Diapers and New Age Children

The other day I was talking to a senior lady. She is only educated up to the primary level, and was married off in her teens, and had three children, all of them settled now in life. I saw this lady forbidding her younger daughter when she was tying the diaper for her son. I asked the lady why is she stopping her. She had this logic: These days there are so many children who get quickly discouraged and take to extremes. We hear of young students committing suicide. (West Bengal has highest student suicide rate in the country.) We also hear of young children taking up arms against their own friends for frivolous things. This is because these children have not learned "control" when they were young. What do diapers do? The diapers teach children that they need not control! And as young kids, even before they learn to speak properly, they know that they need not control their own basic instincts: instinct to excrete and urinate. The parents are not concerned about when the child urinates or excretes. So, the child need not be concerned about it either. This gets into the child as part of its basic trait: uncontrolled behavior following uncontrolled body and emotions. Naturally, you end up with children who cannot control anger, failures, success, and disappointment. 

Well, it makes sense, when it comes from very senior citizens. Someone said, the problem is children get fixated at the anal stage, as Freud would put it. It is right what that woman is saying. Time to reflect folks! Get rid of diapers!

Retail and FDI

India is looking at allowing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in retail markets. India also hopes that this would lead to creation of at least 4 million jobs, and the investment has to be to the tune of a minimum of 100 million US $. So, with this India expects huge inflow of foreign retail marts to start huge stores across the country-- from Wal Mart to Burger King, everyone will be looking into tapping the 600 billion $ Indian retail market ! Although I am personally in favor of opening up the Indian market, certain things seem to hit hard the Indians. And I am afraid of this one too.

Let us start with the first assumed benefit: 4 million jobs in the country, with possibility of another 4- 6 million jobs in allied services. Well, but how many will lose jobs because of this? That one is answering. Few years back, when Pepsi and Coca-Cola where allowed into the country, initially they were allowed to sell drinks in a bottle of 500 ml or more. Now, that meant, keeping the local companies live, including many who were making cool drinks from their own homes, and were selling in the local market in container bottles of 180 ml and 300 ml. Then the law allowed these giants to sell 180 ml and 300 ml bottles as well. Suddenly, the home based entrepreneurs and small vendors vanished! Even my own brother lost business! When I asked him three years ago why his business was going down, he said this as the reason. Now, his business is fully closed, and is unemployed. I do not know how many extra people Coke or Pepsi employed. But I know that some people lost their livelihood too.

During my trips in Eur0pe and the U.S. I have heard some of my friends saying how small shops cannot do business because everyone goes to the big shops, the super-markets to get things cheap, make their own choice and ultimately....leaving the small time vendors heart-broken. I am apprehensive of this move of the government.

The second presumed benefit is, if more money flows in, then inflation would come down! That is really funny. How much of inflation came down with the first round of reforms in India? 3 - 4 percent? But then it went up again. It is now hovering around 10-11 % Cost of basic goods have gone up. Gone up skywards....

What we need today is agricultural reforms--a second green revolution, that benefits both the farmer and the consumer. There are too many middlemen surviving on the farmers' plight and consumers' woes. This must end. Now.

Children Die of Hunger in Expectant Superpower India

India is longing to be considered an Economic Superpower in the globe, and to become a permanent member to the Security Council. However, things are looking grim as the new Human Development Report of the country for 2010-2011 has exposed: Over 35% of children continue to be born malnourished and underweight. My favorite channel CNN-IBN exposed how in one district of the industrial state of Maharashtra alone over 500 children are dying each year due to malnutrition and hunger. View the video at: Malnutrition

Snake Bite - Know More

Snake Bite.ppt

Team Anna Exposed

Mr. Anna Hazare and his team of great servants of the country who have vowed to clean the country of corruption have been thoroughly exposed! They have recently gone to Hissar in Haryana state of India to tell people not to vote for Congress. Nothing wrong with that if their intention of cleaning the country matches with action. The only person in the fray with no criminal records against him is certain Mr. Jai Prakash of Congress! And his nearest rivals of Haryana Janhit, Indian National Lok Dal and the sitting Member of the Legislative Assembly--all these three have several criminal cases pending against them, according to their own affidavits filed along with their nomination. What an irony! It is a SHAME that Team Anna wants to support cleaning the country of corruption and criminality in politics, and yet thrill the politicians with criminal background through their indirect support. By asking to vote against Mr. Jai Prakash they are asking people to vote for criminals! People must see their true colors. Someone said it on TV, this team Anna smells saffron. Or, to tell it bluntly, they are full of hypocrisy.

Apple of the Apple

Steve Jobs is no doubt the Apple of the Apple empire. It is a virtual world in which he alone ruled. There were many co-founders, but everyone knew apple. His followers revered him, and his rivals shuddered at each launch of the Mac and Apple application. He learned little by education, by life and experience an ocean. His speech at the Stanford University is considered as one of his masterpieces of reflective thought--empirically sound, profoundly Augustinian, and yet existenially appealing the young. As a mark of respect and tribute to the man, many news channels, papers and on-line sites have reproduced the same. For those who have missed it, we present it for you here:

Steve Job's Speech at Stanford University

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much

Checking In

Due to terror attacks India has made it mandatory for all hotels to check and preserve a copy of photo identity cards of its guests. When I landed in Srinagar, my driver straightaway took me from the airport to Shah Abbas, facing the picturesque Dal Lake. My room had been already booked through my friend Aamir. (Thank you Aamir for the wonderful travel plan you made for us.) As I reached the reception they asked me to fill a form mentioning my name, where I come from etc. When I took out my photo identity card to give it to them, they said they do not require it. I said, "But is it not mandatory that the visitors' ID cards must be checked and preserved?" The manager replied, "That is only in India, not in Kashmir. We want people to come, stay with us and spend time with us. So we do not harass people." It is surprising at the way he distinguished between India and Kashmir, and that in spite of so many terror attacks, (just couple of days before a bomb set in a suitcase had killed 17 people outside Delhi high court), this hotel had not learned anything. No wonder, at the same time, two young boys were detected to have sent e-mails claiming a particular terror group taking responsibility in the Delhi high court case, and the mails had been sent from a cyber cafe in Kishtwar in Kashmir, and the owner of the cyber cafe had not registered the names of the teenagers, although it is mandatory to do so. If money matters more than safety, we shall have none. (In picture: working in relaxed mode on the boathouse)

Waning Paradise - Melting Glaciers

Between 9 - 14 Sept I got an opportunity to be in Kashmir. First time in the so called "paradise on earth". The trip was highly eventful, about which I shall write in the next post. We had a good driver who took us around to some of the best places. But everyone had one thing to complain about: lack of rainfall and high amount of heat even in September, when it should have been cooler. The only place where we could see a bit of ice was in Sonemarg. But the weather was terribly hot, and the ice was in small patches on the glaciers. Thinking of climate change issues? I was talking to the horsemen who rent their horses at abnormally high price even for an hour's ride. The men said that even the horses are finding it difficult to walk in the heat and many of them suffer due to high exposure to sun. Though the evenings were cooler, we used fan in the boathouse so that we can have proper sleep. Kashmir still has the charm of miraculously changing weather which changes from a warm bright sunny day to a wet cold rainy time with very little warning. It almost comes without a warning. But for the paradise itself, it is waning. (In picture, a woman rows a boat in Dal lake to reach her son and sister to school)

Improving Transparency

One way to improve transparency and reducing black money is to start with smaller things in life--like moderating vegetable and fish markets and regulating rickshaws. Each smaller thing also requires customized solutions.

Let us look at the case of the vegetable and fish markets in our towns and villages. Now, these shops do not give any bills, and the deals made are in smaller amounts. So, what we need to do is to promote billing. But a small vendor may be uneducated and in the rush of things may not have time to write a bill. So, the simpler thing is to have pre-paid bills of rupees 2, 5, 10 & 20. Each of these bills may be commonly printed and purchased by these vendors at a cheaper price, and each of these tickets / bills might cost just 10 paise (a miniscule fraction: i.e. 1/10 of a rupee; and as of today, 1 USD = 45 rupees). So, this would be a small but steady tax flowing into the government's coffers, while the government is able to track which vendor is actually selling how much of products. Customers must be encouraged to ask for these tickets along with their purchase, and in any case the vendor adds the small cost in his/her product. An alternative would be, like in the sale of matchboxes & cinema tickets in which a small logo tag from the Excise Department is added, the bills also may contain such a tag. In the case of rickshaws too we can do similar exercise.

Every taxi driver has a turn over of not less than 600 rupees a day, because that is their break-even point. Imagine that big cities have not less than 1000 taxis. The minimum turnover without any accountability is: 600,000 each day. The taxi meters all must be fixed with a prepaid gadget. Accordingly, the driver and the passenger must be able to see in the digital meter: the distance covered in the trip and the minimum fare only. At the end of the journey the actual bill may be only through the print out with a printer fixed on the meter. Now comes the most important point. The prepaid gadget for which the driver has purchased credits will automatically lose some credits for each trip. It is more like a prepaid voucher in a cell phone. Let me explain: Driver X purchases 100 rupee credit and recharges his system. Then, at the end of the trip, the bill comes out with the details: The vehicle number; Distance traveled : 3 km; and Cost : Rupees 30. A tax of 1 percent, i.e. 0.30 paise is deducted from the prepaid credit, and the driver has a balance of Rs. 99.70 in his account. When the balance goes below 5 rupees, at the beginning of each trip the system gives a warning, and if the balance goes negative, the system refuses to switch on itself with a warning message for recharging.

We will soon notice that most road taxes can be reduced if such innovative and compulsory taxing systems are followed with minimum burden on any service provider or customer.

Transparent Communities, Transparent Government

There is so much of discussion continuing, and people planning go on fast if the anti corruption bill, known as the Lokpal Bill is not stringent enough, and if it is not passed by the parliament. I have some primary questions to be raised before we plan to stop millions being swindled. The patrons of anti-black money and anti-corruption bill need to pay attention to this.

Let us take simple two examples of two small towns in India: Raiganj, the place I worked for over 6 years; it has a population of about 150,000, and Bolpur - Santiniketan, the place of the national poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the eminent economist Amartya Sen--both Nobel laureates. The town has a population of over 250,000. Let us look at the vegetable market and the rickshaw pullers of these two towns as an example. The vegetable market in Bolpur must be having a minimum turn over of not less than 50,000 rupees a day, and Raiganj would have about 50,000 as well, because it has a bigger wholesale marketing system as well, being closer to lots of villages cultivating vegetables. So, on any given day these two towns alone have a turn over of not less than 100,000 rupees. And, believe me, never has any one asked for a bill from any of the vendor, whether it was a purchase for 10 rupees or for 1000 rupees. The maximum you would get from a bigger shop would be a small piece of paper with a scribble of the amount on it. Let us say, in a year only for 300 days these markets are open. These two towns alone make a turn over of 30 million rupees (3 crores) in royal black. Now, count the number of towns and cities in India-- you would never end up counting the the amount that goes unaccounted.

Let us look at the rickshaw pullers in these two towns. Raiganj has about 150 rickshaws on an average on road, and Bolpur has about 250 on road on any given day. Any rickshaw puller would agree that on an average they make not less than 100 rupees a day. So, 400 rickshaws x 100 rupees is equal to 40,000 a day, and 330 days of rickshaws running in a year would result in 13.3 million rupees changing hands in black. Well, no one asks a rickshaw puller to issue tickets or bills.

I have taken two raw examples, leaving aside the bigger ones to show how we promote black money at every level. This money has to be spent. Black begets more black. And that is the father of larger corruption. (Mother is the human crave for more!)

So, we must have simpler solutions. I shall explain some of them in my next blog.