Traffic Stop...

Traffic stop in Bangalore (and I assume around India) is a pretty active place. Things which happen there are amazing.

1. Folks take a break. Some even take their shoes/sandals off and take a stretch. Some very active junctions have a stop time close to 2 minutes.
2. Pee-break - I don't need to explain what this is. It is pretty disgusting.
3. Nose-digging - clean yourself up.
4. Spit (and clear your throat). Disgusting, but we Indians are not really very conscious of our surroundings.
5. Helmet-cleaning - if you are driving a two wheeler with a helmet on, it gets pretty hot inside (the helmet). So it is a time to cool-off and comb your hair.
6. Vendors sell their wares -what better way to market to your customers. If you have shopped at a traffic junction, you know the margins on some of the items are incredibly high. Don't fall a prey, always bargain.
7. Beggars knock on your windows (so tinted is better and you need to keep them rolled up). Beggars are OK if they are genuine, but irritating if you see them over and over again. If you have seen 'Slum Dog Millionaire' it shows an entire business built around begging.
8. Count as the traffic display counts down to zero.
9. Make that urgent phone call or answer that SMS.
10. Wiggle around, vehicles wiggle around the traffic junction, so that they can be the first to be flagged out at the green. It always fascinates me on how people compete for space here - at the traffic junctions all rules are broken - you can go across into the other lane, wiggle from the left most lane to make a right turn etc.
11. Stare around at your surrounding drivers and passengers.
12. Ask for directions which is really common. Folks who ask about directions are usually a long long way off from their destination and the only legible answer you can give them in the couple of minutes is to politely ask them to turn right or left or head straight.

:-)

Promise of connected devices.

Needless to say, I'm a big fan of Kindle (and Amazon).

Kindle fills two very basic needs (at-least from my perspective).

1. Get books when you need them, where-ever you are.
2. Save valuable real-estate at home - you no longer need those big bulky book-shelves. I can carry 100's of books with me in a very nice form factor.

The key is "downloading where ever you are" (not everywhere on this planet, but in most parts). If someone had told be about this 10-15 years back, it would have sounded as science fiction, but not anymore.

Kindle is in essence a connected device which fulfills a single customer need (i.e download your book anywhere) over cellular network. Amazon has also built a profitable business model around it, which is also the key behind its success. I've articulated the advantages of Kindle and how it might catch on in the education space in one of my previous blog posts.

Bigger picture, one of the successes behind Kindle is the concept of connected devices. It opens up more and more opportunities in the future. Classic example is the smart refrigerator - Can I program my refrigerator to work in a auto-mode. Fill in the list of items I usually buy, set a threshold and when items fall behind the threshold, contact my favorite grocery store and order my items (charge my credit card). So, I really don't have to bother about what happens behind the scenes. Sci-fi ? Maybe not, the technology is available right now. The key is getting business model right i.e building a profitable business model where all the stake holders have an advantage.

There is another advantage with connected devices and that is it brings the customer and the producer nearer. Before Kindle, we used to buy books at a book-store - which served as a middle man in the transaction. With Kindle, I really don;t need a book store - I can talk with Amazon directly and in essence I'm closer to the producer (in this case, the author). I no longer have to visit multiple book stores to check out if they carry a book I need or it makes searching a lot easier etc etc.

If you look at the world around us, we see a lot of example where these connected devices would help us if there is a business model which helps everyone.

What triggered this post was this company (Vitality) which launched Connected Pill Bottle, so that your pill bottle can pre-order your tablets when you run out of them. Is this a business model that will work ? It is easy to laugh at them right now. Would I pay $15 for this service, hell no. But then the technology is cool, my guess is that these folks would branch off into related fields (built on the same underlying technology) - remote health monitoring maybe. 

More importantly, it just signals the advent of 'smarter devices' at home :-)

Instincts

If you stay in one place for a long time, you are prone to instinctive behaviour.

The other day, I saw that it was dull and gloomy outside and it looked like the setting was perfect for a bout of rain, my brain instinctively processed that it was November and so putting those two together - I proceeded to wear a light jacket. As I stepped outside, I got a couple of stares (for the jacket) and in a couple of minutes, it was hot and humid. Of course I no longer stay in Pacific NorthWest :-) (where it rains continuously from October to March and sun is hardly visible)

It is interesting how your brain gets tuned to certain things. There are a lot of habits like that which we don't even realize. The same applies to work place too, the longer you stay in a place and longer you perform the same set of activities, your brain gets accustomed to the routine, that is when learning plateaus and interest wanes.

In short, change in good !!

Entrepreneur

Bangalore has a thriving entrepreneur community and it amazes me the ingenuity and innovation these folks bring along. While most tend to be in software/IT sector, there is a lot of stuff happening elsewhere. I see folks who have given up their IT careers and venturing out into a new area. If you drive around the town, you see a lot of new cafes, bakeries, clothing line, niche stores targeting babies/moms-to-be, new chains for electronic items.

Mobile applications are the craze these days and from what I have been hearing from a few folks running their own app-dev companies, demand for mobile app developers is out-stripping supply. Mobile sure is the future and I expect to see a lot of tablet-based activity as it makes in-roads into businesses and drive efficiency and cost-savings.

I had the opportunity to meet Vinod Khosla one of those stalwarts in the VC industry and hearing him speak at close quarters was inspiring. There were a few messages which stuck in my brain as I walked out :

"learn something radically new every 5 years"


"Hard problems mean big opportunities if you're arrogant enough to believe you can solve it"


"Don't tie your ego with your ideas. Manage your failure. Evolve your ideas"


"Fail"


"Analyze your failures"


"Go around in circles for a little while before taking an exit on a road"


"Prepare Plan A, Plan B, Plan C...but don't be reactive to events"


One other lesson for me was his ability to be upfront (and not diplomatic about certain issues). He bluntly called someone's question as being 'stupid' (though he had apologized before making that statement). He also openly said that he does not believe in NGO (not-for-profit model).

It was money and evening well-spent !!

Weather...

If there is one thing I don't miss about Seattle, it has gotta be the weather. November-March is dreary and filled with rain, clouds and gloom.

The current weather comparison between Bellevue and Bangalore tells the story (almost 30 degree differential). I wish I could spend winters in Bangalore and summers in Bellevue :-)

Speed Governors

This is a real welcome news. The Supreme Court has instructed that all public vehicle (taxi fleets, school buses etc) need to be installed with devices which would 'govern' the maximum speed of the vehicles.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/Speed-governors-will-check-racing-cabs-buses-on-road/articleshow/10561673.cms

If you have ever driven in India, you would appreciate the value of these devices. A large percentage of these accidents can be avoided with a little bit of common-sense. Indian roads now experience the highest number of accidents in the world overtaking China. (http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5519345,00.html)

I'm eagerly looking forward to the Google initiative for driver-less cars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car) - a nascent technology but one that has immense potential.

Kindle...

Ever since I brought a Kindle 6 months back, I'm a hard-core Kindle fan. The last few years have been hectic with 2 young kids and the associated work, not to mention the never ending work. As a result, my reading habit had suffered with what-ever free time being spent on taking rest. Most of the reading tend to be either technical and consumed mainly from a few websites.

So, when I brought a new Kindle, it was to see if I can make a turn-around with my reading habits. And so far, it has worked like a charm, I've read 4 books in the last 4 months, which is great, considering that we were in the middle of a big international move and I had to cope with work also :-)

More importantly, I'm amazed at the technology. When I see the reading habits of folks in India, the distribution of print media is still via humans i.e newspaper is still distributed by someone early in the morning, if you need a new magazine, you still have to go to one of those stores nearby and pay money or you get a regular subscription to a magazine which is again delivered by a postman. Will we see a big shift towards digital distribution as the prices of these device drop down and it becomes easier for common folks to afford it ? Will the print media in India go the same way as in US where most of the newspaper are dying a slow death or will they survive with the same distribution and advertising model ?

The other interesting area where we might see a big explosion of Kindle-like devices is in the education space. Kids in India still carry a whole lot of books as they progress through the year. Besides the practical issue of carrying these books (which is a big burden), these digital text books might just help in easy indexing and discovery of information. The regular mode of learning something new in a text book at-least is to go to the index at the end of the book and then try to find a cross-reference to the terms you are looking for (pretty much like the way we would search for information on google.com, except that this is all done manually). So, my guess with digital text-books, it might help a whole lot in easily discovering and consuming new material.

A side-effect of digital text-books is that it makes it easier for copyright protection. Currently, at-least in India, there is a scant respect for copy-right, folks xerox/copy text-books without a regard that this is a violation of law. We all have been in the system where this is not frowned upon and in-fact encouraged to a large extent ("why do you want to buy a expensive text book when you can copy it for 1/10 th of the price"). My guess is that publication house will push the concept of text books just because it a good model for them and more-over in the long-run it is good for the economy as a whole if copy-right and intellectual property is respected.

My prediction is that in the next few years :

• we will see a change in the distribution model for print media as more people buy Kindle-like devices
• we will see a change in the education space as kids move to a more digital text books. Kindle-like device might be part of your kids school bag.
• we might see drop in the number of book shops.
• changes in the advertising and revenue generation for print media

Diwali

Diwali in Bangalore was awesome. A continuous suppy of food kept us happy and of course an opportunity to meet and spend time with family.

On the negative side, it was amazing to experience the noise levels :-). The worst part was reading those Diwali accidents which cause life-long injuries and most of them which are avoidable with a little bit of care and being aware of your surrounding.

Where do you belong ?

NYT carried this blog-post on a NRI who returned back to India only to return back to US again.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/why-i-left-india-again/

While I don't agree with all the opinions in the blog, I am impressed at the author's courage to highlight what prompted the move. As the comment suggest, it is easy to be judgmental about the author and his views and most of the comments make a personal attack on his character.

At the end of day, you gotta be where your heart is !

Namma Metro

Finally, "Namma Metro" is functional, however small the stretch is, it is still symbolic achievement and has the potential to catapult Bangalore into more development and an easier commute for lakhs of Bangaloreans.

Of all the news articles, the link below probably summed it up really well (http://business-standard.com/india/news/for-that-smooth-ride-home/453294/)

The skeptic across the city warns that "Namma Metro" will not really help that much, but it is really great to see a world class urban transport system come to Bangalore. We just had to keep it clean and shiny for years to come. Once the entire stretch across the city becomes operational, it has great potential to reduce the commute time.

The biggest boon as I see it is that this will allow the city to stretch beyond the existing borders and gradually move into the US style urban development, where a big city has a downtown (commercial zone) and then a more residential suburban layout.  The problem as I see in the past few years where Bangalore has seen rapid development has been that as city got richer, the people wanted to move to the interiors which doesn't really scale well. The concept of satellite township bordering a big urban area has a been pushed for a long time, but the two critical components for this to be successful are just falling in place now. The first is the world-class urban transport which would ferry people into the city. The second is a world class road network which would take people to their homes in the satellite townships.

Hopefully, "Namma Metro" will decongest Bangalore and make it a better place to stay !

Murphy's law...

...yesterday was one of those days where all things which could be wrong did go wrong.

In order of events :

1. The DSL line decided to go dead.
2. The router decided to go dead.
3. The subscription on my mobile broadband had run out.

Essentially, an outage with no way of getting on the internet. While it is problem of out of your control, the bigger issue is finding the right folks to fix the problem.

The customer service for most of these are not really world-class. While companies like Comcast take outages seriously, this is not really case for a ordinary connection (I do hope it is better for business customers). In most cases, you need to call a few folks before a outage is registered and the issue solved. To their credit, inspite of the lack of coordination, DSL outage took around 12 hours to be fixed.

The next problem is discovering where services are located. To renew the mobile subscription, you need to find the right 'shop' to pay and renew. This is not a trivial task especially the first time. It took me an hour to find the right place and more often than not, you need to hop from one shop to another and you get redirected to the next place where you might get the 'service' you need. Conceptually, this mirrors the way HTML links are designed :-)

In short, it took me around 10 hours to recover from a outage, hopefully, it is one of a kind and does not repeat too often....

Simple perks..

As an engineer, you really don't have to dress up. An old pair of jeans and a few T-shirt works just fine. Add a jacket to cover the cold weather, you can live an entire winter on that  wardrobe.

That also makes me lazy. Being in Seattle and being an engineer, I never spent enough time on my  wardrobe and of course I hate ironing.

So, for the first time ever, I got my entire wardrobe neatly ironed and it looks awesome.

All for 250 Rs, around 5$ :-). I'm set for more than a month.

Queue-ing

This is nothing new, I guess - queues in India work differently.

I've been spending time in the queues in a few places over the last few weeks (queues in banks, queues to get into parking lot, queues in government offices). It is amusing how folks react in queues.

Firstly, most folks really don;t like the idea of standing in a queue - most of us have that entitlement that queues are for 'others'. The first thing I'm sure most people think about when they see the queue is 'how the heck do I get to the front' - which is where the concept of a queue breaks down.

The queues tend to be compact, compressed and literally, you can have (unwanted) physical contact. There are the perpetual 'jumpers' who find that extra-ordinary excuse to get to the front (more often than that it tends to start with - 'I have a one minute request'). When reminded about the 'jump', some folks give up with a whimper, while the bold ones try to substantiate why they need to be at the start of the queue.

I sometimes feel that somehow people think that just getting as near as possible to the queue counter will help them get the work done faster. It is more of an instinctive reaction to push, hustle and get to the front.

The other annoying is the multi-tasking at the queue counter. Instead of servicing one customer at a time, the people on the other side invariably try to help more than one customer at the same (i.e multi-task) and that really doesn't help.

I just hope that we drill this into our kids - 'stand in line, get your work done and get out as fast as possible, it is just that simple'....

Wrong Place...

If there is one place you really don't want to be in, is to be in an ambulance stuck in Bangalore traffic. I have seen few times when an ambulance is trying to maneuver through the Bangalore traffic at peak hours and it is not making any progress. Last week, on the way to the airport, we were driving right behind an ambulance for more than 3 kms at snail pace(with a patient inside). Unfortunately, with all the construction and changes happening, the choices are restricted in terms on how much space a ambulance or any utility vehicle can get. I'm sure there have been a few lives lost because of this.

While construction is a good excuse, I'm sure there are some common-sense things a drivers on the road could do to at-least make sure the ambulance gets a priority on the way to its destination. I'm sure in  few years, we will see heli-lifts to dispatch patients to the emergency care.

Sometimes, I feel that army should be entrusted care of traffic for a a while to just drill discipline  & common-sense into the drivers and instill the fear of the devil if anyone breaks the rule :-). The pot-bellied traffic police manning the road don't really serve any cause.

Deals..

If you have stayed in the US for a long time, you are tuned to looking out for 'deals'. Deal is any offer which is unusual, obviously gives a big discount and is an event where you look back and feel satisfied that you didn't have to shell out as much money as your friend or neighbour. Thanksgiving sale, X-mas sale or that super saving JC penny sale are examples of these.

The other type of deal is when you get a great price, but you get locked in a contract for an extended period of time - but then you console yourself saying that you got a great 'deal' upfront. For example, we buy that cool phone for 80% off retail (but we are locked in a 2-year contract with that data plan which we don't use). Or we have that Comcast deal where you get 30$ off on your monthly bill, but then need to have subscription for more than a year. Or you can get a Dish installed for free if you have yearly subscription.

The reason I have been mentioning this is that pricing I have seen in India seem to be lot less complex. If you feel like getting rid of your cable connection, you can do that after a month. If you don't like getting tied with a cell phone provider, you can buy pre-paid cards and change when you wish too. If you don't feel good with your broadband connection, just switch without being worried about anything else.

The other thing is buying a car is stress-free as far as price is concerned. The base price for the car is the same everywhere (across all show-rooms). So you don;t the have stress of dealing with a pushy car-salesman, comparing the prices across different show-rooms and then being worried if you are really getting that 'good deal'. You can safely sign that cheque for the car knowing that everyone else is paying the same amount of money.

Of course, the Indian model will change in the long term - but for now, I don't have to worry about those 'deals' :-)

Cars...

As I mentioned here, we are in the market to buy a new car. The car industry is booming out here and the abundance of choices are really confusing for a new customer.

Four important criteria for us :

1. Mid-size vs Sedan. A sedan is the equivalent of a VW Jetta, Honda City, Hyundai Verna vs a mid-size which is Hyundai I20, VW Polo etc. A mid-size has lesser boot space and lesser leg room in the back-seats. 
2. Petrol vs Diesel - everyone recommends a diesel engine now-a-days, with the petrol prices increasing. 
3. Automatic vs Manual - automatic is just making inroads in India and my guess-estimate is that less 10% of the vehicles are automatic.
4. New vs Second-hand - no one locally recommends a second hand car !

Price of course is a big factor - a car is a dead investment. 10-12 years ago, I would have laughed at this, but you become wiser with age :-).

The traffic on the road and the crawl factor during peak hours makes automatic a big convience. Maneuverability is another concern given the parking woes (see link), a smaller car makes sense . A diesel engine would cost approximately 75,000 more than a petrol engine. My rough calculation says that you recover the initial upfront costs within the first 2800 kms, after which the diesel engine is definitely wins in the cost of the ownership.As for second hand cars, the biggest problem is the trust factor. While in the US, it is easy to detect a lemon, India does not have equivalent rules and regulation to detect vehicles which have been through accidents or any other problems.

So it looks like it is going to be a mid-size, automatic, diesel, first hand car (hopefully) !!

Test Drive

We are in the market to buy a car. One of the pretty neat concepts, at-least for me is that we really dont have to drive down to the car dealership to drive one of the new cars. All you have to do is call them up and one of the salesman will arrive at your door-step and you can drive the car around. And the salesman would also run through the car features and other details. Pretty cool. It saves you time to get down to the dealership and of course it is a hassle-free experience.

The bad side is that if you stay within the city, you really cant get the highway feel for a vehicle.

It amazes me to see the car industry booming given the space constraints. Most people have multiple cars and a large percentage are upgrading to sedans (VW Jetta, Hyundai Verna, Honda City etc). Given that car is not really a good financial investment, it is luxury item (on the balance sheet at least), I'm surprised to see them sell like hot-cakes. The real good cars have a wait time of 4-8 months and you need to plan ahead. If you are like us and looking to buy immediately, the choices go down considerably.

The salesman are paid slightly differently when compared to the US. Each of them have fixed salary approximately 10,000Rs pm and they get 1000Rs for every car they sell. Some of them whom I have been talking do, sell approximately 20-25 cars a month i.e 1 car a day. I guess the average cars sold per salesman is lesser, but still that is a large number of cars ! We better get the roads ready to get this many cars on road.

Of course, second hand cars are not recommended by everyone I'm talking to !

Phone book explosion ...

As I start settling down in Bangalore, I'm having a tough time maintaining my phone book. Mobile has become a neccessity and a convience tool. Everyone in India now carries a mobile phone (starting from the domestic help, the utility workers, professionals besides friends and families).

Some of my phone book entries look like this :
Murli 'Grill'
Ranga 'Carpenter'
Venu 'Insurance'
Marshall 'Cleaner'
Satya 'Driver'
Kamlamma 'House cleaning'
Aarthi 'School'
Pradeep 'Car Sales'
And so on...

Indian names tend to be common - more often than not, we have to associate context to the names. Also, these entries tend to be short-lived i.e they are only useful to you for a particular period. The current phone book tends to be not-so-useful for these. It would be awesome if I could some how categorize these entries based on some activity.  One way I'm organizi'ng these entries is to use the 'notes' section for each of these phone entries (and that allows adding some context to each name)

Domestic Help..

Very closely related to my last post on cheap labor, TOI Bangalore edition had this editorial piece by Jug Suraiya on domestic help. I'm sure all of us know this problem very well and as the article says, it is a big topic of discussion.

Personally, I like this piece of news :

"    Which of course is great news for India. Because the growing shortage of servants proves, better than any Planning Commission report, that despite all odds the Indian economy is progressing as more and more former domestic helpers get jobs in the organised sector as industrial workers or service providers. "


As I see around me, it is great to see that the children of the 'domestic helps' go to school and get better jobs elsewhere rather than following their parents footsteps. This unlocks greater potential in the country and they can add more to the GDP !!

Of course, this means that we need to start doing our own work soon !

Cheap Labor...

One of the attractive things about India is the availability of 'cheap labor'. Labor here refers to all blue-collar jobs and cheap because it is easy to find folks who work for less (compared to how much it would cost you in the US). If you have ever tried getting a simple job done in your house in the US, you would understand how costly it is.

While getting the job done is easier and cheaper, it is not necessarily the best work. Typically, these blue collar workers tend to do a patch up job and it works in the short-term and the problem would recur in a short-while. I'm talking about fix a leaky pipe, you get a plumber who does a quick fix for a few hundred rupees, but the problem would recur in a couple of months. Then the cycle repeats.

The other problem is that because labor is cheap, people tend to think that just adding more folk to the work-force would cause things to move faster (think Mythical Man Month problem in software).

As I see more of this blue collar workers, I'm beginning to think that maybe increase in the cost of labor is good for the economy as a whole. The rising costs implies that customers will expect a better quality of service and from the worker point of view, it forces them to work better. Increased costs would also force organizations to think in terms of efficiency and costs.

Two Minutes...

We are trying to move into a new apartment in South Bangalore and so, I'm trying to get the builder to wrap up some last remaining bits of work. Every-time, I talk to one of the contractors out there, the conversation usually goes like this :

Me : "Hi, so is the work done"
Other guy : "It is done sir, BUT, there is some remaining work which will be done in 2 hours"
Me:  "You promised me it would be done yesterday"
Other guy: "It is almost done sir, but the electrician was out of town yesterday. He will finish the work in 2 hours, tomorrow morning it will be ready"

At this point, I'm out of patience and I politely walk out. This conversation literally repeats itself everyday.

Of course, this is just not in my apartment complex - It pretty much happens everywhere, from plush corporate offices to the guy on the road and it is not just "time". I have seen inability to forecast when talking about distances and money. For example if someone say point X is 'just' 2 kms from here, then chances are that X is anywhere from 1 -5 kms :-)

It is something unique about our culture - it could be any of these reasons :

• They really don;t care about the customer, lets just get him out of the way and deal with him tomorrow.
• Inability to say no to things - for example, if the work cannot be done, they need to be upfront about it and say it is going to take 5 days instead of 2 hours
• Inability to plan and forecast - most folks here are overwhelmed with business and their lack of planning and organization causes them to miss deadlines.

So, patience and persistence is the key to deal with these issues.  Things usually get done, but budget 2x the time to get things done :-)

economics of a xerox machine

As I mentioned previously, xerox-ing a part of the getting things done in India. So I have been wondering is the xerox machine a good investment for all the shops.

A typical xerox machine cost around 1,50,000 Rs (1.5 lakhs).
Each xerox copy is Rs1, so it would take around 1,50,000 copies to break even (ignoring the maintenance costs and the cost of ink).
Assuming that you get 100 copies a day, it would be 3000 copies a month.
So, you would break even in 50 months (1,50,000/3000) or around 4 years 2 months. After this point, you are raking in profits on the xerox machine. The thing I'm not sure about is the lifetime of a xerox machine - but from what I have seen is that, these machines sometime run for a long time, but of course they are not working at the optimal level.

The bigger factor for owning the xerox machine in these shops is the stickiness factor, it draws in customers and it is possible to up-sell other items (like stationary).

Cash Transactions...

If you are like me and like to track your expenses on a fairly regular basis, it is going to be a tough task after R2I.

In the US, I used credit cards for most of my expenses and that was very convenient. Besides the fact that you don't have to carry too much cash on you, the credit card report allowed you to track expenses by category fairly easily.

Now, I have been in Bangalore for the last 3 weeks and I have no clue how much money I have nor do I know how much I have spent, nor I do I know where I'm spending. The only thing I know is that my wallet is perpetually empty and I keep re-filling it with more money. In the hope that I don't run out of money at the most inopportune moment, I have started filling my wallet with lots more money and that is causing me to spend more money :-)

I just wish I could use credit cards everywhere. The biggest problem is that in India, there tends to be a lot of micro-transactions with folks who are ad-hoc and temporary (vegetable vendors, auto-drivers, small merchants). These folks live on a day-to-day basis and to them cash is the king, they don't believe in credit (or some form of delayed payment as with credit cards). Their business model is built on 'cash flowing through the system'.

Contrary to the popular belief that having a credit card makes you spend recklessly, in my case at-least, I would prefer credit cash to spending cash !! It does looks like there is some opportunity for mobile payments to ease out this pain, but that would require some mind-shift and change in business models.

when you gotta go..

..you gotta go.

If you are new to Bangalore (or anywhere else in the country for that matter), the first thing that strikes you as you drive across or stroll across the city is the number of people (usually men) answering the 'call of nature'. This could be anywhere - empty plots of land, busy roads, residential neighborhoods, literally anywhere. Of course, we could all blame each other - but the fact is that we lack civic sense and we also lack the sanitation infrastructure to provide the bulging population a cleaner way to answer the call of nature.

In this perspective, this video circulating around of Asha volunteers trying to solve this problem, is really commendable.

In the same vein, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation also called for innovations in re-inventing the toilet :-). There is a good business opportunity here for all entrepreneurs out there.

Getting connected..

Setting up a home office and getting connected has been a breeze. And it is enormously cost-effective too.

For my home office, I have these setup :

• BSNL DSL connection ~ 400Rs/pm
• Tata Photon Broadband Wireless Connection ~ 750Rs/pm
• Data plan on my phone ~ 600Rs/pm

So for 1750Rs/pm or 40+$, you are all connected. Compared this to the $45+ I was shelling out for Comcast broadband connection, this seems like a cheap buy. I didn't even compare the link speeds here, since I am able to do anything I could do with the broadband in the US, no complaints so far.

If you have a bunch of devices, the first thing you need to do is to buy a whole lot of adapters which convert from the flat-pin to the indian-style round pin converters. They cost 40-75Rs per piece.

As I mentioned, getting connected has been a breeze. I managed to set all my devices (laptop, monitor, wireless, VOIP, DSL, wireless modem etc) in a few minutes. After a few minutes of happiness, the entire circuit in the house tripped, since the electric outlet could not handle the load :-) 

That is the general theme of things in India - the new stuff is seamless and just works. It is the old infrastructure (like the electric wiring in my house) which causes the pain, till we get rid of these legacy infrastructure issues, it is going to be a pain.

xerox, xerox, xerox..

If there is one country where the copiers are most widely used, it gotta be India. 2.5 weeks into my visit, I have xerox-ed approximately 300 pages of documents, around 20 pages per day :-).

Every office you visit, every request you make typically tends to be associated with a "request to get documents xerox-ed".  Sometimes, the request makes sense, but more often than not, you are left wondering what the heck the xerox is for. For example, I had to provide some documents for custom-clearance, one of the things I needed to xerox was *all* pages of my passport, including the blank pages. Now, you are left wondering why would anyone need blank pages :-). If you add the 80 pages of my passport, at 2 pages per side, that is a whopping 40 pages of document, which I'm fairly certain no one would ever look at.

Cost-wise, each page costs you one rupee, but it just makes sense, most of the time.

I guess there-in lies a business opportunity, if there is a way to digitally and securely transfer documents, that is going to be a killer app.

crore-pathi...

If you grew up in India in the 90s, then you would typically associate a crore-pathi to be someone who is stinking rich.

A crore = 100 lakhs or approximately 10 million Rs or 220,000 USD.

As I was speaking with more people in Bangalore  (folks who are financially savvy and have a good eye for investment), I hear more statements on these lines -  "If you don't have a crore in your bank account NOW, you have made a wrong decision to get back to India". That got me thinking and worried, I had to scramble around and see what I have in my account, of course, I'm a long way off from that target. Only time will tell if that statement holds true :-)

Cost of living + inflation has hit a point where crore today is really not that worth much these days !!

Mental toughness..

If you have been around in Bangalore, the easiest way to get around (in theory at least) is the auto (short for auto rickshaws). And these are driven by auto-rickshaw-drivers who are an amazing set of entities by themselves. Any discussion about autos and their impact on Bangalore elicits heated discussions (both locally and abroad among folks from Bangalore), more often than not, it borders on negativity (and accusation on how they have really screwed up the Bangalore traffic).

But, instead, there are some amazing positive things which I have observed :-). To list a few :

• Customer is the king - Sometime, if the driver for some reason likes you and is nice to you, he is willing to go that extra route to make you happy. For example, the other day, my rick-driver made a turn which I quickly disputed. Since he was in a happy mood, he literally in a spur of a moment, turned his auto around 180 degrees and inspite of the traffic behind, got me back to where I wanted to turn. A'int that amazing, he was willing to break all rules for the sake of a customer.
• Asking for a raise - How often have almost all of us walked back from our regular meetings with our managers/HR-folks/recruiters and cursed ourselves that we should have asked for more money or a pay raise. If there is one thing I like about auto-drivers and want to apply this in my corporate job, it would be the willingness to be bold and ask for more :-). I have had instances when the drivers would ask for around 15-20% more, just on the whim - when you ask for a reason, they would either provide something sane/rational, sometimes they would say they are just trying, some would laugh it off.
• Team-work - They are a very closely knit breed. If you find a cluster of drivers in the same location and if you ask one of them if they are willing to take you to your destination, if the first one refuses, the chances are that the rest of the drivers in the cluster would also refuse. In you happen to get into a conflict with a rick-driver, you are actually taking on their community. They work on telepathy and they trust their mates intuition - which is something I would love to see more in workplaces. More often than not, in the normal work-space, people are trying to step on each other.
• Don't disturb me - How many times have we been nice to people we really didn't care about or wished that we could be nastier just for the heck of it. More I see these rick-drivers, the more inspired I'm. There are instances, when for example, I'm trying to communicate with a driver on where I want to go, either they don't care about what I said, or they just don't want to be disturbed. It might seem offensive at first, but what the hell, he owns the auto and he can drive where he wants to, after all I'm just putting in a request (and I should be happy if he chooses to agree with my request). This is something I really want to apply in my real life when i want to deal with people I really dont like.

"Auto-Rickshaws make my life better everyday" - Enough said :-)

Thriving or just surviving...

One of the things which struck me when you arrive in India (or at least in Bangalore) is the number of smaller 'mom-and-pop stores' as they are called in the US.

These typically tend to be really small food-outlets/grocery stores/convience centres/tailors/you-name-it. And from what I have been seeing is that these are always packed with customers. There seems to be a continous transaction flow - which to me seems amazing, that these small shop owners are generating so much business.

Now, the next question is are these owners thriving or barely surviving (breaking even). By thriving, I mean, sustainable profitability. Note, there is no competitive advantage in these business(es), unless of course you have a niche - for example, a food outlet with some amazing recipe. More often than not, it is location and of course loyal customer base. By competitive advantage, I mean, it really doesn't take much time for some one to open a similar store (it is just the grunt work of getting your supply chain ready).

None of my immediate family members shop in big retail outlets, we still rely on stores nearby for our daily convenience shopping.

I'm still looking for some relevant information on what the revenue/profit structure is.

Talking with my cousin, who has a lot more knowledge on retail than I do, his take is that the Indian retail segment is poised to grow from 65$ billion to 300$ billion in the next 5-10 years and apparently, there is room for both big retail as well as these small shops.

Crowd-sourcing at its best.

With all the construction going on in Bangalore, all the main arterial roads in the city tend to be dug up for some reason or the other (road widening, metro construction etc). So, one fine day, your typical daily route might land up with a slow-down due to construction (though typically you would get some advance notice). How would you handle this ?

The best way, as I have been finding out, is to just let the crowd around you handle this. You would pick some other commuter in your same direction and then just follow-them. Chances are that the other folks have done some research and would have found adjoining 'side' roads which would lead to the same destination.

So, over a period of time, all the traffic would start converging on the most optimal route :-). It is amazing to see how traffic dynamics change in a few days...

R2I aka returning to India..

When I left India, I never thought that it would take me 13 years to get back home :-). Getting back was long journey, it look me all of 13 years to plan it out !

Returning back is a different experience, you tend to view 'usual' things in a different light.  And of course, it is a big deal, uprooting your family/kids and transitioning across geographies, climate, institutions and culture.

These are just random thoughts, and hopefully are useful for other folks returning back ! So here it goes :-)