365

I have actually managed to average a post a day for a full year.

This would be a good time to thank the many friends who have been following this blog every week, if not every day, for their encouragement. I would also like to thank all those who would post comments or even call in when they disagreed strongly; these have been thought provoking discussions and I have often had to recant in a subsequent post.

I would especially like to mention one person who on the very second day of the year posted on my facebook page, "What are the odds that this will happen for the full year". I need to thank this person most of all for cementing my resolve to stick with it. 

It has been an interesting exercise, not only in trying to improve my writing style, but also in discipline. There have been days when I have seriously contemplated admitting defeat, but the humiliation would have been more difficult to handle than the ordeal of writing every day. Coming up with topics was the toughest part of the project and I learned to use my time commuting to listen to audiobooks. These have been a great source of food for thought and topics to write about. 

As for the writing style, I daresay I see some improvement, but then one always tends to see one's own effort through rose coloured glasses. Friends have called in to tell me when they felt my writing had improved rapidly across a few days only to plateau out again for a few weeks. I suspect progress in most things follows just this pattern. There were days when the writing flowed, and there were days when it was clearly contrived. I can look back at the 364 posts and quite easily tell which ones I enjoyed writing and which ones were done under duress of commitment.

It has taken me a good part of a year to figure out that going public with the commitment to write a post every day was not the best approach I could have taken if the objective was to improve my writing. I intend to write to a private blog going forward and perhaps once in a while, if I feel particularly thrilled or riled about something, I might post it to this public blog. I trust this will make a number of people happy; some of whom have made no attempt to hide their irritation at my facebook posts announcing milestones of achievement. 

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to work on my fitness levels. I was looking through some old pictures of a handsome young man from a couple of decades ago and I intend to regain that level of health and fitness in the coming year. I am counting on my friends to call me out if I start to slip in my commitment.

Thank you for staying with me through the year and here's wishing you a great 2016.

30 December 2015

Big brother is watching you

My son noticed a sticker on the windshield of our car that said, "Please do not remove this RFID tag" and we got into a conversation about how RFID tags are now ubiquitous.

I checked the windshield of our other car and sure enough, there it was, and I am sure the R3 has one too. I read an article recently that said that most apparel has RFID tags sown in near the label on the collar to help track inventory as it moves across the supply chain.

Ostensibly, the tag has served its purpose after it has moved with the item across the assembly line and through the factory gate to the truck and to the store. But it does not stop functioning. Every time you take your car back for servicing, the RFID reader at the dealership picks up the telltale signs. In the US and in Singapore I hear, toll gates have RFID readers and so do most car park gantries.

Big brother knows where you drive and how long you park there and when you leave. If certain movements are out of character, perhaps an algorithm picks them up and flags them. If you have been paying for your clothes with your credit card, big brother knows not only where you are, but also what you are wearing, and if you arrive at the gym in your tennis attire but leave in your dress shirt for dinner, and he knows where you go after the gym everyday.

I had read about some people who nuke their new clothes in the microwave oven to fry the RFID tag and I thought that was a little paranoid. But here is something my son mentioned that has got me thinking. Most new smartphones, he said, are now equipped with a fingerprint scanner which makes it so much easier to unlock the phone and also to make payments with Android Pay or Google Wallet. Mobile phones by the very nature of the technology they rely on, are being tracked and located in real time. Now with fingerprint scanners built into them, and presuming some people will choose to use their fingerprints to unlock the phone instead of a passcode or pattern swipe, they are tracking not only the phone but actually the user. Someone is possibly storing your fingerprints too and there might soon be a black market for fingerprint scan databases. You have probably also noticed that new App you try to install on your phone pretty much insists on getting access to your location, your messages, your phone book, your calendar and other stuff you didn't even know your phone was tracking.

So let me see now. They know what time you wake up, they know how long it takes you to get ready and have breakfast before you get in your car and start your commute. If you pair your phone with your car, they know what make and model of car you own and what model year. They know how long it takes you to get to work. They know which restaurants you like to frequent and what you do in the evenings. They know if you are a fitness freak and if you wear a Fitbit device and if you use Nike running shoes to measure your stride and distance. They know what search terms you type into Google. And of course they know who you call and how often. They have algorithms to read your email and offer relevant advertising. For the few times that your phone is out of reach with their network, they can probably track you by the clothes you wear as you walk into buildings and into elevators. When I first watched Enemy of the State starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman I thought I was watching science fiction.

Now that I know better, I have to go and peel that RFID tag off my windscreen, microwave some clothes and pull my old Mitsubishi clamshell phone out of its box.

Persepolis

I have started reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The book starts with her childhood, growing up in Iran just as the Islamic revolution was beginning.


The Iranian revolution is an interesting event to study, in that it was relatively non-violent, truly backed by the people, even legitimized by a referendum and started without a peasant rebellion, military action or financial crisis.


Things changed however after the referendum chose a supreme leader, who then took the country volte-face in an attempt to undo any and all western influence. The rest as they say is history.


You might want to order a copy of Persepolis.

Engine overhaul

I have a friend who is rather upset over the fact that his car went into the garage for rectification of a supposedly small problem and came back with a huge bill for an engine overhaul.

I asked him what had gone wrong with his car and what work had to be performed as part of the engine overhaul.

"I don't think you understand," he said. "You see, 'engine overhaul' is not a category of work. It is a category of bill."

Work Ethic

I was speaking with a young person who is about to graduate soon and we got to talking about how we expect candidates to handle campus interviews. I stated that our process is geared towards trying to find and recruit people who demonstrate knowledge, curiosity and drive and of course a strong work ethic.

This person asked how we could possibly test for work ethic in the short span of an interview.
I said we were still evolving the process, but one question that we like to ask is, "What would you do with your life if money were no object?" Work ethic, I clarified, is about seeking meaningful work and not whiling one's life away.

This person stared at me for a while and said, "It is incredibly difficult for me to answer this question if I have not thought about it before. And it would be unfair to expect 20 somethings to have thought about this before they meet with you. Most graduating students therefore, when faced with this question are likely to try and game the situation by trying to build an answer that they think you are looking for."

Even more important, this person pointed out, was that I seem to have a different definition of work ethic in my mind as compared with most people currently graduating from Engineering School. To most young people, work ethic implies professionalism; i.e. delivering promised output at the promised time. They have just been through a few years of meaningless work and the better students have worked hard to submit assignments on time. To them, work ethic is not about seeking meaningful work.

Given that I have not clarified what I am looking for with that question, namely a measure of work ethic, and that my definition of work ethic seems to be completely different from the people I am trying to measure, this question seems to be part of a rather unfair process.

Back to the drawing board then.

Tax on consumption vs tax on income

I had to pay advance tax a few days ago, and the feeling that some of my money was being unfairly taken away hit me again, as I am sure it hits you too.

Ostensibly, governments need to collect taxes to be able to provide public goods like law and order and water supply and garbage disposal. Also, ensuring a certain degree of social fairness is the job of the government, to try and provide equal opportunities to citizens from different socio economic strata and from underdeveloped geographical areas.

I have been thinking about how we could come up with a system of taxation that will not seem unfair to the tax payers. I have been wondering if the entire system of taxation was based on taxing consumption rather than taxing income, we would find it more palatable.

I think it is time I read 'Fair Tax' by Neal Boortz to find out more.

Recruiting for 'Fun to be with'

I have written in a previous post about how one of the criteria we recruit for is 'fun to be with'. In a conversation with a close friend a few days ago, I realized that this criterion is as subject to recruiter bias as any other.

Recruiter bias refers to the tendency of people to recruit people they approve of, generally, people like themselves. We thought we had a strong unbiased algorithm in trying to look for people who are driven, curious and fun to be with.

Drive is generally reflected in the CVs. Driven people have demonstrated that they have to drive to work hard for good grades and to get into good schools. Details of prior work experience can also provide indicators of drive. Indicators of curiosity can be sought in the interview, in the conversations.

But 'fun to be with' can be contentious. The unstated part of the statement is the weak link, the part that can be prone to recruiter bias. The unstated part of fun to be with is 'for me'. The recruiter is making the decision. Effectively the test reduces to, 'Does the recruiter think this person is fun to be with'?

Contemplating the funding of good times

There is perhaps something endearing about people like Bill Gates who worked hard to build a product that people were willing to buy, and then took the decision to use the power of that empire for the benefit of people less privileged.

On the other hand, we have the case of a certain large man who celebrated his birthday in style at a beach location a few days ago. While a birthday might be cause for celebration, one wonders about the code of ethics of hedonists who continue to party hard when they are in non-trivial debt; owing a ridiculously large sum of money, not only to banks but also to smaller vendors who have perhaps lost their life savings and gotten into debt to provide services to the Mr. Large's many shenanigans.

Clearly, there are people who have no qualms about first selling the family silver and later borrowing money to fund their lavish lifestyle, presumably with no intention of ever repaying. This in itself would not be so abhorrent if the lenders were all well-to-do aristocrats with abilities to write-off large amounts. It does hurt when the party is funded by the salaries of clerks and peons and folks in administrative jobs who worked for a few months without being paid their salaries while Mr. Large flew his private jet to his private yacht in Monaco to participate in a sporting event involving private parties with private escorts.

It speaks volumes of our law and order system that people can get away with spending other people's money with impunity.

Going to the mall

A few weekends ago, some family members who were visiting Pune invited me to go to the mall with them. I had been putting off buying some clothes for weeks and decided this would be a good opportunity to get it over with.

I noticed a very very strange thing when I was at the mall with these folks. They did not have a shopping list of things to buy. They were visiting the mall hoping to see stuff that they might want to buy. This was an eye-opening experience. Here were upper middle class people who were otherwise perfectly sane but were now hoping to spot opportunities to buy stuff that they did not even know they needed.

I can now see how almost 2 out of 3 Americans have less than $1000 in savings. If people start going out to malls to seek ideas for spending money on stuff they do not need, I am surprised so many people have so much saved at all.

Righteous Indignation

That book by William Irvine posits an interesting theory about anger. Anger is like a virus that can stay dormant within us for an indefinite period of time and flare up when we least expect it. Usually, most of us are sane enough to realize that anger is not enjoyable. We know it only serves to aggravate any situation and to stress us out. The one exception is the anger that comes from righteous indignation.

I have written in an earlier post about how when we are angry we are so sure we are right and then in another, a rejoinder from a friend who added that when we are angry we are also sure we have been wronged.

Righteous indignation stems from this feeling of having been wronged. It hits the most rational of us in irrational ways. We feel insulted. William Irvine has suggested a rather radical solution to this problem. He claims that for the last few years, he has become a collector of insults. His technique involves looking for insults so he can analyze them to try and figure out what exactly makes one angry.

Now there's a thought.

The force awakens after Christmas

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was released the world over on December 18. But here in India we get to wait another week; until Christmas.


There was a time, right after the economic liberalization in 1991 when old world Licence Raj exploiters formed something called the Bombay Club to try one last time to make some feeble attempt to keep the foreign manufacturers out. The foreigners will destroy the Indian manufacturers they said. Yeah right! 25 years later, Maruti is still the largest car manufacturer in the country and Hero Moto Corp is the largest two wheeler manufacturer in the world. Nilkamal plastics is the largest manufacturer of chairs in the world. Arcelor Mittal is the largest steel manufacturer in the world. The Tata group did not have to sell Tata Motors and Tata Steel and Tata Tea, they went out and bought Corus and Jaguar and Land Lover and Tetley. We can more than hold our own in the world when we are asked to face competition. Even Bajaj started making better two wheelers when they had to face the competition.

And just why was the release date of Star Wars: The Force Awakens pushed out? Because Rohit Shetty and Sanjay Leela Bhansali were worried that The Force would demolish Dilwale and Bajirao Mastani. That is nonsense. Utter rubbish. Those movies do not need Star Wars to ruin their chances at the box office. They are perfectly capable of doing it all by themselves.

National Herald

And what does this herald?

Keyboard scanning

I got into an argument with an electronics engineer some time ago about how amazing computers are vis-a-vis electric typewriters. Well, a discussion really, but it got rather animated.

I had made a comment about how fast the computers scanned the keyboard for input, for you could hit multiple keys at seemingly the same time and the computer would have scanned through the entire keyboard multiple times and caught all of the inputs.

The engineer argued that the computer was not really scanning the keyboard, but was only waiting for an electric circuit to close and as soon as the current came through, it registered the keystroke. Here is my argument on why I thought the computer was scanning each key in sequence as against just registering keystrokes when a key circuit was closed.

I figured that the average computer keyboard cable had no more than 5 wires in the plug that connects to the desktop unit. The average keyboard has about 100 keys. For the keyboard to work on a 'close-the-electrical-circuit' basis, one would expect the cable to have at least 102 wires. Given that the entire caboodle worked with only 5 wires, for GROUND, 5V DC, CLOCK and DATA, the computer had to be working on some system of coded signals on the same data wire to differentiate each key; implying that it needed to scan each key in sequence to be able to catch 2 keys that were simultaneously depressed. Somehow, I did not have him convinced.

I wonder how I could have made my case stronger.

How the planet takes care of itself

I have been thinking about evolution and how natural systems tend to be self-balancing. Before homo sapiens ruled the planet, a number of predator species kept the population of herd animals in check. The populations of the predator species were in turn kept in check by the availability of prey which might be affected by the shortage or abundance of fodder which in turn was affected by climate cycles. Homo-sapiens has been one of those evolutionary outliers that possibly threw the self-balancing mechanism off balance. Our ability to not only adapt to changing environs but also our tendency to bend the environment to our needs has perhaps been more than evolution bargained for.

Of course, nature did not give up easily. As recently as the first half of the last century, every so often an outbreak of cholera or the plague would reduce the human poluation by a not-insignificant percentage of the total. As we developed vaccines and cures for a number of diseases, the human population started to grow rapidly.

It would be interesting conjecture that all sexually transmitted diseases including Syphilis and HIV were nature's attempts to control the population of a species by making the very process of pro-creation a transmission vector.

PET menace

A few weeks ago, we visited a beach resort near Alibag for our annual outbound. A few kilometers before our destination we drove past an area that seemed to have become the de-facto landfill for the area. What struck me was the number of PET bottles and plastic bags that littered the ground. Organic waste was either far less voluminous or the friendly neighbourhood dogs and pigs were taking care of it in good order.

I momentarily lamented the use of plastic bags and PET bottles in our society and soon forgot about them. The next day, we had an event organized on the lawns of the resort and given that it was a humid day, the resort had arranged water for us on the lawns.

But here's the thing you see. They had laid out 250 ml PET bottles for us. Each of us probably consumed more than 4 of these bottles on that one evening, and I am sure the empty ones were carted to that same landfill the next day.

An outright ban on all PET bottles would be draconian I suppose. But I wonder if a ban on selling packaged drinking water in PET bottles smaller than 1 liter might be a good idea.

Inflection point in evolutionary design

The two biggest sources of unhappiness in our modern lives are our seeming insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control. It might be exactly these two traits however, that might be a direct cause of us being around today. Our ancestors who worried about that strange growling sound in the trees are more likely to have survived and bred than their happy-go-lucky neighbours who ventured out of the trees with total disregard for that growling noise. Similarly, our ancestors who worried about running out of food and therefore worked harder to collect more than they could consume are more likely to have survived harsh winters than their neighbours who lived each day as it arrived.

In our modern world, especially if we live in one of the more developed and civilized nations, our situation is somewhat different. We know with a fair degree of certainty where our next meal is going to come from and we do not have to worry about some fanged creature springing upon us for its own meal. The two traits that we can thank for our survival, the need to worry and the tendency to hoard, are now beginning to work against us.

Evolution is an amazing thing in that it not only favours survival of the fittest, but also automatically redfines fitness for contemporary times. If today, the need for food and safety is no longer desperate, then the fittest are those who have a better handle on life, and demostrate balance rather than anxiety. In today's day and age, people who are happier are more likely to find a mate than those who are perpetually anxious. And survival of the fittest would mean the passing on of genes from people who are better adapted to today's society.

A respectful nod to the blind watchmaker.

Unearned respect

I wrote a post a few days ago about a certain person in Private Equity who truly believed that the highest order of human beings work in Private Equity.

If the measure of the highness of human beings is the degree to which they amass their wealth usurping the effort of others who do real work, then a number of politicians in India should be of a higher order than those who work in Private Equity.

Come to think of it, and this thought occurred to me as I wrote the word 'highness' in the previous paragraph, royalty and other people who are addressed as your highness, have generally amassed their wealth riding on the backs of others.

So perhaps this person is right. We might need to now question if 'highness' is an honorific accorded to the respected or the mark of exploiters.

Stoicism 202 - Dealing with insults

That book by William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life' is a gold mine, with astute advice on dealing with fame, wealth, exile and here's my favourite, dealing with insults.

Most of us are particularly bad at dealing with insults. Our need for one-upmanship leaves us consumed with retaliation. Irvine presents an interesting perspective on insults though: he proposes that we try and categorize insults on a two-by-two grid.

On one axis, the insult giver can either be well informed or mis-informed.  On the other axis the content of the insult itself could be either true or false.

If the insult giver is mis-informed, we would be wise to ignore the insult for surely it is not worthy of further consideration. Walking away is usually the best recourse.

If s/he is well informed, but the content is untrue or out of context, we might want to address the situation by attempting to set the facts straight. This can only be done if we can communicate quietly, without anger, else the altercation can only escalate.

And finally if the insult giver is well informed and the content is true, then it is not really an insult but feedback. The best approach might be to inform the insult giver that the observation is valid and illuminating, and that we intend to start to work on the short-coming.

In either case, there is usually no value in getting worked up over being insulted.

Queue Density

I was at Bangalore airport a few days ago waiting to board a flight to Pune. A strange thing happened as soon as the gate agent arrived. Even before the airline announced that the flight was ready for boarding, people jumped up from their seats and formed a queue. It was good 20 minutes before the gate agent booted up her computer and made the announcement to commence boarding.

I was quite amused to see how long these people patiently stood in line for that long a time when it was clear that aircraft was not going to leave without them. I can perhaps understand the urgency for people who had large carry-on luggage for they might want to be the first to rush in and lift their bags to the overhead bins, but others, with nothing more than a laptop bag were also standing in line. My own strategy is to remain comfortably seated near the gate until the line has gone through the gate.

The other thing was how tightly packed the queue was. This is a peculiarly Indian thing. Perhaps, having grown up in queues at bus stands and railway stations and at the milk booth, there is an inherent fear in our minds that someone will cut into the line ahead of us if we leave any room there. Perhaps that approach still makes sense at a bus stand in rural Haryana. But here at Bangalore airport were grown men, most sporting Nike sneakers and toting iPhones standing nut-to-butt for a good 20 minutes. What gives?

Books and TV

What books are to curiosity, TV is to dissatisfaction.

Maus II

I have started reading Part 2 of Maus by Art Spiegelman. This second volume focusses on life in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The next time you think you have problems to deal with, imagine being pulled out of your house at the point of a gun, being shoved into the back of a truck without windows, traveling for indefinite hours in the freezing winter without warm clothes and without access to bathrooms, being hustled out at an unknown location at night, being separated from your spouse, being told to line up either on the left or on the right, not knowing which side would be marched off towards the 'chimneys', being taken to a large hall where gun-toting SS men asked you to strip and hand over your papers and valuables, being told to go to the showers, not knowing if water was going to come out of the shower heads or Zyklon-B, being subjected to the humiliation of someone shaving your head and tattooing a prisoner number on your forearm, being handed prison uniforms that were too big, being given no belt or string for your over-sized trousers causing you to hold up your trousers with one hand all the time, being given wooden shoes or shoes without shoe-laces, being whipped when you asked for a string, being shoved into sleeping quarters where you are assigned one bed amongst three people even when half the beds are empty, being assigned to the job of moving dead bodies from the gas chambers to the cremation ovens, being marched to the mess hall while some of your comrades are shot for sport, being fed one piece of bread with watery soup, being made to scrub the floor with your clothes and then being marched to your sleeping quarters where you find out that more inmates have arrived and you now have to share your bed with more people.

The next time you are complaining about something, think about how big your problems really are.

Electronic Toll Collection

Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) lanes on toll roads in India are an interesting phenomenon. They appear to deliver no benefit to any of the stakeholders. The drivers of cars equipped with ETC Tags have to sit behind a non ETC car that is arguing with the toll booth operator. The Toll Operators cannot move to a fully automated lane because there will be non ETC drivers trying to go through the ETC lane. The ETC Only lane in effect becomes an ETC-also lane.

I have been thinking about how Toll Operators could solve this problem. Given the challenges we face in India as discussed above, here is the solution I would like to propose.

The first change would be where the ETC only lane is located. In most civilized countries, ETC lanes are the fast lanes where drivers need barely slow down for the tag reader to read the car tag and to deduct toll charges. In India, we might want to locate the ETC lane at the slowest end, i.e. on the left side of the road and build two exits past the toll collection device, one that leads back to the road and the other that leads to a run-off area where you can hold and deal with the non-payers. The barrier at the toll-gate would need to be programmed to open in one of two directions: to channel traffic back to the road if the toll has been collected or to open the other way to direct cars to the holding area if the toll cannot be collected electronically in say 5 seconds. 

If the procedure in the holding area involves big burly men to argue with and a solid locked gate manned by a suitably large giant to let people out only after they have paid the toll through a suitably arcane time wasting procedure, drivers might eventually learn that it is not worth their time to try and sneak past the ETC lane without an ETC tag. Save for the odd MP with a shot-gun of course.

Maus

I have started reading 'Maus' by Art Spiegelman. It is the only graphic novel ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Spiegelman uses the 'comic-book' format to tell the story of the Holocaust and never has a graphic novel been so touching. The books gives you, in no more time than it takes to read a Tin-tin or Asterix comic, a stark reminder of what people can do to other people when they move into a position of absolute power. Spiegelman has mice depicting the Jews, cats depicting the Nazis, dogs depicting the liberating Americans and for some reason, pigs depicting the Poles - I am still struggling with that last metaphor.


I am writing this post to urge all of you to get to amazon or flipkart now and order yourself a copy.

When messages are designed in bad grammar

I was cleaning out my junk folder a short while ago when I noticed the following subject line.

"These technique will destroys the US Lottery system."

I have always wondered why the scammers do not bother to run a spell check and grammar check on the messages they send out. It would stand to reason that if you wish to snare someone gullible enough to believe that they could partake of a deceased despotic dictator's hidden riches, you might want to deploy a little more finesse in your communications.

After I ran a Google search for why Nigerian Scams have bad grammar, I learned that the scammers are far more devious. They have to send out millions of mail messages to get a few hundred responses, of which a few can be lured into transferring some money to an untraceable destination ostensibly to help grease the process of moving the millions. Here is where the bad grammar comes in. If the messages were sent out in better English and the contents seemed more plausible, the message might attract more educated people, most of whom would get suspicious soon enough and not transfer any money. Playing email tag with such 'false-positives' would be a waste of time for those blokes sitting in some cyber cafe in wherever.

By deliberately using bad grammar and ridiculous plots, the spammers are actively causing only the not-so-educated and gullible to self-select themselves into responding. The conversion ratio on these people is likely to be higher.

The best way to eliminate this scourge would be for educated people to respond to these scams in large enough numbers and cause the spammers to use up a lot of their time in responding to leads that are going to be dead ends. Eventually, they might figure out it is not worth their time. Unfortunately, you and I have better things to do with our spare time.

Perhaps it is time for some bright engineers from an IIT to start work on a project to write a bot that will respond to Nigerian Scammers with natural language responses and keep them occupied.

On politeness

I have been thinking a fair bit about how a little politeness goes a long way. Once you think about it, the revelation is not really extraordinary; it is something we have known or should have known all along. What then prevents us from being polite all the time, and causes us to try the "Do you know who I am?" approach.

I suspect it is our ego's need to feel important, and it is this need that gets us into trouble more often than not. It would be fair to reason that at least some of the time, our need to feel important will be at odds with the other parties need to feel important. More often than not, our demeanour works hard against our best interests rather than for them.

Imagine a person trying to check in for a flight that has been over-booked for some reason. The one person in the world who could perhaps help you get on that flight is the person behind the check-in counter at the airport. That is also the person that people try to berate when they are informed that they might not be accommodated on the flight. When the person behind the counter has some discretion on who to let on board; there should be no prizes for guessing that he or she would be likely to rule in favour of the polite person. Yet we find it easy to be rude to people who provide us with a service such as at an airport or at a hotel or at a restaurant. Interestingly, when the traffic cop stops us, most of us choose to be polite, unless of course we happen to live in Delhi where it would be sign of weakness to show politeness - Tu jaanta hain main kaun hoon?

Here is an algorithm I have just figured out that would lead to be more polite: Transact with every person we meet as if that person were in the position of power.

I realize that this is not a new discovery, for it is exactly what our parents and grandparents have tried to tell us: "It is nice to be important. But it is more important to be nice." Perhaps we will find this wisdom easier to inculcate into our behaviour when we see the purely selfish interest in doing so.

A little politeness goes a long way

I have been having a run of bad luck with traffic offenses lately. After being pulled over for speeding a few days ago, I was guilty yesterday of presuming that I could take a free left turn at an intersection that was not in effect a free-left.

Two cops pulled me over and I stepped out of the car, said 'Namaskar' with a smile and asked what I had done wrong. I think the difference was in my tone, for I asked what I had done wrong in a tone of humble enquiry and not in a tone of challenge. When the policeman informed me that I had taken a left turn at a red light, I apologized and admitted my fault. Without his asking for it, I produced my driving licence and handed it to him and asked him to prepare the challan.

I suspect he was taken aback with my genuine politeness and the fact that I showed no inclination of challenging his stand. I had admitted my mistake and was willing to pay the fine. He looked at my licence and saw that I was from Pune. He looked at the car's registration number and confirmed that the car was also from Pune. He handed my licence back to me and said, "Please drive carefully," and even opened the door of my car for me.

All this talk of corrupt policemen - I have no clue where all that nonsense is coming from.

Hoardings in Mumbai

Some months ago, I had written a post about how all billboards or hoardings in Pune and Bangalore seem to be monopolized by real estate ads.

Driving around in Mumbai yesterday, I noticed some sense of normalcy returning, for I saw advertisements for mobile phones, cars, clothing and chocolates.

I wonder if this is a lead indicator of the fact that real estate companies cannot afford to throw stupid money any more in an attempt to be louder than their competitors.

Is there a correction in real estate prices, long overdue, finally here for the reckoning?

Stoicism 201

There is a certain person who is employed at a Private Equity firm who not only believes, but has the gall to voice, that the highest level of humans work in PE and everyone else is necessarily a lower order human being.

The audacity is preposterous, especially given how fallacious the premise is. By definition, people in Private Equity are trying to partake of the success of people who are building a quality product or service and delivering it efficiently to the people who will buy it. The only thing that people in PE are doing is allocating capital on bets that they believe will pay.

It gets worse. Venture Capitalists in the good old days started out by investing money that they had made themselves, by having succeeded in the very game that they were now investing in; i.e. building a product or service that the market needed and was willing to pay for. They had sold their company to a larger corporation and were now trying to deploy their money, and perhaps experience, across a wider set of opportunities.

A number of today's PE employees have never really done anything real for a living. Admittedly, they have worked extremely hard through the best Business Schools to build CVs that PE and VC firms would shortlist. But for a living, these people essentially meet a lot of real entrepreneurs so that they can invest money that the founding partner of the VC / PE firm has brought in from other people entrusted to invest that money, who in turn got the money from people who have made it by, guess what, building and delivering a product or service that the market wants and is willing to pay for.

The hubris of someone who in effect lives off the success of others, to believe and to voice an opinion that suggests that the best people work in VC / PE and that others are a lower class of human beings is nothing short of atrocious.

And finally, here is where the title of this piece comes in. These people would do well to realize that they have a high paying job at the pleasure of the founder of the VC / PE fund founder, and that if they should lose this job at the whim of their boss, they would be pretty much unemployable anywhere else.  They would do even better to accept their good fortune with grace and gratitude and start building a real life skill in preparation for the day when they will lose their job.

Stoicism 101

I have started reading a little known but an eminently recommendable book, 'A guide to the good life' by William Irvine. Going by the title, one would imagine this book to be a how-to manual for enjoying the good life, for living it large, for living the big dreams.

Au contraire, the book has an entirely different perspective. My take home from the first couple of chapters of the book is this: The path to a fulfilling life comes not from chasing material goods that signal success but from training your mind to want stuff that you already have.

Let us think about this a little more. We strive to achieve our goals, get that coveted job, earn that promotion, marry the person of our dreams and give our children the best experiences that are available out there. After we achieve all of these things, we find ourselves not fulfilled yet. The rat race takes over. We berate our kids for not doing well enough at school, for not telling us sooner that something needed to be purchased for a school project due tomorrow. We crib about how the promotion we deserved was given to the person who must be brown nosing the boss. We take our spouse for granted. Life becomes a series of chores to be gotten through. It doesn't need to.

When was the last time we took time out to truly enjoy that which we already have : our relationships and even our possessions that we worked so hard to obtain? I realize that I have been guilty of this too. I worked for years to be able to finally afford a German car. And what have I been doing ever since the prize had been bagged?

Starting tomorrow, I am going to find reasons to celebrate what I already have. Wish I had chanced upon this book a decade ago. On the other hand, perhaps there is a time and place when such wisdom will hit home.

Enthusiasm exhausted

We went recruiting at one of the super premier institutes a few days ago. We expected that we would meet the brightest minds in the country and that we would be hard pressed to exclude candidates from the shortlists or the final lists. Alas, we met very few such. We did meet a lot of people who had clearly worked extremely hard to make it into these hallowed portals, but somewhere along the way, they seemed to have forgotten why it was important for them to get there in the first place. It was almost as if getting into an elite institution was the end goal in itself - not as a portal to higher opportunity later.

I wonder if the process of preparing for the entrance test sucks all the juice out of a person; so much so, that there is no further ambition left in life.

December Short

Happiness comes from doing things you are proud of.

ATC Control Towers

As I rode back into T3 at Delhi airport, I noticed that they are still working on building the new control tower. Ever since the iconoclastic tower at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport

was made famous by its younger cousin at Singapore's Changi Airport,

a number of airports have been racing to build these new age towers that are situated outside the airport complex. Here is the new tower at Mumbai

and the one they have been building for years at Delhi.

In the old days, the ATC was no more than a glass cabin atop the terminal building and as I drove past the new tower in Delhi, I couldn't help wonder if these new phallic designs were no more than an ego boosters for the politicians that commissioned them; another manifestation of 'mine is bigger than yours', if you will.

A little more thought though, and one has to give the designers credit for coming up with an elegant solution to a modern problem. When airports were built, they were situated way outside the city with nothing more than open fields all around. The ATC glass house atop the terminal building had an unobstructed view of the surrounding plains all the way to the horizon to see the approaching planes coming in. With cities growing at the frenetic pace we have been witnessing for the last couple of decades, new buildings sprouted up near the airports and ATC clearly needed something taller to see over to the horizon.

So the next time you land safely at an airport in a crowded, congested city, you might want to thank the guys slaving away at a giant phallus nearby.

Riding with Lorenzo

I was invited to ride a Yamaha at the Buddh International Circuit with Jorge Lorenzo. Yamaha took care of all expenses including airport pickup, stay at a hotel in Greater Noida, Breakfast, Lunch, Track riding training, and the drop off back to Delhi airport.

The day at the circuit started with a safety briefing on dos and donts and rider training by ex Moto GP rider Kato-san. We then went out to the prep rooms and donned our leather safety gear - complete with ablative armour, elbow pads, knee sliders back protection and neck protection - and strode out to the 10 Yamaha R3s track prepped for us. Each bike was assigned a technician who would check out the machine when we returned to the pits.

Leaning the bike into the turns is one of those things that look macho - and it is - for I could not quite find the nerve to lean in all the way until my knee sliders touched the tarmac. It did not help to have another rider try it and then travel sideways with this bike's right fairing and silencer box taking over duty from the tyres. In a testament to the safety gear, he got back up onto the bike and went on to complete the ride.

As we entered the pit lanes after each practice run, the technician assigned to us would ask us if the bike was performing well or if there were any peculiarities.

At 2 pm Jorge Lorenzo arrived and donned his gear. Then for what seemed like the shortest half hour in my life, he led us out to the track for a few laps.

The event was called 'Ride with Lorenzo' and the name turned out to be a bit of a misnomer, for he might as well have been riding on some other circuit. All I saw of him was when he exited the pit lane, leading our train of bikes and when he banked right on Turn1 a right hander. By the time I got to Turn 1, he was easing into Turn 2 and accelerating out of the apex onto the straight and when I finally got to turn 3 I saw his tail lights banking again at the other end of the straight. I saw him next only in the pits.

The R3 is an awesome machine to ride on the track. The stated top speed is 105 mph, about 170 kmph and I glimpsed 155 on the digital speedo on the straight. For the rest of the lap I was hanging on for dear life.

Would I do it again? I can't wait for my next opportunity.

A slower world

I drove to Mumbai a few days ago for a meeting that was scheduled rather early in the morning. As it turned out, the meeting had been rescheduled to another day and someone had forgotten to recheck the schedule. As recently as a few years ago, I would have been frustrated and angry at the waste of time. This time, I was surprisingly placid. I was enjoying the scenery on my drive back to Pune.

I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, I find myself wondering if I am losing my edge, if I am beginning to accept life as it comes with a little too much acquiescence, and on the other hand, I also notice that I do not get stressed easily any more. I also realized as I was staring out the window that getting stressed does not get the work done any faster; it just works your heart and brain beyond design specifications. Wish I had realized this twenty years ago.

Change is in the air

I was pulled over for speeding yesterday and what struck me was how polite, civilized and upright the policemen were. Their motorcycle pulled up alongside me and after I rolled down my window, they informed me that my speed had been rather high. I apologized immediately and said that I agree, and that I did indeed get carried away with the joy of driving.

They asked to see my licence and told me about how other people on the road might be drunk or at fault in some other way, but my speed could cause them to lose their lives. I could not disagree with that. I believe they were trying to gauge whether I had been drinking and it must have become apparent within a couple of minutes of conversation that I was clearly sober.

I asked them what the fine would be and expected them to prepare a ticket or challan or negotiate a settlement. But then something truly amazing happened. One of two policemen said that I would remember this incident better if there was no money involved. And he is right. Not only will I remember this incident, I will also remember how courteous they were.

Change is in the air.

Sloppiness starts at home.

I was at a social event a few days ago where the catering service was exceptional. Not only was the food delectable, the presentation was exceptional too. The plating was elegant and even the buffet spread had been laid out tastefully.

Within a few minutes of the buffet opening for service however, the scene had become less than appetizing. People had ladled the food not only onto their plates but also onto the table and for good measure had sprinkled a few specks of dal and sambar onto the plates and bowls laid out for service.

It is interesting how inconsiderate Indians can be to their fellow citizens in a bid to save a few seconds. I have tried this and I know that it takes no more than a few seconds extra to be careful when ladling the food from the serving bowl to your own plate. Slapping some dal over to your bowl can be achieved in about 5 seconds and doing it well can be done in 8 or 9. As anyone who has eaten at a buffet surely knows, many Indians slap their food over. There is no joy in precision, in leaving the buffet table beautiful for others.It is no surprise that this desi attitude filters into our engineering or our work.

What really bothers me, is that this time saved is not exactly being put to good use. Punctuality is not one of our virtues either.

Our own little world

I had a flash of clarity yesterday about how people from elite engineering schools and B Schools live in their own little world; cocooned from stark reality.

We have been recruiting at B Schools and Engineering colleges in the last few days, and I have been griping about the unsuitability of these candidates; moaning about how they cannot speak well and complaining about how engineers do not seem to know the basics of engineering.

And then yesterday, I met a classmate who has been doing some really good work in primary education, and is now thinking of expanding outside metros and tier 1 cities into smaller towns. He had just returned from visiting a few schools in small towns and was telling us about the appalling conditions there. Schools had English teachers who could not speak English and Maths teachers who did not really understand the Maths. They had learned how to solve the problems in the text book by rote and that is all they taught.

I can now imagine how the more ambitious kids in such schools work very hard and put a lot of genuine effort into what they think is expected of them - learning by rote. They do well in the state board exams and then make it to elite engineering colleges. Of course, they haven't really learned any Maths or Physics. A few years later, they end up on an interview panel with someone like me only to be written off as incompetent.

Here we are blaming the kids when we should be doing something about those incompetent teachers.

Wilderness

Just got back from three days on a beach near Alibag where I had patchy phone coverage and terrible internet connectivity. I realized during these three days that our addiction to mobile phones and the internet, just like our addiction to television, is not difficult to break.

I wonder if I am brave enough to announce that I can live without mobile phones for some time. It might even give a few snoops some moments where they wonder how a person can drop off the face of the earth for a few days and then appear again. If a large number of us switch off our mobile phones and internet for a few days every month, perhaps Google's ability to track not just our whereabouts, but also what we are doing might become less than omnipotent.

Boat people

I have been reading a little bit more about the EU migrant crisis and chanced upon this article. When I started reading the article, I had no idea that EU countries were paying Col. Muammar Gadaffi to keep Africans from boarding boats bound for the EU. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy actually signed an agreement with Gadaffi in 2009 pledging $5 Billion over 25 years, that is about $ 200 million per year as 'Compensation for its 30 year occupation of the country which ended in 1943'.
Interestingly, $500 million of that 5 Billion was for Electronic Surveillance equipment to be installed on the Libyan coastline according to this article. After Gadaffi was killed in 2011, the one check was removed and the floodgates opened.

According to human rights activist Ajamu Baraka, the EU migrant crisis is a direct consequence of the colonial practices of western European nations, namely Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom. For decades, western European countries exploited the natural resources of Africa and enslaved their people to work in the mines so to speak. Colonial Raj ended when the cost of extracting those resources and transferring them back to Europe proved to be more expensive than it was worth; in effect leaving the native people alienated them from their erstwhile natural lifestyle - whether it was agriculture or hunting. It is these people, displaced and without means to earn a living, who are now in desperation boarding vessels for the land where all their wealth moved to.

Has the EU, by this reckoning, come face to face with its own Karma?

Fly the MRJ

November 11 has been a special day. A company I respect tremendously has gone back to doing something they haven't done for the last 60 years. Mitsubishi has built an aircraft again and on November 11 the Mitsubishi Regional Jet took to the skies for the first time. After a perfect sortie and a perfect landing, Mitsubishi will now proceed to file for FAA approval and soon the MRJ will be available for commercial purchase.

The last time Mitsubishi built an aircraft, it slaughtered the competition: the little plane, the A6M was known to its enemies as The Zero.

Airbus and Embraer need to be afraid. Very afraid.

Form over function

The Lamborghini Countach has been the poster child for car porn ever since I was a teenager. I had a poster on my bedroom wall from the time I turned 12 until the time hormones kicked in. Through my teen years and then through my 20s, I have always lusted after a Lamborghini.

One should never meet one's heroes, they say, for reality has a tough time keeping up with expectations. So also for cars. Read any review of the Countach on line and you will learn that it is a horrid car to drive and worse to own.

The Countach is in reality a poster child of the principle of Form over Function. Chris Bangle once said, "The Italians design their cars with flair. And they don't let engineering get in the way."

I should have learned my lesson after reading about the Countach. But nope. I had to go and learn this for myself.

Lesson learned. Next vehicle: Japanese.

Frustration

My German Humpty Dumpty has been sitting in the service station since Tuesday morning. All the Kaiser's horses and all the Kaiser's men could not get it to work again. They finally gave up on trying to make the touchpad work and sent the car back to me this evening.

However, it has come back with a new problem. The AC blower now makes a whirring noise. The driver who delivered it tried to act like "yeh to sab gaadi mein aata hain". Unfortunately for him, I had a few phone numbers saved on my smartphone. They have asked me to send it back on Monday morning and I suppose it will sit there for few days. I do hope it does not come back with yet another problem.

Fruit and Jam

I remember having read somewhere that once you drop a bad habit for a better one, your mind ceases to find the old habit very enjoyable. To test out this hypothesis, I tried watching TV a few days ago and chanced upon Seinfeld playing on a certain channel. After a month of no TV and using all that time reading or riding, TV now seems dreary. Seinfeld , a show I used to enjoy once upon a time, I did not find funny at all. To be honest, I found the mindless banter between George and Elaine and Jerry to be rather juvenile. I watched an episode of Two and Half Men and ditto: not a single laugh or guffaw ensued. Not even a smile.

Paul Graham once wrote, "When you stop eating jam, fruit starts to taste better."

I have just learned that the converse is also true. When you start eating fruit, jam just doesn't cut it anymore.

Your calling

During the course of my teaching at B Schools, usually after class when I am chatting with students, a question that comes up with regularity is, "How do I find my calling?" I find myself forever in awe of the 24 year-olds who are already contemplating this problem. At that age, the question I was grappling with was no loftier than, "How do I make more money?" or at best, "What do I want to do for a living?"

There is perhaps no silver bullet, no framework, no template, to find the answer to this question, but here is the closest I got to a process that might work. Actually it is more a question to ponder over. My personal experience is that one's answer to this question evolves over time - so you might want to stick with it.

Ponder this: What would you do if / when money is no object?

HOG

I went riding with a Harley Group on Sunday and tried my hand at the Harley Davidson Street 750 and the Iron 883. Riding a Harley is completely different experience vis-a-vis riding a street-sport and it is nothing if not memorable.

First, there is that THUMP-THUMP when you thumb the starter. Each spark fired ignition of the air-fuel mixture in each of its twin cylinders makes itself known - both to your auditory sense and to your butt, and your palms, and your feet, wherever in fact, any part of your anatomy is in contact with the machine. The next is noise the gearshift makes when you prod the shifter: 'THUNK'. Third, as you rev the engine, the vibrations make themselves felt on the insides of your thighs where you grab the fuel tank. That can be fun for a while, I suppose. And all this is before you have even set off.

The real experience begins when you twist the throttle and the bike leaps forward leaving you hanging on for dear life from the handle bars as the savage acceleration throws the rest of your body back. Then there is that macho feeling when you try to manhandle the bike to get it to turn, all while your left foot is stomping the shifter trying to shift down and your right foot is frantically prodding the rear brake pedal which was probably designed in 1903 and last revised in 1943. In desperation you yank at the front brake lever and this produces a result that is completely unexpected; for the bike comes to a complete halt without drama and your blood reaches your brain again leaving you wondering why your heart rate had gone up at all. It is the one component on the 20th century machine that was designed in the 21st century and made by people who know what brakes are for and what they are supposed to do and how. I would not be surprised one bit if the front brakes have been sourced from Akebono. These are the folks who make the brakes for the Shinkansen Bullet Train of Japan, and - let me see if this might be a good place to slide this in here - for some Yamahas.

Interesting experience then, all-in-all. One thing is for certain, the Harley Davidson Iron 883 and the Yamaha R3 are as alike as chalk and cheese. Which is which depends on who you ask. Let me just say that I am very very happy with my acquisition.

But for that odd day when I wake up with a devil-may-care attitude and feeling more than a little adventurous, I wonder...

The new face of war

It used to be that countries went to war against each other. The fronts were known and the agenda was announced.

Clearly, the situation has changed. Ever since Osama bin Laden and his henchmen flew civilian aircraft into the twin towers in New York on 9-11-2001, it has been that individuals can now wage war against entire nations.

26-11in Mumbai and 13-11 in Paris are recurring example of this new war. That a few people can stroll into a city, spray bullets at people who they have nothing against and then blow themselves up is strange phenomenon that is beyond comprehension. They make no ransom demands, they do not expect to make any money or gain freedom for someone, and most bafflingly, they do not even expect to 'win'. They know that the end is death. One of the explosions outside Stade de France had only one casualty - the suicide bomber - who caused no other damage. Yet the teenagers had the gumption to push a button that blew the explosive charges strapped to their own body. They did not even wish to be claimed as victors or heroes. Their own end came before they could witness what they had done.

What motivates these people? There is clearly no win-lose possibility here. The victims lose their lives and the perpetrators also lose their lives. Lose-lose is the only possible outcome. Why would anyone play this game?

France's response

President Hollande has categorically stated that yesterday IS declared war against France and that France's response against the IS will be merciless and pitiless.

On the one hand I admire the conviction of the leader of a country to clearly identify and acknowledge the situation, to call a spade a spade and to promise retaliation, something that another country under similar circumstances has been either unable or unwilling to do.

On the other hand, I have been struggling to grapple with how one could wage war against an enemy that is fragmented and has no specific location, and worse, has no qualms about taking their own people hostage or making human shields of their own civilians. The civilized world's weapons of war are designed to work against an enemy who presents a defined front. Even the most modern drones and laser sharp precision are never completely effective against an enemy that is amorphous and growing. The new enemy is like a virus for it affects your own body. IS clearly has sympathizers within France and Belgium and the UK - people who like the said virus can stay dormant for an indeterminate amount of time only to be activated by some unknown event and proceed to wreak havoc on the host.

I find one part of me wishing that France's response is more than political rhetoric, and yet another part of me hopes that it will remain the response of a civilized nation, not the wrath of Anakin Skywalker who could just as easily kill women and children.

How does one reconcile this paradox, where civility itself shackles the hands that hold the weapons of retaliation?

Brennt Paris?

:'-(

Golf-club memberships

Golf club memberships are options that give you the right to access the property for the privilege of shelling out more money across the life of the membership.

Rocking trains

While I was reading about the Shinkansen on the internet  few days ago, some links led me to the wiki article about the Pendolino tilting train developed by FIAT of Italy. The Pendolino gets its name from Pendolo - Italian for pendulum and the suffix ino as in bambino or topolino.

The Pendolino design has since been evaluated by multiple train operators in many countries including RENFE of Spain, Cisalpina of Switzerland, PKP of Poland, Ceske Drahy of the Czech Republic and Virgin Trains of the UK. Spanish CAF (translated: Construction & Auxiliary of Railways) and Bombardier transportation of Canada have developed their own tilting trains as has the engineering team that builds the Shinkansen.

There are essentially three different approaches that engineers have taken to get the train to tilt as it goes into a corner. The Pendolino uses hydraulic actuators to push up one side of the car while the bogie remains flat with respect to the rail. The Spanish Talgo Pendular adopts a passive suspension and the Shinkansen uses airbags that inflate to raise the side on the outside of the curve.

All of these approaches were attempts at trying to achieve higher speeds on regular, i.e. Non HSR tracks.

I was under the impression that tilting trains helped the train travel faster along the same curve than a non tilting train without the risk of derailment. Not true. The only way to get trains to travel faster around a curve is to bank the track, i.e. raise the outside rail so that the bogie is inclined into the curve. Clearly, you can only go so far with raising one of the two rails without running the risk of a slower travelling train tipping over. In Japan, an early warning system against earthquakes on the Shinkansen brings the train to a complete halt in case tremors are detected and you definitely wouldn't want to stop on a part of the track where the incline is 45 degrees.

The trains tilt not to travel faster around a banked track but to make the travel more comfortable for travellers. For some strange reason, humans wearing formal clothes prefer to be pushed into their seats as against being pushed into the armrest, and tilting the train achieves this objective. In denim jeans and T-shirts, the same humans want to feel the G Forces laterally, transversely and longitudinally. We want to rock. It is for those times that we have roller coasters.

Ayn Rand

This is going to be a long post. But then a post in defence of Atlas Shrugged can hardly be expected to be short.

Someone sent me a link to this article on Salon.com about Ayn Rand and her Magnum Opus. It is one of those articles that cause you to think again about a topic you have always felt strongly about. Two out of those ten points even make sense, I have to concede. However, if one reads the article carefully, one notices that a number of things appear to be quoted out of context. And in at least one case, the article seems to reach a conclusion from a quotation in the book that is completely baffling.

I can understand why a number of people do not think highly of Ayn Rand. She was possibly a misogynist and favoured smoking and did not think much of the rights of Native Americans. However, her thoughts on Capitalism and her critique of Socialism have been no less than erudite.

Let me attempt to argue my case against the shortcomings of the article in Salon.com
As I read that article I noticed that compared to what I remember of the book, some of the arguments in the article seem to be taking rather generous liberties with quoting Atlas Shrugged out of context. Let me elaborate.

Point number 2
The Salon article only says, "Dagny pulled rank and ordered them (the train engineer and conductor) to drive through the red light." While this is technically true, the article has conveniently left out the context under which she chooses this course of action. The book had set up enough context to say that the train engineers guessed that the red signal was most likely faulty but nobody was willing to take the responsibility for any next steps. They were perfectly willing to just sit there and wait forever. Dagny heard them out and then took the call to move forward at a safe speed. Somebody needed to take action and Dagny did.

In the same point, the Salon article refers to Dagny's defence of the 100 mph speed of the first train on the John Galt Line, where Dagny says that if it were not for public opinion, the speed might as well have been a slower 65 mph, implying that they were going to travel at 100 mph to prove the mettle of Rearden metal as it were.

The article conveniently leaves out the context that the moochers worked very hard to ensure that Rearden Metal was discredited and not allowed for use anywhere and when Dagny, after trying hard to buy regular steel and failing, took the call to build the John Galt line with it, they tried to label the John Galt Line as unsafe. The book further sets up the context that Dagny and Rearden had enough confidence in the Rearden Metal rail, and the courage, to ride the train themselves. If others were unsure of the safety, nobody was putting a gun to their head and making them ride the train.

I do have to admit, that there is not enough in the book that talks about safety testing of Rearden Metal under different stress test conditions. But then the book was written in a different day and age. Countries back then thought it was perfectly acceptable to put lead in gasoline and CFCs in aerosol cans and watches and clock faces were regularly painted with radium for the glow-in-the-dark effect. Drugs were administered for maladies before side effects were fully understood. Pre-launch testing is a rather recent invention. I am tempted to point out, however, that Atlas Shrugged is a novel, not a text-book on product launch procedure.

Point number 3
The Salon article implies that the Equalization of Opportunities bill was passed by a majority of congress where the elected representatives were honouring their pre-election promises. That is not how the book sets up the context. The book clearly states that vested interests, like James Taggart,  exert undue influence over the powers that be to have the bill passed for their benefit - to actually prevent superior competition on their turf. Isn't is this bill that causes the Phoenix Durango line to close down just in time for the launch of the John Galt line? The salon article twists this around completely and presents the bill as benevolent and anti-monopoly when the book sets up the context to show the bill as being anti-competition.

Point number 4
The article says that Ayn Rand insinuates that the government has never invented anything or done any good for anyone. Umm - not quite. Ayn Rand says the State Science Institute as portrayed in Atlas Shrugged had not invented anything.

Point number 5
The article suggests that Francisco slaps Dagny when she makes a joke he doesn't like. If I remember correctly, he slaps her when she suggests that she should act incompetent so that others might like her; because it is her competence that they seem to resent. The very idea is so abhorrent to Rand that her pen possibly convulsed with violence.

I do have to admit that in most of Ayn Rand's books there is something very warped about how men treat women - whether it is the scene in Fountainhead where Howard Roark rapes Dominique Francon or the scene in Atlas Shrugged where Hank Rearden takes Dagny almost by force and then calls her a whore. There is definitely something weird going on in Ayn Rand's head here - I won't even try to contest this point.

Point number 6

The article says that Ayn Rand suggests that all natural resources are limitless.

I don't remember it that way at all. I believe the book goes to some length to show that Ellis Wyatt had to work hard to figure out a way to extract oil from hard to get to places like - ahem - Shale.

 

Similarly, John Galt worked hard to figure out a way to get energy out of thin air WITHOUT having to burn fossil fuels like - ahem again - Solar Photo Voltaic cells. Check out the youtube video of the launch of the Tesla Power-wall and hear what Elon Musk has to say about this infinite source of power that shows up every morning and just works.

The article refers sarcastically to Ayn Rand's philosophy that human ingenuity can overcome any problem if only the government would get out of the way.

 

Given the rapid development in efficiency of Solar PV cells and that we manage to make our devices and appliances more efficient / less energy hungry, I do not see any reason to argue against Ayn Rand's claim that human ingenuity can overcome any problem. We have already managed to find solutions to various diseases, growing enough food for 7 billion people and putting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely. We have put telescopes in orbit and have sent probes to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have left the solar system and are still sending signals back; one powered by a solar array and another powered by a small device providing nuclear energy.

 

Incidentally, most of this scientific advance has been achieved in the free world, where the government does indeed get out of the way.

 

Point number 7.

Again the article does not provide the context completely.

Dagny and Rearden have been driving through what could be termed as an industrial wilderness - an area that was once productive but has now decayed. The 20th century Motor Company once provided gainful employment to people like John Galt who were producing the best work they could. It was only when Ivy Starnes instituted the principle of  'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs' that the once great company floundered and eventually died.

Looking now at the rust-belt around Detroit one cannot but notice the decline from the glory days of General Motors to its bankruptcy of 2009. Given that a large part of the problem was precipitated by the United Auto Worker (UAW) negotiated Jobs Bank program, which mandated that any unionized employee could never be fired and would continue to draw upto 90% of his salary even if there was no work for him, I would say that Ayn Rand has been quite prescient.

Point number 9 is especially twisted.
I did a double take when I read the Salon author's interpretation of what Francisco said in the quote provided, “Dagny, there’s nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard.”

What kind of a person reads 'rich people are more valuable than poor people' from that quote?

Point number 1 and 10.

Good people look good and bad people are unattractive. 

Fair point, but just a sign of the times. Ayn Rand is not the only author or film-maker of that era to be guilty of this.I suspect story telling and movie making had not evolved enough to appreciate that audiences were intelligent enough to figure out the nuances of good and bad without the protagonists and antagonists being made to wear explicit masks to showcase their character.

Similarly, the point about smoking being revered as laudatory is clearly unacceptable today, but then again, those were different times. I remember movies from my own teen age when the hero smoked cigarettes to signify 'cool'; consider Deewar and Trishul or any number of English movies.

I would appreciate a fair critique of any book, even Atlas Shrugged perhaps, but to quote out of context appears to be a rather sly way of making a point.

Atlas Shrugged - The Movies

When the first Atlas Shrugged movie was released in 2011, I was waiting for it, for it had been more than a decade in the making. It was put into production on a tight budget because the tenure on the rights was about to expire. The film bombed at a box office earning less than $5 million against the production cost of $20 million; but then it was a labour of love for the producer. He went on to produce part 2 and part 3 even when it was clear that he was going to lose money. Unfortunately, the films got progressively worse, with the third part being labelled by some critics as atrocious.

I would recommend watching the first part if you are an Ayn Rand fan and if you remember the book well. For people who haven't read the book, the movies are likely to leave you wondering what the hell it was supposed to be all about.

You might want to watch the second part if you are a die-hard Ayn Rand fan. You can definitely skip the third installment.

Getting traction in learning

I watched a documentary on YouTube about the development of the Shinkansen, the Japanese Bullet train. The engineers faced a number of challenges in trying to get trains to travel faster. Chief among them was traction. Steel wheels moving on steel rails are clearly not going to provide as much traction as rubber on asphalt. The problem is compounded if you have super-powerful electric locomotives trying to put down more than ten thousand horses across a contact patch that is no more than a few square centimeters on each wheel. What you get is wheel spin, the phenomenon you witness when you watch a drag racer spin its rear tyres at the starting line, effectively converting a lot of rubber into a lot of smoke.

One way to solve the problem is to increase weight on the driven wheels, but this can be counterproductive to payload, the stuff that people are paying you to haul. The other method, known to automobile users for some time, is what the Shinkansen engineers adopted: All-Wheel-Drive.

Just as a 4x4 moves off the line a lot more efficiently, in terms of traction, than a front wheel drive, the Shinkansen employs multiple drive units, electric motors at almost all the wheels to get the train moving along quickly. This increased traction aids rapid acceleration, especially important if you are planning on stopping every few kilometers and yet hoping to achieve average speeds in excess of 160 kmph. Incidentally, these EMUs or Electric Multiple Units are not unique to the Shinkansen. Most urban metro systems, where rapid acceleration after multiple stops is important, use EMUs. Most long distance trains, on the other hand deploy a locomotive at the front end to haul the free-wheeling carriages along. The bullet shaped ends of the Shinkansen trains, then, are not locomotives at all, but control cabins with a nose for aerodynamic efficiency to reduce air resistance.

Allow me a metaphor to connect this discussion to the topic of today's blog-post. Teachers are like train systems; some prefer the lecture method, where the professors do all the work, like the locomotive trying to haul the freewheeling carriages along. The best ones are like the Shinkansen, facilitating learning through ensuring engagement, where the carriages pull their own weight. These best ones see their job as only removing the resistance to learning. You know which system accelerates faster.

The passing of television

When will TV go the way of the telegram?

When we all have access to the internet with speeds that allow watching of video without buffering delays at prices that match satellite TV subscriptions.

Goin' 'lectric Part Deux

I got stuck in traffic on Friday. On my motorcycle. I couldn't believe it. Traffic is getting so bad that even a motorcycle cannot weave through. I need something smaller. A bicycle. But there is a problem. I don't like to show up at a meeting with a sweat stained shirt. So we need an electric bicycle. But those have always looked dorky. Until now.

You see, thanks to this new invention called kickstarter, smart, driven people with a great idea can now find the means to take those great ideas and turn them into great products. The flykly is the result of a kickstarter campaign. And because I know that most of you are not going to take the trouble of clicking on that hyperlink in the previous sentence, I feel compelled to put a picture here.

What makes the flykly an amazing product is that you can convert your existing bicycle into an electric just by swapping out your rear wheel and swapping in the flykly. The entire gizmo is crammed into the hub of the rear wheel; everything; the electric motor, the lithium ion batteries, the controller, the bluetooth stuff to talk to your smartphone and the torque sensors.

The way the flykly wheel works is that the moment the torque sensor senses your pedaling, it powers up the hub motor to assist you. It also has regenerative braking to charge those batteries when you are slowing down. You can also charge it from your wall socket if you don't care to slow down very much. The motor assist will give you a top speed of 25 kmph, which is the limit in Europe for a vehicle to be classified as an electric bicycle and not a moped.

What I find most compelling about this electric bicycle argument, especially after flykly has solved the problem of not having to lug a 20 kg lead acid battery around with you, is that if you use a bicycle to get around, you are not transporting 2 tons of metal just so you can move 70 kilos.

I always knew the Dutch were great engineers, after all they have devised a system to pump out the sea from under their feet every hour of every day just so they can live below sea level and stay dry doing it; but their wisdom with using bicycles has only now hit me.

Honourable mention must also be made of the Copenhagen Wheel in this article for it is a similar product of similar design and it has been turning heads since 2009. And if they had put it into production and were able to deliver it in time to people who have paid for it, this article might even have been about it.

Diesel Generator sets

This article in the Indian Express states that the total installed capacity of Diesel Generator (DG) units for power backup in the country now add up to about 90 000 MW. That is 36 % of total installed capacity in the country or about half of installed capacity in large power stations in the country.

It gets worse. The installed DG capacity is growing at somewhere between 5000 MW to 8000 MW every year. For context, the largest Hydro-electric power project in the country generates 1920 MW. The DG capacity added every year is more than the cumulative nuclear and solar capacity added in the country each year. The total global market for installation of DG sets is expected to be US$ 68 Billion by 2020.

Let us think about that for a minute. Electricity is the most portable of energies. You can generate it anywhere in the country and use it anywhere else instantly if you have a grid in place. The problem with most developing nations is that demand exceeds supply and in under-developed nations, that there is no grid, because the political rulers have used the money to buy property in London. Or in the case of Lebanon, the mafia has found out that sale of power from localized DG sets is so lucrative that they actively protect their turf and prevent the government agencies from installing step-down transformers to distribute the power generated in large power stations.

Some people are starting to say that power generation in India is not really lagging that far behind demand. I wonder how much of the Lebanon problem is at play here in India.

3 degrees of complexity

I found out yesterday that there is a difference between complicated and complex, terms that I had been using interchangeably. The book I am currently reading, The Checklist Manifesto, tries to address the issue of whether checklists will work for any level of complexity in situations we deal with in our professional lives. The author refers to a paper by Sholom Glouberman and Brenda Zimmerman which categorizes problems as simple, complicated, and complex.

Simple situations are those that have been addressed multiple times and sometimes tools and processes are available to reduce errors further. An example would be baking a cake; if you have the recipe and follow the instructions faithfully, it is easy to imagine that you would end up with an acceptable cake. The process is replicable and the availability of moulds and ready-mixes makes the process easier and the outcome more predictable.

Complicated problems contain subsets of simple problems but are not merely reducible to them; there are issues of coordination and specialized expertise. Sending a spacecraft to the moon is a complicated problem. However, once the problem has been solved, the solution can be replicated if we develop rigourous processes; these are likely to assure a high degree of success if followed faithfully.

Complex problems, the highest order in their classification, can encompass both simple and complicated sub-problems but may not be reducible to either. There is the added complexity brought in by uniqueness of situations, subjects and objects that makes replication of success difficult to assure. Consider the problem of raising a child. One can apply oneself and put in a lot of effort and have tremendous success with one child. But all the expertise, inherent and learned during the process cannot assure that success can be replicated in raising another child with the same process.

Expertise can contribute to success in complex situations, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for success.

Outcomes will always remain uncertain with complex problems.

Pre-flight checklists

I have started reading 'The Checklist Manifesto' by Dr. Atul Gawande. An accomplished surgeon, Dr. Gawande has started the book with stories of how lives were saved and sometimes almost lost because the team in the OR followed strict procedure or failed to, respectively.

He also tells the story of how pilot checklists were born. It was at Wright Airfield in Dayton Ohio in 1935 where the US Army and US Army Air Corps were evaluating the next generation long range bomber for the US Military. The Boeing B299 had already impressed the evaluation team till then, outclassing the competition in terms of range, speed and payload.

The military brass was there just to complete the formality. On that day, the sleek aircraft roared down the runway and took the skies and climbed sharply to 300 feet; at which point two of its four engines stalled and the plane tipped on its wing and crashed to the ground killing 2 of its 5 crew members.

The investigation revealed that there was no mechanical failure and the crash was due to pilot error. The B299, one newspaper reported, was too much aircraft for one man to fly. The pilot was required to control the air fuel mixture to its four engines separately and to control the pitch on its constant speed propellers individually and to watch engine temperature and oil pressure on those four engines individually all in addition to keeping an eye on altitude, air speed, rudder, elevators, ailerons and flaps. The pilot on that day had missed releasing a new locking mechanism on the elevators keeping them angling the aircraft upwards until it hit stall speed.

The Air Corps ordered the next best aircraft from Douglas but the Army ordered a few from Boeing from Research purposes using a legal loophole. The army delivered these planes to the 2nd Bombardment group at Langley field in Virginia and launched a study to figure out how to fly this plane more reliably. This team came up with the idea of pre-flight checklists.

The checklist has been saving lives in Operation Theaters and in aluminium cylinders shooting through the sky ever since.

Incidentally, after the US Army figured out that the 4 engines behemoth was indeed fly-able, they went on the order more than 12000 of the Boeing  Flying Fortress for World War II.

More stuff from this amazing book to follow. Watch this space.

Wearing a tie and doing it right.

We visited a Business School campus for recruitment the other day and among the candidates were a few guys who insisted on wearing their tie loose around their neck with the collar open. And this is for the interview.

Call me old fashioned, but this seemed a little callous. Perhaps they did not want the job and the college insisted that they apply, but they said they really wanted to work for an analytics company. I suggested they could take off the jacket and tie but they said they were comfortable.

I wonder what it takes for MBAs to take a hint.

November short

The problem with religious authority begins not so much when they tell us how we should behave but when they start to assume control over how we should think.

Global warming

I read in the newspaper today that this November is likely to be the hottest November ever and the onset of winter is expected only in late December. A senior from B-School who lives in Europe who hates the cold is not complaining, but the 10800 citizens of the tiny island nation of Tuvalu are already feeling the heat. The rising sea levels have seen the salt water enter the fresh water aquifers and the primary source of fresh water on the island is now rainwater harvesting. They are facing a bleak future. For some others though, the future is already here. The first refugees of rising sea levels have already migrated from the Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea  to relocate to island of Bougainville after salt water inundated their crops and infiltrated their fresh water wells. This newfound safety on another island may be fleeting though as scientists believe that most of their islands will be uninhabitable by 2016 and completely submerged as early as 2020.

Yet others have come up with a more novel solution. President Anote Tong of Kiribati, another small island nation in the south pacific has bought land in Fiji in preparation for the day that Kiribati will have to be abandoned due to rising sea water levels.

Closer to the western world, the Alaskan island of Kivalina is under threat too with sea water levels rising at a rate that gives the 400 residents of the island just under a decade to think about where they wish to relocate to.

I suspect that even for the nay-sayers, the evidence is going to soon become difficult to ignore, but they have another line of defense. There is no proof they say that global warming is anthropogenic. The Earth has been subjected to warming and cooling cycles for eons and some groups actually claim that another ice age is around the corner. Time to turn on the oil fired heaters for them I suppose.

Sales pressure

I visited my bank for some work a few days ago and someone accosted me trying to sell me some mutual fund investment. I politely declined. Today, I received a call from someone else in my branch who wished to speak with me about investment opportunities. Needless to say, the conversation was starting to veer towards this same fund. If I dig a little deeper, I might find that this fund is focused on the 'transportation' sector and I suspect airlines fall squarely within the transport sector.

One would think that by now, my relationship manager at my bank would know that I am not interested in investing in anything but index funds at least for the time being.

However, just like a Smith & Wesson beats four aces, a sales target beats relationships.

Goin' 'lectric

India has witnessed a leapfrogging of technology at least once with our Mobile Telephony revolution skipping the landline entirely for most of the nation. We might be staring at another such opportunity vis-a-vis fossil fuels and clean energy. For myriad reasons, India has been unable to deliver grid power to a large percentage of the population. With Solar power and LED bulbs and a small battery, we can perhaps expend with the cost, and corruption, involved in stringing a lot of aluminium across a lot of steel.

With Solar Photo Voltaic Cells becoming ever more efficient and Lithium-ion batteries evolving at the rate they are, we are facing for the first time ever, the possibility that power generation and consumption do not need to be concurrent. If you have not yet watched Elon Musk speak at the launch of the Tesla Powerwall, you might want to do so now.

With Tesla declaring some interest in setting up a Gigafactory in India for manufacture of batteries, all it might take is a little nudge for us to be able to drop the shackles of fossil fuels entirely.

Airline IPO

Indigo's IPO has been in the news for a couple of days. An article in Business Standard proclaimed yesterday that on the first day the issue had been subscribed 86%. If you read the article through, you might notice that the blocks allocated to institutional investors have been oversubscribed and the blocks allocated for individual investors have been left almost completely unsubscribed.

Interestingly, the airline has reported a negative net worth on 30 June, after it paid out a dividend of Rs 1080 Crores to the founder promoters in FY 2015. Add that to the dividend paid out in FY 14 of Rs 377 Crores and the 1010 Crores of interim dividend declared for this year, and we come to a value of about 2400 Crores. Of the total IPO value of 3200 Crores, 1200 crores is new capital and the remaining issue is accounted for by sale of equity by the founders according to this article. The company has stated that it intends to use part of the IPO proceeds to retire about 1200 Crores of its 3900 Crores of debt. So the entire amount of new capital invested by folks like you and me and will be used to pay off one-third of the old debt.


To top things off, the company has clearly stated as part of disclosures for their IPO that "there can be no assurance that we will be able to achieve a positive net worth in the periods going forward. If this financial position (negative net worth) continues, it may be difficult or more expensive to obtain future financing or meet our liquidity needs."

Wait. What? Let me get this straight. If I understand this correctly, the capital markets in my country find it acceptable that I can start a company, take on a mountain of debt to buy new aircraft, place an order for another 430 aircraft, pay myself a dividend exceeding the total profits earned in the last few years and large enough to take the net worth of this company to a point below zero, then offer to sell the company to other investors while telling them that I give them no assurance that the company's net worth can turn positive again and also add for good measure, that it might be difficult to maintain the liquidity needs of the company.

Now that takes titanium cojones.
It is easy to see why the individual investors might want to stay away from this IPO. I wonder what the institutional investors are up to.