Monthly archives: May 2004

By Pavan K Varma

From PenguinBooksIndia.com:

This book is a new and dramatically different inquiry into what India and being Indian mean in the new millennium. Such an inquiry is especially relevant today when the world’s largest democracy is also a nuclear power, a potentially major economic power poised to emerge as the second largest consumer market in the world, and a growing force in information technology. Misconceptions about India and Indians abound, fed by the stereotypes created by foreigners, and the myths about themselves projected by Indians. In Being Indian, Pavan K.Varma demolishes these myths and generalizations as he turns his sharply observant gaze on his fellow countrymen to examine what really makes Indians tick and what they have to offer the world in the 21st century.

Varma’s insightful analysis of the Indian personality and the culture that has created it reaches startling new conclusions on the paradoxes and contradictions that characterize Indian attitudes towards issues such as power, wealth and spirituality. How, for example, does the appalling indifference of most Indians to the suffering of the poor and the inequities of the caste system square with their enthusiastic championing of parliamentary democracy? And why do Indians have a reputation for being spiritual and `other-worldly’ when their philosophy and tradition exalt the pursuit of material well-being —artha—as a principal goal of life? The book also examines India’s future prospects as an economic, military and technological power, providing valuable pointers to the likely destiny of a nation of one billion people.

Drawing on sources as diverse as ancient Sanskrit treatises and Bollywood lyrics, and illuminating his examples with a wealth of telling anecdotes, Pavan Varma creates a vivid and compelling portrait of Indians as he argues that they will survive and flourish in the new millennium precisely because of what they are, warts and all, and not because of what they think they are or would like to be. This book, which will stimulate reflection, discussion and controversy, is a must read for both foreigners who wish to understand Indians and Indians who wish to understand themselves.

( About the Auhtor avan K. Varma graduated with honours in history from St Stephens College, Delhi, and took a degree in law from Delhi University. A member of the Indian Foreign Service, he is at present Director of the Nehru Centre in London. He is the author of Ghalib: The Man, The Times; Krishna: The Playful Divine, The Great Indian Middle Class; The Book of Krishna; and Maximize Your Life (with Renuka Khandekar), all published by Penguin. More on PavankVarma.com… )

Related Links :

* View / Post Your Review

* Buy This Book

More Books From Pavan K. Varma :

* The Great Indian Middle Class

MarketWire Reports :

Plaxo, Inc. creator of the fastest growing contact management software and network, today announced the availability of Plaxo 2.0™, a new version of the company’s popular contact management software. For the first time ever, Plaxo 2.0 enables users to access Yahoo! Search directly from their Outlook and Outlook Express programs by embedding the Yahoo! Search window in the Plaxo™ toolbar. Plaxo will generate revenue on searches performed.

Other featured enhancements of Plaxo 2.0 include the ability to synchronize a user’s calendar, contacts, tasks and notes on a Plaxo Web page for anywhere, anytime access. Plaxo 2.0 also includes a major redesign of the user interface and a new “microblog” feature.

“Plaxo 2.0 with Yahoo! Search functionality brings search and email — the two most popular online activities — together in a single platform,” said Todd Masonis, co-founder and vice president of products, Plaxo. “We believe the new features will be instrumental in the continued rapid growth of the Plaxo Network™. Since launching in May 2003, we’ve registered more than two million users and are growing at a rate of 10,000-12,000 new members daily. The Plaxo Network is fast becoming an important new layer of the Internet, like email, instant messaging and Web browsing.”

Plaxo 2.0 seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and PDA devices via the Outlook platform. Plaxo 2.0 works by enabling users to choose contacts in their address book from whom they want to receive updated information. Users then send Plaxo Update Requests to the selected contacts, allowing the contact to reply either by email or via a secure Website. Plaxo processes the replies and integrates updated information into the user’s address book.

From Plaxo.com:

* Save time by keeping your address book up-to-date automatically

Had enough of returned holiday cards? Tired of typing in new contact information? Plaxo takes the hassle out of updating your address book.

* Synchronize your home and work computers

Keep your information synchronized between your home and work computers. You’ll never have to worry about keeping multiple address books or calendars up-to-date.

* Access your information anywhere using Plaxo Online

Need a phone number or appointment information, but can’t get to your computer? Sign in to Plaxo Online and access it instantly, from anywhere.

* Back up and recover your vital information

Never lose your data again! Plaxo 2.0 creates an online backup of your information. Download and recover your information securely to another computer with just a click of a button.

* Plugs seamlessly in to Outlook or Outlook Express

Synchronize your existing contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes in Outlook or Outlook Express. Not an Outlook or Outlook Express user? You can quickly import your data into Plaxo Online from many personal data managers.

Via Geekzone : SmallPlanet.com has launched social networking site on Mobile Phones (GPRS & Bluetooth):

SmallPlanet’s CrowdSurfer technology was tested on the UCLA campus. Limited to Nokia 6600 and 6230 phones only (which reduces the level of social networking by limiting options, in my opinion), the application uses Bluetooth to find other users up to 100 feet away, and relationship information is made available via GPRS connections to the SmallPlanet.net Web site. “This is true location-based, mobile social networking,” says SmallPlanet’s Ken Torimaru, who led the development of CrowdSurfer. “We are giving users the option to know when friends are nearby and to meet new people with whom they share some common, previously invisible connection, and we’re doing it in the real world; in real time, in real place.”

Related Links :

* Leader: Social networking – comical, phishy or next big thing? | Silicon.com

* No Business in Social Networking | Eweek.com

Rajesh Jain writes, how he is able to keep up with his blog Emergic.org.

When I started, I was clear about one thing: that the blog would be updated daily. And except for two weekend days just after I started, that has been the case. It is a lesson I learnt from the IndiaWorld days: you have to become a daily part of the life of your readers. This is also what I tell every person who I recommend blogging to – have something new everyday. It is not difficult; it just requires a discipline and determination. It daily blogging is a commitment we make, our readers will reciprocate by making a daily visit. Given that there is so much happening everyday and our minds are constantly active and thinking, it is not a very difficult thing to do. Near-ubiquitous connectivity, even when one is travelling, makes posting a trivial exercise.

What has spurred the writing revolution for me is the ease of the blogging tool. Using MovableType is very easy. I am not dependent on any other person for posting to the blog. Once the blog has been set up, no technical expertise is needed. This simplicity of the blogging tools has laid the foundation for the two-way web that we are seeing emerge around us.

Also read his views on Andra Pradesh Election Verdit 2004.

Back to the question. What went wrong for Naidu, and before him Digvijay Singh? In two words, rising expectations. While there is an anti-incumbency element (people’s desire for a change), there’s much more to it. People want a lot more and a lot faster. They want a basic quality of life that most of the Indian governments have still not been able to deliver. Development for the most part has been uneven. In a democracy, there is “one person, one vote.” And sometimes, we living in the cities forget that there is another India that has barely changed. [Read my "Rajasthan Ruminations" written after a visit earlier in the year.] Education, Electricity, Water, Opportunities – we are still not able to provide these to the majority of Indians. And the elections are the only time they can have their say.

Santa Monica-based television software producer Greg Spotts is working on his directorial debut, “American Jobs”, that takes an “empathetic look” at the costs of outsourcing. made with a budget of $40,000, the film will be released first on DVD on US Labour Day, Sep 6, followed by a traditional theatrical release

David Beckman produces the detailed picture of Greg Spots venture in Techcsunite.org’s artcile : Filmmaker Documents Effects of American Job Losses

While googling for Greg Spotts , I spotted the Poetry on outsourcing in ROBERT TRIGAUX’s, (Times Business Columnist) column Short-term reality clashes with long-term economic theory on sptimes.com

Via Slashdot :

Craig Silverstein is the employee No. 1 & the technology director of world No.1 Search Engine & the only company which is giving Microsoft a tough time. Silverstein, 31, left his doctoral studies at Stanford University in 1998, joining school chums Sergey Brin and Larry Page in a nearby garage to build “the Google”. Google is poised to raise US$2.7 billion in one of the hottest tech initial public offerings since 2000. Imminent wealth aside, Silverstein has long been a champion of working hard and whistling while you do it. As Google’s director of technology, he balances pie-in-the-sky visions for search — in other words, artificially intelligent search pets — and churning out products that improve people’s access to information. Just a sampling includes new technology to personalise the company’s Web site; comparative shopping prices on wireless devices; and the ability to send, store and manage up to 1 gigabyte of free e-mail, otherwise known as Gmail.

In an interview before Google’s IPO filing [ZDnet], Silverstein discussed the backlash against Gmail among privacy advocates, the company’s cultural changes and its shifting reliance on PageRank, the mathematical algorithm that has helped Google shine. The company recently renewed an exclusive PageRank licence from Stanford that’s valid through 2011.

After the Google’s takeover of Blogger, for the first time Blogger has made a major revamp. Now blogger.com offers much awaited feature ‘comments‘ , accompanying it , is a wonderful feature ‘profiles‘ which also offers a basic social networking tool. For example if I mention ‘mumbai’ as my location, I can find other bloggers from mumbai ; similarly I can find people with similar interest and likings. Using Mail-to-blogger you can now send the post via email. You can check the all new blogger at http://www.blogger.com

David Coursey writes on the week, why he consider all this social networking as some hype & no business :

These are meant to be membership services that link people with like interests, which is what Yahoo Groups do quite nicely for free.

These things are really nothing new. Since the beginning of the Internet boom people have talked about making money by creating communities. Some have done it, but lots more have failed. For every AOL there are six to ten TalkCity’s.

I don’t believe people will pay lots of money for contacts. But, I can see a demand for the services to split their revenue with the people who actually own the contacts. For example, want an introduction to Rob Enderle? He’s a friend and if I asked him to meet with you, I bet he would. So don’t pay LinkedIn, pay me. After all, LinkedIn is just a service, the contact is mine. But how legit is a paid introduction, do you really want your friends selling you to the highest bidder?

On the other hand, if people can find a use for these networks, they’d probably pay a $10 monthly fee to belong. But not more, unless these are high-value (i.e. sexual or whatever) relationships we’re creating.

This is another get-rich-quick-scheme that will disappear within a year or so. Someone will make a little money here, but…

I just don’t see a very interesting business opportunity here. At least not for “legit” services. However, some vendors are like conferencing that support a better business model than paid introductions.

On the other hand a survey has found out that One In Five ‘Net Users Have Visited A Social Networking Site:

survey of more than 9,200 Internet users’ Web habits finds that one in five has visited a social networking site, according to a survey by BURST! Media, an Internet ad services company.

The survey found that 19.2 percent of respondents say they have visited a social networking Web site such as Friendster or Tribe.net. Of those respondents, half (50.5 percent) actually registered and joined these sites. Men were slightly more likely than women to say they have visited a social networking Web site (21.7 percent versus 16.7 percent). However, women are more likely to register and join (53.3 percent versus 47.9 percent).

Related Links:
Social Networking Services Meta List

Technology evangelist Sam Pitroda tells in an interview:

* Technology in India is urbane, elitist, exotic, intimidating and sexy

* What is needed is that it should reach the rural masses

* There are two reasons we need telecommunications and IT. They not only can only help Indians create wealth, they can also create wealth of their own. Unless we have both, we have no future as a nation

* High technology can put unequal human beings on an equal footing. But this whole information revolution has not been clearly understood by people in India. They think they are somehow not going to be affected by it.

On the other hand, Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist employed by Intel Research, has visited 100 households in 19 cities in seven countries overr the two years, in Asia and the Pacific to study how people use technology

Some of what she learned in the field will be folded into Intel’s design process, passed on to industrial designers and engineers and perhaps eventually embodied in a device. But many of Bell’s findings also raise deep questions about the meaning of technology in an interconnected world.

Her fieldwork project began four years ago with the insight that Intel might have a misconception about the potential users of its products elsewhere in the world.

“We thought, there’s a group of people just like us all over the world who will buy the technology and have it fill the same values in their lives,” Bell said. “I was fairly certain that wasn’t going to be the case. I’m an anthropologist. Culture matters.”

Bell, 37, who received her doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University with a dissertation on American Indian boarding schools, joined Intel in 1998. She is working on a book for MIT Press about her Asian research.

Bell’s project sent her to seven countries: India, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia. She found that in some places, “It’s harder for some forms of technology to get over the threshold of the home” — not simply for economic reasons but for religious ones as well. For example, she said, values of humility and simplicity may make technology less welcome in some Hindu homes in India or some Muslim homes in Malaysia and Indonesia.
* More on Taipeitimes.com…

.

Warren Vieth reports about Inshoring, Nearshoring, Rightshoring & Microsourcing :

The business of finding low-cost substitutes for American workers is getting more complex — and so is the terminology. They don’t just call it “offshoring” anymore.

At a recent conference, the people who help U.S. companies shift white-collar work overseas offered potential clients a buffet of outsourcing options: “nearshoring,” for those willing to stray no farther than Canada or Mexico; “inshoring,” for those who prefer to bring foreign workers to America; and “rightshoring,” for those desiring a custom package of in-house and off-site, foreign and domestic.

For the faint of heart, there’s “microsourcing.” Don’t fire your entire computer department, advised David Elmo, president of Ohio-based Corbus Corp. Instead, farm out chronic backlogs and special projects to programmers in India.

“Getting rid of everyone puts you at a strategic disadvantage,” said Elmo, whose company will help supply the foreign talent. “You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”