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Another Perfect Notebook

I went to Odyssey in Chennai last week. I like to go to the stationery section in the book store. You never know what you’ll find.

This time I found a handy little notebook. I like notebooks. I know people who will take notes in a meeting on their laptops, some even on their handhelds. I just can’t. So I always carry a notebook around. This one is from a company called Kaapy (couldn’t locate the website). It has about 80 pages of good quality paper. The hard cover has a nice distinctive, monochrome graphic on it. Not too flashy, but not too plain either. The best thing about it is that it is light weight and just the right size to fit into your pocket.

It costs Rs. 36. I know this price can’t last, so I bought 6 of them.

A few years ago I wrote about another notebook from Rubberband. Strangely, that slim, stylish notebook was not carried by Odyssey. Instead they had a fat, ugly looking notebook which seemed to be a special edition notebook in collaboration with some movie. It cost some godawful amount that I can’t recall. Why would Rubberband do this and who are the people who buy this one, escapes me.

I guess notebooks are a little like companies. With success, they bloat and raise their prices.

Time for a Reader Survey

Why is it time for a reader survey? I don’t know. But it sure has been a long time since I did one, which is never.

This is the 5th year of this blog. If you look at the archive, the first post dates back to January 2006. I have enjoyed it immensely and have found it very rewarding. I hope you have too.

I have always maintained that I write for myself. I write because I feel like writing. Consequently, the way I write and what I write about are entirely driven by what’s going on with me – what I am reading, my interests professionally and personally and whether I feel like writing or not.

But that is partly disingenuous. I also write because people read what I write. Just as it is important to a thespian that the theater be full for his performance, readers are important for a writer. A rant is not fun if nobody’s listening.

Which brings me to the survey. I have never tried to understand my readers better (other than what Google Analytics tells me). I’d like to know my readers better and get some feedback. Ergo, the survey.

It’s short. It’s sweet. And it’s here. I promise to share the results after I close the survey.

IPL Notes

We watched the IPL T20 Finals yesterday. Some random musings:

• We had subscribed to Willow.tv but YouTube quality was way better even though free. Willow.tv was $60 for the entire season. I wonder if advertising can pull in that kind of revenue per viewer. There was a lot of wastage, I thought. That dual SIM ad with Gambhir and Sehwag is now deeply etched on my brain for no useful purpose at all.
• We were supporting Chennai but not really with any passion (I didn’t have a hoarse throat at the end of the game). We have supported an Indian team for so long that it is difficult to take sides when Dhoni and Tendulkar are on different teams. I wonder if this happens to other folks too. A friend from Bangalore was actually supporting the Chennai team just because they liked Dhoni. Another one, also, from Bangalore supports KKR for similar reasons. Is it because we so much identify with the Indian team or is it because we are all rootless, economic migrants who don’t identify with a particular city?
• When Raina [corrected from Tendulkar] was dropped off Zaheer Khan, you could read his lips so clearly it should have been bleeped out.
• The whole Shashi Tharoor matter has got me foxed. I cannot make head or tail of it. Some woman who had some connection with Tharoor got sweat equity in a company that was part of the consortium that won the bid for the Cochin IPL team. Now, I don’t watch Indian TV. Nor am I part of the grapevine on this kind of a thing. But from just reading online, I couldn’t make out why he had to leave. To leave he either had to have used his position as a minister to influence the selection process or there was some hanky panky going on between Tharoor and the woman which could not be denied. Or he chose not to deny it. If anyone can illuminate this clueless NRI with some links in the comments, it will be much appreciated.
• The IPL has too much money involved for politicians to stay away from it. BCCI is already in their clutches. Cricket is too important to mess around with. How about if someone with unimpeachable credentials who also cared deeply about cricket became interim Chairman of IPL. Just long enough to put a new charter in place and hire a Commissioner with great credentials. Running IPL is like running a mega corporation. Experience with regional sports bodies has no relevance to the job. The new charter should put the players and owners in charge with some other people on the board who will make sure that short-term greed doesn’t destroy the national pastime.
• The stats could be much, much better. The IPL website was pathetic on stats. Cricinfo was better, but not quite there. Or maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place.

Its Getting Warm in California

It was a nice day to be in the backyard. It was a riot of colour. The rainbow picture is from a few days back. We had quite a lot of rain this winter in Norther California. I think the flora like it.

The Best Names are Gult Names

Gaurav Rastogi has a very interesting take on the inadequacies of human naming conventions.

A naming convention designed for a planet with 100 million people (as on 500 BCE) is hopelessly useless in the world where the number of people to be named has expanded 70-fold. What was designed to be a unique identifier (viz. “Gaurav”, son of the “Rastogi” family) is no longer unique now. By my reckoning, there must be another 5-600 people called “Gaurav Rastogi”, and another 5-10,000 people called “Amit Garg”. Living. Today. Waiting for their unique names.

I completely concur that this is a problem that needs a modern day solution. Many an email has been sent to the wrong Gaurav Rastogi or S. Raghavan. Sometimes, said Raghavan may not even be in the company. When said Raghavan got my second email meant for the internal Raghavan, he said something like “You think I left the company just to keep getting your stinking emails?!” More »

Why are IPL Cheerleaders all Firangis?

Back home from a rather hectic week in India. The IPL fever is raging. You can’t meet anybody in India in business circles and not get into the economics of IPL. Corporate India is just fascinated by the money gushing out of IPL. It is actually a complex economic system which is unfolding in front of our eyes. Capitalism at its best. There is a book in the making there. I would buy it in a flash – I hope someone good writes it.

Everything in the IPL seems to be well thought out and well executed, for an operation that’s in its formative stages. So there must be a good reason why all (or at least most) of the cheer leaders are firangi (I hate the term ‘non-Indian’ which is more PC. Here firangi is more apt anyway.)

I asked a few friends why this was so. There’s a cap on the number of foreign players that a team can play. But when it comes to cheer leaders, there are no rules. Nobody knew exactly why this is so. But some of the hypotheses were:

- Indian women would never do this. Goes against the grain of our culture. Besides, who would marry them after they did a gig with IPL?

- Indian women can’t do it. The problem is not that they can’t do the moves. It’s that with their body types, those moves would send the men folk amongst the spectators into orbit. That’s not good for business. Just ask the English football clubs about their rampaging drunk male fans.

- Security reasons. Shiv Sena and other cultural police pretenders threaten physical harm to women who showed that much leg and midriff. The culture cops apparently have no problem with firangi women debasing themselves.

- Economics. If you have the figure and the moves, becoming a Bollywood item girl pays much better. And is less hazardous.

- Cheerleader positions have been offered to cricketing nations whose players have not found enough spots on the IPL teams. (OK I made this up)

None of these ring true to me. But if I had to pick one, I’d go with the “afraid of Shiv Sena” reason.

Any thoughts?

Photo by S V Jagadeesh

Why are Non-Fiction Books so Boring?

I read a lot of non-fiction. But I seldom finish the book. I find that as the book goes along, the incremental insight gained per chapter keeps reducing, till it is no longer worth my time to keep reading.

For a while I thought that this was my problem. I do know that my reading speed is generally less than my friends. My wife reads at twice the speed that I read, for example.

But that is not the reason. I have compared notes with others who read non-fiction. And most people don’t finish their non-fiction books, especially if they read a lot of non-fiction and there’s another book waiting for them. The problem is widespread, if not universal.

I have a hypothesis for why this is so. Non-fiction books are typically written around a set of concepts, notions, historical perspectives etc. Often these concepts, while original, can be concisely written in the form of an article in a journal or a magazine. Or just a blog post. However, there is no model to monetize that other than the ridiculously low fee the print media industry, itself under threat, might pay you.

If you think that your ideas have power, the only way to monetize it in any substantial way writing about them, is to write a book. A book has certain definitional boundaries. It has to be say a hundred pages or more. The fatter it is, the more justifiable is the price of $20 or $30 or whatever. So you end up writing page after page, chapter after chapter on ideas that don’t really have the legs to go that far. In the process you make a book that can’t hold the reader’s interest till the end.

I am being a little foolhardy in bringing this up right now, when I am writing my maiden book myself. It’ll be a business book, and I can just hear you say, “Well let’s see what your book turns out to be, Basab.” Well, Gaurav and I are hoping it will be packed with insightful goodness and will hold your attention till the end. And now that I’ve put this post out there, it gives us a goal – get the reader to finish the book.

A Better Year

This year has been a trying year for many of us. In the US and most of the West, unemployment is high and a gradual recovery is the best we can hope for. In the IT world, in India and elsewhere, things are much better at the end of the year but still a far cry from the hypergrowth that we’ve become used to.

For me personally, this has been a challenging year. I started out the year looking to switch gears and do something else after my four year stint at Gridstone. But a family health issue has become a priority that trumps everything else. This will require my wife’s and my full attention for a while. If there is one thing I hope the next year will bring is better health for my son.

In the meanwhile, I am working with startups and interesting companies, helping them to the extent I can. It keeps the juices flowing and hopefully I can add some value to their business.

This blog is now like an old friend to me. A constant companion, through good times and tough times. Always there for a couple of hours of enjoyable company. By extension, you, my readers are like old friends too. I feel like I know the regular commentors well even if I’ve never met you.

And the silent majority, the readers who read but never join the discussion, thank you for coming back again and again. Here’s a humble suggestion. If you do one thing in 2010, join the discussion. Not necessarily on this blog. On any blog. On issues and topics that matter to you. Be heard. And hear yourself. It will feel good. Like you are plugging in to this massive collective brain that is humanity online. Like exercising your vote. It can be empowering.

I hope all of you have a great 2010. Or just a better year, perhaps. Happiness is a choice. I hope you choose to be happy.

Cheers!

Indian Church in Fremont

Fremont has a very high percentage of immigrants among the city residents. Especially North Fremont, where I live has a sizable Indian crowd. Most, like us are immigrants. Because of which Indian food, groceries and Bollywood movies are all within a ten minute drive, which is nice. Recently an Indian Church has come up close to where I live. I have never seen one before.

The proportion of Indian Christians amongst immigrant Indians may be higher than in India but still should not be more than say 10%. And given that there will be plenty of options on churches to join in the US, I wonder what drives the need for an Indian church. Could it be that Syrian Catholics (or other Indian Christian communities) from India practice their faith differently enough to feel the need for a separate church? Or is it the need to share their common, distinctive culture which an American church does not fulfill?

Ideas from the New York Times

The NY Times Magazine’s latest issue is on “ideas”. The ideas are of mixed standards, probably because they were force fitted into an alphabetical list as much as possible (“hey, we don’t have any ideas for X Y Z. We can’t discriminate against the bottom three so can you go and find any old idea.”). But here are some that I thought were great. Go read the whole thing if you can.

Here goes (alphabetically, of course):

Drunken Ultimatums. Revenge trumps rationality. An experiment with drunks shows how.

Empty Beer Bottles Make Better Weapons. The fizz in the full ones causes them to break at lower impacts. More »