BombayCurry

One can't deny that ever since Bombay's name was changed to Mumbai in 1995 India's economy has boomed. The Mumbai change was followed by Bangalore to Bengaluru, Calcutta to Kolkatta, Madras to Chennai and a few others, all of which has undoubtedly contributed to Indias 10% annual GDP growth.

Now that Oil has gone over the top and the world economy is on the rocks, it's time to release some important strategic name reserves and make some important name related changes to shore up India's economy and ensure we do not miss our 10% target this year:

Orissa changes to Odisha
&
from now in Mumbai all nameboards have to be in both English and Marathi.

Both these important changes were passed by the respective state governments after debates in governing houses. I am so glad our politicians are doing the right thing and ensuring that the people live well and the economy keeps running.

It's bad enough that India's borders are being constantly attacked by Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, etc; and the secret service outfits of these countries have also created militant outfits within India that keep setting off bombs every few months.

What is even worse when Indians attack themselves. Everyday the media is filled with news of how some political or semi political outfit went violent and attacked people. Just today the story is about the Gujjar community in Rajasthan attacked people, police stations, blocked highways and dug up railways tracks. Lots of people lost their lives as a result, 1000s were injured, lots of economic damage was done and people are generally in a state of fear.

Another story today is about political parties in Mumbai, namely the Shiv Sena & the MNS are attacking North Indians and destroying property. They beat up so called North Indian taxi drivers for immigrating to Mumbai and destroyed these poor people's taxis and even killed a few. Then they went around destroying museums and commercial establishments because they had the word "Bombay" in their name.

This is happening with total and complete disregard for the law. My view is that if you are unhappy with something, goto the court and complain, but don't resort to destruction and violence. When the very political parties that are supposed to govern do this, it speaks volumes of the state of affairs of our judicial system and the liberties of the common man: there is virtually no justice in India !

India, please stop attacking yourself.

With 30% Federal Corporate Income Tax, 10% Sate Corporate Income Tax, and in the case of New York City, another 10% City Corporate Income Tax, and with Sales Tax of nearly 10% in most states, the US is one of the most tax intensive countries in the world.

Which is a shame, because it fabulous infrastructure, highly qualified workforce, huge capital markets and large domestic market the US is one of the best places to set up a global head quarter. A company could base it global HQ in the US and cut short by many years the time it takes to grow.

But these high taxes come in the way, so instead companies want to locate the corporate head quarters in Dubai, London, Gibraltar, or are agnostic about where they locate their headquarters.

With the diminished role of the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency, the US has seen since June 2007 reduction in monthly Government Bond purchases by foreign nations from $300B a month $80B a month. This has sucked a lot of low cost liquidity out of US capital markets.

To compensate for this reduced liquidity, the US needs to go all out to woo foreign companies to shift their global headquarters to the US. And the best way to do this is to cut taxes drastically and even go as far as giving 20 year tax holidays to any businesses over $5M turnover that relocate headquarters to the US.

With businesses relocating to the US, investments will follow and the US should easily be able to compensate for the low cost $220B it is losing out every month.

Oil is at $110 a barrel, yet the price of petrol and diesel hasn't gone up in India the last 3 years. Since a year back, oil has doubled from around $60 to approximately $110 today. Yet, I am paying the same in Rupees for my petrol as I was last year.

How is this possible ?

The price of petrol is being artificially maintained. India's 3 large petrol and diesel retailing companies, all state owned, are deep in the red, their combined debt has mounted to over $2000 Billion !

This is being done to keep people happy, to keep prices from going crazy. To ensure that people can go on living and there are no major disturbances in towns & cities.

But this is not sustainable. How long can the oil companies go on borrowing? This is madness.

The price will have to correct and when it corrects by doubling, cost of food, transport and electricity will go sky high. A majority of people's incomes will go towards simply meeting these costs and people will be forced to reduce spending on new homes, new cars, new tvs, holidays, clothes, etc. The economy will come to a screeching halt.

This is not just an Indian problem, this will be a world problem. The cost of the basics is likely to go so high that people are just not going to be able to afford anything else.

Unless, the world once again gets a new source of cheap energy, quickly.

What can that be? It can only be Nuclear & Coal. I think the planet should start going Nuclear on the double. There is no more time to waste deliberating if it is good or not, it is necessary. Coal fired power has already started, all recent power plants coming up seem to be coal based.

But can all this happen fast enough, or is the planet going to be caught napping and we will end up with 7 to 10 very hard years. Well, we'll find out in early 2009 by which time oil should have crossed $200.

Here is a Google horror story, and it's happening to me. Suddenly while using my email in the middle of my work day, I get the message that "Your email has been locked down for 24hrs due to illegal activity". This is not my ordinary email, but my Apps email.

I read all their reasons for the LOCKDOWN and I was in violation of none of them. I am using no 3rd party software, not using 2 machines for the same account, not sending spam, nothing. Yet it happens.

Google is so sure of their technology that they believe they are 100% right when it comes to taking severe & damaging action against a user.

The best part is their support form does not even contain support for Google Apps email. You have to fill in your gmail id in "what if your email id", so I am not even sure if their customer service centre guys will understand what is to be done.

Google, I can tell you that you are sure to lose me as a customer and my whole company if this issue is not resolved quickly and keeps re-occurring.

Update: Google resolved the issue within 30 mins of the lockdown; not sure if this was due to the complaint I filed, or if it is auto-programmed into their system.

After spending years with FireFox, I never imagined I'd move back to IE. But with all of FF's memory leaks, which seemed to grow with each release, I moved back to IE 7. And what a relief. All the same functionality, none of the misery. It's a shame that FF couldn't resolve this issuse, which may happen with FF 3....

Getting brand right is the differance between just doing business and doing profitable business. If you don't get your brand right, if it isn't unique, the you are likely to spend a vast amount of money on being just another brand and thus you don't make any profits.

Here is a long but great presentation on how to get your brand right.



Here is another on how to get Luxury Branding right

Reposting this from my original post in VentureWoods

For all the hype surrounding India, the fact is that all the airlines and private owners of aircraft put together do not have more than 250 planes on lease or ownership.


There are airlines in the US that each own 1000+ aircraft. Go figure what the India boom is all about.

Your thoughts?

Yes that picture above is of the website of the President of India on 2nd August 2007 (rather 3rd August 12:51am), which has been down since last night. Why? Because it rained in New Delhi and the building that hosts all government websites (known as National Informatics Centre or NIC), such as defense, income tax, President of India, Prime Minister, Railways, and 3000 other government websites, flooded and had no back-up or proper disaster recover system except for the neighborhood bucket shop...

Now we really know and how serious the Government of India is about the Internet. So much for their announcements of 100 Million broadband connections by Dec 2007 and WiMax across India.

Ok I know 120 is not a traditional milestone number, but I just happened to realise that ITS 120 POSTS !

Started on March '06 with no mission other than to kill boredom, BombayCurry has come to be, well, nothing more than a bunch of rambling posts with spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and no particular direction, but a small but loyal readership

According to Google Analytics 167 people from all over the world visited in the last one month, and nearly 1500 since the start of 2007.


What I've been most pleased about is the fair amount of photos I have been able to post here. This is thanks to my great little Sony Ericsson K750i mobile, which in my opinion has the best digital camera built in; and I mean THE BEST, because it even puts my Nikon Cool Pix to shame.

What has been most disappointing since I started blogging is that global blog readership is growing much too slowly. I blame this on the poor design of blog reading tools which in my opinion are still much too complicated to use. Blogs have remained confined to techies and savvy Internet users. All average users have no idea about how to set-up RSS feeds and subscribe to blogs. I need to do something about that...

Thanks for regularly stopping by and reading, please keep commenting....I'll make sure I post atleast as regularly as I currently do.

If you use FireFox browser (which you MUST because it's way better than Safari & Internet Explorer), then you should get Gspace. This is a nifty little Firefox addon them equally easily. If you are working between home pc, laptop and office pc, like me, then Gspace is an absolute necessity. No more carrying (or rather forgetting) flash drives and having to email self important files.

The image above is the Gspace interface which opens within Firefox itself. On the left are the files on your computer and on the right are the files uploaded via Gspace to your Gmail account. This dash in addition to allowing storage and retrieval of files on Gmail, allows you to easily manage and maintain and synchronize all computers.

Enjoy

VCs all over the world are proclaiming that web 2.0 is over, so what's this all about a Web 2.0 conf that you are inviting me to speak at I ask? Well it's in India my inviter explains, as if to mean "everything in India happens a few years later".

Jokes apart it was a good conf. I was really glad to hear how even giants like Citibank had woken up to the web and are consciously listening to bloggers; and they realize the pitfalls of starting hoax blogs and blogs promoting products.

Also very encouraging to hear that many publishers stated that advertising revenues in India have climbed quite a bit. Still bit too low for me, but good for the others.

Here is the webcast

I'm in Delhi for Band of Angels' monthly investor presentation. After my work is done, my aunt takes me out for dinner to Veda, which is apparently a trendy restaurant opened by a celebrity (she didn't know who; but knowing Delhi its probably a fashion designer or a criminal, as Delhi doesn't have any other kind of celebrities). Whats the food? Indian she says. I protest! Its supposed to be very good she says defensively and almost remembers the name of the celebrity.

So we are there for our table at 9pm sharp because she was threatened on the phone that if we are even 15 minutes late our table will be given away. The decor is, well, Moulin Rouge, red and black with lots of mirrors, kitsch, Indian lamp motifs, candle lit feel. Lacking imagination, but not a bad feel, quite calming, relaxing and even trendy.

However the reason I am writing this in my blog, and why an entire post has been dedicated to it is because of the kebabs at this place. The best I have ever had, and trust me I've had 1000s of very high standard kebabs in my life. Order the Lamb Chops and the Mixed Platter and then await a divine experience. The flavour and melt in the mouth is simply the best.

Warning: While you're enjoying the kebabs, beware the Delhi "family" crowds which turn even the most upmarket places into noisy Indian bus terminals with their numerous children, crass manners and non stop arguing with waiters.

GAP is here, um, not quite...its being made in India, but officially not sold in India. So what does one enterprising guy do, he opens his own GAP store with the Indian made clothes, which are naturally cheaper than those else where and appropriately calls it GAPL or Gap for Less. Well done. Its right opposite my office if you want to do some shopping.

A colleague in our office recently underwent Human Factors' usability imporovement ceterification. She proudly published the link to her certificate on MSN Messenger.

A software company in Bangalore that I was dealing with was very excited about their Human Factors certification.

A colleague in the US who was part of the Flora2000 usability redesign team in 2004 also went thru Human Factors training and told me how her market rate has increased.

And recently the no. 1 newspaper in India, The Times of India, proudly advertised their newly redesigned website in their print edition boasting how good it was and that Human Factors had redone it.

Want to rush in for Human Factors' training?

Hold on.

Now the fact, the sad fact, is that Human Factors' own website is extremely poorly designed, something that both my colleagues who underwent the course agreed. The Times of India is also a very poorly designed site, cluttered and with space wastage. Ditto with the company in Bangalore whose own website at that time was poorly designed.

Look at the New York Times site and compare it to Times of India; NYT is a clean, readable site, with attention paid to details such as spacing between letters to improve readability; TOI is extremely cluttered with everything shouting: click me 1st.



Who are these Human Factor people? Well they are experts at hype. They have published reams of papers and given seminars on their usability improvement techniques, they proudly label their technique the Schaffer- Weinschenk Method after their founders and pitch it as the leading usability improvement technique in the world. Unfortunately, whatever that technique is, it does not produce stylish, uncluttered, easy on the eyes websites. Their websites all have the look from sites we used to see in 1999 - 2000 with only a focus on information rather than the readability of the information.

This is what happens when you fall for hype instead of using your common sense.On one side is Human Factor's own poorly designed website and their poorly designed flagship projects: Staples.com; TimesofIndia.com, etc, on the other side is their own hype about how good they are. And you go fall for the hype.

You wanted it, you got it: prosperity. You evolved as a species and developed your mind, thru this mind you developed yourself, you developed your race, you upgraded your living standard. Now you don't have to be insecure anymore, now you don't have to worry about the wind outside, or diseases affecting you. Your future as a banker, lawyer, manager, entrepreneur, scientist, professor, model, actor, singer musician et al is secure.

But look at what you have done.

You have destroyed the poor innocent speechless creatures around you, you have orphaned the trees and the beasts. You have ruthlessly exploited them and thoughtlessly used them as entertainment and to serve you.

Here is the story of a small baby elephant called Laxmi, in this so called great world of ours, in this so called great country, where 100 million IT engineers bloom and everybody speaks in high fly intelligent speech using words like processes, disruptive, model, evolved, etc. This baby elephant has been a slave captive from the day it was born, it was taken away from its mother and its siblings and kept in chains.

But a baby is a baby, so at 4am while all of Mumbai (Bombay) slept, this baby bound in chains, got the urge to play, she slowly made her way to a nearby tree and frolicked with a few branches lying by. Can you imagine it: born a slave in captivity, with no mother, living in chains, and yet having the urge to play. Though we tried, we could not kill this in her, some small part of her was still alive.

No but we must not allow this to live, we must not allow this baby to have any joy. So soon enough her mahout got up and severely reprimanded her, for playing.

This my friends is the world we have built, which we are so proud off. So carry on with your ambition and your fighting and your drive and your high standard of living. Carry on with your designer car, designer house, designer clothes, your branded girlfriends and boyfriends, your high society life, your spa holidays, your Turkish carpets and your French wines...

A breeder in California (where else) has bred a cat by crossing African leopards and with a cat. The result: a domestic cat with the print of a leopard/cheetah. Click on the image below to visit their webiste and order one for yourself.