Say no to Mandal 2

The proposed increase in OBC reservation from 22.5% to 27% in premier educational institutes in India has created the big students' uprising here. (The photo is from AFP taken  during the students' uprising against reservation). The proposal seems to be politically motivated to garner up the vote share for congress in the election period.

 

It's government duty to provide equal oppurtunities for all its citizens to lead a normal life. A child from economically backward class has to face lot of challenges in family. When comes to competing with peer group in getting a good education, he/she stands in a disadvantage position. Historically reservation started to supplement this difference. Few percent of seats in educational institution are reserved in quotas for different segment of the people.

 

Mind my words usage when describing, it is economically backward class and it's not caste. This is the place where politics has enter into reservation policy. Linking caste with class is the historical blunder. It's like generalising people based on their sun signs- say Taureans are soft hearted people, lets reserve 15% of management seats for them. Funny, isn't it? Giving reservations based on the caste itself is a joke, besides that these stupid politicians keeps on increasing the quota.

 

The creamy layer idealogy essentially means there are different segments of people in same caste in different economic classes. When you prefer caste based reservation system, the whole idea of supplementing those disadvantaged people in their challenges gets defeated. So, what can be the possible solution?

 

Lets take the good points in arguments of those for and against the reservation. Lets develop a situation where consensus in a good reservation policy be arrived at. My take would be - lets categorise people based on their economy and livelihood. Propose reservation based on economic classes. Update people's status based on constant feedback and update their status. It's not that impossible. Our census does this segregation and lets improve on the system. We have the all the essential system in place, refining the system based on consensus is what is needed.

 

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There is no free lunch!

In push-marketing, managers sell the product with lot of catchy words - 0% interrest, attractive prizes, free articles, 50% discounts and a lot of promotional offers. But in real world, there is nothing called free lunch. All these offers are carefully sandwiched with good finance deals. Lets analyse few.

Zero pecent interest scheme for loans are the best push deal ever I have seen in automobile industry. Bank lends you 50-60% of the entire amount and the loan can be paid in easy installements at 0% interest. Gosh, look like a ready-to-grab deal right?! but not so. After reading the fine prints in the paper advt, drop in a dealer shop and talk to them. They will add an extra clause: you have pay an extra amount for the loan transaction with bank. Usually that works out to be nearly 8.33 to 12% interest rate.

Next is attraction over operational lease and finance lease in car lease policy of corporates. In finance lease, the company takes loan from a financial institution and buys a car for you. You have to pay for the maintenance costs. In operational lease, the car lease agency hires you a brand new car through your company. You have to pay the EMI to the car lease company. Attraction is, when your car gets into any problems, the lease agency will come for your rescue. They will pay all the penny for your car maintenance. Looks great right?! Catch is at the end of car loan period, you are not the owner of the car unlike the finance deal. You have to pay 25% of car cost to get that car for yourself. And there is an additional charge in EMI every month to the tune of the 10-20% compared to EMI in finance deal. Suppose you pay INR 500,000 to buy a car in all-cash deal, the actual cost may scale up to 20% in finance deal (INR 600,000) and nearly 50% in operational lease (INT 750,000). It's all our hard earned money burning off at the end of the day.

 

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Swingers Dance School - Bangalore

Lot of people in Bangalore seems to be looking for the directions to reach swingers dance school in Bangalore. (Google search on swingers dance school bangalore has been linking my blog for quite some time). So here is an entry in my blog for them. Btw, I learn dance in this school.

 

 

 

 

For more details, visit their website

http://www.swingersdance.com/

 

 

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What is it About Shoes?

This post adds one more dimension in trivia discussion 'What is it About Shoes?' in John's Blog. Men wardrobe has maximum 4 to 5 shoes. I have 3 shoes now, one Red Tape for daily office usage. One Adidas black sneaker for all causal purposes. One more Red tape for formal occasions. But women's shoe collection is bigger than man, some say it is approximately 10 times more than men's collection. Why on the world do women need so many shoes? That was a funny and trivia discussion put forth by John.

 

Assume a girl has 30 shoes, which equates to usage of 12.167 days for a pair of shoes. Definitely she should have more number of dresses to match with her shoes. Assume she has 60 dresses, which equates to usage of roughly 6.1 days for a dress. Her collection will have a lot of fashion paraphrenalias . Assume she has 90 other fashion accessories like bags, valets,..etc. which roughly equates to usage of 4.1 days for each one. Now all together she buys 180 accessories in a year. It's a myth that women go for shopping whenever she feels blue. That culminates in saying she felt blue once in 2 days because she bought 180 items in 365 days. Isn't it bad on all of us to let women feel depressed so often. ;)

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Riff speculation & Sensex breaches 12000 mark. Hurray!

ET carries a headline of "Reliance strikes oil in KG Basin" today. Thats not the formal announcement of the oil strike from the company. Just a speculation with a guarantee that within a month, company will announce it formally. God knows what this kind of speculation can cause in already volatile market.

 

I cant avoid getting nostalgic memories about "Not a penny more, not a penny less" novel at this moment. The villain in the novel floats an oil company, gives out insider information style speculation to the market that his new company has strike oil in sea. Four gullible investors invest their life savings in the company and the promoter of that company releases his shares to them. Later shuts down the corp too. Then the plot goes about how those four people cheat the villain to get back their money.

 

Today after this speculation, bearish market will bounce upon reliance petrochemicals and refineries shares like as jackpot. Lets keep a watch on the market for today, restrict to reliance industries shares alone. Last traded price is 920.85 in sensex .LTP on Nifty is 921.80. Lets see how it varies within a day.

 

ET says an Indian goverment official is the resource for them for this news. This is also a kind of speculation, may be good or may be bad. Lot of multinationals didnt show much interest earlier in oil exploration in KG Basin in India. This news will definitely increase the marketability of the KG basin oil exploration space.

 

Btw, I talked about my virtual investments in sensex shares in my earlier post. After that 11th april crash, sensex has recovered smartly in the bearish market. Sensex correction is still not around the corner. My virtual investments has got 2.7% growth for 9 days and its equated annual returns is approx 112% (woww..thats an impressive returns right). Now I can become a mutual fund manager ;)

 

Update note at 5PM IST: So here is the update on today's trading on reliance industries shares. This below graph tells you a lot of story. Reliance shares LTP at close of the day is 994. That means 10% growth within a day. All because -see the introduction lines of the blog. And one more good news, with this specualtion, sensex breached the 12000 mark with ease today. thats really wonderful now.

 

Courtesy: Charts from NSE

 

I am excited in writing this good business article. It happened within a day. I checked in to office today morning. While flipping through the ET, I found this catchy speculative article. My inner conscious told me that this is an important event. I was following sensex in the busy schedule of the day. And now at the end of the day, as expected the speculation brought in a big push for the sensex. Lets see who all else talk about this version of sensex crossing 12000 mark story.

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NBA, Medha Patkar, Aamir and Modi: My take

During Narmada Bachao Andoloan (NBA) recent protest in capital, Aamir Khan arrived at Jantar Mantar and assured his support for the movement. 'I do not know about the technicalities involved in raising the height of the dam. What I do know is that farmers have been displaced from their land and they have lost their livelihood. Till the people who have already been displaced by the dam are not rehabilitated, the height of the dam should not be raised,' Khan said. There were lot of criticism as well as praises for his actions. I appreciate that he could empathize their pains and assured his support voraciously.

Dams are marketed as modern temples in independent India. In the 50+ years of independence, a lot of dams are built to harness the fertile rivers. For outside world, the advantages of the dam alone is well propagated. But there is a flip side of the story. NBA is one such movement which fights for proper rehabilitation of the people (of threee state Gujarat, Madya Pradhesh and Maharastra) who got displaced by these dams. Narmada valley is filled with dams (see the picture below). The point of contention now is Sardar Sarovar dam. The state governments got clearance from supreme court for increasing the height of dam. This proposed height increase implies displacement of 35000 families. Red tapism in government machinery in the rehabilitation is reason to worry. NBA and Medha Patkar fights for proper rehabilitation of these people. From Medha patkar's words, the proposed increase in dam height could submerge huge area comparable to the area between delhi and agra. The damage is quite extraordinary.

 

Courtesy: Rediff.com

 

Recent protest also saw the politicisation of the whole problem. Gujarat governemnt and Narendra Modi successfully projected the increasing dam's height as the pride issue of farmers. Against the supreme court interim order of stopping of dam construction, Modi went for fast, which is hightly politically motivated rather than empathizing with the cause of people. He maligned the image of NBA as movement against building dams. NBA is concentrating on justice to those people who rightful place are going to be filled with dam water. There were protests all around in gujarat againt Medha and Aamir. There were funny quips by some politician to protest against Aamir's forthcoming movie. All I could say is: Please dont politicise people's movement.

 

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Inspiration Idols

Few people born to inspire. Kalyan Chakarvarthy is one among them. He is head of the startup on multimedia technologies in Banglaore. Wonder how old he is, just in early 30's. With 5 years experience in multimedia codecs domain, he floated his company. Heard a lot about him off late from my frens here who came from Emuzed. And my company management leads knowledge on his company and products added more respect for him. Undoubtedly, Emuzed's single minded focus on multimedia technologies got them their space in the domain - where dolphins dread to play in the sea of mighty sharks.

 

Kalyan was working as multimedia codec engineer in Sasken, after his graduation from IIT- Kanpur. The core team of emuzed were all started their career in sasken. After a lot of tea-time discussions and hot thinktank sessions, kalyan and his frens decided to float a new company. Thus his startup came into its life in 1999. All the core team members were leading the different product divisions of Emuzed. The dynamic leadership quality of all those guys brought the initial team of the company. Now ofcourse Emuzed is a success story with 300+ people in two R&D centres. Flextronics, a singapore based company, acquired Emuzed in 2005. Emuzed revenue was around Rs.50 million in 2002-03. The acquisition deal was pegged at $38 million.

 

One interesting anecdote about kalyan. HR consultants in bangalore are known for their unsolicited calls to software engineers.One day a  HR consultant called Kalyan when he was CTO of his company and talked to him about a team leader offer in another company. This guy couldn't control his laughter, said "look mr consultant, I am CTO of this company and you can't get me a better offer than this".

 

Bangalore has best of world atmosphere to incubate the entrepreneurial spirit. The mindset of people here is comparable to silicon valley serial entrepreneurs. Lot of softies talk loudly on their ventures and plans. Only few people got guts to live their dream. Kalyan inspires all of us with his leadership and ventures. Best wishes to scale more heights in your career Mr.Kalyan!

 

 

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Sensex meltdown

Everybody here in India are now bullish (not about market), but about the correction in sensex. For dummies, sensex is index of 30 shares that account for nearly 70% of market capitalisation in BSE. Yesterday, we had seen a steep fall of 306 points in sensex. All investors would have seen a dip in their assests overnight.

 

I am not a fanatic or frantic equity investor, who gets high adrenalin level, whenever stock market crashes. I invest through systematic investment plan in mutual funds in equity market. Its mere a coincidence with the crash, that I started doing virtual investments in share market day before yesterday. Virtual investments are like a game, you invest virtually an imaginary sum of money in shares, track on the share prices of scrips daily, calculate the profit/loss, modify your portfolio and investment strategy. This game will not eat away your money but will teach you a loooooooot on share markets and investment strategy. You can always barge into real trading on any fine day. This sensex crash had eaten away 0.3% in my virtual investments.

 

Here is my gyan on rupee-cost averaging (RCA) and market correction. RCA is a investment philopshy which says you can buy the shares on crashing time and reduce the overall cost of your investments in that share. For example, you buy 100 shares of company A for Rs.200 each. Next day, you found the share price to be falling down. Assume you purchase again 100 shares of the same company at reduced price of Rs.100. Then total shares you have is 200 and money invested is Rs.30000, which implies that the your investment cost on each share is now Rs.150. Avearaged out price reduces your loss and increases your chance of profits. This is what precisely happening now in the market, mutual funds and other institutional investors will buy more in the crashing time. More buying leads to more demand that leads to increase in share price again. Sensex will recover after every crash. Buyers wont buy insanely after crash and will think on the ideal price of the scrip (that is an another funda on its own). This fixing of correct price for the scrips is termed as market correction.

 

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Lovely Monday

Today morning, I got up with a mind full of monday blues. I was cramming in with this media player assignment for a week now (oops....you could have seen less post in my blog for past one week, thats the reason for lullness). Yeahhh, Now I got the media player working (video decoder and audio decoder runs parallely on the given encoded video stream on the embedded processor).Ohhh....what could be the best way in end my day? 

These days week starting are always seems to be slow and boring. I am kinda joining league of oldies who get monday blues ;). I woke up today to feel as if some big stone is kept on my head, not had good dream either. Slowly came to office, started the days work and suddenly some lovely angels lucky spell fell on me. One-by-one all problems got fixed up and I now screaming with joy and like to party for whole night. Catch you all later!

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Why not you standup for National Anthem?

This post is my voice on (rather opposing) the article of 'Why standup for National Anthem' by Rohan Desai on JAM. Read the article here

 

In short, he felt incongruity when he has been asked up to standup for the National Anthem in a democratic country. I believe paying respect to anthem is the only contribution from most of the citizens of the country. Take any country, she spends a lot to give  you and me a good primary education and good society to grow up. Think on whatever we have contributed back to the country till now, absolutely nothing. we grow up, compete in exams, mug up/do something to get into good educational instituion, get a good paying job, do job hops, marry a beautiful damsel from your own town, make a good living with good house & ofocurse good car and finally addup the population and die down at some senile age.

 

Even though our life looks like an independent jungle on its own, but all these needs the support of the society we live-in. Ask the guy who travels in hot summer, he will tell you the importance of the shade. Ask those people who seek asylum in foreign countries, they will tell you importance of being in home country. If all those indian NRI are happy in their life abroad, why do they come to india once in a year and celeberate ' Bharatiya Parvasi divas'. Alright just confine yourself to your room ( which you assume is your bodhi tree!), think aloud on what all you have contributed to your mother country. List the possible oppurtunities where you could have contributed, but still chose not to do that.

 

Hope that exercise will tell you- how bad citizen you are to this country where you live. Leave all those contributions business, atleast what the least thing you could do to your country? show your gratitude to your mother country. Standing up and paying repsect to National Anthem is one such act. Why not you do that? Well, thats the best thing most of us do to our mother country.

 

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Me in The Hindu

Way back in 2003, when cold drinks with pesticides issue blown up, the Hindu had called for public opinion. I had submitted a 200+ words article for the same and it got published too in Trivandrum edition (but neatly edited to 4 lines). While browsing in internet, I had found the published article in Hindu's archive.

 

 

Links:

[+] http://www.hindu.com/lf/2003/09/27/stories/2003092700310205.htm

[+] http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2003092700310205.htm&date=2003/09/27/&prd=thlf&

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Lazy River

I am a lazy river when running in home. I chose to rest and spend quality time whenever I am on vacation. Bad that I didnt get much time to slug around this time. I went to Thirukadiyoor temply for a family function. India is undoubtedly religious mystical land and Thirukadiyoor is one more famous temple in South India. Its was a rustic village two decades back and now become a world renowned temple because of single person. Viswanatha kurrukal who found out that this place has got mythical significance from the past for one's celeberation of 60th and 80th age from some literature. His evangelical approach on this now made this village a big business center with economy spinning around the temple. Though nothing bad in this, I found this work to be worthy mentioning in internet. (If i got that person wrong, then you can correct me)

 

Somehow I dont feel great about a vacation, if i dont spend those days with my nieces and nephew. Thank god, there were also on vacation. One good thing about spending time with kids is, we dont have to plan for anything to entertain them. Just listen to them and those cute little angels will make our days busy and worth braggin about. I simple love it.

 

[-] I couldn't see those green farms around my place this time. The time for summer crop is yet to come. And farms were dry again and its not even summer in my place. Last year's rain god had shown so much love to land and made those people fight for survival in floods. But now just after 4 months, where are those water gone?

 

[+] Office life is slowly drifting to busy line. After four days, I was excited to open my mailbox which was flooded with mails today morning. Just got so much used to emails in life, I am wondering how life will be if all mail service providers decided to shut down their shop and go home. Its like invention of electricity, we cant even think of life without electricity.

 

Popcorn: South Indian Media Moghul Kalanidhi maran going public with stated IPO of Sun Networks. Reliance went public in 1977 when its turnover was just Rs 1000 crores. Its was Dhirubhai's work on ROI of public investments brought the equity cult in India. Now sensex brimming 11000 shows how Indian economy has grown to equity world

 

 

 

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