Steyn on Fire

I had the privilege to watch some of the best West Indian all rounders when I was a kid.Then I enjoyed the pace of Waqar and now the true and mesmerizing bowling is of Dale Steyn. it is a pleasure to watch him run and deliver. Such a treat to watch even replays

Har Ek Friend Paseena Hota hai

I may be excused if I say 90 percent of my friends are hard core Modi bhakts. They make me sweat with their hypocrisy and constant change of goal posts. Very few among them are steadfast and stands to what they believe because they don’t have any other alternative. A few others think Modi is the answer to their problems.

But most of them have this utopian idea that Modi will do the unthinkable and convert India into a nation they dream of – what else than America. But in the last few weeks, I see their nerves breaking down. The more Modi disappears from newspapers and televisions, the more they get nervous. They always thought I am a Congress supporter. And when I was impressed with AAP in Delhi, they perceived that I am not only a Congress supporter but AAP fan too.

I receive nasty Facebook posts from these friends shooting me questions ranging from Kashmir to Teesta asking my response to it. Very typical to the Modi trolls, they fall into the same trap as others ending up confused. The same Kashmiri Pandit and 1984 riots and Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler and the list endless. An eye for an eye doesn’t make you blind but creative is that they taught me.

Since I don’t have many Twitter followers, I don’t get the unparliamentarily devised and innovative deshi barrage as some who criticize the PM aspirant gets.

Today as the AAP office got vandalized, I realised not only my friends but the entire BJP is rattled at AAP. The Chai wala slogan to make the PMO a Kitli has gone out of window, the development plank is in Sabarmati, the nationalist mood is in Narmada, there are few takers for statues, the Gujarat model of development that is supposed to be replicated elsewhere in the country is in doldrums and now the latest salvo is that the personality himself is out of radar. Does this mean you cannot have a revolution in the country by any other than Congress or BJP? Do these two parties along with sundry regional parties – whose aim is to loot their respective regions – have the sole copyrights for our life? You decide a PM aspirant and we have to follow? You spend millions in your makeover or a billion in corporate gifts to favourable businessmen and we should stand as mute spectators?

I was not a big supporter of Kejriwal when he sat on a futile fast with a person whom Indians thought was the second Mahatma. Along with this mahatma came a series of so called public figures that did nothing when they were in service other than fighting their personal cause. This included Kejriwal, of I am not wrong. But when he jumped into the politics, I became his big admirer because you cannot change a system without being in the system. Since AAP’s victory, not a day has passed when they were crucified under instructions from parties who think they have the ultimate authority to rule this country. The poor government in Delhi is fighting to counter the allegations and blame games instead of governing. The sole objective of all the sinister campaign is to stop AAP from emerging as a dark horse in parliamentary elections.

Now let me come back to the friends. They are all close buddies and despite ideological difference, we gel, dine and wine together just as Indian diplomats meet with their Pakistan counterparts.

I will be arrogant if I say most of them are blinded by idolism and false belief. To prove the point I get no answers when I ask them when they last enjoyed the development in Gujarat, the roads, the tourism, the coastal beauty. I have lived here my life – almost 4 decades. That is my age now. Take any city in Gujarat – Let’s start with Ahmdabad the showpiece and upcoming Shanghai. It is nothing but a glorified village with road encroachment as deep as the divider itself. Not a single stretch of road by any imagination where you can go smoothly. Either they are dug up or patch work is done without applying any sense. In the Contractor Economy (where contractors do work for no reason or purpose), the continuous civil work is seen as development by a few. The less you discuss on tourism, the better because there is nothing to discuss other than a Bollywood star shooting some catchy ad and aired in no other place than this state itself. Almost all the roads that the trolls claim to be smooth are national highways.

So by becoming a critic, I am becoming the enemy of the state. That is what the trolls believe. Actually in a civilized society, it should be the other way round. A critic is the mirror in which you should see the actual image. You act on genuine issues and trash the rest. But blinded souls out to make a person godly can’t understand this virtue of ground realties. For the third time, let me come back to the same friends. Some message they spread through messaging applications like What’s App is hilarious and shows the intellectual bankruptcy that we have today. So does this make me an intellectual? Even if you agree, I wont.

Earlier these messages used to be on Rahul, Sonia and Congress attacking their personal life. It also used to sing bhajans on Modi, Subramaniam Swamy and Baba Ramdev and later V K Singh for a certain period. All these Praise the Lord bhajans have disappeared all of a sudden. Now it is Kejriwal, Sisodia and his team. Their credentials, their background, their capabilities are under scanner. A few months back I got a slanderous message with a link to verify. The link, as usual, was not working. When I asked why he forwarded the message without any basis, he was at pains to make me understand that he forwarded it without even reading the message or verifying its truth. So if you happen to receive any Whats App message on any one, you will not be faulted in thinking that their popularity is gaining leaps and bounds.

Oh! For the fourth time I deviated from my friends and went on to unchartered areas. But let me take this chance of deviating for the last time because I may end up saying the same thing again and again. So let me end this useless essay. You are reading this at your own peril. Mind it.

Disclaimer: I am not AAP member, not a Cong supporter nor a BJP biter. These friends still remains the best of friends despite our daily arguments. They are the inspiration and source of this utter nonsense article whose blame I take it on me.

Refreshing and soothing, expect more

It was an April evening last summer though I don’t remember the day or the date. Summer was at its peak and I was sipping a cup of hot tea early in the morning checking mail on the iPad after I got through the newspapers. I got a response to one of the stories that was filed by one of our Content Editors. The response was not about the story but a straight lecture to me how he found our flagship portal, www.commodityonline.com, very useful but very complicated. He had to struggle to find many stories, sections and other details. ‘If you can, he urged in the mail, please make it more useful to people like me because I completely rely on your site for Commodity insights.’ I came to the office after an hour and started soul searching if we could do anything for this person. I went through comments and feedback by others and found at least two more people expressing similar views. There could be many adjusting to the complications. The reason that we had too much content and too less space to display was because our site got evolved over a period of time with new sections, new additions without evolving the basic design. We were putting more stuff into an already cramped space. That day I started my research on how we can present the information, data and the flow of insights in a way that an old man who wrote to me can easily grasp and also how a person with very little knowledge of English could grab. Same evening, I got into Fluid UI, a browser based wire framing and prototyping tool used primarily for mobile touch interfaces. Instead of having a designer working for me under my directions, I got myself into solving the real life problems faced by our current users getting into their shoes and pricking myself with problems without any solutions in sight. For the next 15 days, I drew and trashed at least 500 different prototypes but could not find one that could match what I envisaged as a killer product. Summer was at its peak and I started sitting late to find out a solution. I realized late evening time was better suited to extract more out of me and gradually this got extended to midnight. The iMac started heating up because it got overloaded with huge images and 18 hours of continuous effort. In late May with temperature touching 46 to 48 degree, I got a break in the price display page. It is easy to conceptualize but then you also have to make sure your programmer can code it. Additionally, if at all such a design is possible or not in real life. Also need to ensure all browsers and OS can adjust it. It also need to be fluid so that I can do away with the wap version and give a full version in the mobile platform itself. It also needs to be adjusting to machines like iPads. I searched through visitor behavior to learn where they remain the most. I realized they were stickier to the pricing part than the text part. The lacuna here was the missing link between the price and the related stories and insights. We wanted to plug this loophole first. I wanted the fresh idea to be drawn by a fresh mind. So I entrusted the work to a fresh designer interning with us. Thankfully our senior designer in the tech team came handy to her. In the next seven to eight months, the struggle continued. Gradually, the prototypes were coded and became reality. The idea of having infographics for language neutrality prompted us to put images to commodity names. We put the Commodity prices in bigger fonts and in a more appealing manner and linked everything that is related to the particular commodity or name within the page itself. This will save the person who emailed me the task of searching for his desired news and information. The other issue was to fix the registration page problems. More than a hundred people register for our services every day and many of them find the registration process tough. This is because we have cut the dummy registrations by adding many features. This is being eased in design but not security. Users who want to register with us will have to go through rigorous process. This is being done to cut down non-serious registrants. Since we do not make any cold calling, we need to ensure each person who registers with us gets a call within 2 hours. This new page will be launched shortly. This week, we launched the beta version which is for you to see and comment. It will take a month for us to fix the bugs and complete it and go on to the next idea. For users who were used to our old design will take a little time to come into terms with the new one. But I am sure you will like it. Thank you everyone for your feedback and continue to write to us.

Unless adapted, technology is worthless

After 10 years I landed in Bangalore couple of weeks back to a swanky airport unlike the earlier HAL one. Last time I was at the airport, I could see a couple of television sets informing the arrival and departure of flights and the entire process of information was done manually. This means a person sitting in a PC opened a Power Point and physically moved flight numbers and this was clearly visible to all and sundry at the airport.

Now things are international standards and the best thing here is the Vayu Vajra or the Bus shuttle service. I dont think any other airport has this facility. And despite being the most developed state, the condition at Ahmedabad airport is worse than the worst public bus stands. Even today, you see those primitive Rikshaw guys pouncing upon you and virtually looting you. Many taxi services and systematic planning efforts at Ahmedabad failed miserably. Passengers are now at the hands of the ruffians and despite not being able to manage this petty issue, Gujarat call itself vibrant. But then I had thought why any one from the so called software capital didnt help the airport authorities to automate the system in Bangalore. Or for that matter why the so called great institutions in Ahmedabad, CEPT, IIM, NID failed to give a solution to these problems though they are teaching their students to tackle problems a million times harsh than this?

I called from Ahmedabad to a chain called The Fern where I have a corporate membership to know if I could get corporate rate in Bangalore too. The Ahmedabad Fern staff said they dont have a hotel in Bangalore where as a Fern Hotel exists in Anand Rao circle. The Bangalore guy said they dont have one in Ahmedabad. Oooh La. Why this corporate programme then?

I looked at the Fern Citadel Bangalore site and saw a package which I asked the reception  guy to book and confirm. But he said there is no such package on their website. I went ahead booked online and got the same package. So much for Information Technology and hospitality integration.

Bangalore has changed a lot and so the new areas were alien to me. But then technology also has transformed and there is now all sorts of maps available. I chose Google and Waze to help me through the city. So without any hesitation, I started off to White Field in one of the hundreds of Volvo Services and no sooner I reached the outer ring road, my Vodafone 3G conked off. There was no data service at all. I switched on my other phone and the same result. I had shared my live location to my friend who would be coming to pick me up at Cosmos Mall. But his update showed I havent started my journey at all. The net result - we started sharing location the old way - through calls.

Whatever you term the country of, we are still a century behind where we should have been. I am now at the airport staring at the TV where Mumbai police has revealed they have cracked the Photojournalist gangrape case.

We are not concerned about all what should be. Most of our parties are fighting for petty causes and most of us just support them. I headed to Kochi where last time I was there, I didnt get any data service after Supreme Court banned Vodafone from sharing services from Idea. But to my surprise, I got it this time. may be the court has failed to get reporting from its representatives. 

Path – Record each moment of your life

What do you do when you want to record every bit of your and your dear one's life and share only those which you think is best suited to share?

This is where Path comes in (www.path.com). I have been using Path since a long time and I record every moment of my life including when I sleep and when I am awake in Path. All my fuel expenses, ODO readings, where I am and why I am there are all recorded and the best thing is I share only those which I think is necessary to share. All other activities are private to me and my family and my diaries are private to myself. I have also noted each movie I have seen. You can only have 50 people inside your network. 

In India, Path is not gaining the momentum it is gaining in the western world because we are obsessed with Facebook. We do not have the sensibility of privacy and we tend to share everything publicly. Worldwide it has more than 20 mn users and these numbers are awesome for a company which competes with the like of Facebook and Tumblr.

Available for Android, iPhone and iPad, this is a wonderful App that doesnt allow you to operate on web. You have to do everything on your mobile only. Why it is different from Facebook or Twitter? This is because it gives you the flexibility of privacy.

Now the new Path update comes with Premium subscription. It allows you to create an inner circle. It has also introduced a new feature called ‘Private Sharing’ which allows Path Users to select one friend or a number of friends that they wish to broadcast moments to. Those moments will appear in other users’ feeds with a lock in the upper right-hand corner designating that it was privately shared.

Imagine you have recorded every part of your life for a decade and after a decade imagine the feel of looking back at your life with each moment. This is where Path scores and Facebook fails.

You expect more from Path – especially for premium subscribers as it is in the process of raising up to $50 million more after total of $41 million from investors such as Redpoint, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Digital Garage, CrunchFund*, Jerry Murdock, Mark Pincus, Yuri Milner, Allen & Company, Greylock Partners, and other angels. Moreover it is opening its API to partner with content managers to bring more value.

Google Keep – The Must have To-Do App for you

Out of many easy to use Apps that Google has given us, Google Keep is one of the best and pretty useful. If you haven’t got it in your Android Phone, do it now.  Here is the link :

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.keep&hl=en

Why is it useful? Three things. One it can remind you on your date and time and secondly the latest update can remind you location wise. You can pin point exactly where you want to get reminded. Say for example, you want to get reminded of certain things when you are Bangalore or a particular Hotel or office, you set it up and if your phone has a data connectivity at the time of reaching this place, you will be reminded for sure. And thirdly, your notes can be colour coded which makes it a pretty sexy App.

It is now a full fledged To-Do App and you will love it. 

Yes, it can also store photos, make a list and everything you need for a quick note.

And everything is stored on your Google Drive which you can find here
http://keep.google.com

You can also get a Google Chrome Extension so that while on work, you go on jotting down your notes and it gets automatically synced on your mobile.

Three Most important Apps you must have on your phone

I use mostly Android OS not because of love for Android but because most of my App development work and research are in Android. And this is because my users are based in India. 80% of the traffic for my Apps is in Android and the rest in iPhone and Windows.

But for those who use iPhone, I recommend three Apps as a must have on their iphones. You can have it on your iPad too. The primary is Any.cal followed by Any.do and then Mailbox (By Orchestra, Inc).

Any.cal is one of the finest calendar applications that have ever been built. It is so simple that your toddler can make a professional appointment for you. It has a beautiful interface, great layout and better way of prioritizing what you do when you enter a calendar entry. It shows you the location, easy scheduling, share with contacts and easy sync even with your icloud. The stand out part of this App is its thinking design. Even if your forget everything else, this one point will make you love this product. 

Get it here : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cal-calendar-for-living/id648287824

Any.do is a task creator and integrates with any.cal and your Google or phone Calendar application. It is one of the best Task Creators around and a must have for those who like to scribble everything. The speech to text on this app is also fantastic and though native to your system, works very well. 

iOS : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/any.do/id497328576?ls=1&mt=8
Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anydo

Then comes the most important part of your life. Email. Try Mailbox if you are a Gmail follower. This doesn’t sync or get well with any other email clients. First time you set up, it creates a folder for all your old mails and then four folders to manage your future mails. Just follow and keep your inbox empty. A very good way for those who never deletes even unwanted mails. Keep a habbit of scheduling your mails.

Get it here: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/mailbox/id576502633?mt=8

Sadly, only one among these three, Any.do, is available on Android. Waiting for the other two to enter the Google territory.

Knowledge of sight, ignorance of might

Yesterday, I called two of my staff to explain them the difference between a normal newspaper article and an opinion. Both were MBA Finance and from decent families. During my conversations, it accidentally happened that I asked them about Dr. M S Swaminathan, Dr. Varghese Kurien and Missionaries of Charity, though none of these references had any resemblance to each other. I went on a step further asking if they have heard of Kangaroo, Kiwi, Penguin and India’s national animal. 

These two people – very good at their desk work – had not heard of these three in their recent memory. I prodded them further by giving clues such as Punjab, Green Revolution, Milk, Anand and Nobel price etc. But they could not get anywhere near to the right answer.

Hundreds of such young people pass through my office day in and day out for interviews. None of them below MBA and everyone with swanky mobile and when I later make discreet web enquiries, I land on their Facebook page. Most of them have shared or liked a Narendra Modi quote but not a single one from his opponent Rahul Gandhi. In most of these quotes Swami Vivekanand reigns supreme.  A commendable work done by APCO worldwide, very professionally and clinically done job.

Why I am prompted to write this on a humid Sunday afternoon leaving my weekly siesta is a sermon I heard this morning in the church where the priest praised Modi for safety of Malayalis in Gujarat. Now, wait a minute, I told myself. I am here since my birth and I never felt like a Malayali on a foreign soil. Likewise, hundreds of young people attending the church this morning must have thought the same way. They all speak and live the way locals do. 

But such sermons do leave a footprint of doubt over the listeners to think if it is really so? 

Modi is no doubt taking all credits for things he has never heard of – as his detractors allege but now people have begun crediting him for imaginary things as well. 

Modi, Rahul and Nitish have reached inside schools, institutes and religious places. Now do I have any problem with Modi? Oh No! Absolutely not. After all he is from my state and perhaps could be the next prime minister which is actually a matter of pride.

The problem I have is the priorities and misconceptions that we nurture. We have been fed so much of Nehru, Indira, Rajiv and Gandhi that 98% of India’s bridges, roads or buildings are named after them. In the last half a century because Congress ruled India, there were only one family that made headlines. Now the chance has come for the other party to take a sweet revenge. So a new set of names Mukherjee, Vivekanand, Upadhyay have come into the picture. 

Because of television, reading habits have vanished. And television news is nothing but worse than a third degree torture. Institutions are operating out of makeshift flats and have no basic facilities like libraries. Very few youths born after 1985 read newspapers. Even if they do, it is limited to entertainment. 

And then came social media, another strong tool to get well informed real time. But these youths are more or less using it for anything but information. Even if they use it, it is for skewed information. These are the people whom Modi is targeting and he has identified his target audience very well. Every third Indian is a youth. In about seven years, the median individual in India will be 29 years, very likely a city-boy or a girl. 

A study by IRIS Knowledge Foundation in collaboration with UN-HABITAT says India’s population in the age-group of 15-34 increased from 353 million in 2001 to 430 million in 2011. Current predictions suggest a steady increase in the youth population to 464 million by 2021 and finally a decline to 458 million by 2026.

Now imagine reaping dividends by tapping this category. It further states that the aspiration of these youths is to get greater political participation, get involved in policy level improving their quality of life. But if India is to remain as one nation, these youths have to deviate from their skewed approach and blind faith and start asking questions.  

This is what Modi quotes Vivekananda in his blog - “My Faith is in the Younger Generation, the Modern Generation, out of them will come my workers. They will work out the whole problem, like Lions.”  I have never understood how lions can solve any problem and the definition of workers in today's context. 

But what I have understood is that I am failing to get intelligent people whom I can put my faith on. The quality of education across the country has been more or less limited to facebook sharing of political party bashing or ideological fights. It is never becoming intellectual. We are seriously turning into a banana republic and we are not realizing it a bit. Not a bit, I bet.

Dearth of worthwhile television comedy programmes in India

I don’t remember when I last saw a real comedy programme on Indian television. What you have are slapstick, stand up vulgar programmes that makes only the people in the studio laugh. I have not seen none of the viewers differentiating Comedy Circle in Sony with that of Crime Patrol in terms of expressions. 

Let’s take the case of Comedy Circus in Sony. Many believe it is a success. This can be gauged from Colours channel which copied both Comedy Circus and Crime Patrol theme from Sony. But the levels of comedy in these shows are so floundered sometimes you wonder why are these shows produced? In Comedy Circus, the stand up comedians copy the two judges, script writers, producers and directors of the show so frequently that you get completely bored of it. And who are these people who get spoofed? They are not known to any viewers, they don’t have any standing in the entertainment industry. To make sure the audience doesn’t disconnect from the show, these unknown people are invited to the stage after the show is over. The way Bharati Singh, Krishna, Sudesh and others perform, it seems, we have dearth of good script, good humour, good satire in our country. What remains is mimicry.

But this also brings to the core issue of quality of our own viewership? Are we destined to view these third rated shows? Do we have a choice? In the west, you switch on a genre and choose comedy and you have a lot to choose from. A majority of Indians, despite having hundreds of channels, have to depend on Comedy Central, Just for Laughs etc even today. Sure, some enterprising producers tried making copy of these successful series but failed miserably.

The matter of fact is television is a one way communication. What the TV produces, we have to see. I have no other choice to express my discontent other than switching off. But then the TRP meters are so tampered that you will end up high on rankings. Is there anyway, we can immediately protest a bad programme so that it is booted out before its scheduled end? I am sure technology will bring some solutions.

The Annoying Facebook Home

When Facebook Home was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “next version of Facebook,” I was keen to get it on my Android version. After all it could solve everything social. The day it was put on the Play Store on April 12th, I tried to install on my Note II. But I got a message the product was not available in my country. HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II are the only devices where you can use this. I waited till it got released i
nternationally and got it to my phone.

But this was not what I expected. My facebook friends are both close and distant friends, class mates, colleagues and a few other social animals. In activation, I saw photos of people whom I know only remotely, making appearance on my screen more often that I would have wanted. The shifting from Facebook Home to the Application bar was not smooth and I had to adjust the application bars to suit Facebook Home. The text messages were annoying. I thought I would give it a try for a fortnight.

Nothing went well the way I imagined Zuckerberg would have made this. There was Google Now similar to this which again I didnt like. Both failed in my devices because I am staying in India where nothing is organised. The time to work, home, temperature etc are all horribly wrong because Indians are not used to what Zuckerberg had imagined. Even on a sunday, Google Now alerted me to go to office and said my office is just 6 minutes away from my office. The temperature it showed was far different from what it was outside.   On Facebook Home, photos and status updates of innumerable friends whom I normally dont ever bother to see were popping up with cut and paste messages from great authors. There was no way I could customise both FB and FB Home differently. I thought of getting the feedback of those market where this would have got targetted.

But to my surprise I found the Google Play rankings dropped considerably. out of the 1 billion active FB users, only 1 million downloaded FB Home. This I consider is an utter failure. I am fully aware Home is not available in all handsets but then also consider thousands who may be annoyed like me.

Yesterday, I deleted it from my Note II. Post deletion, I feel I have been liberated. I still have Google Now on both my iPad and Note II as well as Xperia Ion. It may not be too far before I get rid of that too.