Einstein: His life and Universe

When I heard that a biography of Steve Jobs is going to come out soon, I was more curious than excited. I was curious to know who is author of the book and which are his previous books. Having read about Steve Jobs's perfectionalist nature I was assuming, correctly, that Steve Jobs might have cherrypicked the author to write about his life and work - Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson's previous work include biographies on Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger. I would not be surprised if Steve Jobs believed himself to be the successor of these famous personalities in terms of 'making a dent in the universe'.

Reading a biography is usually a better use of time as compared to reading a fiction - mainly, because you learn a lot about human achievements and sufferings and also a bit of our history. I enjoyed reading Einstein. Before reading the book I didn't know much about Einstein apart from his relativity theory and his 'rockstar' status as a scientist. The books explains how he got that 'rockstar' status - well he made good use of his fame to promote anti-war campaigns during war time, never shied away from press and gave then many sleazy one liners to write in their papers. He was very outgoing person as opposed to the introvert nature that people perceive of scientists. He was a german jew who hated Hitler's guts, and unsurprisingly was given first-class treatment in US when he decided to live here. I wonder if for some bizzare reason Einstein had sided with Hitler then whether he would have been as popular as he is today. Nevertheless he was / is perceived as the most intelligent man ever lived on our planet.

Walter has done an impressive job digging through letters, newspapers, meeting second / third generation relatives of Einstein to get useful information about him. The last 150 pages of the book list all the references that had made this book happen. The thing that strike me the most about Einstein is that his best work in professional life came during his worst time in his personal life. He was succesfully able to shut down all the tragic moments (failed marriage / failed parenting) from his mind while working on his theories. Here are some of the highlights from his life:

- He decided to not join industry because he believed that he is destined to do something much bigger.
- He didn't have a Masters / Doctoral degree. He got a diploma certificate from a polytechnic college.
- He did most of his ground breaking theories while working in a patent office, alone and away from all researchers and academia.
- Being a theoretical physicist most of his work are thought experiments i.e. day dreaming about situations that start with 'What if'.

Rating : 4 / 5

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

The book, written by Rashmi Bansal, lists 25 alumni from IIM-A that are successful entrepreneurs. The book explains the struggle of these people in starting something from scratch. Rashmi interviewed these 25 people and got them to advice the budding entrepreneurs about the paths they should take and the pitfalls they should avoid.
The book is a pretty average read. I would have preferred if Rashmi had interviewed only 3 out of these 25 stalwarts and wrote their startup-survival stories in long and detail. Instead she chose to write 25 stories which after certain point sound similar. Well to be fair I cannot expect her to write a fictional story with a nerve-breaking twist at the end, but then the book fails in inspiring its readers as none of the stories are well-researched. Most of the material has been provided by the entrepreneurs themselves during their one-on-one interview with her. It seems that all she did was to use her own IIM-A alumni card to get access to these people and interview them in the limited time that they could provide her.
On the better part, these numerous stories tell you that a successful entrepreneur can come from any academic / family / economic background. The common factor of all these people is their strong will - willingness to stick around longer with their creation especially during the bad times.

Extraordinary Stories

A great place to read about what human spirit can achieve (despite all the hurdles that life throws at you): Extraordinary Indians

Narayan Murthy's inspirational speech

Here is an inspirational speech from Narayan Murthy: Life Lessons

This speech reminds me a lot of Steve Job's speech at Standford. Both are must-read.

Murthys and Infy

A pleasant story about love, freedom, entrepreneurship and human values. A must-read article.

Numbers, figures and all that...

Facts got hold of me quite firmly this week when I decided to google curiously some of my unanswered questions. Here is what it looks like:

1) India with the population of 1.2 billion people has only 47 million total internet users. Read the last line carefully, the number belongs to total internet users and not the active ones. The number of active users would be even lesser. Out of 47 million, 39 mill come from urban areas and the remaining 8 mill come from rural areas.

2) The projected yearly growth for total internet users is about 10%, i.e. one will see growth of about 5 - 6 mill users for few years, which is a pretty disappointing figure.

3) Another interesting yet somewhat discomforting fact is that only 13% of the total internet users prefer to read online content in English. Other popular languages are Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Gujurati.

So if you are a tech entrepreneur in India banking on online ads for the business model then these figures will serve a good reality check for your business.

Entrepreneurship and YOU

While reading one of the articles on TechCrunch I came across the analogy that Yossi Vardi made in regard to the current entrepreneurship. He quoted Theodore Roosevelt from a 1910 speech 'The Man in the Arena':

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.".

Something worth pondering about....

A speech

Steve Job's Standford Commencement Address

One of the best speeches that I have ever heard and the best part is that the whole speech is factual. It has happened to a person who is known for beating all the odds.

Rediff

Rediff has always impressed me with the type of articles they cover. They are usually a step ahead from the others. When dignified news corporations were covering Mumbai terror attacks and their effects on Indian people and politics, rediff was covering different strategies as a reply, for attacks, to Pakistan. When news were filled with Steve Job's temporary exit from Apple and its reasons, rediff was covering Tim Cook (Steve's back up guy), his resume and his capacity to lead Apple.

And of course they always have articles like these for personal development.

Do I sound like a marketing guy for Rediff, hmmmm...

Must read article!

The depths Indian democracy has fallen to

Classic example of incompetency achieved by politicians and blamed on Indian people for the outcome.

Happy New Year

What a better way to start the New Year than a healthy breakfast followed by a first blog entry for the year. Yeah, I know I am a geek and I am proud of it. This might be one of the few occasions where I am blogging with no particular thought in mind. So I will fall back on everybody’s favorite i.e. New Year resolution.

For me, resolution means to figure out what went wrong in last year and try to improve it in this one. When I think of it, I might have followed my own resolutions only about 50% of the time every year. But people do feel this urge of planning their lives and work and get the maximum benefit out of it. And I think this is a good idea. Don’t you feel good when you plan something out and accomplish it? But the only drawback with planning is that you lose out on enjoying the current moment as you are always heading towards your future goals. So the trick is to draw a fine line between your planned and unplanned lives and keep it as balanced as possible. You need to know where you are heading in life; however you also need to be open to the sudden surprises and excitement in life. Remember life is a journey and not a destination.

With this blog, wishing you a happy new year.

Mumbai Terror attacks - Part 2

To address the topic of terrorism I am going to ask myself few questions and answer them as well:

Vpd: {laughs} this plan doesn’t seem feasible.
Me: Why not? Currently we have two slow poisons in India: over-excited, hopeless media trying to cover every rat and dog in the streets and small political goons desperate to make an impression on public. I will say Media should find out the most-corrupted politicians and political goons should beat them up (instead of beating poor non-localities). It can’t get any simpler than this.

Vpd: Interesting!
Me: The corruption has gone so deep that it is not going to be resolved by kicking politicians out of the power. Politicians end up making more illegal money when not in power as compared to when in power. Not being under the national radar helps them to churn out more illegal money. They want to be in power at least once in a lifetime so that they can boast for the rest of their lives. And my suggestion is to deprive them of their whole illusion. Let’s publicly beat and insult few corrupted ones and you will see the others straightening up pretty soon.

Vpd: Sir, your ideas and suggestions are pretty harsh and not diplomatic at all.
Me: I have realized that changes need to happen at the grass-root level. And diplomacy will never succeed at grass-root level, well at least not in India with the poor quotient of literacy. Strict actions are necessary to bring change in the system. Have you seen our current politicians and their education level? We should take some drastic steps to get country’s so-called leaders in line.

Vpd: What are your thoughts about our PM?
Me: He is a smart guy but not a good leader. As we all know he became PM by accident. I believe he is learning those leadership skills now but meanwhile the whole country will suffer.

Vpd: What do you think of our new home minister, Chidambaram?
Me: Another smart guy taking up a position where he doesn’t belong. This shows how India has a scarcity of good politicians and ruling party has to shuffle the cabinet profiles among the few chosen ones.

Vpd: What you think about most of the film industry being reluctant to comment on these attacks?
Me: This is the perfect example of my previous comment of media being overly-excited and hopeless. When did film stars become our defense experts or ambassadors? And why should Indian public care about film stars’ opinion anyways? Movie stars are entertainers and nothing more than that. Its time media realized that and helped improve our people’s outlook toward governance. Media should direct their energy questioning current and previous security advisors instead of trying to figure out why there were no prominent movie stars in Taj on night of the tragedy.

Vpd: Why did you decide to come off so late with your comments?
Me: I wanted to understand the whole situation before forming an opinion. Also I wanted to see what decisions government will take regarding the attacks. It seems they have disappointed people again, and you might be looking at a similar after-math of 1992 Mumbai bomb blasts: a panel will be appointed and the court case will go for almost 10-12 years or until people have forgotten about it. They will pat each other after the case is closed and people will have no choice but to be satisfied about the whole affair. Time has come for people to show that they will not tolerate any more incompetency and might revolt, if necessary.

Mumbai Terror attacks - Part 1

To address the topic of terrorism I am going to ask myself few questions and answer them as well:

Vpd: Thank you Sir for coming on our talk show. Let’s start with first Q&A: How do you feel about recent terrorist attacks on Mumbai?
Me: I condemn the attacks. This is all what politicians currently say, isn’t it? No matter where and who you are, all you need to say is ‘condemn’ and it will make things right. Condemn basically means “I didn’t like what happened but I am not going to do anything about it”.

Vpd: I sense anger in you for politicians?
Me: Well of course, come to think of it, if I can get this angry by staying in US how people in India and especially in Mumbai might be feeling about it right now?

Vpd: But why politicians?
Me: Because we pay them for keeping our country secure and most of them don’t seem to have an idea of what they are doing. First of all, Chief Minister of Maharashtra created an embarrassing situation by showing his reluctance to resign from his post. Instead of addressing the issue he started attacking opposition by digging out the examples of when they didn’t resign for terrorist attacks during their power. To make the pain worse, he showed up with his actor son and his director friend for an official visit to all terrorized places. This just shows how serious he is about the whole situation.

Vpd: Sir, you should understand that for every terrorized attack, Indian police and politicians are responsible for stopping other 10 attacks from happening. But people don’t seem to appreciate that, do you think this anger is justified?
Me: Yes, it is justified because we don’t seem to take failed terror attempts seriously. Every failed terror attempt should be taken as seriously as an actual successful terror attack. The very idea of some groups trying to kill people from your country should alert the government, instead it takes 20-25 failed attempts and 6-8 successful terror attacks to get government’s attention. This is very very sad.

Vpd: Good point, what do you think we should do?
Me: Let me start with what people usually do. Most of the religious and spiritual people end up conversing about existence of GOD in today’s difficult times. And few activists will mourn for the dead by lighting candles and rally for their cause for few months before they find a new one. These activists sometimes will even go a step further asking all citizens to be responsible citizens and improve their civic habits. Their favorite lines are “what have you done for your country lately”, “Why blame others instead blame yourself”.
My stand is why people should feel guilty and depressed every time a terror attack takes place. Don’t we appoint politicians for this work? I would like to see people beating up few corrupted politicians on the streets for a start. This should alert the political parties and scare them off with the possibility of another revolution.

Something to ponder!!

Life is like a freeway. Some people are born rich (they drive Porsche) and most of the others are not that lucky. Some have their own goals (destinations) to reach while others don’t believe in goals (driving for fun and for good scenic views). Some like to move faster in life (drive in fast lane) while others play it safe. Given the situation (weather, time) people tend to change pace in their lives (change lanes, they either move from slower to faster lane or vice versa). Without proper precaution people face difficulties in their lives (accidents) and sometimes people get lucky and miss those tough times even after committing few grievous mistakes. When someone gets crazy in life, he bears the brunt of his actions (ticketed by Cop) and thus life – freeway anomaly goes on.

So here is the question, what is the definition of a good driver (success in life)? One who is adamant and drives in the fast lane all the time and reaches his destination earlier / one who adapts to current traffic by changing lanes / one who doesn’t care about traffic, drive in his own way and enjoys the drive?

History will prove us that we, as a society, have admired people (drivers) from each of the above categories. Think of all big names in the world (present and past) and you will find people of all categories. So there is no single answer.

What type of a driver are you?

My second baby

Do you have a kid whom you would like to gift a game that is educational and enriching at the same time? The game that runs on PC and hones building and puzzle-solving skills.
You don’t have to look anywhere else, MySims on PC is just the game for you.

Here are the details:
http://www.mysimskingdom.com/pc/

Reason why I am acting as a salesman: I am one of the developers for this game:-) . My second shipped game whoo-woo!!!

World's take on India's Olympic spirit

This is what commentators have to say when Indian team was walking down the aisle during the opening ceremony of Beijing 2008:

Commentator1: "India is just behind China as world's second populous country. They have more than a billion people. Unlike Chinese, they don't really have a sports infrastructure. Since 1984 which marked the mainland China's entry to Olympic competition they have won 286 medals and during that time India, with a comprehensive population, has won 3 in all. "

Commentator2: "In few minutes you will see China marching with their several hundred athletes as compared to 56 from India."

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