Harish Palaniappan's

You are in India, and whichever news channel or newspaper you try, you see one thing big .. Indian politicians mulling over the nuclear deal that they signed with America. They signed it and then they stopped doing anything about it.. That should firstly give Americans some sign as to how to trust India next times when anything is signed.

Anyway, coming to the real part. .. Firstly, I suggest you ignore the drama the Indian politicians are doing with this nuclear deal thing. Yes, DRAMA.. you got it right.. they are not **really** really talking the deal, neither is the prime minister Dr.Manmohan sign a very positive person trying to do something good for India. It is all happening because, they want the country and importantly the country's media diverted from all gross problems in India today..

Gross problems from were we are being diverted:

1. Inflation is in two digits and strongly rising and seems to be steady for long at the higher mark.. never happened before.

2. The stock market made some uncalculated bullishness after the present government came to power and fiddled with something in the market. Everyone kept on diverting saying it is because India is really growing very fast economically.. and now the obvious BIG crash happened.. everybody outside India and many politicians and a few people who knew about all the eye-wash and brain-wash made loooot of money in this.... last time it happened they made a scape goat of a stock broker Harshad Mehta and bundled every other problem on him and put him in jail for many years. .. this time they are trying all means to divert attention so the truth about many billion India rupees never comes out.

3. Petrol prices are uphill.. and though the government can reduce some taxes on it and help the people, they want to continue making the money in taxes without any any consideration for helping all Indians at large.

4. Real estate prices are exhorbitant, because none of the government control authorities on the prices are working, because if prices increase fast and quick, the government gets lot of money in taxes quite quick.

These are some of the problems that you and I are made to divert from, so we don't discuss it, talk it, voice it, protest it.. and the government and most Indian politicians in power today seem to be more interested in the benefit of people outside the country by helping them make more and more money in India, rather than helping Indians live. Capitalism is fine, but not to do it outright when nothing in the country is ready for it immediately except the Software industry.

So, are you still diverted into the artificial Nuclear deal chaos, and still thinking Dr.Manmohan sign is trying to do something for the country.

Posted by Harish at 10:01 PM | Permalink

I chanced upon this website Planninga from Nanninga

This is a nice blog by Gerald Nanninga on planning and strategy.. Could be an invaluable resource for beginners on strategy planning studies. Nanninga tells it with stories to make a boring subject like planning look interesting to listen to.

Posted by Harish at 2:20 PM | Permalink

These days, I seem to get more worried about what I have not achieved in life, both personal or career.. because everything that starts takes too much time to be fulfilled... to the extent that it sometimes pricks that "I am not yet there, then am I a failure".

Getting out of an inspiring movie like 'The pursuit of Happyness' or 'Yuva (Tamil)', I would dream of doing something in my life to achieve what the lead roles in these movies seem to achieve in close to 2 hours. And when I plan to do it, I realize I got a truckload of problems, no patience, no money, no resources, no contacts, no that and no this. So much would broil over in my head, I simply think this is not something I can do, and sit and wonder when and where am I going to be successful.

I get 101 ideas to work on, to make a business, to make a company, to make some money to make more money, and all that, but with every idea there seems to be certain need of time, money, resources, which I just misunderstand as zero always, and try to think I can complete projects in nothing more than 8 hrs of a day, even if it be a sunday with lot of distraction of TV programmes, or a friday when a lot of seemingly good movies get released.

I am not a movie buff, but movies are the only things that motivated me after college.

If you don't work in a salaried job, probably you would also have had such occassions where you think you need a break.. from yourself.

This is where I get reminded of a lot of things I have read somewhere, or known from some source, that every idea has a nascent stage, the beginning of things where you get to know the idea more and know what all the idea wants to drink and how long it will take to become big, take shape, and give you back what you wanted it to.. like money or happiness. Even relationships have a nascent stage...where you break-up - patch-up, break-up and again patch-up, but were you make sure NOT to give-up.

The nascent stage of an idea:

Ideas are sparks.. they ignite, but take time to develop.
Be it a big company CMD with a lot of bucks, or be it a small guy on the street, I learn that both will take the same time to realize an idea that they have.. but, if, and only if they wait for it to happen and waiting doesn't mean.. just .. standing and waiting.. but working towards something, or atleast working on something else for the time being.

Some people give up when things take time, and taking time in a business means taking time to make profit, have a return on investment(ROI) and all.

These things are best understood in financial terms.. Short-term and Long-term.

Becoming rich, Making an Achievement or accomplishing something in life, developing and realizing an idea, why, even having a nice and happy family, are all long-term processes. They just can't happen quick like in films. Whatever money you have, your money can only pressurize the idea to happen.. What makes ideas reality is your constant effort on it, and patience.

Except for financial goals, money cannot be used as a resource to accompolish any long-term goal. You need to invest a lot of Time, a lot of brainstorming, and pull in enough resources now and then to develop on, to gradually allow your idea to grow.

If you remember old cartoons, the bulb glowing off above your head is just representation of a spark of idea. The realization and efforts take longer and are not represented in motivating movies or cartoons or even your favorite professor's speech...because putting all that straight is actually "de-motivating".

The nascent stage of an idea.. is a spark.. if you get it, be happy and work on it whenever possible. You will reach there.

My school's caption line said it all "Efforts never fail"... so put your efforts, invest some time, for your ideas are your babies which will need time to grow.

Now my worry is off.. and I am back to work.

Posted by Harish at 6:51 PM | Permalink

Indian languages have always given way to English, the business language of the world.

But still in Indian companies, and institutions, informal communications in indian languages are a considerable percentage, compared to formal english commmunications, and sooner or later a huge amount of business on the web, in india, is going to go the indic way.

Already, indian language based blogs are rising in numbers, against the huge english blog following in the country. Thanks to unicode based tools like www.quillpad.com, http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic, which have made the platform for developing content for indian language websites look so easy.. which was a major problem area earlier.

Reading indian language webblogs feels very different and in a way like a soothing feeling for a crave... and its not just me, some of my friends also have expressed similar interests in reading or writing the local tamil language blogs. And remember these are people just like me who havent written anything more than a sentence in tamil in their lives. but know the letters and can read or understand them.

Soon, I think we will see all major indian businesses have one or more indian language versions of their websites, and slowly this seems to open up big opportunities.

To dream about, If web content were in indian languages, may be it can add to bridging the technology divide between the villages and cities in india which indians have long been yearning for, to take advantage of technology, to boost growth in the lower strata of india and also to breath more power into marketplace.. why marketplace, because many big industries are still only in villages / towns rather than major cities, like the agriculture industry, like diary products, like farm manure and supplies, even a major portion of the textile industry, and many others.

Typing in Tamil, Hindi or other indian languages.. is easy through below links.
All you do is type the equivalent of the language word in english.. and the applications below translate that into the language text in unicode. You can then copy the language text and paste in your web blog or email or any unicode supported software (like in any latest browsers).

www.quillpad.com
http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic

Read detailed about Unicode in my earlier post:
Can your computer process your language

Posted by Harish at 9:53 PM | Permalink

Simply because Indians have isolated agriculture and farm produce far from being in sync with the growth and demand for non-agricultural products in India.

India on the face of economic growth has seen an increase in the prices of many things.. clothes, shoes, books, processed foods, petrol, oil, and everything... except farm produce.

All this just squeezes the farming sector like a sponge in attempting to pay them the same decade old cost for their produce, but asking them to live in a richer country...where the loan interest rates are rising, and even seeds are dearer in 2007 than what they were in the last decade.

If you are a farmer in India since 1999, you would earn the same amount of money now in 2007 from your produce.. but your spending and living expenses would have increased 5-10 times because of rising costs in fuel for transporting the produce or running tractors, because of rising interest rates, rising plant seed costs, rising fertilizer costs, rising irrigation costs due to dearer electricity, and also rising labour costs. Also, if as a farmer if you wanted to send your son/daughter to school or college, the costs are much higher..

So, Indians on the face of economic growth, still in the interest of keeping the inflation low, ban exports of farm produce as and when neccessary so that farmers don't get higher prices for their produce, control prices through government agencies and force farmers to sell only to the government or a very very few private agencies... and we Indians are trying to keep the farmer and his family forced to farming even with the poor quality of life they live..as long as they can survive.

India on the face of growth, wants to remove subsidies in electricity given to farmers, wants to stop practise of freebies given by politicians to farmers, wants to stop providing loans at subsidized rates.. wants to allow private fertilizer companies enter the market and have a free-pricing regime for better profits and trade for the companies and hence removing subsidies in fertilizer costs too..

And because farmers are poor, voiceless people who don't know how to stand in front of the people from the city and say "we need better prices for our produce because we also need to grow".. and, because they are confined to under-developed villages where there is no growth in roads or electricity reliability or infrastructure like schools / colleges / hospitals,

we, the educated people who are basking in the 10% GDP growth and ever rising foreign investments in the country, with higher salaries and more money..
are, squeezing these poor indirectly, without understanding how our ignorance is costing them their lives.

The consequences: We, the non-farming based people of India are living happy buying tomatoes for the same old price and saving more on our salaries and expenses.. we would give away money to some stupid broadband or mobile phone or banking service provider even if we know they charge extraordinarily high, but we won't pay even one rupee higher each year to farm produce.

Farmers can suffer.. because none of my/your family or relatives or friends are farmers.. even if they where, they are not anymore (either dead or gave up farming itself).

We will boot it, with trying to stop businesses like Reliance Fresh, or other private agencies which are trying to bring in competition and higher demand for retailing of farm produce.
All these private company methods seem to promise a higher demand and a small increase in prices, over a couple of years, for farm produce, to a level where farmers can earn as much as to sustain their agriculture business, and come out of debt. But NO, we can't allow them.. it will increase 2 rupees in my weekly consumption of tomato.

Wheat farmers alone are saved:
Thanks to ITC, a company in India, which at least saved the wheat farmers from getting into this mess. Because India has good amount of wheat produce(thanks to the climatic conditions in North India which best suits wheat growers), India produces much more wheat than the demand for it in the country, and hence the government was happy a few years back, to allow private companies to acquire wheat directly from farmers and export it or sell it at whatever price they want. Yes, as far as I know, you can't do the same with a few farm products like cotton, sugarcane, etc., because the Indian government bans private organizations from buying directly from farmers (that is to keep the costs in control).

ITC's e-choupal scheme, revolutionized and supported the wheat farmers in North India in a big way, that everything has increased to very happy levels. The wheat produce and efficiency of farmers have increased since they earn more to produce more because they can now sell at a higher cost to ITC rather than selling to government agencies all the time.
The demand for wheat both within the country and outside the country has increased because the produce is now more richer and of higher quality than what farmers could sustain given the prices they could sell for earlier.
Yes, the prices of wheat and wheat based products have increased because of this, but not exorbitantly but in a controlled manner.. and people have happily absorbed a few rupees higher cost each year.
The wheat farmers are happy, and live a better life.

Bottomline:
If fuel prices increase by 2 rupees, every indian seems concerned, raises voice, and the government feels a pressure to keep the prices within limits. or, if not, the government will spend big bucks to advertize big in the first page of all leading newspapers.. and all media... to educate people that this price increase in fuel is neccessary to sustain business of the oil companies, and that further subsidies will kill the companies not just their profits.

But, everybody is happy that the vegetables, pulses are still at down-to-earth costs (atleast the unprocessed, unpackaged ones direct from the farms).. ofcourse the farmer is not happy, but that is not important now.. we will talk about it later.

To show our ignorance towards the subject further, we will talk stupid things like we should stop drinking coca-cola, or stop buying vegetables from reliance fresh, to sustain farmer's lives.. what??

Happily catch some corporations like that un-awares and blame them..

..and lets be happy with more farmer deaths.. by the way what is the finance minister saying about the GDP growth for next year.. lets discuss important things like that.

P.S:
This post is not written with the idea of charging the educated people / government, as the only reasons for farmer suicides.. but to put my opinions which I believe is the ground reality of the situation.. and is written with the thought "what problems I would have faced if I were a farmer" and hence the opinions.

Posted by Harish at 12:00 PM | Permalink

"Indians.. they always complain about their country.. blame each other.. and you waste a lot of time talking.. ".. was what I have read in blogs by foreigners, in reaction to debates and talk we host on our TV channels and news mags in india.

While I have read/heard a lot about this "indian attitude" thing as perceived by foreigners, especially from the US and UK, I never had any doubt they were wrong.. it was all real facts that I have seen living in this country.

Today, a conversation was triggered on an yahoo group I am part of.. as a cry.org volunteer. Thanks for vijay of that group who posted some information on a TV programme he found interesting on LokSabha TV where there was a speech by the chief editor of 'The Hindu's rural affairs section P.sainath.

It seems whenever the Parliament is not in session, the channel telecasts this programme at 4:30 pm. Many experts come and talk on diverse topics.

Considering Lok sabha TV is not some interesting, commercial, popular, channel.. if you by any accident have it on your TV (only in india), may be you can tune in on such programmes.. schedules are at: http://164.100.24.208/ls/lstv/dailyschedule.aspx

So, today, there was this programme.
Parliamentary Lecture Series - Featuring lectures by eminent experts to Parliamentarians... P.Sainath speaks on “The Farm Crisis: Why have more than a lakh farmers ended their lives in India”, followed by a Q&A interaction with Members of Parliament

I quote the summary.. of what Mr.P.sainath spoke.

"India's NREGA(national rural employment guarantee act) ensures 100 days of work with a minimum pay of Rs. 60 per day... whereas the diary subsidies in the USA is like $3 per day per cow(for all 365 days). Which is equal to Rs. 120 per day! Sainath remarked that the dream of every Indian farmer is to be born as an American cow!

Sainath noted that with Government continuously withdrawing bank operations from rural India, the farmers struggled hard for a debt of just Rs. 8000 at a decent interest rate last year. Whereas when he went home in urban India, he got a advertisement letter from a bank which was willing to give him loan for a luxury car at 6% without collateral!"

My opinion on this speech:

Mr.P.Sainath.. is known for saying things like "indian farmers are dreaming to be born in somalia... better than india.." and now, "indian farmers are dreaming of becoming US cows which have a subsidy of US$ 3 per day" is great. He is a magsaysay award winner for 2007.. and sure he is energitic.

It is so surprising that he is still with that immature line that we hear very often.. where we translate some counrty's cost of things and compare which country is better.. Economical comparison is not any indicator of a healthy life.. and economy has a different movement.. so this comparison is so immature.. I think japanese yen is much low priced than indian rupees, does that mean japanese farmers should come and live in india. interesting statements.

regarding P.Sainath's examples and speech: He complains all the time.. many people just do that unfortunately, and only blame it on this and that and whatever.. it would be great if he sometimes talks with some insight on how to correct problems or what is the reality.. i dont know whether he did.. but if he didnt, he missed a great opportunity to tell parlimentarians ways to correct issues rather than just say "US cow is better than indians.. or somalia is better than india" and stuff like that.

United states of america .. as far as my geography is.. is 3 times bigger than india by land.. and has just over 350 million people.. while india has 2 billion and growing strong .. it means US has to struggle a lot lesser than india to use its resources, taxes and everything properly and distribute it properly.

unfortunately every person in this country called an expert says population is this country's strength.. just because it can get more engineers and graduates (who we again sell to US and UK)..doesn't mean it is our strength. our population is what is eating away all resources which could have been well organized if only we had a controllable population.. so comparing US cows with indians is so unfortunate... i hope sainath coupled that description with some speech on giving reasons and suggestions for improvement also.

regarding somalia.. their story is also something similar.

I read in somebody's biography(i think jrd tata's) that population growth was extraordinary during indira gandhi's period and she realized late how it was or could become a problem.. and that's why in her period... they did so much talk and tried reforms on population control. whatever we have today in population control.. much of it was just started then.

Posted by Harish at 1:34 AM | Permalink

New age tamil cinema music directors they are called.. many of them like harris jayraj, yuvan shankar raja.. and some oldies like deva, all had or have or with all possibility will have copied song tunes in their albums.

I was devastated some years back when I realized the music score for all songs in the film Mugavari by Deva, were just a copy of all songs in the entire album of backstreet boys. I don't how he lived with it.. but wouldn't it pain everytime you hear that song you created copying something else. what you earn money for so much of copying..

just because backstreet boys aren't going to sue somebody copying their records in chennai.. doesn't mean it is happily getting away.

They give reasons these days like "i am remixing it", or "its not a copy, but inspired by that song".. and all that.

Being genuinely inspired is different.. everyone learns their tricks of trade from somebody's else's work or book or on inspiration and admiration for someone or their stuff. But just reproducing the exact same thing is not what you should happily do.

The thing is, it lets the listeners happiness go out of them as soon as they realize it was a copycat. There's this secret set of music directors in tamilnadu i think, who consider some amount of music as open source.

Copying requires skill.. i don't know, but i tend to believe that atleast in music it needs real skill to reproduce what you hear.. so if that kind of skill is there to copy backstreet boys and make its tamil music a success then why not get to tune your own.

Not that deva, or harris or yuvan produce only copies.. 80% of their work is personal creativity.. or at least I will assume so until I listen to some similar tune from an oldie english or punjabi or hindi song.

yuvan transformed the international hit "who let the dogs out" to "enga area ulla varathe" for the film pudupettai.

Today I heard a punjabi song which is exactly what yuvan has reproduced in his latest hit in the film 'chennai 6000028'.. the song that goes 'jalsa pannu da.. gilma kaatu da'.. or whatever.

The irony is.. even the bits and pieces of auxilliary musical instruments in the song at places were exactly there in the punjabi song.

Even some film directors do this.. copying scene ideas from popular films.. as far as I remember director selvaraghavan.. his first hit kadhal konden itself had almost all scenes (except songs ofcourse) lifted from a collection of many english films with the psycho concept.. particularly the climax was lifted from an english film called 'Good son'.. the original had a mom holding her son and a friend's son hanging from a cliff to both her hands, and lets go her bad son at the end.

Many startup programmers in software, do this same thing.. no not letting go sons. :o)
but Googling.. they google for a particular logic of code, a task they are asked to program for a software, and copy it from some website to use it in their development.. and we nuts have to pay them high costs for doing the google thing. Thing is, atleast if they understand what they are copying and can handle errors or convert them to fit the slight differences in our actual requirements it would be great. These guys will particularly fight and argue a lot that some implementation is not possible because they don't know about the code they copied and can't change a thing because if it screws up they have to confess to plagiarism.

I only remember how, one NRI girl in the USA (from harvard i think) was a few months back caught for plagiarism for her successful best selling book.. she was internationally humiliated by the media everywhere, because she was paid hight for that book. She later accepted to plagiarism and returned the money her publisher paid her for the book.. which was close to half-a-million US$.. imagine.. happily copying some portions of work even if somebody is ready to pay that much of money.. and happily enjoying their moment of fame until embarrassingly getting caught.

Probably this is a concept indian kids are forced to inherit by parents and teachers when they are at school.. mugging up stuff and reproducing it on examinations is what 90% of children do in schools.. i did too, except for physics, biology and english. not many teachers teach with interest of driving the knowledge and understanding of the subject to the students.

and the effects of it.. yuvan shankar raja grows up to copy an english song.

Posted by Harish at 11:55 PM | Permalink

Thanks to the medium of movies.

Movies are taking us all somewhere.

Marketing Neccessity

They say Neccessity is the mother of invention..

When people thought that it would be nice to fly across land to transport things or people or yourself to a place, they invented airplanes..
When people wanted to some way get rid of doing the boring home laundry work, they invented the washing machine..

But... to feel a neccessity, one has to be motivated and convinced of the advantages of doing things faster or better. For instance, you have to market advantages of travelling in 30 minutes across the english channel to make people feel the advantages, before they can see the advantages working in reality... and then we would have kindled the need for it, the neccessity.

Who does this marketing ?
As of today.. movies, I think. Obviously we can't expect the government to run an AD in public interest on TV channels..selling the idea of flying taxis. Some movie showcases it.. and people say "hmm.. ", then we go about it.. ( yes, sometimes technologists might be praying that such movies run well...so the time the technology or the product comes )

These days, computer graphics and animations add a lot of capacity and power to movie making, giving good scale for imagination for the movie maker.

People are motivated to think big on the future of things.. Watch a movie like star trek, and come out of the hall, sometimes, you get a feel what would it be if there were such machines and beings outside the hall in real life,

and likewise,

most often we understand that its not so likely to see a flying taxi in our lifetime and it is a long time real life technology would catch up.

Be honest, we all thought about cloning this way, but what happened.. we have already heard of successfully cloned species around the world.. and who knows there might be some scientist somewhere who has already secretly cloned himself or his fellow researcher.

Movies feed thought.. and also technology these days. While new technologies and researches kindle writers, and writers kindle movie makers... successfly imagination goes around well, and good movies motivate technologists in return.

We all knew how much thrill we felt seeing dinosaurs finally out of the local museum.. in the movie Jurassic Park.. If the movie thrilled normal people so much, imagine how much it should have sympathised with the researchers searching every speck of sand for a dinosaur bone..

Movies help raise the benchmark in quality of living, advancement in technology.. in regular intervals. When you thought we are at our best, and saw a movie where they are showing flying trains, we are going to obviously think there are more things to do.. rather than sitting like the world has everything today.

That should explain things like, why the French keep breaking their own fastest train speed record. It should be giving them that thrill in breaking it, rather than to make customers happy by transporting them a few minutes early.

Is today's technology far off ..

If my opinion woul mean anything to you... we are not far off.

Technology today is definitely capable of making most of the things that we see in the movies, .. mind you.. including generating species that we saw in MIB2..

The reason why we dont hear of anything so futuristic in research, most of the time, is, there isn't any neccessity so we are not doing it in a rush. But, but.. people are moving towards the goal, though at a slower pace.

We always saw advanced weapon systems in movies... today, we DO have recognized labs or engineers trying to make the fastest fighter airplane that cannot be detected by even radar, we DO have teams that have already had success testing a gun like weapon that doesn't fire bullets but fires invisible rays at the target, and if the target is a human, the rays burn up body moisture to make the human feel enormous heat at the point of fire.

They keep mum over these inventions or research on purpose...and much of it is defence secret. There are systems that are slowly and cautiously being developed...cautiously because we don't want to have villians to acquire these systems or technologies like in movies...and one reason is because we don't have a hero to save us, like in the movies. Even Arnold schwarzenneger would only run for life if a power packed villain appears in real life. Real life is no movie.

If you are wondering whether any neccessity is being created at all, through movies... don't worry, it is. To put it clear, we could say, Things rise up to the surface to be noticed only when the weather is good.

We all know internet.. but know this, Internet was top secret technology invented and used in second world war times and has been so until the late 1990's when one of its features, the power of sharing information, overcame all risks of keeping the technology a secret any further, and so you are here reading this blog. Sharing information has been a serious neccessity since 1990's, which is proven now with the amount of information we have on the web in just 15 years of Internet's popularity.

Posted by Harish at 8:04 PM | Permalink

Point: If they want to earn a living, well they should earn it, why would they beg? Why this decent disguise?

Now online begging is become a habit and dangerously close to being an attitude... unfortunately of most computer nerds and small time geeks. What the heck, even wikipedia.org did it once and couldn't give up the habit later...wikipedia still begs.

Donations / Fund-raising:
Donations, Fund-raiser, Buy me from my wish-list, are just a few forms of diplomatic begging online. Take 10 websites which offer free code, free software, free information, etc., you will on an average land up with 9.5 of them asking for money for running the website or free service they are doing.

Most free service online seems to be going free only with the idea of either making it big on donations itself which is a stupid model, leave alone calling it a revenue model... or they try to make their service or product become popular by offering it free until they make enough donations to start a company and become paid service/software.

PHP Designer, an example:

A good example of the this 'collect donations and become a commercial software' model, is a product 'phpdesigner'. PHPDesigner is a programming environment for PHP programming.

PHPDesigner's 2005, 2006 versions.. were free development environments built on mostly open-source software modules. and the software was hugely popular in filling a gap where there are no development environments for php. Many people donated money to michael pham who creates or runs the website offering it.

The community probably donated money thinking future versions of the software will also be free and most often paid money equivalent to what such software commercially costs. Michael Pham thought otherwise, and when he released the 2007 version, he made it commercial software.

The problem here was, he didn't communicate his view on the donations page or donations messages what he is going to use the donations for, and what happens when he doesn't have enough money to even continue have the older versions free.

Wikipedia and their future:
Well, if you are not aware, they say, even wikipedia.org can go commercial or totally shutdown if donations don't keep coming in. Its little exxagerrated here and in almost all blogs which talk about wikipedia finances, but you have your rights to have your perception yourself from what Jimmy Wales, the founder of wikipedia.org has to say about this issue, and other stuff.

The bottomline of what Jimbo(as he is refered to in geek circles) has to say, was a slight relief. Yes, he says wikipedia is looking at all those numerous options of raising money, still avoiding advertizing on the site.. but no mention of whether the plug will be pulled off on the Donations page(they call it Fund-raiser.. anyways).

I respect Jimbo and wikipedia as an organization for two things.

One, For still strongly holding to their decision not making AD revenue from wikipedia.org, which definitely makes it feel that they mean what they say. I hope they keep the decision in the interest of the community as long as they can, but doing everything possible to support having wikipedia.org existing and free for centuries to come.

Two, For the well researched concept and highly featured wiki or mediawiki environments.. that they are eventually giving for free. This has triggered changes in the way people saw content on the web, and more natural, honest, information and facts are coming in. If you havent seen this power of content on the web after wiki came in, then you should ask google who would have seen the jump in revenue through their adsense from blogs and wikis that are rich in content.

I have a question for Jimbo..

you say you are thinking about the big poor world outside who dont even have access to computers, and you feel happy about wikipedia's freedom of content, its no-ADs policy, and all that... then,

why don't you do the same thing that most experienced people in the industry are doing with respect to creating funds for keeping a good work good, like commercializing your products (not wikipedia.org) wikimedia, wikiversity, etc., and still having a charity pricing or student pricing as options other than commercial pricing.

Isn't it the better way to do it, rather than put a open page for begging, and allowing everyone to think you are asking them money no matter whether they are just browsing wikimedia, or downloading a wiki itself.

Online begging - a brief History
Not so importantly an historical thing to investigate, it was probably somebody or some company which did open-source software, then made links on their website asking for voluntary donations from their users, to support their expenses of being a free product or service.

Unfortunately, everyone caught up, as reasonable as it may be, because it gives the advantage of attracting large audience and making things popular, when you are giving your hard-worked product or service for free.

Today the attitude has changed, and more people are asking for donations to their software rather than standing by their so-called passion of doing free software and giving to users.

This is slow poison to open-source software in the sense people backing such software are already prioritizing their work towards addressing issues of donors first than addressing issues of any free user, let alone the idea of still continuing free updates and upgrades to their software.

The Geeky future
Also, people who are not involved in programming or put it easy, non-geeks, see geeks as a different kind of people who make easy money with donations, sitting in air conditioned rooms, and doing nothing but staring at a computer.

Why are geeks isolating themself from the normal world, by trying to put a easy donation link on their webpage and make it look like they are asking money so easy. Rather than that, geeks could hold some camps like barcamps, or meet points and ask a particular set of people for money eye-to-eye.

Going this way, probably there will be a new species of humans in a thousand years, which will not communicate with anyone but use technology for everything right from talking about what they do, to travelling geek class in airplanes with isolated all-ways wired chambers.

Bottomline:
Its already a bad geek world on the internet.. most sites have fund raising, either in the form of donations, or those multiple Google adsense banners in every page.

To understand the serious effect this is making... imagine a scenario like below.

In a street, all houses, offices, shops, and every person living or working there, are having a Donate badge, or sticky note, or board asking for contributions..how would you feel walking the street ??

They could ask contributions for those little many things you use of them, like the pavement in front of their place (they keep it clean), the lights in their place (it helps light up the area collectively), and the people itself in general contribute to the reputation of the street like 'rich people live here', 'this is a neat street', 'nobody throws garbage out', etc., and many other things.

Imagine walking the 'geek street'..

Posted by Harish at 11:49 AM | Permalink

"I’m setting up an accessibility research project. I need your support to buy me time to raise the money for the project. You’d be funding me, not the project. You can show support by donating – or just by posting one of my clever ad banners on your site",

Questions like why somebody is using the web, and why should they pay him money, dont seem to bother joe (that clearly is the likes of a beggar). At his webpage he states clearly 'if you want to, you donate, or else don't', and joe even goes further setting pre-conditions to probable donors, like stating 'I won't report to you what i am doing, i am not liable to telling you anything about what i use the money for, you only donate based on trust, you are donating to me and not to the project'...and more like that. What the heck you may think!

Technically joe is one of those idiots on the internet who think internet users can throw their money on them and just walk away.. and people like joe go a step further and just DEMAND users in that.

In what probably started as requesting donations from users, to pay up for maintaining a free software or service online, .. is gradually over-grown into a habit many people have (they call themselves geeks).

I have made a more detailed post here, on this slow poison that most geeks have taken as a habit and willingly drink unmindful of the decrease in value of money online its creating. This will kill open-source itself, and more low quality software will be made in the community.

Posted by Harish at 11:19 AM | Permalink

I have had the opportunity to work in different sizes of software companies through my career. Big, Medium, SmalI, Very small. And currently, I have a startup right from scratch.

I learned quite a bit of each company's perception towards software, their indian-ness, their attitude, their project management, and numerous other stuff. And understandably, a company's perception is the underlying boses's or team's perception.... the team's perception is most often a consolidation of each members perception. We won't go into what a person's perception is based on, that would be a book to write.

Every often I think about the industry that made India standup from its stigma to show-off to the world, the software industry we are talking about... I only feel dissappointed.

For the potential every human brain has, that of the Indian also, for the number of people who are into software in India (every 1 in 2 educated youth you catchup in India will be into software).. the Indians could pull off something really really big almost every week in software. But its not happening.

Problem : Attitude
Current status : Slowly building up.. but long way to go.
Resolution : Needs regular attitude boosters.. and big guy speeches...

Always Developing
Like India is always a developing country in the mind of the Indians... I am afraid Indians have similar attitude with respect to growth in the software industry also. That its always someone else who has to do the big job, and I will always sulk with what I have. They call this attitude 'modesty' back here in India.

Every company I have worked for, every team I have worked for, I have experienced sparks and shocks from atleast one person in the team, which has had an effect in developing my own sparks (or shocks) over the years.. Every one of these guys (unfortunately including myself) feel very uncomfortable to shackle up and get out of box to do something bigger other than working on some outsourced project supporting / improving some old age technology.

And "old technology" here doesn't mean Fortran or cobol.. but any project that doesn't have any innovation involved.. something that is developed only to meet the current day demand of the customer without any foresight of future use scenarios.

Dreaming...
In my dreams I thought big companies all do great software, in all the latest technolgies.... until I got employed into one such big company in chennai, india to see that most projects were like maintaining or testing old products and improvements until the US or UK customer migrated to a better technology and platform.

I have always wondered and discussed with friends, that, 'Looks like Americans and London'ers are dumping all their old technology projects on us because nobody else in their cities would love to do it'.
Also, I ponder over questions like 'Are Indians trying to stick around something called proven ground most often, than making a ground themselves'.

Job Security
Job security is a word I read in all management books. I didn't know earlier that there was this term for the idea of keeping your job only because you have a good understanding with people in your office, and that they aren't probably thinking about firing you in the near future. The term clearly sucked any ideals and respect a person should show to his career which is the only thing that can justify his existence.

The first thing my mom tells me when I tell her I am shifting jobs is 'If this company you are already in keeps you happy, then stick around, why risk going to a new office new people new environments, you never know!'. After the first two times of hearing this, I only mentioned my shifts after I made them in my next companies.

I am not sure who is to blame for the stigma still sticking around with job security. The family seems all the time thinking about steady fund flows rather than words like aimbitions, achievements... the self has its indian attitude to make you always think like 'one step at a time' and still conservatively make only half steps.

Anyways, dreaming again about how things can be... if Indians and many many Indians for that matter destroy stigmas, and leap out of the box making differing with the traditional indian attitude or modesty thoughts.

While these things stand as introduction to the subject of this post... we will dive into what could be done in India to make many indians shackle out of the box... in software atleast.

I will keep it short:

For Big companies:
If companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, Satyam, .. at the least allocated 10-15% of their employee base into product development, stay there and be focussed, India could be making big names in software business.. to equate with Adobe, Google, Microsoft and the likes. Currently, its only like all these product giants (google for web based products), have their bases in india and use the potential of indians here... while infosys, wipro and every indian company there are only most of the time only doing IT services or ITEs, and not even 10% of their revenue share links to any product sales.

One exception could be Infosys's Finacle software, but after that even Infosys seemed to have nothing more to do in products.

For Small companies:
If small companies spend time automating themselves and their processes or services, rather than all the time doing applications and services for clients...they could make a foundation for their growth.

I have learnt from experience that clients like to see their demos live as the product is developed (if its web), or like to see weekly or bi-monthly packages to see how things are coming up. and actually some of my clients liked to invest twice or thrice more than what was planned at first communication, because they liked what they saw with the work happening and the progress levels.

And when a small company doesn't have the delivery systems and communication systems to do this, their is a damp feeling in the project until its release which actually could get delayed or never happen because the damp feeling sweeps through quality levels in the project. When we say delivery/communication systems here.. we definitely don't mean email and chat software for these purposes. Email or chat software only should be used for brief notes and more often to make pointers / give links to the actual formal document communication or product packages.

For Small / Mid-size companies:
We can assume that this suggestion is already implemented in big companies.
I have also learnt from mistakes my own and that of my employers, that, if companies, mid-size or small-size, recruited employees regularly rather than recruiting based on new projects and short-term profits coming up... then such companies are more probably to be on a steady track of growth.

An analogy to understand this would be 'Financial investment planning'. If you invested regularly from an early age you get to reap its fruits much better and you grow better.. and re-invest better. If you invested based on the stock market charts or to make short-term profits, either you rise up on luck, or drop down to collect yourself up taking a while.

Posted by Harish at 7:59 PM | Permalink

Drama, Play, Natakam are all synonymous in tamil.. and my use of these in the below post, mean all the same.

I have been to many Plays, a few times now, and whenever I hear debates and arguments on the dying state of Natakams in Chennai or India as a whole, I only could make some observations from what I like to view and what I wouldn't like or haven't enjoyed watching a play. Below laid out are my observation of core issues with Plays, and when people can be expected to consider watching a Play as equal to(or more than) their movie experience.

Core issues:

1. Too costly tickets.. even costlier than watching a blockbuster movie in an elite cinema hall.

2. Many actors don't have a feel of the audience, their body language shows it all as if they are doing it for the sake of it. The spirit of capturing the attention of the audience is not there.

3. Bad Sound management. Sound management is important for a Drama to be enjoyable. Most chennai drama actors and organizers have problems with understanding this. The actors shout out their throats or sneeze or cought at the mike, and most of the time the background score of the drama is so unclean/ bad on the speakers, or they just enact the play without background music at all for the worst.

4. Respect for the stage. Performing arts like drama, or dance needs to respect their stage space, its spot-clean looks, how they use it while pulling up background screen, structures and boards to make for the sets...at the least. More clearer respect for stage could be expressed by praying on stage. Some drama companies which focus on the weekend market, just ignore anything on stage use, and treat it like a rehersal ground with everything strewn around backstage.

5. Respect for the audience. Understanding audience age-groups and relatively presenting the play in an entertaining manner is core to any stage performance. It could not only save a Play but also make it profitable, even when most of the above points are not addressed. Avoiding this like smoking literally to act like smoking, or shouting slangs loud to act like insulting, are things to avoid.

6. Last but not the least. Infrastructure. Be it proper seats and air conditioning and environment for the audience, or proper optimal cost snacks at the counter, or the quality of sets put up behind an act in the Play.... if not high, I only wish organizers consider give some amount of priority to all this, rather than hosting the drama in a hall which best fits their low-cost budget with smelly seats and not-good snacks in the counter.

How not to Play - A bad example:

The other day I had been to a drama 'Ayya amma ammamma'.. by kathadi ramamurthy.
I paid the usual 150/- for a ticket.

The experience was totally unworth the money i paid, for the following reasons:

1. The drama advertisements mentioned popular comedy track writer and actor Crazy mohan's name as if he was in the crew, but
turned out that Crazy Mohan's was not part of the drama but his name was being used to market the drama and
it was the story once written by Crazy Mohan. Disappointed! that this was not mentioned clearly in the ADs.

2. The core character in the drama was played by one Mr.Kathadi Ramamurthy. This man
had no respect for the performing arts, and his body language with a lungi on the stage said it all, he was acting like it was a rehersal.

3. Also, for the reputation he enjoyed being a well-known comedian in chennai, it was dissappointing that Kathadi Ramamurthy
had no respect for the audience or their health and was smoking literally in scenes where he is to act like he is smoking. The smoke
got circulated through the air conditioning system, and the audience were literally second-hand smoking and the hall was smelling smoke.

4. Neither did the organizers(Abbas), of the drama have any respect for the audience. There was no break in the three hour long drama...also it wasn't enjoyable enough to make not having a break interesting. And the drama ended quite abruptly, there was not even a mention of 'The End' or a 'Thank you'... let alone the usual S.Ve.Sekar style commencing lineup of all actors to thank the audience.

I decided, I could even see a bad film, rather than going to a drama where Kathadi Ramamurthy is acting..or where one somebody Abbas is organizing.

Posted by Harish at 12:07 AM | Permalink

Verizon, vodafone and many other US or UK based communications/internet service providers could have a bright business future if they came to sell their services in India.

Why?
India is fast consuming huge bandwidth for internet services, and telephone /mobile services. With small enterprises coming up in clusters, and every household considering computers and broadband as necessary as a Refrigerator, the Indian market is whopping big to miss for big multinational service providers.

Ask about the strength of the "Indian market" from Coca-cola and Pepsi, and they will tell you how much they sold and made since the 1990's.. (Only in the last couple of years do the cola companies have few hiccups, due to increased acceptance of the health concerns of drinking cola with its effervescence ingredients). Once you understand the deal Indians want, and you get acceptance, multinationals won't have time to look back.

Citibank had a dream run until other local Indian banks learned from its marketing...
Honda, Suzuki all have, and are still having India on their earnings charts in the top order.

For the question "why?", these are the core answers:

1. Currently not one multinational is servicing the communications market, be it the internet or the mobile phones.

2. Because the Indian companies providing these services have come to see no international competition, they make good money.

3. Rather than competing with each other, the Indian companies all go hand-in-hand in making money and just reword their deals and offers keeping their base cost almost or just the same.

4. For the cost of what verizon sells as 768kbps DSL in the United states, Indian companies are making the same money by providing around 64kbps technically, and marketing the package as 128 / 256 / 512 kbps. Yes, be it 128 / 256 / 512, its all the same speed in India, and the communications ministry in India, the regulatory authority all approve of this practice.

5. For the cost of what vodafone sells in UK or Ireland as a 'social connection' prepaid package, Indian companies are selling similar plans with approx. 40% hidden costs, raising this 40% extra cost without even informing the customer first hand through an advertisement or package brochure.

For all the above reasons, companies like verizon or vodafone, would be able to easily create the infrastructure and bandwidth for selling these services for very competitive prices, and still having very good profit margins on each unit of the services or products.

Good deals have good acceptance in india...even at a higher price.

A look at how the vehicle Honda Activa has struck gold in the market will provide the needed proof. Scooters seem to always have a good market in india.. especially the ungeared vehicles for men. Compared to other scooters available, their mileage, and related parameters, Honda Activa had a mileage comparable to that of a 4-stroke bike for indian roads, and was marketed as a friendly fresh new scooter (the last time there was a new scooter designed for men and attracting the family audience was a Bajaj scooter from the 1980's).

For all these reasons the Honda Activa is making brisk business, and is priced only a few bucks less than a 4-stroke bike for the same audience. Un-tethered by the pricing, there are still more takers for the Honda Activa since its considered equivalent to buying a 4-stroke bike without gears.

The local mobile phone service providers do attractive deals like lifetime prepaid cards. The hidden costs in the deal go like this. If you had 50Rupees worth of talktime on your phone, every outgoing call costs 4.99rupees per 60 sec pulse, if you had 400 rupees worth of talktime, each outgoing call costs 2.99 rupees per pulse. The intention is to make the user keep buy talkvalue in replacement for the lifetime free prepaid offer.

BSNL a communications company started All-India one-rupee per phone call concept and made huge promotion campaigns. What was hidden from the customer though was, the one rupee per call was actually one rupee per pulse, and this pulse was much lesser than the earlier pulse secs that were in use. Today even a local call through BSNL phones is actually costing the user higher than what he used to pay. Earlier it was 1 rupee per call for a 3 minute subsidized pulse. Now its a 60 sec pulse that costs 1 rupee per call.

All internet and mobile phone service costs from Indian companies have disguises and hidden costs. You cannot find even one Ad campaign without the wording "* conditions apply". Stands applied lots of conditions and rules which obviously have to be broken by users to use the services and the companies happily charge higher than advertised charges.

End Note:
Verizon and vodafone like companies, would enjoy competing in such market conditions where deals and offers are more important than quality of services. Because being multinational competitors, they would be easily selling a reliable, quality service among local competition.

But may be verizon and vodafone can't enter the Indian market at this time, since I believe, if i am right, the ministry of communications have an understanding with Indian communications service companies, to block multinational competition until more years to come. Though this entry point can be eased or broken if big organizations can woo politicians in the ministry.

For the market base and the increasing demand, multinationals would be missing a huge opportunity if they ignored or shy'ed away from tapping the Indian market. This is a market where a barber, grocery store keeper, rickshaw puller have prepaid mobile connections. And this is a market where students of all age groups are using the internet, online gaming is reached notably popular levels (secondLife gamers aren't far away from becoming), and importantly every software company does most of their development, testing / support for outsourced projects through secure internet connections 24/7 a week.

Posted by Harish at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Software Patents
Software is one industry dealing with imaginative/visual content, rather than physically designed content/equipment. Ideas here are imaginations of different people based on existing software or processes. And 8 out of 10 people come up with the same idea genuinely in isolated environments without copying.

Software ideas are more like seeing somebody writing with a pencil and inventing a pencil which has an eraser stuck to it at one end. Qualifying something like the "pencil with eraser" for a patent, is like giving authority to one person or company the rights to commercialize on a mass idea.

For years, patents have been issued on stupid things in software. Believe me someone holds an European patent for having shopping carts on webpages. Someone has a US patent on putting a small thumnail photograph of people who comment on a webpage.. and so on.

And that means if you have a website or I make a website that has this stuff, we are theoretically liable to be sued over patent infringement if we are allowing our websites to be seen/used by people in US and Europe.

The present Software innovations and advancements have grown out of innumerable re-inventions. Just like how improving on current life style improves/advances life style of the future, anybody would agree to the fact that improvements on existing technology is the one most major source of technological growth..

Microsoft's victories over patent infringement:
Microsoft Corporation a software giant was sued by Sun Microsystems (another software giant), for patent infringement because Microsoft's new technology .NET released in 2000 was very much a copy(at the concept level) of Sun's Java which released much earlier than 2000.

Microsoft won the suit at the end of an year of argument in the courts contending that "software evolves from previous technologies and like Java evolved from a programming language called C, .NET has also evolved from C and many other technologies".

Microsoft had similarly won a previous suit on its word processing software "Microsoft Word", against another company's product "Word Perfect".

Microsoft's victories suggest that software patents are invalid, and practically not implementable.

If you read through this page at ffii.org (here http://webshop.ffii.org/), you will find that creating any kind of a website is like walking over many patents and getting yourself into trouble. The page has references and links to contents of the patents issued on simple things like putting a shopping cart, putting image next to content, putting tabs, etc.,

NoSoftwarePatents.com Yes! a website which fights for "No software patents" in Europe.

DRM
The next stupid thing is DRM.

You bought a PC, it came with Microsoft Windows installation. You tried playing your Audio CD and it said 'DRM license not found. Cannot play'. Your technical guy talks all tells you the funda that you were trying to play with windows media player which these days has got a digital rights management software built-in, which verifies that you (technically your PC) has licences to play every bit of digital content on it.

You bought the machine, but the machine can't do what you want. You are already searching the web for hours, reading blogs like this to hear your music. May be you copied the music from a genuine CD.. but stop we can't trust you, you can only play from the genuine CD, if its corrupt buy another.

While the above scene is created by Microsoft by implementing DRM or digital rights management into its media player software(for which i believe microsoft is already sued by many times).

Microsoft claims this is to protect the rights of innumerable musicians and artists whose work is easily copied through digital media without purchasing licenses.

Music has always been copied by people and there are big examples of websites like napster.com shutting down, for allowing users to share music with fellow users for Free.

I am not sure whether artists are happy with Microsoft coming to help, but audio and video CD manufacturers and sellers are very happy about these things.. because it directly improves sales.

Microsoft unvieled DRM a couple of years back for probably two reasons.
1. Some CD sales executive who had huge loss in sales joined Microsoft at a higher level.
2. Microsoft wanted to endear media industry knowing well that media content sales is obviously growing at enormous rates every year, and Microsoft is now one among top technically adaptive companies in the digital media industry.

Because of DRM, there is immense pressure from the non-technical world, on the technical world, to implement such systems in software in the pretext of protecting rights of artists, and media content providers. And many popular software products have given way in implementing such systems or considering implementation, many software companies / web sites have sold off or shut down.. and what not.

One-CPU licenses
You bought a software, when you start it up it requests for registering the product through an internet connection.. Technically, this action registers the current PC as the sole PC licensed to use the software.

When you buy another PC and give away your old PC, you land up in some or other kind of a problem while using the software or while registering the software. You end up unable to use its full features, or you land up searching the web for counter-action, you contact the software manufacturers' customer helpdesk and all sorts of things. What the heck!! You bought the software and it should work on your current PC you think...but the software manufacturers' customer helpdesk start explaining you reasons for such protection.

You would have come across games which can be played only with the original game CD spinning in the CDROM drive.. copying it to another CD won't work.

All these implementations just kill the practicality of software usage itself, and many people very often struggle 4 hours to get a 2 minute work done because they get lost into solving such issues. This beats the very idea of using software to do stuff quickly.

End Note:

Ensuring that a software is used only by the buyer and only in the context of how many licenses where bought etc., is a major major implementation hurdle because of technology limitations, and that's first reason for software manufacturers to do all sorts of things to make sure they make atleast 50% sales of the actual number of users of their software.. because software is easy to pirate many people don't buy.

The problem with corporates is, companies like Microsoft know about all such issues for years, but they make hay as much as possible without implementing protection, and when they see competition in the industry they implement such systems to literally gain some kind of advantage over the competition under the cover of protecting rights of a community, and in the background avoiding or wiping all competitors from the business.

Are there solutions good for everybody:
This is where open-source community gains motivation from, and more of such protectionism attitude is creating a higher population in open-source technologists and free software users as well.

Like they say in medicine, that human body has a lot of counter-action mechanisms for defending its own health, the open-source industry looks like the automated counter-action system for all such above discussed 'nonsense systems' in software.

Does that mean every software company should become open-source or sell software for Free! Obviously not, but open-source is what is keeping the industry going, giving that much needed balance when commercial software is practically becoming more problematic to use.

And for the question whether the condition is going to improve for commercial software users / makers, its unfortunately... 'NO'.

"Live with it" is the answer many debates on such issues have always given.

Posted by Harish at 9:03 PM | Permalink

"A good deed is a good deed... when its known as a good deed."

Note "when its known as" in the above line. That means one has to claim recognition for a good deed or action, to "complete" the good deed.

Again notice "complete", it means when you do a good thing to the society, or to your employees, or to anybody/any place/or a thing, you need to tell that you have done it to complete the action. Some people think of this as show-casing or making a hype, and not- claiming recognition for doing a good deed is considered being, modest, humble and the likes.

In my opinion people who try to be modest are 'stupid'. I am sorry to say that, but that's the fact.. because they leave their action incomplete and they dont understand how much it affects the reach of their good deed itself. Tell me, will you feel ok if you paid for your shopping and the shop staff didnt give you a bill?. Can you just hop out of the shop calling it as being modest. That's what happens when good people do good things and don't make a noise about it.

Call it showcasing, 'making hay when the sun shines', or whatever you like. But being against it, or being "modest" has very bad effects. And, what wrong is it to claim recognition for a good deed done well... when there are people who claim even bribes for doing nothing or just doing their duty. The more the number of modest people, there exist double that amount of unmodest, anti-development people.

I will take Indians for quoting the effects India is facing in growing into a better country because of modest people. Because there are too many modest people is one of the big reasons for India still trying hard to become a developed nation.

The politicians in India for example, just sign/approve a reform bill and claim they have done great things to make the nation grow.. and they drum it loud on newspapers, TV channels, radio... name a medium, they shout there for little deeds they do.

Point Number 1 here is, these politicians were elected only for doing these deeds, and shouting it loud is nuts... they are just doing their duty... and they are not giving away their money to reform anything or anybody. Are they?

There are some people on earth like Bill Gates (Chairman Microsoft corporation), who earns all his money out of hard-work, stressed-up planning, marketing, managing his large enterprise over many many years, and after all that Bill Gates donates billions of this hard-earned money to charity. Does Bill Gates drum it like these stupid politicians do.. and comparing Bill Gates with these politicians would only de-credit him, because he does it with his money, while politicians do it with people's money amassing some it to themself too.

In my opinion, every minute Bill Gates doesn't claim recognition for his work, his modesty costs an awful amount of time and money. Wondering how?

Kill your modesty:
You are a Dance choreographer, your creative work for a hindi music video gets you critical acclaim.. Go there, show off.. if you be modest, you are giving valuable Television air-time for a politician to make another claim for signing a small reform bill, you are giving scope for government employees to show-off as if they did a great thing when they have just did a part of their job and this is because you make general public think that great things are so uncommon and they believe every bit of a claim that unmodest people make.

This why I call unmodest people as anti-development guys.. and modest people are directly supporting them in allowing them to do their stuff with all the hype.

Looks like a simple thing to be modest..
Looks like a great thing to do a lot of good work and keep quiet,
But if you understand what all advantages people make for every bit of a space and opportunity they get, you will only need to make use of your good deed and claim notice for it... so that great things remain great things, and doing duty remains just a duty done well.

Kill your modesty... or it kills the meaning of "a good action".

Modesty and Indians:
Being an Indian, I have seen that "Modesty" is something that's grown with the fabric of Indian culture... quiet unfortunate.

So sad to see that many Indians who talk of trying to change the face of India, are also the people who are reluctantly trying to be modest with their deeds.

All the time when the question arises how they feel about doing the good work, they point their fingers above (towards god), or at someone else at a lower level (to encourage them help more)... which gives unreasonable effect to their work and makes it look like the person wasn't interested doing it, or it just happened by accident, or it wasn't hard work at all. They in turn insult the act of doing good, and nullify its importance (if it has any).

Whenever I see a politician or anybody making noise about a thing or two they did to correct a problem that was waiting to be solved, I remember one o