Category: general

Why Kannadigas are Inherently Lazy

There is something about the weather in Bangalore. There is something about the weather in Bangalore that perks you up. There is something about the weather in Bangalore that most of the time you really want to do something, to be active, to go out, walk around, lead an active life and all such. The first few days I spent in Bangalore after my return from Gurgaon in June I spent literally jumping around. The weather was so uplifting. It filled me with so much enthu for everything in life!

So I was wondering why people usually classify Kannadigas as being inherently lazy. As one of the professors in my JEE coaching factory used to say “naavu Kannadigarige aambode mosaranna koTTbiTTre khushhyaagiddbiDtivi” (if someone gives us Kannadigas dal vada and curd rice, we’ll live happily forever, and we will forget about working hard). Basically implying that we are inherently not too ambitious, and that we are generally laidback about stuff.

Thinking about it, I was wondering if the wonderful climate of South Interior Karnataka has to do with this (people from North Karnataka and the coast are supposed to be fairly hardworking, and are not known for their laidbackness unlike us Old Mysore people). I wonder if this laidbackness is because our wonderful weather has spoilt us. Spoilt us to an extent that we don’t really need to normally fight against the odds.

So I was thinking about Gurgaon, the other place where I’ve recently lived in. Gurgaon has horrible climate. Maybe a total of one month in the year can be desccribed as “pleasant”. Most of the time it’s either too hot or too cold. Temperatures are extreme. When it rains the whole place floods up. If people in Gurgaon are happy it is in spite of the weather and because of it. And therein lies the reason why people from there are traditionally more hardworking than us people from Old Mysore.

Blessed with such wonderful climate, we don’t really need to fight the odds. If today is too hot, we can put off the job for another day when we’re sure it’ll be cooler. If it rains too much today, we know that it’s likely to be dry tomorrow and can thus postpone it. Essentially we don’t need to put too much fight. When the weather is good, we are all jumpy and enthu and do our work. Which allows us to wait and sit when the weather is bad.

The man in Gurgaon, or in Chennai, or even in Raichur, however, can’t afford that. The likelihood of him having a good day weatherwise sometime in the near future is so thin that there exists just no point for him to postpone his work thinking he’ll do it when he feels better. This means that he is culturally (rather, climatically) conditioned to work against the odds. To do stuff even when he doesn’t want to do it. To essentially put more fight. And so he avoids that “inherently lazy” tag which people like us have unfortunately got.

I’m reminded of the second case that we did in our Corporate Strategy course at IIMB, from which the main learning was that sometimes your biggest strengths can turn out to be your biggest weaknesses.

nODi swami, naaviruvudu heege.

Hospital Issues

There is one thing that I haven’t managed to understand about Indian hospitals – it is the dependence on patients’ attendants. Every patient is required to have an attendant next to him/her all the time. In case the attendant is going out, he/she has  to literally take permission from the nurses. Full time, it is the attendant’s job to monitor the patient and alert hte doctors/nurses in case something goes wrong. And the main job of the attendant is to bring medicines.

Yeah, you heard that right. Most hospitals here have attached pharmacies, and the usual practice is for the doctor/nurse to scribble down a prescription which the attendant has to fulfil from the hospital’s own pharmacy. I find this practice weird and ridiculous, and wonder why the hospital cannot short-circuit the attendant’s role and then finally bill the medicines to the patient along with the rest of the bill.

Over the last couple of weeks when my mother has been in ho0spital, I’ve found myself being woken up at all times – including 1 am and 5am to go get stuff from the pharmacy. Sometimes it’s been as trivial as a syringe. Usually it’s a much longer list. Such a long list that given the crowd at the pharmacy, it’s impossible to check if the pharmacist has given you everything he’s billed you for. And in the wee hours of Tuesday morning when there was an emergency and my mother had to be shifted to intensive care, the first thing the people there did was to give me an extra-long list of stuff to get from the pharmacy. This was at 3am.

I wonder why this practice came about, and why it still exists. Is it to facilitate easy transfer pricing for the hospital? Is it t give some sort of transparency to the patient about the medicines being given to him? If the latter, can’t the patient just sign on the prescription authorizing the hospital to procure the stuff from the pharmacy? And given the monopoly power that the hospital’s pharmacy has, service is usually slow and inefficient, thus leading to long queues. And in such scenarios, it’s not easy to actually check if you’ve received everything you’ve paid for. And on top of this, you have the hospital giving multiple prescriptions for the same non-consumable thing, maybe just hoping you don’t notice.

And then there is this thing about the attendants. Thankfully we have enough extended family here in Bangalore that it isn’t hard to find volunteers to do vigil at  the hospital when I’m away at work or other things. But what if we were in a place with no relatives around? Or if the patient were living alone in the particular city? How would the hospital handle this? Would they make the patient himself run around to get medicines?

Whenever I think about these things I tend to get extremely pissed off. The hospital has been otherwise good. The nursing staff are all very nice and never crib. The hospital is maintained extremely well and is clean in most places. There are enough duty doctors at all times. And then they expect an attendant to be with the patient. And the expect the attendant to run around all the time to fetch stuff from the hospital’s own pharmacy.

The Loot

So I executed the book binge yesterday. In two phases – first at the “main” Landmark at the Forum and then at the “other” Landmark at Swagath Garuda Mall. Technically the binge is incomplete since I still have another Rs.600 to spend but it’s unlikely I’ll be spending that off soon, so for all practical purposes we can take the binge to be complete.

While book-shopping yesterday I was thinking about the various Landmark stores I’ve been to, and how the Landmark at the Forum is the worst of them all, with the one at Spencer’s Plaza in Madras (which I last visited seven years back) coming second. The problem with these two stores is that they are in otherwise popular malls. What this does is that it attracts casual browsers to just check out the mall and makes the browsing experience more painful for the serious browsers.

On the other hand, the Landmark stores in Nungambakkam, Gurgaon (Grand Mall) and Garuda Swagath Mall are either standalone or situated in malls which are otherwise not too popular. And precisely for this reason, the crowd at these stores is significantly superior. You get your space to browse without being asked to make way for passerby, you can actually sit down going through a book and deciding whether to buy it. The store staff, who are much less hassled, are far more courteous and helpful. And if you happen to pick up a conversation with another browser, it is likely to be much better than at the more popular malls.

This presents an interesting problem for the bookshop-owners regarding location. Do they put the bookshop in a popular mall and thus maximize footfalls? Or do they locate their shops in lesser malls or on high streets hoping to attract better “quality” of footfalls which might actually result in better sales? Keeping the shop in a popular mall attracts more casual browsers and if book purchase is an impulse decision, then it is likely to pay off for the store (even there you need to keep in mind that crowded checkout counters can cause the casual browser to drop the book back in the shelf). On the other hand, if they think book buying is a more informed, laborious decision, then they should be locating themselves in places where they won’t get random crowd.

Of course I’m only talking about the browse-and-buy model here and not covering shops such as the erstwhile Premier Bookshop – which rely on customers who know exactly what they want and just ask for it. And of course, for a shop to locate itself in a slightly obscure location it needs to have the “pull” (of a brand name or something) in order to attract customers.

Coming to the loot:

  • The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris
  • The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux
  • The Emerging Mind, VS Ramachandran
  • The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida
  • Panic, Michael Lewis
  • A Splendid Exchange (How Trade Shaped the World), Willian Bernstein
  • Gang Leader For A Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
  • The Bowler’s Holding the Batsman’s Willey (humorous sporting quotes collection), Geoff Tibballs
  • Musicophilia, Oliver Sachs
  • The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, Edited by Richard Dawkins
  • When Genius Failed (LTCM), Roger Lowenstein
  • Ramayana, a modern rendition, Ramesh Menon
  • The Rise and fall of the third chimpanzee, Jared Diamond
  • Bhairavi, the global impact of indian music, Peter Lavezzoli
  • The Real Price of Everything (collection of 6 economics classics – fundaes by adam smith, david ricardo, etc.), Edited by Michael Lewis
  • Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
  • The Universal History of Numbers (Part 1 and 2), George Ifrah (didn’t buy part 3 since it seemed full of CS fundaes)
  • A Maidan View, Mihir Bose
  • The States of Indian Cricket, Ramachandra Guha
  • The Bhagavad Gita, Royal Science of God-Realization, Paramahamsa Yogananda
  • Autobiography of a Yogi (Kannada translation), Paramahamsa Yogananda (mom and aunt asked for it)

People, thanks for your recommendations. And once I’m done reading these books, I might be open to lending them (provided I trust you to return them, of course).

An Inquiry Into Queue Lengths At Wedding Receptions

So last night once again I was at a wedding reception where there was a long queue for getting on stage, wishing the couple, giving gift and getting photo taken. In fact, last night, the queue literally extended to outside the hall (maybe the non-standard orientation of the hall – more breadth than length – contributed to this) – probably the first time I was seeing such a thing. Thankfully the wedding hall entrance was deep inside the building compound, else there might have been the unsavoury sight of the queue extending all the way on to the road.

This has been a problem that has been bugging me for a long time now – regarding queue length at wedding receptions. Apart from a handful, most wedding receptions that I’ve attended in the last 3-4 years have had this issue. You get to the hall and finding a long queue to get on stage, immediately go and plonk yourself at the end of it. By the time you get to the stage and do your business, you are hungry so off you go to the dining hall to probably stand in another queue. And before you know it, the reception is over and all the networking opportunity that you had been thinking of is now lost.

Udupa has a simple solution to this – introduce a token system like they have at commercial banks. Upon entry, you get a token with a number on it and you go take your seat or go around networking. And when your number gets flashed on a screen close to the stage, you go join what will be a very short queue, and you have done your business without really wasting much time. I’m told that this is the system that they had introduced at Tirupati in order to prevent time wastage at queues. However, it is doubtful if such a solution is practicable for the wedding case – people might get offended, people might get too busy to see their token number flashing, and all such.

A while back, I had raised this issue with my mom, and had casually mentioned to her about Udupa’s solution. She said that the whole problem lay with girls’ fascination for make-up nowadays, and that 99% of the problem would get solved if the reception were to start on time. This was never a problem during her time, she mentioned, when makeup was lesser and girls took less time to dress. And she also mentioned that the number of guests hasn’t gone up as significantly as one might expect.

Another solution that my mom suggested was to get the couple to stand at floor level, thus reducing the “distance” between them and the crowd, and making them more accessible. Apparently, she and my dad did that at their wedding – abandoned the stage in favour of the musicians and stood on one side at floor level, and this, she says, made crowds move faster. In fact, even at Katsa’s wedding last weekend, the couple were not at a great height off ground level, and this made them more accessible, and somehow prevented a queue from building up.

Next, we will need to look at the various processes that go into the “proceedings”. So you meet the couple. One of the couple introduces you to the spouse. You make small talk for a couple of minutes. You handover the gift. Then, you stand with the couple and wait for the photographer to make sure everything is ready, and then get your snap taken. And then put exit and head for the grub. So we need to figure out which part of this whole process needs to be reduced, or even done away with.

Gift-giving takes minimal time, so it stays. Introduction is the reason you are there at the wedding, so that also stays. Yesterday’s wedding, they took photos side-on while we were putting small talk. And that still did nothing for queue length. But still, I think that’s a good start – too much time is wasted anyways in organizing gumbals for photos. And the closer gumbals can wait for beyond grubtime.

Small talk? Is there any way that can be reduced? Two weddings recently, the couple has promised to put small talk post-reception but reception has carried on for too long making us put NED before the talk. People kept streaming in even after 10pm. Will the couple abruptly getting off stage at the closing time help? People who come later can seek out the couple wherever they are, and in the meantime they can put the small talk. And this promise means that they don’t have to put small talk when there aer 100 people waiting in the queue?

Any other bright ideas? This is a common problem. Only thing is no one party will pay you enough to come up with a brilliant solution for this – benefits of this are far too distributed. Anyways, your thoughts on this, please.

Punjoo Wedding

On Saturday I was in Delhi to attend a Punjoo wedding. Technically, it was a half-Punjoo wedding if you take only the marrying couple into question, but given the overall processes, venue, events, guests, etc. it can be classified as a completely Punjoo wedding. Apart from the groom and a handful of his family members, there were only two things Tam at the wedding – presence of curd rice as part of the dinner buffer, and “appdi pODu” during the “L^2 session”.

The groom was Sriwatsan K from Malleswaram, formerly of Katpadi; also known at various points in time as Free Watsa, Bullet Watsa and Katsa. The bride was his colleague Dipti. The wedding took place in Delhi, at the Hyatt Hotel. And it was the first time that I was attending a Punjoo wedding. I had attended a couple of north indian weddings before but those were of UPites, and I had been told that Punjoo weddings were something else.

The wedding had been scheduled for 8 pm but our kind Punjoo host informed us that most Punjoo weddings start at least two hours late. So reaching there half an hour late would be a good hedge, we were told. Unfortunately the groom, being Tam, had arrived on time and the wedding was already underway. The bride was yet to arrive but Katsa was there, sitting on a low stool and doing some random stuff that the Shastri was advising him to do. And he was fully clothed – if it had been a Tam wedding, he would’ve been topless.

Given that none of us had seen his wife before, someone had come up with the idea that she was a figment of Watsa’s imagination, and that we had all been conned into traveling all the way to Delhi for a non-event. And it didn’t help that when we had arrived at the venue, Watsa was sitting alone in the Mantap. So it was only when Dipti made her way to the mantap and took her place next to Watsa that we were convinced that she existed. “She exists! She exists!”, we shouted. And later on during the reception, to make sure she actually exists, we all made it a point to shake her hand. And I must mention here that she walked to the mantap. If she had been south indian, some uncle would’ve carried her there.

All this took place in a small courtyard in the Hyatt compound. There was a reception hall where the event was being telecast live, and the daaru was flowing freely there. And waiters walked around the place serving starters – all vegetarian. I think that is one thing common all over India – irrespective of the marriage parties’ eating habits, food is always vegetarian. Anyway, given the relative space in the courtyard and the “reception hall”, it was as if we were all there to watch the video of the wedding.

Presently, the couple finished getting married and slowly made their way into the reception hall. It had surprisingly gotten over quite soon – it was only 10 pm. This time, we lined up by the sides of the entrance into the reception hall and shouted “Watsa, Watsa” as he passed us with his new wife. I must say we greeted him like he was a triumphant hero. We definitely had fun. I don’t know and don’t care about the rest of the guests at the wedding.

Surprisingly there was no queue at the reception to wish the couple. In most weddings here, as soon as the couple are seated, a queue builds up all the way to the door of the hall. However, while we waited at the end of the short queue, people (relative types) poured in from the other side. Maybe that’s how things work in Delhi. We wanted to shout “poond, poond” but restricted ourselves to just shoving ourselves on stage and wishing the couple (and making sure the bride exists).

The food was brilliant. Unforunately, of late, the standard of food at Bangalore weddings has ebbed. I don’t konw if it with the cooks taking it easy, or with the flawed incentive system (nature of cooking contracts has changed significantly over the years), but of late it’s just not worth going to a Bangalore wedding for the food. In this context, the food here was doubly brilliant. Hogged like I haven’t hogged at a wedding for a long time.

Two weeks back when I had met Watsa in Bangalore, he had shown me the playlist of songs that were to be played at his wedding. I had cringed back then, for most of them seemed like arbitmax Punjoo songs. And while we were grubbing, the noise had started. Yes, it was noise. Random-max songs, at extremely high decibel. And the speakers were just next to the bar, so you had to really torture yourself if you wanted to go grab a drink. And there were no earplugs in supply.

After a while, though, the music got better and they switched to standard Indian dance-party music. As I had mentioned earlier, they even played a Tam song. Much fun ensued. The demographics of the dancing parties was interesting. If this had happened in a South Indian wedding, at least 95% of the people on the dance floor would’ve been under 30. Here, though, a significant proportion included unclejis and auntyjis and maamas and maamis. Anyways, I think this idea of a dance party attached to a wedding is fairly awesome, and should be replicated at South Indian weddings also (there may not be any thanni but it doesn’t matter).

Some married people in our group had initiated NED soon after dinner, and that had turned into collective NED and we were all back to pavilion (aadisht’s haveli) by midnight. Before we returned we went up to Watsa and told him that he has now become a proper Punjoo.

The National College Flyover

What will happen to the controversial National College Flyover when the Metro gets built? If I remember right, the proposed Metro goes from Lalbagh West Gate up Vani Vilas road, and is supposed to take a right turn on to K R Road at the National College circle. Surely there is no space on VV Road to for the metro and the flyover to exist side by side. They can’t take the metro underground there since the ground there has to bear the additional weight of the flyover.

So what will become of the flyover? Yet another example of the BBMP’s shortsightedness.

I don’t remember the forum (it might have been this blog, or its predecessor) but I had once mentioned as to how the National College Flyover was useless. And I had gotten shouted down by a bunch of people saying “go in the evening and see the number of vehicles on the flyover, and you’ll know it’s not useless”. I’ve gone there a few evenings after that (over the last 2-3 years) and watched the traffic in the evening, and still believe that it wasn’t necessary.

It wasn’t necessary because the traffic at the intersection isn’t enough of a reduction in petrol and time cost of going over the flyover to pay for the flyover in a reasonable number of years (if I remember my minor subjects right, this is the standard reasoning by transportation engineers). People on K R Road, and the traffic going towards Jain college from “north road” (the western part of VV Road) still have to spend an insane amount of time at the signal. People on VV Road have it easy but then they get stuck at the new signal that has been installed at the junction of VV Road and Shankar Mutt Road.

And to consider the amount of controversy that the flyover created when it was built. And the fact that it’s most likely going to get pulled down for the metro construction.

Mysore trip – Table of contents post

I returned last night from a two day driving trip to mysore and surrounding areas. There are several things to blog about, but I felt too lazy to make notes in my mobile. Also, I was driving most of the time, so didn’t really have the time to make notes. I made a lot of mental notes, though, but I’m prone to losing those easily – I don’t have a very good short term memory.

I made two major stops on the way to Mysore – first at Kamat Lokaruchi near Ramanagara for breakfast, and then at Seringapatnam. At the latter place, I saw a couple of temples and a jail and a palace-cum-museum. The last named turned out to be pretty strong. Also, my car started making funny noises when I kept it parked in front of one of the temples. Turned out to be a problem with the A/C. This problem was going to become significant later on in the trip.

At Mysore, I stayed at the Ginger (subsidiary of Indian Hotels which runs the Taj chain) and was amazed at the kind of cost-cutting that they have put in compared to the extravagant 5*s. Then I went in search of the supposedly world-famous Mylari restaurants, found not one but two of them, both of which claimed to be the original, got put off by the amount of oil on the dosa and came out after having had just a coffee.

I walked around the palace area in the evening and was amazed by the respect pedestrians get in Mysore, at least in that area. Nice pavements, strictly enforced pedestrian crossings, etc. And there were millions of people walking around the area. And everywhere I saw boards that called Mysore a “JNNURM city”.

I also discovered that wearing shorts is a surefire way of announcing that you are a tourist. Hundreds of people started speaking to me in Hindi and seemed slightly startled when I replied in Kannada. I didn’t see a single other soul in shorts through my 2-day stay in the city.

Lunch and dinner on Tuesday was at the Dasaprakash, and yesterday’s breakfast and lunch at Siddharta. Got me thinking about pricing and delivery systems in sit-down restaurants (had done a series on pricing systems at darshinis in Bnagalore a few years back). Most intriguing is that “meals” are pre-paid while everything else is post-paid.

Then I went to the Chamundi hills, Nanjangud (beautiful temple), Somnathpur (again extremely strong ruined temples, but lousy roads) and the Jaganmohan Palace. Time constraints meant that we skipped going to the main Mysore palace.

On the way back, we stopped at a Sathya Sai Baba ashram in Seringapatnam after which the rain came with us. We would see dry roads ahead, and would hope that there would be no more rain. And soon, there would be rain. Heavy rain. Cupped a/c meant that the windshield kept fogging, and I could hardly see the road as I drove.

I think the rain got confused when we stopped for an hour for dinner at Kamat Lokaruchi, and decided not to accompany us all the way to Bangalore.

I took lots of pics using my phone camera. While at Somnathpur I was thinking about Aadisht’s 50mm low-light lens. I need to find my data cable now and then I’ll post pics. In the course of the next one week, I’ll also write half a dozen more detailed posts.

Outliers – Notes

Last evening I borrowed Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers from the library. Finished off reading it in one sitting this morning. I had been disappointed with his earlier book (The Tipping Point) and have been describing it as a blog post that has been written in 200 pages.

Outliers, on the other hand, is significantly better. For starters, there is a really nice narrative style which goes the book going. Having read the book, I still haven’t understood the central idea of it, but there are enough interesting sub-plots and side-fundaes that it’s worth reading. Some notes.

  • The second chapter of the book hints that you need to spend a considerable amount of time fighting it out at something before you become a stud in that. Gladwell claims there are no “natural studs” at anything, and people become studs at something only after reasonable effort. I think the key is on taking that step up to studness after you have put enough fight, and some people (pure fighters) don’t seeem to do that
  • There is tremendous non-linearity in the world, and this is a point that Nassim Taleb had also made in Fooled by Randomness. Basically, there are some discrete steps. For example, if I had applied the brakes even one second earlier, I could’ve prevented the car crash I was involved in this April. One extra mark here or there can change a candidate’s JEE rank by 500 places, and totally change his life. Etc.
  • Gladwell talks about “honor cultures” – where people tend to take offence easily. He claims that this kind of culture is more prevalent in pastoral communities where people need to be more aggressive and possessive. When I read about “honor cultures”, I was reminded of Rajasthan, and the Rajputs there going to war on one another on trivial “honour issues”, and Prithviraj Chauhan using “honour” as the excuse for supposedly pardoning Mohd Ghori in the first battle of Tarain in 1190. Was Rajasthan a traditionally pastoral society in those days?
  • The Power Distance Index that he talks about makes sense, but unfortunately India is not mentioned in the studies that he quotes. I would expect India to have a fairly high power distance index, but I’d also be interested in seeing if India’s PDI varies regionally – I would expect it to be higher in the north than in the south
  • A while back, I had written one reason as to why there doesn’t exist a strong breakfast culture in North India. Gladwell’s chapter on rice cultivation inspires an alternate reasoning. He claims that rice farming is much harder than wheat farming, and the former tends to take longer hours, and occupies a larger proportion of the year. Maybe due to the longer hours, south indians felt the need for three meals a day, while two were sufficient in the north. Also, rice digests quicker than wheat, so eating at more frequent intervals is warranted.
  • The epilogue, in which Gladwell talks about his mother’s family, gives an indcation about the “race system” in Jamaica. Compared to our caste system, which is discrete, Jamaican discrimination is on a continuous scale which has several shades of brown between black and white. Also, this continuous scale means that a child lies somewhere on the colour line between his father and his mother, and his standing in society is determined by his own colour. On the other hand, in the Indian caste system, rules dictate that the child belongs to either the father’s or the mother’s caste. Interesting to see how much of a difference this has made in general economic development.

I know a lot of this might not make sense to you if you haven’t read the book. I have just noted some headline points here. If you need more fundaes, leave a comment with your question and I’ll write about it.

And I would definitely recommend you to read the book. Nice quick read it is.

Wagah Border

Ok this post is approximately one month late. Truth is that I’d thought this up almost a month back – in fact more than a month back, as I got my ass roasted by the hot concrete galleries while waiting for the flag-down ceremony to begin at the Wagah Border. My mind had then gone back to the old IITM chant “start the f***ing show”, but given that I couldn’t actually utter those words, I’d thought up this blog post instead. I had constructed each and every sentence of how I was going to write this. It was a maze of thoughts. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten most of it until I’d gotten back to Delhi two days later – which was when I had access to the net.

I attempted to write this post back when I was in Delhi, but couldn’t get beyond a paragraph. What I had written would never measure up to what I’d constructed in my head on that day at the Wagah, and I kept scrapping it. But then, there’s a story to be told, so I think it’s time I tell the story, “in my own words”.

Ok so now that I’ve gotten beyond two paragraphs, the rest of this should flow, hopefully. It was a hot and crowded afternoon. There were three stalls, and one had been kept closed. People were piled into the other two stalls – one for ladies and one for men. It was as hot as a Punjabi summer afternoon could get. The concrete benches were all heated up, and there were the military men who were exhorting people to sit down and get their asses roasted.

And there was the master of ceremonies. One man in plain clothes with a mic. Periodically he’d surface and shout slogans, which the over-enthusiastic crowd would complete. He would drag young women out of their stands and make them run around the place with the National Flag, which they enthusiastically did. He would wave his hands as if his repressed dream was to be a band conductor, and people would tone up or tone down their cheers.

And the people! It was incredible. I had never known that the Indian mango man could be so enthusiastic. There seemed to be something special in the air as everyone shouted and cheered, and danced and swung, as the patriotic songs blared and the master of ceremonies waved his hands around. People seemed to be remembering their mis-spent youths and trying to re-live it in the name of patriotism. It was like going back to one of those wonderful inter-school cul-fests. The kind of enthu seen at the Wagah Border would put the Saarang Pro-shows to shame.

Sadly, it had no effect on me. I stood by myself, in one corner, bored, and observing the people. Maybe it was a good thing that I was bored, since I managed to get my thoughts in order – though I was to subsequently forget them. Music was blaring, people were shouting, but it didn’t seem to make any sense to me. We were there to witness a military parade, which I thought was a fairly solemn occasion. And here you had people who were “letting go” like nobody’s business. Maybe I’ve become too cynical. Maybe a certain libertarian-leaning group that I’m part of is having too much of an influence on me.

I was a reluctant visitor to the border. I didn’t want to go. The reason I was at Amritsar was to see the Golden Temple and thulp the food that I’d heard so much about. Wagah wasn’t part of my plans. My mother, however, had other ideas. For some reason, she had happened to really enjoy the border parade when she had visited there six years back along with my father. And she wanted me to “experience this experience”. While we were driving back, however, she admitted that the show wasn’t as spectacular as it was six years ago.

In the beginning of the post, I had mentioned ot you that I’d wanted to chant an IITM chant. Once the “show” started, another favourite IITM chant came to my head. “STOP the f***ing show”. It was drab and boring. Say what you want, but I somehow don’t find the idea of a bunch of armymen marching and performing drills exciting. And it can be consumed in small doses only. To their credit, the show at Wagah wasn’t too long – it lasted only for about half an hour or so.

However, given the conditions (crowd, weather, etc.) it didn’t turn out to be a pleasant experience. The idea of going to the border to watch the ceremonies was so not worth it. Only a couple of days earlier, I had read about the Hillsborough tragedy, and given the way the crowd was pushing and jostling and continued to pour in after the stands were full brought up thoughts of an encore. At one point, I even left  my prized spot in one of the stands in order to go to the relative safety of the ground outside the stands. I only went back in after they opened the third stand (which had been closed till half an hour before the show) and could find a relatively peaceful spot to stand there.

I don’t think I’ve documented all that I’d thought of when I stood there in that relatively peaceful spot in that third stand. I’ll probably make a separate post out of all that if I do manage to remember it sometime.

The Trouble with Orkut

Some of you might have noticed that I haven’t been replying to your messages on orkut any more. I still exist there, but am not “active” by any stretch of imagination. I check my account once in a long while, when I’m feeling really bored. And make a conscious decision not to reply to scraps there, since doing so will invite more scraps, which I don’t want. I haven’t deleted my account since I’m told that doing so will remove from my GTalk friends list those people who’ve been added because of Orkut.

Speaking to other people, I find similar stories. Most people have either deleted their orkut accounts, or just let them go dormant. Of course this doesn’t include people who occasionally scrap me over there. Oh, and btw, most people are still around on facebook. I  know one guy (POTA) who deleted his facebook account but apart from that, most people are still around. So what exactly went wrong with orkut?

1. Fransips: Orkut allowed you to send messages/scraps to whoever you wanted to, irrespective of whether they knew you or not. In the initial stage, when people were rediscovering themselves and their networks, this was a fantastic facility. But once that got completed, it was used by random fransip-seekers, which drove most women away from orkut. And once the women went away, the “good guys” followed them out.

2. Random names: Orkut allowed people to change their display names very easily, and this turned out to be a huge problem. Some day, you’d get a scrap from someone with first name “going to” and second name “california” (with lots of periods and exclamations punctuating the name) and it would take a huge effort to figure out who had messaged you. It is easy dealing with standard nicknames but when people start naming themselves after something that doesn’t make any sense, and hten proceed to change their names every few days, it does get disconcerting.

3. There was nothing to do: Once the initial network-rediscovering face was done, there was nothing one could “do” on orkut. Yeah, about a year back they introduced the concept of applications and stuff, but that was more in response to facebook after the latter had drawn away most of Orkut’s users. Orkut allowed you to write scraps on friends. It allowed you to write rediff-level comments on discussion boards. It allowed you to find random women and seek franship. But that was that. Nothing to do on a sustainable basis.

4.Lack of privacy There was absolutely no privacy on orkut. Everyone could see what you did, who you talked to, what photos you put, where you had been, and in essesnce your entire life history. This, combined with the fransip seekers meant that people “shut down” on orkut. Away went the interesting pictures. Scraps would get deleted. Everyone suddenly became “committed”. People basically started lying, and hiding information. There was no way a forum that encouraged this could help sustain “keeping in touch”.

5. Spam Orkut stupidly allowed some stupid scripts to be run, and so on new year’s day 2008, i had a hundred messages on my scrapbook, all of them having been generated by some stupid script. Orkut had ceased to be personal. You could write a script which would write “hello world” on all your friends’ scrapbooks.

Once the balance had tipped towards facebook, there was no looking back towards Orkut. Orkut tried some themes, which ended up making people’s pages very gaudy indeed. The photo tagging tool was added, but navigation was tough. They tried to introduce a friend feed, but most of the feed was taken up by random thrid party apps. Over the course of the last one year, orkut has kept getting progressively worse.

If you look at it, some of hte features of orkut that enabled it to fail recently were what made it so popular in the early days (2004-07). In that golden age for orkut, people were busy reconnecting. Finding lost friends and relatives. You would crawl through entire friends’ lists in order to find that special friend who you had lost touch with. And you found dozens of them every day. It was incredible. People who you hardly talked to in school suddenly became close “orkut friends”. New relationships were built. New bonds were made. And then you realized that you had gotten back in touch with practically everyone you’ve known. Orkut was of no use to you any more.

I think there is a business school case study waiting to be written over here – about what made and broke Orkut. And it can be used in that session in corporate strategy class where they teach that your greatest strengths can turn into your greatest weaknesses.