6 AM Pacific

My Secret Starbucks Name

One of the many challenges facing the global executive is the important task of pronouncing and spelling foreign names. Indians in the US do face some difficulty with American names – a strong Mallu accent can change a ‘John’ to a ‘Joan’ for instance – but in general they do fine. American first names are designed to be simple. The ones that aren’t, are mercilessly shortened to nicknames. I know many Tims, but no Timothys.

Americans pronouncing Indian names is an entirely different matter. More »

My Mother-in-law Blogs!

It’s true. And it is a great blog!

Geeta Padmanabhan is Deputy Editor of the Ability Foundation. In her spare time she also writes for the Hindu Metroplus - Chennai (her articles here) as a free lance journalist and writes English grammar books. After all this, she still finds the time to be a prolific blogger on her own blog - Grandma’s Tales.

Those of us who know Geeta, admire her energy and zest for life. She brings that passion for life and for good writing to her blog. Grandma’s Tales is a unique mix of observations about the English language (in the style of Eats, Shoots and Leaves) and life in general.

You’ll like it.

Indian startups making a mark

Last week’s post on IndiaPost raised quite a storm of comments. Some of them were supportive of my central thesis that for Indian citizens to get better public services the issue of labour flexibility within public service organizations is the most important one to address. Many were not. Of these some thought that IndiaPost has actually done well, given the circumstances, and that I was looking at the glass half-empty.

So for a change, let’s look at the glass half-full. Let’s talk about some Indian startups that are being noticed.
More »

Indian Public Services - Crying for Change

An article on the Indian Postal Service in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) portrays the service so pathetically, it almost reads like a children’s book describing a distant kingdom where everything goes wrong all the time. Unfortunately, this is no fairy tale. It is very, very real.

Here are some damning stats and facts about Indiapost: More »

New Blogsite

If you are reading this post, you have found your way to the new home of my blog http://6ampacific.com. So far I have been using Typepad’s service which has worked well for my early needs. But now that I have been blogging for a few months, I want to try out some things that Typepad, or any other consumer oriented service doesn’t offer.

My new blog runs on a customized installation of Wordpress. Wordpress is an open source blogging software. You can also get a hosted service from wordpress.com, but one that is a little limiting like Typepad’s service. I plan to customize Wordpress to offer some new features and a slicker look in the future, but currently I’ve got it working well enough that I felt I could transition my readers to the new blogsite.

As I move the blogsite, this is also a good time to thank my readers. Thank you, you make writing worthwhile. More »

Bizarre Bullet

Bullet in solar coil tubing

Last week the most bizarre thing happened. We found a bullet embedded in our roof. This will take some explaining so let me get down to it.

We have these solar coils on our roof that heat the swimming pool. Water is pumped up into these coils made of black PVC like material where it gets heated by the sun and then goes into the pool. It doesn’t use photovoltaic cells which coverts solar energy into electricity. It has worked well so far.

Last week my wife noticed water leaking and called the company that installed it for us. The technician went up on the roof. He fixed the leak and then brought down this most interesting artifact - a two inch length of tubing with a bullet in it. More »