Many of my friends and classmates insisted me to mail them the following article by Mrs. Sudha murthy(wife of Narayanmurthy of Infosys), hence i am doing it.
This is an article by Sudha Murthy (No introductions required). Both romantic and inspiring as the article is, one cannot but help concluding that the best thing to happen to Narayan Murthy that led to the founding of Infosys was his marriage to a woman as remarkable as Sudha.
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It was in Pune that I met Narayan Murthy through my friend Prasanna who is now the Wipro chief, who was also training in Telco.
Most of the books that Prasanna lent me had Murthy's name on them, which meant that I had a preconceived image of the man.
Contrary to expectation, Murthy was shy, bespectacled and an introvert. When he invited us for dinner, I was a bit taken aback as I thought the young man was making a very fast move. I refused since I was the only girl in the group. But Murthy was relentless and we all decided to meet for dinner the next day at 7.30 pm at Green Fields hotel on the Main Road, Pune. The next day I went there at 7 o clock since I had to go to the tailor near the hotel. And what do I see? Mr. Murthy waiting in front of the hotel and it was only seven. Till today, Murthy maintains that I had mentioned (consciously!) that I would be going to the tailor at 7 so that I could meet him. And I maintain that I did not say any such thing consciously or unconsciously because I did not think of Murthy as anything other than a friend at that stage. We have agreed to disagree on this matter.
Soon, we became friends. Our conversations were filled with Murthy's experiences abroad and the books that he has read. My friends insisted that Murthy was trying to impress me because he was interested in me. I kept denying it till one fine day, after dinner Murthy said, I want to tell you something. I knew this was it. It was coming. He said, I am 5'4" tall. I come from a lower middle class family. I can never become rich in my life and I can never give you any riches. You are beautiful, bright and intelligent and you can get anyone you want. But will you marry me? I asked Murthy to give me some time for an answer.
My father didn't want me to marry a wannabe politician, (a communist at that) who didn't have a steady job and wanted to build an orphanage... When I went to Hubli I told my parents about Murthy and his proposal. My mother was positive since Murthy was also from Karnataka, seemed intelligent and comes from a good family. But my father asked: What's his job, his salary, his qualifications etc? Murthy was working as a research assistant and was earning less than me. He was willing to go Dutch with me on our outings.
My parents agreed to meet Murthy in Pune on a particular day at 10 am sharp. Murthy did not turn up. How can I trust a man to take care of my daughter if he cannot keep an appointment, asked my father? At 12 noon Murthy turned up in a bright red shirt! He had gone on work to Bombay, was stuck in a traffic jam on the Ghats, so he hired a taxi (though it was very expensive for him) to meet his would-be father-in-law. My father was unimpressed. My father asked him what he wanted to become in life. Murthy said he wanted to become a politician in the communist party and wanted to open an orphanage.
My father gave his verdict. No. I don't want my daughter to marry somebody who wants to become a communist and then open an orphanage when he himself didn't have money to support his family. Ironically, today, I have opened many orphanages something which Murthy wanted to do 25 years ago.
By this time I realized I had developed a liking towards Murthy which could only be termed as love. I wanted to marry Murthy because he is an honest man. He proposed to me highlighting the negatives in his life. I promised my father that I will not marry Murthy without his blessings though at the same time, I cannot marry anybody else. My father said he would agree if Murthy promised to take up a steady job. But Murthy refused saying he will not do things in life because somebody wanted him to. So, I was caught between the two most important people in my life.
The stalemate continued for three years during which our courtship took us to every restaurant and cinema hall in Pune.
In those days, Murthy was always broke. Moreover, he didn't earn much to manage. Ironically today, he manages Infosys Technologies Ltd one of the world's most reputed companies. He always owed me money. We used to go for dinner and he would say, I don't have money with me, you pay my share and I will return it to you later. For three years I maintained a book on Murthy's debt to me. No, he never returned the money and I finally tore it up after my wedding. The amount was a little over Rs 4000. During this interim period Murthy quit his job as research assistant and started his own software business. Now, I had to pay his salary too!
Towards the late 70s computers were entering India in a big way. During the fag end of 1977 Murthy decided to take up a job as General Manager at Patni Computers in Bombay. But before he joined the company he wanted to marry me since he was to go on training to the US after joining.
My father gave in as he was happy Murthy had a decent job now.
We were married in Murthy's house in Bangalore on February 10, 1978 with only our two families present. I got my first silk sari. The wedding expenses came to only Rs 800 (US $ 17) with Murthy and I pooling in Rs 400 each.
I went to the US with Murthy after marriage. Murthy encouraged me to see America on my own because I loved traveling. I toured America for three months on backpack and had interesting experiences which will remain fresh in my mind forever. Like the time when I was taken into custody by the New York police because they thought I was an Italian trafficking drugs in Harlem. Or the time when I spent the night at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with an old couple. Murthy panicked because he couldn't get a response from my hotel room even at midnight. He thought I was either killed or kidnapped.
In 1981 Murthy wanted to start Infosys. He had a vision and zero capital... initially I was very apprehensive about Murthy getting into business. We did not have any business background. Moreover we were living a comfortable life in Bombay with a regular pay check and I didn't want to rock the boat. But Murthy was passionate about creating good quality software. I decided to support him.
Typical of Murthy, he just had a dream and no money. So I gave him Rs10000 which I had saved for a rainy day, without his knowledge and told him, this is all I have. Take it. I give you three years sabbatical leave. I will take care of the financial needs of our house. You go and chase your dreams without any worry.
But you have only three years!
Murthy and his six colleagues started Infosys in 1981, with enormous interest and hard work. In 1982 I left Telco and moved to Pune with Murthy. We bought a small house on loan which also became the Infosys office. I was a clerk-cum-cook-cum-programmer. I also took up a job as Senior Systems analyst with Walchand group of Industries to support the house. In 1983 Infosys got their first client, MICO, in Bangalore.
Murthy moved to Bangalore and stayed with his mother while I went to Hubli to deliver my second child Rohan. Ten days after my son was born, Murthy left for the US on project work. I saw him only after a year as I was unable to join Murthy in the US because my son had infantile eczema, an allergy to vaccinations. So for more than a year I did not step outside our home for fear of my son contracting an infection. It was only after Rohan got all his vaccinations that I came to Bangalore where we rented a small house in Jayanagar and rented another house as Infosys headquarters. My father presented Murthy a scooter to commute. I once again became a cook programmer, clerk, secretary, office assistant Nandan Nilekani (MD of Infosys) and his wife Rohini stayed with us. While Rohini baby sat my son, I wrote programmes for Infosys.
There was no car, no phone, just two kids and a bunch of us working hard, juggling our lives and having fun while Infosys was taking shape. It was not only me but the wives of other partners too who gave their unstinted support.
We all knew that our men were trying to build something good. It was like a big joint family, taking care and looking out for one another. I still remember Sudha Gopalakrishna looking after my daughter Akshata with all care and love while Kumari Shibulal cooked for all of us.
Murthy made it very clear that it would either be me or him working at Infosys. Never the two of us together... I was involved with Infosys initially. Nandan Nilekani suggested I should be on the Board but Murthy said he did not want a husband and wife team at Infosys. I was shocked since I had the relevant experience and technical qualifications. He said, Sudha if you want to work with Infosys, I will withdraw, happily. I was pained to know that I will not be involved in the company my husband was building and that I would have to give up a job that I am qualified to do and love doing. It took me a couple of days to grasp the reason behind Murthy's request. I realized that to make Infosys a success one had to give one's 100 percent. One had to be focused on it alone with no other distractions. If the two of us had to give 100 percent to Infosys then what would happen to our home and our children? One of us had to take care of our home while the other took care of Infosys. I opted to be a homemaker, after all Infosys was Murthy's dream. It was a big sacrifice but it was one that had to be made. Even today, Murthy says, Sudha, I stepped on your career to make mine. You are responsible for my success.
I might have given up my career for my husband's sake. But that does not make me a doormat... Many think that I have been made the sacrificial lamb at Narayan Murthy's altar of success. A few women journalists have even accused me of setting a wrong example by giving up my dreams to make my husbands a reality. Isn't freedom about living your life the way you want it? What is right for one person might be wrong for another. It is up to the individual to make a choice that is effective in her life. I feel that when a woman gives up her right to choose for herself is when she crosses over from being an individual to a doormat. Murthy's dreams encompassed not only himself but a generation of people. It was about founding something worthy, exemplary and honorable. It was about creation and distribution of wealth. His dreams were grander than my career plans, in all aspects. So, when I had to choose between Marty's career and mine, I opted for what I thought was a right choice.
We had a home and two little children, measles, mumps, fractures, PTA meetings, wants and needs of growing children do not care much for grandiose dreams. They just needed to be attended to. Somebody had to take care of it all. Somebody had to stay back to create a home base that would be fertile for healthy growth, happiness, and more dreams to dream. I became that somebody willingly.
I can confidently say that if I had had a dream like Infosys, Murthy would have given me his unstinted support. The roles would have been reversed. We are not bound by the archaic rules of marriage. I cook for him but I don't wait up to serve dinner like a traditional wife. So, he has no hassles about heating up the food and having his dinner. He does not intrude into my time especially when I am writing my novels. He does not interfere in my work at the Infosys Foundation and I don't interfere with the running of Infosys. I teach Computer Science to MBA and MCA students at Christ College for a few hours every week and I earn around Rs 50,000 a year. I value this financial independence greatly though there is no need for me to pursue a teaching career. Murthy respects that. I travel all over the world without Murthy because he hates traveling. We trust each other implicitly. We have another understanding too. While he earns the money, I spend it, mostly through the charity. Philanthropy is a profession and an art... The Infosys Foundation was born in 1997 with the sole objective of uplifting the less-privileged sections of society. In the past three years we have built hospitals, orphanages, rehabilitation centers, school buildings, science centers and more than 3500 libraries. Our work is mainly in the rural areas amongst women and children. I am one of the trustees and our activities span six states including Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Orissa, Chandigarh and Maharashtra. I travel to around 800 villages constantly. Infosys Foundation has a minimal staff of three trustees and three office members. We all work very hard to achieve our goals and that is the reason why Infosys Foundation has a distinct identity.
Every year we donate around Rs 5-6 crore (Rs 50 - 60 million). We run Infosys Foundation the way Murthy runs Infosys in a professional and scientific way. Philanthropy is a profession and an art. It can be used or misused. We slowly want to increase the donations and we dream of a time when Infosys Foundation could donate large amounts of money. Every year we receive more than 10,000 applications for donations. Everyday I receive more than 120 calls. Amongst these, there are those who genuinely need help and there are hood winkers too.
I receive letters asking me to donate Rs five lakh to someone because five lakh is, like peanuts to Infosys. Some people write to us asking for free Infosys shares. Over the years I have learnt to differentiate the wheat from the chaff, though I still give a patient hearing to all the cases. Sometimes I feel I have lost the ability to trust people. I have become shrewder to avoid being conned. It saddens me to realize that even as a person is talking to me I try to analyze them: Has he come here for any donation? Why is he praising my work or enquiring about my health, does he wants some money from me? Eight out of ten times I am right. They do want my money. But I feel bad for the other two whom I suspected. I think that is the price that I have to pay for the position that I am in now. The greatest difficulty in having money is teaching your children the value of it and trying to keep them on a straight line... Bringing up children in a moneyed atmosphere is a difficult task. Even today I think twice if I have to spend Rs 10 on an auto when I can walk up to my house. I cannot expect my children to do the same. They have seen money from the time they were born. But we can lead by example. When they see Murthy wash his own plate after eating and clean the two toilets in the house everyday they realize that no work is demeaning irrespective of how rich you are.
I don't have a maid at home because I don't see the need for one. When children see both parents working hard, living a simple life, most of the time they tend to follow. This doesn't mean we expect our children to live an austere life. My children buy what they want and go where they want but they have to follow certain rules. They will have to show me a bill for whatever they buy. My daughter can buy five new outfits but she has to give away five old ones. My son can go out with his friends for lunch or dinner but if he wants to go to a five star hotel, we discourage it. Or we accompany him.
So far my children haven't given me any heartbreak. They are good children. My eldest daughter is studying abroad, whereas my son is studying in Bangalore. They don't use their father's name in vain. If asked, they only say that his name is Murthy and that he works for Infosys. They don't want to be recognized and appreciated because of their father or me but for themselves. I don't feel guilty about having money for we have worked hard for it. But I don't feel comfortable flaunting it ...it is a conscious decision on our part to live a simple, so-called middle class life. We live in the same two-bedroom, sparsely furnished house before Infosys became a success.
Our only extravagance is buying books and CDs. My house has no lockers for I have no jewels. I wear a stone earring which I bought in Bombay for Rs100. I don't even wear my mangalsutra until I attend some family functions or I am with my mother-in-law. I am not fond of jewellery or saris. Five years ago, I went to Kashi where tradition demands that you give up something and I gave up shopping. Since then I haven't bought myself a sari or gone shopping. It is my friends who gift me with saris. Murty bought me a sari a long time ago. It was not to my taste and I told him to refrain from buying saris for me in the future. I am no good at selecting men's clothes either. It is my daughter who does the shopping for us. I still have the same sofa at home which my daughter wants to change. However, we have indulged ourselves with each one having their own music system and computer. I don't carry a purse and neither does Murty most of the time. I do tell him to keep some small change with him but he doesn't. I borrow money from my secretary or my driver if I need cash. They know my habit so they always carry extra cash with them. But I settle the accounts every evening. Murty and I are very comfortable with our lifestyle and we don't see the need to change it now that we have money.
Murty and I are two opposites that complement each other... Murty is sensitive and romantic in his own way. He always gifts me books addressed to From Me to You. Or to the person I most admire etc. We both love books. We are both complete opposites. I am an extrovert and he is an introvert. I love watching movies and listening to classical music. Murty loves listening to English classical music. I go out for movies with my students and secretary every other week. I am still young at heart. I really enjoyed watching "Kaho Na Pyaar Hai" and I am a Hrithik Roshan fan. It has been more than 20 years since Murty and I went for a movie. My daughter once gave us a surprise by booking tickets for "Titanic". Since I had a prior engagement that day, Murty went for the movie with his secretary Pandu. I love traveling whereas Murty loves spending time at home.
Friends come and go with the share prices... Even in my dreams, I did not expect Infosys to grow like the way it has. I don't think even Murty envisioned this phenomenal success, at least not in 1981. After Infosys went public in 1993, we became what people would call as rich, moneyed people. I was shocked to see what was happening to Infosys and to us. Suddenly you see and hear about so much money. Your name and photo is splashed in the papers. People talk about you. It was all new to me.
Suddenly I have people walking up to me saying, oh, we were such good friends, we had a meal 25 years ago. They claim to have been present at our wedding (which is an utter lie because only my family was present at my wedding). I don't even know all these people who claim to know Murty and me so well.
But that doesn't mean I don't have true friends. I do have genuine friends, a handful, which has been with me for a very long time. My equation with these people has not changed and vice versa. I am also very close to Narayan Murty's family, especially my sister-in-law Kamala Murty, a school teacher, who is more of a dear friend to me. I have discovered that these are the few relationships and friendships that don't fluctuate depending on the price of Infosys shares.
Have I lost my identity as a woman, in Murty's shadow...?
No. I might be Mrs Narayan Murty. I might be Akshata and Rohan's mother. I might be the trustee of Infosys Foundation. But I am still Sudha. I play different roles like all women. That doesn't mean we don't have our own identity. Women have that extra quality of adaptability and learn to fit into different shoes. But we are our own selves still. And we have to exact our freedom by making the right choices in our lives dictated by us and not by the world.
"Shoot for the moon...even if u miss, u’ll be among the stars"
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do ... Explore. Dream. Discover."
Friday, December 24, 2004
DREAM,DREAM,DREAM. CONVERT THESE DREAMS INTO THOUGHTS AND LATER INTO ACTIONS...
Am blogging after a mammoth time...but starting with an inspirational letter post.
This is a speech given by Abdul Kalam at a meeting in Hyderabad some years ago...
It was really inspiring to read... So i thought it is worth putting it up here... Read on...
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I have three visions for India.
In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self- reliant and self-assured. Isn't this incorrect?
I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor. Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closely and consider this the great opportunity of my life.
I see four milestones in my career:
Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India's first satellite launch vehicle,SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist.
After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India's guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994.
The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss. The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon.
One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic callipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around.
He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram callipers and took them to the orthopedic centre.
The children didn't believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!
Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
We are the first in milk production. We are number one in Remote sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat. We are the second largest producer of rice. Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.
I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.
In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?
Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?
I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.
Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours.
YOU say that our government is inefficient.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.
YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke, the airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.
YOU say, say and say.
What do YOU do about it?
Take a person on his way to Singapore.
Give him a name - YOURS.
Give him a face - YOURS.
YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best.
In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores.
YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are.
You pay $5 (approx. Rs.60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5PM and 8PM.
YOU comeback to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity. In Singapore you don't say anything, DO YOU?
YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai.
YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah.
YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, "see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else."
YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, "Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon" (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost."
YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand.
Why don't YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo?
Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston?
We are still talking of the same YOU.
YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India?
Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr.Tinaikar, had a point to make. "Rich people's dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place," he said. "And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom everytime their dog feels the pressure in his bowels?
In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen do thathere?" He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.
We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? "It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry." So who's going to change the system?
What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.
Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too....I am echoing J.F.Kennedy's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.....
"ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY"
Lets do what India needs from us.
Thank you.
Abdul Kalaam.
This is a speech given by Abdul Kalam at a meeting in Hyderabad some years ago...
It was really inspiring to read... So i thought it is worth putting it up here... Read on...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have three visions for India.
In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self- reliant and self-assured. Isn't this incorrect?
I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor. Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closely and consider this the great opportunity of my life.
I see four milestones in my career:
Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India's first satellite launch vehicle,SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist.
After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India's guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994.
The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss. The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon.
One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic callipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around.
He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram callipers and took them to the orthopedic centre.
The children didn't believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!
Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
We are the first in milk production. We are number one in Remote sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat. We are the second largest producer of rice. Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.
I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.
In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?
Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?
I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.
Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours.
YOU say that our government is inefficient.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.
YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke, the airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.
YOU say, say and say.
What do YOU do about it?
Take a person on his way to Singapore.
Give him a name - YOURS.
Give him a face - YOURS.
YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best.
In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores.
YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are.
You pay $5 (approx. Rs.60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5PM and 8PM.
YOU comeback to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity. In Singapore you don't say anything, DO YOU?
YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai.
YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah.
YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, "see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else."
YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, "Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon" (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost."
YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand.
Why don't YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo?
Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston?
We are still talking of the same YOU.
YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India?
Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr.Tinaikar, had a point to make. "Rich people's dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place," he said. "And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom everytime their dog feels the pressure in his bowels?
In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen do thathere?" He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.
We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? "It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry." So who's going to change the system?
What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.
Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too....I am echoing J.F.Kennedy's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.....
"ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY"
Lets do what India needs from us.
Thank you.
Abdul Kalaam.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
World's Coolest Sportsbikes... A must see...
A slide show of worlds 10 coolest sportsbikes presented by Indiatimes.
Monday, October 18, 2004
Will broadband start IT boom ver 3.0?
Union Communications & IT Minister on October 14 announced the government’s broadband policy. Though the government allowed direct-to-home (DTH) operators to offer broadband services, it also rejected a number of recommendations made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
The policy has also delicensed the 2.40-2.48 Ghz band for low power outdoor use.
Given the increasing power of the Internet, this policy was in the offing for a long time now. Now, that it is in place, a lot of things will become clear though it has left a number of sections disgruntled.
What is broadband?
Broadband is a transmission facility having a bandwidth sufficient to carry multiple voice, video or data channels simultaneously.
Each channel occupies (is modulated to) a different frequency bandwidth on the transmission medium and is demodulated to its original frequency at the receiving end.
Channels are separated by “guardbands” (empty spaces) to ensure that each channel won’t interfere with its neighboring channels.
This technique is used to provide 50 CATV channels on one coaxial cable.
The term “broadband” is widely used to describe Internet connections with download speeds which are faster than dial-up, including DSL services, cable modem services, as well as satellite connections.
What is India’s position vis-Ã -vis the rest of the world when it comes to broadband access?
Despite its reputation as an infotech powerhouse, India lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband access.
The US is the world's leading broadband country with over 25 million lines and the figure is growing rapidly Japan has nearly 15 million, China 14 million, South Korea 12 million and Canada over five million.
India had only 82,000 lines till December 31, 2003. Globally, broadband lines crossed the 100.8 million-mark in 2003. The previous year, the figure was 62 million. So, one can gauge how fast this technology is growing.
What are the different types of broadband connections?
The main types of broadband connection are optical fibre network, DSL, cable and satellite. Newer technologies, like Wi-Fi, are also coming up.
Fibre optics technology can provide nearly unlimited bandwith potential and is steadily replacing coper network specially in intra-city backbone networks. This is being deployed in commercial buildings and some metros and big cities having high density potential broadband users.
Hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC), fibre to the curb (FTTC) and fibre to the home (FTTH) networks make use of fibre cabling into the last mile.
There are three types of DSL lines – symmetrical digital subscriber line (SDSL), ISDN digital subscriber line (IDSL), and asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL).
SDSL is a symmetric service - the upstream speed is the same as the downstream speed. SDSL can deliver high-speed data communications at up to 1.54 mbps. This service is delivered via a single copper pair of wires and is ideal for business applications that would have otherwise been served by an expensive T1.
IDSL is a symmetric service that can deliver high-speed data communication up to 128 kbps.
In many non-urban areas, the distance between a telephone company's central office and a user's business or home can be substantial. IDSL's strongest asset is its ability to reach up to 36,000 feet for the telephone central office. This is twice the distance of SDSL.
ADSL is an asymmetric service, which means the downstream speeds are faster than the upstream speeds. This service is ideal for single users with high-speed data needs. It is an excellent solution for home Web users who would like to conduct quick, efficient Web surfing, Internet research, large file downloads, video streaming, audio streaming, and 3-D image posting.
ADSL operates at speeds of 384/128 kbps or 768/384 kbps, depending on a user's distance from their telephone company's central office.
ADSL is an asymmetrical service that is most commonly offered by telephone companies. ADSL is not suited for business uses such as hosting Web or e-mail servers. In addition, ADSL often uses a bridge instead of a router which provides little to no security, making your network vulnerable to attacks.
ADSL is available in most urban areas and some rural areas where the distance from the exchange is less than 5.5 kilometers. This will also be dependant on line quality and testing.
After DSL, comes the cable connection. Your neighbourhood cable operator is already delivering digital information to your home or office in the form of cable television. This cable also has the ability to allow you to be connected to the Internet at speeds ranging from 128kb through to 1mb.
To receive broadband via cable you need to live or work in a location serviced by one of the cable providers, and have additional network equipment installed.
There are two forms of satellite broadband – one-way and two-way. One-way satellite broadband provides a fast download speed of up to 60 times that of a modem: 3 mb. This is only one way of course and your computer has to be connected to the Internet via a modem to request the data.
Two-way satellite broadband will provide a fast link in both directions, and should be available anywhere throughout the country. The downside is likely to be the cost of this option. Two-way satellite broadband is still in the R&D stage with no field trials planned yet.
Why is a broadband policy needed?
Broadband today is needed for enhancement of quality of life though a number of societal applications including tele-education, tele-medicine, e-governance as well as entertainment. Greater usage of broadband will also help in growth of GDP.
Demand for broadband is primarily based on Internet and computer penetration, which is low in India compared to a number of Asian countries.
High-speed Internet access is available in the country at various speeds from 64 Kbps onwards and an access speed of 128 Kbps is considered “broadband”. There is no uniform standard of broadband connectivity and various countries follow various standards.
It is because of this and to accelerate Internet and PC penetration that a national broadband policy has become necessary.
What is the standard set by the new broadband policy?
India’s new Broadband Policy 2004 defines broadband as: “An always-on data connection that is able to support interactive services including Internet access and the capability of a minimum download speed of 256 kbps to an individual subscriber from the point of Presence (PoP) of the service provider intending to provide broadband service where multiple such individual broadband connections are aggregated and the subscriber is able to access these interactive services including the Internet through this PoP.
“The interactive services will exclude any services for which a separate licence is separately required, for example, real-time voice transmission, except to the extent that it is presently permitted under ISP licence with Internet telephony.”
How many people will be helped by this new policy?
The new policy targets three million broadband users and six million Internet users by the end of 2005.
By the end of 2007, this policy is expected to touch nine million broadband subscribers and 18 million Internet subscribers.
The policy envisions targeting 20 million broadband users and 40 million Internet users by the end of this decade.
How does the new policy intend to boost broadband infrastructure growth?
The new policy encourages creation and growth of infrastructure through various access technologies which can mutually co-exist like optical fibre technologies, digital subscriber lines on copper loop, cable TV network, Satellite and terrestrial wireless technologies. It is for the service provider to decide which technology to use.
Copper loop using DSL can provide broadband services. The age and the condition of copper loop in the country can, at best, provide six million broadband connections.
BSNL and MTNL along with other owners of copper loop are expected to provide about two million connections by the end of 2005. Further, recognising that last mile copper loop is not a ‘bottleneck facility’ for broadband services, access providers shall be free to enter into mutually agreed commercial arrangements for utilisation of available copper loop for expansion of broadband services including content. Use of brand name being treated as a part of the value shall be permitted in such commercial arrangement.
The government also intends to make available transponder capacity for VSAT services at competitive rates after taking into consideration the security requirements. The Department of Telecom (DoT), in consultation with the concerned Ministries, will soon propose additional measures with regard to Open Sky Policy for VSAT operators. VSAT operators would be closely associated while determining the transponder usage charges.
Service providers will be allowed to enter into franchisee agreement with cable TV network operators. However, the licensee shall be responsible for compliance of the terms and conditions of the licence. Further, in the case of DTH services, the service providers shall be permitted to provide receive-only-Internet service after obtaining ISP licence from DoT.
The DTH Service providers will also be permitted to provide bi-directional Internet services after obtaining VSAT and ISP licence from DoT.
What are the other important features of this new policy?
The policy intends to boost spread of fibre networks keeping in view the long term perspective as they are able to provide huge amounts of bandwidth in the last mile as well as provide a true IP and converged network that can deliver high quality voice, data and video.
The 2.40-2.48 GHz band will be delicensed for low power outdoor use on non-protection, non-interference and non-exclusive basis.
The 5.15-5.35 GHz band shall be delicensed for the indoor use of low power Wi-Fi systems. For outdoor use, the band 5.25-5.35 GHz shall be de-licensed in consultation with Department of Space while delicensing in the band 5.15-5.25 GHz would be considered after the process of vacation.
In order to simplify SACFA/WPC clearance, the VSAT operators shall be allowed to start the installation process for VSAT terminals after a period of one month of submitting all relevant documents to WPC for SACFA/WPC clearance wherever the total height of such installation is less than five metres above the rooftop of an authorised building.
In the case of receive-only VSAT terminals and DTH with receive-only-Internet, no SACFA/WPC clearance will be required wherever the total height of such installation is less than five metres above the rooftop of an authorised building.
A transparent scheme is being outlined separately for time-bound frequency allocation, siting clearance and wireless licensing by removing the cumbersome procedures, computerisation and by setting predetermined standards.
To keep pace with technological advances, throughput and antenna size for VSATs are proposed to be reviewed periodically.
Commercial VSAT service providers having ISP licence shall be permitted use of same hub station and remote station to provide Internet service directly to the subscribers. Further, these remote stations shall be permitted to be used as a distribution point to provide Internet services to multiple independent subscribers.
The policy has assigned a very high priority to indigenous manufacture of broadband related equipments and shall endeavour to work closely with the concerned ministries and manufacturers associations so that the equipment are made available at an affordable price.
The policy has also delicensed the 2.40-2.48 Ghz band for low power outdoor use.
Given the increasing power of the Internet, this policy was in the offing for a long time now. Now, that it is in place, a lot of things will become clear though it has left a number of sections disgruntled.
What is broadband?
Broadband is a transmission facility having a bandwidth sufficient to carry multiple voice, video or data channels simultaneously.
Each channel occupies (is modulated to) a different frequency bandwidth on the transmission medium and is demodulated to its original frequency at the receiving end.
Channels are separated by “guardbands” (empty spaces) to ensure that each channel won’t interfere with its neighboring channels.
This technique is used to provide 50 CATV channels on one coaxial cable.
The term “broadband” is widely used to describe Internet connections with download speeds which are faster than dial-up, including DSL services, cable modem services, as well as satellite connections.
What is India’s position vis-Ã -vis the rest of the world when it comes to broadband access?
Despite its reputation as an infotech powerhouse, India lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband access.
The US is the world's leading broadband country with over 25 million lines and the figure is growing rapidly Japan has nearly 15 million, China 14 million, South Korea 12 million and Canada over five million.
India had only 82,000 lines till December 31, 2003. Globally, broadband lines crossed the 100.8 million-mark in 2003. The previous year, the figure was 62 million. So, one can gauge how fast this technology is growing.
What are the different types of broadband connections?
The main types of broadband connection are optical fibre network, DSL, cable and satellite. Newer technologies, like Wi-Fi, are also coming up.
Fibre optics technology can provide nearly unlimited bandwith potential and is steadily replacing coper network specially in intra-city backbone networks. This is being deployed in commercial buildings and some metros and big cities having high density potential broadband users.
Hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC), fibre to the curb (FTTC) and fibre to the home (FTTH) networks make use of fibre cabling into the last mile.
There are three types of DSL lines – symmetrical digital subscriber line (SDSL), ISDN digital subscriber line (IDSL), and asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL).
SDSL is a symmetric service - the upstream speed is the same as the downstream speed. SDSL can deliver high-speed data communications at up to 1.54 mbps. This service is delivered via a single copper pair of wires and is ideal for business applications that would have otherwise been served by an expensive T1.
IDSL is a symmetric service that can deliver high-speed data communication up to 128 kbps.
In many non-urban areas, the distance between a telephone company's central office and a user's business or home can be substantial. IDSL's strongest asset is its ability to reach up to 36,000 feet for the telephone central office. This is twice the distance of SDSL.
ADSL is an asymmetric service, which means the downstream speeds are faster than the upstream speeds. This service is ideal for single users with high-speed data needs. It is an excellent solution for home Web users who would like to conduct quick, efficient Web surfing, Internet research, large file downloads, video streaming, audio streaming, and 3-D image posting.
ADSL operates at speeds of 384/128 kbps or 768/384 kbps, depending on a user's distance from their telephone company's central office.
ADSL is an asymmetrical service that is most commonly offered by telephone companies. ADSL is not suited for business uses such as hosting Web or e-mail servers. In addition, ADSL often uses a bridge instead of a router which provides little to no security, making your network vulnerable to attacks.
ADSL is available in most urban areas and some rural areas where the distance from the exchange is less than 5.5 kilometers. This will also be dependant on line quality and testing.
After DSL, comes the cable connection. Your neighbourhood cable operator is already delivering digital information to your home or office in the form of cable television. This cable also has the ability to allow you to be connected to the Internet at speeds ranging from 128kb through to 1mb.
To receive broadband via cable you need to live or work in a location serviced by one of the cable providers, and have additional network equipment installed.
There are two forms of satellite broadband – one-way and two-way. One-way satellite broadband provides a fast download speed of up to 60 times that of a modem: 3 mb. This is only one way of course and your computer has to be connected to the Internet via a modem to request the data.
Two-way satellite broadband will provide a fast link in both directions, and should be available anywhere throughout the country. The downside is likely to be the cost of this option. Two-way satellite broadband is still in the R&D stage with no field trials planned yet.
Why is a broadband policy needed?
Broadband today is needed for enhancement of quality of life though a number of societal applications including tele-education, tele-medicine, e-governance as well as entertainment. Greater usage of broadband will also help in growth of GDP.
Demand for broadband is primarily based on Internet and computer penetration, which is low in India compared to a number of Asian countries.
High-speed Internet access is available in the country at various speeds from 64 Kbps onwards and an access speed of 128 Kbps is considered “broadband”. There is no uniform standard of broadband connectivity and various countries follow various standards.
It is because of this and to accelerate Internet and PC penetration that a national broadband policy has become necessary.
What is the standard set by the new broadband policy?
India’s new Broadband Policy 2004 defines broadband as: “An always-on data connection that is able to support interactive services including Internet access and the capability of a minimum download speed of 256 kbps to an individual subscriber from the point of Presence (PoP) of the service provider intending to provide broadband service where multiple such individual broadband connections are aggregated and the subscriber is able to access these interactive services including the Internet through this PoP.
“The interactive services will exclude any services for which a separate licence is separately required, for example, real-time voice transmission, except to the extent that it is presently permitted under ISP licence with Internet telephony.”
How many people will be helped by this new policy?
The new policy targets three million broadband users and six million Internet users by the end of 2005.
By the end of 2007, this policy is expected to touch nine million broadband subscribers and 18 million Internet subscribers.
The policy envisions targeting 20 million broadband users and 40 million Internet users by the end of this decade.
How does the new policy intend to boost broadband infrastructure growth?
The new policy encourages creation and growth of infrastructure through various access technologies which can mutually co-exist like optical fibre technologies, digital subscriber lines on copper loop, cable TV network, Satellite and terrestrial wireless technologies. It is for the service provider to decide which technology to use.
Copper loop using DSL can provide broadband services. The age and the condition of copper loop in the country can, at best, provide six million broadband connections.
BSNL and MTNL along with other owners of copper loop are expected to provide about two million connections by the end of 2005. Further, recognising that last mile copper loop is not a ‘bottleneck facility’ for broadband services, access providers shall be free to enter into mutually agreed commercial arrangements for utilisation of available copper loop for expansion of broadband services including content. Use of brand name being treated as a part of the value shall be permitted in such commercial arrangement.
The government also intends to make available transponder capacity for VSAT services at competitive rates after taking into consideration the security requirements. The Department of Telecom (DoT), in consultation with the concerned Ministries, will soon propose additional measures with regard to Open Sky Policy for VSAT operators. VSAT operators would be closely associated while determining the transponder usage charges.
Service providers will be allowed to enter into franchisee agreement with cable TV network operators. However, the licensee shall be responsible for compliance of the terms and conditions of the licence. Further, in the case of DTH services, the service providers shall be permitted to provide receive-only-Internet service after obtaining ISP licence from DoT.
The DTH Service providers will also be permitted to provide bi-directional Internet services after obtaining VSAT and ISP licence from DoT.
What are the other important features of this new policy?
The policy intends to boost spread of fibre networks keeping in view the long term perspective as they are able to provide huge amounts of bandwidth in the last mile as well as provide a true IP and converged network that can deliver high quality voice, data and video.
The 2.40-2.48 GHz band will be delicensed for low power outdoor use on non-protection, non-interference and non-exclusive basis.
The 5.15-5.35 GHz band shall be delicensed for the indoor use of low power Wi-Fi systems. For outdoor use, the band 5.25-5.35 GHz shall be de-licensed in consultation with Department of Space while delicensing in the band 5.15-5.25 GHz would be considered after the process of vacation.
In order to simplify SACFA/WPC clearance, the VSAT operators shall be allowed to start the installation process for VSAT terminals after a period of one month of submitting all relevant documents to WPC for SACFA/WPC clearance wherever the total height of such installation is less than five metres above the rooftop of an authorised building.
In the case of receive-only VSAT terminals and DTH with receive-only-Internet, no SACFA/WPC clearance will be required wherever the total height of such installation is less than five metres above the rooftop of an authorised building.
A transparent scheme is being outlined separately for time-bound frequency allocation, siting clearance and wireless licensing by removing the cumbersome procedures, computerisation and by setting predetermined standards.
To keep pace with technological advances, throughput and antenna size for VSATs are proposed to be reviewed periodically.
Commercial VSAT service providers having ISP licence shall be permitted use of same hub station and remote station to provide Internet service directly to the subscribers. Further, these remote stations shall be permitted to be used as a distribution point to provide Internet services to multiple independent subscribers.
The policy has assigned a very high priority to indigenous manufacture of broadband related equipments and shall endeavour to work closely with the concerned ministries and manufacturers associations so that the equipment are made available at an affordable price.
Friday, August 13, 2004
New Corporate Rules
Transportation:
It is advised that you come to work driving a car according to your salary.
If we see you driving a Honda, we assume you are doing well financially and therefore you do not need a raise.
If you drive a 10 year old car or taking public transportation, we assume you must have lots of savings therefore you do not need a raise.
If you drive a Pickup, you are right where you need to be and therefore you do not need a raise.
Annual Leave:
Each employee will receive 52 Annual Leave days a year (Wooow!). They are called Sunday.
Lunch Break:
Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch as they need to eat more so that they can look healthy.
Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch to get a balanced meal to maintain their average figure.
Fat people get 5 minutes for lunch, because that's all the time needed to drink a Slim Fast and take a diet pill.
Sick Days:
We will no longer accept a doctor Medical Cert as proof of sickness.
If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.
Toilet Use
Entirely too much time is being spent in the toilets.
There is now a strict 3-minute time limit in the cubicles. At the end of three minutes, an alarm will sound, the toilet paper roll will retract, the door will open and a picture will be taken. After your second offence, your picture will be posted on the company bulletin board under the "Chronic Offenders" category. Subsequent pictures will be sold at public auctions to raise money to pay your salary.
Surgery:
As long as you are an employee here, you need all your organs. You should not consider removing anything. We hired you intact. To have something removed constitutes a breach of employment.
Internet Usage
All personal internet usage will be recorded and charges will be deducted from your bonus (if any) and if we decide not to give you any, charges will be deducted from your salary. (note: Rs.20 per minute as we have 4MB connection).
Just for the record. 73% of the staff will not be entitled to any salary for the next 3 months as their internet charges have exceeded their 3 months salary.
Thank you for your loyalty to our company. We are here to provide a positive employment experience. Therefore, all questions, comments, concerns, complaints, frustrations, irritations, aggravations, insinuations, allegations, accusations, contemplation, consternation and input should be directed elsewhere.
It is advised that you come to work driving a car according to your salary.
If we see you driving a Honda, we assume you are doing well financially and therefore you do not need a raise.
If you drive a 10 year old car or taking public transportation, we assume you must have lots of savings therefore you do not need a raise.
If you drive a Pickup, you are right where you need to be and therefore you do not need a raise.
Annual Leave:
Each employee will receive 52 Annual Leave days a year (Wooow!). They are called Sunday.
Lunch Break:
Skinny people get 30 minutes for lunch as they need to eat more so that they can look healthy.
Normal size people get 15 minutes for lunch to get a balanced meal to maintain their average figure.
Fat people get 5 minutes for lunch, because that's all the time needed to drink a Slim Fast and take a diet pill.
Sick Days:
We will no longer accept a doctor Medical Cert as proof of sickness.
If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.
Toilet Use
Entirely too much time is being spent in the toilets.
There is now a strict 3-minute time limit in the cubicles. At the end of three minutes, an alarm will sound, the toilet paper roll will retract, the door will open and a picture will be taken. After your second offence, your picture will be posted on the company bulletin board under the "Chronic Offenders" category. Subsequent pictures will be sold at public auctions to raise money to pay your salary.
Surgery:
As long as you are an employee here, you need all your organs. You should not consider removing anything. We hired you intact. To have something removed constitutes a breach of employment.
Internet Usage
All personal internet usage will be recorded and charges will be deducted from your bonus (if any) and if we decide not to give you any, charges will be deducted from your salary. (note: Rs.20 per minute as we have 4MB connection).
Just for the record. 73% of the staff will not be entitled to any salary for the next 3 months as their internet charges have exceeded their 3 months salary.
Thank you for your loyalty to our company. We are here to provide a positive employment experience. Therefore, all questions, comments, concerns, complaints, frustrations, irritations, aggravations, insinuations, allegations, accusations, contemplation, consternation and input should be directed elsewhere.
Welcome Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
" I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today. As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government - he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.
The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.
Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.
Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons.
We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.
My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.
Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.
Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.
He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.
My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.
Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!
Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.
The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.
Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.
Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons.
We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.
My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.
Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.
Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.
He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.
My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.
Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!
Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.
A Mail from a frustrated victim of spams and forwards
*I wanted to thank all my friends and family who have forwarded chain letters to me in 2003 & 2004.
Because of your kindness:
* I stopped drinking Coca Cola after I found out that it's good for removing toilet stains.
* I stopped going to the movies for fear of sitting on a needle infected with AIDS.
* I smell like a wet dog since I stopped using deodorants because they cause cancer.
* I don't leave my car in the parking lot or any other place and sometimes I even have to walk about 7 blocks for fear that someone will drug me with a perfume sample and try to rob me.
* I also stopped answering the phone for fear that they may ask me to dial a stupid number and the I get a phone bill from hell with calls to Uganda, Singapore and Tokyo.
* I also stopped drinking anything out of a can for fear that I will get sick from the rat feces and urine.
* When I go to parties, I don't look at any girl no matter how hot she is, for fear that she will take me to a hotel, drug me then take my kidneys and leave me taking a nap in a bathtub full of ice.
* I also donated all my savings to the AmyBruce account. A sick girl hat was about to die in the hospital about 7,000 times. (Funny that girl, she's been 7 since 1993...)
* I went bankrupt from bounced checks that I made expecting the $15,000 that Microsoft and AOL were supposed to send me when I participated in their special e-mail program would arrive soon.
* My free Nokia phone never arrived and neither did the free passes for a paid vacation to Disneyland.*
* Made some Hundred wishes before forwarding those ganesh vandana etc..now most of those 'wishes' are already married :( to somone else * Still open to help some from bulgaria who wants to use my account to transfer his uncle property of some hundred millions $.
Because of your kindness:
* I stopped drinking Coca Cola after I found out that it's good for removing toilet stains.
* I stopped going to the movies for fear of sitting on a needle infected with AIDS.
* I smell like a wet dog since I stopped using deodorants because they cause cancer.
* I don't leave my car in the parking lot or any other place and sometimes I even have to walk about 7 blocks for fear that someone will drug me with a perfume sample and try to rob me.
* I also stopped answering the phone for fear that they may ask me to dial a stupid number and the I get a phone bill from hell with calls to Uganda, Singapore and Tokyo.
* I also stopped drinking anything out of a can for fear that I will get sick from the rat feces and urine.
* When I go to parties, I don't look at any girl no matter how hot she is, for fear that she will take me to a hotel, drug me then take my kidneys and leave me taking a nap in a bathtub full of ice.
* I also donated all my savings to the AmyBruce account. A sick girl hat was about to die in the hospital about 7,000 times. (Funny that girl, she's been 7 since 1993...)
* I went bankrupt from bounced checks that I made expecting the $15,000 that Microsoft and AOL were supposed to send me when I participated in their special e-mail program would arrive soon.
* My free Nokia phone never arrived and neither did the free passes for a paid vacation to Disneyland.*
* Made some Hundred wishes before forwarding those ganesh vandana etc..now most of those 'wishes' are already married :( to somone else * Still open to help some from bulgaria who wants to use my account to transfer his uncle property of some hundred millions $.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Daily Life at NIRMA INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT...
A few days back i had asked one of my friend, Aatish, to write me about his new life at NIM.This is what he replied :
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Janta!!!
Before I start this article, I would like to WARN you!!! Anyone who has got big expectations from life in NIM or any other good MBA institution should shut this page and go to something prettier because this is gonna get messy over here.
Very first month in NIM had already taken it's toll and if that was not enough, I'd my first Mid-TERMS, which means the torture of whole months concentrated in 6 exams!!!
To start from the beginning, it is business as usual and I have formulated a weird daily pattern that is sustainable.
I wake at 8:30 am EVERYDAY and sleepwalk through the minimal effort required that makes me look "presentable" in class. Every day, I've to make critical decisions regarding "time management" such as:
1. have both bath and breakfast (becoming a rarity)
2. bath but no breakfast
3. breakfast but no bath
4. neither (becoming alarmingly a regular option)
Every day, I've to take solace that, some people arrive in far worse shape than me, others fight a losing battle with sleep and occasionally doze off right under the prof's nose. Four hours later, I lumber off to the mess, and just can't wait to fall on my bed, UNLESS, sometimes the class notice board has the deadly signs of a quiz at 2:30 pm. Which means, another hour of frenetic page turning followed by sitting emptily through 15, 30, 40 minutes back in the classroom for the quiz to get over.
The infrastructure at NIM is one of the best in the country. The classroom is akin to an amphitheatre, with name slips arranged, to confine each soul to his dreadful misery for the rest of the year to a single seat. For example, my name Aatish hasn't done anything good since I've to sit in front row right under the Prof's nose. So in evening, I manage to get a hour or so of sleep(sometimes) which is very necessary for those "long nights!!" It's 6:00 pm and I'm confused about which subject to start. I would like to add that for each subject there is a long reading to be done, usually exceeding 15 pages, and the very inevitable small fonts to ensure we read more!!!
Then it is 8:00 pm and still no headway in preparation for the next day's class, so I give up and head for the mess, and sit amidst people who give my confidence a bad jolt by offering some free advice on the mess tables. "Haan, Economic Analysis kaa next chapter ho gaaya, read the case also, very easy to solve yaar..... Pass the water please".
Soon it is 10:00 pm, and after some more struggle between Accounting and Human Resources, I give up and head for the CA in the adjoining room, who gleefully smiles and is chased around by several of the so-called engineering types like me. At 12:00 midnight, we have a birthday on GROUND ZERO, the favourite meeting spot at NIM gardens, and there is a proper round of cakes and bumps. Birthday's are a nice thing here, every roomie (roommate) put a mail on the intranet the previous day so everyone gets to know in the batch and it’s the roomie’s duty to get a cake and also get the share of bumps. Also, there is a fair sprinkling of the feminine kind around to witness the inanities other people impose on the birthday boy. Also sometimes there is this method of getting one's face smeared by the birthday cake and cream by a girl of your choice, if she obliges. Else some sympathetic lady comes forth to do the honors. The face looks ugly, but I believe it is worth it. So I cannot wait for mine to come by..…
It is 2:00 am and I head for the Tea-Coffee vending machine at my hostel ground floor, after promising to wind up the day by 4:00 am. At 2:00 am, everybody is awake. There are meetings scheduled at 3:00 am in the night(usually during exams) sometimes 5:00 am and everything is a mess now.
My standard of living has been decreasing everyday. Earlier, I'd rarely wake up till 3:00 am, but now things keep getting worse each day. So now I've woken up till 4:00, 4:30, 5:00, 5:30, 6:00 am!!! It's our duty to tell the birds that wake up guys!! We'r a kind of their alarm system.
That's about it. In case of a detailed description of life at a B-school, another guy has done a far better job with "Snapshots from Hell". In case this induces fear, then that is what it is meant to do. Keeping sanity is an uphill task.
Hence, as a payment for writing this article for you guys, I expect you all to pray for some less mortal souls like us who are facing this music everyday!!!
Byeee and enjoy your life because you never know how bad it can get!!!
Aatish Shah(eaglechap007@yahoo.com)
B.E. Computer
Pune University,
Now at NIM-Ahmedabad.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Janta!!!
Before I start this article, I would like to WARN you!!! Anyone who has got big expectations from life in NIM or any other good MBA institution should shut this page and go to something prettier because this is gonna get messy over here.
Very first month in NIM had already taken it's toll and if that was not enough, I'd my first Mid-TERMS, which means the torture of whole months concentrated in 6 exams!!!
To start from the beginning, it is business as usual and I have formulated a weird daily pattern that is sustainable.
I wake at 8:30 am EVERYDAY and sleepwalk through the minimal effort required that makes me look "presentable" in class. Every day, I've to make critical decisions regarding "time management" such as:
1. have both bath and breakfast (becoming a rarity)
2. bath but no breakfast
3. breakfast but no bath
4. neither (becoming alarmingly a regular option)
Every day, I've to take solace that, some people arrive in far worse shape than me, others fight a losing battle with sleep and occasionally doze off right under the prof's nose. Four hours later, I lumber off to the mess, and just can't wait to fall on my bed, UNLESS, sometimes the class notice board has the deadly signs of a quiz at 2:30 pm. Which means, another hour of frenetic page turning followed by sitting emptily through 15, 30, 40 minutes back in the classroom for the quiz to get over.
The infrastructure at NIM is one of the best in the country. The classroom is akin to an amphitheatre, with name slips arranged, to confine each soul to his dreadful misery for the rest of the year to a single seat. For example, my name Aatish hasn't done anything good since I've to sit in front row right under the Prof's nose. So in evening, I manage to get a hour or so of sleep(sometimes) which is very necessary for those "long nights!!" It's 6:00 pm and I'm confused about which subject to start. I would like to add that for each subject there is a long reading to be done, usually exceeding 15 pages, and the very inevitable small fonts to ensure we read more!!!
Then it is 8:00 pm and still no headway in preparation for the next day's class, so I give up and head for the mess, and sit amidst people who give my confidence a bad jolt by offering some free advice on the mess tables. "Haan, Economic Analysis kaa next chapter ho gaaya, read the case also, very easy to solve yaar..... Pass the water please".
Soon it is 10:00 pm, and after some more struggle between Accounting and Human Resources, I give up and head for the CA in the adjoining room, who gleefully smiles and is chased around by several of the so-called engineering types like me. At 12:00 midnight, we have a birthday on GROUND ZERO, the favourite meeting spot at NIM gardens, and there is a proper round of cakes and bumps. Birthday's are a nice thing here, every roomie (roommate) put a mail on the intranet the previous day so everyone gets to know in the batch and it’s the roomie’s duty to get a cake and also get the share of bumps. Also, there is a fair sprinkling of the feminine kind around to witness the inanities other people impose on the birthday boy. Also sometimes there is this method of getting one's face smeared by the birthday cake and cream by a girl of your choice, if she obliges. Else some sympathetic lady comes forth to do the honors. The face looks ugly, but I believe it is worth it. So I cannot wait for mine to come by..…
It is 2:00 am and I head for the Tea-Coffee vending machine at my hostel ground floor, after promising to wind up the day by 4:00 am. At 2:00 am, everybody is awake. There are meetings scheduled at 3:00 am in the night(usually during exams) sometimes 5:00 am and everything is a mess now.
My standard of living has been decreasing everyday. Earlier, I'd rarely wake up till 3:00 am, but now things keep getting worse each day. So now I've woken up till 4:00, 4:30, 5:00, 5:30, 6:00 am!!! It's our duty to tell the birds that wake up guys!! We'r a kind of their alarm system.
That's about it. In case of a detailed description of life at a B-school, another guy has done a far better job with "Snapshots from Hell". In case this induces fear, then that is what it is meant to do. Keeping sanity is an uphill task.
Hence, as a payment for writing this article for you guys, I expect you all to pray for some less mortal souls like us who are facing this music everyday!!!
Byeee and enjoy your life because you never know how bad it can get!!!
Aatish Shah(eaglechap007@yahoo.com)
B.E. Computer
Pune University,
Now at NIM-Ahmedabad.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Indians realise there's more to life than fat MNC salaries
By Parthip Thyagarajan
A career in Indian Oil, SAIL or one of the Tata companies had once been welcomed as the perfect choice for the bright sparks from the management and engineering colleges until the multinational companies (MNCs) arrived. The MNCs trebled the average basic salary, replaced the accommodation facility with a fat HRA and the family benefit schemes with stock options.
Significantly, it was MNCs like Coca-Cola India, McKinsey, Citibank and Pepsico which garnered the choicest harvest of students during this year's campus recruitment at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. But a dream job with an MNC which spells prestige, lucre and risk to most young Indian professionals and corporate executives could turn out to be a nightmare for some.
My family was greatly impressed by my starting salary,'' says Arvind Chaturvedi (name changed), a 24-year-old IIM graduate who joined a foreign bank last year. His gross monthly salary stands at about Rs 23,000. His father, a government official of 27 years seniority, takes home Rs 9,000 a month. ``But one year later,'' continues Mr Chaturvedi, ``I feel that my father, at my level, enjoyed a far happier life and could offer his children more stability than I can offer mine. Besides, I work round the clock, round the year.''
This sentiment is echoed at all levels in the managerial hierarchy. The transition from an Indian organisation to an MNC is considered especially difficult for middle-and senior-level managers. While the cross-cultural experience enriches many careers, others can be crushed by the excessive workload, the cultural incompatibility with foreign colleagues, the threat of being fired and the neglect of personal life.
While MNCs promise enormous financial rewards, they seem to stint on emotional rewards. ``I can't think of a single family benefit facility that my present employer would offer me right now,'' says the IIM graduate we met earlier. ``And there's no way my family can identify with the organisation I work for.'' Over the decades, employees and their families have taken pride in being associated with PSUs like Indian Oil and ONGC, or giants like Larsen & Toubro and the Tatas. While these organisations did not offer their employees astronomical salaries, they provided welfare and recreational facilities, acting as an `extended family' within which employees' spouses and children felt secure.
By contrast, an MNC employee's family rarely gets to meet his or her co-workers today. While the MNC work culture places a premium on professionalism, its lack of a personal touch could disorient some Indians, says Sushma Sharma, a management consultant. ``An Indian professional is different from his Western counterpart,'' she says. ``Despite being in an extremely hectic job, he or she needs to be in constant touch with the family.'' In Ms Sharma's opinion, any organisation that wishes to tap its employees' maximum potential should be familial in nature. Some believe, also, that the lack of meaningful personal contact with their American or European bosses leaves many Indian employees uneasy. Lata Vispi Patel of India Orientation Services describes the workplace experience of some European and American managers in an Indian milieu. ``Some expatriate managers are put off by the desire of their Indian employees to know about their family life. They may take it as inquisitiveness.'' Illustrating this inter-cultural incomprehension, Ms Sharma cites the example of a Bangalore-based software consultant who asked his American boss for leave to attend a distant cousin's wedding. His boss was puzzled that the otherwise conscientious employee should want leave to attend a distant relative's wedding. ``He didn't realise that the Indian employee was driven by a different set of cultural factors it was imperative that he maintain close family ties.''
The moral that Ms Sharma draws from the episode is: ``Companies have to realise that the employee is happy if his or her family is happy.'' She argues that only those organisations where the family can identify with the corporation will triumph in the matter of retaining employees in India.
Sushil Bahl, who has worked with Indian as well as foreign companies, disagrees. ``The Tatas may be an exception, but today everyone realises that a company's efforts to act as a family are cosmetic,'' he insists. ``When you're old, your family does not throw you out but in a company, you have to leave once your skills become obsolete.'' W.J.N. Danait, who retired as general manager from Larsen & Toubro and is now chief executive of Bombay First, also attests to the change that has swept India's corporate culture. Mr Danait observes that even L&T, which was noted for its employee welfare schemes, has now shifted its emphasis to the monetary package instead.
Companies may no longer regard welfare schemes and family benefit facilities as essential to retain people, says management consultant and writer George Menezes, who retired as personnel director of Hoechst Ltd. ``With employees' loyalty being at an all-time low,'' remarks Mr Menezes, ``companies now believe in using up an employee's total potential within two or three years, rather than viewing him as a lifetime employee, no matter how good he may be.'' Since an increasing number of companies now value ``professionals who have changed many jobs'', Mr Menezes concludes, it is only a corollary that ``schemes based on the philosophy of lifetime employment will slowly fade away''.
A career in Indian Oil, SAIL or one of the Tata companies had once been welcomed as the perfect choice for the bright sparks from the management and engineering colleges until the multinational companies (MNCs) arrived. The MNCs trebled the average basic salary, replaced the accommodation facility with a fat HRA and the family benefit schemes with stock options.
Significantly, it was MNCs like Coca-Cola India, McKinsey, Citibank and Pepsico which garnered the choicest harvest of students during this year's campus recruitment at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. But a dream job with an MNC which spells prestige, lucre and risk to most young Indian professionals and corporate executives could turn out to be a nightmare for some.
My family was greatly impressed by my starting salary,'' says Arvind Chaturvedi (name changed), a 24-year-old IIM graduate who joined a foreign bank last year. His gross monthly salary stands at about Rs 23,000. His father, a government official of 27 years seniority, takes home Rs 9,000 a month. ``But one year later,'' continues Mr Chaturvedi, ``I feel that my father, at my level, enjoyed a far happier life and could offer his children more stability than I can offer mine. Besides, I work round the clock, round the year.''
This sentiment is echoed at all levels in the managerial hierarchy. The transition from an Indian organisation to an MNC is considered especially difficult for middle-and senior-level managers. While the cross-cultural experience enriches many careers, others can be crushed by the excessive workload, the cultural incompatibility with foreign colleagues, the threat of being fired and the neglect of personal life.
While MNCs promise enormous financial rewards, they seem to stint on emotional rewards. ``I can't think of a single family benefit facility that my present employer would offer me right now,'' says the IIM graduate we met earlier. ``And there's no way my family can identify with the organisation I work for.'' Over the decades, employees and their families have taken pride in being associated with PSUs like Indian Oil and ONGC, or giants like Larsen & Toubro and the Tatas. While these organisations did not offer their employees astronomical salaries, they provided welfare and recreational facilities, acting as an `extended family' within which employees' spouses and children felt secure.
By contrast, an MNC employee's family rarely gets to meet his or her co-workers today. While the MNC work culture places a premium on professionalism, its lack of a personal touch could disorient some Indians, says Sushma Sharma, a management consultant. ``An Indian professional is different from his Western counterpart,'' she says. ``Despite being in an extremely hectic job, he or she needs to be in constant touch with the family.'' In Ms Sharma's opinion, any organisation that wishes to tap its employees' maximum potential should be familial in nature. Some believe, also, that the lack of meaningful personal contact with their American or European bosses leaves many Indian employees uneasy. Lata Vispi Patel of India Orientation Services describes the workplace experience of some European and American managers in an Indian milieu. ``Some expatriate managers are put off by the desire of their Indian employees to know about their family life. They may take it as inquisitiveness.'' Illustrating this inter-cultural incomprehension, Ms Sharma cites the example of a Bangalore-based software consultant who asked his American boss for leave to attend a distant cousin's wedding. His boss was puzzled that the otherwise conscientious employee should want leave to attend a distant relative's wedding. ``He didn't realise that the Indian employee was driven by a different set of cultural factors it was imperative that he maintain close family ties.''
The moral that Ms Sharma draws from the episode is: ``Companies have to realise that the employee is happy if his or her family is happy.'' She argues that only those organisations where the family can identify with the corporation will triumph in the matter of retaining employees in India.
Sushil Bahl, who has worked with Indian as well as foreign companies, disagrees. ``The Tatas may be an exception, but today everyone realises that a company's efforts to act as a family are cosmetic,'' he insists. ``When you're old, your family does not throw you out but in a company, you have to leave once your skills become obsolete.'' W.J.N. Danait, who retired as general manager from Larsen & Toubro and is now chief executive of Bombay First, also attests to the change that has swept India's corporate culture. Mr Danait observes that even L&T, which was noted for its employee welfare schemes, has now shifted its emphasis to the monetary package instead.
Companies may no longer regard welfare schemes and family benefit facilities as essential to retain people, says management consultant and writer George Menezes, who retired as personnel director of Hoechst Ltd. ``With employees' loyalty being at an all-time low,'' remarks Mr Menezes, ``companies now believe in using up an employee's total potential within two or three years, rather than viewing him as a lifetime employee, no matter how good he may be.'' Since an increasing number of companies now value ``professionals who have changed many jobs'', Mr Menezes concludes, it is only a corollary that ``schemes based on the philosophy of lifetime employment will slowly fade away''.
This is how certain company names came into being........
Mercedes : This was actually the financier's daughter's name.
Adobe : This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apple Computers : It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs.He was three months Late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock.
CISCO : It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.
Compaq :This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a Small integral object.
Corel : The name was derived from the founder's name Dr.Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.
Google :The name started as a joke boa! sting about the amount of information .The search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'
Intel : Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Lotus (Notes) : Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft : Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.
Motorola : Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE : Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The codename for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later
they kept the same name for the company.
Sony : It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN : Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, And Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.
Yahoo! :The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos
Adobe : This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apple Computers : It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs.He was three months Late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a better name by 5 O'clock.
CISCO : It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.
Compaq :This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a Small integral object.
Corel : The name was derived from the founder's name Dr.Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.
Google :The name started as a joke boa! sting about the amount of information .The search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'
Intel : Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Lotus (Notes) : Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft : Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-' was removed later on.
Motorola : Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE : Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The codename for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later
they kept the same name for the company.
Sony : It originated from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN : Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, And Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.
Yahoo! :The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book 'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos
Some interesting facts...
1. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.
2. Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
3. Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
4. The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.
5. No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
6. Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.
7. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
8. Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.
9. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
10. The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.
11. A Boeing 747's wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
12. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
13. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
14. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
15. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.
16. The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.
17. Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
18. Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
19. Marilyn Monroe had six toes.
20. All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.
21. Walt Disney was afraid of mice.
22. Pearls melt in vinegar.
23. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
24. The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
25. It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
26. A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.
27. The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
2. Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
3. Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.
4. The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.
5. No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
6. Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.
7. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.
8. Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.
9. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
10. The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.
11. A Boeing 747's wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.
12. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.
13. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
14. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
15. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.
16. The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.
17. Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
18. Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.
19. Marilyn Monroe had six toes.
20. All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.
21. Walt Disney was afraid of mice.
22. Pearls melt in vinegar.
23. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
24. The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
25. It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
26. A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.
27. The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
Convocation Address by Anil D Ambani at Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Ahmedabad on 13th September, 2003
Entrepreneurial success is a highly collaborative process. India is a land of great opportunities – opportunities that are perhaps incomparable in the world!
You are doubly fortunate to be starting your life, at an exciting time like this – the world's eyes are on India, new business opportunities are unlimited, and economic reforms have unshackled the chains on creativity and innovation. We are a very young nation – just over 55 years since independence – setting out on a path of sustained economic growth, for decades to come.
We already have over a billion fellow Indians. Within the next 20 years, we will have 400 million people below the age of 35 years –more than the entire population of the United States! Each person, in this bold new generation, will be in the prime of his or her life, striving for a better tomorrow – creating, in the process, new growth opportunities, for budding entrepreneurs like you!
On the most conservative basis, our domestic consumption, in virtually any sector, has the potential to at least double, or treble, from current levels – perhaps, just to catch up with a country like China!
And then, there is the entire global opportunity! Across diverse sectors internationally, the "Made in India" tag is now an increasingly respected brand, valued for quality, reliability,and competitiveness. Truly, with economic reforms in the country, and with the virtual removal of all trade barriers, the world is now our market – and our opportunity!
The pursuit of these opportunities requires an indomitable spirit of entrepreneurship!
And, to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to identify opportunities, that have either not existed before, or have not been noticed before by others! It is often said, people, who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the only ones that actually do!
My father, Dhirubhai Ambani, a proud son of this glorious state of Gujarat, and a man with long ties with this wonderful city of Ahmedabad, was the greatest example of this spirit of entrepreneurship! In a short span of less than 25 years, and without even the benefit of a formal education, Dhirubhai Ambani built Reliance, a first generation enterprise, into one of the world's 200 most profitable companies!
He started out in life, working as a mere petrol pump attendant in Aden, Yemen. He had no technical knowledge, of any of the businesses he wished to create in India. He had just five hundred rupees in his pocket, a vision of what he wanted to achieve, an intrinsic faith in the latent demand potential of the Indian markets, a belief in the capabilities of Indian people, and a burning desire to succeed!
The end result?
He created Reliance, a Rs. 75,000 crore enterprise, in a single lifetime!
We must, each one of us, take inspiration from Dhirubhai's extraordinary life, and challenge ourselves, to build on his achievements, to fulfil his desire, of one day making India an economic superpower.
I would like to now share with you, some of my own thoughts on entrepreneurship – especially, things that do not, normally, form part of the curriculum, at management institutions !
I believe the first, and perhaps most important, requirement for success, as an entrepreneur, is a passion for your work. To be able to look forward, to every new day of work, with a sense of optimism, with a sense of purpose, with a sense of challenge, and with a view to enjoying the work you are doing!
I have found that the happiness, which comes from this passion, and from the achievement and recognition that follows, is more lasting, and far surpasses anything based on earning a little more wealth, or obtaining greater material comforts. Of course, it is not enough for just you, as an entrepreneur, to have this sense of romance about your work. What is important is to get the entire organization seized, with this same sense of passion, and enjoyment, for work.
It is one of the most commonly accepted myths of our times, that entrepreneurial success, is all about entrepreneurial abilities of an individual. In reality, far from being a solitary pursuit, entrepreneurial success is a highly collaborative process. A good entrepreneur has to bring out creative ideas and the entrepreneurial spirit from all his people. This can happen only when the sense of passion, and romance, of building a successful business, is shared by the entire organization.
Our corporate mantra at Reliance is, "We bet on people." We provide the vision, inspiration and resources to accomplish tasks, but we empower people, and we build new knowledge and new core competencies around people, fostering a spirit of teamwork and performance, across the entire organization.
We believe that we can do with people, who do not have experience in a particular role, but we cannot do with people who do not have basic competence. Absence of experience can be made up through training and on-the-job performance, but lack of basic competence can never be made up. We encourage – indeed, expect - each one of our people to have a sense of ownership in whatever they are doing. As a result, Reliance is run by thousands of owner-managers!
We strengthen our organization, every day, bringing in the brightest talent. We firmly believe the smarter our people, the better our organization will perform. So, we surround ourselves with high performing people! We firmly believe – Do not be afraid to recruit people who are 10 times brighter, or more intelligent, than you!
This leads me to another important attribute for success as an entrepreneur – the necessity of dealing with people, in every walk of life, at a very human level, building, and nurturing, relationships, preserving one's humility, and never losing family and social values. It may surprise many of you to learn that, despite all my travel and exposure, I remain a vegetarian and a teetotaler, and I am a God-fearing individual.
I often say, that more than my academic education, my biggest education was at home, from my loving mother and father, where I developed an abiding commitment to our traditional value systems. What is important, is that these lasting value systems, should be extended to the professional and business side of our lives. I have found, during the last 20 years of my working life, that relationships, both, internal and external, built on the foundations of these value systems, have contributed immensely, to my success as an entrepreneur.
I now move on to the "harder" attributes required, for success as an entrepreneur.
I believe the greatest need is to guard against a sense of complacency – the usual organizational response to any major achievement. Dhirubhai used to put it in his own way - "Growth has no limit. You have to constantly reshape the boundaries of growth."
I believe successful entrepreneurship demands constant raising of the bar to achieve higher and higher levels of performance, encouraging people to stretch and sweat, to venture where few others would think of stepping out, to take calculated risks to achieve growth on an exponential scale, to never give up, to take every obstacle, or setback, or even outright failure, as a learning experience!
Successful entrepreneurship is a high-octane, high-energy business! And, it is this constant and infinite flow of energy that differentiates the most successful entrepreneurial organizations, from the rest of the pack!
Of course, successful entrepreneurship is not just based on brilliant and innovative ideas, powered by a constant flow of energy!What is ultimately required is hard action and results.
Good entrepreneurs have the ability to execute - to effectively marshal resources to achieve end objectives – to ensure that there is no gap, between what the entrepreneur wants to achieve, and the ability of the organization to deliver it.
Entrepreneurship also involves, taking what most people might consider to be big risks – cutting across accepted boundaries, going against the status quo, defying conventional wisdom! But entrepreneurs approach risk in a different way – they evaluate risks, and then take decisions based on their assessment of risk.
Successful entrepreneurs always focus on goals, not on possible hurdles along the way – and that is why they are not paralysed into immobility, but keep moving ahead. All entrepreneurs are faced with adversity at some point of time. The secret is to convert every adversity into opportunity, and keep moving on.
Successful entrepreneurs also learn to take doubts and criticisms in their stride. Consider critics to be your greatest friends – they show you where you can still improve!
Successful entrepreneurs have all these qualities I spoke of.
But, there are some additional qualities required, especially in the Indian context, which are very significant in building sustainable businesses – and which, incidentally, no institute teaches!
I am sure you have heard the popular joke about MBAs – that MBA stands for Mane Badhu Aavdache?! - people who claim to know everything, but actually know very little!
To be successful, apart from all our academic knowledge, we have to develop an understanding of the business environment. We have a plethora of laws, rules and regulations, and a high level of government and bureaucratic intervention, that can kill the most ardent entrepreneurial spirit! Archaic and complex laws and procedures in India, often impede swift decision-making, impairing the ability to exploit new business opportunities.
But, we have to succeed in this very environment. We have to understand the democratic and parliamentary system in India – how laws are made or altered, what parliamentary committees advise on legislation!
We have to understand the legal and judicial system in the country. We have to understand the complex direct and indirect tax systems and procedures - customs, excise, sales tax, income tax – all major determinants of success, and profitability, of any business! Of course, I am not suggesting that each one of you should become a tax expert, but a basic understanding of such matters is important,if you wish to succeed as an entrepreneur in India!
My dear young friends, to meet the challenges of the 21st century,India needs entrepreneurs with a global vision, who believe in change and transformation, who have the ability to take risks and chart out new growth paths!
To guide you in this exciting journey of entrepreneurship, I would like to end my comments today, by sharing with you the guru-mantras for all entrepreneurs:
Relationship and Trust – these are the foundations of success.
If you work with determination and with perfection, success will follow.
Meeting deadlines is not good enough. Beating deadlines is what is required.
Pursue your goals even in the face of difficulties. In every adversity, there is opportunity.
Do not accept defeat. Challenge negative forces. The past will give in. You will certainly succeed. Never give up.
Hope is your most powerful weapon. Self-confidence is your greatest asset.
Ordinary people, when motivated, achieve extraordinary things.
Pedigree is no longer of any significance in modern India. It is performance that is crucial.
Recognition is your greatest reward.
Work till your last breath. Work is worship.
In conclusion, my dear young friends, I sincerely hope, that each one of you will derive inspiration from Dhirubhai's life and deeds - and accomplish his dream of making India an economic superpower! That will be a fitting tribute to him - and to the entrepreneurial spirit of which he will remain the undying icon.
You are doubly fortunate to be starting your life, at an exciting time like this – the world's eyes are on India, new business opportunities are unlimited, and economic reforms have unshackled the chains on creativity and innovation. We are a very young nation – just over 55 years since independence – setting out on a path of sustained economic growth, for decades to come.
We already have over a billion fellow Indians. Within the next 20 years, we will have 400 million people below the age of 35 years –more than the entire population of the United States! Each person, in this bold new generation, will be in the prime of his or her life, striving for a better tomorrow – creating, in the process, new growth opportunities, for budding entrepreneurs like you!
On the most conservative basis, our domestic consumption, in virtually any sector, has the potential to at least double, or treble, from current levels – perhaps, just to catch up with a country like China!
And then, there is the entire global opportunity! Across diverse sectors internationally, the "Made in India" tag is now an increasingly respected brand, valued for quality, reliability,and competitiveness. Truly, with economic reforms in the country, and with the virtual removal of all trade barriers, the world is now our market – and our opportunity!
The pursuit of these opportunities requires an indomitable spirit of entrepreneurship!
And, to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to identify opportunities, that have either not existed before, or have not been noticed before by others! It is often said, people, who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the only ones that actually do!
My father, Dhirubhai Ambani, a proud son of this glorious state of Gujarat, and a man with long ties with this wonderful city of Ahmedabad, was the greatest example of this spirit of entrepreneurship! In a short span of less than 25 years, and without even the benefit of a formal education, Dhirubhai Ambani built Reliance, a first generation enterprise, into one of the world's 200 most profitable companies!
He started out in life, working as a mere petrol pump attendant in Aden, Yemen. He had no technical knowledge, of any of the businesses he wished to create in India. He had just five hundred rupees in his pocket, a vision of what he wanted to achieve, an intrinsic faith in the latent demand potential of the Indian markets, a belief in the capabilities of Indian people, and a burning desire to succeed!
The end result?
He created Reliance, a Rs. 75,000 crore enterprise, in a single lifetime!
We must, each one of us, take inspiration from Dhirubhai's extraordinary life, and challenge ourselves, to build on his achievements, to fulfil his desire, of one day making India an economic superpower.
I would like to now share with you, some of my own thoughts on entrepreneurship – especially, things that do not, normally, form part of the curriculum, at management institutions !
I believe the first, and perhaps most important, requirement for success, as an entrepreneur, is a passion for your work. To be able to look forward, to every new day of work, with a sense of optimism, with a sense of purpose, with a sense of challenge, and with a view to enjoying the work you are doing!
I have found that the happiness, which comes from this passion, and from the achievement and recognition that follows, is more lasting, and far surpasses anything based on earning a little more wealth, or obtaining greater material comforts. Of course, it is not enough for just you, as an entrepreneur, to have this sense of romance about your work. What is important is to get the entire organization seized, with this same sense of passion, and enjoyment, for work.
It is one of the most commonly accepted myths of our times, that entrepreneurial success, is all about entrepreneurial abilities of an individual. In reality, far from being a solitary pursuit, entrepreneurial success is a highly collaborative process. A good entrepreneur has to bring out creative ideas and the entrepreneurial spirit from all his people. This can happen only when the sense of passion, and romance, of building a successful business, is shared by the entire organization.
Our corporate mantra at Reliance is, "We bet on people." We provide the vision, inspiration and resources to accomplish tasks, but we empower people, and we build new knowledge and new core competencies around people, fostering a spirit of teamwork and performance, across the entire organization.
We believe that we can do with people, who do not have experience in a particular role, but we cannot do with people who do not have basic competence. Absence of experience can be made up through training and on-the-job performance, but lack of basic competence can never be made up. We encourage – indeed, expect - each one of our people to have a sense of ownership in whatever they are doing. As a result, Reliance is run by thousands of owner-managers!
We strengthen our organization, every day, bringing in the brightest talent. We firmly believe the smarter our people, the better our organization will perform. So, we surround ourselves with high performing people! We firmly believe – Do not be afraid to recruit people who are 10 times brighter, or more intelligent, than you!
This leads me to another important attribute for success as an entrepreneur – the necessity of dealing with people, in every walk of life, at a very human level, building, and nurturing, relationships, preserving one's humility, and never losing family and social values. It may surprise many of you to learn that, despite all my travel and exposure, I remain a vegetarian and a teetotaler, and I am a God-fearing individual.
I often say, that more than my academic education, my biggest education was at home, from my loving mother and father, where I developed an abiding commitment to our traditional value systems. What is important, is that these lasting value systems, should be extended to the professional and business side of our lives. I have found, during the last 20 years of my working life, that relationships, both, internal and external, built on the foundations of these value systems, have contributed immensely, to my success as an entrepreneur.
I now move on to the "harder" attributes required, for success as an entrepreneur.
I believe the greatest need is to guard against a sense of complacency – the usual organizational response to any major achievement. Dhirubhai used to put it in his own way - "Growth has no limit. You have to constantly reshape the boundaries of growth."
I believe successful entrepreneurship demands constant raising of the bar to achieve higher and higher levels of performance, encouraging people to stretch and sweat, to venture where few others would think of stepping out, to take calculated risks to achieve growth on an exponential scale, to never give up, to take every obstacle, or setback, or even outright failure, as a learning experience!
Successful entrepreneurship is a high-octane, high-energy business! And, it is this constant and infinite flow of energy that differentiates the most successful entrepreneurial organizations, from the rest of the pack!
Of course, successful entrepreneurship is not just based on brilliant and innovative ideas, powered by a constant flow of energy!What is ultimately required is hard action and results.
Good entrepreneurs have the ability to execute - to effectively marshal resources to achieve end objectives – to ensure that there is no gap, between what the entrepreneur wants to achieve, and the ability of the organization to deliver it.
Entrepreneurship also involves, taking what most people might consider to be big risks – cutting across accepted boundaries, going against the status quo, defying conventional wisdom! But entrepreneurs approach risk in a different way – they evaluate risks, and then take decisions based on their assessment of risk.
Successful entrepreneurs always focus on goals, not on possible hurdles along the way – and that is why they are not paralysed into immobility, but keep moving ahead. All entrepreneurs are faced with adversity at some point of time. The secret is to convert every adversity into opportunity, and keep moving on.
Successful entrepreneurs also learn to take doubts and criticisms in their stride. Consider critics to be your greatest friends – they show you where you can still improve!
Successful entrepreneurs have all these qualities I spoke of.
But, there are some additional qualities required, especially in the Indian context, which are very significant in building sustainable businesses – and which, incidentally, no institute teaches!
I am sure you have heard the popular joke about MBAs – that MBA stands for Mane Badhu Aavdache?! - people who claim to know everything, but actually know very little!
To be successful, apart from all our academic knowledge, we have to develop an understanding of the business environment. We have a plethora of laws, rules and regulations, and a high level of government and bureaucratic intervention, that can kill the most ardent entrepreneurial spirit! Archaic and complex laws and procedures in India, often impede swift decision-making, impairing the ability to exploit new business opportunities.
But, we have to succeed in this very environment. We have to understand the democratic and parliamentary system in India – how laws are made or altered, what parliamentary committees advise on legislation!
We have to understand the legal and judicial system in the country. We have to understand the complex direct and indirect tax systems and procedures - customs, excise, sales tax, income tax – all major determinants of success, and profitability, of any business! Of course, I am not suggesting that each one of you should become a tax expert, but a basic understanding of such matters is important,if you wish to succeed as an entrepreneur in India!
My dear young friends, to meet the challenges of the 21st century,India needs entrepreneurs with a global vision, who believe in change and transformation, who have the ability to take risks and chart out new growth paths!
To guide you in this exciting journey of entrepreneurship, I would like to end my comments today, by sharing with you the guru-mantras for all entrepreneurs:
Relationship and Trust – these are the foundations of success.
If you work with determination and with perfection, success will follow.
Meeting deadlines is not good enough. Beating deadlines is what is required.
Pursue your goals even in the face of difficulties. In every adversity, there is opportunity.
Do not accept defeat. Challenge negative forces. The past will give in. You will certainly succeed. Never give up.
Hope is your most powerful weapon. Self-confidence is your greatest asset.
Ordinary people, when motivated, achieve extraordinary things.
Pedigree is no longer of any significance in modern India. It is performance that is crucial.
Recognition is your greatest reward.
Work till your last breath. Work is worship.
In conclusion, my dear young friends, I sincerely hope, that each one of you will derive inspiration from Dhirubhai's life and deeds - and accomplish his dream of making India an economic superpower! That will be a fitting tribute to him - and to the entrepreneurial spirit of which he will remain the undying icon.
Just experimenting with my new blog...
Hi guys and girls.......
Welcome to my blogworld. Soon i will start posting good articles to read...
Welcome to my blogworld. Soon i will start posting good articles to read...
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