The League of Extraordinary Men and Women....

The biggest privilege that I have had is the exceptional people I have met, been friends with, been taught by and have worked with.  There are some who I met briefly in a fleeting situation and some who I know and continue to know. There are millions on this planet that are more than mundane and accomplished, people who have enriched the world and others' lives.

 

These people come in different shapes and sizes, from different nationalities, different areas of profession, different economic strata, different cultural and religious background, different approach to life and things around and in all kinds of varieties. At times it is the situations that bring out their luster

 

Not all are demonstrably humble but broadly all are reasonable, some are sarcastic but laced with experience, intelligence and accomplishment, all are great communicators not in the verbal sense but in actions - in fact some of these don't even have a strong academic background not a strong vocabulary in the conventional sense. Their choice of words are always earthly and appropriate. They are kind to others in their own unique way, they many not be submissive but not abrasive and they are independent - their lives are not dependent on others doing things to them. There are others that look up to them. They are generous in giving what they have. Every one of these is a source of knowledge. They can set a right perspective to a situation. Without them one bulb in a gamut is without fuse. The world is dark by one such individual if lost.

 

What is it that they are not - they are not frivolous, they don't accept mediocrity, they neither see, hear or do things at a superficial level. They are not obstructive, they do not crave for unnecessary attention. Yes, the one fallacy that I see is that they expect recognition - not always in the form of that elaborate ceremonial decoration but something on the lines of a subtle nod or so.

 

Why such a long story today. To thank the many who I haven't thanked before, to acknowledge and express my gratitude. Some situations make people exceptional, some are inborn - not all will be published in news papers. Many don't even know what influence they have on others.

 

I wish I am always with these exceptional people and God showers with me with many such privileges.

 

 

In the Oasis of Desert......

In Miles of your walking, Worshiping the Sun

Speeding with Camels and Stopping for none

Now in the Oasis in the middle of the Desert

Count all your pellets and all you call mine

Take out the grains and Sieve it through time

Chaff out of Wheat and the real out of lie

The real is the one that glows more with time

Keep close to heart for the comfort at night

Mixed in the Melee, Wrapped deep inside

Find out that Lotus in the marshy twilight

For all the circles you’ve covered through the dunes

There’ll be that One Jewel, that fruit of your chores

Forget the Marsh and forget the Chaff

In the Oasis of Desert where you rest and relax

Learn to pick next the diamond that glows

The light of the Diamond that comfort the roads 

The real hero of Gujarat.................Amitabh Bachan :)

You bet....we know that Gujarat is a great place to be because Amitabh Bachchan said that on TV and Radio..How many knew that Gir, Somnath and other places that he spoke about was in Gujarat until Mr. Bachchan said that in his Baritone voice.

Okay...let us count now, how many people think that living in Ahmedabad is better than living in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad or Delhi. Would a UP laborer rather work in Mumbai or in Surat. Even the Ambanis (who are Gujarati if you didn't know) live in Mumbai. But we all know that that the place to emulate is Gujarat, because Mr. Bachchan says so.

...And the Chief Minister of Gujarat is Shri. Narendra Modi....

Let me be upfront, this is not meant to be a pro or anti Modi note but an appreciation of the marketing strategy and an indication on how to create association and ensure that you grow as the associated entity grows.

Of course Nitish Kumar has to wait for sometime before he can do this, Bihar has to be fixed but Gujarat is okay. One cannot say that Gujarat is bad, one cannot say Gujarat is not developed and one cannot say that Gujaratis are communal ---- these cannot be done in politics. There may be some negative association but it is good for the proponents if the other side live in a glass house too.

It is not illegitimate to take credit at all. If Mr. Modi has developed Gujarat then he can take enough and more credit for it. It is for the voter to decide the extent of Mr. Modi's contribution. But who will tell the voter - Ta Dan .... enter Mr. Bachchan.

Is this any different from corporate world advertising.......

...Another thousand miles over the last week end.

This was on road over the last week end to the north of Bangalore with an interesting set of people.

A few things that I noticed.

a) The road condition has improved considerably, lot of people on the way told me when asked that this Vajpayee effect. I did also see boards that said Prime Minister's funds for rural roads that was initiated by Manmohan Singh. I saw nice and powerful cars in small towns and the economies flourishing every where - if not for IT these small towns are big commercial centers.

b) People's familiarity with IT, Media and Politics is very high in rural Karnataka. In my opinion more than in Urban Areas. I feel it is easy to win in Urban centers with a wave. Rural people are more discerning - except for the very poor whose priorities are basic and sometimes not something that the so called activist population may not relate to. This is a direct outcome of education and access to information. Everybody I spoke to have access to 24X7 news and news papers. I spoke to one person who wanted to get publicity on the internet. He wanted to have a membership of 25000 people (let me not use this blog to do his job yet) and said let as many people know about it. Marketing is not just sitting in glamorous places and checking graphs alone, there has to be an acumen to it.

c) I was surprised with the sophistication of people, of their language and the food. While we urbanites give preference to speaking softly they are concerned about speaking to get the job done, while we use cautious words they are sensitive of road manners and giving way, while we are concerned about diet they have a balanced diet. While we learn to earn a living they learn the way of living. I think it was education that was missing and the last mile is infrastructure, with these done  I can see cities emptying. Also I did 700 kms in 9 hours with a couple of breaks and some bad road in between. Not bad at all. Travelling a few hundred kms will no longer be a big deal even if you  have to work in a nearby city.

d) I did see the impact of mining. Between  for about 50 kms the road has gone to dogs with trucks moving and I did see trucks waiting to get into mines and causing traffic jams. I hope the benefit of these activities accrues to the infrastructure and people there.

There is always something to learn, cities in India have always been the centers for learning and earning. I am beginning to enjoy these long drives. Going abroad is good but there is no salvation if you do not know your back yard.

...Collaborative Software Platform between Enterprises....

This is a reality in corporate banking space. There are enough "connections" between corporate and banks for payments and now a real time instruction transfer is a reality. I have myself  delivered two such connections for payments and bank statement reconciliations and have been part of various other discussions.

The discussions have now gone beyond with banks wanting to manage the treasury desk at the corporate. When we started broaching this three years ago the interest was mainly in the form of a factory and a shared service centers driven by payments and to some extent cash management. In the last three months after discussing with about half a dozen banks in Asia Pacific, I am convinced of the direction that corporate banking relationship will be taking - that the internal processes of the corporate whether on ERP or otherwise will be integrated to bank's operations.

It could be approval of credits, guarantees, hedging or even providing tax and working capital advisory or for that matter help creating a financial supply chain linking business through a network that they own or work on. The last is an even interesting proposition that will enable collaboration between Business, big, small or mix match for collaboration even without banks involvement - to check stock needs upstream, downstream or so. 

For a starter, the nuts and bolts are already there. The payment connection that is now getting stabilized - either host to host that we did between SAP ERP and bank's network or using networks like SAP FSN and SWIFT SCORE exist - which can be used as the back bone for any further collaboration. SAP ARIBA is another network that allows collaboration between parties. In addition, a big bottleneck to harmonize the language of communication has been addressed in the form of ISO20022 XML messages. The huge body of work that has been incorporated in this standard provides a comprehensive list of data dictionary that can help integration.

What is left to do in the larger scheme of things is actually small. To prioritize offerings and get the data elements for transfer on both ends. I give five years before when the integration will become seamless and also a hygiene requirement for banks. I see this easier to do on the corporate side - all they have to agree to part with the data. The challenge with banks will be to move their large mainframe monsters or even their complex infrastructure to address this new world. An approach they may take could be to separate these services from the core like they did when they moved CRM outside the core till such a time a product or a service is created in the core. Till that time an application would cycle through the stages in a customer relationship module that is accessed across channels. Perhaps these services are best way to get into the cloud world, offering a desk on the cloud for their corporate, out-sourcing infrastructure entirely. 

Banking unlike the ERP world continues to be niche - despite harmonization of process globally. Large Banks continue to have abysmally large IT departments and continue to avoid getting into packaged software - particularly for core operations. Perhaps an experiment into the cloud world offered by many large scale providers can help banks rationalize the cost and get access to the latest technologies.

Which ever way, I can see a new exciting phase for IT. 

My interest has always been for retail customers of the bank. While we speak of banks offering to man treasury desks for corporates, definitely for SME the same can be extended to retail customers. This will spawn a wide variety of software that can be downloaded on various online stores we have - Appstore, playstore or whatever and club it with India's ADHAAR experiment.

We are up for exciting phase, just look at the number of retailers in your town that are not connected but need to. 

...The Light that Shows and the Light that Covers

The scorching sun the pleasant moon

The chilling cold and the soothing warmth

The long days and the cozy nights

A single day in so many ways

That dirty race and here the divine grace

Unknown face that paves the ways

Clear titles knotted in riddles

Unseen lands with hearts clear

Muddy waters where lotus grace

Clear streams with whirlpool maze

The light that shows and the light that covers

Same source but perspectives differs

...The real Banking....Balanced Books Fair and Square

Scales of accounts

Tilted by schemes

Many many views

To write off the dues

New songs abound

The unfinished dropped 

Abandoned words

All time wrapped

Hold up the Sand Grains

but time flows free

Transfer the books 

to the master referee

The elements of time

Recorded in air

In master's books

It is all fair and square

Chavez - Is there a Capitalistic Side Lane?

I have been wanting to write this note about Chavez. He is no more but the impact he made on Venezuela and the politics of Latin America and beyond is considerable. I had a chance to be in Caracas and in Barquisimeto when he was the Presidente and the impact he had made on the society was significant. 

The banking world was distraught, it was not just that the banks had fund Chavez's plans but also had to keep the infrastructure open for the poor and the hitherto "un-banked".

One scheme that was being discussed was the La Politica Habitationes - the housing plan where all "workers" either self employed or employed by others had to contribute a part of income (through another set of regulations and agreements) to ultimately get a housing benefit. The money would go to a government fund and there would be returns. All good so far but the funds would be collected in Bank Accounts (just a store who had to transfer money to the government periodically and report) and the banks had to have a quota of such accounts to fill.

Take this further - these accounts would need to have infrastructure similar to that of a typical customer operative account (at least a savings account).

For those employed at the bank, dealing with those with limited means in itself is beneath dignity but "serving" such a large number is abhorring particularly for such low returns with no liberty to play with these funds. The real estate is expensive and technology can tend to catch up late in this segment where a pass book record is considered a guarantee or proof of funds availability. People would queue up every month may be to just check the balance. Senor Chavez would not take a no for an answer.

As in many such matters there can be a huge polarization of opinions and it is not fair to ask an external observer to make an opinion. Apart from the typical social, economic and political issue that needed resolution there was a technology issue that was there to be resolved - to keep the cost low and provide a wider access.

I remember there were talk of stored value cards (will they be Visa, Maestro, Master - imaging somebody who you thought otherwise would be carrying the Visa power) that are accessible on Multiple channels (to leverage among others shared networks) - ATMs and Mobiles were actively discussed. The talk of kiosks that are not attached to the physical branch perhaps in locations closer to the location of the customers. There was mention about selling store value cards available in street side shops (in a slightly unrelated context).

There was no middle path the banks had to fall in line. Both the source of funds and the application of funds and the ultimate use of the fund were pre-defined.

In India, there are these Aadhar cards and MNREGA scheme. This a new source of revenue for consultants to solve another problem. 

One may say, if there is an open mind socialism is the best financier for capitalism - it is just that somebody has to figure it out. Like somebody told me the other day one should not be bogged down by jargon. The result of successful socialism is individual wealth and money makes money - does that sound like capitalism. I don't know of any society that has bucked this trend. Charity is also if you have money, individual charity is capitalism not socialism. 

All old things are better of in museums and as ruins for tourist places. Let the new flow and it need not always wrapped in a gift paper with a ribbon.

A little rhetoric this one ...but none the less RIP Senor Chavez.

Bank Statements - Clean up the Mess

I am tired of Bank Statements which are not easily available in importable formats. First of all it is difficult to get an excel format, if there is then an export to excel is not clean due to the nature of data in the statements and historical data is more often than not available in a consolidated formats.

The transaction list that the bank provides is required for savings, current, loans, credit card, Demat and name it and one has to spend hours transforming it and uploading them into the database.

There are indeed good tech enabled banks - ICICI seems to stand out in technology innovation at times better than international banks - but one does not bank exclusively due to technology.

It is not that there are no standards. ISO20022 has acceptable formats and XML can be easily imported into Excel. It requires some discipline and regulation and not to penalize customers to buy applications that negotiate with banks to get the statements formatted and display.

It is time RBI considered this. A bank may go head over heal to create custom formats for corporates for retail customers it requires regulation.A simplified and standardized statements help many people in the financial supply chain, CA, Income Tax Department least of all and indeed will save the bank many expenses downstream.

People and Power - The Last Sentence so to say.

Dr Manmohan Singh is an Economist, has a greater experience as a bureaucrat than as a politician and even as a politician is elected to the upper house of Parliament. Mr. IK Gujral, the former PM of India was an acclaimed diplomat, some of the most visible ministers in the cabinet today and many of today's leading spokesmen are well acclaimed lawyers of supreme court of India and elsewhere. Mr. Shinde's qualification for the post of home minister of India is his previous job (however little)as a policeman. Some in the government are well known industrialists. A similar situation exists in opposition parties. In short, many are in politics today (small today but growing) due to their past experience and many cannot get elected on their own, infact many are in the Rajya Sabha - the indirectly elected house. If you look at the people who participants of the Indian freedom strugggle a bulk of them were students of law and political science. They were in politics because they had experience of a lifetime in some or the other form of professional occupation.

Let us come to Indian Democracy - The PM and the cabinet are part of the legislature and not the executive. All the better, because they need to represent people's views to legislate. But then, when one is in Rajya Sabha they are not directly elected - Mr. Nitish Kumar, the popular and well acclaimed mass leader and Chief Minister of Bihar is also from the upper house.

Now, look at the real popular people - The Gandhi's don't want power, they believe in sacrificing, the late Mr. Balasaheb Thakerey preferred a remote control to an office and like him the RSS leadership does not even want to contest elections. There are king makers in the states that control the central government without sitting in either houses of parliament. Mr. Ahmed Patel is not a member of either house, Mr. Deve Gowda will never want to become the Chief Minister while he awaits ashes to rise. All these people want to rule through their people. Power can have many titles and powerful titles many not satisfy all egos.  Some may call this power without responsibility and others statesmanship, altruism or sacrifice.

What ever it is - I think we have to grant every body their wish. The cabinet can be assigned to the upper house and strict qualifications can be defined for entering that house in terms of qualification and experience in public service or profession. The necessary requirement is that they have to be elected by directly elected bodies. Well, call them indirectly elected representatives.

This way the intellectuals can have the satisfaction of governing and the mass leaders the satisfaction of power. The common person will have qualified people governing (not ruling) and mass leaders and their ego tempering the government with public opinion.

The Americans do this in a good way with college professors and fat moneyed capitalists in the cabinet.

If only the Chinese get a Lower House.

Last but not the least compare this to an organization. Where do you fit people managers and project managers :). This was the last sentence that I wanted to make.

....Caravan ka khel

Ek Aur Saal beet gaya

Caravan chal ta hi gaya

Jo Uthara woh choota

Bache sab nikal gaye

Rasta sirf Caravan ki

kab bani thi pata nahin

Chahe jis taraf bhi raah mude

talash hai sirf puranee wahee

Maango jitna bhi tum

na rukegi yeh karvan

chahe jitna bhi  mutthi pakdo

Samay ki reth phisal gayi

khud apna raah banao

banao duniya mein naam

kuch bhi karo baath wahin

jo Is karvan samajh ta ho

Aasman phaad ke nikal pado

ya samay ki dhara badalhi do

Chahe durbin se duniya jhanko

aadmi rahega sirf wahin

Samay ka niyam yehin hai jisko

divya jyothi dikhati hai

Andhera deepak mein yeh aank micholi

Itna hi Karvan ka khel hai

Be Ready and Be Suitable

What is Suitable? There is one proverb that says all that is white is not milk. The iceberg is deeper below the sea than what meets the eye.

There is another that says that suitable is how you define it. One has to adjust to become suitable. We can make a perfectly logical argument hazy by bringing is perfectly reasonable sayings....but would we need a mirror to see the wound on the palms.

...again examples for life apply to it's constituents, what is relevant for the esoteric is relevant for the real too...like say IT projects.

At a philosophic level every body can do everything, after all the boundaries are defined by us but that is for the future, the current should be well defined particularly when the problem is known. What we have on hand is what we have what we do not is what will cause us pain. We need to define boundaries for the needs and assess how to bridge it?

The most important thing that one needs to do is constantly learn so that when an opportunity comes one is there to help and make oneself useful. It is what we offer to make life simpler and not what we get out of an opportunity. If there are things that needs to be learned so be it, we can cross a stream but we cannot build a boat to cross the seas a day before the travel. We cannot start arms practicing during the War - we cannot do 'Yuddha Kale Shastrabhyasa!'

An IT infrastructure is simple but critical - particularly when applied to mission critical applications like Banking - but one has to have a deep understanding of the fundamentals. A person playing with toy gun cannot lead a war let along participate in it. There could be hierarchies and escalation paths for resolving the unknown but the person who does not know the concept or feels it  is not in his or her scope of learning is irrelevant and if involved in the project a pure nuisance. All lies will eventually get caught.

The next important thing is professionalism, not in the conventional sense that is taught in management classes but just to the extent of being reliable. This is independant of the sourroundings and is a reflection of integrity. Integrity comes out in program code and can be caught in code reviews, in the quality of comments, quality of defining the scenario and if probed a litte more than normal in the articulation of a solution.

In my opinion suitability cannot be faked for long. In the short haul however all involved will struggle.

I am writing this as an observation of a situation. There are solutions and most problems can be solved but better solve it before than later.

..The Real Retail Banking..

This has been there from the time we remember in a formal organized way but it is only now that the retail customers are getting empowered. There are two reasons for this I think a) Technology - Among others giving them some power can push them out of the branch and save real estate and manpower costs b) There is competition - particularly banks breaking country barriers to acquire reliable customers.

However for some reason retail banking customers are treated as simplistic non sophisticated users who are not trusted with features. The UI in retail Internet banking is restrictive if not condescending. Even if there are some tools it is in the mode of creating additional revenue stream or to get insight into their data and not to provide independant insight into finances. While a bank would be careful enough to prevent corruption of their data there is an opportunity for the banks to provide user fields that can be in control of the retail customers only the data store can be on the servers. This data should be maintainable and downloadable in some standard formats.

The benefits can be quite startling. A bank statement can be reviewed online and the download criteria can be defined. This is better then downloading the data and uploading this to another application to segregate.

Similar infrastructure can be provided by the banks to associate classifications (not just the comments ) at the source of a transaction that can provide classification on the nature of transactions. This can be directly fed to the tax calculation data among others.

By just providing flexibility in the way a statement can be downloaded and providing options for transaction classification a considerable customer delight can be achieved for a tech savvy customer. Options to integrate the different accounts, providing cash forecast methods are additional bonus.

Think about the amount of small scale applications that can be built by third parties by empowering these transactions.

Yeh Bhi Sahi Woh Bhi Sahi

sab kuch apna hi hai, kuch bhi to paraya nahin
sab paraya duniya mein, apna to kuch bhi nahin

yeh desh to apnahi hai, duniya mein to sambandhi sabhi
yeh deh bhi apna nahin, jaana hi hai choD yahi

kamana hai khoobi se aur jina bharpoora sabhi
vyrag se jeena hai sabko ,fhal ki apeksha kada nahin

pyar main doob jana humko, pyar pooja bhagwan ki
moh me na pado he balak, ye bhandan se chooTo abhi

sab choD kar sanyasi bano, daas bano shri charaNon ki
karm is lok ka nibhana hai, palayan to karna nahin

dhyan karo bhagawan ki, chaDado jeevan bhakti mein
mukti sirf uski hai jo, chup chap swamy ki seva mein

Jnyan ki asha mein jeeyo, jnyan hi anth andhere ki
janam janam ki talash hai, is jnyan ki pyas bujhegi kabhi

Diya deep se andhera bhage, Divya jyoti se jagat Ughe

Jalti diya ka kaam hi aisa, khud rakh bane phir jeevan khile.

...Its a Dog's life after all :)

When I said I had travelled 20 countries somebody had said yours is a dog's life. It was interesting to be down under last week - another street to roam and another culture to see.

Meeting people of different cultures is a privilege in my opinion. There are so many variations in cultures and what is considered acceptable. Each culture has something unique that they would want to show off almost in variance at what is generally accepted.

It is also true that true Globalization has set in. We can book hotels every where, my friends can find watering holes wherever they go, meeting etiquette are getting standardized, in most places living and getting back is not an issue if they have access to technology. Technology seems to be come a great leveller and the Business houses that are forming the vehicle that routes them to far away places.

Sydney is  a beautiful place and Australians open and frank. I met an interesting Australian who had tried out many worlds the dark and the bright, East and West. It is always nice for an Indian to hear good things about the Indian heritage and culture particularly from a foreigner. A question that always bothered me was why is it that - despite the thousands of years of civilization - an Indian lifestyle is more difficult than a typical western like culture.

Our rituals are elaborate, our cooking is elaborate, our dressing (traditional) is elaborate, our prayers are elaborate, our festivals are elaborate, our travel to office is elaborate and so many others. For a civilization that wears simplicity as a virtue (have you seen Mahatma Gandhi's loin clothes) this is a major irony. These Western like cultures are in fact more direct and many a times up to the point - almost like there are no strings attached (don't get me wrong - I did not mean that). Even a dog is privileged in the western like cultures almost a substitute to kids. There are no rituals and a dog can get to the sofa and sit on it, I know of a pet dog in India that has to follow rituals.

The answer may lie in some Karma. Whether one has the legs of dogs or not, all have to face the consequence of Karma - it is a dog's life after all - that of a street dog or a kid like pet.

The other Anna....the grassroot democracy

KR Puram railway bridge traffic bottleneck on the way towards ITPL in Bangalore has seen some surprising improvements in the last month. What used to take 15 minutes for a 1km stretch can now be crossed in less than 5 minutes in peak traffic. This is the best I have seen at this stretch in the last 12 years (from the time before the bridge was constructed).

I heard the local MLA of KR Puram met the Railway General Manager with about 1000 of his supporters to convince the GM of the need to release some Railway land to ease traffic. Naturally, I don't support such a show of unnecessary strength to convince a bureaucrat in the service of the country but I don't have many other instances when a local politician uses his muscle power for public good.

Now MLA Anna if you contest against the other Anna you will have my one vote for achieving this goal.

I read an article in Deccan Herald that the local police are aware of the problem at the mouth of the bridge near the temple and the issue related to the traffic on the way into the city from ITPL via K.R. Puram. I would like to add that traffic can be smoothened if the pedestrians are provided a better crossing path, more secure and less hinder some to the traffic.

If you do that and get the papers to write about it. With Gowda and Yeddy fighting, you may get the Gaddi too. Who knows?

...the Singh Sangha

Dr Manmohan Singh's biodata is impressive. He is a world renowned economist, was the finance minister of India that guided India out of what is now the most common case study in b-schools on public bankruptcy and economy, he was the governor of Indian central bank and he has been in almost all spheres of economics. He fails in politics. He is not a mass politician...

...but then when UPA was re-elected he was the declared Prime Ministerial candidate and every body knew that when they voted. Despite the various scandals he is still considered an honest man, he is weak but he is not asked to be replaced.

What surprises me is the extent to which politicians mainly of his party have taken him for granted. How can an eminent person like him be treated like a bench warmer for somebody. How can a person of his intellect tolerate it and why?

We give credit to so many for what is perceived of them why not to Dr Saab. Does he have an agenda - either devious or altruistic.

When Dr. Singh leaves office, the person who fills the post will have to fit in large shoes. It is under Dr. Singh premiership that RTI was passed, India's foreign policy is stepping into a more realistic platform, economy had a direction for a long period till I feel the usurper stood at the door, there are achievements that looks visionary and long lasting.

Corruption under his rule is something that he will look back as his failing. In India where everything is auctioned among the insiders the first come first served corruption has for some reason not touched Dr. Singh. Media has all kinds of insinuations on different political dynasties and allied industrial houses but Dr. Singh is still clean. The only other person in the government who has managed this feat is Pranab Mukherjee-but he is another breed. Is this the politician in Dr. Singh that we do not know of?

In politics as in every field there are those who do and those who display. When doers display they are statesmen, when doers become rich they are leaders who create rules, when people display without doing they either go to jail or become philosophers like people who do it the wrong way, but what about doers that are quiet....enter the genre of Dr. Singh.

I feel the just concluded UP Elections will show the world the worth of Dr.Singh. He talks in parliament and in other gathering but he has to speak, if he chooses to it will create a new Sangha, the set of people who will swear by Singhisms, create a Singh Era and lay the foundation of the Singh Sangha....of quiet doers who speak later :)

....Of Products and Infrastructure for the mass IT Users....

As everywhere consumers of IT products can also be stratified - Niche Users, Enterprise Users and the Masses (Three is easy, we can have more levels of classifications if you wish). The Niche users will have to pay the premium, Enterprise Users will require to optimize on an large budget but the mass users will require a commodity without the overhead of managing a large IT team - in most cases this segment will have one laptop and one user/techie all rolled into one - or some more small change.

IT commodities targeting these large mass market should be treated separately as compared with the Enterprise. In today's world the common man who wishes to deploy a small office automation or a home improvement tool is treated as a miniature enterprise. With computing and communication devices integrating and shrinking in size, on the one hand there are devices that empower the masses but on the other IT infrastructure is not catching up - either for the end users or for the developers in this space.

The small IT user cannot afford the real estate for a server room and the overheads, cannot hire a dedicated team servicing back up and managing offline connectivity, will not have the ability to test every upgrade and would not want all these nuisance that these large enterprise level applications will bring with it. He is however willing to comply with what ever the infrastructure advises as standard upgrades on a click and wish every thing else will work fine.

On the same line a developer would want an infrastructure to bring in these automation. A database that is integrated with an OS or an end to end automation suite, that provides for automated incremental back up on a pre-specified host. A simple communication protocol that is almost real time - enterprise visibility can be on a request basis using an e-mail request except in some specialized cases where they will possibly use the telephone line (and at the most a modem - or Outlook like infrastructure that will manage all forms for communication not just e-mail traffic guaranteeing delivery and managing acknowledgements and logging). The end to end infrastructure for data access, interface mechanism, security, reporting abilities, logging should all be defined and standardized within the application with the developer burdened only with building the business functions on a rigidly structured infrastructure. The choice would be on what OS platform to base the application on or on how many to port this.

It is not that this has not been done. There are small tools in the market but importance that this segment deserves has not been harnessed by the platform providers. Development environments of large scale products have highly optimized and restructured workbenches standardizing the output from these tools. Till such a time somebody has the patience to sit and design an environment - will it be some mobile device vendor who has a hidden agenda of reaching the masses - a small time developer,  either for commercial or personal use will have to create an API library for data access, error handling, interface, security and all and hope that new technologies will never emerge.

I hope this happens sooner than later...in my lifetime at least..this will become another hobby which is profitable too for the independent spirited :)

....EverGreen Dev Saab....

...Dev Anand died at 88 yesterday, may he Rest in Peace.  I have seen some of his flops but who knows about them. His hits have dwarfed them out as if they do not exist.

Of the big three in Bollywood of his era - Dileep Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand - Dev Anand's work is most pleasant to watch.  One would be surprised if Raj Kapoor's movie was not a tragedy - there were many though. One saw only Dileep Kumar in his movies in whatever role he acted, mostly serious except for one or two in comic roles - that people of the newer generation will hardly remember - it was Dileep Kumar who was romancing Anarkali and not the Moghul Prince. But Dev Anand despite his or perhaps due to his looks gelled into his roles...until he decided to become "Ever Green".

Ironically, it is his penchant for being ever green - and what he is known for that reduced his fame post the 80s. Amitabh Bachan changed and continues to be relevant. For a versatile actor like Dev Anand or again perhaps because of it Dev Anand is remembered for his great classics whereas Amitabh despite that steriotyical "Angry Young Man" of his younger days is now a versatile and mature actor now well within his 60s and continues so competing with "heroes" of today.

...Is it a good idea to stick to the past like Dev Anand and live the life of titles or become versatile and stay in Business.

One is Socialism and another Capitalism....but we will never forget Dev Anand. Be it a good or a bad day I will listen to songs of Dev Anand than that of Amitabh's. There will be millions who will celebrate good and grieve their sorrow's with the songs that Dev Anand help create and his movies. To that extent if it matters he has repaid his debt for the successes he gained.

...but who does not like Amitabh Bachan.

...Mera Taj Mahal....

Labon ko sila baitha hoon

Boli mein sirf tera hi naam

Khamosh Yeh aahat hai

Awaaz sirf teri subah shyam

Aankhon mein baithee hai tasweer

Har tasweer chali teri mukaam

Kahi kisi se bhi ja miloon

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Chalo jahaan bhi tu raho

Tu Sirf meri hai Janam Janam

Chahe kisi ko na dikhta ho

Mera Dil Taj Mahal Tera Naam