Author: Rajesh Jain

Business Standard’s “The Strategist” had a story on Novatium a few days ago, entitled “Computing power to every home.” Here is how it begins:

A serial entrepreneur’s vision to drive PC adoption in India promises to bring computing power to every household through the innovative use of cloud computing. Novatium, a computing services company founded by Rajesh Jain in 2004, offers a thin client-based computing solution, which is delivered as a utility service to households and requires very low energy to function. The company has filed 10 patents in the areas of utility-based computing services. Read how the company is making computing affordable for everyone in the concluding part of India Brand Equity Foundation’s series Innovations from India: Harbingers of Change.

The shocking thing about the Mumbai blasts last evening is the regularity with which terrorists are able to strike at the heart of life in the city. Innocent bystanders going about their daily life are killed or injured, and will soon become a statistic linked to a date. And we will all wait for the next date with more attacks.

At this moment, we must come together and pray for those who have lost their lives to yet another senseless act. Many families across the city will need help picking up their lives after what happened last night. We must not forget their sacrifice, and ensure it is not in vain. The scourge of terrorism needs to be firmly dealt with and every citizen must feel safe. This is the most basic guarantee that a government needs to be able to provide.

What we unfortunately have is a government that cannot connect the dots in the intelligence, a government that cannot punish the guilty, a government that cannot protect its citizens. A government like this has no business being in power.  This cycle has to be broken. For long, India has been seen as a soft state. Hopefully, some sense will finally dawn in those in power.

After a couple years of the Nokia E71, I got myself a new mobile – Samsung’s Android phone which sold 3 million worldwide in its first 55 days. It cost Rs 30,500 ($680).

It is a beautiful phone. Quite light, big sharp screen, and quite an intuitive interface. Of course, the Apps are now being downloaded and tried out. I still think the iPhone feels much better from the experience perspective, but Android is now very good. It is a good fight between the two, so the innovations should keep coming.

I intend to keep this as a second phone for some time. With a battery replacement, the Nokia E71 is still quite a reliable talk-and-sms warhorse, and I like its qwerty keypad.

I saw “Delhi Belly” a few days ago. It is a movie which will bring out extreme reactions in people! If one can look past the coarse language (which is quite central to the movie, though somewhat overdone), there are many good things in the movie.

It is in English. It is fast-paced. There is no interval, and the movie is just about 1 hour 40 minutes long. No unnecessary stretching to fill time. The acting is excellent. There are quite a few neat shots of Delhi.

It is good to see such variety coming out of Bollywood, where we are doing something different and not ripping off a Hollywood movie.

There was a front page article in DNA (July 1) on how missed calls have helped the Jan Lokpal Bill campaign of Anna Hazare:

Who said Anna missed his calling?

Over 76 lakh missed calls in support says he did not! No, Sir

Mayank Aggarwal Delhi

It started with one man’s call to support his fight against corruption. Three months later, the Anna Hazare led India Against Corruption (IAC) campaign has received the support of over 76 lakh people from across the country.

On April 5, when Hazare started his fast-unto-death at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, organisers requested the public to give a missed call on 022-61550789 to register their support. “By June 28, we got over one crore missed calls of which 76.83 lakh were unique missed calls, all different numbers and no repetition,” said Kunal Dixit of Netcore Solutions Private Limited, who is handling this scheme for the IAC.

“This data clearly proves that Lokpal movement is not limited to just a few thousand people. The whole country is behind us,” said Arvind Kejriwal, RTI activist, IAC member and one of the civil society representatives in the Lokpal bill’s joint drafting committee.

According to data, the highest number of missed calls came from the 2G scam-embroiled Tamil Nadu (including Puducherry) region with 16.41 lakh calls followed by Maharashtra-Goa region (including Mumbai) with 15.15 lakh.
Missed calls came from as far as Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli.

A Delhi based auto-driver, Balwant Singh said, “I couldn’t go to Annaji’s fast but I certainly can give a missed call to express my support and encouragement. I regularly give a missed call on that number and also encourage my friends and relatives to follow me.”

Also see: Ajit Ranade’s column in Mumbai Mirror (July 2): “Missed Call: Great Indian trick”

…. A Mumbai based telecom technology company (Netcore) among others offers a service to telemarketers, where it can capture a missed call as a “vote” to be opted-in. That caller then gets registered as a willing recipient of the marketing calls and SMS.  It is much easier to “give” a missed call and register yourself.

The software can track unique numbers, their originating geography and many other details. You can also devise a mechanism to get “delisted” by another missed call. Easy! …

From a post a year ago:

I cannot but help think that we in India don’t have a clue how to solve the big challenges that we face. Whether it is getting 500 million out of extreme poverty or dealing with Naxalism or handling our neighbours (Pakistan and China) or even something seemingly simple as dealing with errant Ministers at the Centre, the belief seems to be that problems will solve themselves if we left them alone.

At a time when India needs leadership of the highest order, we are getting silence and seeing weakness. At a time when India needs big vision and rapid execution, we are getting inaction and petty thinking.

It is because We, the People of Middle India, have seceded and created our own mini-worlds that we inhabit, unconcerned about what is happening around. Some day soon, we will realise that this is the biggest mistake made by one of the largest collectives in the world.

This week’s links:

• The World is an Internet Startup Now: by John Battelle. “The Internet no longer belongs to the young tech genius with a great idea and the means to execute it online. Innovation on the Internet now belongs to the world, and that is perhaps the most exciting thing about this space.”
• The State (Plight) of the Mobile Industry: by Bob Frankston. “We are asking providers to add capacity but we’re not willing to let them share in the value created (as with a VoIP call). Worse, the more capacity there is the less valuable the carriers’ own services are…We need to shift to a funding model that doesn’t work at cross purposes with the Internet’s generativity.”
• Six Classic Business Books: from The Economist. Among the books mentioned is CK Prahalad’s “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, which “unleashed a business revolution that has done far more good than any number of “Live Aid” concerts.”
• State of India’s Political Parties: India Today writes about the “Decline & Stall of the Congress Empire” and the New Indian Express writes about a BJP which is “Divided and ruled out.”
• Why Friends help strengthen a Marriage: from Wall Street Journal. “…Friends help you gather perspective on your relationship to your spouse: When you’re inside a marriage, it’s easy to focus on the points of friction and the minutiae of daily life…friends draw you toward life’s big picture.”

I asked the driver and the watchman about the government. They said the government made no difference to them. The MPs and MLAs only came to ask for votes and were never seen again. Both voted, and would flip their vote each time because they saw no progress.

Many of the 12-15 year-olds end up going to Mumbai, taken up typically by a family which wants a domestic help or someone to help at the shop. Employment opportunities locally are few and far between – there is no manufacturing happening. NREGA provides some employment once in a while, but it only ends up being at best a few days in a month.

For the most part, little has changed in the lives of this India. As a nation, we have failed them – by not being able to provide a decent education and by not providing adequate employment opportunities. The time has come for India’s politics of votebanks to be replaced by the politics of development. We need to get Zakirbhai and Radheshyam dreaming about a New India for their children.

While at Nageshwar, I had a conversation with the driver of the vehicle that brought us from Vikramgarh Alot and the watchman of the dharamshala. It brought out the reality of India that we have to work hard on improving.

They were both in their mid-30s. Both had been born in the neighbourhood. Their salaries were in the range of Rs 2,500-3,000 per month. One could not even write his name, while the other had studied till the 5^th standard. They were both married. Their kids went to private school, because the government school teachers would not show up most of the time. Complaining would not help much since all that would happen is one set would get transferred and another similar one would replace them.

The only work available, other than the temple-related activities, was in farming. And that in turn was dependent on the rains, which had been deficient for the past couple of years. The villages around still had ‘kacchi basti’ and the roads were not tarred. Drinking water would get difficult if the rains were not good.

Continued tomorrow.

I wish they would add digital displays with GPS in the train compartments. They can then provide contextual information on the stations and the states one passes through. (Presumably, a mobile app could do the same thing.) A train ride can be very educational, and adding a bit of history, geography and economy can make us realise the true wonder that India is. Of course, one can read about it on the Net, but the train provides a context that sitting at a desk usually never does.

While we were waiting at Vikramgarh Alot for the train back to Mumbai, Abhishek was excitedly waiting for other trains to come. And as if on cue, a few trains did – during the hour that we spent at the station. (Our train was delayed by 30 minutes.) Trains are to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth! So, imagine the thrill in watching a train race past at high speed, quickly followed by a goods train going in the opposite direction. Then, a passenger train came by and plenty got off and on, followed by the Inter-city from Indore to Delhi, before our train finally arrived.

The only jarring part was with the synthetic announcements announcing the impending arrivals of the trains. The railways have learnt from the airports, and have ‘improvised’ to ensure that every announcement is repeated ad infinitum in English and Hindi n times over.

Continued tomorrow.