From The Telegraph

The team of American and Australian scientists concluded that the easier a person’s name was to say, the better their success was in the workplace and the quicker they were promoted.

In a fiver year old post I drew the very same conclusions. From My Secret Starbucks Name

All things being equal, in Sales, you can be under a major handicap if the client is unsure about how your name is pronounced. A guy I know had the following email signature – Niraj (knee-rudge) Sharma. He was a top Sales rep at Infosys. Others have to take even stronger measures. There was a guy I had some business dealings with in New York, whose parents, in an inspired moment nearly half a century back in India, had named him Bhuleshwar Gandhi. In New York, when he wisely decided to change his name, he decided to not succumb to sentimental half-measures – he changed his name to Bill Grandee. I suspect that was a turning point in his career.

The research studied the effect of last names. In my opinion, first names matter more because you need to use them over and over again.

The average Indian first name is tough to pronounce in western markets. If you contrast Indian first names with typical American first names there are key differences in design and intent. American names are short and the nick names are shorter. The nick name for every first name is pretty standard. David is Dave. Timothy is Tim. Robert is Bob or Rob. American first names are designed for an easy “user interface”.

Indian Hindu names, on the other hand, are designed to be unique and beautiful. When parents name their children they want other parents to ask them the question “What a beautiful name, what does it mean?”

Also, the Hindu names are always in Sanskrit – the language of the gods. It is as if, it doesn’t matter if mortals can’t pronounce it, as long as the gods can.

By the time my daughter was born, I had a keen appreciation of the value of a short, familiar name. My wife and I named her Lori, which is a familiar American name. It also happens to be a Hindi word that means lullaby. In Sanskrit lullaby would be Alolika. Which is a non-starter. She would have been called Aloo by all, which means potato.

But even with her name, we couldn’t resist the temptation of an honest-to-goodness Sanskrit name. So we snuck in a middle name, which she will probably shorten to an initial all her life.

In this new world that is fast globalising, my advice to Indian parents is to please be kind to your children and name them with simpler two syllable names.

Summers had a quotable quote

I think you have to decide whether achievement is the route to self-esteem or whether self-esteem is the route to achievement.

But he also said

“It is not entirely clear that your veneration of traditional academic achievement is exactly well placed,” he said to Ms. Chua. “Which two freshmen at Harvard have arguably been most transformative of the world in the last 25 years?” he asked. “You can make a reasonable case for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom graduated.”

Now, Gates and Zuckerberg will certainly bump up the average earnings of Harvard dropouts quite a bit. I don’t have data to tell you if that will be enough to outdo the hedge fund millionaires among those who graduated. But I can guarantee that the median earnings of a Harvard graduate far exceed the median earnings of a Harvard dropout. And to Moms, medians matter, not averages.

As an Indian, I totally get where Amy Chua is coming from. Our Indian friends in the US are no less focused on their kids academics and extra curricular activities. You may think that this kind of parenting is part of the culture. It is, but it is not deep-set. It manifests itself because of economic reasons.

India, like China, is a poor country. There are no safety nets – no unemployment benefits, no healthcare insurance. If you don’t have a job, its a ticket straight to the poorhouse. The govt. hospitals don’t work and the rural employment guarantee program can only prevent starvation.

But just education doesn’t guarantee much. The dispersion in outcomes of your education is very, very wide. Even among college graduates, the average IIT graduate’s life-time income could be 10X that of an Arts graduate. I doubt that that is the case anywhere in the developed world.

And one more thing. The difference in quality of life between Rs. 4 lakhs and Rs. 40 lakhs p.a. is stark. Not like that between $40,000 and $400,000.

So if you are one of the millions of salaried, educated, middle class parents in India and you are thinking about the life your children are going to have, you are not thinking about self-esteem or creativity. You are thinking about simpler goals like how do I get my son into an engineering college? If your child shows just a little bit of promise, he will be entered into coaching classes every spare minute of the day. Or be sent to Kota. He will not have a life for two years of his childhood. Activities? Forget about it. You can’t make a living playing the flute. And no Engineering college needs you to have any extra-curricular activities.

Now imagine that you are that child. You made it into an Engineering college and then made your way to the US. How would you raise your kids? Probably the way Amy Chua did. Even though the income dispersion among college graduates is much lower in the US and even the bottom quartile of college grads have a pretty good quality of life, you raise your kids the way you were raised. It takes an effort to break away from your own upbringing. You may say, that’s why it’s cultural. But if it is, it wears off pretty quick.

The reason I don’t think this is culturally very deep set is because I can see how things can change within a generation. Even within India. Some of my friends in India would be called affluent anywhere, but in India they are in the top 1%. For their kids, they seek a more well-rounded education. Maybe they are wiser and know what really counts to get ahead. Or maybe they know that their own wealth gives their kids a safety net.

Does this parenting play out everywhere in the world? Probably not. I think there are a few conditions that are present in today’s India and China that make it so. One, the country must allow upward mobility. The economy has to be growing for there to be opportunities for talented graduates. Two, there should be a pretty sizable educated, salaried middle-class. That’s when parenting behavior becomes widespread enough to be deemed “cultural”.

For the longest time, BBC has had reporters in India or Pakistan or Africa who speak English like the locals do. So I’m used to hearing English spoken in a nice Indian accent on BBC. Which is perhaps why, I did not notice this till today – nowadays, even newscasters on BBC World News have Indian accents.

Today’s news, for instance, was anchored by someone with a British accent, presumably in London, and someone in India with a pucca Indian accent.

A few years ago, I had written a piece on The Future of Business English, predicting that Indian English would become more and more acceptable. That piece was more about words and phrases. But its the same with accents.

The acceptability of Indian accented English will be propelled by two things – India’s economic importance and the greater interconnectedness of the world.

The rise of Indian as an economic power is most important. Nobody cares about the culture and heritage of country that is poor. But as soon as that very country’s economy starts growing it presents opportunities. Suddenly, every one wants to learn what they can about the country, its language and culture. That’s the way of the world.

Now if this was all there was to it, China would be far ahead. But that will change. Western democracies have a natural preference for democratic India. And English is an Indian language. It’s a big window into India. English is not a Chinese language.

Greater interconnectedness comes from many things. Immigration is one. Indians form the largest (or one of the largest) groups of immigrants in the US, Canada, UK and Australia. Some come as college students. Others with the Indian IT Services industry. With the years, the number of Indian-born immigrants embedded in all walks of life in these countries keeps going up. And guess what, every one of them speaks in this accent that gets less and less strange to the natives, as the years go by.

The explosion of video on the internet also helps. You don’t have to depend upon the fare network TV is dishing out. You can go to TED Talks where you’ll find many Indian speakers. Or some Indian born exec at Google talking about the next big thing from Google.

But Indian accents on American TV still hasn’t caught on. We’re seeing a whole bunch of Indian faces – Aarti Sequeira on Food Network, Archie Panjabi on The Good Wife and Reshma Shetty on Royal Pains. But by some odd coincidence, they all speak in British accents. Outsourced, on NBC, has lots of Indian accents, but then its setting is India (though it is shot in the US). CNBC in New York has an anchor with an unalloyed Australian accent, which is a step forward. But BBC is way ahead. They are truly global. (sidenote: they announced that they are shutting down their BBC Hindi service on shortwave. Apparently, shortwave costs too much.)

In the meanwhile, us Indian-Americans, we’ll just keep rolling our R’s. And our kids will grow up having fun at our expense.

We’ll be going to see a very interesting play this weekend in San Francisco called Failure 2 Communicate. The play is written by Valerie Fachman and directed by Scott Baker. Valerie describes the play

Based on my work experience in Chicago, this play immerses the audience in a maelstrom where autistic teens are forced into high school classes with gang bangers, while the teachers try to channel this chaos into an education.

Good friend Nandini Minocha is in the play as well.

The play is also trying to raise a modest amount of money to cover costs and such. If Autism or supporting the arts is something you consider a worthy cause, I hope you will be generous.

The notice is a microcosm of Indianness. If you get past the English (hey, its a foreign tongue, so stop being so fussy) it really is a reflection of our relationship with predictability.

There are three kinds of Indians:

- Those that are unpredictable and don’t care.
- Those that are unpredictable, but would like you to expect, and perhaps accept, their unpredictability. The store owner who put this notice up belongs to this set.
- The predictable kind. Within India, this is a very small set.

Indians are not brought up to be predictable in their behavior. The environment (Bangalore traffic for instance) doesn’t allow us to be. But this is certainly a phenotype issue not a genotype one. Because somehow, when Indians leave India they leave their unpredictability behind.

The great achievement of the IT Services industry has been to extract predictable outcomes for clients out of this morass of unpredictability. They erect these boundary walls around the company. Within these figurative walls there are no power cuts and meetings start on time. Defects are measured and deadlines are met. Because that’s what clients in the developed world expect. It’s gotten easier and easier over time, but in the early days the pioneers did the equivalent of moulding square pegs to fit into round holes.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

Texas textbooks are important not just because Texas is a big state, but also because many small states just go with the Texas version of the textbooks because it costs less than commissioning their own versions.

Around this time last year the Texas Board voted to change science text books. Evolution, which is always in the spotlight when such matters are discussed, was saved by the skin of its teeth from being relegated to “one of many alternate theories”. However,

Failing to overhaul the curriculum broadly, conservatives instead attached a series of measures specific to subjects like biology, where teachers would be newly required to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.”

Christian Conservatives in American politics have recently been tripping over each other in their eagerness to denounce evolution. Bradley Byrne, candidate for Governor of Alabama was recently attacked in a TV ad which claimed that he believed in evolution. Byrne denied the “despicable lies”

“As a Christian and as a public servant, I have never wavered in my belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God,” he said. “As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state.”

Evolution and to some extent the Big Bang are the flash points in the battle between organized religion and science. They both inject serious doubt into the belief that god created the world and all its creatures, or Creationism. Sure, Intelligent Design can sort of fit the facts into a new theory that preserves the role of god, but that’s not good enough because the Bible doesn’t talk about ID. It vividly describes how god created the world.

This allergy to evolution is to be seen in Islam as well. Turkey, which is the most liberal Muslim country, has very little support for evolution. From the Washington Post

A recent survey, quoted in a 2008 article in the American journal Science, found that fewer than 25 percent of Turks accepted evolution as an explanation of how modern life came to be — by far the lowest percentage of any developed nation.

In the same article

The Discovery Institute of Seattle, which researches and promotes intelligent design as an alternative to creationism and evolution, also sent speakers to Turkey after being invited by the Istanbul municipal government in 2007. President Bruce Chapman said the institute helped bring Turkish evolution critic Mustafa Akyol to a 2005 Kansas school board hearing on teaching critiques of evolution.

A battle against as formidable a foe as science can bring together the two faiths. Somewhat like how Delhi High Court’s verdict allowing consensual gay sex brought together the BJP and All India Muslim Personal Board for the first time on any issue.

Are all religions opposed to evolution? Buddhism and Hinduism are the two other great religions of the world. Do devout Hindus view evolution as a threat to their beliefs? I haven’t heard of any attempts to mess around with science text books in India based upon ideology. Although the BJP did try to change history text books when Murli Manhor Joshi had charge of the HRD ministry.

In my view, other things being equal, Hinduism will be friendlier to evolution. The “other things being equal” being mostly about education. A high school education that teaches science and evolution well, will matter more to people’s acceptance of evolution than their religion or religiosity.

Why is Hinduism friendlier to evolution? It is not because religiosity amongst Hindus is less. Razib Khan analyzes religiosity amongst South Asians in developed countries. It turns out that South Asians are very religious. Being a large majority Hindus must also be very religious.

So there must be other reasons.

Many scriptures, not one Book – Islam and Christianity both have The Book which is the word of god, the ultimate truth. If that book says that god created the earth, then there can be no negotiation on that. Hinduism on the other hand has many scriptures – Bhagvad Gita, Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, Ramayana. None of them to my knowledge are considered to be the word of god.

Many gods – For millennia, Hindus have had many gods. Personally you might worship just one god, but the people around you worship different gods. In a Hindu’s world view there is no one god and no one truth. Acceptance of alternate gods was in fact a design criteria in the Hindu faith. It was how the Aryans assimilated the tribes in India. This flexibility continued. As far back as the 15th century Hinduism tolerated an atheist school of philosophy.

No organized religion – Organizations perpetuate themselves. The conditions for organized religion to thrive are just not there in Hinduism. As a consequence there is very little, if any, religious education. Faith is a family or personal matter (Here I’m talking about faith rather than ritual).

Bizarre mythology – In Hinduism, scripture, literature and mythology weave a seamless fabric that every Hindu grows up with. From Ram Leela to Grandma’s stories to Amar Chitra Katha we are immersed in this sea of lore and mythology where individual stories can be evocative and powerful, but together they don’t make a cohesive whole. There are miracles in all religious texts, but Indian mythology can get so bizarre that really nobody will ever think it to be possible. The gods are depicted to be flawed, with unpredictable behavior (Why doesn’t Indra just use his thunderbolt and get it over with?). They are more like the DC comics of ancient Hindus than the Bible.

This tolerance for internal inconsistency makes it easier for Hinduism to accept a new idea like evolution. In fact if you look hard enough you will be able to find support in the scriptures or elsewhere in ancient texts for almost any idea. One might, for instance, see the Dashavatara as a metaphor for evolution.

I am not a devout Hindu. I am more Hindu by culture than religion, if there is in fact, a line separating them. I am sure many readers are though. It would be very interesting to get your views on how do you think Hinduism will respond to challenges from science in the years to come and specifically, evolution.

Now one could write a book on this subject (not me, I’ve already got a gig going but someone, I’m sure) but here’s a short blog post.

Whether you have an Indian passport or not is a terrible way to look at it. From the Husain media circus, it appears that surrendering the passport was really the event that made him unIndian. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, Barkha Dutt (link to NDTV above) seemed to think that was the case. It so happens that India does not permit dual citizenship. The OCI is not the same as citizenship. If like many other countries like the US, India did permit dual citizenship then Husain could have added the Qatari passport and no one would have cared.

I have many friends who live in India but hold a US passport. I think they would consider themselves Indian.

What about residency? Is that a good criterion? But then there are all kinds of Non Resident Indians. Short stays, long stays, those that are waiting for the kids to go to college to return. And then there are those who don’t intend to go back but still feel very connected to India.

I think that its just silly to try to draw these boundaries, and affix labels. Let’s just celebrate a shared culture with great diversity within it and fuzzy boundaries at the edges.

And it is downright hypocritical to celebrate Sunita Williams as one of our own, but decry M F Husain surrendering his passport as abandoning his country.

A French fast food chain’s decision to serve only halal meat in eight restaurants with a strong Muslim clientele has sparked a wave of criticism from politicians decrying the step as unacceptable.

Quick, the restaurant chain, is also not serving any pork products in these restaurants.

Right wing politicians are making hay out of the incident. But to anybody not blinkered by religious prejudice, there is absolutely no logical argument that you can make against Quick’s decision. Quick is free to tailor their product to suit individual or group preferences. Customers who don’t like halal meat, even though it tastes identical, are free to go elsewhere for their meals. Customers who would like pork in their meals could also follow suit.

I would spend a little more time on searching for a grain of logic in the arguments of the critics, but that would be a waste of time. What is clearly happening is that Europe is seeing growing pressure against its secular principles. Switzerland’s minaret ban vote is another case in point. France itself is pretty close to banning the burqa, which I have to admit is not as illogical as the tirade against halal only restaurants, but is fueled largely by political calculations and an anti-minority sentiment.

When jobs are scarce, people turn against immigrants. Most of the Muslims in Europe are immigrants from North Africa or South Asia. Add that to the fact that some people can’t separate terrorists from the religion itself and you have a situation ripe for exploitation by politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen.

This movie still has a few reels left.

An Indian mother expresses her love by feeding her child till he groans “bus mummy”. In the sport of offspring feeding, she is unparelleled. It is not just the quantity of food, it is also the kind of food. She gives herself high points for feeding her “ladla” snacks fried in saturated fat, mithai and lots and lots of carbs. Resistance is futile. If there is ever any research done in this area, my money says that men living in joint families are more likely to be overweight.

The “tricks of the trade” have been passed down from generation to generation. Here is a short list of “tricks” employed by loving mothers all over India:

1. Not putting all the dishes in the menu on the table to begin with. Withholding key information relating to dessert.
2. Putting more rice or rotis onto your plate while you are distracted.
3. “Roti sookhi sookhi kyon kha rahe ho”. (Why are you eating your rotis dry?).
4. If you refuse a third helping of something – “Kyon acchah nahin laga?” – didn’t you like it?
5. “Sab khana tumhari pasand ka hai. Tumhe bachpan mein yeh bahut achcha lagta tha.” These dishes were your favourites when you were growing up.
6. And lest we forget “Beta, bahut duble ho gaye ho.” Son, you’ve lost too much weight.

My advice to you is to have a gameplan for when you go visit your mother. As for me, I gave up long ago. Meal after meal, I loosen my belt and clean my plate. I workout twice as much the week after..but for the few days I am with her I can’t break her heart.

To mothers everywhere…you’re the best.

First of all, let me compliment you on your pricing strategy so far. You have aced the test on how to price information products. Information products like music are tricky – the content is all in digital form, the fixed costs are high and marginal costs approach zero. How do you price such a thing?

Your current strategy seems to be working well. You have segmented the market according to the listeners’ ability to pay. To each segment you offer a different product (or sometimes the same product) at vastly different prices. I checked prices at different places for the same album – Don. Here’s what I found:

1. Cassettes for the “Aam Aadmi” – Rs. 58 at Indiaplaza.in
2. CDs for the yuppie Indian – Rs. 160 at Indiaplaza.in
3. CDs for NRIs – $ 14.99 at amazon.com which I thought was crazy since the local Indian grocery store in Fremont sells them for $6.
4. Songs for NRIs – $0.99 on iTunes per song. Price of the album is just a sum of all the songs on it, in this case $7.92.

Even if you exclude the Amazon pricing, the highest to lowest ratios are 5 to 7 times. That is an amazing range of prices for what is essentially the same product. You are getting volumes at the low end and milking the high end. Best of both worlds.

But I hope you’ll understand if I as an NRI have a problem being royally ripped off. Luckily, I travel back to India quite often and pick up all my music here at Rs. 160 an album. I wonder what other Indians who don’t get back too often do. Pass USB disks around, I suppose. Lost revenue for you, but hey, who cares, you’re making a buck a song on iTunes.

I understand why you have to sell your songs for $0.99 on iTunes. You don’t have a choice – that’s the only pricing that Apple will allow. It just happens to be totally out of whack with CD music prices in India. And that rankles.

Most people want to buy music legally, if it is made simple and inexpensive for them to get it. Say this to yourself three times every morning after your morning prayers. And then think about your pricing strategy. There is a vast, relatively untapped appetite for Bollywood music amongst NRIs. If you just got rid of your pre-conceived notions.

Your current strategy has another flaw. It offers no legal way for Indians in India to download music.

Digital music in India is going to happen. I can easily visualize millions of portable music players in the hands of a young population with disposable income. With millions of music players in the market, how can there be no place where one can legally download music? iTunes + iPod together don’t work for India – too expensive – so that’s not an option. The way to make it work in India is to do what mobile handset manufacturers did – make it cheap and go for volumes. Matter of fact, it is quite possible that Nokia and Motorola might dominate the mp3 player market as well, as they include them in their cell phones.

As broadband in India truly becomes “broad”, the convenience of downloading music becomes very real. Especially for those people who listen to their music largely on their portable players. They don’t have to go to a store to buy the whole album when they actually want just a couple of songs. They don’t have to then “rip” the music off of the CD and convert it into mp3. And they don’t have to deal with your brittle, cheap CD cases, which break within two days leaving unprotected CDs around getting scratched.

So here are my recommendations for your digital music strategy:

1. Go DRM-less. I wrote about the DRM lock-in issues in an earlier post. I would strongly advise you to go DRM less. You have nothing to lose – DRM-less files are already out there – on every CD that you sell. What are you afraid of?
2. Price it low and fairly. Stop your “sock-it-to-the-NRI” pricing schemes. Eros Music is trying out a new pricing strategy – $0.25 per song outside India and Rs. 19 in India. There are very few songs (only the albums that they own) and the website sucks, but I think they are onto something. I’m not sure what their thinking is behind the discounted dollar price, but the Indian price per song is bang on. At eight songs for an album that would be the fair value of the song. Their album price is the price of a cassette, which is also surprising. But if the dollar price was even $0.50 that would be fair and very attractive. I’d build up my entire collection of Mukesh songs at these prices. Except that Eros won’t have those songs, Saregama would.
3. Think about flexible pricing. Amie Street has an interesting model where the price of a song, DRM-free by the way, goes up as demand goes up. You could experiment with your own pricing schemes. For instance, release a new album only digitally for a week. Charge a higher price for it.
4. Don’t do this on your own. I am not going to go to different sites for Eros, Saregama and Sony music. And don’t form a consortium to build the site either. They never work. Just let the industry know that you (all of you) are open to considering DRM free music downloads. I’ll bet that in three months there will be a dozen existing and new companies who will respond to it and offer to build online music stores.
5. Form an association like the RIAA and prosecute anybody who illegally hosts your music. Ask the Indian government to help in prosecuting people who operate from countries where the IP laws aren’t as strictly enforced.

But the first thing you need to do is get over your fear of piracy. There are a few things you can do to slow it down. Do them. But don’t expect it to go away. Selling DRM free, digital downloads is not going to increase piracy. Once you get over this mental hump, the rest is easy. You’re smart, (you have to be to have come up with your current pricing strategy), you’ll figure it out.

Sincerely,