The Free Rider

By far the most obvious. This guy would rarely ever attend a group meeting or reply to group mails or do anything that might be generally useful to the group. In the initial days, he would do a shoddy job of all group work assigned to him/her (let’s not be gender biased now) and soon the other members would realize that the chances of getting good work done by him are far less likely than that of Rakhi Sawant quoting George Bernard Shaw. While this guy/gal does have the obvious benefit of a far relaxed work load (hey no group work) and you would often find him(or her) going to sleep at 11 pm when you are about to leave for the library to begin working on your group submission for the next day, and therefore would usually have enough time for study and/or booze, don’t expect stellar grades. The group work at IIMA is meant to teach you a lot of those concepts that are talked about in class and if you haven’t done those, you won’t really ace the exam. Sure, you would do well, but don’t expect miracles. Besides, networking is a major part of your stay at IIM-A and a reputation of a free rider is not the first thing you want your batch mates to remember when you meet them 10 years down the line for some business.

The One Man Army

This one is pretty much the exact opposite of the free rider guy. This person treats group meets with utter disdain and is as eager to join a group meet as he/she is eager to get a root canal done. Not that he/she is a slacker; given a portion of a task (or the whole task) and a deadline, they would happily complete the work and submit it by the deadline, usually not bothering to include any of the suggestions made by the other members. He/She a typical introvert and does not realize that the life of a manager requires getting work done from others. This person is typically a member of the male species.

 The Copy Paste guy

This guy/gal can get your entire group expelled. While most of us do ‘online research’ to get material for our reports and presentation, this particular person has either not fully figured out the capability of the pain-in-the-ass software that is TurnItIn or does not understand the AMA guidelines for referencing. He/She would lift up sections or even pages/slides verbatim from assignments of previous students, Wikipedia, consulting reports and presentation, presentations on SlideShare or newspapers articles, often forgetting to even change the tense or removing [1] and [2] markers from the text. He/She is usually a moderate version of the free rider but can potentially cause much graver damage.

The Pain in the Ass

He/She is the serious guy, way too concerned about deadlines and usually insists on starting very very early. For some inexplicable reason, this person thinks that it would take a month or more for a team of 6, IIM-A students at that, to write a 40 page report. They also insist of keeping the last 2 days for ‘revising’ and perfecting the delivery of the presentation and usually insists on weekly or even bi-weekly meetings and would ask you the progress of your part of the work if he/she happens to run into you at CT or Rambhai. While this person is him/herself very sincere is his/her work, not all (and in fact very few) are that concerned and most IIM-A students, coming from a engineering background, love to work at the 11th hour. This particular species is usually foreign and here on an exchange program and has trouble in adjusting with the ‘Indian way of doing things’ (think Common Wealth Games ). But as the saying goes “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.

The Idea Guy

This person would browbeat everyone into agreeing to their ideas for a project, they would go out of their way to prevail and force the group to select their choice of industry sector, company, market segment or product for an assignment and the group would inevitably agree hoping The Idea Guy would lend his/her expertise on the assignment. But when the time comes for the actual work, this guy is nowhere to be seen and would turn up at the last moment and find flaws in the assignment.

The Busy Guy

This guy is usually a part of multiple clubs or Placecom or Club co-ordinator or even the GS and would be forever busy, usually with good reason, and unable to attend group meets. Being a responsible person that this guy is, he/she will offer to attend group meets or work with members of the group but only at a time that suits their busy schedule; usually ungodly hours in the night or, horror of horrors, a Sunday. This guy may also wake you up at 5 am in the morning, which is when he/she found time out of their busy schedule, to clarify something about the group assignment that was assigned to them.

The Project Manager

By far the most useful guy and also usually acts as the de facto group leader, this guy would keep track of deadlines a month or two in advance usually in an Excel sheet, divide the work among the members usually with something akin to a Work Breakdown Structure, and remind you days in advance about your task. He/She is the anchor of the group and is responsible for getting everyone to sit in a room together and finish the work, come what may.

The FRA guy

Usually a Commerce grad or a guy who has completed one or more levels of CFA, this guy is the most sought after person in the first trimester at IIM-A where people get tortured and traumatized by the beast that is Financial Reporting and Analysis. He is loved by the girls and therefore hated by the guys and would be only person in class not hiding his work book from the FRA prof. Love ‘em or hate ‘em you can’t ignore them because this is the guy whose balance sheet actually ever balances.

The Kotler

This person has inexplicably mastered the wild beast that is Marketing. and has figured the answer to the age old question “Who are you?”. Somehow this guy/gal knows the difference between  segmentation and categorization, mission and vision,  and can wade through the 4P’s (or is it 6P’s now?) and 5C’s and apply arcane frameworks with the ease at which Shahnaz Husain applies kohl and understand the meaning of TAM, SAM, SOM, making all numbers oriented engineers wonder “Us main aisa kya hain?” He/She usually is the point (wo)man for all marketing decision sheets and presentations and would often take the suicidal step of raising his/her hand in the marketing class.

Well these are the ones I could think of from my own experience. If you have anything else to add, feel free to share. I was lucky to have a very good study group in the first year and worked with some really smart, intelligent, helpful and awesome people (not many people can proudly say that about their study group members :p). May be some other time, I will tell you about them.

But then, there are areas where this philosophy wouldn’t work. Say you are creating the next Facebook. A RERO philosophy would imply that you would release a MVP (minimum viable product) and get user feedback, iterate and improve. Well, I doubt if that would work at all. Users will compare your product to Facebook and will find it lacking, the feedback would be negative, interest would wane and you would never get to the point where you really have a credible product which can compete with Facebook. You see, users have very limited attention span. If I don’t like it in the first 4-5 hours, chances are I would just not use it again. Even if you added new features, I would be predisposed to discount those. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons Google Wave failed (and Google+ isn’t yet the awesome social network that we all want it to be). Google Wave was released too early and to too few people; the novelty factor soon wore off, users got bored and left. Something similar happened to Google+ a few weeks after it launched (I still use Google+ because people share really good content there but the content is increasingly more stale). When you are creating a Facebook competitor (or the next evolution of email as Wave was claimed to be) you have a very big shoes to fill, the bar is set very high, people expect awesomeness. With such expectations, a MVP would hardly work. While Facebook got many years to reach this level of finesse, a new comer would have to hit the ground running and come up with something that’s revolutionary and not merely evolutionary.

The same goes for apps. When people can download and remove apps in a matter of minutes, you really have like 10 minutes of user attention and in that time you need to make an impression. A MVP will very likely not make that impression. You will need much more than that. I have over 50 apps on my Android phone and I use may be 20 of them. The rest I had hoped would be useful but just didn’t work for me or simply disappointed me. This would be the case for most users. You, therefore, need to be present a really compelling proposition at the very first sight because you will not get a second chance.

One company that really understands this better than others would be Apple. They create revolutionary products and eschew market research and user studies. And when they come up with a product it is usually miles ahead of competition. Sure the first version of iOS had many shortcomings but the first version of Android had even more. They don’t release a MVP and instead release far more well thought out products than the competition.  An MVP can get evolutionary product because you are highly dependent on the user for feedback and direction, and users cannot always foresee the possibilities and more often don’t even know what they want. So if you want to create something evolutionary, you might think again about RERO and MVP. Are they really what would get you there?

Alleged Myth 1.  Business does everything better than government.

According to Dave Johnson, ‘conservative economists’ have been arguing all along that business do everything better than government because they are more efficient and profit driven. He writes

“They argue that constant competition, placing companies under constant fear of going under and people under constant fear of job-loss, focuses the mind like a pending execution. They say it leads them to do only what they should be doing and no more, in the best possible way, always looking for the best and most “efficient” ways, forcing innovation to occur… But as we have seen, what actually happens in this kind of dehumanized “Force You” system (as in “F.U.”) is that businesses are forced to cut every corner, cheapen every product, cut out every service, lay people off, cut people’s wages while adding hours, gut benefits … and probably go under anyway because when every business does the same 99 percent of us can’t afford to buy or do things anymore.”

Let’s first dissect the heading of the myth “Business does everything better than government”. Really? Do they always? What about public goods, goods which are non rival in consumption and non excludable? With public goods, it’s pretty hard to get private parties interested and that is where government needs to step in and take it up. Examples of such public goods would be defense, police force, public parks, various public services etc. In all those cases, private enterprise would find it hard to survive, and therefore the government needs to do those. And any economist, whether ‘conservative’ or otherwise, would be happy to point that out.

Now let’s look at the explanation he provides, that is ‘placing companies under constant fear of going under and people under constant fear of job-loss’ doesn’t result in good performance. For one, he exaggerates the whole thing; I don’t think the average employee of a private corporation is under ‘the constant fear of job-loss’ when he/she is participating in office gossip at the cafeteria or surfing Facebook during office hours. Sure, you are not expected to make big screw-ups (and I am pretty neither are public sector employees)  but you won’t be kicked out of our job for every other fault. Even if your employer is a sadist, the cost of hiring (and subsequent training) alone acts as a deterrent from employers firing their employees at every whim and fancy. Lets take the case of Apple; Steve Jobs was known to be hard taskmaster and was not easily satisfied;  his employees had always been in fear of displeasing him and he is was known to have fired people for very minor issues (once because someone dared to use his white board). Going by Dave Johnson’s logic, Apple should the producing the most crappy products in the universe. On the contrary Apple comes up with dazzling products which have the highest possible craftsmanship and with an attention to detail that’s borders on the obsessive. Apple does not cut corners with the quality of it’s products and their service at the Apple stores is legendary.

The same applies to corporations as a whole; sure you can’t bring up one crappy product after another but the market would not wipe you out at your very first mistake. Fear of failure is an important motivator. What if a teacher agreed to give an A to every student despite their performance in the tests of quality of project work? How many would actually bother to study? A few would, most wouldn’t. I am a student myself and therefore I know.

All being said, public companies aren’t always worse than private ones. One of my friends was recently praising the service of the State Bank of India (SBI),a public sector bank, while criticizing that of another private bank. In fact, SBI, the once slow moving lazy behemoth, has kept up considerably well with private retail banks; you can get an account made in 2 days against a week or so not long ago, you can get a new ATM card on the spot instead of waiting for 2-3 weeks.

Alleged Myth #2. Rich people are “job creators.”

Dave Johnson says “This is the old “trickle-down” idea — that if you give enough money to the already-rich eventually some of that money will trickle down to the rest of us. This is also called the “getting peed on” theory of economics.”

What does he mean by “give enough money to the rich”? Have the rich become rich by asking for handouts like OWS hippies? He makes it sound almost as if that these OWS hippies have been writing cheques to the rich and now are simply protesting to get that money back.  And I have never heard of “getting peed” on “theory of economics”. Which textbook did Mr. Johnson read? He then goes on to quote and misquote Ann Rand who, last time I checked, wasn’t an economist at all, conservative or otherwise.

So are rich people job creators? First of all, I have never seen any economist claiming that anyone who has money will create jobs. However, most people who got rich did so because they created successful companies which employed people. So yes, being rich and creating jobs goes somewhat hand in hand. Of course some of you would point out that financial firms and people who run them (particularly fund managers) do not create jobs proportionate to their wealth. But is it really? What does a hedge fund manager do? He manages a fund for his clients and invests his client’s (who are rich people) money in businesses and these businesses in turn produce products and services and therefore employ people. The job of the hedge fund manager then is to choose the best possible investment opportunities for his/her clients so that their money is invested in viable and sound businesses. And that’s a pretty important job and a job that in turn creates many other jobs in the company in which the money is invested.

More importantly, it’s entrepreneurs, and not the rich, who create jobs. And successful entrepreneurs become rich.

Alleged Myth #3 : Government and taxes take money out of the economy

Dave Johnson writes “They argue that the money government collects is a) pocketed by politicians; or b) stuffed under a giant mattress; or c) is just wasted.”

Obviously, Mr. Johnson completely failed to understand the meaning of “taking money out of the economy”. It has nothing to do with getting money pocketed by politicians or getting it ‘stuffed under a giant mattress’ or ‘getting it wasted’. The meaning is quite different. When people are taxed they lose purchasing power and therefore save less, buy less, invest less; liquidity drops and interest rates increases. If interest rates increase, entrepreneurs and business will find it tough to get loans to start businesses which would have otherwise resulted in employment of lots of people, the average guy would find it tough to get a loan for a house or a car, so on and so forth. Of course, too much money supply would also be detrimental because it would lead to runaway inflation which isn’t something governments want either.

He also advocated high tax rates saying “High top tax rates also reduce the incentive to be greedy and destructive, which can overcome many of us and make us do things we shouldn’t”. Really? It is a pretty well established fact that per capita working hours as well as per capita productivity declined (by 20%) in Europe from 1970 onwards owing to higher tax rates, high minimum wage and other regulations while US productivity rose by 20% in the same period. Not just that, high tax rates, higher minimum wages and regulations (like employee health care benefits) also resulted in higher unemployment in European countries. High tax rates can quite easily induce people to work less, why would a CEO put two extra hours at work per day when she knows that the extra salary would be taxed much higher, why not go home and relax instead? The marginal utility of those extra hours is much less. That being said, taxes are needed to pay for much of the public goods. However, taxing higher and higher is not the solution.

Johnson also alleges that

“Cutting top tax rates in the ’80s forced a change in business models away from long-term planning and building wealth by building sustainable businesses over decades. Instead, since you could take home a fortune overnight, it made more sense to go for the get-rich-quick, sell-the-farm-style schemes so prevalent today”

Of course he conveniently does not provide any proof for the assertion. So let’s think for ourselves. Let’s take some of the most visible tech companies – Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle) and the more recent, Google and Facebook. All these companies worked towards building a long lasting brand, making revolutionary products that have pushed the edge of technology.

Alleged Myth #4: Regulations Kill Jobs

Sure they do. But no economist would be stupid enough to argue towards removing all regulations. If that were so, we should also decriminalize murder because I am pretty sure there is a thriving potential market for contract killing that would surely employ a lot of people. Regulations, and therefore government is needed, even in a free market, in fact more so in a free market. A free market needs a government and the rule of law to ensure that contracts are upheld and buyers and sellers can trust each other; without that there can be no market.

Alleged Myth #5: “Protectionism” hurts the economy

Aah, that’s by far my favourite one.Dave Johnson begins with a load of rhetoric claiming that there is no ‘free trade’ anymore.

“the trade deals of recent decades have not been free or fair, and can’t really even be called “trade.” What has happened is countries sell to us but do not buy equally from us, causing huge trade deficits that have drained our economy and our jobs and our wages”

So according to him, it is trade only if I buy from you goods worth $1 and you also buy from me goods worth $1? I am sorry Mr. Johnson, that’s not trade, that’s barter and barter is just one form of trade. In a global marketplace it is practically impossible for all trade between any two countries to balance out and there is nothing wrong with it. Besides, trade deficit in itself is not a big problem; constantly surging trade deficit is. Most countries run a trade deficit with some countries while a trade surplus with some others which may result in an overall trade surplus or deficit. And hey, for much of recent history the US has been a beneficiary of globalization running huge trade surplus through exports to other countries. It is only recently that Asian economies have risen up exporting goods and services to the US and Europe and thereby gaining prosperity. For long the US has argued against protectionism, overtly and covertly arm twisting smaller countries to open up their economies. It benefited Americans, their corporations made money by selling products in many countries and American citizens got jobs. But now it’s our turn, why cry hoarse now Mr Johnson? I didn’t see you complaining when American companies sold drugs at exorbitant prices in India which only the top 5% of Indians could afford. Every dog has it’s day, you had yours, now let us have ours.

But is protectionism good? The answer : It depends. Take examples from India itself. We had a highly protected economy until as recently as 1990s. Cars were expensive and made largely by two companies – Maruti Udyog Limited and Hindustan Motors. There were some fringe suppliers like Peugeot etc. One had to wait for years to get a car or a bike and it was way too expensive. Zips used to be cheap and broke down easily, quite embarrassment if someone noticed your zip open in public. Banking was highly protected too and you had to bribe the bank staff to get loans. Look at us now, an Indian these days has multiple options for cars (sure not as many as an American does ) and bikes and banks vie for your attention to give you a loan at competitive rates; you don’t have to bribe the bank employee any more, instead they would rather send an employee over to your home to get documents signed. Sure, some of those firms made lesser profits because of the opening up of the economy, but Indians at large became more well off.

However, had we opened our economy too early some of our firms would not have become competitive enough to match up to the global competition. Nowhere is it more evident than the pharmaceuticals industry. With American and European firms having a patent on each and every drug and selling those in India at exorbitant prices in the 1950′s, medicine has become unaffordable for all but the top 5% of Indians. We didn’t have any competitive Indian firms that could sell medicines at affordable prices. So we did away with product patents and instead set a process patent regime that enabled our pharma companies to become competitive to a point where our processes now are far more efficient that those in US and European pharma firms. Now that our pharma firms have become competitive we have re-established product patents in pharma since 2005 and our pharma firms will now have to spend a lot more on R&D and come up with new molecules rather than simply innovate on the process.

It all boils down to a trade-off between producer surplus and consumer surplus and of course concerns about national competitiveness. South Korea selectively protected some of it’s industry until those became globally competitive; China is doing something similar. In the end, opening up economy does benefit the people by providing goods and services at cheaper prices. That has been established fairly well with numerous studies. Anyone doubting this is urged to read up some of Bhagwati’s research.

Johnson further adds

“Conservatives say that it is good that businesses in countries like China are more competitive because they don’t have a lot of regulations to comply with. Countries where the people have little say in things don’t have to spend the money to pay minimum wages, keep the environment clean, keep workers safe and keep products up to standard and they don’t have to worry about lawsuits.”

Minimum wage law exists in China (and India) and employers are supposed to abide by those. Sure, some don’t. But to claim that the only reason Chinese (and Indian) companies are competitive is because they don’t have enough regulations is very simplistic at best and fallacious and academically dishonest at worst. There are a lot of factors that contribute to China’s export competitiveness. One of the major being labour wage arbitrage because living standards are different in China. A Chinese working at a McDonals in China would not demand the same salary as that of a McD guy is New York because things cost less in China, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), remember? As a matter of fact, an Indian call centre workers get paid less, when measured in dollars, than a pizza delivery guy in US. But that does mean that the call centre employee is living worse off than the pizza delivery guy. Besides, US has a high exchange rate while China undervalues it’s currency. That acts as a indirect subsidy on each and every Chinese export.

More importantly, by arguing for protectionism these Occupy Wall Street protesters are only displaying their hypocrisy. If companies decide to protect jobs and bring back jobs to the US, millions will become unemployed in India, China and may other countries and these countries would be pushed into deeper poverty. These OWS hippies may consider themselves to be the allegedly disadvantaged 99% but to much of the world they are the 1% and by arguing to protect these jobs, they are in effect conspiring to take away jobs from the rest of the world. Not kosher at all.

Overall, Dave Johnson make a rather poor, ill informed case for OWS. If only he had passed the draft of his post through a Undergrad economics student, the flaws would have become evident. For anyone who wants to understand the other side of this argument, I urge you to read Guy Sorman‘s ‘Economics does not Lie“

One of the other startups on display was VVIPParties and ElementSessions spearheaded by Piyush Nahata. At the startup fair, I asked him if he would like to give out the list of parties to other sites or a third party. As he was visibly getting swamped by questions from other facchas (IIM-A lingo for a first year student) he promised to get back to me later. I gave him my card and went to the other booths and I didn’t really hope he would get back to me. May be, because my questions were not at all about working for his firm, he thought I was a jerk. Which is why I was very surprised when I received his SMS the very next day and he asked me to meet up at Cafe Tanstaafl.

So I went hoping to understand about his startup and how parties are organized in metros and of course to find out if he was willing to share the list of parties with me for my own startup (more on that later, some other day, some other post). The rest of the post, as the title suggest, is about what I understood about startups from him.

Piyush is your average guy. He studied B.Com at Mumbai University and by his own admission not really very good at acads. He is not a product out of any of the IITs or IIMs and he does not have a stellar all rounded CV that almost every batch mate of mine here has. And yet, he has his own startup and makes a good friggin’ amount of money from it. So what does his startup do? It publicizes big ticket parties in metros and other big cities and also arranges for international DJs for these parties.

Piyush started Element Sessions back in 2008. In the initial years he had to hide it from his father, a typical orthodox Marwari according to him, who would rather liked him to join the family business. He lied to his father and used to tell him that he was going for an interview whenever he had to go out of town for his work. He narrates the first time he had to get an international DJ for a party; he did not have the cash but he had his credit card. So he stood next to the counter of a shopping mall urging people to pay him cash and he would swipe his card and in turn pay for their bill. Within a day, he had all the cash he needed and make the payment for the DJ all the while hoping his gamble would pay off and there would be enough people coming to the party to enable him to make a good enough profit. And pay off it did, he was able to pay off the credit card ‘loan’ along with overdue charges and yet make a decent profit from the whole thing. And so it had begun, ElementSessions was on and Piyush Nahata had tasted blood (and not to mention multiple other cocktails to celebrate this victory).

So what does he expect from IIM-A grads? Well he thinks that IIM-A grads will be able to get him business beyond what he currently does. He is looking for smart and suave MBA grads who can just as easily deliver a presentation to the CEOs and COOs of hotels like Taj and Oberoi as they would talk to international DJs. And he promises, 10% of the net profit of Element Sessions during the period as stipend for the Summer intern and that would be quite a lot of money indeed. He wants to divide his operations into horizontals (based on the type of party) and verticals (based on the city or metro) with hopefully one IIM-A guy manning one or more of those. And considering the number of parties that happen all round the year, I am sure they will all have their hands full, with work as well as cash. I had a great time talking to Piyush and I wish him all the best in his endeavours. Oh, and yes, next time I am in Mumbai I will sure check out one of his parties. And if you live in Mumbai and love to party, Element Sessions and VVIPParties will tell you when and where.

This is hopefully the first in a series of posts on my interactions with entrepreneurs, big and small. Considering that I am myself searching for a VC to fund my startup, such interactions will be a learning experience for me as well as you, my faithful reader. I will try and cover entrepreneurs from as many sectors as possible but pardon me if a large number of them turn out to be from the technology sector. I will also not make a distinction between how good or bad the startups are doing because I believe you learn more from your failures than success.

Also if you are a Gujarati entrepreneur and want me to write about you, please drop me an email at you[at].sandipdev[dot]you (Replace ‘you’ with ‘me’ in the email address. That was just a measure to avoid spam).  This state has given me a lot and this would be my way of giving back to it. Gujaratis have a healthy attitude towards entrepreneurship and I would love to do my bit to help them. I would not charge you for writing about you, this blog does not exist to make money. I will write about you for free provided I like your entrepreneurial venture.

1. At the most basic, the tailors have no clue what the ideal length of a suit should be.The length of the suit jacket should be in line with your extended thumb when you place your arms parallel to your body and it should just cover your buttocks; whichever is longer. The one in Guwahati made it a tad shorter and it doesn’t completely cover my buttocks and the one in Ahmedabad made it way longer and then I had to ask him to cut it short.

2. The two suits bought from Guwahati have abysmal buttons which lost their color in the top after 2-3 dry clean (bear in mind that I spent upwards of Rs 40,ooo on the two suit combined. At that price you can throw in a few good button at least).

3. The tailors have a tendency to slightly curve the outer edge of the lapel. I am not sure what style that is but it sure is more than a decade old. That lapel should be a straight line and no curve on the edge of the lapel.

4. Shirt collars : They (tailors at Raymonds) know just one collar Make it as huge as you possibly can and curve it on the outer edge giving a perfect 80s look. Now those collars are out of fashion. Personally I like my collars straight (like Neal Caffrey aka Matt Bomer in White Collar) or slightly spread (Harvey Spector in Suits). Even the spread curved collar (like Moriarty in Sherlock) is cool but I that wouldn’t suit my bulky frame and round face. Even after repeated instructions on how I want my collar, it still is the same curved at the edge nonsense that these tailors learnt when they first started their trade.

5. Hara-kiri on the lapel: The lapel should be an easy thing to do, but not for the Raymonds people in Ahmedabad. First, they made a really wide lapel, it still is wider than my other suits even after I asked them to slim it up. Then the line where the lapel meets the collar is not done straight, the collar line is slightly above the line where the lapel and collar meet. Now, I don’t know how someone can get that wrong, but Raymonds did. Also, these days, the notch is slightly higher but our Raymonds people are still stuck up in the 90s; they cannot and will not learn anything new.

6. Buttons on the sleeve: A lot of bespoke suits have functional buttons; buttons that you can actually open or close. So I thought why not get one for myself; the suit is certainly not bespoke but what the heck. I had asked Raymonds (Ahmedabad) to make the buttons functional and reminded the tailors thrice and yet on final delivery; the buttons are the usual, the ones you can’t open.

Raymonds is not doing anything to train its tailors and I have idea why. Styles change so frequently and yet their tailors are still stuck up in their decades old mindset. I don’t think I am going to Raymonds ever again to get a suit. I have had enough.

And finally, pocket squares. Yes, check out the pocket square collection at Raymonds in Ahmedabad and you might throw up. The pocket squares have some multi coloured patterns drawn on them – may be Gujaratis like those. I have seen way better squares at Turtle and that is where I am going to pick up pocket squares from. Good bye Raymonds, it certainly wasn’t a pleasure meeting you.

Students Union) to act like a Robinhood-esqe outfit that would implement a socialist structure in the state of Assam and also drive away all ‘foreigners’ which basically means non-Assamese inhabitants of Assam like Bengalis (particularly the ones who had come to Assam

after the partition of Bangladesh), Marwaris and Biharis. The logic was of the ULFA leaders and their supporters, whether armed or just the regular guy, was simple, and one oft-repeated by most such xenophobic groups; the ‘foreigners’ have taken a hold on our land, they run the offices, they own the shops and businesses and we can let this happen, we can’t let them ‘rule’ us and therefore we want them out of the state. You can see similar sentiments echoed by MNS too and by the Nazis. The ULFA wanted a separate sovereign ‘country’ of Assam which would have a socialist government and where no ‘foreigners’ would be allowed.

In the initial days, they enjoyed great popularity as they extorted

 money from the rich and ‘supposedly’ distributed among the poor Assamese people.It received arms and ammunition from the  Kachin Independence Army(KIA), a terrorist organization in Myanmar(then Burma) and the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland(NSCN). By the late 80s it had launched a bloody campaign against non Assamese with willful killings, bombings, executions and kidnappings. It was declared a terrorist organization in 1984 by the Government of India under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967.

Most of the above information has been gathered from Wikipedia and other online sources (because I wasn’t even born then) and little bit from what I learnt growing up as a kid. I still remember, when I was around 8 or 10, my mom asking me to lower my voice when I mentioned the name ‘Ulfa’ in a public place; I was a kid then and I didn’t really understand. Growing up, ULFA has been synonymous to me with bombing and killings. In Assam, not a day passes without some bombing somewhere, and if you are lucky to be in the state capital(Dispur/Guwahati) or in Upper Assam, where the ULFA has a stronger hold, your town would pretty much regularly make up the above statistics of 1 bombing a week. Sometimes, one bombing a week is not enough (particularly if there has been a lull for long in which case the ULFA needs to set the statistics right) and so you can have serial bombings a day, even in the very same city/town.

Fast Forward to mid 90s (the time I can remember); everything before that is a little hazy as I was too young then to remember or comprehend much. By now, the old animosities and xenophobia between Assamese and Bengalis (and Marwaris who owned most of the businesses and were rich) were fast vanishing. A new generation had grown up, with people like myself (I am a Bengali), who did not see any difference between the Bengali kid in the playground and the Assamese kid beyond the fact that those kids had a funny accent and their food was little different, a little less spicy. Among the grownups too, things had mellowed down considerably. An Assamese girl marrying a Bengali guy (or vice versa) was no longer the catastrophe that it was considered to be; yes eyebrows were raised but it wasn’t that much of a big deal. The three communities (Assamese, Bengalis and Marwaris) invited each other in their festivals and things had gotten much much better. Of course, there was the occasional xenophobe on either side or the racist teacher or two at school, but his/her influence was much reduced by now. This may not be the complete picture of things, but this is how I, a kid growing up in those times, saw and heard it.

Click to view slideshow.

Also the ULFA had taken to planting bombs at markets, Independence day parades, buses; name a public place and they had planted a bomb there. By now, their targets were no more Bengalis or Marwaris, Assamese too were victim of their attacks. They had lost much of their support among the people and their only means to stay in the minds of the people was unbridled terror. Blasts at Durga Puja pandals were common and they would even call up doctors to warn them before hand and dare them to prevent it. Bandhs were regular, and shops would be destroyed if they remained open. A flag outside your house on Independence Day could invite their wrath. Rampant extortion from  and kidnapping of rich businessman , high ranking officials of the very few businesses that existed in Assam (or their family members) or just about anyone who bought a new car (even a Maruti 800) resulted in dwindling support for this outfit. By the end of the 90s, they were a nuisance at best and a public enemy at worse. Of course, they still had links with some of the political parties. Nevertheless, military offensive against them were at a all time high and it’s key leaders had long taken to living across the border in neighbouring Bangladesh; living in the country of the same Bangladeshis they wanted to drive out, an irony if there ever was one.

The only way now to remain relevant was to carry out blasts across the state and once in a while raise the issue of driving out illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, a genuine concern of the people or the occasional violence against Biharis, who had settled in the state in good number doing mostly marginal jobs like barbers and small time shop keepers. Operation All Clear and Operation Rhino 2 carried out by the Indian state against the ULFA in co-operation with Myanmar since 2003 had been particularly effective. Rattled by the offensive of the Indian Army, the ULFA called for a truce, brokered by eminent people including Mamoni Raisom Goswami, to get to the negotiation table, in the meanwhile buying time to either flee the country or prepare for more terrorist activities. Once their farce was caught, the talks broke and the Indian Army resumed its operations against the ULFA. Besides, diplomatic channels with Bangladesh were used.ULFA Chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, deputy military chief Raju Barua, finance secretary Chitraban Hazarika and foreign secretary Sashadhar Choudhury and Rajkhowa’s bodyguard Raja Bora were arrested in tacit co-operation with Bangladesh and the Indian government is pushing for more arrests right now.

As things stand now, the ULFA has called for a truce again. They have drawn their agenda and a list of demands asking for more autonomy in the state, something similar to J&K. I am not sure how these talks will work out but it sure is a nice change from constant fear of bomb blasts.

But the larger question is, who are the ULFA negotiating for? Is it the people of Assam? Do the people of Assam want secession from the Indian state or even partial autonomy? Do the people of Assam truly think of themselves as not a part of India? Does the average Assamese, who now increasingly send their kids to study in Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai really think of the non-Assamese as foreigners? Does the average Assamese youth who is very likely doing a job at some IT firm down south think of India as a country hostile to their interests? Does the average Assamese think it necessary to get the UN involved in resolving issues with the Indian Union as the ULFA has demanded? Does the average Assamese think that Assam will be safer if the arrested ULFA cadres and their leaders are released?

The way I see it, and most people of Assam would agree, the ULFA do not represent the wishes of the people of Assam in any way whatsoever. They are a terrorist outfit, a cause of decades of fear in the minds of the people and responsible for over 20,000 deaths. They don’t deserve a truce; they deserve a bullet between their eyes, humanitarian considerations be damned. It is because of them that businesses are afraid to operate in the state, it is because of them that shops and restaurants close by 9pm in most places of Assam. It is because of them that a lot of innocent lives have been lost, irrespective of which language those dead bodies spoke. The peace talks, therefore are a farce. If factions can gain legitimacy and the right to decide for a entire state just by the power of the gun, then I am really worried for the future of my country. You cannot let every other terrorist group speak on behalf of the people. Guns and bombs don’t build consensus.

Yes, Assam does have a lot of problem. Lack of development, high unemployment  and poverty are the major ones (more on the development issues in another post I suppose). But we don’t need a ULFA to fix that up. They are part of the problem, not the solution.

In this peace talk, they are representing their own interests and not that of the people of Assam. And we don’t need nor want them to talk on our behalf. Period.

If you don’t know what “The Story of Stuff” is. Well its a video series by Annie Leonard, Greenpeace activist and a critic of excessive consumerism. These videos are a propaganda by her to show how capitalism is destroying the planet. The videos are full of outright lies and misrepresentation of facts and a mere tool for her to further her neo-communist agenda. Sadly however, these videos are being shown in US schools by teachers who thought, with their limited understanding of the facts of the matter under consideration, that these would be a nice way to teach students to be environmentally conscious.

Anyways, watch these videos which debunk her lies. Its pretty awesome.

And do leave comments. I would like to know your views on the matter.

Do you see anything surprising?

Lets say you have two numbers a and b; and you want to find the average of these. The average will always lie within a and b, not outside it. Now look at the numbers again, the provincial growth rates. While the aggregate growth rate for Mainland China is 10.3% and 9.2% in 2010 and 2009 respectively, the growth rates of the constituent provinces are almost all greater than the aggregate growth rate.How is that possible? How can the growth rate of the whole be less than the growth rate of the parts? Its a mathematical impossibility.

Well the yearbook explains it away thus : ” Since the GDP is calculated separately by the state and local governments, the sum of data of different regions is not equal to the national total amount.”

That sounds a little dodgy at best. However, the explanation is far simple. You see, local officials, in their over eagerness to show better growth in their areas, fudge with the data resulting in such absurd figures. It is hoped however, that the National Bureau of Statistics of China does collect and report real national level data and the aggregate figure is a accurate representation of the real situation on the ground.

But there is another breed of tech fanatics, whose fanaticism borders on the edge of delusion, who would not listen to facts and figures that go against them and would instead cook up and speculate numbers to justify their alleged superiority, and whose fanaticism has been equaled by scientists to those of religious fanatics.

I am an Apple fan too and I have watched a re-watched Steve Jobs talking about Apple products at MacWorld and WWDC. Apple makes great and innovative products that their competition can neither think of nor have the guts to bring to market. Apple is truly a great company and its products are definitely superior than the competition in terms of innovation and usability. The growing numbers of Macbook users and the already huge sales of iPad while other tablet sales are declining bear a testimony to that. In an age, where the hardware has become commodity, Apple has been successfully able to keep consumers paying a premium for aesthetics and style and that’s no mean a feat.

And Apple users are a devoted lot indeed. Once you make a switch to an Apple product you will rarely, if ever, want to switch to a competitor’s product or so I have been told. Apple fanboys wax eloquent about Apple and you will find them endlessly speculating about what Apple’s next product would be, but sometimes their eagerness gets the better of them as some of their tirade against Android just shows.

Lets take two of the most recent ones.

First this one titled “Report: Android’s Dirty Secret? A Return Rate High As 40 Percent” which has been doing the rounds of Twitter. When I first read the title, I thought this would have data from some consumer survey which shows that return rates of Android is “as high as 40%”[sic]. But no, the blogger conveniently does away with such minor issues like facts and figures by attributing the stats to “ person familiar with handset sales for multiple manufacturers”  as is done by the original article by TechCrunch. For one, the stats are unsubstantiated which means this is a non argument. I would like to quote Infosys Chairman Narayan Murthy here “In God we trust, everyone else please bring data to the table”. Besides, with Android, users have a lot of options; so if they are not happy with a device they have the option (in the US) for returning it within a month and try a new one. With Apple, there are no option, its just one device, the iPhone.

The second one, titled “Android activations have caught up to iOS, so what” came sometimes back when Google’s Andy Rubin went to town telling everyone that Android device activation have outpaced iOS. This one too is wrong on multiple counts. For one, on the basis of pure number there are more Android devices than iOS. The articles takes offense at the fact that the comparison is made between multiple Android devices and just 2 iOS devices – the iPhone and the iPad. As true as the contention is, its an unfounded one. As an app developer, I would go by numbers and not how many devices led to that number. And remember, we are comparing Android versus iOS, not iPhone or iPad versus all other Android devices. As a single device, the iPhone or iPad are obviously outselling other devices in its category and it surely shows that those are great devices but that’s really not relevant in this case.

Then the article laments the fact that Android runs not just on ‘smartphones’ but also a lot of ‘dumb phones’, a classification best understood by the authors. You sure don’t need as powerful a phone as the iPhone or the Galaxy S2 to enjoy a good experience with your phone. Besides, there are markets other than the US and Europe where lower spec phones sell really well as long as those are capable of opening up web pages and running some of the most common social networking and productivity apps. Not every consumer is looking to watch HD video on his/her phone or even play graphics intensive games. Sure, Apple does not cater to those customers but that does not mean they don’t exist. The bloggers remark that  ”most people would rather pay $300 for a low-quality piece of junk than fork out $500 for a much more premium product” is almost laughable, not every user needs,wants or can even afford $500 for a phone. Not every used is equally enthused by the Apple logo on a device.Of course, the blogger conveniently forgets the 12 million+high end  Galaxy phones out in the market not to mentions Motorola Droid and the other high end ones from HTC.

The kind of fanaticism and utter disregard to pure numbers is something only a half functioning mind is capable of; like that of a religious fanatic. These guys really need to grow up and stop trembling every time they hear a news that’t not exactly music to their ears.

Apple with iOS (and iPhones,iPads,iTabs) follow a product strategy while Google takes the platform route with the Android (just like Microsoft did with its Windows). Which is why Android will always beat iOS in terms of sheer numbers. Yes, it may lose out a little bit on the UI and usability front owing to lack of control over how device manufacturers chose to implement it, but it will make up for that with volumes.

And that’s the fact of life Apple fanatics need to adjust with.

It all began with Usenets

Usenet systems were first conceived of in 1979 by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. Usenets let users post articles or posts (referred to as “news”) to newsgroups and could be called the forefather of Google Groups which borrows a lot of functionality from Usenet

Usenets have no centralized server or dedicated administrator, setting them apart from most BBSs and forums. Usenets are mostly responsible for the development of newsreader clients, which are the precursor to RSS feed readers so commonly used to follow blogs and news sites today.

Usenets, like most social networks of that time, were a favourite hangout of geeks, programmers and hackers. Linus Torvalds first post about Linux on comp.os.minix is still the stuff of tech folklore

And then there were Bulletin Board Systems

The first BBSs came online in the late 70s. They were usually hosted on personal computers and users had to dial in to access a BBS. Only one person at a time could gain access to the BBS because only one connection could be made to the host modem at a time (just like a telephone call).

BBS were a favourite tool for hackers and phreakers to share information, code etc. BBS were one of the first to allow user to ‘dial in’ (like logging in) to a site and get information.

Online Services

After BBSs came “online services” like CompuServe and Prodigy. These were the first real “corporate” attempts at accessing the Internet.

CompuServe was the first company to incorporate a chat program into their service. Prodigy was responsible for making online service more affordable (CompuServe had been prohibitively expensive for many, with charges of $6/hour plug long-distance fees that often made the service run $30/hour or more).

GEnie was an early online service created by a General Electric subsidiary (GEIS) in 1985. It ran through 1999 and was one of the earliest services available. It was a text-based service, and considered the first viable commercial competition to CompuServe. The service was created to make use of idle time-sharing mainframes after normal U.S. business hours. GEnie offered games, shopping, mail, and forums (called RoundTables). There was even a print magazine associated with the service at one time.

AOL started as an online service too and made great strides at making the Internet more universally accessible in the U.S.

Not many in India would know or have even used any of these services as we got internet only in the early 90s

IRC, ICQ, and Instant Messaging

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was developed in 1988 and used for file sharing, link sharing and otherwise keeping in touch.

It was really the father of instant messaging as we know it today. IRC, being a geek toy, was mostly UNIX-based though, limiting access to most people. Even to this day, hackers prefer IRC to most other forms of communication. Most open source projects maintain their own IRC channels for communication among developers.

ICQ was developed in the mid-90s and was the first instant messaging program for PCs. It was at least partly responsible for the adoption of avatars, abbreviations (LOL, BRB) and emoticons. Other IM clients soon followed.

Forums

Forums were and still are a popular form of communication and played a huge role in the evolution of social networking sites. Software like phpBB and vBulletin allowed just about any site to host its own forum and engage users in discussions. In many ways, they were the grand children of BBS, only this time they were faster and more user friendly.

SixDegrees

This was based on the ‘Chain-links’ and six degrees of separation concept by Frigyes Karinthy.SixDegrees was launched in 1997 and was the first modern social network. It allowed users to create a profile and to become friends with other users.

While the site is no longer functional, at one time it was actually quite popular and had around a million members at its peak.In 2000 it was purchased for $125 million and in 2001 it was shut down.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal started in 1999 and was a social network built around constantly-updated blogs (or weblogs). LiveJournal encouraged its users to follow one another and to create groups and otherwise interact. It was really the precursor to the live updates we see in social networks currently

And MMORPG

The grand daddy of Farmville on FB, MMORPG allowed players situated continents apart to play online game by assuming roles and interact socially through the game allowing players to create an entire online persona. World of Warcraft is perhaps the most popular MMORPG and there were others like Raganrok, which my brother used to play a lot. It was different from online FPS and racing games n that it allowed you to create online personalities and interact socially rather than go on a fragging rampage or just outrun the other players. Second Life took this concept much further but hasn’t been very successful.

And then there came along Friendster, Hi5, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook and the rest.

Google+ is the newest social networking site and you can read my review of Google+ here