a few hours I got several responses that came back. A few of them said, they have actually started blogging more and a lot of them said, blogging has come down significantly. Some people reported 30-50% drops in blogging. And then someone tweeted a great insight - while blogging has actually increased, it is the reading the blogs via RSS feed readers that has come down drastically.

Aha. That was the key. In my case also, I found myself reading a lot more, but I found my Google Reader account piling up with unread blog posts by the 1000s - I was following over 150+ blogs.

I was not satisfied with this. Why is reading tweets and the tweeted links via twitter reducing the Google Reader intake? Then i remembered Clay Shirky's brilliantpoint about the "Cognitive Surplus" [http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html ]. Per Shirky, before the Internet,we spent almost all of that Cognitive Surplus watching TV - almost 200 billion hours per year just in the USA. That is a staggering amount of time.

After the arrival of Google, Video Games, Sims, Wikipedia, and many others things, our Cognitive Surplus started being put to better use. Out of theInternet portion of the Surplus, bloggers spent a lot of their time reading blogs using a RSS feed reader.

Bloggers, like me, read 100s of blogs using an RSS reader and then pick out the best ones and learn from them. The onus was on us to sort out the wheat from the chaff - we had to read all the posts that the bloggers we follow wrote to extract the few important posts. Now in the Twitter world, if you follow a good set of twitterers, they point to interesting things we could read.

Now I only read blogs of people that are less well known and those that have some connection to me - my friends/colleagues and some friends I have made viablogs or twitter. This has made my overall blogging experience much more enjoyable. I don't have 1000s of posts waiting in my Google Reader queue, but at the same time, I am reading a lot more on subjects that I care about, thanks to my twitter friends.

Therefore, in my view, all bloggers should build a community using twitter. Read the blog posts that are tweeted, but more importantly comment on thoseposts. Given that you pick twitterers you follow based on your interests, it is highly likely that you will get traffic to your blog that cares about the topics you write on.

Commenting on other blogs is the single biggest contributor to a successful blog (it is counter intuitive, but true).

Happy blogging & twittering.
--

I blog at http://www.sastwingees.org/

I twitter at http://twitter.com/rsukumar

Awards time!

Somebody thinks I write read-worthy blogs. I'd better hope I am doing a fair job, coz I have been doing this for a long time.

Anyways, here's the drill:

Me getting this award also entitles me to give this award to others :-) How nice!

The rules I have to follow (and so do you) are:

1. Link the person who tagged you
2. Copy the image above, the rules and the questionnaire in this post
3. Post this in one or all of your blogs
4. Answer the four questions following these Rules
5. Recruit at least seven friends on your Blog Roll by sharing this with them
6. Come back to BLoGGiSTa iNFo CoRNeR and leave the URL of your post so your blog can be added to the Master List

Here are my answers and questions you need to pass on -

The person who tagged you : TW
His/her site's title and url : TW's many many random musings @ http://thoughtwrought.blogspot.com
Date when you were tagged : 14 July 2009
Persons you tagged : And here goes....

Jamshed

Twisted DNA

Ram

Pallavi

Jessica

Kiruba

Sudhish

For now!

Indexed: Apparels

Indexed: Emails

Alrite, it's a cliche, but a picture is worth a thousand words.

After I saw this wonderful site called Indexed (www.thisisindexed.com), I figured I have some thoughts too.

Here's the first:

Balanced life is a myth

I read this great post from Vidya and started commenting on the post. That is when I realized my comment became as big as the post itself. So read the following after you read the original post at http://vidyab.blogspot.com/2009/07/balanced-life-is-myth.html (you wont understand my post, if you dont :-) ) Let me know what you think.

This is great introspection.

I think work-life balance is created by the working class of people who'd like to have time-away-from-work for other things. I realize work-life balance and balanced life are not quite the same, but at the same time, I have not seen any achiever (whether it is swimming or chess or music or magic or circus or anything) become an achiever without doing the same thing over and over, day after day, year after year and forever.

1) Is there a day when they can afford to stop doing it? I dont know...my guess is there is probably not....Zakir Hussain practises even today for 4 hrs/day and starts his day at 3:30am and still calls himself a "student"

2) Do achievers not have a thing as balanced-life? I believe a lot of this has to do with perspective. Its about having a choice. When you've practised for several years and become an accomplished person on whatever it is you do, you then have a choice in life. Choice of material pleasures as well as other things. While I may be sounding a little too strong, I believe the mediocre person will have accomplished very little and life would give them the options, they wont get to choose.

Take schooling for example. You can follow an aggressive system and accomplish more OR settle down for a mellowed school system, providing rather organic development of our skills. But at the end, you'd have taken longer, with even chances of whether you will become accomplished or not.

3) Lastly, are parents justified in showing their children the one path THEY think might work for their children? Quite frankly, I haven't found an answer in myself for this question. Consider this: you did not know if the way your parents showed you was your best until much later. That leaves you as a parent with a choice to make (a) show them what you think is appropriate (b) let your children figure out what they want. I know of +ves and -ves of both, I think it comes down to something that we hold very close to ourselves.

Note:

1) All my mentions of "you" was just bcoz I was comfy with direct speech

2) This entire comment assumes the parent/child can afford the kind of training and practice. Financially, that is.

The disaster called AF447

Not a day has gone by since 31^st of May where I have not checked for news about the recent air disaster near the islands of Noronha, north-east of Brazil. In fact, on the night of 1st June, I had nightmares of being desolated in the middle of Atlantic ocean, with no sight of land and thunderstorms all around me. The accident sent a chill down my spine, what mighty nature is against the miniscule advancements we have made in several thousand years.

Like all accidents, this will also soon be forgotten – with planes going over the same route and people all over the world taking to flights for pleasure and business, like nothing ever happened.

Anyways, what the heck happened to AF447?

I am not here to recap what media and investigators alike have been speculating for the 16^th day today. Neither am I here to disbelieve everything everybody has had to say.

The most plausible theory we have so far is this could not have happened as a result of one bad thing. It must have been a combination of several bad things. Right? Of course, you couldn’t be surer. Couldn’t you?

Thunderstorm and lightning – with hundred years of flying and supersonics and air palaces to several thousand flights making trips all over the world, I wonder – was this the deadliest storm ever? Less than likely. And if that was to be, what were the weathermen doing? What happened to the Luft that was passing this route 30 mins before and 30 mins after?

Pitot tubes – we have managed to make people who don’t understand how planes fly to talk in length about what Pitot tubes are used for. Honestly, I had no idea what this is. Again, are we saying these gadgets – the Pitot tubes – never known to have become dysfunctional on some of the icy/snowy routes in the world, did become so? Really?

Evaluations in hindsight part I – It is sad that people died. It is sad there were 228 of them. But I feel weird when people talk about the flight-hours of the 3 pilots in that aircraft. One had 11000 hours and another had 8000 and another had how-much-ever. I would expect somebody like Air France, flying a trans-continental plane, to hire experienced staff. If they did not, shame on them. More than shame, I would expect the regulatory to find these types of things and prevent them from flying in the first place. On the other hand, at the same time this plane dove into the ocean, there are perhaps 1000 planes mid-air flown by pilots who have far less than 8000 flight-hours. May be it was somebody’s first flight. Somebody’s first A330. Somebody’s first 747. We accept these things in our normal life, but evaluate them in 20/20 when something bad happens.

Evaluations in hindsight part II – Not only we, at some point anyways, blame Pitot-tube for the death of 228 people, but also went and replaced these parts across their entire fleet. Genuine and reasoned as it may be, the timing of this move seems to me like it is a knee-jerk reaction to all the commotion around the failed part. Now what about that other part called Tipop Tube? Did they replace that? What about the million other parts that makes the few-100 passenger aircraft?

None of this is to say these theories are false or fictitious – just that these theories could be entirely false.

Of all the news and articles I read after this accident, one opinion struck me as particularly telling. It is that, it is statistically established that there are very few air disasters, where the ultimately confirmed reason for disaster had anything to do with what they first thought.

Whether it is what we know or what we don’t know – I just hope we will find the reason. For not finding it puts a permanent degree of doubt in the things impossible for us to do, without the help of technology.

Traceability – marketing campaign or paradigm shift?

A new phenomenon that is spreading slowly but steadily (at least in developed nations) is traceability. Don’t know exactly what the technical name is – but what it means is when you buy a finished product from your favorite brand store, not only can you flaunt your possessions, but you will also be enabled to know where your product came from. Let’s say you buy a cotton trouser, they will tell you where the cotton was grown and how it landed in the hands of the people who made trousers with it. If you buy a gold necklace, they are going to tell you where the gold was mined from, who the goldsmith was and whether or not the supply-chain process involved child labor. They will tell you if the vendors along the way were paid fair value for the goods (or services, as the case may be).

So the next time you wear a Gucci shirt, you can tell people the raw materials were cultivated in Vietnam. That wedding ring you wear could be coming from China or South Africa. But you will know about it.

I am guessing it all must have started with Blood Diamond and jewelry brands were near-forced to divulge these details to regulatory bodies and consumers about where the damn stones came from. This must have made other businessmen wonder – can I really move up the value chain, just by letting my customers know where I buy my shit? And guess what, there is no cost associated with doing this – assuming the businesses already practice fair trade.

Diamonds are an example. You have heard Starbucks tell you that they only use “ethically traded” beans. Many people are adopting this and you will see more of this soon.

The people who can’t quite benefit from this movement are the people who may be deploying unethical trading, child labor, underpaid vendors with the sole purpose of passing that saving to the customer and being a market-leader in the business of selling things cheap. This is not to say that there won’t be a market for them. As a consumer, you might just choose to care less about traceability when you save hard dollars. Dollars speak.

So, it is to be seen whether or not this is another marketing gimmick or a game-changer.

Credit card wisdom

I was reading this article that offered free advice for people trying to cut costs in times of economic despair.

Though it should not come as surprise to you (it did not to me), the things America likes to call cost savings are things most people in the 3^rd world countries have been doing for years. In fact, coming from India, I personally think some of the spending habits America is trying to curb are alien to us to begin with.

So, I am thinking – isn’t there wisdom we already have, we can impart to these people?

Here are the things I came up with. None of these things are new. None of these things are proprietary to me. Infact, none of these are totally new to America. It is just that the country chose not to adopt this, because they did not have to. They just got ignored in the Darwinian process of Natural Selection.

1. If it’s not your dime, don’t spend it – Don’t spend future income, don’t spend notional income, don’t spend on anything that gives you instant gratification without paying for it. Paying completely, that is.
   
2. Eat at home, cook at home – Restaurant industry in US is a multi-billion dollar industry. They thrive on one thing – making you lazy, feed you food that pampers you and makes you want to come again. Try eating at home, you will save money. Try cooking your own food, you will save more. Try cooking from scratch, you will save even more.
   
3. It’s debt until it’s paid off – Even if it’s a house, remember – you don’t own it, until it’s paid off for. If this rule is true for real estate, it’s true for everything else. My blood boils when people succumb to the pressure of buying something, where the seller offers – for example - “pay nothing for one year”. If you don’t know Tamil, you won’t understand the following anecdote. In my primary school years, I used to read this phrase called “கடன் பட்டார் நெஞ்சம் போல்”. This is an idiomatic expression in which a person who suffers a certain type of mental suffering, compares the feeling to that of somebody who is debted. Debt is bad. Always.
4. Live within your means – This is not a completely eastern world concept. This is common sense. This is what several millionaires and billionaires have adopted. It is often said that the real rich people don’t live in bungalows or drive a Cadillac, but live next door with modest ways of living. This is what Kiyosaki preaches. This is also something most of us have forgotten along the journey of imitating the people who don’t really have to.
   
5. Dollar not spent is not a dollar saved – I think the people who want you to spend the money consider your unspent dollar a saved dollar. This mindset is what lures many people into spending more.
   

As a closing note, when I was a young boy and when I first came to know about the existence of a concept called credit cards, my mother used to say she has seen other people buy things and “never pay” for it, instead hand something made of plastic. Little did she know the concept of paying back later with interest. I guess most many people in America also failed to realize a dollar’s worth of goods bought on credit, also means they have to pay dollar plus interest.

Car Dealers 101

There are a few things you have to do in preparation for buying a car from a dealer, especially if you care for your dollar.

• Read this post in full
  
• Read Artful Persuasion by Harry Mills (ISBN 978-0814470633)
  
• Read Art of War by Sun Tzu (ISBN 978-0813319513)
  
• Remember the game rules for Chess
  

No, this is not a spin. Dealing with a car dealer can be one of the most overwhelming experiences there can be and at some level or the other, they – the dealers – will get you. I have always been told in my management training programs that the customer is the 900-pound-gorilla. But in a car-sale transaction, the dealer is the 900-pound-gorilla. It is not without a reason that these people are typified to be the “used car salesmen”. Oh yes, people dealing with used cars (as opposed to new cars) are even more aggressive.

Here are a few things you need to know when it comes to buying cars – whether new or used – from a dealer.

Even in a seller’s market, car dealers are trained to do one thing. All their training, all their motivation, all their incentive plans drive them to do one thing – not let you leave the dealership until you have a new set of keys in your hands. They will please you, intimidate you, outsmart you, make serious deals with you, beg you – do just about everything legal  – so you bite the bullet and sign the contract.

See the picture below. Though dealerships (think of the office space) may be different in size or shape, they all will have one thing in common. The different small desks meant for customers to sit (the red boxes marked C is where you sit, the blue box marked A is where the dealer sits). Think of the blue long line I drew as a glass wall. Literally, it is a glass see-through wall. The guy who sits behind the big table in that room is somebody who is very important. I will tell you who it is….I promise. Read on.

So, lets say you go to a dealership and see a car. Or may be a few cars. Old, new - whatever. The guy who welcomes you to the dealership is the guy who will eventually sit in the “A” spot. During the time you are outside the office premises of the dealership, he actually does an amazing job of taking you to the cars you want. You give a hint, he will make sure you see the car and he will offer to give it to you for a test drive. Typically the dealer’s viciousness is very limited, if that. But once you have seen the cars you want, when you have indicated to the dealer what type of cars you are looking at (a signal which is usually pretty obvious to the dealer, based on your initial picks) – he takes you into the office space. Seats you at the “C” spot and he sits at the “A” spot. He now offers coffee, soda whatever. Makes you feel important.

He draws an imaginary skeleton of you (your potential trade-in car, your choice of cars, your preferences, your down-payment ability etc…). He will ask you a question at this point. He is required to. “Will you buy the car today, if I were to agree to ALL YOUR terms and conditions?” Hey, this is a straight forward question. There is no reason why your answer should not be a “Yes”. After all, it is your terms and conditions, right? Read on.

Now he walks past the glass wall, to position B and talks to the guy across the table from him. They have a small-talk which you cannot hear and he walks back to you and tells you that this deal is not viable. That’s it. He just said it. Guess what – this is a deliberate attempt to crush your ego and to tell you that you are not good enough to achieve your own dream. You can’t even buy the car you wished. Now you freak out, ask him about various options. He walks back to position B and talks to the guy across the table. They both come back to you with a piece of paper. This is what the paper will look like this:

As you can see, this is supposed to capture trade value, purchase value, down payment and monthly payment. This is called the “four square” and it forms the basis of your negotiation exercise with the dealer. Infact, the dealers are trained to show this paper to you for a split-second and fold it in such a way that you only see the bottom-half (down payment and monthly payment). In his cut-throat transaction, the trade-in and the value of the car truly have no value. He plays you only on the other two things. Remember, the first time you see the numbers written here, it is a figment of his imagination. He will tell you how carefully he arrived at this value, based on your merits – but it is purely his imagination. What he wants to do is show you some official-looking document, upon which – at some point – he will ask you to sign. This legally means nothing – but makes you ink your initials – firming up your commitment. All the negotiations you do and he does from this point on, will be rewrites of the numbers in the bottom two squares.

He will demerit your car: Even if you have a beautiful car in good condition, he will play it down and make it sound like it is worth nothing

He will insult your ego: He will claim that your business does not even matter to him or his company. Your business is too profit-unattractive. Whatever he makes off your purchase is only good for a meal or buying an underwear or some such thing.

He will upsell his product: Especially if your target car is a used car, he will completely conceal from you the very same (negative) attributes which would bring the value of the car, if you were selling it.

He will confuse you: With finance options. You bargain on downpayment, he will play with your monthlies. You play with monthlies, he will offer to take the trade-in off the table. You offer a total cash deal, he will act as if your dollar is not important.

Keep in mind, this is a warfront, this is a chess game, this is manipulation and mind-winning game.

Here are few things you can do to keep your position or atleast get the best out of him:

• Don’t appear interested in any car in particular
  
• Be prepared to walk-away without a flinch, at any point of time
  
• Don’t appear interested in the one car you are really interested in
  
• Be prepared to walk-away without a flinch, at any point of time
  
• Don’t be lured by finance options – the only thing that counts is how low he can get the price to
  
• Be prepared to walk-away without a flinch, at any point of time
  
• If you are trading in, don’t let him know that until you have a satisfactory price on the car you are buying
  
• Be prepared to…….you get the idea
  
•  Just remember that you are the customer, you are the one having dollars to spend and refuse to be played
  
• If it’s a new car you are buying, unless you are careful, you are going to spend a lot on additional accessories, warranties
  
• Don’t pay too much for things like color etc...
  
• Find out what your credit score is, before you walk-in to the dealership
  
• Better yet, have a loan pre-approved before you walk-in
  
• Be prepared to walk-away without a flinch, at any point of time
  
• 0% APRs are not. Be careful.
  
• Manufacturers themselves give discounts and cashbacks. Don’t give them to your dealer.
  
• With cars and with everything else, just remember that – when you are the one shelling out the dollars – you have the power of choice and no deal is worth getting desperate about.
  

Happy shopping. Play safe.

Fine print:

• In addition to this post and Harry Mills and Sun Tzu, you can google up a lot. The more you read, the better you will be prepared.
  
• Dealers want to stay in business. While they will be aggressive in sales pitches and sometimes very aggressive, their practices will generally be within confines of law. However, some dealers also engage in illegal/unethical practices which I have not covered in this post.

Bo or what?

I love dogs. If not for the poop-scoop laws or the fact that I'd have to leave them alone when I am at work, I would have bought a dog myself.

But I sincerely believe human welfare is far more important that welfare of pets. Don't get me wrong, the only thing I am up against is obsessive spending on dogs. I know its one's own money, but still. We are talking about $36 billion dollars. Just in America. Just in a year.

So when it comes to dogs (and pets in general), here's the incomplete list of things I detest:

Gourmet Dinners

Beauticians

Apparel

Furniture

Birthdays (the celebration of it, that is!)

Gifts

Anything that involves significant human investment, other than for things reasonable

Oh, and the fact that more than 13 CEOs of America consider it their higher-purpose to find the right name for Obama's dog.

Eco-friendly – What do we really mean?

I have heard – but not sure – that Webster or Oxford or somebody continually watch the usage the words in the English language and every year they not only add words to it (such as ‘googling’) but also remove words that have no real meaning.

Now lets switch topics.

Eco-friendly. Green. What do they really mean? For sure, there is no legal or technical definition of what “green” is. If one exists, that is not what everybody means consistently when they use the word green. The closest definition I can fathom is – if I can dump my 60-inch television on the road and over a period of time, it will degrade into particles that the earth can accept, it is green. You know only Toyota can do that (pun intended). Also, the TV will get stolen long before that J

Green has become a pick-up line. Green has become a fashion statement. Green has become a revolution. Cars call themselves green.  Toys call themselves green. Companies call themselves green. Plastic calls itself green. Clothes, equipments and what have you.

 Who are the ‘green’ ambassadors? People who have to profit from it. And this for what? To gain a certain niche over their competition to push their ideas, products, whatever. There is reason why “green” products are always more expensive than their conventional counterparts. They want you to believe. They want you to think you can prevent the earth from becoming a shithole by buying a organic TV (believe me, I actually saw a commercial for an organic TV)

What really matters?

We have 6 billion fellows in the world. We need to consume a certain amount of resources. Some of them will be inorganic. We need plastic, we need chemicals, we need metals, we need fossil products. Nothing in the world can change the fact that we continue to erode the earth of things we need for our mere existence. You can change from plastic bags to paper bags. But you will continue to chop trees.

So is green a myth? I’d say no. There are things that are truly renewable or otherwise does not pose a significant impact to the earth. Energy conversion methods – like dynamo that powers some of the electric cars or hydro-electricity. Here again, you have to think about loss-less transmission of energy and just how much inorganic stuff is deployed in the delivery of energy. For example, battery car is a great idea because energy generated by the dynamo, also gets deployed at the same location. On the contrary, hydro-electricity is great – but imagine the amount of unnatural products used to deliver that electricity to your homes.

While a small % of the world truly knows what is green, the rest of the world just abuses it, exploits it to enhance individual gains.

Oh, I mentioned Webster and Oxford, because I want to nominate “green”, “eco-friendly”, “tree-huggers” as candidates for removal from dictionary.

So, the next time you consume a product or an idea that says “green”, think!

Tree-huggers? Really?

Super Brain Yoga

I am spell-bound.

Top 5 of all times

Per Analytics, the following five posts have the most hits, and hence I call them the 5 Best

Dasavatharam

What goes around, comes around

Music and literature

Google

WTF

Overall:

kuppurao.com has reached 83 countries / 749 cities, with repeat access from 20 countries / 40 cities. I define repeat access as 20 all-time visits at country level and 10 all-time visits at city level.

Visitor trends:

Visitors from US spend average of 90 seconds and their counterparts in India spend 38 seconds on average (wonder what they read). I mention India and US, because they are toppers. 20% of overall visitors are repeat visitors and 80% new (I will ignore this). I get average of 7 page-visits per day.

Fun facts:

More visitors use Firefox than anything else. Between IE and Firefox, 87% of my visitors are covered.  7% Chrome visitors is a pleasant surprise.

No surprise here. 93% visitors use Windows. 3% Mac. Others share the rest.

Contrary to what I expected, upwards of 40% of my visitors use screen resolution higher than 1024X768. This means I can pack more per page (if Blogger helps me). Good % of this are wide-screen users (16:9) which means I got to start using wide-screen, if I had to simulate their experience.

1.5% of my visitors still use dial-up connections. Can you believe that?

Top referrers for my site are Adithi, Nandu, Pallavi, Ajay, Kiruba.  Thanks guys!

If I look at what search terms land people on my page, they are almost always related to music. Not sure this is a good or bad sign for a blog that likes to be called pot-pourri.

What else?

Analytics is good, blog is getting better and you fellas are the best!

Music and me

I was going through some of my old pictures today and had this interesting thing to write about:

I had exactly 87 cassettes in my collection dated 16th Dec 1999 (see timestamp on the pic above). About 70% of this would be movie songs, equal numbers in Tamil and Hindi, mostly the ones that combine 2 or 3 movies in one cassette, most of which will be priced around 35 bucks.

There are cassettes of other types above. The left-bottom corner is Handful of Beauty, an album from John McLaughlin’s Shakti of the 1st generation (with L Shankar). All the blank tapes (with the D90 label) are recorded albums of people like Zakir Hussain (Making Music), L Shankar (Touch me there – L Shankar’s experiment with Zappa) etc… There’s also Hazir – the Hariharan-Zakir’s Ghazal album (9th from top on the first column). I also had a handful of Carnatic music albums. The ones I started listening in the early times are ML Vasanthakumari (esp Venkatachala Nilayam in Sindhu Bhairavi), L Subramaniam (I had Maestro’s Choice with Alla Rakha and Violin Trio, where he played with his 2 brothers Shankar and Vaidyanathan). All these were genres that I had just started listening, because I naturally started liking and based on further recommendations I received. I had written in 2005 how Rahul introduced me to Shakti. Likewise, the owner of the recording shop at Parson’s Complex (next to Gemini Studio, which has now been replaced by The Park) introduced me to Making Music, one of my friends (Ashok) introduced me to Touch me there.

The cassette player is something I bought on my second job, when I started considering my interest in music worthy enough to spend on a player. I must have spent about 2000 bucks on this player. The radio tuner on this equipment was an added plus for me.

During this time, I did not have a CD player. Even when I eventually bought a CD player, CDs used to be very expensive (300 bucks for a local CD, 500 and up for imported CDs). The way I would do this is when I wanted to experiment with any new music, I would first buy a cassette – find out its worthiness and if I was going to cherish this in the longer-term, I would buy the CD of the same album. Sure, the cassettes would then be wasted, but it insured my spending on the CDs.

Over a period of time, my tastes have changed, interests matured and affordability increased and lastly, technology changed at great pace.

See what my collection looks like now:

Can you figure out anything? I don’t expect you to. The small white shiny box on the second rack from top (not counting the roof of the desk) towards the left is a big-fat hard drive that packs so much music, you will need about a month and a half to finish listening to my entire collection. About 45-50% of it is a combination of Hindustani and Carnatic traditional music, another 15-20% of it Jazz, Jazz-Fusion and World music. I don’t prefer to buy CDs these days, they are such a waste of manufacturing resources. Not to mention, the overhead of maintaining it. The CDs I already own are packed in a nice CD wallet kept in storage space, after having been ripped and packed in the hard drive. I am willing to sell them, for I don’t want to own them.

In addition to cost of living and old pictures, this is another aspect reminiscent of how much technologies surrounding music have changed.

How will this change in another 10 years from now? I will write on that shortly……

What comes around, goes around

I feel funny about something Bernanke said.

I have written on this same blog several years ago that the world saves for the US to spend.

We live in an economical ecosystem where it is only important to keep the ecosystem running. There is no equality here, there is no democracy here, and there are no rules except the first one. We have managed to grow this economy based on the sheer arrogance and willingness of consumers to buy more and more – even it if is beyond means of spending. The classic rule of “living within means” has not applied. The world saved $2 billion dollars every day and practically donated it to the US, in the hopes that they will spend it. Guess what, it payed off. The US spent the donation money, their earned money, their natural resources and the artificial money. The US now has a national debt of excess of $10 trillion dollars. We can do all math and all statistics – but the bottomline is the consumer could have been any country – not necessarily the US; the world chose to pick a spender and stimulated him enough to put food at their own tables.

We accuse the US businessmen as having been greedy all this time – but the truth is several parties were benefited over several decades. The capitalists became millionaires and billionaires. This is to say people who imported cheap stuff and sold for unbelievable prices made lot of money. People who did this and floated their company in the stock market benefited even more. The directors of boards, investment bankers, people who subscribed to investments with mutual funds made lot of money.

On a separate note, institutions that sold real estates, institutions that financed them, institutions that brokered them, institutions that were involved in sell/buy of mortgage portfolios made lots of money. How? By being unrealistic about who they lend to, how much they lend and the borrower’s capability to return the money. How did they manage to do this? They made the fellow Americans believe that they can borrow just about anything they want, for just about any reason. Of course, they can. Because they had the regulatory bodies “look in the other direction” while they continue to do what they do. Because they had the backing of the entire world telling them “Of course, America! Would you like us to loan you $2 billion today so you can build a house for Santa Claus?”

The ripple effects are many. Because money was available for so cheap, people could afford to lose money. People who afford to lose $2000 on a casino night, not worrying bull’s crap about how hard the rest of the world has to work to earn $2000. People could spend on gas-guzzling super-powered cars, when some countries in the world still cry for decent roads and a viable means of commuting. People could spend $20 on a piece of meal, while people elsewhere were struggling to make $1 a day. People would afford to fly for nothing (remember the $62 one-way air-fares?), while people elsewhere don’t even know what it is like to fly. People could spend to glory on their artificial money, while people who contributed to the donation die starving. People could spend $36 billion dollars a year grooming their cats and dogs, while people elsewhere couldn’t afford to provide themselves the basics of food, cloth and shelter. People could waste money buying things they didn’t need, using the money they didn’t have.

Now, lets come back to what is happening today. Since 2Q or 3Q, we have been experiencing a change in the economical climate, which in my opinion, is beyond the comprehension of any single individual, whoever it might be. People call it a come back of 1930, comeback of 1992, comeback of 1999, people say it is bigger than all of this put together, people say this is the beginning of the end, people say we will be “back in business” by end of ’09. Truth is, in my opinion, nobody really knows what’s happening. Because we don’t know what it is like to live without an economy like US.  We don’t know what it is like to live without a Citibank or a Bank of America or any such big institution. Because over the period of several decades, the ecosystem has developed itself to grow around pillars like Citi and BofA. In the process, we failed to realize and/or acknowledge that these are just individual companies that are managed by a definite group of people, who can be wrong. We just dismissed the possibility that we may have a situation where we have to dissolve a company like Citi or BofA. In the world stage, it was just not (and it still not?) possible to ignore a customer – a cashcow – like America.

We are now faced with two questions

1. At a national level, should we let erred companies fail?
   
2. At a global level, should we let the customer called USA fail?
   

We have a choice to make.

1. Make the right decision. Fail America, fail Citi, fail BofA and fail every institution that was part of the mistake we nurtured in many many decades. Sure, this would be the right thing to do, but in the process, we will have a tough time of recovering from this and that might last for at least 10 years, if not much longer.
   
2. Do what puts food at our tables.

I am afraid we will end up choosing (2) above.

Fun with numbers

A post I came across made me have some fun with numbers.

According to this post, there are 285 million cars on a population of 330 million, representing 1.4 cars per driver in the US. Is that all? I didn't think so.

So I decided to have some fun. Let me know what you think.

Carmax has 100 locations and their inventory size is 23330 (True as of 3/4/09)

This averages about 233 cars per Carmax location (Simple math)

Carmax is choosy compared to other dealers and I would say the average inventory size of any dealership would be higher than this (My assumption, but I am not going to use this assumption)

US geographical area is 9,161,923 sq km (Per CIA Factbook)

This equals about 3,537,438 sq mi (Simple math)

There is atleast 1 dealership per 50 sq mi (My assumption, I am going to use this)

There are 70,750 dealerships across the country (Simple math)

This means there is a total inventory of 16,484,461 (Simple math)

Total US population is 303 million (CIA Factbook, July 2008)

Adult population is 79% (15 yrs and up, CIA Factbook)

Adult population in numbers is 239 million

Inventory size per eligible driver in the country = 0.07

What this means is for every 14 drivers in the country, there is 1 car waiting to be sold.

And the assumption I didn't use? Use of that assumption will only drive this number up.

Isn't that astounding?

Random thoughts

I was reading a wiki article on American Express today. While reading the article, few random thoughts came to my mind. These thoughts probably deserve a separate post for each of them, but I will write about them all in one post, for want of time.

I was reading that Amex was established originally as an express mail company and a good % of the space they needed to conduct their businesses were for stables. The article talks in detail about how an express mail company became an international financial services company, why/how Wells Fargo came into existence etc... As I read this, I am going,

1) Do we have ANY entity in India where the details as to the business performance, key business changes, people changes, failures and successes, major milestones in the growth of the company etc...have been documented? I tried the obvious ones like Tata etc... and am not finding the article nearly as detailed.

We are a country that has several hundred years of history, yet very little has been documented. Most economical developments in India happened in the last 50-150 years. Media boom happened in the last 2 decades. Internet came into existence in '78 or so. Internet really became popular only in late 80's / early 90's. YET, the most comprehensive article you can find on a subject related to India is the Tsunami 2004. Most of what we know about India before our birth is what the history books tell us. We all know history books are never going to reveal controversial facts.

My bottomline: We are very poor in documentation. Where documentation is done, we are very poor in digitizing them and making them available on the internet.

2) Do we have ANY business in India, regardless how much they are documented, that have had a history of a 50 or 100 or more years with changes in business principles/philosophy, significant changes to what they sell, changes to people, major milestones, diversification etc... I read that Tata was founded in 1868, but I cant think of any other company.

What are your thoughts?

It takes guts

ARR does me proud

Not because of the music he scored for SDM. I truly believe he has created music that is superlative to SDM.

Not because he won the Oscar. You may be able to convince me if you say that he has scored great music over the last 18 years (some of which may have been Oscar-deserving) and SDM did to ARR the final push to Oscar. Even then…..

Not because he is the only Asian/Indian/South Indian/Tamilian to win the Oscar….I think that is BS.

Not because of all the glamour and attention he has got for anything relating to India

I really liked the fact that he had the guts to speak a few words in Hindi and Tamil in front of several thousands of English-speaking spectators.

And by that, he did be proud.

Survival of the fittest

If this kid is not memorizing what he spoke, he is better than 60-70% of students who pass out from a engg college.

LinkedIn Polls

Polls are a great way to understand what people think. If you are LinkedIn member, please take a moment to participate in this poll.

http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/19368/uawyj

Who will follow suit?

You dont have to look at the share prices, P/L statements and CEO compensations to ascertain the fate of certain companies, which would have had a difficult time always but the ill-fated economy will expose them and cause them to liquidate or go bankrupt or at the very least - change the fundamentals of how their business operates.

Simple things like customer experience, price points, staff competency, cleanliness of restrooms tell us a big deal about where the company is headed.

We just saw Circuit City.

Who will follow suit?

One of my guesses is Radioshack.

What do you think?

Divine

Review and comments shortly.

 

Niche musicians

If you are a follower of music and if you constantly seek to identify great talents and great music they produce, you will discover from time to time, niche musicians.

I define niche as belonging to two categories:

1) They are budding musicians and the media has not yet recognized them

2) They are established musicians and the media has under-rated/not rated them

There is a 3rd category - They are established or niche, only I have not known them

In any case, I am publishing a snippet on the right, which will recognize musicians like this. Remember, this is not just a list of musicians, populated by the urge to fill it with something, but genuinely out-of-the-world musicians.

Raju's Interview in early 2000s

Naan Kadavul

I have maintained for a long time that Ilayaraja has given us enough music to be busy with, for the rest of our life, both in a physical and intellectual sense. Having said that, when a new piece of music is expected, nothing stops us from the temptation of thinking “May be he will create another masterpiece”. Not a realistic expectation to have from Ilayaraja, considering his track record of the past 10 years or so, but when the director of the movie is Bala, who created epics such as “Sethu” and “Pithamagan”, you do expect the music of comparable types, if not better.

I have serious difficulty understanding the tendency of creators – I use the word “creator” generically because this applies to people in many institutions of music – to recreate their own content. When AR Rehman used his “Poraale Ponnuthaayae” from “Karuthamma” in “Gurus of Peace” from “Vande Maatharam” or used an array of his earlier creations in “Bombay Dreams” or when the famous violinist duo “Ganesh-Kumaresh” use to death some of their original compositions in different albums in different titles or when Ilayaraja reproduced his earlier creations in newer albums (too many to list), I wonder if it is because of their limitation of creativity OR their innate desperation to make sure their creations reach out to the masses. In any case, I am unable to appreciate this gesture from a creator, who in my opinion should keep moving on, regardless something is under-appreciated or otherwise.

Also I was under the impression that we were done with the era in Tamil film music, where the same song would be recorded more than once in the same album – happy vs. pathos, male vs. female, single vs. chorus etc…To my rude shock, this hasn’t disappeared.

There were 6 songs in this movie called “Naan Kadavul”. I will review them in the order I listened to them:

1. Om Siva Om – Vijay Prakash - With the over-do of Rudhram (I think it is Rudhram), the song must have been set to an aggressive context such as “Adadaa” song from “Pithamagan”. Great tabla score at the end, I would rate this song 3/5.
2. Kannil Paarvai – Shreya Ghoshal - This is easily the best number from the album. Shreya Ghoshal’s voice is as sweet as it can be. I can write about this song in more detail and then in even further detail, because this is the only song worth writing about.
3. Maatha Un Kovilil – Madhumita - Don’t have anything to say about these songs, which are a repeat of his older creation from his movie “Achaani”
4. Pichaipaathiram – Madhu Balakrishnan - The moment I saw Madhu Balakrishnan as the singer, I couldn’t wait. I was expecting the likes of “Edhilum Ingu Iruppaan” from Bharathi or “Pirayae Pirayae” from Pithamagan. I still have no gripes about his singing, except the song itself which is a repeat of Ilayaraja’s number from his devotional album “Rajavin Ramanamaalai
5. Amma Un Pillai – Sadhana Sargam - I would say is a good reproduction of “Maatha Un Kovilil” from Achaani, but still a reproduction. Except Sadhana’s voice and the second interlude, I have nothing to praise about this song. By the way, this is one of the examples where the original song itself is under-appreciated.
6. Oru Kaatril – Ilayaraja - Repeat of Shreya’s rendition in track#2. Hullo?

I have two things to look forward to. After all, what is life without hope?

a)    The movie itself b)   Ilayaraja’s background score

They say it is the director’s ability – that brings out the music director’s potential. If that is true, Bala failed.

1/19 Update: Nandhalala is a complete disappointment

Happy Holidays and...