Let's Give Free Markets a Fair Chance

The second largest electronics retailer Circuit City files for bankruptcy. General Motors is on the verge of a collapse with its stock getting to the lowest point in 60 years, DHL shuts down domestic operations cutting close to 10,000 jobs. Starbucks's earnings fall 97% despite valiant efforts from Howard Schultz. IT companies are feeling the pinch in India cutting jobs, freezing recruitment.

These are just a small sample of the news that we have been hearing over the past few weeks. Can't imagine a worse time for a new President (or for a new MBA for that matter).

The dangerous off-shoot of this is the fact that Communism seems to be raising its ugly head. Here is an interesting article from WSJ talking about how this is playing out in India: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122628672919612761.html

For 43 years since Independence till the point where the Indian economy almost collapsed, we have tried communism. And FAILED miserably, we have created a few really wealthy politicians in the process for sure, but the common man has seen no progress, and that was until IT came in which was for some reason untouchable by communists and politicians and it has been successful for that one reason. Now, capitalism will have its share of failures no doubt-and we have to live through it. That definitely does not mean we get into the regressive politics of communists as a reprieve, that will only take us back to a time that we definitely don't want to go back to.

Let's give capitalism and free markets a fair chance in India-let us learn the lessons from them as global citizens, and then may be we stand a chance of becoming the power that we deserve to be.

"As long as there is a Left in India, India has no future left."-Cho Ramaswamy.

Complicating the Web Space..

How would you like it if all your favorite websites had different top level domain names, that is to say, if instead of www.chase.com you could have www.chase.bank or www.walmart.shop or even top level domains referring to brand names themselves like www.laundry.whirlpool or www.laundry.maytag? You could argue both ways-that it could lead to more creative ways for consumers to remember websites or that it would result in more confusion (I subscribe to the latter view).

Whatever your point of view is, apparently the change is coming (a weak pun intended:)). WSJ has covered the issue here and here is an old article announcing the move. And since it needs a membership to read the whole article, I will take the liberty of providing my interpretation of what it says:

1. Costs for companies to maintain top level domain names will go up. For instance, if you are Apple, what domains do you purchase-.apple .mac .ipod .itunes .iphone? What about .music or .cool or .notebook or even .jobs? What if another company took these domain names?

2. Already companies spend an enormous amount to maintain their web domain names, this move multiplies the costs of doing business.

3. The number of fraudsters might go up. What if I purchase .bank and create a site called jpchase.bank that looks exactly like chase.com and fool people into giving their account details? That again means the monitoring costs just went up.

4. What happens if I buy .life and do a bidding between insurance companies, lifestyle product companies, hospitals and sell it to the highest bidder?

5. Finally, it already takes so much effort for companies to make people remember websites, this will complicate that attempt even further.

On the other side, the justification for the move is that there are just not enough domain names for everyone-instead of exhausting the domain names, opening up the top level domain names provides an almost infinite supply of unique domain names (the names are provided by a non-profit organization remember-they are apparently not trying to make more money out of this though they definitely will).

I personally feel, it is time to make things simpler and not more complicated. We are all so used to .com .edu and other domain names and Google search is the way we find 95% of what we need; so why go through this hassle of multiple top level domains and inflate the costs of companies at a time when they definitely cannot afford any slack?

Testing Blogger Buddy...

To get out of this huge rut I seem to have gotten into, in terms of blogging, I am trying out a new gadget called Blogger Buddy, that sits right on my desktop from which I can post directly to my blog without having to open a browser or Word (as if that was the problem all along:)). Here is the tool:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=c02ee13e-11e1-4a3b-b33c-7a1b8f3b4671&bt=1

Anyway, expect more activity this point forward. Ciao.

Isha in Columbus!!!

Once again it is that time of the year when everything else relegates to the background and a beautiful space opens up for me to go back and relive what has been one of the most significant influences in my life so far-Isha.

To sum up Isha in one post (or even in words) would definitely be an exercise in futility. However I have made a feeble attempt in a mail I wrote to a friend (below).

April 9th Wednesday 6.30 pm is the introductory talk and I would be delighted if everyone in Columbus who sees this post at least chooses to take that step of spending 1.5 hours to explore a new possibility.

When: Wednesday, April 9th 6.30pm to 8pm
Where: COSERRC (Central Ohio Special Education Regional Resource Center) in Clintonville, 470 Glenmont Ave. Columbus, OH 43214
Contact: Arvind (857-207-9941) or Isha Columbus Chapter (614-235-2045).

Isha Website:

http://ishafoundation.org/

Program Details:

http://www.ishafoundation.org/index.php?option=com_program&task=details&program_id=561

E-Flyer:

http://www.ishafoundation.org/eflyers/ColumbusApr08.html

My Experience with Isha:

I did the program about one and half years back primarily because firstly I was curious, as all my roommates had done the program and I could observe several changes in them after the program. Second reason was of course that I wanted to lose some weightJ. And from the program I gained a lot more than weight loss! To say that it has transformed my life in a very fundamental way would not be an overstatement. As for the physical benefits, my sleep quota has gone down significantly and am able to be much more productive in the hours am awake, I can eat a lot less than before and still stay active, and my weight has reduced significantly and stayed at a decent level for the past one year.

But the real changes are at a subtler level. I get stressed out very easily by failures, by circumstances and by people. After doing my practices for a few months I could observe that my relationships with people had improved significantly without any special efforts. I was just able deal with events, stresses and people from a very different level, many times I have thought back to myself, “Wow, if this had happened before I would have totally freaked out! Now this doesn’t affect me!”. That clarity has enabled me to deal with situations much more effectively than I could have with all the stresses and turbulence within.

The program is scientific (for an engineer like me that is a big requirement!), it is not based on any belief system, in fact throughout the class it is not necessary to believe in anything. It is just an inward journey to see what’s true within ourselves. Purely based on undeniable logic.

After this experience, there is something within me that just won’t stop until EVERYONE around me has had the same experience! That is the reason for that poster and that is the reason for this mail. I know that this experience is possible for anyone, it is just the matter of taking the first step and that I hope you will!

Let me know if you need any other details.

Sadhguru’s talks:

Your state of Peace & Joy is the Quality of your Life:

Both Joy and Misery are Infectious:

Yoga Means Union:

P

A New Quarter...

Spring quarter begins tomorrow. We are done with two (of the six) quarters of our MBA program-time does fly fast in a b-school! A friend dutifully reminded me that I could have been graduating out of the MBA program in a week's time had I chosen to join ISB one year back. But I have no regrets. Its been a great journey so far. Just to look back at the Winter quarter...

• We were introduced to three major areas of business in one quarter-Finance, Operations and Marketing.
• Of these, quite surprisingly for me, the Finance course has been the best introduction ever not least due to Professor Rudi Fahlenbrach who is among the best professors I have ever seen-so much that I, (whose only expectation from an MBA was "Anything but Finance") am now interested in Finance!
• Marketing and Operations have altered many of my perceptions. The way I look at a supermarket now is fundamentally altered. I try to sneak into the back end of the store and see how big of an inventory they maintain. I look at the shelf space each product occupies and try to judge how these vary from one week to another. I look closely at the in-store promotions, display logic and a bunch of other stuff that I was totally oblivious to, earlier.
• We had a case competition, which was literally a 24-hour marathon, exhausting, but very revealing in terms of how to structure a problem, how to think through solutions with teams, how to (how not to) present and so on.
• I had the opportunity to work with the marketing department of a college at OSU which has been a great learning experience so far.
• Girls auctioning dates, talkative folks auctioning a day of silence, private flight ride, homemade German dinner, Indian dinner, you name it-it would be up on Fisher Follies! It was a crazy night with people bidding for huge amounts (I am guessing at least half of those were more the work of alcohol than anything else:) ). A fun night.

The best thing about my MBA experience has been the fact that every day, I do something new, or learn something new. Of course nothing groundbreaking, just simple things like talking to a person from a new country, writing a consulting report, handling a passionate team discussion, learning to wear a tie -it could be anything-the novelty of each experience makes life interesting!

Vista and Vostro-the love-hate story...

I have been forced out of the blogosphere for quite a while due to some issues in my laptop that ate away a major portion of my spring break :(. I love my laptop-I really really do and Vista Ultimate has definitely been one of the reasons for that. But of-late I am tired of searching for solutions to all the problems that have been cropping up over and over. I am going to record the best and worst of this Vista-Vostro combination and if any of you have something to add (esp. some solutions) please do so in the comments.

Awesome:

• Windows Media Center-watching movies has become a great new experience with Media Center (there are a few bugs though, like every resizing of the window freezes the player and confuses the hell out of it-maybe it was not designed for laptops and fast application switching).
• Windows Dreamscene: One sure-shot way to grab attention to your laptop is to have one of these moving wallpapers on the desktop-its unbeleivably beautiful-some videos are really soothing. (again some issues with Dreamscene crashing and stopping+making the overall system slow-still worth it for the experience).
• Games: I love the Chess and Hold'em Poker games on the Ultimate.
• Aero: Doing a Windows+Tab to switch Windows is a new paradigm and am addicted to it now-its super cool to watch the windows in 3D and choose.
• Organized: Its hard to explain this one, but somehow all the pieces of the UI and the file system are a lot better organized on Vista than any other-very intuitive and simple.

Bummers:

• My advice to all new users would be-DON'T do a clean install of Vista Ultimate on your own. I did that and the first screen that greeted me after the install was a blue-screen (crash), and to top it all, the blue screen would vanish in a split second and the machine will reboot and the system will dutifully ask-"Looks like last time Windows did not boot successfully. Do you want safe mode?" (well there was no last time that Windows booted successfully in the first place!!). And the same blue screen appears in safe mode too.
• After a lot of debugging I narrowed it down to one driver that seems to screw it up for Vista-RICOH. And since you never get to login to the system, you cannot upgrade it either.
• So I tried the next best option-reisntall the OS, and I did this 4 times each time trying a different combination-nothing worked.
• The only “solution” was to install Vista home and upgrade to Ultimate. Now its “better”
• And why only “better”-well the first reason I reinstalled the system was because ever since I upgraded Vista Home to Ultimate, Sleep function is totally screwed up. If you put the machine to sleep and wake it up a balloon that says “One of your USB devices malfunctioned” greets you (I don’t have any USB devices connected) and from then on none of the USB ports work.
• Another problem when this happens is the system cannot be shut down after the USB problem; it stands in the “Shutting Down” screen for at least 30 minutes AFAIK.
• Finally, the problem that really drove me mad was this-every now and then when the system goes to sleep, it will never wake up. All the blue lights for the CPU/Bluetooth/WIFI will be glowing bright and fine, but the screen just stays blank-never comes up no matter what key/button you press.
• Then there are minor irritants like, once your hard disk capacity goes below a certain level, hibernate function vanishes and there is no way you can turn it back on even if you free up a lot of space.
• IE crashes every now and then. I started using Firefox and the world’s been brighter since then. If you are really adventurous, try Firefox 3 Beta 4-its lightning fast, does not eat memory and has some very helpful new features.
• And today I installed Vista SP1 and the microphone drivers seem to have disappeared from the system-need to debug this tomorrow-still not sure if it’s a Vista problem.

Yahooooo...its snow time!!

There was a snowstorm in Columbus this morning and we were hit by about a feet of snow! Seems that this is a record for the month of March (broke the 1906 record for Columbus!)...
http://blog.dispatch.com/Weather/2008/03/10_inches_and_counting_in_colu.shtml

Here is a video I took from the window in our living room....




Of course we were out playing in the snow after the carnage and photos are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/toarvind/Snow