Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Last week was very special for me as I got an opportunity to attend the ‘Art of living part –I’ course. Last year I attended the ‘Sri Sri Yoga’ course organized by the same organization and you can find more details on my blog titled ‘Yoga – An integrated solution’ . In this blog I am going to share my experiences and learning from the AOL course. Before getting into the course details, let me give some background information. Dr.Stephen covey in his ‘seven habits of highly effective people’ talks about four important dimensions for human development. They are physical, mental, spiritual and emotional (social) dimensions. He had arrived at these dimensions based on his thirty years of research in the human development, psychology and character building. In order to have an ‘inclusive’ growth, human beings need to develop themselves in all four dimensions. In his book Dr. Covey strongly advocates for having a strong character in order to be effective. This character centric growth wi...

Some time back I wrote a blog about ‘Muhammed Yuguf and Microcredit’ where I gave my perspective on the excellent work he has done. This December 10 th he received the Noble peace price for his revolutionary micro-credit implementation in Bangladesh . I got a chance to read his inspirational noble price speech, which is really wonderful. The total speech was very good and I personally liked the following points: On poverty: “World's income distribution gives a very telling story. Ninety four percent of the world income goes to 40 percent of the population while sixty percent of people live on only 6 per cent of world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day. Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace. Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunitie...

This weekend I went to have Pizza and learned what the word ‘differentiation’ of employees exactly means. If you closely observe, guys out there would be wearing some interesting badges and symbols in their shirts. This time I couldn’t control my curiosity and asked what it means. The answer the bearer gave was pretty interesting. Each new joiner is put into a particular department (customer service, delivery, phone service, pizza preparation, pasta preparation etc...) and they have a strict evaluation system in place. When an employee becomes an ‘expert’ in a particular department he gets a badge with the particular name. Then I observed closely and it was fun to see badges like ‘pasta expert’. Apart from this when an employee reaches ‘excellence’ in any domain they get other special batches like ‘customer maniac’. Of course this is truly based on performance of the employees. This also explains why a bearer who is not ‘assigned’ to your table doesn’t hesitate to serve pizza or...

As we all know India is a ‘diverse’ country with various languages, culture, food, customs and geographical nature. In fact we proudly say ‘Unity in diversity’ and it’s really a miracle that how this complex system called India is working. The roots of ‘diversity’ traces back to Indus valley civilization times, which are explained very beautifully in Nehru’s all time classic ‘Discovery of India’. I have not yet completed this book, but following two points are very important to understand. First, let us compare Indus valley civilization (where India ’s origin belongs to) with Egyptian and Greek civilizations. The Egyptians worshipped their forefathers and preserved them as ‘mummies’. These mummies served them as a guide and everything revolved around them. In case of Greek they worshipped the ‘kings’ as their centre of attraction. Whereas in Indus valley civilization they couldn’t find any symbols like mummies, which bound people in a single thread. So early traces of ‘democrac...

Author: Subroto Bagchi Price: 395 INR For years I have been a sincere reader of Mr. Subroto Bagchi’s writings starting with his ‘Making of Mindtree’ write-ups. I have read his articles in Business world (Arbor Mentis), Times of India (Times of Mind) and attended ‘Ping-me’ sessions organized by Mindtree. I can very well say his writings are excellent almost everyone would have read his famous speech ‘Go kiss the world’ . For quiet some time I was not able to see much of his writings in the media and really concerned about it. But Mr. Bagchi came up with a ‘bonus’ by writing this book ‘The high performance Entrepreneur’ where he shared his learnings which he got from building Mindtree. This book is truly awesome and gave loads of insights into Entrepreneurship. To start with, Mr.Bagchi coined the ‘high performance entrepreneur’ in this book and talks about how ‘high performance’ entrepreneurship is different from mere self employment of small scale. High performance ‘rain making’ entr...

Author: Varghese Kurien as told to Gouri Salvi Price: 395 INR Translation in Tamil: Mu. Sivalingam Price: 150 INR (Tamil version) This is one of the best auto-biographies I have ever read so far. It is about the life and work of Dr. Varghese Kurien. For people who don’t know who is Dr. Kurien is, just think about the famous advertisement: ‘Amul – The taste of India ’ . He is the man behind the Amul brand and the key person who envisioned, carved and executed the blueprint for the ‘White revolution’. This book consists of his experiences, which is truly inspirational, amazing and mind-blowing. I can easily compare his achievements with Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s contributions to strategic and defense sector. The story starts with Dr. Kurien finishing his Master of Science in Metallurgical Engineering from Michigan State University , which was sponsored by Indian government. As the government sponsored his scholarship, he is supposed to serve the government in return. Because...

Last week the HP Asia Techcon 2006 was held in Bangalore and one of my papers got selected for the same. It was really an exciting experience to be part of the tech-con and had loads of learning. I am not in a position to elaborate on them because some of the information is company confidential. So I am just placing my photograph in the blog.

The month’s ‘The Smart Techie’ magazine has come up with a cover story titled ‘the road ahead’. The cover story about the career roadmap for techies and the problems they are facing. Since I know some of the folks in the magazine, they asked for my opinions and it published it as a part of their story. The complete cover story can be accessed from the link: http://www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine/fullstory.php/ZDRE117725379 I am giving the questions they have asked for their cover story and my answers below: Can you explain in detail, how do you factor the big trends in technology into your career strategies? Along with your explanation kindly give us a specific instance of how you have done it. To be very honest I feel the big trends in technology don’t have much impact on individual career. Even though technologies change very fast, the fundamental learning process remains the same. So as long as I have the learning mentality it only had positi...

It’s been almost a year since I have started performing yoga. My journey of yoga started off with taking up the ‘Sri Sri Yoga’ course thought by ‘Art of living’ foundation. Also I got some theoretical knowledge by reading the book ‘yoga and prayanama for health’ . Performing Yoga has become part of my life now. Even though benefits need to be experienced rather than writing it, I thought of share my personal thoughts about yoga in a series of blogs. I am not going to give a ‘spiritual’ explanation of yoga but more of ‘common sense’ approach in this blog. Human system can be classified into three parts namely body, mind and subconscious mind and it is important to understand these things before getting into understanding of yoga. The mind is the ‘active’ entity which helps us to think day to day activities. The subconscious mind is a ‘passive’ and responsible for ‘non-rational’ behavior of human beings. It is always active and keeps recording the happenings around. This recording metho...

When Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) visited India couple of weeks back, he appeared in a TV show in NDTV profit channel. The program name was ‘Bridging 2 Indias’ and Naraya Murthy (Chief mentor of Infosys), Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala (Professor at Electrical Engineering department at IIT Chennai and a famous personality who is promoting entrepreneurship in a big way) and Mr. Manvinder Singh(CEO of Ranbaxy) appeared in the panel discussion along with Mr. Ballmer. The theme of discussion was bridging rural-urban India using technology and it was really interesting. For people who are reading my blogs regularly, would have found out that I am a strong believer in ‘empowerment’. It is the only way to solve major problems that India is facing today. In order to empower people, technology would definitely play a very key role and all the panel members shared the same opinion. Having said that, empowering people using technology (mainly using PC) is not all that easy in rural India becau...

The word ‘Innovation’ seems to be the latest buzzword in the tech industry. Last week Steve Ballmer (CEO Microsoft Corporation) visited India and re-iterated the need for innovation in Indian software companies. From my personal point of view I have been struggling hard to do innovation at my workplace and finally able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. In this blog I am going to share my reflections on Innovation. Even though the word ‘Innovation’ sounds very flashy, it’s very difficult to innovate in Indian software companies because of the following reasons: Most of the projects we get to do in India are more of maintenance and enhancement type. Since the technology is already matured, there is little room to innovate. Since most of the companies are operating in the ‘offshore’ model, engineers are completely kept away from customers. We don’t get to see how exactly the customer is going to use a particular product or service. This also means that we don’t understand custom...

The Embedded Systems domain is poised for a huge growth as more and more embedded devices are flocking into the market. These Embedded devices range from small consumer electronic devices (like mobile phones) to enterprise devices (like telecom switches). Even though the size of these devices varies, the programming fundamentals remain almost the same. In this article we will discuss about building blocks of embedded systems from a programmer’s perspective. Before getting into these blocks, we need to understand that programming embedded systems is very much different from application programming. Also embedded systems programming has a set of challenges because of the following reasons: 1. Embedded systems have very limited resources (in terms of memory, storage, processing power) compared to a general purpose computing device like PC. 2. Because of the less memory availability and requirement of faster response, embedded systems have Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS). These RTOS ha...

Couple of weeks back I wrote a blog about Muhammad Yusuf and his micro credit concept . This trigged interested discussion among my friends circle and finally we all converged and agreed about a single word: ‘Empowerment’. The empowerment is the only way to solve problems like poverty, illiteracy in countries like India and it needs to be done at all levels ranging from family to government. When individuals are empowered, they get access to information and knowledge which will improve the quality of life. The raise of Indian middle class is a standing example for empowerment. Economists (Especially ‘swaminomics’ ) are predicting that economic empowerment will result in betterment. Of course the betterment cannot be achieved in a near future and it will take at last another two to three hundred years. In the mean time it is important that we march towards the future with confidence, pride and patriotism. In these lines one of my senior Alumni Mr. P.R.Iyer wrote an article and sent it ...

Last weekend I got a chance to visit bangaloreit.com-2006, an annual IT tradeshow promoted by Government of Karnataka along with Software Technology Parks of India (STPI). Following are some of the stuff which I liked this time: IP Zone This stall was dedicated for ‘Intellectual property development in India’ and it was really amazing. This had about 11 participants who demonstrated their products (Completely developed out of India) and felt ‘special’ when I saw the ‘Made in India’ logo in some of these products. Yes! It’s happening! Products can be completely developed out of India. Following are some of the companies and their products: a. SemIndia: This Company deserves a special note because it is promoted as a public-private partnership, supported by Government of Andra Pradesh. I was able to see their Broadband routers (One with single Ethernet-DSL and another with multiple Ethernet ports with Wireless) and it was simply amazing. This organization is setting up their hardware m...

Got this information via my college alumni group. This shows how much optimization can be done :) Last week I took some friends out to a restaurant, and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange, but I ignored it. However, when the busboy brought out water and utensils, I noticed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. I then looked around the room and saw that all the waiter persons had a spoon in their pocket. When the waiter came back to check on our order I asked, "Why the spoon?"Well," he said, "the restaurant's owners hired Anderson Consulting Experts in efficiency in order to revamp all of our processes. After several months of statistical analysis, they concluded that customers drop their spoons 73.84% more often than any other utensil. This represents a drop of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel is prepared to deal with that contingency, we can reduce the number o...

Following are some of the books I have read and their reviews. I have posted them in my geocities homepage. Since some of my friends are interested in this posting it as a seperate blog. Read them and let me know your comments :) Envisioning an empowered nation – Abdul Kalam with Sivathanu Pillai This is the last by Kalam and it gives a very clear picture of what should be done in each sectors of India. India as a country is very diverse and only the knowledge based economy will help India to become a developed nation. This books talks about agriculture, healthcare, information and communication, critical sectors, biotechnology sectors. He explains clearly what is been done in each and every sector and gives a proposal of what should be done in each sector. This is a very nice book to understand India’s economy in a very top level. Count your chickens before they hatch – Arindham Chaudhuri This is one of the best selling books in India. This book consists of two major sections. The fi...