A couple of years ago I had posted a New Year’s Wish “Less”. Instead of a Wish List, which is mostly about wishing for things that you don’t have, I thought that I would ask for less of things that we have too much of. (no money is not one of those things!)

Fewer natural disasters in parts of the world that can’t handle them

Haiti

Less irresponsible government spending

One word – Greece

Less than 24 hours of news coverage from 24 hour news channels

If they can’t do that then can we get them to have fewer talking heads on the screen at the same time. CNBC, I’m talking to you.

Fewer pages in the US Tax Code

Unfortunately, every change that is deficit neutral, hurts somebody who goes and lobbies their senator who filibusters until the bill is killed. Either that or the tax accountants will kill it. Simplification reduces billings. Hmmm…that’s true about IT Services too.

Less complexity in our cell phone bills, banking fees, utility bills…

I eagerly await Bank Simple

Fewer Amitabh Bachhan ads

I propose a public service ad that has Amitabh Bachhan say “I endorse all products sold by all manufacturers”. The ad loops from 2am to 4am on all TV channels. When we want to see Big B, we go to the movies. Oh wait, when did he do his last movie?

And while we are on the subject of TV ads, can we have fewer ad minutes per programming minute in India?

Less disrespect for its readers from Times of India group websites

ET and ToI start video ads with sound, as soon as you land on the website. On the other hand, I click less and less on links from ToI.

Less corruption in India

It’s not like I am hopeful or anything, but this is a Wish List after all.

Less religion in politics. Less religion in education.

Leave science alone.

My personal resolve for 2011

Spend less time with the Web of Infinite Information and more time with friends and family.

@labnol’s resolve for 2011

…type less and spend more time with speech recognition…

I did some research on ClearTrip on the subject. There are nine direct flights between the US and India. All of them are from the New York area and Chicago to either Delhi or Mumbai. Either city in India works for me to land in. But there are no direct flights out of San Francisco. Bummer.

Why aren’t there direct flights out of San Francisco. Distance obviously isn’t the problem. New York to Bombay is 12, 500 km. San Francisco to Delhi is 12,360 km. So the distance that a plane can travel without refueling is obviously is not the problem.

The distances are as the crow flies and were computed here.

It can’t be a problem of no-fly zones either. That is to say, the shortest route involves flying over countries that won’t allow you to, so you have to alter the flight path to an extent where it becomes too long. The San Francisco to Mumbai shortest path essentially flies over Russia and China.

So then it must be about the San Francisco Bay Area market. Will they be able to fill seats on a direct flight to India from SFO? I find it hard to believe that Chicago can be a bigger destination than San Francisco. There’s a large Indian population in both metro areas, but the Bay Area has to be bigger by a wide margin. More businesses in the Bay Area – all the tech companies – do business in India than out of Chicago. Tech companies are both interested in the Indian market as well as India as an outsourcing/backoffice destination.

I hope some airline will stand up and admit that they have tarried too long on San Francisco and quickly inaugurate a direct flight to India. Someone was about to do it before the recession, so it isn’t entirely inconceivable.

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.

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.

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.

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?!”

In a way he was kind. Most recipients of email not intended for them just keep quiet. They hope that no one will notice and they’ll keep getting copied on an entertaining battle for supremacy between two people who wouldn’t be quibbling if they’d just meet and talk. But where’s the fun in that.

The funny thing is that the very person who sends out an email screaming “Stop copying me on this s***. It doesn’t concern me.” will silently read every single email from some email chain in another company where he’s been copied inadvertently.

As far as misdirected email is concerned, MS Outlook is the culprit – specifically, the way it handles display names. If the name of the recipient is recognized by the type ahead, you press return. You never even see the email address. (I haven’t used Outlook in years now. They may have changed their design.)

Back to names. Gaurav is on the money – the two name convention no longer works. Inserting numbers is a good idea. Kind of like IPv6 – increase the number of digits and you have enough room for every man made object to have an IP address. The only problem is, people (unlike routers) might prefer not to have digits in their names. Unless of course Oprah (she of the one name only) goes for it.

Americans use the middle name to overcome this problem which would have been particularly acute because of the low diversity in first names in America (Jack, Bob, Joe…). But then they rarely use their middle names or initials and so the disambiguation problem remains.

Most North Indians have two names – first and last. Kumar and Singh can be common middle names in the North. But since as middle names they are so common they don’t go too far on disambiguation. In Maharashtra, your father’s name is generally your middle name. This is a good system and expands the namespace considerably.

But the best naming convention comes from Telegu land. The Gults have always had it right. A common naming convention is a name, or sometimes two, prefixed by a series of letters – T.S.P.S. Prasad, for instance. While they may get joshed about their names (Hey Prasad, what’s your full name, yaar? Come on tell, no!) their names are designed for the modern, Malthusian world.

The Gult name disambiguates very well. With three or four near random letters, there is ample scope for disambiguation. But it does another thing well. The name is typically a common name like Prasad. Which makes it easy for the people around Prasad to remember and pronounce his name correctly. Unlike say a name like Basab which disambiguates well, but nobody knows how to pronounce. Meanwhile, the preceding initials allow for unique identification by email and other systems.

In the short term Gults may face some trouble in countries like the US where they will want you to neatly fit into the first-name-last-name box. But they should take solace from the fact that theirs is the superior system and one day the whole world will follow it.

By that time, of course, graduates from Osmania university would have taken over the US, so it’ll be easier to mandate a change to naming conventions. I hope they’ll also mandate a change to the metric system.

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

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.