Jayakumar Balasubramanian

In my blog titled ‘Am I proud to be an Indian?’ I briefly touched upon Indian’s glorious past and the abundant knowledge in Vedas and Upanishads. Having said that it is very difficult to interpret Vedas and understand the real meaning. This is mainly because the language of Sanskrit is much more complex than any other languages and each word conveys many meanings. But my simple question was ‘If we have so much of knowledge and intellectual wealth, why can’t we use them for welfare of human beings?’. To my surprise, recently I found one classic example for this. Before getting into the details let me give some background information. One of my very close friends is working for an IT company in Bangalore and couple of months back they celebrated ‘technology day’ in their organization. They invited Mr. Satish Chandra (who has supposedly demonstrated power generation using Vedic methods) for a guest lecture. I also got to know from my friend that he has proved that the output energy ...

It was 5:10 AM on 26 th January when I reached Bangalore railway station and I was supposed to travel by general compartment. The ticketing counters open by 5 AM, and there was a long 'hanuman tail' queue in almost all counters. I was cursing myself for getting late by 10 minutes (normally I go sharp 5 AM and stand in the as the first person in the queue) and thinking whether I will get a place to sit in the 6:30 AM train to Chennai. Also our Indian junta was giving me 'dhakka' from all directions :( All of a sudden I discovered a ATM like machine with touchscreen saying 'Swipe your Credit/Debit card and get tickets to Chennai and Mysore' and I was taken by surprise. In the past I have done some case studies about photo kiosks and with lots of excitement, I approached the kiosk. It had a simple touchscreen which had four different combinations for Chennai and Mysore. I selected 'chennai' and 'super-fast' combination and swiped my debit c...

I like only two type of movies: serious and comedy. Since Mani Rathnam's 'THE GURU' belongs to the first category watched it on the theater (after a long long time). Overall the movie was pretty good at the same time raises lots of questions about building businesses in India. Before getting the business, let me quickly run thro' the movie. The hero Gurukant Desai, who hails from a small village in Gujarat moves to Turkey for employment and make some quick bucks. Because of his hard work and commitment (and of course his shrewdness)he raises very fast, but comes back to India and starts his own company. The first set of scenes itself says that 'Guru' is the story of Dhirubai Ambani and Reliance. If not for anything I would appreciate Mani's attempt to make movie based on real life heroes. Long time back he made an excellent Tamil movie called 'iruvar', which was a neat sketch of lives of MGR and Karunanidhi. Unfortunately it was a commercial failure ...

In today’s match against WI, former captain and the comeback kid Sourav Gan guly scored 98 runs and played a significant role in India ’s victory. I was watching the post match analysis in some of the media channels and finally got irritated with a high level of ‘immature’ comments. All our ‘famous’ commentators like Jadeja, Yashpal sharma, Arun lal are back with their useless opinions. These are the ones who slammed Gan guly some months back. Whatever said in the past is completely reversed now and the ‘dada’ has become a poster boy once again. I am not able to understand the behavior of the Indian media. No-logic! No-commonsense! No-ground realities! .What’s the big deal if Gan guly is out of the team? According to me, every player goes thro’ difficult times and makes a come back. Players who don’t have that reinvention capability remain forgotten heroes. It should be taken with the right spirit and appreciate the game of cricket as it is. Unfortunately in India nothing is taken...

The Times of India recently launched 'India poised' campaign showcasing India's achievements and problems in various areas. I am able to see the big-B's TV appearance, huge banners near Richmond road (Bangalore), with this new fad. With India's republic day is nearing, TOI can get some premium and publicity by initiating such things. These initiatives definitely bring in 'feel-good' factor among Indians at the same time there are lot of crude realities, which we need to digest. With over 5000 years of history and 57 years of democracy, I started asking a simple question to myself 'Am I proud to be an Indian?'. After deep introspection within myself I got the answer 'yes and no'. How come I can get two answers for a 'yes' or 'no' type question? I feel very proud when I look back India's glorious past. When the red-Indian tribes were living in north-American jungles, we had a great civilization here. Tr...

I started my career with a startup company, which failed eventually . After reading the 'crossing the chasm' book my Moore, I can map my observations to the chasm paradigm. I am not in a position to give out the company name, but the learnings are more important. Let me share my chasm experiences in this blog. To start with, the company was a typical Silicon Valley based, venture funded startup. It had its engineering center in Bangalore with about 120 employees both in India and in the US. The company was into broadband gateway business, mainly focusing on home-gateways or Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) product. It raised about 9 million series-A and 13 million series-B venture funding apart from the initial angel funding. It was the year 1999 and everything looked so good at the beginning. Before this company the angel investor and the CEO has sold 14 startup companies to various huge corporations. In early 2000, the company was valued about 300 million USD. Fr...

Author: Geoffrey A Moore Price: 17.95 USD ISBN: 0-06-051712-3 This book is one of the all time classics in the high tech product marketing and Innovation. Its been in my 'reading list' for years together and one of my colleagues literally forced me to read this book in order to have interesting 'coffee-table' discussions. As a matter of fact we had multiple discussions and I got ample amount of insights into technology product marketing. This book provides a basic frame-work, where any technology and its growth can be fitted in. To start with, what does it take to build great technology product and how to measure the success of any technology? The author introduces two key terms 'fad' and 'trend' to understand the consumer behavior, which is very key in innovating and marketing any technology product. The former (fad) is seen only among the small segment of people who are technology enthusiasts or special interest groups. These are the people...

Last night I was watching a TV program 'Education in India' in NDTV profit, where a set of educationalists (in my words arm-chair-activists) were talking about the current education system and the discussion turned to giving education in regional languages. Somehow everyone was glorifying the need of English language and telling there is not much need to stress regional languages. When any state government (recently in Karnataka and Maharashtra) tries to 'impose' a regional language, people start protesting as if they were born with English language. Frankly speaking I am not able to understand the reason behind simply 'aping' the west by embracing English big time. Speaking from my personal experience, I learned all my education in Tamil till the age of 17 and I was able to understand things much better because it was taught in my 'mother tongue'. But unfortunately for today's parents they derive enormous amount of pleasure a...

The new year is on very much and I trace back one of my initial blog titled 'The manager mania', where i briefly touched upon leadership and management. It made me think more in that direction and sharing my perspectives in this blog. Whether you are a corporate guy or a government employee,these two words are gaining more and more importance. At the same time attributes of leadership and management has gone through changes over time. What exactly do I understand by leadership? What is management? How different they are? How important for an individual to know about them? Read on. What is leadership? According to me ' Leadership' is all about setting a clear direction for a great vision by empowering and enabling individuals. It is more about understanding the present, visualizing the future and leading to the future. This term can be applied to any particular discipline. Some examples are 'corporate leadership' 'thought leadership...

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...