2009

I turned 25

Slumdogged the Oscars

Obama happened and got a Nobel peace prize and he still got to send troops to Afghanistan... talk about CHANGE!

Copenhagen

Six friends got married- two of them were my ex’s

Tiger Woods finally proved to be human, let’s face it, sportsmen get a lot of good a**, case in point-Nehra, so I don’t blame him

Section 377

Didn’t confess for a year and the list now covers everything short of murder, contemplating to do that soon.

Michael Jackson went out with a whimper, but people made millions out of it. Guess, he is more valuable when dead

India’s first nuclear submarine INS Arihant was commissioned; incidentally we also had a small nuclear accident.

Did something meaningful for Christmas

The biggest show on earth- the Indian elections went off with not much of a hitch, it also proved the theory of collective intelligence

No more LTTE

YSR flew to his death

Most of Africa, South America, Iraq and Afghanistan occasionally went up in flames

Bored a lot of people to death by talking too much

Satyam proved to the world that we too can pull big scams

Did the cardinal mistake of helping others, which always seemed to bite me from behind

Tata dreamed big with Jag and small with Nano

Gatecrashing entered into the petite Indian vocabulary with the White House incident

The economy was boring

One whole year without a girlfriend since 2001-it was actually good

Liquor consumption grew by 16% in Kerala (our humble contribution to the country’s revenues)

Jenson Button and Brawn GP won F1, an underdog victory!

Nursed my pet dog to life

Bought a new dog, named it Cody, he clearly doesn’t like it though, pees every time you call him that.

The Indian test team ranked first, let’s hope it stays there long enough

Swiss banks started to spill their beans, wonder who all got a cold sweat after hearing that

Compromised on a lot of things, mainly education

Demand for two states in Andhra and all the other states followed suit, in other Andhra news governor N D Tiwari was caught with his pants down, literally!

Mayawati’s fetish for statues redefined heights of ego

Recession killed my brother’s business and his spirit but still drives an Audi though

Shoe throwing has been officially accepted in press circles as taking a stand.

Made a good friend but huge distances now separate us

Maserati Granturismo and Ferrari 458 Italia

25 years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, the affected are still to receive the basic right of having safe drinking water- the ugly face of capitalism

One hell of an year, ain't it?

The Poor

"Give me your tired, your poor.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

This is the inscription on the famous Statue of Liberty.

The world needs the tired and the poor. It was actually on them that the capitalistic world that exists today was built. America in its tumultuous ontogenesis needed them the most then and they came in by the thousands creating the leader of all nations that we know today. It was the colonial countries, which had the poor and needy, that built the English empire and also most of Europe.

So, you see, basic utopian theories on society are flawed on two counts- there can’t be economic equality and you can’t expect them to behave rationally. That is why perceptions and decisions formed by such systems go wrong most of the time and we end up resorting to the proverbial statement of ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ to lie to ourselves that life is all dandy. In fact, perfect society can be envisaged by factoring in selfishness and irrationality and then the only aberrations in the system would be random acts of kindness, which are rare enough.

But, that argument is for a different day. Let’s talk about economic inequality or the need for it. The rich need countries like Columbia to make sure that they get their weekly lines of cocaine, the tired from Africa so they can test their drugs, the needy from Mexico to give them their blood plasma to big drug companies so they can process it and resell it for 80 times the price to get it, the poor to provide their wombs so that women can have kids without having cellulite to worry about, they are needed to build Xanadus in deserts.

The poor do all this because they aspire for sustenance and better lives which the rich ideate everyday through extravagances. The inevitable consequence is that people eventually would grow out of poverty and the developed world would go in search for better pastures to exploit. Africa is still fertile with poverty and the lords of war make sure they stay that way by financing military governments. At least, when the rich are done with the world, people would at least have 3 square meals a day and then the relatively poor would have another chance to go up the ranks.

Mirage in the desert

This was an article that was published in the Economic Times on 1/12/09 as part of the editorial, couldn't stop myself to post it here..

A Time Of Fear And Loathing In Dubai

It was a monument to overvaulting human ambition, a fantasy fuelled by frenetic investment-dollars and oxymoronic benevolent despotism. A desert mirage built to rival the sheen and glitz of Las Vegas. Crass spectacle on a surreal scale. And it seems to have ended in a nightmare. Welcome to fear and loathing in Dubai. The emirate for which the term metropolitan disorder seems to have been solely invented. Sure, given its paucity of oil, Dubai did the right thing to posit itself as a model of the new economy. But the fun and games bits were grandiloquent. An attempt to cast the world anew, according to fantasy. Thus, the 24-squaremile archipelago of islands in the shape of a world map jigsaw ; the new Pyramids and the Colosseum; hyper resorts, mega-hotels , sky-scraping towers, amusement parks and an array of kitschy mansions in the middle of water. Buildings that echo the Tower of Babel: half a mile high, higher than the Empire State Building doubled. The childish wonderland extended downwards too a hotel like the Hydropolis , jellyfish-shaped and 66 feet below the surface of the sea where you could presumably have your sharkfin soup while gazing at a live specimen. That, perhaps, is what happens when a small sea-trading town fantasises about becoming a megapolis. Megalomania as a way of life.

You didnt need a financial whiz to suspect something was wrong here. At best, it was like watching an unrestrained kid pile on the lego blocks, amazement tinged with the lingering certainty of the impending collapse. And it did. The bust is as staggering as the spectacle. The total debt estimated at a jaw-dropping $80 billion. This was a citystate built as an anti-thesis of the original Greek conception. One that ballooned using the exploited labour of masses of south Asians, subject to total control, working inhuman shifts in white heat to enable the sheikhdom to wallow in refrigerated swimming pools. Often, it was compared to indentured labour under colonial rule. Livelihoods might have been lost, but the moot point is whether such a colonial Xanadu was ever workable in the first place.

Books, Movies and Music

I can’t take it anymore! The constant yammering of lectures, formulaic books, romantic comedies and all that is called mundane has driven me to the point of desperation. I reached a point in time when you feel you have to speak out or forever hold your breath. Why? You may ask. Well, the best the reason I can conjure up is ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and my threshold to tolerate bullshit has gone down a lot.

People would attribute it to my apparent smugness, well, I pride myself for having an opinion of my own and so I don’t give a damn. Let me explain myself why I snapped.

I read ‘The Lost Symbol’ by Dan Brown.

My verdict- a waste of 7 hours of my life! It follows the same formula, Langdon wakes up the morning having no idea what shit is going down that evening, some superhuman crazy guy who is borderline gay, likes playing dress-up and is trying to get ‘atonement’, of course, the damsel in distress, a sceptical Langdon (on the premise which crazy rituals thought up by show-off scientists are explained), symbols and architecture explained by half truths, a near death experience for Langdon… yada yada yada… Sounds familiar? It’s the formula that revived the sheen ridden ‘thriller literature’. It’s as if though, the writer did not even try to conjure up something original. It’s a disgrace.

It’s the same for movies and music, all formulaic and even copied; we then nurture it by consuming them without criticism. The whole point of creativity is to be fresh and inspiring. If you are a serious follower of art, please don’t encourage such mediocrity and give fresh ideas and fresh minds a chance.

The Business of being Politically Correct

After the scare of the cold war, the fear-mongers of the world found something else- “Global Warming”. It was a perfect cause for the resurgent hippie community and also kept the intellectual community occupied. Pressure groups went all out on this, convinced us that we were really, really bad people and created terms such as carbon footprint to add more guilt to our already depressing lives.

Lets us bear in mind that pressure groups like Greenpeace and Environment Defence Fund are now part of a multi-billion dollar industry. The top officials draw handsome salaries and run these well-oiled organisations to amass huge fortunes as donations. They made it fashionable to donate; they got celebrity darlings to pose for them, they even made it heroic by an ad-campaign that exalted people who went to jail for these causes.

The biggest criticism I have against them was the anti-DDT campaign. The National Academy of Sciences once reported, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria." During the 60’s an uproar shunning DDT, as it was ending up in our bodies led to litigations against it and eventually was banned  in the US, even though it was ruled that DDT was not a hazard to man. The cause was taken up by the pressure groups and it led to the complete ban of DDT.

Since the ban in 1972, over 50 million people have died from this once nearly vanquished disease and India is particularly notorious in Malaria-related deaths. Instead of the DDT that didn’t harm human beings we now use Prallethrin, which is like the Anton LaVey of being nice.

There are lots of other examples of them effing things up, so given their track record; Is Global Warming a hoax? If it’s true, are the measures done by them productive or counter-productive?

My qualms arise out of the unsubstantiated and skewed reports circulated by activists, they show drastic pictures of ice-caps melting while we know for a fact that some ice-caps are actually growing, surface temperatures have indeed gone up in some places but its not true for all over the world, in fact many cities in the US have grown colder after adjusting the increases due to concrete density (number of buildings) and so on.

Climate is something that we have not even begun to understand properly because of the very fact that there are far too many variables involved, even the best models of climatic prediction should be taken with a pinch of salt.

I cannot say it’s all been bad, companies have made conscious efforts to reduce their impact on the environment. Research for clean fuels and to increase efficiency of existing systems has been funded because of this. It’s just that when we make opinions we should see all sides of an issue rather than blatantly accepting public sentiment.

Fun Fact:  A recent report by the UN revealed that the total livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world. So I am offsetting the greenhouse gases produced by my 3-litre car by eating as much as beef as possible. Wink!

                                                                                                        

Memes

I am truly fascinated by memes and the power of ideas. Ideas can be infectious, empires were built on it, coups were initiated by it, religions are propagated by it, and wars were fought for it. So, what is a meme? It’s a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. In basic terms, it is the ideas or practices we inherit from our upbringing and also from our environment.

To understand the power of memes, consider the Muslim movement of Jihad or if it’s too clichéd let’s take the Nazis, they created anti-Semitism in the minds of the millions of Germans, the holocaust that followed is considered to be the very low point of human civilization. Closer to home, the idea of regionalism seems to be catching on with the help of opportunistic politicians like the Shiv Sena. Memes are also quite notorious in the markets, it’s commonly known as market-sentiments, and millions are lost because the idea of poor performance or the reverse catches on faster than wild fire.

So, why understand memes? As educated individuals, understanding the power of memes and their implications would help us to use our intellect and rationality to use them for our own means and obviously, in positive ways.

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry"-Richard Dawkins

Differences

People are different. It’s these differences that make us so interesting or we would be just bland as British cuisine. These differences dictate our beliefs, our tastes, our partners, our opinions and even our fights. The fights have been quite prominent enough that the masons of society tried to use universals to segregate us or rather restrict our differences. This led to basic segregation based on gender, religion, race, colour and so on. These segregates then developed rules and practices. Crude segregation like this was done to rein in the chaos that arose out of these differences. Simply put, rules keep us alive or we would just kill each other at the drop of a hat.

This worked well for some time because these rules have evolved with society and now as we believe it, constitutes the civilized society. The evolution was not without its hiccups, some really bad practices and rules led to unnecessary stifling of individualism, like casteism and subjugation of women. However, as society evolves, it corrects its mistakes and such practices would eventually come to an end. That’s the beauty of evolution.

Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist, on his quest to find the perfect Diet Pepsi (he was consulting for them to find the perfect blend for their new product ‘Diet Pepsi’) stumbled on the fact, that there can never be the perfect PEPSI only Perfect PEPSIS. He realized that people have different preferences so the perfect Pepsi is a delusion. The best way is to get people into clusters of preferences and develop products to satisfy that particular clusters. Even though, Pepsi just went with only one diet Pepsi, his later clients took his advice and bought out different choices for their products. This unwittingly started the revolution of choices.

Today, the ruling dogma of all western industrial societies is that “if we are interested in maximising the welfare of citizens, then the way to do that would be to maximise individual freedom. The way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice.” This was explained by Barry Schwartz the writer of “The Paradox of Choice”. This contradicts our accepted segregation.

This was ground breaking; the advent of choices and cheap customised servicing with the help of technology has changed the way we live. We are spoilt with choices today. Individualism rules over collectivism. It’s our very own differences that are being harnessed by marketers to sell products. Product lines are being horizontally expanded to service everybody’s needs. Life can’t get any better.

The downside for all this is something called as ‘opportunity cost’. We are so spoilt with choices that we can’t make up our minds on anything and is always bothered by the missed opportunity. For example, when we order something at a restaurant, we always wonder what it would have been to have the other dish, it’s the same with men choosing partners, and why else do you think men cheat? ‘It’s all because of choices’. So inadvertently, we end up with regret or anticipated regret, its opportunity costs, an escalation of expectations and self-blame which all spiral into being miserable.

Everything seems to be a good idea the night before.

Halo ed Cars

I usually hate marketers, they always twist facts and if you are at the receiving end of it, you are sure to be screwed (e.g. how they made me join ABS) but I am very grateful to them because of creating a term called Halo cars. Halo cars are those models that are developed to create positive associations to a brand. Companies tell their pot-smoking engineers to go nuts and develop something so berserk and impractical that car nuts like me would drool over it and have wet dreams.

And look what it created, the Sergio Scaglietti-designed 250GTO! That’s one beauty(the red car) that just oozes passion. There are several others too, like the 250LM, 288GTO, F40, F50, the Mercedes 300SL gull-wing, Ford GT40, Aston Martin db5, Jaguar XJ220, Lamborghini Miura, Diablo. More money was made from selling merchandise of these cars than the cars themselves.

These cars were downright bonkers. The gull-wing Merc had the dubious status of frying your balls, literally, it was that hot inside. The Miura for instance, asks in its manual to actually open the door and sit sideways to look outside to reverse it. All of these cars always put up tantrums. If it was out in the rain it won’t start, if you haven’t driven it for a week, it won’t start, if it’s not the right fuel it won’t start, if someone else drove it with a heavy foot, he would have probably messed up the timing and that’s a visit to the mechanic. It would also kill you, if you did not treat it properly. But, I would have loved every moment of it.

The Japanese then came along with their halo cars, like the very iconic ‘Nismo-Nissan Skyline GT-R’. These things were crazy, they had tons of power and handling ability all this with Japanese reliability. That meant you can burn rubber at the track and on the way back pick up the kids from school. Sure, they weren’t anywhere as pretty as the Italians but the GT-Rs started filling kid’s and dorm room walls.

The Italians then embraced the ‘vulgar’ electronic aids and developed some pretty interesting cars. The latest of the crazies are the Ferrari FXXs (the black car; the glow in the front wheel arch is the semi molten disc brake due to immense braking friction) and the Merc 722s, both cars push the boundaries so much that it creates new ways for you to die. It has so much grip, that if you get over zealous at a turn, the g-forces could snap your neck like a twig.

Oh! God bless the marketers!

Breakpoint

What’s eating China and Pakistan? Why do they hate us Indians? Did we, by chance, make fun of their really small wieners or is it that they aren’t getting any. It’s a bloody mystery.

Last week, when we inked a deal to promote free trading to ASEAN countries, the bloody Chinese acted like a bunch of third graders. A Chinese ‘scholar’ from a state-run ‘university’ declared in his infinite wisdom that India was a “Hindu Religious State” and that Hinduism is a “decadent religion” and that apart from annexing Arunachal Pradesh and working with countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan to secure the separation of Assam and Bengal from the Indian Union, should encourage Tamil separation and divide the country into 20-30 nation states. That’s not all; they have been spreading such ‘insights’ to countries which we trade with thereby trying to erode our ties with them. The cheeky bastards

During the dreadful 26/11 acts on Mumbai, Jiabao picked up his cheap Chinese-made phone to called his frat buddy (in the small wieners club) Giliani, to extend his support. While the world sympathised with us, these bastards were thinking of breaking us up. No points in guessing who was against extending sanctions on Jammat-ud-Dawa, the Chinese again. They have also been constantly upping their naval presence in the Indian Ocean and also been very cooperative to enhance the Pakistani fleet.

You know what, fuck them; I challenge the yellow bellied assholes to do as they please. We won’t take this lying down. I know one thing for sure; they are shit scared of us, otherwise they wouldn’t go for such underhanded tactics. I know, we Indians have our differences and can’t stand each other, but when it comes down to the shits we are a bloody force to reckon with.

Identity Crisis

My previous post sucked. Yes, sucked per se. After some painful reviews, I realised what I have done. I went out of character.

On the trepidation of losing my readers, I decided to understand my blog. I reread all my posts and my first thoughts were that it was a manifestation of an angry young man lashing out at the savageness of this world.

No, it was too clichéd! This ain’t the freaking 80’s! Nobody likes a freaking one-man-against-the-world plot. These are the years of the sweet-talking metro-sexual and I know for the fact that I’m not one. I still think mousse is something you eat and not for your hair. I still believe in treating women with respect and not slapping them around (strangely they seem to like it).

Maybe that’s it. The blog has an old-worldliness character to it strewn with a newfangled attitude toward issues. Its like ‘The Hindu’ and ‘DNA’ (the newspaper) coming together with soft porn and economics on the same page. Maybe that’s what my readers like.

I hope this self-diagnosis hit the sweet spot and I promise that I’ll never lose sight of the character again.

Reinventing the Wheel

“In business, you have to reinvent the wheel every day; once you stop doing that, you are finished” said an acquaintance of mine. Considering that he started from scratch and now owns 18 golf courses, there must be some truth to it.

Fundamentals in business schools are just generalisations of the real thing. An entrepreneur is required to learn, evolve and customise business processes, often learning important lessons on the way.

The above mentioned gentleman was a regular at my brother’s hotel. His insights into business were marvellous. I often used to share a bottle of wine with him, during which we would discuss a business opportunity and how to go about it, scribbling on a piece of paper while doing so. I would have to say that those pieces of paper have given me more insights in running a business than I have learnt in the past one year at Alliance.

We would also come up with a plan to do some cost cutting or utilise some resource more efficiently in our respective businesses. Something as trivial as getting a better deal on the disposable cups for the coffee machines or getting slot machines were discussed at length often scouring the yellow pages and doing phone calls, justified by saying “Every penny counts”.

Lessons lie in the rough, obscured by the annals of banality. Understanding it and implementing it requires skill and fortitude.

Coming Out of the Closet

A landmark judgement by the Delhi High Court striking down Section 377, which criminalises consensual sex between two individuals including same gender(for the perverts, goats are still a No No), was the cause for a bittersweet moment for me. It was actually like watching a kid growing into adolescence; you are happy for him growing up but sad because he would lose his innocence.

India is finally growing up, accepting certain facts of life to which it was in deep denial. Don t get me wrong, I believe gay sex is as unnatural as Michael Jackson’s face, both creeps the shit out of me, except for lesbianism (wink!).

This verdict has changed everything, the truth that homosexuality is no more a closet truth and the sheer number of people involved puts a new perspective to an otherwise naive and innocent India. On the other hand, I am proud of India being mature enough to take such a decision. I view this as a step towards becoming a country that values freedom and faces truth than deny it.

I just hope the fanatics, that this country is so famous for, grew half a brain and join the programme.

Adieu to MJ

MJ passed away. I mourn for him. Like all great artists, he is more remembered for his scandals than his achievements. A misunderstood soul, he always tried to come to grips with his life by outrageous acts.

In his life time he has achieved unprecedented worldwide fame and recognition, every kid in the 80’s knew who he was. I remember jumping on the bed to his tunes, the Van Halen solos that he interlaced with his high energy performances, just brilliant.

I will remember him along with the greats Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury, Jim Morrison, Cliff Burton, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Tom Fogerty and others.

I mourn for him.

Beauty

I hate painting beautiful pictures with words, because the beauty we conceive is not true, it ceases to be true when we alter life to make it so.  I revel in the intricacies of life, the innate gestures we take for granted and the ones that spawn out of innocence. So to me, a child smiling at the prospect of getting a candy has more beauty than a well toned model with features that even god didn’t have a hand in making them.

Naturally so, I was a little perplexed on the issue of later stage abortions (for the naive few, its aborting the child after 20 weeks of conception; the foetus is almost formed and is declared alive by US law).  It’s appalling, I know, killing a child because it’s not formed properly. Are the stereotypes of babies propagated by media the benchmark in deciding how yours should be? If everybody looked like that where would individualism figure in our list of priorities? Several disabled people live happy lives, sure, they may be ridiculed in society and be looked upon in pity all their lives, but does that give anybody the right to kill, who are we to decide? I am starting to sound like a fear monger selling a dystopia to the inexorable public.

Then I heard the plight of a couple, their story put a different perspective on the topic. They have been trying to conceive for years and when they finally did they were elated, painted the kids room, bought everything they could get their hands on, did everything prescribed in every pre-natal care book. Unfortunately, after 22 weeks, a scan revealed that the baby’s brain was filling up with fluids and he would be born without any brain function. They were distraught, they took as many second opinions as possible but they all concurred. So they had an abortion. Are they justified in doing so? Did they in doing so, reduce the agony that the child would have lived through and also the parents agony?

Like all debates, we can never conclude on anything, we just compromise between the two and hope that our conscience figures out what’s right.

Paying the Penance for Ignorance

As my friend is in the other room, shredding bad guys to death on ‘Death Space’, I pulled up my laptop as a means to end my boredom. The restlessness you experience when there is nothing to do is pure agony. I unequivocally realise what I need is a girlfriend.

Now you can see how bored I am.

Well, I didn’t start this blog to publish my personal life and you can thank god that I am not going to change that.

Ignorance; we come across it every day. My English teacher used to harp away “Don’t betray your ignorance” all the time. I never stopped to figure out what she meant to say. See, now that’s ignorance.

Ignorance, I believe, is intertwined with ego and stupidity because for ignorance to propagate through society the propagators should be egoistic or plain stupid or both. We would think ignorance is rare among us and we are all epitomes of fine thought. Wrong! Ignorance is the lack of knowledge or understanding. Knowledge, we have, but understanding, that is a tad bit difficult to come by.

The elections are just shoring up. So far, we Indians have put up a poor show of just over 50% turnout. So the question arises, how ignorant and nonchalant are we on who should run our country? How many of us really understand the intricacies of our democracy? Let’s hope we don’t have to pay the price for that.

Then there are the environmentalists, they scream murder at SUVs from their puny electric cars, knowing little that the CO2 expelled to produce the batteries and the electricity to charge them are more than the SUV does in its lifetime. The dams we create for renewable energy are done so by inundating flood plains rich in flora and fauna, probably even forcing some species to extinction. Wind turbines kill more migratory birds than humans ever did directly. Hydrogen power slated to be the future for only emitting water vapour would seem a good idea, but with increased water content in the air, it could probably change climatic patterns and bring in disastrous storms.

There are millions of examples where ignorance or a blithe unconcern in understanding the system has led to peril.

So when was the last time you did something without ignorance?

The Big Three

Ever since Henry Ford with his freakishly attuned business mind bought out the Model T, America has been the leader in automobile manufacturing and the Big Three viz. GM, Ford and Chrysler have been ruling the roost. They were the automotive equivalent of the mafia; they weeded out or gobbled up all the small players (the Tucker story would substantiate that fact). They decided what to sell and what not to, the customer just played along, ironic, considering these companies are often considered to be the epitomes of capitalism.

Then, along came the Japanese with their small and fragile contraptions, which the Americans would not even honour with the tag ‘car’. To them a car had to have a V8, had to be two football fields long and should handle like fat momma on Viagra. As a twist of fate, they sneered at the small Toyotas and Hondas to their own peril. The oil crisis rolled in the 70’s and the environment crazies came along with their flower-power shit and suddenly these cars made sense to the gobbledygook Americans and boy-oh-boy ,the Japs took real advantage of the situation.

The American markets have always been the largest but they became increasingly served by foreign car makers, notably the Japs. The Big Three has been consistently been losing market share and have become less and less profitable, they tried offsetting their losses by expanding worldwide, mostly by acquisitions and exporting to countries where people are daft enough to buy them (e.g. Saudi Arabia). But still they kept on declining; the recent recession has hammered in the last nails on their coffins.  To make matters worse, Obama has been particularly against any kind of bailout, he has literally told them to go suck a lolly instead.

Well, what went wrong?  Everything actually, they still operated the old way, the push system. They set targets and estimated requirements and then produced and made the dealers to sell them off, it was prehistoric. They have spent millions to develop complex supply chains and organisations to support this business model. Each new product took several years to develop and hundreds of millions of dollars were tied up in massive inventory and working capital throughout the system. These flaws were masked by the huge demand for Trucks and SUVs.

Then there is the labour problem, the UAW (United Auto Workers) union was and is a pain in the ass. Sergio Marchionne, Fiat CEO, was quite eloquent about his concerns about the workforce when negotiating a lifeline deal with Chrysler, being a hard man, he said unless the union decides to accept major cost cuts- no deal.

So can we envision a turnaround? Even if mildly possible, it would require some radical changes in the system. They need to embrace the pull system, as the Japs and Germans have long back done. They should learn and develop new inventory systems; they can glean from lessons from all over the world; do something radical, challenge dominant thought (e.g. Tata Nano). However, their manufacturing facilities are world class and are capable of producing quality products. It just needs to factor in the details and make changes accordingly. It’s always about the little things.

YAMAHA

For those who have a passion for bikes and are old enough to remember Tom Petty and Guns N’ Roses tunes would agree that Yamaha were the bee’s knees. The RXs and RDs were a constant cause of wet dreams.

Yamaha came into our undeserving lives in the 80’s. It came out with the RD350 badged as a Rajdoot and it was brilliant, it was like having a crazy-in-bed high maintenance girl friend. People have gone bankrupt by taking care of it but the sheer exhilaration it gave was better than anything that you could snort up your nose.

Unfortunately it didn’t sell well but Yamaha had another ace up their sleeve, the RX100, and boy-oh-boy was it good. It was a light weight one-cylinder version of the RD. It left every other manufacturer in the dust, in terms of performance. It was frugal too, not as much as the Hondas but not as vulgar as the RDs. It became the choice ride for the young and careless.

As usual the green police spoilt the fun. Environment laws came in and the RX100 died in 1995. The company came out with another bike fortunately crazier than the 100, the RX135, it went through a number of iterations before it created a legend the RX135 5speed, it had the famous seventh port technology which the RD had used and it did fly, the new age bikes like CBZ or Pulsar were no match to this mean beast.

Growing petrol prices and environment consciousness put a stop to its life. Then Yamaha went through a dry phase with a slew of run of the mill models, they were capable but none were class leading and somebody else always did it better than them. Sales dwindled, dealers closed down and everything looked rather bleak. They even tried reviving it with John Abraham, as if that’s going to make a difference.

Yamaha woke up from its slumber and started to do what it did best, excite people. It sought to a flagship strategy; it bought in the cavalry namely the R1, raised brand awareness and bought in an aspirational sub-model the R15 which took the Indian market by storm. It didn’t end there; they bought out the radical FZ16. Sales have been racking up, dealers upgrading and once again children started dreaming about Yamahas. The balance is restored.

 

Seduction

A business which is involved in delivering to human cravings is a sure shot. I am not talking about a dollop of ice cream here; it’s the hard stuff like gambling, narcotics, liquor, tobacco and sex. These were prevalent from times yore. Soma, a concoction of Cannabis, Poppy and Ephedra, was mentioned in the Vedas as a drink much sought after. The Geishas have been satisfying Japanese perversions for centuries. Amsterdam even has a cannabis museum!!!

Ethical and legal issues aside, these segments have been amassing huge amounts of money. Let’s talk about Gambling for a while. Casinos are raking in money by the millions. At the start of the 20th century, Las Vegas was a desert town, where a passerby would not give a second look. Then the Mafia syndicate came in and changed it all. The illusions of making a quick buck and grandeur bought in people like bees to honey. Las Vegas became the city of sin, anything goes, if Satan had a home on earth, it would be there.

Countries seduced by the huge gains of having a Las Vegas of their own, have been seriously thinking of legalising gambling and helping investors to setup Super Casinos. England and Macau has one, Singapore is building one and if Dubai had its way, they would have the largest one in the world. Argument is that it brings in huge tourist inflows and revenues, on the other hand, some argue it would bring with it the lewdness associated with the industry.

Goa has legalised gambling but only on ships moored on the coast though. We are getting there. The seductive tones of the ‘gambling sirens’ are too much for us mere mortals.

The Nano

I always have an opinion on automobiles. If it’s not made out of passion or engineering ingenuity, I usually shun it as a by-product of modern capitalism. I find myself in a quandary as I cheer for the arrival of the Nano. Is it because I am witnessing the birth of something epochal such as the Volkswagen or the Mini or the 500 or the 2CV? Or maybe it’s the implications that the new car would throw up. To a car-owning city dweller, it should provide a good option for trips to areas short on parking space. To others, a lifestyle, environment friendly option. And to the vast majority, simply a chance to own a modern car.

I think India has finally arrived in the world motoring scene, however it did it with a whimper rather than a bang. Motoring gurus are eating their words as they had snickered at Ratan Tata’s dream. Major players are now scampering to introduce their own UCVs (Ultra low Cost Vehicles, yeah, it created its own new market segment too).

I am just waiting to see how it fares in the market and what kind of export responses it gets. Much would depend on how the Nano connects with the buyers.

Business Lesson: The most simple and robust products or ideas would always be the most profitable and the most remembered.

Elections

I really look forward to elections; it puts some fun into the otherwise mundane lives of us villagers. Everybody has their version of conspiracy theories which are debated in tea shops. Political celebrities come out of their cocoons and pose for awkward photographs with filthy looking children and mothers, cartoonists have a riot, scandals, TV shows filled with sketches, SUV sales increase, polls, exit polls, politicians changing allegiances every other day, repercussions of the change, polls on that, lazily worded, often grammatically wrong slogans, election songs - the horrible tunes, the publicity stunts, Laloo, few people getting beaten up by the police, politicians going and seeing them, cheap sentiments, stats, news channels, newspapers, the actual elections, the stubborn stain - which you try to remove even though you know that it is meant to stay, the awkward silence, the results, the winners rally, the looser retaliating with small skirmishes, changing of allegiances again, stats, news channels, newspapers, more discussions at the tea shop, finally somebody gets sworn in.

We then cross our fingers and hope that the idiots we elected to parliament would make our lives a little better. Take charge, vote for a better country. Jaago re!!!

Obama and the Merry Men

2008 proved to be the year of the underdog. Obama won, Slumdog won, Resul Pookutty won and so on. It’s all because the underdog got fucked real hard. It was retaliation by them just to affirm their real power. The middle class defines a country, they drive the economy, and they work like dogs so they can give their earnings to conglomerates (to make/create unnecessary products) and to governments (to spend it on wars and bailouts because somebody fucked up).

Obama, an African- American, at the helm of the most powerful country in the world, means there is some serious ‘change’ happening. His promise to bring the country and in turn the world around seems to be a bit lofty. His policies so far have been quite populist which went about flaying the rich and giving to the needy. CEOs of companies getting bailouts have their salaries capped at half a million a year. Companies outsourcing outside the country would not receive tax sops (bad luck India!). H1B visas limited, possibly even eliminated.

But would this all work. His plan of action (a budget) is to bring the country back to the position it was in before the downturn and not eliminate the root cause altogether (bad asset management and sub-prime lending). Don’t we learn from mistakes? My layman’s opinion would get beaten down by a ton of economic experts. I just hope he realizes that any decision he and his merry men make may cause a family somewhere in remote China to probably resort to poison.

One more thing, I went through this news article recently which stated that Obama is being considered for the Noble Peace Prize. Now what is that all about???

The Oscars

The show was a sham. It no longer signifies the celebration of real art. I know India is celebrating its achievement and I tried real hard to be a part of it, I really did. I even took the pains to watch it live and I applauded every time Slumdog slammed one home but I confess it wasn’t wholehearted. I felt the awards were patronizing and catered to the current economic and political situation.

A. R. Rahman deserves the ‘Best Original Music Score’ award, no doubt about it. However, the best song could have gone to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrestler’, which for some apparent reason did not even get nominated. That is where I smelt something fishy. Usually there are five nominations for each category and again for some reason there were only three - two from Slumdog Millionaire(SM), one from Wall-E.

All the movies were either ‘Oscar-made’ or uplifting and SM’s use of gory or ‘poverty porn’ as some critics put it, leveraged its position to the general public.

Whatever happened to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? It was by far one of the best movies to be made this year. If I had my way, I would have given it all the awards, except for Best Actor, which would have gone to Mickey Rourke for his brilliant performance in The Wrestler.

So you see the Academy has made the Oscars recession proof. It put on a good show which catered to public opinion and raked in a sizeable moolah from its TV ratings and to top it off, added a new audience (India). Now that is what I call show biz folks!

Business Lesson: Fuck ideals and standards; give the customer what he wants.

Questions

Satyam was a fiasco, big time, no doubt about it, a corporate f**k up, a failure of the system and a nauseating pimple on the face of squeaky clean ‘Corporate India’. These descriptions sum up the sentiments of the hordes of ‘critics’ dissecting the biggest sensation since Rakhi Sawant’s fake mammary glands.

What nags me the most is the question ‘why did he do it?’. Ramalinga Raju, a poster child of the Indian IT industry, was not doing badly when the scam started. Satyam was globally recognised, projects were numerous, his construction company, Maytas, had its order books full. Now why did he have to go ahead and screw it all up?

I think it is all about ‘Maximizing the shareholders wealth’. The constant need to satisfy the incessant greed of investors just gets to you. To add insult to injury, quarter reporting just aggravates the problem, every quarter the pressure just builds up. In my list of villains I also add the media for lionising of such personalities, Raju is the recipient of many awards, he was often hailed as an underdog superhero. To keep up with the expectations the poor man was pushed to show better profits every quarter and needed to show how his company excelled in everything. Sure, there might have been a lot of ego feeding involved which leads me to the next topic in this discussion.

I read an article contrasting the role of the promoter in companies in the US and in India. In the US, the promoter is quite encumbered by the company’s proceedings; it would be run by professionals who in turn would keep its policies intact. India, on the other hand, is in favour of promoters meddling in the company’s affairs. The author concluded that we should follow the Americans and let the professionals handle it. Quite a good idea, but it made me wonder; what is the incentive for a promoter to start something new. More than the money, it’s the ego trip that the promoters crave for and if that is not satisfied what’s in it for them?

Is it really justified to keep the shareholders wealth to be the utmost concern? They are just in it for a quick buck or two. Where is the loyalty? Investors, in the traditional sense are a dying breed. So is it time for to shift focus from shareholder’s benefit to company’s benefit? Treating the company as an entity and taking decisions that would help it grow and become a better service to society (Forgive me for that tinge of socialism).

Don’t even get me started on the role of auditors. If they don’t assume responsibility of the work they do, then why is it mandatory. If the ‘Big Four’ guys don’t check at least the bank accounts, then why in God’s name is it called an audit. I looked it up, Webster’s define Audit as “The review of a body's activities and operations to ensure that these are being performed or are functioning in accordance with objectives, budgets, rules and standards. The aim of this review is to identify, at regular intervals, deviations which might require corrective action”. I don’t think this was what PWC did at Satyam. Arrrrgghhh...

I don’t want to draw any conclusions; I’ll leave that to you. I believe there’s more to unfold and many lessons to be gleaned from this.