Window Cleaners in operation at Burj, Dubai ( the tallest building in the world)
The Lake Fountain opposite the Burj......
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
A Fund Of Surprises
Took one of those extra super-fast trains to Paris some days later. It was delayed en route. In Paris, we disembarking passengers were met by railway officials handing out envelopes to each one of us. Turned mine over to find it was for claiming a refund. Postage paid, too.
I could get used to this business of being bewildered......
( Dilip D'Souza, Outlook)
Dilip Kumar : Master At Work......
Speech in chaste Urdu in Karachi ( part 1 and 2)......
BBC Interview ( Hard Talk) in English....
World's expiry date: 21 December 2012?
London September 25 :
The world will end on 21 December 2012, claims "web-bot" technology that has pushed apocalyptic prophecy into the internet age.
According to web's conspiracy theorists, the bots accurately predicted the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and now they believe that a cataclysm of some sort will devastate the planet on 21 December, 2012.
Developed in the 1990s to predict stock market movements, the software is similar to the "spiders" that search engines use to index web pages.
The bots crawl through relevant web pages, noting keywords and examining the text around them. The theory is that this gives an insight into the "wisdom of crowds", as the thoughts of thousands of people are aggregated, reports The Telegraph.
George Ure, the project’s "co-mind", says that his system predicted a "world-changing event" in the 60 to 90 days after June 2001, and on 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks happened.
Despite the vagueness of this prediction, many believed it to be genuine.
Now, the latest prediction is that 21 December 2012 signals the end of the world, possibly through a "polar shift" – when the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field is reversed. Believers claim that as well as the bots, the 2012 apocalypse is predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar, the Book of Revelations, and the Chinese text I Ching.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Difficult Date !
A customer wanted to ask his attractive waitress for a date, but couldn't get her attention. When he was able to catch her eye, she quickly looked away. Finally he followed her into the kitchen and blurted out his invitation. To his amazement, she readily consented.
He said, "Why have you been avoiding me all this time? You wouldn't even make eye contact."
"Oh," said the waitress, "I thought you wanted more coffee."
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Courier by Microsoft
Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet.
Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre..................
CricTrivia
Brad Haddin took 52 catches in Test cricket before making a stumping. Has any other wicketkeeper had a longer stretch of dismissals without a stumping?
The record in this regard is held by the former South African wicketkeeper Dave Richardson, who took 119 Test catches before finally managing a stumping, against India in Cape Town in 1996-97. He expressed his relief at the time, saying he hadn't wanted to end his career with no stumpings at all in case people thought he was a good slip fielder rather than a wicketkeeper! He ended up with 150 catches and two stumpings in his 42 Tests.
As I write the whole of New Zealand lead Sachin Tendulkar by 26 - there have been 70 ODI centuries by New Zealand batsmen. Tendulkar (44) is in front of Zimbabwe (36) and Bangladesh (15) though. Largely thanks to him, India lead the way overall with 163 ODI centuries: Australia have 146, Pakistan 141, West Indies 130, Sri Lanka 98, England 90 and South Africa 85.
The record in this regard is held by the former South African wicketkeeper Dave Richardson, who took 119 Test catches before finally managing a stumping, against India in Cape Town in 1996-97. He expressed his relief at the time, saying he hadn't wanted to end his career with no stumpings at all in case people thought he was a good slip fielder rather than a wicketkeeper! He ended up with 150 catches and two stumpings in his 42 Tests.
In the Compaq Cup final Sachin Tendulkar scored his 44th century in one-day internationals. How many ODI centuries have New Zealand batsmen scored all told? I'm guessing that it isn't much more than 44...
As I write the whole of New Zealand lead Sachin Tendulkar by 26 - there have been 70 ODI centuries by New Zealand batsmen. Tendulkar (44) is in front of Zimbabwe (36) and Bangladesh (15) though. Largely thanks to him, India lead the way overall with 163 ODI centuries: Australia have 146, Pakistan 141, West Indies 130, Sri Lanka 98, England 90 and South Africa 85.
Honest !
Teacher: Well, at least there's one good thing I can
say about your son.
Parent: What's that?
Teacher: With grades like these, he couldn't be cheating.
Parent: What's that?
Teacher: With grades like these, he couldn't be cheating.
Monday, September 21, 2009
17 laws of Teamwork
The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork By John Maxwell4 |
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Dubai
All that glisters...
Dubai’s visionary ruler is determined to keep smiling amid the gloom
Sep 10th 2009
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
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THE new metro in Dubai, the glitziest but most heavily indebted of the seven statelets making up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is not the world’s biggest, fastest or costliest. But even in these straitened times, the city-state has rolled out this latest bauble with its usual flair. In flowing robes, amid laser lights and red carpets, Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, launched the inaugural service on the auspicious date of 9/9/2009.
Built by a Japanese consortium in just four years, the driverless system’s first line comes complete with sleekly futuristic air-conditioned stations, leather seating for first-class passengers and carriages specially designated for women. The Arabian peninsula’s first urban railway looks swell, it may unclog the roads and should be a welcome convenience to the ordinary folk who cater to Dubai’s plushily motorised elite.
And yet Dubai’s economy is still stalled on the tracks. Though the cost of commercial rents has fallen by half since the start of the year, nearly a quarter of Dubai’s office space is empty. A third of all building projects are reckoned to be frozen, yet so much new space is still coming on to the market that the glut may persist well into next year. The general slump, after years of breakneck growth and soaring prices, has spread its poison through the economy. A survey in a local magazine finds that workers across the UAE this year have taken salary cuts of 26-30%.
Sheikh Mohammed recently likened his realm’s troubles to the headwinds slowing down an aircraft. Insisting that those winds were now blowing less fiercely, he dismissed worries about government debts, which are estimated to total anything between $80 billion and $120 billion (equal to 100-150% of GDP). Dubai’s intricate web of parastatal corporations controlled by the Maktoums may indeed find the cash to tide them over.
There is plenty of it still sloshing around. Where else would a government think of selling seat-belts with designer labels to promote road safety? The friendly neighbouring emirate of Abu Dhabi, which has been bailing Dubai out, is still flush with petrodollars. And Dubai still draws customers by being a pleasanter place than other Gulf destinations. Yet even Sheikh Mohammed, whose ambition has inspired Dubai’s furious drive for superlatives, says he will now be more careful.
As for the metro, it is debatable whether the $7.6 billion investment will make a profit even after more of it becomes operational in five years. Dubai’s rapid-transit authority says it could cut traffic by 17%, and slash losses due to delays. But how many of Dubai’s 1.6m people will give up their 1m air-conditioned cars to walk even short distances in the punishing summer heat? At any rate, the sheikh can console himself with the knowledge that the metro will be the world’s biggest computer-operated train system, and its Union Station will have the world’s biggest underground railway concourse.
Beware of how you use your office computer !
Employers spying on staff
More than ever, companies want to know what their employees are up to
Sep 10th 2009
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
More than ever, companies want to know what their employees are up to
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Your every keystroke, silently logged |
IF THE workers at Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company seem unnaturally cheerful for drizzly autumn mornings, it is because they are being watched. The firm has installed cameras with special scanners at 15 of its stations to measure employees’ smiles, ensuring that harried commuters are always greeted with a grin, however forced.
It may seem extreme to Western eyes but it is just one example of a business that is booming: employee monitoring. Companies have long kept a close eye on employees to maintain productivity and guard against theft. But the economic downturn has prompted some to redouble their efforts—and advances in technology have given them the means.
A recent report from Gartner, a consultancy, found that spending on security software rose by 18.6% to $13.5 billion in 2008. The market for security information and event management software (SIEM), which can be used to mine e-mails for keywords and security breaches, grew by 50% according to Gartner. The fastest-growing area is network forensic software, which lets firms record and playback exactly what happens on employees’ computer screens, and can even record keystrokes.
Gartner’s John Pescatore says the software is “like a giant TiVo” or “a security camera pointed at a till in a bank”. This niche doubled in value between 2007 and 2008, from $25m to $50m. Mr Pescatore predicts that the market will jump another 50% by the end of this year.
Companies use this kind of software, for example, to monitor employees who are about to leave, whether through redundancy or choice, to make sure they do not take sensitive information with them. Managers can spot the moment that an embittered salesperson copies a client database onto a flash-memory stick.
Financial-services firms are particularly vulnerable to the enemy within. The case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs banker accused in July of stealing high-frequency trading software worth millions of dollars to the bank, was an illustration of the huge value of intellectual property that is at risk of going astray.
Companies also use monitoring software to protect employees from themselves. Malicious software often infects a corporate network by exploiting security holes in web browsers to infiltrate a PC when its user visits a dodgy website. Compromised machines can then be linked up to form “botnets” under external control, which are used to send spam e-mails or disable websites with a flood of bogus requests. When Procter & Gamble ran a security check of its 80,000 PCs, it found 3,000 were infected with botnet software.
Another use of employee-monitoring software is measuring productivity. Managers trying to decide who to make redundant can use forensic software to catch that slacking YouTube addict red-handed.
Even workers on the road are not safe from prying corporate eyes. Several start-up companies, such as Purewire and Zscaler, have launched software to monitor employees outside the company network. Workers accessing the internet from hotel rooms using a company laptop may be surprised to find their web browsing is being monitored by the IT department back in the office. Their page requests flow through a web monitoring service, which can block or report access to certain sites.
Monitoring software can also be used to spot “presenteeism”—employees who turn up in the office every day but then do nothing. Peter Cheese, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organisation practice, says that presenteeism has become more common as communications break down between managers and staff in firms that are under financial stress.
But although workforce-monitoring software may provide what seems like useful information, it is no help when it comes to addressing the problems it uncovers. It may also undermine morale and mutual trust. Mr Cheese warns: “If you have to check up on employees all the time, then you probably have bigger issues than just productivity.”
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Coming Soon : Washing without water
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
Environment: A washing machine uses thousands of nylon beads, and just a cup of water, to provide a greener way to do the laundry
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Water? Who needs it? |
SYNTHETIC fibres tend to make low quality clothing. But one of the properties that makes nylon a poor choice of fabric for a shirt, namely its ability to attract and retain dirt and stains, is being exploited by a company that has developed a new laundry system. Its machine uses no more than a cup of water to wash each load of fabrics and uses much less energy than conventional devices.
The system developed by Xeros, a spin-off from the University of Leeds, in England, uses thousands of tiny nylon beads each measuring a few millimetres across. These are placed inside the smaller of two concentric drums along with the dirty laundry, a squirt of detergent and a little water. As the drums rotate, the water wets the clothes and the detergent gets to work loosening the dirt. Then the nylon beads mop it up.
The crystalline structure of the beads endows the surface of each with an electrical charge that attracts dirt. When the beads are heated in humid conditions to the temperature at which they switch from a crystalline to an amorphous structure, the dirt is drawn into the core of the bead, where it remains locked in place.
The inner drum, containing the clothes and the beads, has a small slot in it. At the end of the washing cycle, the outer drum is halted and the beads fall through the slot; some 99.95% of them are collected.
Because so little water is used and the warm beads help dry the laundry, less tumble drying is needed. An environmental consultancy commissioned by Xeros to test its system reckoned that its carbon footprint was 40% smaller than the most efficient existing systems for washing and drying laundry.
The first machines to be built by Xeros will be aimed at commercial cleaners and designed to take loads of up to 20 kilograms. Customers will still be able to use the same stain treatments, bleaches and fragrances that they use with traditional laundry systems. Nylon may be nasty to wear, but it scrubs up well inside a washing machine.
Paranoid survivor
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
Andrew Grove, the former boss of Intel, believes other fields can learn from the chipmaking industry that he helped bring into being
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EARLIER this year Andrew Grove taught a class at Stanford Business School. As a living legend in Silicon Valley and a former boss of Intel, the world’s leading chipmaker, Dr Grove could have simply used the opportunity to blow his own trumpet. Instead he started by displaying a headline from the Wall Street Journal heralding the recent takeover of General Motors by the American government as the start of “a new era”. He gave a potted history of his own industry’s spectacular rise, pointing out that plenty of venerable firms—with names like Digital, Wang and IBM—were nearly or completely wiped out along the way.
Then, to put a sting in his Schumpeterian tale, he displayed a fabricated headline from that same newspaper, this one supposedly drawn from a couple of decades ago: “Presidential Action Saves Computer Industry”. A fake article beneath it describes government intervention to prop up the ailing mainframe industry. It sounds ridiculous, of course. Computer firms come and go all the time, such is the pace of innovation in the industry. Yet for some reason this healthy attitude towards creative destruction is not shared by other industries. This is just one of the ways in which Dr Grove believes that his business can teach other industries a thing or two. He thinks fields such as energy and health care could be transformed if they were run more like the computer industry—and made greater use of its products.
Dr Grove may be 73 and coping with Parkinson’s disease, but his wit is still barbed and his desire to provoke remains as strong as ever. Rather than slipping off to a gilded retirement of golf or gallivanting, as many other accomplished men of his age do, he is still spoiling for a fight.
His achievements mean that his provocations are worth paying attention to. He has arguably done as much as anyone to usher in the age of cheap, cheerful and ubiquitous personal computing. In part, he did this through technological prowess. He graduated at the top of his engineering class at New York’s City College (one of the few options available to him as a poor Jewish refugee from Communist-controlled Hungary). He then went on to earn a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, and wrote a book on semiconductors that remains a standard text.
He joined Fairchild Semiconductor, once a pioneering electronics firm, where he caught the eye of Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. The former was a co-inventor of the integrated circuit, while the latter coined Moore’s law (which decrees, roughly, that the amount of computing power available at a given price doubles every 18 months). When the two left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968—initially to make memory chips, not microprocessors—they took the young Dr Grove with them. He eventually ended up in charge of the company, becoming chief executive in 1987. He continued in that role until 1998, when he became chairman, holding that post until 2004.
Though his scientific credentials are solid, he will probably be best remembered as a daring and successful businessman. Richard Tedlow, a historian at Harvard Business School, calls him “one of the master managers in the history of American business”. One reason is market success: under his tenure, Intel came to dominate the microprocessor industry and its market capitalisation rocketed (making it, at one point, the world’s most valuable company). A bigger reason, though, lies in how exactly he managed to steer Intel to such spectacular success.
Two particularly risky decisions he took are revealing. In “Only the Paranoid Survive”, Dr Grove’s bestselling book, he argues that every company will face a confluence of internal and external forces, often unanticipated, that will conspire to make an existing business strategy unviable. In Intel’s case, such a “strategic inflection point” arose because its memory-chip business came under heavy assault from new Japanese rivals willing to undercut any price Intel offered.
What could he do? The firm’s roots and most of its profits lay in making memory chips; Intel’s microprocessor group was just a small niche. The firm’s two founders and much of its engineering staff were too emotionally wedded to its past successes to make a break. But Dr Grove decided to bet the future of the company on microprocessors, a move that saved his company and transformed the industry.
 |  Dr Grove thinks pharmaceutical firms should study chipmakers to accelerate learning and innovation. |
The second big decision was Dr Grove’s radical announcement that Intel would market its microchips directly to consumers. Previously, chipmakers had regarded computer-makers such as Dell and Compaq as their customers, and had not bothered with fancy advertising campaigns to end users. But Dr Grove believed that such a relationship allowed these assembly and marketing firms, which did little original research of their own, to capture too much of the value created by his firm’s innovation.
So he launched the “Intel Inside” campaign, which marketed microprocessor chips directly to consumers, starting in 1991. This incensed his rivals and his immediate customers, the computer-makers, but the strong demand for Intel’s new Pentium chip showed that the strategy had worked. True, the firm stumbled when a minor flaw was discovered in the Pentium that affected some mathematical calculations. Rather than rush to correct the problem, Intel tried to downplay it—a strategy that quickly turned into a public-relations disaster. The firm was forced to offer a replacement for all affected chips, at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars.
Painful though that was, Dr Grove now thinks this episode actually benefited the firm in two ways. First, it proved to internal sceptics that Intel really had become a consumer brand. Second, he reckons that it bolstered his efforts to improve the shoddy quality of manufacturing, to protect the firm from future fiascos. In hindsight, his risky decision to turn Intel from a component-maker into a consumer brand was a masterstroke.
Some observers have suggested that it was his family’s escape from the Nazis, and his own experience of the abuses of communism, that shaped Dr Grove’s strict management style. On this view, his demanding but meritocratic approach, rewarding ideas and knowledge over power, was a rejection of the injustices of communism.
Dr Grove, however, insists that it was his experience at City College, where talent and hard work were rewarded and where students challenged their professors without concern for rank, that impressed upon him the value of meritocracy. By contrast, he recalls an elitist, back-stabbing and lax corporate culture at Fairchild. Senior executives would stroll into the office or into meetings as late as they pleased, but blue-collar workers were penalised or even fired if they committed similar offences.
When he took control of Intel Dr Grove imposed a strict arrival time of 8am, with latecomers forced to sign a sheet. He also refused to go along with popular management trends such as flexi-time and teleworking. He was known as a blunt and demanding manager, but he also gained a reputation as a fair-minded boss who rewarded good ideas, no matter where they came from.
Asked today if he regrets imposing his disciplinarian personality on his company, he makes a confession: “You don’t understand—I was never that disciplined myself, and I’m not even a morning person!” He was determined to impose discipline on Intel, he says, for two reasons that ultimately worked to the firm’s advantage. First, he wanted to avoid the outrageous double standards he had experienced at Fairchild. The meritocratic culture he created at Intel then helped it attract the best talent in the industry. Second, he knew that strong discipline would also be necessary to improve his firm’s shoddy manufacturing.
At the time the microchip business was producing such unreliable products that customers insisted that companies like Intel always license new products to a secondary supplier to ensure reliability of supply. His efforts to tighten up quality control led to a commercial coup. When his firm introduced its widely anticipated 386 processor, he stunned the industry by declaring that Intel would not license any secondary manufacturers. This was a huge risk for computer-makers, but such was their appetite for the new chip that they bought it anyway. Intel’s ability to deliver good enough chips in large numbers meant profits no longer had to be shared with secondary manufacturers.
With his reputation for ruthlessness in the marketplace and rigorous discipline inside his firm, Dr Grove has much in common with another American business leader: Lee Raymond, the formidable former chairman of Exxon Mobil. Both men were feared by both rivals and many of their employees. Dr Grove once even spearheaded a sales campaign against a superior chip made by Motorola in an effort dubbed “Operation Crush”. When asked about such bully-boy tactics, Dr Grove remains unrepentant. He even likes the comparison with the unloved oilman: “I never knew Lee Raymond, but he did take Exxon to the top of the Fortune 500—and that’s OK with me.”
Personal admiration aside, however, Dr Grove is convinced that Exxon and its Big Oil brethren are in a sunset industry. He has written and lectured widely on energy and environmental topics in recent years, arguing that oil and cars are heading for a divorce. He regards electricity as the most promising replacement fuel, and thinks battery technology has the potential to produce an Intel-like giant as the industry develops.
Another business he believes to be ripe for disruption is health care. He complains that the industry seems to innovate much too slowly. The lack of proper electronic medical records and smart “clinical decision systems” bothers him, as does the slow-moving, bureaucratic nature of clinical trials. He thinks pharmaceutical firms should study the fast “knowledge turns” achieved by chipmakers, so that the cycles of learning and innovation are accelerated. (A knowledge turn, a term coined by Dr Grove, is the time it takes for an experiment to proceed from hypothesis to results, and then to a new hypothesis—around 18 months in chipmaking, but 10-20 years in medicine.)
And what of chipmaking—is it, too, a sunset industry ripe for disruption? Dr Grove still believes in Moore’s law (with the caveat that it will get ever pricier for chipmakers to uphold) but he has a grave concern. At a recent ceremony honouring his achievements, he shocked the gathered bigwigs by declaring that the industry’s approach to hoarding patents was an abuse of intellectual-property rights and risked undermining its future. Asked to defend that claim, which upset even his own family members, he does not backtrack. He insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: “You can’t just sit on your ass and give everyone the finger.” Even though Dr Grove is no longer running Intel, it seems that his desire to shake things up is undimmed.
Friday, September 18, 2009
The Sound of Cricket
When I was living in Mumbai in the mid-’70s and cricket on television had not yet arrived, there was no greater pleasure than listening to BBC’s Test Match Special ball-by-ball radio commentary. There were such greats as Trevor Bailey, Norman Yardley, John Arlott, Brian Johnston, Fred Trueman, Christopher Martin-Jenkins. The producer’s brief was clear: convey the atmosphere on the ground and crack jokes. And don’t forget the cricket. Old ladies from Henley-on-Thames used to send Johnston freshly baked chocolate cakes which were consumed on air by the commentary team while wickets were falling! I remember the way Arlott signed off the air after a 35-year commentary career. He had, like Neville Cardus, become a legend. After his fellow commentators had paid him a fulsome tribute, Arlott remained silent and ended his stint on Test Match Special with the words: “And after Trevor Bailey, it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins.” What a way to go!
A worthy successor to those greats is the Lancastrian David Lloyd. On TV during the recent Ashes series, he said of an English player: “If that fellow is a Test bowler, my backside is a fire engine!”
( Vinod Mehta, Outlook)
Alaskan Warning !
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Sehwag
"I have asked Tendulkar many times what the zone is. He tells me that's when 'I see nothing except the ball'. I have asked Rahul Dravid the same thing. He says sometimes when he is in really good form, he sees the ball and not even the sightscreen, the non-striker, the umpire or who is bowling. I ask how that is possible. I have never entered that zone"
- Virender Sehwag
India to spend USD 1300 bln on infrastructure......
India's infrastructure story goes well beyond roads, bridges and ports. It anchors on the savings of Indian citizens.
Yes, you read that right! As per the latest Goldman Sachs report, India will require US$ 1.7 trillion in financing over the next decade to meet its infrastructure needs. This estimate tops both Goldman Sachs' earlier estimate of US$ 620 bn as well as our government's 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-2012) infrastructure spending of US$ 500 bn. Even if the financing for the 11th Plan has been accounted for, we will need at least a trillion dollars more to execute the investments required.
Goldman Sachs expects most of the infrastructure investment to be funded by India's domestic savings without significant recourse to external borrowings. This belief stems from the trend of rising domestic savings rate and robust balance sheets of private sector companies. Goldman Sachs has pegged the gross savings rate in Asia's third largest economy to rise to 40% of GDP by 2016 (from 37% in FY09) and remain at high levels for well over a decade. These savings will be pertinent to fund public private partnership (PPP) projects that are estimated to fund 30% to 50% of the total infrastructure investment in the next decade.
However, what is even more important to note is that for this plan to fructify, India's household savings must be intermediated through the financial sector (pension funds, insurance and the like) to the government, which then spends on infrastructure. Else, as the chart shows, rising savings could possibly have little or no impact on public sector / infrastructure investments.
Source: CMIE
Allowing institutions like IIFCL to raise funds through long term bonds or allowing the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) to route investments from pension funds to equity and debt markets for the long term could be ideal ways to tap the potential savings.
Goldman Sachs expects most of the infrastructure investment to be funded by India's domestic savings without significant recourse to external borrowings. This belief stems from the trend of rising domestic savings rate and robust balance sheets of private sector companies. Goldman Sachs has pegged the gross savings rate in Asia's third largest economy to rise to 40% of GDP by 2016 (from 37% in FY09) and remain at high levels for well over a decade. These savings will be pertinent to fund public private partnership (PPP) projects that are estimated to fund 30% to 50% of the total infrastructure investment in the next decade.
However, what is even more important to note is that for this plan to fructify, India's household savings must be intermediated through the financial sector (pension funds, insurance and the like) to the government, which then spends on infrastructure. Else, as the chart shows, rising savings could possibly have little or no impact on public sector / infrastructure investments.
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Allowing institutions like IIFCL to raise funds through long term bonds or allowing the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) to route investments from pension funds to equity and debt markets for the long term could be ideal ways to tap the potential savings.
Know facts and then conclude.....
One old man was sitting with his 25 years old son in the train. Train was about to leave the station. All passengers were settling down in their seats. As the train started moving, the young man was filled with lots of joy and curiosity. He was sitting on the window side. He put out hishand and started feeling the passing air. He shouted, "Papa see all the trees are going behind". Old man smile and acknowledged his son's feelings. Beside the young man was a couple sitting and listening to the conversation between the father and the son. They were puzzled at the 25 years old's child like behaviour.
Suddenly, the young man again shouted, "Papa see the pond and animals, clouds are moving with the train". The couple continued to watch the young man in embarrassment. Suddenly it started raining and some water drops touched the young man's hand. He was filled with joy and he closed his eyes and shouted again," Papa it's raining, water is touching me, see papa". The couple couldn't help themselves and asked the old man "why don't you visit the Doctor and get your son treated".
The old man replied "yes, we are actually coming back from the hospital. It so happens that today itself my son has got the eyes for first time in life".
Moral: Don’t draw conclusions until you know all the facts
Suddenly, the young man again shouted, "Papa see the pond and animals, clouds are moving with the train". The couple continued to watch the young man in embarrassment. Suddenly it started raining and some water drops touched the young man's hand. He was filled with joy and he closed his eyes and shouted again," Papa it's raining, water is touching me, see papa". The couple couldn't help themselves and asked the old man "why don't you visit the Doctor and get your son treated".
The old man replied "yes, we are actually coming back from the hospital. It so happens that today itself my son has got the eyes for first time in life".
Moral: Don’t draw conclusions until you know all the facts
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Small Is Manageable?
Face value
Dummies for finance
Andreas Treichl of Erste Bank thinks banks should be kept small and simple
Dummies for finance
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
Andreas Treichl of Erste Bank thinks banks should be kept small and simple
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HE MAY be descended from five generations of bankers and head a large bank himself, but Andreas Treichl has a pretty low opinion of his profession. He had hoped to become a conductor, but changed his mind on the advice of Leonard Bernstein. The maestro saw him perform, Mr Treichl says, and “told me to go into banking because one would do better as a mediocre banker than one would as a mediocre conductor.”
Happily, most observers consider his tenure at Erste Bank, Austria’s second biggest, which he has run for more than a decade, better than mediocre. He has transformed the staid, insular, 200-year-old savings bank into one of the largest retail banks in central and eastern Europe. Although he led it into a region that subsequently found itself on the front-line of the financial crisis, he has managed to keep it profitable and independent. To be sure, Erste Bank has not escaped the crisis unscathed. Earlier this year it had to raise €1.8 billion ($2.3 billion), including €1.2 billion from the Austrian government, to bolster its capital, and provisions for bad loans have more than doubled in the first half of this year compared with a year earlier. Yet these setbacks look inconsequential when set against the monstrous losses reported by bigger banks farther afield.
That Erste Bank continues to stagger on in perilous emerging markets while many of those that bet on American or British housing have fallen flat is explained, at least in part, by the fact that banking was not Mr Treichl’s first choice of career. He built a business on the assumption that commercial banks do not have the pick of the best or the brightest, and should therefore keep their strategies simple and their ambitions relatively modest.
“People who want to make a lot of money fast go to work in investment banks, but people who work in commercial banks are pretty average people,” says Mr Treichlin an office so understated that it almost seems calculatedly so. On the whiteboard near his desk are the colourful doodles of one of his three sons—testimony to a recent spot of baby-sitting. Near the door is an open carton containing dozens of boxes of chewing gum. Mr Treichl’s prescriptions for banking are as unpretentious as his office. “We should not think we can invent something brilliant. If we could we would be working somewhere else,” he says of the exotic credit derivatives that spread risk, like a contagion, through the financial system. “We bought the crap but we didn’t invent it.”
Mr Treichl’s keep-it-simple philosophy has steered his firm’s strategy. Instead of trying to expand into investment banking, a business with juicy margins in good times but horrible losses in bad, Erste Bank has instead concentrated on expanding its retail banking business into central and eastern Europe, where it has subsidiaries stretching from Austria to Ukraine. In most countries where it does business, it owns one of the larger local banks. In the Czech Republic, for instance, it holds almost a third of all retail deposits, and in Romania it has a quarter. Erste Bank also has a policy of balancing loans and deposits. In the go-go years before the credit crunch, that left it growing more slowly than many rivals. But because it did not rely on flighty capital markets for funds, it has weathered the downturn better. Conservatism has other rewards, too: being a big, safe-sounding bank in small countries has allowed it to pay uncompetitive interest rates and still keep pulling in deposits.
It is also firmly a local bank. Most of its main markets are just a few hours’ drive away from the head office in Vienna. In the waiting room on the executive floor, the head of risk from a subsidiary in a neighbouring country is pouring himself a coffee, having driven for an hour from his own office to talk about a new computer system. This localism underscores one of Mr Treichl’s deeply held beliefs: that big banks fail because they become unmanageable. “If you run something like Citi how the hell do you know what’s going on in Poland if you only go there every three years?” he asks. “This is very much a people business. I need to touch and smell and feel what’s going on.” It is a view formed by his many years in various bits of the far-flung empire of Chase Manhattan, a company about which former employees joke that it “trained the best but kept the rest”. Mr Treichl joined it as a credit analyst in New York and worked in its offices in Brussels, Athens and Vienna before joining Erste Bank some 15 years ago.
It is hard to find fault with the argument that many big banks have become ungovernable. Even HSBC, a British bank with a sterling reputation, ingrained prudence and a history of astute acquisitions has stumbled in recent years when entering markets where unfamiliarity prevented it from bringing these traits to bear. But there is a corollary. Size and geographic reach allow big banks to spread risk. Erste’s profitability over the next few years, by contrast, will depend on a few fragile economies in one small part of the world—albeit ones that are not moving in unison, and for which Austria has mustered an international bail-out.
Being decidedly local also carries other, idiosyncratic risks. Austrian banks have, in recent years, been enthusiastically peddling risky foreign-currency mortgages at home and abroad. Erste Bank was far from the worst culprit in this regard, but it did opt to issue some mortgages denominated in Swiss francs and euros to Hungarians and Romanians rather than entirely surrender a booming new business to more daring rivals.
Banking also has an annoying knack of turning today’s genius into tomorrow’s fool. Devotees of back-to-basics banking such as Mr Treichl and Banco Santander’s Emilio Botín are riding high only by comparison with racier (and now disgraced) rivals who tried to combine investment banking with retail and who boosted returns buying credit derivatives they did not understand. Yet their stars may also fall if a long economic slowdown produces bigger-than-expected losses at conservative banks, too.
CricTrivia
I've just seen Australia's Tim Paine run out for a duck on his ODI debut. How many people have suffered this fate?
Well, first of all it wasn't Tim Paine's first one-day international, as he also played against Scotland in Edinburgh the previous week, and scored 29 not out. But 20 people have been run out for a duck in their first one-day international, the most recent being Sri Lanka's Thilan Thushara against West Indies in St Lucia in April 2008. Five of the batsmen concerned - Roger Binny of India, Zimbabwe's Eddo Brandes, Ryan Hurley of West Indies, Bangladesh's Enamul Haque junior and England's Alex Loudon - were particularly unlucky, as they were run out without even facing a ball. In Loudon's case it was his one and only international match, against Sri Lanka at Chester-le-Street in 2006.
How many people have been out stumped by the same wicketkeeper off the same bowler in both innings of the same Test?
This has happened on 11 occasions now, most recently to Zimbabwe's Christopher Mpofu, who was stumped McCullum bowled Vettori in both innings against New Zealand in Harare in 2005. The previous one was Sri Lanka's Upul Chandana, stumped Gilchrist bowled Warne in both innings against Australia in Cairns in 2004. The first time it happened was in 1894-95, when England's Bobby Peel was stumped by Affie Jarvis off the bowling of Charles "Terror" Turner in both innings against Australia in Sydney, to complete his second successive pair. A further seven batsmen, making a total of 18, have been out stumped in both innings of a Test (but not off the same bowler).
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
Inspiring Stories from every-day life......
SOLACE FOR THE SOUL
In the busy central market of Faizabad district in Uttar Pradesh is a cycle repairing shop.
Its owner, Mohammed Sharif, sits amid scattered cycle seats, rims, chains and assorted
nuts, bolts, spanners and screw drivers.
Sharif had lived in Faizabad since birth and built his life around this shop. Having
provided well for his family and saved enough to help his son Mohammed Rahiz kickstart
his own drugstore, Mohammed Sharif was a happy man. And then, one day in 1990,
his son Rahiz did not return home. A frantic Sharif went around the town meeting
everyone who knew his son, but at the end of one week, there was still no news of his
whereabouts, only despair.
Mohammed Sharif lodged a complaint at the local police station, and prayed.
A month later, the police came calling. Rahiz, Sharif’s son and only child, had been
found dead in a neighbouring district just days after his disappearance. But not being able
to establish his identity, the police, following their procedures, had disposed of the body
as a ‘laawaris’ or unknown. Sharif was devastated. ‘I did not even get to see his body. For
a father to have his son die and not even see the body, you can imagine what I went
through,’ he says.
Slowly, as time went by and Sharif recovered from his tragedy, he thought of the other
unfortunates or unknown, with no family or friends to attend to the final rituals. From
that day on he made it his mission to provide dignity to the dead.
Mohammed Sharif seeks out abandoned bodies, arranges for a casket, calls for a priest
and organizes a decent burial. Says Sharif, ‘These are not just bodies for me. I see in each
of them a son or daughter, sister or brother, mother or father. It is this thought that I carry
to the burial ground. Even the dead need someone to be close to them when they depart.’
Sharif has lost count of the hundreds of visits he has had to make to the cemetery in the
last ten years. His charity is towards the entire community-in cases where the deceased is
Hindu, he organizes for a cremation and a Hindu priest to perform the last rites.
The shutters of Mohammed’s little cycle repair shop continue to open every morning. He
earns a modest living and in a corner of his home lies a unlikely apparatus-a casket. Who
knows when this may come handy to provide dignity to another ‘laawaris’.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
FLIGHT TO FREEDOM
Lost in the maze of streets, in a downtown locality in Kolkata is the house of a tailor
named Nur Nabhi. He stitches only colourful clothes for children in all shapes – frocks,
shorts, shirts, every style is available in small sizes. They seem to be an expression of his
love for kids. The work brings him an income which is hardly enough to pay for his
family’s meals and his children’s school fees.
Despite all the tensions, life was moving along at its usual pace for Nur Nabhi. The
mundane routine was punctuated with little joys, dreams and disappointments. His family
was bonded together in a strong emotional tie and their support was enough to carry him
through the lows and highs of life.
But five years ago, just as his family was about to celebrate Eid together, a terrible
tragedy befell them. On that fateful morning, as everyone was preparing to go to the
mosque for the Eid prayers, Nur Nabhi’s son and this two nephews went to the river to
have a bath. Little did they know that this was to be their last dip. As they entered the
water, the three boys felt the pressure of a forceful water current. They tried to get out but
the water kept pulling them down till they could no longer hold their breath. They were
swept away by a powerful tide and drowned in a matter of minutes.
At home, Nur waited impatiently for his son and nephews to return. He was angry with
the boys for being so callous. The last thing he wanted was to be late for his prayers. His
wife calmed him and sent him to the mosque saying that the boys would get there on their
own. Seeing that the boys had not reached the mosque even when the prayers were over,
Nur Nabhi made his way home. From the corner of the street he saw a crowd outside his
house. As he ran towards his house he could hear his wife’s wails. And then his world
came crashing down around him. The auspicious occasion of Eid was now filled with
cries of mourning and, since that day, his family has never celebrated Eid.
Losing his son and nephews has made Nur more sensitive to pain, his personal loss has
brought him closer to the sufferings of others. He is touched by the grief of those in
vulnerable situations. From his shop, where Nur Nabhi sits with his sewing machine, he
gets a good view of the market outside. One day, as he sat thinking of the boys, Nur’s
eyes wandered outside. There, in the din of the market, Nur saw a cage full of birds. A
man was selling them to earn his bread. For some reason unknown to him, Nur could not
take his eyes off the birds. While other customers admired the beauty of the birds, the
only thing Nur could see was the pain in their eyes. Before he knew what he was doing,
Nur had walked up to the bird-seller and bought his entire catch. He took them to a park,
opened the doors of the cage and set all of them free. That day he felt a strange
satisfaction in his heart, something that had been eluding him since the day his boys were
snatched from him so cruelly. As he watched the birds flying away into the sky, he felt
they would carry his wishes to the boys’ souls, as if he was reaching out to his boys
though the birds.
Every week Nur spends one-fourth of his earnings to free caged birds. He brings them
home, feeds them and then opens the door of their cage so they may fly free, as they were
meant to. Every time he watches them disappear, his heart fills with joy, his throat chokes
with emotion and his eyes well up.
Till date Nur has set free hundreds of birds. As the birds stretch their wings to fly free,
Nur’s face breaks into a contented smile as he watches them sail into the air.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
A CIVIL SERVICE
Year after year, more than 250,000 young citizens from all over the country face the
monumental task of appearing for the entrance examination for the Indian Administrative
Service (IAS).
It is a fascinating annual ritual spanning every nook and corner of this vast country. Be it
in Manipur, Bihar, Kerala or anywhere else, every single mofussil town has at least one
aspirant, if not more.
The dream to join the Indian bureaucracy, however, is fraught with agony. The
examination is known to be difficult, and the chances are a punter’s nightmare since the
number of vacancies is only 500 each year. Yet, there is no dearth of career martyrs,
which probably explains the explosion of institutes to prepare such aspirants.
But this career theatre also portrays the anguish of the less privileged, who have neither
the coaching not the resources to prepare for this monumental hurdle. Brij Lal Patel was
one such unfortunate. As a boy, Brij Lal grew up in a village in Saurashtra, and was the
first local citizen to complete high school. That was in 1976. He then moved to Mumbai
and got his bachelor’s degree in science and firmly set his sights on joining the IAS.
He got no counseling and was hard-pressed to even buy the necessary books, but that did
not dampen his zeal. He appeared for the exam not once, not twice, but three times. But,
like that of so many others, Brij Lal’s dreams too were shattered. He was crestfallen.
However, he soon bounced back and devised a plan. He procured employment in the
Central Excise and Customs, which is also a part of the bureaucracy, though not the
coveted IAS. Even as he worked on his new future, he began to implement his plan to
help needy aspirants to the IAS.
In Brij Lal’s personal failure lay the foundation of a new hope for the students like him in
Mumbai. His small apartment has a room which has been converted into a library. This
library has more than 25,000 books, all providing lessons and techniques in facing
competitive examinations. Any student is welcome to share the resources of this library,
for free.
‘Once upon a time, I had dreamed of joining the IAS,’ says the Customs Inspector.
‘Today, my desire is that no poor student’s dream must go unrealized for want of books
and counseling.’
Brij Lal’s services don’t end there. Every morning, between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m., he
interacts with the young people frequenting the library, providing advice for some, solace
to others, and pep talk to those who need it. Evenings too find him performing the role of
friend, philosopher and guide to students.
There is no external funding in this voluntary effort. Brij Lal says he spends most of this
savings on books and reference material, and thanks his wife, an officer in a bank, for her
wholehearted support.
Failure and shattered dreams afflict all of us, and we usually walk away, wary of looking
back at them. Brij Lal is one of the very few among us who has the courage not only to
look defeat in the eyes, but to also use it as an inspiration to bring hope and happiness to
the lives of others.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
THE VOICE OF COMPASSION
Inspector Ravi Atrauliya of the Indore police force might be a middle-age man, but he sill
reads his textbooks. He spends a couple of hours every day speaking into an ordinary
mike connected to an inexpensive sound recording system, reading and recording
chapters from different textbooks prescribed in schools for the board examinations. Once
he finishes with a topic in history, he goes on to something in science or English. And his
magical voice is actually creating history, not just reading it.
As it happened, one day in 1994, a group of blind men approached him for help in
locating an address. His inquisitiveness forced him to find out who they were looking for.
He was amazed to discover that these blind men were about to appear for the class X
examinations and were going to meet a man who read to them from textbooks. Inspector
Atrauliya took the men to the place they were looking for and parted ways with them, but
the incident had suddenly made him aware of a serious situation that very few people
know about.
Ravi realized that if blind men wanted to study, they could only do so till class VII
because their books in Braille were available only till that class. Those who desired to
study further had to depend on people to read the texts out to them. There were many
blind men who aspired for a graduate degree, but there were hardly any readers
committed to their cause. Ravi decided that he would do something about it.
From 1994 to 2002, Inspector Ravi Atrauliya has recorded all the prescribed books from
class VIII to graduate level into audio cassettes. These cassettes are circulated among
groups of blind students free of cost. To make copies of these cassettes, Ravi has invested
his savings in a dubbing machine. As for audio cassettes he gets a constant supply of
them from his colleagues. Every day he spends a couple of hours at his recording studio,
making more and more copies. He wants to reach out, to illuminate as many lives as he
can with his voice.
But there were further concerns. Despite his efforts Ravi realized that his students were
not making much headway because there were no writers for their exams either. Even if
these students prepared from Ravi’s cassettes, they could not write out their exam.
Invariably, their families had to keep looking for writers till the morning before the
examinations. Ravi decided to try and sort out this problem as well. He went to all the
local schools and appealed to them for a bank of volunteers from among the students.
These volunteers would have to be willing to sit in for three hours and write on behalf of
their disabled friends. The response was enormous. Five hundred students of varying age
groups registered with him during the first phase.
The number of blind students appearing for the exams in Indore has more than doubled
since Inspector Atrauliya’s bank of writers began writing examinations for the blind. A
significant number of blind students have passed secondary, senior secondary and even
graduate level exams. Some of them are now employed and earning for their families – a
becoming victory against a crushing disability!
But Ravi Atrauliya is still not satisfied. He now dreams of taking the students to the State
Public Service Commission Exams. He wants to see them as Deputy Collectors of
districts like Indore. Not really an improbable proposition, going by Ravi’s resolve and
commitment. But ask him how it all happened and he smiles, quietly, without answering.
He had stepped in to track down an address for a group of blind men but ended up finding
the direction of his own life. The symbolism is more than palpable.
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
HELPING THE HELPERS
Keshubhai’s dream of his small clothes shop in Saurashtra, Gujarat, becoming a large
successful outlet came to naught when his son fell ill and showed no signs of recovery for
four months. The doctors did all they could and finally advised him to visit the
Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, the biggest hospital in Gujarat. It was here that Kanji, his son,
was diagnosed with cancer and admitted to the cancer department for an extensive
routine of tests and treatment.
Keshubhai had come to Ahmedabad alone, leaving behind his wife and a daughter in
their village. But now he needed help. Somebody had to be with the boy when Keshubhai
was out to buy medicines or fruits or collect test reports. He thought of calling his brother
but realized that it would be difficult for him to leave his work and stay with them for
three months. So Keshubhai chose the only alternative left for him – his wife and
daughter moved to Ahmedabad.
Keshubhai was a man of limited resources and these unexpected expenses caught him
unawares. He was willing to stretch himself beyond his means for his son. He pooled all
his resources and each paisa that could be saved was put in this pool; it meant no
expenses on any other needs. Slowly as time went by and the resources started drying up,
everything seemed to become more expensive by the day. They began cutting down on
smaller expenses like buying a soap for themselves and even eating two meals a day.
Their only solace was that they were not alone in this situation. All the families who had
had to admit someone in the cancer department were living on the footpath outside the
hospital. None of them belonged to Ahmedabad. They had all traveled from far-off
places, some from as far as Rajasthan, and none of them could afford to rent a house for
two to three months.
Ghatlodia, the locality that houses the hospital, is also the home of Gobindbhai, a
contractor and builder by profession. One day, Gobindbhai offered a lift to a colleague
whose mother had been admitted to the cancer department. Gobindbhai went to the
department thinking that he too would pay his respects. But his visit was destined to be
more than just that. The images from his visit replayed in his mind like a film that is
telecast again and again. He wanted to do something to relieve the pain, to ease the
hardship, to comfort all the people living in sub-human conditions outside the hospital.
Gobindbhai had noticed them sharing very meager meals. There was a dignity in it but
how long would they survive without falling ill themselves? One day the families would
be so burdened that they would have to beg for food or may be go without any. Finally, a
solution seemed to form in his mind. He visited families in the neighbourhood who he
knew would be willing to donate a meal a day. Gobindbhai drew up a list of thirty-five
such housewives to start with. All of them lived around the hospital and offered to bring
the food to a particular location by lunch time. Gobindbhai arranged for the hospital
authorities to identify the poorest families in the cancer department. Next, he hired an
auto to carry the boxes of food and distribute them among these families.
On the first day, the home-cooked food brought tears to the eyes of all those who ate it. It
reminded them of their homes, where they had the security of meals. For all of them, this
packed food was much more than just a meal, it was as if they had found a friend who
wanted to share their hardships.
That night Gobindbhai slept well; it was a heavy burden off his chest. But now that he
had found his way, he did not want to stop. So he went on convincing more housewives
to join in. Today, after three years of non-stop work, he gets seventy packets of food
daily while seventy more housewives are on the list waiting to join in. As they take turns
preparing these tiffins, the housewives in Ghatlodia feel that it is their duty to look after
the well-being of the relatives of the patients. And so these are no ordinary meals, for
each packet of food has a personal touch to it.
Gobindbhai’s idea clicked so fast that he could not handle the work alone, so he set up
the Gujarat Cancer Dardi Sewa Trust. They now have two auto-rickshaws that collect the
packets from several locations and carry them to the cancer department. The trust has
collected enough resources to serve 250 ml of milk to each of the four hundred patients,
twice a week. On Tuesdays and Fridays, ‘shiro’ made from pure ghee is served to all the
patients.
Gobindbhai’s initiative is a rare case of extending help to those who are helping others.
The patients were being looked after by their families and it is now the families that are
being looked after by the locals of Ghatlodia.
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