Emerging ‘isms’ Of The New Economy

This list of ‘Emerging ‘isms’ Of The New Economy’ was posted by Arzan Sam Wadia on his blog. It’s good fun! Read it.

INFOSYSism: You have a 1000 poor cows. You put them on a nice campus, & send them one at a time to the US for milking.

PATNIism: You have 10 cows. You make them work so that they give milk of 100 cows

WIPROism: GE has a cow. You take 49% of the milk.

DELLism: Intel has a Goat. Samsung has a Camel. Buy milk from both & sell it as Cow’s milk.

IBMism: You have old stubborn cows. You sell them as pet dogs to innocent small businessmen.

MICROSOFTism: You have a cow. Force the world to buy milk from you. Spend a million dollars to feed poorer cows.

SUNism: You have a bull. It doesn’t give milk. You hate Microsoft.

ORACLEism: You have a cow. You don’t know which side to milk, so you sell tools to help milk cows.

SAPism: You don’t have a cow You sell milking solutions for cows implemented by milking consultants.

APPLEism: You have a cow. You sell iMilk.

SONYism:You have a cow. You spend $50 mn to develop the world’s thinnest milk.

CITIBANKism: Welcome to Citibank. If you have a cow, press 1. If you have a bull, press 2…stay on line if you’d like our customer care to milk it for you.

HPism: You don’t know if what you have is a cow. You sell complete milking solutions through authorised resellers only.

GEism: You have a donkey. People think you have a 100-year old cow. If someone finds out, that’s his imagination at work.

RELIANCEism: You don’t yet have a cow. You sell empty cans to people for Rs. 501, because Dhirubhai wanted everyone to have milk.

TATAism: You have a very old cow. You re-brand it as TATA Indicow.

HONEYWELLism: You have a cow. You start counting its legs, hair on the body… etc..!! then you get alongwith NASA to send her on a space mission. You also fit sensors on it to detect abnormality during voyage. Oops..!!! Somewhere somehow ….. you forgot a cow was meant for milking..!!

Hu, Dr. Singh And The Recipe For Veg Manchurian

The only thing I can say about this article by Suresh Nair is….. it is hilarious! I have read it thrice already and still am not satisfied. It is a comic take on the Indian Prime Minister’s recent visit to China.

There are whispers in Delhi’s political circles that Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh signed a secret deal with the Chinese during his recent visit. While there are very little details on what exactly transpired between Dr Singh, his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao, it allegedly started on a note of absolute confusion when President Jintau introduced himself.

“Hu,” he said as he bowed before our PM.

Dr Singh was a little embarrassed. “What do you mean who?” he asked gently. “Nobody told you I am the Prime Minister of India, huh? If you’ve any doubts, why don’t you call up Soniaji!”

That’s when Premier Jaibao bowed and said, “Wen!”Dr Singh shrugged his shoulders and replied, “As soon as possible! You never know when one of our coalition partners will pull out and put the country through another election!”

Finally, the miscommunication was solved after a translator arrived on the scene. The meeting then progressed to a matter of grave concern—the Indo-Chinese border conflicts. Dr Singh adopted an aggressive stance. “If you don’t stop encroaching into our territory,” he hollered, “we will show you how cheap we can get by launching an offensive with Nano cars, Moser Baer DVDs and Chinese Bhel!”

Wen and Hu shivered in their pants as Dr Singh continued his threat. “And if that doesn’t stop you from meddling in our country,” he warned, “we will copy all your films and unleash their Indianised versions with Himesh Reshammiya as the hero and item numbers by Rakhi Sawant!”

By now Wen and Hu were thinking what and why! They retreated to a corner, whispered in each other’s ears, bowed to each other and came back to Dr Singh, grinning as if they had just heard about Salman Rushdie discussing ‘Midnight’s Children’ with Riya Sen. In a single chorus they told the usually mild-mannered Indian Prime Minister that the border dispute could be solved very easily.

“How?” asked Dr Singh.

“No, How no solve it,” said Wen with a vigorous shake of his head. “Only Hu and Wen! We want India give something we no have but want badly!”

Dr Singh looked at them and asked, “Nach Baliye? Moral Police?”

The Chinese leaders replied, “We want recipe for Veg Manchurian! We search all Manchuria and no find this dish! We find Veg Manchurian not in Manchuria, but in India! Give us recipe and we no attack India border!”

Bollywood’s Constitution On Film Scripts

This article written by Ismat Tahseen has been published on the DNA website. Funny article! I loved it.

Here’s Bollywood’s own ‘constitution’ when it comes to film scripts

Two brothers separated in childhood will always grow up on different sides of the law. The law-breaker, however, will suddenly turn over a new leaf before the end, bash up the villain (who is the ‘real’ bad guy), and be pardoned for all his sins before the last-scene family reunion. (This is possible only if he has a heroine – see next rule).

If the number of heroes does not equal that of the heroines, the excess heroes/heroines will
a) die
b) join the Red Cross and take off to Switzerland before the end of the movie.

If there are two heroes, they will fight each other savagely for five minutes (10 minutes if they are brothers).

Any court scene will have the dialogue “Objection milord”. If it is said by the hero, or his lawyer, it will be overruled.

The hero’s sister will usually marry the hero’s best friend (that is, the second hero). Else, she will be molested by the villain within the first 30 minutes, and then attempt commit suicide.

In a chase, the hero will always overtake the villain, even on a bullock-cart, horseback, train or on foot.

When the hero fires at the villain(s), he will never
a) miss
b) run out of bullets. When the villain fires at the hero, he will always miss (unless the hero is required to die)

Any fight sequence shall take place in the vicinity of a stack of
a) pots
b) barrels
c) glass bottles,

Any movie involving lost and found brothers will see them re-united
a) by a song sung by their blind mother
b) the brothers themselves
c) by the family dog/cat.

Police inspectors (when not played by the hero) come in two categories:
a) Scrupulously honest, probably the hero’s father killed by the villain before the titles.
b) Honest, but always chasing the anti-hero (as in Rule 1), saying “Tum kanoon se bach nahin sakte” or “kanoon ke haath itne lambe hain”, only to pat him in the back in the third last reel. Usually, this inspector’s daughter is in love with the anti-hero.

Please Welcome The ‘Emerging Markets Century’!

The Indian Express published an excerpt from James Surowiecki’s ‘Tata Invasion’ in the January issue of the ‘New Yorker’. It says, “The ‘emerging markets century’ is here, as homegrown MNCs take on the West“.

Most of the Americans, it seems, had never heard of Tata!. Well, now they will. Quite often.

I have reproduced the article below.

Americans are used to foreign cars — nearly half of us, after all, drive on — but no American has yet seen a vehicle bearing the brand name Tata Motors tooling along the highway. So when, a few weeks ago, news broke that this same Tata Motors, an Indian auto company, was close to buying Jaguar and Land Rover, the first reaction of many was “Who?” The implausibility of the bid was magnified when Tata rolled out its newest product, a tiny, stripped-down car that will sell for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars. The spectacle of a low-end specialist trying to buy a couple of established luxury brands looked to some like a cubic-zirconium peddler making a play for Tiffany.

There’s no denying the audacity of Tata’s bid — the company has never sold a car in the US — but there’s also no denying Tata’s distinguished pedigree…. Today, Tata is a huge conglomerate — ninety-eight companies producing everything from tea to steel and solar power — with annual revenues of around thirty billion dollars and a chairman whom Fortune recently named one of the twenty-five most powerful people in business.

If Tata is so powerful, why have so few Americans heard of it? In large part, because so much of its fortune has been made selling to its home market and to other developing countries, rather than to the US and Europe. Historically, developing-country firms that have become global power houses — like Japanese companies decades ago or, more recently, Korean companies like Samsung — were companies that, in addition to dominating their domestic markets, were heavily oriented toward exports to the West. Tata-with some exceptions, such as its steel and consulting businesses — has taken a very different approach, becoming tremendously rich while selling to people who are still pretty poor… As the business professor C.K. Prahalad argues in his book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” even the poor in these countries constitute a market worth trillions of dollars. Twenty years ago, few people in India could have afforded even a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car. Today, tens of millions can…

Now, a huge wave of what you might call developing-country multinationals — companies like Mittal Steel, Lenovo, Chery Automobile — and Cemex — have recently begun to move aggressively into Western markets. These are the advance guard of what’s been called “the emerging-markets century”… Globalisation, it once seemed, was mainly going to give companies in the US, Europe, and Japan billions of new customers and plenty of cheap labour. But it has also meant that these companies have had to face many more real competitors than they once imagined. When we persuaded developing countries to open their doors to us, we also opened our doors to them. Now they’re walking through.

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A Novel Way To Fight Corruption!

Try as we might, we just can’t get rid of corruption! A study conducted by Centre for Media Studies (CMS) in alliance with Transparency International India in 2005 said,

Common citizens pay a bribe of Rs. 21,068 crores while availing one or more of the eleven public services in a year. As high as 62 percent think that the corruption is not hearsay, but they in fact had the first hand experience of paying a bribe or ‘using a contact’ to get a job done in a public office.

Rs. 21,068 crores? That’s a lot. It just goes to show how deep-rooted corruption has become in our society. We can never eliminate it completely. So is there a way out? Oh yes there is. On Sunday, 20th January 2008, an article written by Tavleen Singh (she is one of my favorite columnists!) discussed a novel way of getting things done in our country despite the menace of corruption.

Some of you may not agree with it completely, but still that idea is worth considering. Your suggestions, if any, are welcome.

The article is titled ‘Honour Among Thieves’.

Who would have thought that the best advice Indian politicians have been given in the longest while would come from none other than the Badshah of Bollywood himself. Shah Rukh Khan was at NDTV’s Indian of the Year award ceremony in Delhi last Thursday, and despite the presence of the prime minister, ministers galore, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, and Rajnikant (rarely seen off celluloid), Shah Rukh was the shiniest star at this glittering celebration of Indian heroes. At some point, when our Hero Number 1 was on stage to receive yet another award, Rahul Gandhi was persuaded to ask him a question from the audience.

The man who would like to be our future prime minister smiled shyly in that sweet, self-effacing way of his before asking Shah Rukh what advice he would like to give politicians. Shah Rukh, modest as only the really famous can be, said he was only an actor and in no position to give politicians advice, but since he had been asked to, he would like to suggest that politicians try to be less corrupt. ‘Please be as honest as is realistically possible. Don’t take money under the table, don’t do anything shady… and do something for the country.’

Great advice, but unrealistic. Corruption in Indian public life is now endemic like smallpox, cholera and polio once used to be. And it is a disease for which modern medicine will never have a cure. So we have to learn to live with it. We have to learn to accept the speed with which newly elected representatives of the people acquire an exalted standard of living. The speed with which they are elevated to a lifestyle that only the richest Indians can afford… expensive cars, expensive holidays abroad, expensive jewels for the wife, and expensive schools for the bachcha log. Most Indians, whether in town, village or city, accept that our politicians are incurable in their venality.

They despair of this and I cannot count the number of times I have heard ordinary, apolitical Indians say, ‘Sab saaley chor hain’. They are all thieves. But there is no reason to despair. This column offers a solution. Let us teach our politicians to make money out of doing good for the country instead of doing bad. I am being serious.

The idea is not my own. It originated from a friend who likes to mull over the state of the country. Weary of major infrastructure projects being delayed because someone or the other had been insufficiently bribed, he said he was going to pay someone like McKinsey & Company to do a report on how to teach Indian politicians to make money out of doing good for the country.

‘You see,’ said he, ‘during those decades of socialism our politicians perfected the art of making money out of obstructing things from happening. Files would not move unless palms were greased, permissions to build something would remain in suspended animation until everyone was satisfied with their cut. What they did not learn was how to make money out of speeding up the process. A report by McKinsey into new ways for Indian politicians to make money would, I think, offer valuable advice.’

By way of example, let us take the power sector.

We need nearly 100,000 more megawatts of power in the next five years just to keep India going. One of the reasons for this power shortage is the amount of bribes that have to be paid before a power facility comes into being. What about doubling the rates for those politicians who make things happen double quick? When this is done, we can apply the same formula to roads, schools, hospitals and all the other things we need. Who would mind if a politician who did really good work bought himself a Porsche and the wife a Cartier necklace? Nobody.

On my travels, I have often passed through constituencies where development has really happened, and even if the MP is corrupt, people forgive him his little peccadilloes. ‘Kaam to kiya hai,’ they say.

Other than infrastructure, the two areas worst affected by corruption are public education and healthcare. Government schools are so bad that children are lucky to come out of them with functional literacy, and government healthcare is so bad that more than 80 per cent of our poorest citizens resort to private clinics and quacks. Sickness is one of the main causes of indebtedness in rural India.

So what about teaching our ministers of education and health to build us the best facilities they can think of, and give them the incentive that the better the school or hospital, the more money there is to be made? What do you think? What other ways can you think of to turn endemic corruption in public life to our advantage? Shah Rukh Khan’s advice was excellent but alas not realistically possible.

Source: The Indian Express

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For Love Or Money

Here is a very interesting article that appeared in today’s edition of The Indian Express. It is written by Amulya Gopalakrishnan and talks about how Internet is changing the rules of business (especially the entertainment industry) and concludes by saying that if they don’t change, they won’t survive. And yes, blogs get a special mention too!

So read on. It’s titled ‘For Love or Money‘.

‘I wouldn’t work for you no matter what you paid/ And I may not be able to change the whole f..king world/ But I could be the million you never made.’

That was indie singer-songwriter Ani Difranco’s kiss-off to the mighty music industry circa 1995. But as it turns out, the real million-dollar mutinies against the record business are only just beginning. Recently, British band Radiohead shoved aside the big labels and directly put their latest album up for grabs on the Internet. Fans could pay what they thought fit, or not pay at all.

Sounds crazy? Get this: Radiohead CD sales have been just fine, and in fact the album topped the Billboard charts this past week.

What’s going on here? Well, lots of things, but primarily the crazy, counter-intuitive logic of the Internet that has busted all kinds of revenue models. Whether it’s music, publishing, entertainment, education, the Web threatens to simply take the bottom out of their businesses by supplying almost the same thing at no cost.

Just look at the sheer abundance of stuff you get for nothing. Blogs are giving journalists the jitters. Wikipedia’s the first stop if you want to know anything about anything. Open Courseware programs from schools like MIT give you access to the best higher education in the world, for free. Craigslist, a non-commercial US-based classifieds service, struck at the financial foundations of newspapers whose revenues depend on charging for the same kind of platform (its founding partner befuddled business journalists by politely passing up the chance to ‘monetise’). And let’s not even get into the illegal bounty out there on the Web. Entertainment, information, expertise — whatever you’re looking for, there’s a way to get it free, on tap, anytime. Right this moment, there’s an entire universe of people tapping away at their keyboards, all steady accretions towards this tremendous common resource.

But this impulse is essential to the very creation myth of the Internet, from the early days of idealistic hackers and academics who saw it as a great open digital commons. And even now, the free software movement, which believes in sharing and building on code instead of profiteering, has provided the kernel for much of this largesse. As they see it, money is not the only thing — the desire for recognition and reputation, the urge to share what you’re passionate about, are also powerful drivers of our behaviour.

In many ways, the Internet unexpectedly granted a long-held countercultural dream. For instance, back in the sixties, an anarchist artistic movement called the Situationists tried to live this heady philosophy. Abbie Hoffman, leading figure of the movement, wrote a playful, provocative book called Steal This Book outlining an entire philosophy that rejected commodity culture, idealising the tribal ‘gift economy’.

The scope and scale of the Web, along with this surrounding culture of sharing and collaboration collides dramatically with the ka ching! of the entertainment industry, which results in the familiar panic attacks over digital piracy.

The free culture answer to this would be that ideas and creative works aren’t exactly private property — they don’t spontaneously spring from between the brows of an artist alone. Artistic and intellectual achievements build on the past, borrow, pick and mix, from a broth of influences. And a copyright regime that clamps down on content as the author’s sole property and views all sharing and remixing as theft ultimately impedes the free flow of ideas.

By contrast, Creative Commons is a copyright reform movement that acknowledges this cultural swirl. It lets artists strike their own balance between how tightly they want to clutch their work, and how liberally they want to spread it.

Today, a lot of the Web’s content — writing, pictures, music, video — is available under Creative Commons licences. This broader concept of ‘copyleft’ is not about denying authors their due, but finding a model that recognises and compensates them, without letting an overweening industry pull the shots.

Which is not to claim that there’s a big revolution brewing. The Web is a mixed economy of those who sell and those who give away. It’s not a vast dotcommunist utopia, nor the fief of a few Fortune 500 companies. The commercial Web coexists comfortably with the tribal potlatch of peer-to-peer collaboration.

Source: The Indian Express
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