Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Inside Bangalore city, autos were supposed to be the best mode of transport in a cost-effective way. Compared to other metros like Chennai, Bangalore had a well regulated meter system in place, which was hassle free. Especially for IT employees, autos used to be used to be viable alternative to commute to workplace, back and forth. There were numerous folks who use autos to commute on a daily basis without any worries. In fact many of them preferred auto journeys, given the city traffic conditions. Added to that auto drivers were friendly and co-operative, thereby making the journey comfortable. Unfortunately over the past three to five years auto rickshaw journey has gone from pleasure to pain, and getting worse day by day. After traveling in an auto, individuals end up having head-ache, tension apart from emptying their pockets. Based on our recent study, many of the city residents experienced set of different problems with auto-rickshaws. First problem is about getting an auto to re...

Author : Subroto Bagchi Price: 399 INR Related posts: Book review: High performance Entrepreneur Book release: Go Kiss the world The first book of Subroto 'The high performance entrepreneur' primarily depicted various aspects of Entrepreneurship. If the first book is all about 'work' the second one 'Go kiss the world' is all about 'life', thus completing the 'work-life' hemispheres. In the year 2006,Subroto delivered his famous speech to the students of IIM-Bangalore on the same title, where he shared some of his life lessons with management graduates. This book is an extension of that speech covering many aspects of his personal and professional life. This book has couldn't come at a better time where India is going through a huge transformation. Thanks to economic policies and availability of talent pool, the number of jobs for young professionals is growing at an exponential phase. Well paid global jobs are getting poured into the country ...

One of my colleagues prepared this slide set about Global warming. Any thoughts? Live Green View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: environment green )

On Independence Day, one of the TV channels aired Kamal Haasan's ‘Hey Ram'. I have a long, transformational and emotional journey with that movie. Way back in 2000 I watched it during my college days along with one of my friends, upon his compulsion. I felt it was a total junk, where I commented that Kamal put together multiple documentaries to form of a movie. I hardly understood the movie and cursed my friend for wasting my time and money. After all, spending 14 rupees for a movie ticket along with 6 rupees for the transportation (share-auto) was a big deal in 2000. Cut to Bangalore. It was the year 2005 (Oct 2nd, Gandhi Jayanthi to be precise) and the same movie was shown in Sony channel. I was alone at my home as my room-mate had gone to office to fix a customer facing issue. As no other movie was aired during the same time, I started watching the movie with more concentration. By 2005 I was mature enough to understand the world better and read few chapters from Gandhi'...

Following serial bomb blasts in Bangalore , security has become top concern for all IT companies. While its true that the blasts are not targeted on them, companies are not taking any chances. However all IT companies have private security agencies (on contract) to take care of the facility for 24 hours. I have my own questions about these agencies. Who are they? When many of the IT companies (especially MNCs) started their operations in India, they wanted to ensure their global security policy to be followed here as well. Sniffing this as an opportunity to make a business out of it, many people started jumping into security contract without having proper background information. Most of these agencies hire ex-army men (read it as retired army men) as their chief security personal and started providing services to companies. In order to meet a contract requirement of a company, they need to provide X number of people, which they were falling well short of. So these folks in turn go to ...

My better half is out of station and I am back to bachelor life for few days. Its been quite a while since I had breakfast in roadside Darshinis. This morning I stopped by one such Darshini to have idly-vada combo. Got a shock when the shopkeeper returned 3 rupee change in return for my 20 rupee. Man! A plate of idly vada costs 17 rupees, that too in a roadside Darshini? I am still better off as the 2-3 rupee raise doesn't pinch my pocket much. But what about a daily wager who is earning 50-100 rupee a day? 12% inflation means he may end up eventually skipping a meal? Added to global oil price raise, the local inflation is hitting Indians big time. What happened to UPA's 'Aam Admi' promise?

I live in a apartment complex, where most of them are working in the IT industry. We have formed a committee to take care of various aspects like resident grievances,moderating accounts, maintaining equipments, planning budgets and organizing events etc. We also appointed a operations manager to execute these activities in a planned manner. The committee has various positions (President, Vice-president, Secretary etc..) which in most of the cases held by folks who are in entry/middle level management positions in IT industry. These folks use 'corporate lingo' in every other opportunity they get. Recently I came across couple of interesting scenes. Scene 1: Operations manager's resignation Last Sunday Mr.President of the association called for an 'urgent' meeting to announce the resignation of the operations manager. Here is what he has to say: "This is to inform you that our operations manager X has resigned from his current position. He got such a lucrative o...

I was supposed to post this entry last week. As I was not well, it got delayed by a week. Hope it is not too late to write about IPL. The first edition of Indian Premier League (IPL) concluded last week with Rajastan Royals emerging as champions. The Royals played excellent cricket in each department as a team with very few super starts. Of course one cannot rule out the great leadership provided by Shane Warne to these young lads. In spite of having many of hard-hitting players like Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Symonds, Shahid Afridi, Herschell Gibbs the Hyderabad Deccan chargers finished last in the tally. This once again proves my belief that I don't need a team with super heroes to do great things. All I require is a committed set of young players, who can perform well as a team. Ever since IPL was announced, it paved way for lot of media coverage and controversies around it. Many called it as a total money spinner with cricket given a backset and auctioning players was consi...

Check out my post on Toilets in Indian trains before reading this. Yesterday I was in Bangalore railway station to receive my parents. As I was wandering in the waiting room, found the photograph (see the pic below) of the letter written by Akil Chandra Sen. Small initiative, big difference!

This morning I was reading June edition of 'Business world' and found an interesting article titled 'Bilingual Way'. The article talks about a survey conducted by National University of Education Planning and Administration. The survey shows that 74% increase in the number of enrollments from 5.47 million students in 2003-2004 to 9.51 million in 2005-2006 -- in upper-primary sections of English medium schools across India. The article goes on saying that the results has come at the cost of regional languages like Marathi, Telugu and Kannada and suggests that its time we moved away from the 'either or' debate and lookat bilingualism as a real alternative for education. The BW article has given statistical evidence, which is in sync my previous blog post .

Even today Indians are living a pseudo life! Be it color of the skin or language, we tend to 'ape' whatever the westerners do. Let me give some examples: Fair is beautiful When it comes to beauty in a person, it is often equated with how fair his or her skin is. Yes! It is unfortunate but a reality. Check out this advertisement from fair and lovely site. A girl, who is a theatre artist gets no audience because she is not having a fair skin. By using fair and lovely cream, she gets fair skin in 8 weeks. Followed by that she becomes a great artist. What is the message conveyed? Be fair, Be beautiful and be famous. When parents are discussing possible proposals for their son/daughter, the color of the skin becomes one important parameter for shortlisting a person. In case of a person not having a fair skin, it is described as 'weatish complexion but beautiful'. Apart from being beautiful, fair skin is considered as rich, superior, posh and civilized. On the other hand, if...

Found this interesting information in Bangalore majestic station's waiting room: Akhil Chandra Sen, a passenger wrote the following letter to Indian railways in the year 1909. I am arriving by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with 'lotah' in one hand and 'dhoti' in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on platform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger goes to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honor to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers. During those days there were no toilet facility inside trains and the letter made railways introduce them. Many times think 'what difference it is going to make?' and start acc...

Karnataka state assembly polling was held today. I got an opportunity to vote for the first time. Fortunately the election commission announced that citizens can a use a list of identity proofs (apart from electoral ID cards) for voting. For the past two weeks I tried to get the electoral ID cards, but no success. Long queues, screwed up computer system, incorrect entry of my name in two different wards made my life miserable. In spite of spending more than 7 hours I was not able to get the card. Luckily, using the PAN card and voter's slip I was able to vote today (see picture below). I have been staying out of my hometown for the past 10 years. Initial 4 years went for engineering education. After that I came to Bangalore and tried to get my name enrolled into the electoral list for quite some time. During last assembly election I was not able to get proper contact information and missed the chance. This time I made it a point to do it without fail. Fortunately things were much e...

Its interesting to observe the way we Indians think! We apply logic and build complex software. But forget to apply basic common sense in many aspects. Following are some simple examples from Bangalore: Nobody talks about laying proper roads to Bangalore International airport before opening it. The airport construction is complete now. But it takes more time to reach the airport by road than the flying time to Chennai. Out of the blue another set of activists, workers, media talk about 'What to do with HAL airport?'. The majority of the road traffic (during the office hours) is due to knowledge workers traveling to ITPL and electronic city. Yet the proposed metro rail route is not covering both the places. Always IT employees complain about not getting autos to reach their homes. Auto drivers complain about not getting 'savari' all the times. More demand, more supply! But still there is a problem. How come one third of cubbon road can be declared as 'auto lane...

I understood quite a lot of things by observing people who attend landmark forum. Primarily the educated, upper-middle class, urban population attend this and they don't have any clue of what life is all about. The materialistic life style has taken toll totally, which makes them live a miserable life with wrong perceptions, notions and beliefs. Suddenly they realize that the situation it out of control and start thinking about 'one-stop' solution for all their problems. They look for one 'thread' on which they can hang on for rest of their life and forget their worries. The start identifying the thread by attending course like: Landmark forum, Art of living, Ramdev yoga and then getting associated with them. Other examples include: Kanchi ashram,ISKCON, Saibaba ashram, Aurobindo ahsram, Amritanandamayi etc. In a way all these organizations and courses teach almost the same universal values like: humility, responsibility, community service, treating everybody equal,...

It’s been 6 months since I attended Landmark Forum in Bangalore. For people who don't know what this is all about please check out this link . I have mixed opinions about the course. Let me share my first set of thoughts about this course. Let me explain the course structure first. It’s basically a three day plus one evening course primarily focused on personal transformation. Each day starts about 9 AM in the morning (sharp) and goes on till 11 PM in the night, with grueling sessions. Each day has only very few break in between, that too at odd timings (11 AM, 3 PM and 7 PM). A well trained ‘forum leader' will be leading the course for about 400 participants. He has a pre-defined courseware and speaks non-stop for all the three days. These leaders are extremely smart people and ruthless in expressing their viewpoints. The landmark education forum has internal methods of identifying, coaching and grooming these leaders. Coming to the course contents, it’s completely a westerniz...

In 2002, I visited USA for the first time. During transit I spent some time in Singapore and Hong-Kong. I was totally shocked to see the great infrastructure, well defined rules, robust systems and responsible individuals. After I got back to India , I was frustrated and disgusted to see the Indian system. We Indians just don’t follow any rules; Even if we follow, it is short lived. Take example of Indian roads: We can’t lay good roads; Even if we lay, we will not maintain it; within months, the newly built road will have numerous potholes; Added to that we spit, throw garbage, urinate on it and make sure it is spoilt to the maximum. This phenomenon is very unique in the subcontinent. Take the well developed western world, Middle Eastern and south East Asian countries – they all well built and properly maintained. After some more experiences, I learned that it all finally boils down to an individual’s behavior. Even though Indians are as smart as anyone else in the world, w...

Recently came across couple of interesting experiences, which prompted me to write this post. Scene 1: Bangalore Airport I was waiting in a long queue for checking in and came across Cafe coffee day joint. This is supposedly an exclusive one inside the airport, where the coffee is priced higher than their outside joints. There was a dust-bin kept outside the shop and I was totally shocked to see the state (see the picture below). This is the behavior of 'so-called' -- educated, elite, urban, upper-middle class people who are engineers, doctors, businessmen by profession. They can afford to pay 50 INR for a cup of coffee but can't think of disposing the used cup properly; They are representatives of new India and popularly known as 'Global Indians'; They visit multiple countries but just don't have basic civic sense when it comes to their own country; They make the westerners believe that the world is flat but still throw used coffee cups in a...

Author: Sudha Narayanamurthy This book contains collection of short stories, which the author wrote in many newspapers and magazines. The author has traveled extensively to the rural parts of India where she met different type of people in India . She explains how people in rural India are having very high value system and leading a self-contained life. This book contains almost 50 small stories. Written in very simple English, this book explains the author’s experiences. Reading this book also gave me the background information of Infosys able to contribute to the society. Basically the author experienced everything, which made Infosys as a good corporate citizen. However at some places, the author mixed too much of sentimental stuff which I didn't like it. Also at some places it became boring as it had similar kind of stories. I would strongly suggest to read this book if anyone is interested in doing charity in India .

Here is couple of interesting links: "Winning is everything" "Chak De India enters management books" Another movie has come to the lime-light of the corporate world - 'Chak De India' In the movie, the hero (kabir khan) takes-up the herculian task of coaching women's hockey team and finally the team wins the women's world cup. Starting from building a team with complementory skills, the hero demonstrates elements like patriotism,leadership and personal experiences to make the movie interesting.In 2001 'Lagaan' created lot of exicement by taking up a similar story. These type of movies get huge popularity ranging from companies to b-schools. Even though these type of movies are really vital to have a 'positive' thinking going among Indians, they take us very far from the reality. Added to that the movie directors smartly add the required 'sentimental' elements to tap the average Indian fan and make the movie as a box-office h...