An India that Deserves Better

It was in May of 2004 when I’d first blogged about a New, Improved India, based on the belief that a highly-educated economist being elected as the PM would help change India for the better.   India did change, but not for the better. 

Within a few months, it had become evident that the Dr. Singh who was responsible for the visionary practices of globalization and liberalisation was not the Dr. Singh who was now the alleged “leader” of the country.  In fact, over the next few years, India would see multiple scams surfacing, each trying to outdo its predecessor in terms of the millions and billions it amassed for its kingpins.  And, the famous Dr. Singh was reduced to being no more than a mouthpiece for the venerable “G” clan – if at all he ever spoke!

Like thousands of others, I too saw a glimmer of hope when, a few months ago, a frail old man in a “Gandhi” cap – Anna Hazare – decided to take on the cause of “India Against Corruption” by declaring a fast-unto-death in the capital of the country.  He was doing so, in support of the Lokpal Bill that proposed strong measures against corrupt practices. 

Frankly, the amount of activity online (Twitter, etc.) and on-ground, at the time, was a surprise to most of us.  But, the Govt. managed to postpone the problem by seeking some time to correct its steps and table the Bill.  Not one to give up easily, Anna promised that if suitable measures were not taken, he will return on 16th Aug – a day after India’s independence day.

What was eventually drafted by the ruling government was a completely stripped-down version of the Bill, with ommission or reduced liability for key stakeholders like the PM’s office and members of parliaments, and strict punishments for those who “wrongly” make an allegation of corruption!  And, true to his word, Anna was back.

By this time, however, the man had become a movement…

India Against Corruption was now a full-fledged initiative that sparked the imagination of millions of Indians, both here and abroad.  Twitter was abuzz with activity around hashtags like #anna and #janlokpal.  Thousands of people in most major towns responded to Anna’s call of jail bharo (fill the prisons), to mark their protest against the prevalent corruption.  Retired IPS officers and High Court judges were pledging their support in public.  Even NRIs were flying down from across the globe, in a show of solidarity! 

Enough and more has been written about how India is a country that is too large and diverse to manage.  And, about how every coalition government has to make tradeoffs that may not be acceptable.  But today, for the first time, I feel that as a people, we have had enough.  The citizens of India are demanding a better government.  The citizens of India – youth and disabled included – are bunking classes and taking leave from work, to show up for candle marches and protest gatherings, at places like Azad Maidan and Tihar Jail… 

800+ voluntarily got themselves jailed in Mumbai, just a few days ago.   Thousands have been detained in Tihar Jail already.  Hundreds of thousands are spreading awareness via SMS and tweets, to their friends and family.  1.5 million have pledged their support via the Facebook group – Jai Ho!  And, more than 13 million have registered their voice of dissent via missed calls, as reported by the IAC website.

Yes, some of us are still wishing that this is just a phase, and that “this too shall pass”.  Some of us are still squabbling over semantics, and questioning the “unparliamentary” manner in which this movement has grown from strength to strength.  Some of us are still arguing that as long as we continue to grease palms to expedite things, we have no right to protest against corrupt practices.

But, there is no denying that, what started as one man’s fight for an India that deserved more, has become a movement for which Anna is but a symbol – a face.  Nearly a century ago, a man named M.K. Gandhi taught us that you can shake a nation from its slumber, and oust a colonial ruler, by non-violent means. Today, Anna is using those means to re-ignite a spark in millions.  And, he’s doing more for our society than most of us ever will in our lifetime.

I support Anna because Life is hard as it is, and for decades, we Indians have (mistakenly) lived with the belief that we are like this only.  I support Anna because it takes a lot to get the youth of our country to even care about what’s happening to it.  I support Anna because he may be our only hope, in our fight against corruption and injustice, and an ineffective government.  I support Anna because, years later, when my grandchildren ask me if I had any role to play in the “freedom struggle” of my time, I want to be able to say “Yes, I did!”

I do hope that this flame does not die out too soon… for your sake and mine.

Read Also:
Wikipedia on Jan Lokpal Bill (Anti Corruption) of India
Answering Anna’s critics: 10 posers and rebuttals

All We Need

Thanks to a re tweet, I chanced upon a wonderful blog post by Anirban, entitled Driftwood.  In it, he shares a very personal account of how we cope with the tragedies of our lives.  It was beautifully written and poignant, almost poetry in prose form…

And so the waves come crashing down on us. With marriage. With graduation. With a job or a promotion. On buying a house. With the first steps of an infant. With the scaling of every personal Mount Everest.

There is no unalloyed joy in this world, no hope, no freedom, no solace – once you have lost someone you truly love.

Anirban’s words will ring true for many of us.  Yes, we all have our own unique ways to cope with our losses.  But, in the end, we are all united in the truth that there’s not much we can do about it…

On weekends you call relatives up. Just as they state the plain truth that they are getting older, you either bluff your way through the conversation by telling them that nothing will ever happen to them or you berate them for not taking better care of themselves. The deception and the anger are your strange way of compensating for the impotence of not being able to do anything at all.

One day you are speaking to a loved one. The next day he or she is gone forever. You know that tomorrow it could be someone else. And the day after, it will be someone else. And one day it will be you.

Driftwood was an affirmation of my belief that Life should be lived to the fullest, every single moment!  That, we cannot choose our circumstances, only how we react to them.  That, all things come to an end, good and bad.  That, all we need is love.

How to move from Nokia to Android

I switched to the superb Android platform a couple of years ago, and within days, it was evident that there would be no going back to the “Nokia” days.  However, the wife’s phone was still a Nokia.  And, it was getting increasingly frustrating to work with.  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she agreed to make the switch.

I spent a good part of Sunday moving all her critical information from her old Nokia to the new Android phone.  While Nokia makes it a breeze to switch phones from one of their models to another, try doing it across platforms and you’ll soon be tearing your hair out!  Short story – Nokia doesn’t play nice with anything else.

So, here’s how you can get rid of your Nokia phone and move to a nice Android smartphone…

Before we get started, make sure you have a Windows PC (yes, Nokia still doesn’t support Mac OS X!!!) with the latest copy of the infamous Ovi suite installed.  You can download it for free from the Nokia site.  You will also need Outlook installed on your PC, to make it easier to send your info to Gmail’s services.

If you’re moving to Android, I also suggest you set up a new Gmail account only to use with your phone for the purpose of Contacts and Calendar sync.  That way, your phonebook will not get cluttered with the thousands of email ids already stored as contacts in your primary gmail account.

Once you’ve got the Ovi suite up and running, do the following:

- Connect your Nokia handset to your PC, using a USB cable, and Backup your phone!
- Go to Sync settings and enable Sync with Outlook for Calendar, Contacts and Tasks
- Enable sync for Messages if you’re keen on also getting your messages off your phone
- Now, run the Sync operation till complete
- Disconnect phone and exit Ovi
- Launch Outlook to ensure that Calendar/Contacts/Tasks are all in
- In Outlook, File/Import Export and export these to DOS comma separated files (CSV)
- Launch your newly-setup Gmail account, go to Settings and import Contacts from the CSV file
- Launch said account’s Calendar, go to Settings and import Calendar entries from the CSV file
- If you want to set up Tasks in Gmail too, you may have to add each task manually

(If you have a lot of recurring events or complex entries in your Calendar, you may have to run a sanity check on Google Calendar to ensure the recurrence and notifications are as intended.  Also, if you do setup Tasks in your Google account, you can use the GTask app to sync those with your phone.)

Now, you’re all set to import all this information to your handset.  Start your new Android phone (with wifi on or an active net connection), setup your newly-created Gmail account as the base/default account, and the phone will automatically sync your Contacts and Calendar to your phone!

The best part of this setup is that, once this is done, all new Contact/Calendar entries created using your phone in the said Gmail account will autosync to the cloud, eliminating the need for backups altogether! 

If you’d like to export your Messages to the new phone as well, you can try using a combination of Nokia2AndroidSMS (PC) and SMSBackup and Restore (Android), but for some reason, that didn’t work for me.  If all you want to do it save those Inbox messages in an accessible format, just in case you need some of that info, you can instead download NBUExplorer from SourceForge, and point it to your full-backup Nokia file, from which you can access all your messages.

If you use Notes actively, and would like to move that to the cloud as well, look no further than SimpleNote.  The web service works with just about anything, including MNotes on Android and JustNotes on Mac.  You’ll just have to add your old Notes, one by one, to get started.

So, that takes care of all your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes. 

Bye bye data backups.  Bye bye Nokia…

Read Also: Moving to Android: Essential Guide

Innovation vs Quality

Thanks to a friend sharing a link on FB, I chanced upon an interesting post on the VC Circle blog entitled ‘Status Quo Police‘ by Adam Hartung.  The writeup covers many aspects of innovation in large scale enterprise, and the impediments that innovators face.  What particularly interested me was Hartung’s argument on how Quality systems and practices can often become the biggest obstacles to Innovation:

Quality – Who can argue with the need to have quality? Total Quality Management (TQM,) Continuous Improvement (CI,) and Six Sigma programs all have been glorified by companies hoping to improve product or service quality. If you’re trying to fix a broken product, or process, these work pretty well at helping everyone do their job better.

But these programs live with the mantra “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Measure everything that’s important.” If you’re innovating, what do you measure? If you’re in a new technology, or manufacturing process, how do you know what you really need to do right? If you’re in a new market, how do you know the key metric for sales success?

The key to success isn’t to have critical metrics and measure performance on a graph, but rather to learn from everything you do – and usually to change. Quality people hate this, and can only stand in the way of trying anything new because you don’t know what to measure, or what constitutes a “good” measure.

Now, I’ve spent a fair bit of my working life as a Six Sigma / Quality champion, and an even longer tenure developing cutting-edge Technology solutions for organizations.  Given my background, I always viewed Systems and Processes as two sides of the same coin.  In fact, I believed that real success in one depended on success in the other. 

But, Hartung has a point.

If you go by the classical approach, practitioners of Quality typically stick to the “what gets measured, gets improved” argument and, therefore, are unable to get a good grip around ideas that reek of blue-sky thinking and innovation.  How ironic that the champions of Change become obstacles to change itself!

On the other hand, innovators have to contend with uncharted territories and unknown experiences, often-times operating in an environment that does not understand their unique needs.  As Hartung elaborates:

… When you’re innovating, what you don’t know far exceeds what you know. You don’t know the market size, the price that people will pay, the first year’s volume (much less year 5,) the direct cost at various volumes, the indirect cost, the cost of marketing to obtain customer attention, the number of sales calls it will take to land a sale, how many solution revisions will be necessary to finally put out the “right” solution, or how sales will ramp up quarterly from nothing. So to create a business plan, you have to guess.

Everything done to efficiently run the old business is irrelevant when it comes to innovation.

When you think about it, for any organization to succeed, it must achieve a fine balance – between maintaining status quo and forging a new path, between encouraging new ideas and rewarding evolutionary growth, and ultimately, between Quality and Innovation.  Easier said than done, don’t you think?

The Price of Progress

A post by Neeraj pointed me to an interesting NY Times writeup called “The Twitter Trap“.

In it, Bill Keller describes his observations on the wonders of modern Technology, and how they impact our lives… sometimes, not so favourably.

I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, and I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that the Web reaches and engages a vast, global audience, that it invites participation and facilitates — up to a point — newsgathering. But before we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves…

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

By day, I lead a team that goes by the name of Business Solutions & Innovation, where we focus on leveraging Technology to improve customer engagement across a diversified range of financial services.  So, I am well acquainted with the benefits that Technology and Innovation offer.  But, I am also acutely aware of the downside.

Keller touches upon my fears in his essay, too: 

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

The choice of poison differs, but the consequences are the same – Email clients that sync every few minutes; Blackberry devices that show you that all-important (and not-so-important) message as soon as it arrives; Twitter and FB updates that refresh on your preferred screen every few seconds, and of course, every conceivable piece of information that is now just a “Google search” away… 

Increasingly, we are all growing up in a culture of instantly-available, always-on, information-overload. 

The “shelf life” of most of the stuff we encounter in today’s day and age is abysmally low – sometimes as low as a few seconds (a la Twitter).  And, by and large, we seem to be “okay” with that.  But, it’s leading to shorter (as in really, really short) attention spans, which demands even faster turnaround times from such mechanisms, further fuelling the viscious cycle!  And, it’s leaving us little time to digest much of the content we consume, which means that few of us are really “processing” any of the stuff we come across, let alone synthesize it with our own learnings and world views.

How would this affect how we view relationships?  How would we define “long-term” in the years to come?  How would this impact creativity – the art of creating something new by combining two seemingly-unrelated entities?  Will we lose all understanding of “delayed gratification”?  What would “learning” be like, in the next decade or two – when all information would literally be at our fingertips?!

I am convinced that if this continues – and it probably will – it will have long-lasting effects on the human race.  Like Keller, I also fear that we may be losing our most essential human qualities in the bargain.  And, that would be too high a price to pay for progress.

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