s e s h m i c s: August 2005

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Monday, August 29, 2005

Confessions of an Enterpreneur!

Good read:

[...]

It had been six months since I had read a business plan. And I missed it. I missed it real bad. I salivated when the Wall St. Journal driver came down my block… only to skip my house. My wife had a block on our cable TV- no more MSNBC and it was no better on the Internet, I couldn't access Bloomberg.

[...]

She made me return to Entrepreneurs Anonymous (EA). I had stopped going to my meetings. I had beaten it or so I thought. But the truth is, we never do. I was just like everyone else in EA. I matched the profile perfectly. 80% of members have a relapse within their first six months. I was now another data point confirming that statistic.

My next stop is the 28-day regimen at the Warren Buffett Center for Recovering Entrepreneurs at White Sulfur Springs. I wonder if they will give me my old room back. Wish me luck.

http://www.heshreinfeld.com/columns/confessionsentrepreneur.html

What have you googled today?

What have you googled today? Tom Austin says google could be useful to show "googled" (valuable) caller information when someone calls you.

Googling
Posted By: Tom Austin, GVP & Gartner Fellow
The word is now part of our vocabulary, or so says the popular press as well as Wikipedia. It's a verb that means to perform a Web search on a person's name. Twenty-somethings google each other before they go out. Salespeople google their clients to get insights and gems to use on sales calls. Patients google their doctors, and investors google their stockbrokers (if they use any - something they are far less likely to do these days).

So why can't you google someone down the hall - in your own company - and find something meaningful to your business activities? Why can't you google the people from finance you have a meeting with in two hours? Why can't you google your company's transaction history when a happy customer calls up and wants to chat about an order she just placed with a different division of your company? Why can't your voice-over-IP system google all incoming calls and match up caller-ID information with everything and anything related to the caller?

Isn't it about time we started working on figuring out how to help people inside our own companies find structured and unstructured information about people and relationships between people? Not just by navigating a set of fields populated by a "dumb" human resource management system, but by intelligently probing for value in information (often tacit knowledge) that IT systems could crawl day in and day out - systems ranging from e-mail, through file servers, to content management and production.

http://hpw.blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?blogid=3

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Standing Tall

Rayar Gopuram, Mahabalipuram Aug 28, '05

Park ho to aisee

Shore Temple park, Mahabalipuram, Aug 28, 2005

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Bunty and Babli: The Face of the Current Generation?

Choti Choti Shaharon se
Kaali bore duparahon se
Hum to jhola utake chale
[...]
Hum Chale, Hum Chale
Oye Raam Chand re
[...]
Dhadak Dhadak
Mujhe bulaye re

Are chores of peope who went out of their 'choti sharar's for education or work playing “Bunty Aur Babli”? The story of a young lad trying to break free from the clutches of a small town mentality and resources to reach a wonderland of opportunities that will make him “someone” strikes a chord with me. I am sure there are hundreds out there who come from a similar background as I am–some small town.. went umpteen places to study and then is working in some city. Are we making a mistake (“Hum Galat The”)?

Let me get the movie out of the way first. The story assumes honesty = poverty and respect minus comforts. It also assumes Naukri = poverty. These are no longer true thanks to the IT revolution and Mr. “NRN” Murthy and Premji in particular (but the script writers, directors etc. could be from that generation where it was practically true).

Bunty and Bubli make their day mostly out of theft and cheating. So the story is not applicable to majority of the Bunties and Bablies I am referring to. But it raises intriguing questions.

What is our (bunty aur babli ka) goal in life? We seem to be ceaselessly planning our career for the next big step. How long will it last? What are we breaking free from? And what is our destination? Do we just want to be “someone important”? Will the enthu last till we actually achieve something? Or are we selfish to stop trying soon after we are “someone important”?

And what about our choti shehar? Do we have any responsibility towards our hometowns? If every one uses our home-towns only till we can “break-free,” are the towns ever going to improve? I don't think I have ever done anything to my hometown. But I have rejoiced when my hometown paper wrote about me “Some one from our town made it!” I have never felt heavier about my hometown. My hometown actually is a hot place (55 degrees in summer) with a declining population. But still it is the place where I grew up. It provided me with a place to live, school to study and a job to my father so he can feed the family.

Can our towns survive their own “brain-drain”?

Inspiration:
Small town India of Bunty aur Babli
Rama Bijapurkar
June 21, 2005

Friday, August 26, 2005

Tower II

ISB SV-II Tower March '05

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Kutub Minar

Kutub Minar Sept '04

Friday, August 19, 2005

Sivamani 9 8 4 8 0 2 2 3 3 8

Probably the only movie with a cell phone number in its title. Not surprisingly, cell phones get a lot of prominence in the movie.

First, positives-Intriguing music, well-knit over all story, couple of good songs, scenes from Kerala and finally, Asin.

The 'Ilaya raja'-like background (and title) music raises many questions in your mind and is probably best suited to listen to in an introspection session on a beach. The movie starts showing waves on a beach with a fair share of the sounds waves make. One of very few movies I replayed titles because it has great music to go with it. A couple of songs (Yenatiki, Mona Mona) are decent.

Overall story resembles that in “Never Been Kissed.” It starts well with the "second heroine" (Rakshita) finding a bottle on the Visakhapatnam beach in which the heroine (Vasanta-Asin) sends her parting message to the hero before they part for the next couple of years. Rakshita looks at the message and raises several questions. “Who wrote the message? Why did the “sender” have to put it in a bottle?” I guess it is a printed matter in Malayalam with the message in Telugu. “Why two languages? Did the couple met since?” Rakshita is the link between the newspaper that publishes the story and the couple. The story is a run away hit with its readers getting ready to “pranalaina istam” for the couple.

The story intertwines the past and the present revealing why the Telugu speaking hero stays in Kerala, how the couple gets together, why the heroine disappears suddenly, etc. Many parts of the movie are shot in Kerala. The camera man does a decent job with capturing Kerala's beauty but no where does Kerala come alive. It is at best an average job. I guess even if he had done a good job may be that will still not liven up the entire movie. [Putting best ppl in one or two jobs will not make the product a winner. You can only maximise locally. We need best guys in all speres of a company to multiply results]

Asin – did a decent job. I was pleasantly surprised to see her name in the titles cos I did not know that she acted in this movie until then. Her last movie I watched was Gharshana. It was a great movie. She played a person with good looks, great education and a teacher in a school. Seemed like a killer combination to me. [Had that lady come alive from the movie, I would have proposed to her ;) Alas she may not be as smart in the real world!] I watched that movie twice and wanted to watch it another time. I dont think the CDs are out yet.

The movie starts well with those questions gripping your attention. And then it goes on a slippery slope till the end. The second half is just another dumb telugu movie with patched up sequence, ill-timed songs, mandatory “fightings” and a couple of songs aimed at “masses.” That is all. It is just another movie.

Why do directors fail to understand the essence of a successful movie? If you do an average job on all fronts, it becomes just that – an average job. Only those movies will be successful that 'push the frontier' and be an 'outlier.' Otherwise, you are going with luck. Goodluck!