The Perfect Phone Call

Every now and then, I come across newspaper articles which border insanity and at times cross that. A few days back in the TOI, there was an article on what constitutes a perfect phone call. Another reference of the article is here.

The research suggest that an ideal phone call should last 9 minutes and 36 seconds!! It should contain a healthy mix of current affairs, opposite sex, health and such stuff.

Three minutes should be spent catching up with news about family and friends
One minute on personal problems
One minute on work/school
42 seconds on current affairs
24 seconds on the weather
24 seconds on chat about opposite sex
12 seconds, staying quite

Another interesting discovery: One in five people spend the maximum time on the phone talking to their mothers. Even more fantastic is the following:

Only 3 % of people named their father as the person they spent most time on the phone with – because dads hand over the phone to their wives.

My personal probability of mom being at the top of the list, at any point of time depends on the following factors:

• Whether love life exists or not? If it does, whether it is on track or not?
• Exams going on or not? [If yes, frequency of calls to mom increase!]
• Whether my sister is having her exams or not? [Same as above]
  
• Balance in the phone [Lesser the balance, the more missed calls that go home]
• Whether dad has asked me to courier the fee receipt or not? [If yes, DON'T call till you have sent it, which usually is not soon]
• Bank balance and the slope of decrease of the balance [Higher the gradient, higher is the probability that I bypass dad and call mom directly and use the powers vested in her :-) ]
• Frequency of 'achievements' - Perhaps, there is no one who is happier than mom - so makes sense. Marginal benefit fundaes.
  

With dad it is far far simpler:

Dad has a fixed set of questions :

• Wassup?
• Do you need money?
• Why is your CGPA falling every sem?
• Why did you not send the courier yet.. #@$!$!!
• Want to talk to mom?

There have been times when I have finished the above conversation with dad in 7 seconds!! But thanks to the research finding, I am not as guilty anymore - I guess its meant to be that way. Let me not challenge nature! ;)

Since we are talking of phone calls, I leave the reader with the following pic of my dear buddy, Ugri, talking to his then would-be girlfriend and now is girlfriend. This is the wing-phone in our wing and the time would be around 1 AM some August night of 2008. What all people do for love! :-P

The IITian! :-)

For the past three years here at IIT Madras, I have always had a nagging feeling of 'exploiting' the resources of the country. "The government spends a fortune on each IITian", "Brain Drain", "IITs are a social disaster" and the likes...

Infact, the best of them all is Prof. MS Ananth's oft-heard comment - "Nehru created the IITs as a step to build the nation, but he did not specify which nation." - with an obvious reference to Obama's country.

Pan-IIT 2008, the global IIT alumni conference that is going to be held in December at IIT Madras has come out with a fascinatng report on the contribution of IITs to India. The numbers and facts that they have managed to put together is amazing, to say the least. Quoting from a couple of news articles, this, here is a summary of their findings:

• Over the last 50 years, the IIT alumni have created over 2 crore jobs, which translates to 'Each IITian has created 100 jobs'
• One in 10 IIT alumni have started their own companies, with over 40% of them being serial entrepreneurs. Two-thirds of the companies founded are in India. In the last 15-20 years, most of them have preferred to start up in India
• Budgetary responsibility of IITians is over Rs 40 lakh crore ($885 bn)
  
• They are associated with incremental economic value creation of Rs 20 lakh crore ($450 bn)
• Every Rs 1 invested on an IITian has created an economic impact of Rs 50 at the global level. Of this, India’s share will be Rs 25, says Manu Santhanam.
• 54 pc of the top-500 Indian companies have atleast one IIT alumnus in their Board of Directors

I am eagerly waiting for the organsition to release the methodology and other findings of the report.

An important factor that should not be undermined is the numbers associated with the IITs. It is the largest organisation in India, by number, to churn out technocrats. Perhaps, no other institution/organisation has such a scale. Hence, these figures should not be taken at face value. That said, for the 3-odd lakhs of engineers that graduate every year, the three thousand of the IITians seem to make a distinct mark.

But, if you are in the limelight - bouquets and brickbats alike follow. I was going throughtthe comments section of one of these articles and here's what I stumbled upon. I would highly recommend you all to read the comments.

One thing is clear from the comments. Although the findings of the report purely talk about only the contribution of IITs and the their alumni and has not criticised any one, a lot of people seem to have been offended and have given baseless reasons to ridicule them. Comments like 'They are patting their own back' 'They should give credit to others' 'You find them selling soaps in FMCG and giving loans in the banking sector'.

(To be completed..)

TANSTAAFL!

TANSTAAFL is an acronym that stands for There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Wiki entry suggests that it was popularized by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his book - The Moon is a Hersh Mistress. But that's not the point here.

In terms of economics, it means nothing comes for free in this world. Everything has a cost attached to it -the opportunity cost of doing it. Essentially, everything and anything that happens to you has an ulterior motive to it - some immediately recognizable, some latent. But that is also not the point of this post.

We (especially Chinmay and I) believe that there is such a thing called a Free Lunch after all. Following is the photographic evidence of a 'Free Lunch' - Normal hogging away to glory without paying for it at the Campus Cafe, one of the summer afternoons in the insti. Well, that was not the first time and a not-so-educated guess is that it'll not be the last time either.


Apart, interestingly, the name of the the eating joint at IIM Ahmedabad is Cafe TANSTAAFL. They serve pretty good food till 4 AM in the night. And to top it all, they deliver it to your rooms - so food is just one phone call away. In that respect, the IIMA cafe clearly scores over the IITM cafe. But yet, food for us (also) is just a phone call away - a call to the poor freshie, who'll go buy food for us, albeit only till 2 PM.

PS: That said, even as I publish this post, I owe Normal 600 bucks. :-(
Damn the economic recession!

Goo-gle

Dear Larry and Sergey,

Gmail is holy. Please don't defile it with ugly themes. You can screw around as much as you want with Orkut, but DO NOT with Gmail.

Gmail is holy.

Regards

Lypas and autoFiLIP in the news!

Well.. a moment of reckoning. Lypas and autoFiLIP have managed to make some impact after all. Last week, thanks to Vaishnavi, we were featured on JAM magazine.

And here is another one, in the IT supplement, Ergo, of The Hindu, by Anusha.

I am yet to lay my hands on the JAM article [if anyone has the November issue of JAM and love me, please do hand over the copy] but here is the article on Ergo. The epaper

This one goes out to my MOM! Love you and miss you mama :-)

To Balaji, Hypo, Uss, Sanjay and Hrushya - Cheers, lets kick some more ass. :-P

Update: The JAM mag, e-article snapshot:

What the fuck, Dollar!

The great US of A and it's recession has definitely impacted India. Since India is a major servicing hub of the world and most of world's business is carried out in the US, the Indian industry has been hit badly.

While everything that is going wrong with the Indian markets can't be attributed to the US, most of it I think can be. Cutting across to the job market, things are gloomy. There is no Lehman to recruit us, Citibank is laying off and home-grown companies are battling for survival themselves. Quoting Chinmay, "I hope next year when we are passing out, the economy gets so bad that we are forced to start our own companies, that way we'll see a turnaround". Well, this recession might be a blessing in disguise for entrepreneurs.

Inspite of the being at the epicentre of the epicentre for all the worldly troubles, the US currency seems to give the Indian rupee a run for its money. The fact that the US economy does not have enough liquidity to pump into the market is giving rise to an illusionary strength to the dollar. The dollar seems to have gained strength in comparison to most other currencies. The Indian rupee was trading at less than 40 about eight months back and look at it now - up almost 25 % to about 50. I checked up Google finance to see the trend and it seems the dollar is 'gaining strength' pretty rapidly. Post September 15 (when Lehman filed for bankruptcy and the global crisis was recognised by the common man on the streets), the growth is unabashed.

It can be explained by the simple concept of Supply and Demand. Since there is a liquidity crunch in the US and the banks and companies alike need a lot of dollars to honour their commitments, they are taking all the dollars from elsewhere in the world. In essence, there is a shortage of supply in the other countries as the companies are selling the native currency in return for dollars.

In India, although we have a liquidity crunch ourselves, in the supply-demand dynamics of the rupee and the dollar, the rupee loses out because the world needs more dollars than rupees. And what with the RBI reducing the CRR (which is the fraction of the cash deposits that the banks have to keep with the RBI), rupee-crunch has been addressed to an extent. So, the dollar strength is not because of the weakness of the rupee or the Indian economy, it is due to the sheer amount of 'recoverable' dollars present in the Indian markets and the evident lack of it in the US markets.

Information Overload

Uss and I were having one of those brain-shattering weekend-chats where we are madly researching on random topics like energy consultancy to head-hunting to economics to Egon Zehnder to Harvard.

AND this is what he says at one point of time:

"abe, we shall soon turn into each other and won't even know it"

PS: Saturday night at 1.34 AM - I have my toughest end sem coming up on Tuesday; a 100-marks term paper submission on Monday; Four more end-sems lined up and HERE I am.

Freakonomics - Our attempt!

Freakonomics - Concepts and Application

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: freakonomics economics)

We had to make a presentation in our economics course. The three of us, Varun, Karthik and I chose 'Freakonomics' - till about a day before the presentation we had no clue on what to present. There was no unifying theme, but then that is what Freakonomics was all about. :-)

Finally, it came out well, albeit, with a broad theme of 'What you see is NOT what is inside'

Free Markets: China, India and Globalization 3.0

Free market is a concept which moots the idea "Business gets done where it gets done the best". It means businesses will always tend to minimise costs and maximise benefits. Profit is the name of the game.

China, the apple of the eye of the developing world and India's great nightmare is able to churn out manufactured products at jaw-dropping costs. and consistently enough now - its been about seven years now since they joined the WTO and opened up their markets in the truest sense of the word. "To get rich is glorious" declared the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping back in 1977, when he put China on the road to capitalism.

China can amass so many low-wage workers to cater to their industrial needs because it has such a voracious appetite for factory equipment and knowledge jobs. This is precisely where the government has to step-in. Create the ecosystem and let the flowers bloom. Because as as long as there are needs and wants, and they will be forever, there will be these industrial flowers eager to bloom. Immediately within a year of joining the WTO China saw a boom in their infrastructure - the government was under pressure from the private companies to provide them the ecosystem for the millions of dollars that they were willing to pool in. Privatization has done China a world of good and i am a little worried that China has found the key to the treasure.

Cutting across to India, the poster boy of our economic reforms and growth - the telecom sector is a shining example what private companies can do with optimum government support. In just one hour, India Inc. sells about 12,000 phones!! It marks a landmark growth-rate of 42 pc in teledensity this year. The government alone could never have done that.

This leads us to a very interesting phenomenon called Globalization 3.0. The term is coined by Thomas Friedman in his book - 'The world is Flat'. Globalisation 3.0 is when you empower an individual with tools to excel - tools like education, electricity, infrastructure, broadband connectivity - tools that'll enable him go into the wild and hunt for himself. You are putting the ball in the court of the individual citizens. You are enabling "Business to get done where it gets done the best".

In the long run, the answer lies in a conscious effort by the government to generate ecosystems, letting private companies model the market, let the market itself decide the course of the development. And as it has shown in the past - be it the the-world's-favorite-son Obama's USA or Japan, they have done it. I am sure we can too.

Three key phrases:

Business gets done where it gets done the best
Government should create ecosystems
Globalization 3.0

PS: The above is a modified reader-friendly version of my entry in the IITM's inter-hostel debate.
PS 2: The skeleton of the discussion is based on 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman

Chemplast Memoirs - I

There is this bright sunny day when you go out to bat when the team needs more than fifty runs in less than five overs. Then somehow riding on your luck and the good wishes of fellow team members, you win the match for your team with five balls to spare. You come back to the pavilion, welcomed with cheers and figure out that you scored a first-time-in-life 32 off 15 balls. You go back to your room pumped up and wanting to better your performance the next day. You go to your gtalk and change your status message to "One over mid-wicket for a four" - a comforting reminder to yourself (and to the gtalk-world) of the best shot you played in the match. You go to sleep and then when you lay on the bed, you feel the strain in every square inch of your body. Then you think to yourself "Aah, is this the sweet pain of success? "

The very next day - equally bright and sunny, if not more, you go out to bat - no pressure, no targets to chase. You are riding on the confidence of the last knock. You think to yourself "This is the day!" You tap your first ball to mid-wicket for a dot ball. Next ball, you time it to perfection only to realise that you are caught at mid-wicket. Out for a Duck. Gtalk status message changes to "Quack Quack" and the body pain intensifies. Only this time, you don't like it one bit.

Such is life. 32 off 15 one day and a ZERO off 2 the very next. Such is life.