Basket Case

Over at HSI , Vijay Anand of Startup Centre and Proto.in fame, posted some excellent thoughts about the wannabe entrepreneurs who are looking for technical co-founders: A Trademark Skillset (and I am reiterating) is that one thing you are absolutely known for - it might be people skills; to be able to bring people together around a problem, form a solution and build an enterprise around it, it might be more specific around technology, or design, or fundraising (sic), or sales / business development - but it has to be one quality that you have, that the entire organization (sic) can bet on.  You should read the full post on HSI .

Five of our books are being launched today in Bangalore Book Festival. I am very excited and a little nervous too :-). Please come to the launch and show your support. We promise it will be interesting. Here is a Press Release with some more information - Print-on-Demand titles come to Bangalore Book Festival . You can see the titles being launched on Pothi.com . Time: 4:30pm Venue: Gayatri Vihar, Palace Grounds,  Near Mekhri Circle, Bangalore upcoming page

The foreword to Guy Kawasaki's new book by the Fake Steve Jobs. Funny ! I don't know if it will make me jump out of the window and head to a book store to buy the book but will sure make me pick it up and turn few pages whenever I see it next. This may have something to do with me being a poor cash-strapped entrepreneur who loves books. But it sure proves the worth of a suitable foreword in marketing a book. Enjoy ! You know what I think about whenever I hear the name Guy Kawasaki? Motorcycles. It's true. It's the first thing I think about when I hear his name, even though I???ve been told again and again that Guy actually has nothing to do with motorcycles. So then I try not to think about motorcycles, but come on, the dude's name is Kawasaki. What else are you going to think about? And don't say Vietnam because that is not cool, people. Not cool at all. Guy was just a friggin kid when all that shit was going down. Anyway, since Guy is not a motorcycle designer...

I return to blog after so many days and unfortunately it is a bad news. Millions of people in states of Bihar and Assam are reeling under massive floods in Kosi and Brahmaputra rivers. The Kosi floods are much more damaging than previous years because due to the breach in Nepal, the river has taken the course it had left 200 years ago and the areas under flood were actually considered flood safe! While the blame game is on, it is quite clear that the embankment was not repaired and was already beyond its expected life. But none of that matters right now to around 3 million people in Bihar and 1 million in Assam who have lost their everything in the floods. Many of them are still struck in water logged areas and those who have been evacuated are trying to survive in relief camps setup all over the state. The situation is going to be serious for months to come since breach can only be filled after 2 months when the water level of kosi goes down. Right now the hope lies in the only thing ...

A beautiful quote from a interview taken from an interview of Sean Johnson published by Coffee with Sunder . Beyond a CS degree there are some obvious skills you need such as the ability to present to customers and at industry conferences. But more than a specific skill set, you need to develop a base of knowledge. You need to spend time with the sales organization learning how a deal progresses from an email address of a prospect to a closed deal 9 months later. You need to spend time with marketers to understand how hard and expensive it is to generate a quality lead. You need to spend time with quality assurance and support teams to understand the ramifications of ill defined features. You need to spend time with software executives to learn how a software business operates, how contracts are negotiated for example or how a partnership is put together. You need to learn the domain that your product is in and become something very close to a domain expert in it. You need to know yo...

Before reading my post, read this post about the problem of Indian Entrepreneurs not thinking big enough . There was a followup post on the same blog that countered some of those point. It was during undergrad days that I heard this argument for the first time. The biggest problem with people pitching their business plans in competitions, according to one of the judges, was that they were not asking for enough money ! It sounded quite counterintuitive to my middle class trained mind. My instincts told me to borrow as little as possible and to bootstrap as much as possible, the old Indian way of doing business as somebody later put it. But I was naive back then, didn't understand the importance of capital, didn't understand the central premise of running a successful company in a capitalist setting i.e. growth ! Year after year, every year, growth in terms of bottom line, revenue, profits ! Because although we start out with customers, with efforts to solve a problem they are ...

A big reason for my decreased frequency of blogging had to do with Google launching the Hindi Transliterator in blogger. While, like every red blood Hindi lover, I was also very much pleased by the turn of events, the joy was short lived. Very soon, I discovered that on Linux Firefox version 1.5, the on line blogger editor became very very slow. So slow that I can type 1-2 sentences and than sit back and watch as it works very hard to bring the characters in view one by one, at the speed of around 1 character per second. And this is not in transliteration mode but in normal English typing mode. Now being a busy grad student that I am, I spend a large part of my day and night in my office and away from my laptop. So it was a sad situation. Finally I started looking around for an alternative blog editor and after some false starts, landed at ScribeFire from performancing which is an extension for Firefox. From the first looks, it seems to be quite fast and have all the basic facilities ...

These are some heady days in my life. Lots of things happening and at times I get the feeling that everything might just slip away. And often times I remind myself that what you have is not what you hold in your fist but that which rests on your open palm. So the big news is that I am going back to India next year. Things moved fast and there are chances of a startup looming on the horizon, already threatening to block the sun of rationality and rob the clarity out of life. Let us see where it goes. Back from the future, in the present, there are some more things to be excited about. For next few months I am going to work on a Urdu to English Machine Translation System. Now given the state of the art, you can be sure that this MT system will be pretty useless for almost any use. What is exciting however is that it may produce as a side effect some nice tools for Urdu, conversion of Urdu script into Devanagari being one of them, an issue close to my heart . For the starters though, Bhom...

After a long time, some language related articles. It is no secret how powers that be have often tried to control the nature of public discourse by introducing new words for old ways and substituting neutral sounding words for words having negative connotations. As it turns out, they are often successful, thus giving little credibility to the famous Shakespearian adage of what's in a name. In this piece on India Together , Shripad Dharmadhikary points out the changing language of development debate in India. Irrespective of which side of the fence you are on, it makes sense to know the tricks of the trade. And if you ever doubted the power of sentence restructuring, perhaps this will convince you otherwise. How should we think about our farmer's? PS: This post is 201st post on Basket Case. It took almost 3.5 years which would mean on average 1 post per week, though as usual that statistics hides more than it reveals :-)

Let me pick up this thread from my last post. I lamented there about the lack of higher education (PhD level) opportunities India. That is one of the reasons I am here. But make no mistake, majority of the Indian students who come to states every year, do not come here to get educated. That degree they get is just a stepping stone to this land of opportunities. In most cases, it is not even the oft repeated story of becoming used to things here and finding it difficult to return back. They made up their minds long before the passports were stamped and bags were packed. Considering that the job market in India is booming like nothing before, markets are open and shops are full, why do people still leave? And for most of them, money is not in short supply, these are not the people who didn't get the opportunity or faced oppression. In fact most of them belong to the most privileged class of people. And I don't know what you thought when Haneef after everything that happened, aske...

Note: The post was written 2 days ago, so please adjust the timeline accordingly. A lot of time has passed. Almost four years since I graduated, almost 1 years since I came to US, almost 1 month since I returned from San Diego/ Bay Area trip, almost 1 week since I moved into this new house, almost 1 day since I returned from the whitewater rafting trip from Ohiopyle. Somewhere along that time-line lies the one and a half months mark since I have not posted. Not that I was totally gone, I wrote somethings on wasted margins . So now you know that I have changed houses, have been on a couple of trips and read couple of books. During those trips, I visited Coronado beach and La Jolla coves in San Diego, met a lot of old friends, some of them already finishing up their PhD and staring a new phase in life, visited the famous Golden gate bridge, ate a one pound crab and learned a lot about its anatomy along the way, lost and found my phone, sat in a train after almost one year, rafted (guided...

I never hoped he will ! In fact when I saw the forwarded mail in my inbox, I felt slightly irritated. What with all the commencement speeches being forwarded. I am sure at this rate and given the consumerist society we live in, we will be able to buy a collector's edition of these speeches very soon ! So I reluctantly opened it up and expected the now old formula speech of most-dramatic-events-of-my-life, the recent speech by Narayan Murthy at NYU being one very bad example (but people seem to be getting inspired by that also !!). As I have mentioned before on this blog, my disillusionment with such speeches started after I saw the video of Steve Jobs delivering his wonderfully written piece at Stanford. His presentation had no life, no soul and for me, no inspiration either. But to my pleasant surprise, Bill got this one right ! Looking back, Steve Jobs and Narayan Murthy sound like 2 narcissists now. And this when I had much less sympathies for Bill Gates than for Narayan Murthy ...

What a wonderful way of celebrating Republic Day ! I just loved the concept and the wonderful entries. Surely my try out list is a little longer now. :-) A happy and thoughtful Republic day to everybody. May you become a more responsible citizen in the year to come.

"...if India didn't exist, no one would have the imagination to invent it." An article by Mukul Kesavan in Telegraph about why India matters more and more in today's prejudiced world . Again from Telegraph, For a True Flowering of The Mind by Partha Ghosh. I quote, "Fourth, we must insist that they learn language and literature well. Without that, they will remain insensitive, incapable of understanding other people and other cultures, and nothing creative will ever emerge from them. Language creates the world we live in. The more sophisticated the language we use, the greater the freedom and power of our thoughts and the better the grasp of reality around us. This is why science had to invent the formal and abstract language of mathematics. Also, without the ability to read, hear, analyse and understand the constant bombardment of our ears and eyes by the media and politicians, and without the ability for clear and logical understanding and self-expression, the...

One of those days, one of those times when that sudden feeling of melancholy takes over ! So sad yet so hauntingly enjoyable ! What is it that the heart longs for? What fires this craving? What old dreams haunt the open eyes? How can one say and yet, how can one keep quiet but for lack of words ! goonga keri sharkara, baitha hi muskaaye ! And the reason can be as simple as a song that you have heard hundreds of times before. That ever so thin line between hearing and listening and it is so suddenly crossed ! Every word becomes pregnant with meaning and every movement of voice becomes a door to a whole new world. Blessed are those who gave voice to the human pain and longing ! Song: Tera mera pyaar amar, Phir kyon mujhko lagta hai darr . Singer : Lata Movie: Asli Naqli Music : Shanker-Jaikishan Enjoy it here .

Following up on my previous post about RTI, here are some links: Parivartan : This is the NGO started by Arvind Kejriwal which is heading the RTI movement in India. The site has all kind of info. The Indian RTI blog . Taz writes about Arvind Kejriwal's visit at Sepia Mutiny . And while I am at it, let me recount a vivid example of how the international institutions like WB impose their will on the administration. So all your doubts about the evilness of WB may not be far fetched after all. The story goes that Delhi Govt has a project about the privatization of water distribution in Delhi. The project was funded by WB. The project was being run secretly for 5-6 years ! And when Parivartan tried to get information under RTI, they initial response of the Govt was a complete denial of the existence of the project. However after a extended confrontation, they were able to get all the files related to the project and the details that came out were shocking. The project was finally scrap...