Category: general

Recognition

I just bumped into this guy at the Mumbai airport and the conversation went like this:
Me: hey I’ve seen you somewhere
He: ugh?
Me: you’re from Chennai?
He: yes
Me: svce?
He: yes..
Me: 2001-2005?
He (looking confused) : yes
Me: you represented your college at university challenge in 2003
He: yeah..
Me: you were goach’s teammate. I’m sorry I don’t remember your name… (two seconds later)… arvind chandrasekhar?

He had the look on his face that suggested he almost gave up in life. I decided to put him out of his misery. ‘Back in Madras I used to be known as wimpy’ I said. I’m not sure if he actually remembered me but he mumbled a ‘I thought so but wasn’t sure’ and we parted.

Before you find this way too unusual let
me tell you that he wasn’t some random guy in the airport I accosted. I was catching up with this long lost friend who I’d bumped into at the airport and he happened to be traveling with her..

Nevertheless I’m proud of my long-term memory. And I’m proud to be married to someone who has an equally good, if not better, long term memory. In fact both of us find ourselves on socially awkward situations frequently when we meet someone we recognize but they don’t recognize us back.

Oh and two minutes before I bumped into arvind I was talking to someone about twenty questions and tintoretto!

Flight rescheduling

I’m booked on the 830 flight from mumbai to bangalore this evening and have checked in online also. However, I happened to finish my work at mu client’s office early so I thought I should reschedule to an earlier flight if one were available.

I’m writing this post on my phone sitting at shree balaji veg refreshments just outside the airport. This is after I decided not to reschedule my ticket. It was way too expensive I reasoned.

Its funny how airlinea work and having worked for sabre I should know that. Anyway I found their formula for fare recalculation rather weird. Given that I had booked my earlier ticket at a low fare the airline deemed that I had to pay an extra seven kilorupees, and that too to change my booking from a higher demand flight to a lower demand flight. I find this outrageous and believe that the airline should have paid me to make this switch, or at let done it for free.

The problem lies in incorrect recognition of marginal costs. Ok my onion uthappam has arrived so I’ll c9ntinue this post later. But I thibk I’ve made my point

Industry and agriculture’s contribution to GDP of Indian States

So you think India is an agricultural country? Maybe you are right in terms of the number of people employed in the sector. But that is not really the case in terms of output – the contribution to GDP to agriculture is a paltry 30% in most states and dropping sharply. The chart here (hope it works) shows how the contribution of agriculture and manufacturing to SGDP of various states in India.

[cf]indiagdp[/cf]

time lost in traffic

I’ve spent the last two hours traveling to itpl (whitefield) for a meeting. Thankfully I’m not driving – the volvo service from banashankari is ‘efficient’ enough to avoid that. It doesn’t seem I’ll reach for another ten minutes. Or maybe I will – just got past a monster traffic jam.

The bus is full. Mostly IT types with dogtags around their necks. I imagine that unlike me, most of these people do this ‘trek’ daily. A total of four hours every day spent traveling. I don’t see many laptops out, not even smartphones. So we can assume that most of these people aren’t working.

Think about the number of people who make such treks and you begin to wonder if someone has done some analysis on the total cost of lost time thanks to time lost in travel. It’s been a long time since I stopped doing something like this, but I don’t know what employers are doing to save this time.

A former employer of mine recognized this problem early and encouraged us to work from home – it helped that it was an accepted practice at the parent office in the US also. When I bring this up with friends, they point out that the motivation of the labour force is a problem, and if not supervised they’ll not work at all. An unproductive day is better than that, they say.

IT parks in bangalore are situated in an arc around the eastern edge of the city. Immigrants try to stay close to their workplaces but thanks to job switches and roommate switches, most of them, too end up traveling significantly. As for long-time residents, they prefer to stay in their ‘native’ areas and do a longer commute than shifting to an unfamiliar area and still doing a commute.

Now the question arises – whose responsibility is it to break this deadlock and improve Bangalore’s productivity? Both employees and employers seem resigned to the high commute time and consequent loss of productivity. The government has much to gain from increased productivity, but the causality there is not very apparent.

I’m about to reach my destination so I’ll close the post here with the question still open. However, what do you think needs to be done to enable bangalore to break out of this high commute time deadlock?