Well, the weekend is here again, almost faster than I could imagine. Time to go out and paint Chennai red…or whatever shade I please.
The sun is out, it looks like transport is around, and all is right with the world. Time for me to stop typing and start moving!
So, till I come back,
Ta Ta!
The weekend Approaches Friday, Jun 29 2007
General stuff 3:30 pm
Clouds on the Horizon Thursday, Jun 28 2007
General stuff 5:43 pm
There are times when I love my office. My window faces the docks, and the harbour just lies outside. And today, the monsoon clouds have moved in. The sight was unbelievable. The clouds were so low that they seemed to scrape the top of the cranes at the docks. And the sight of rain out to sea is one that can only be described when seen.
Truly amazing.
Farewell Tony Blair Monday, Jun 25 2007
Politics 12:44 pm
Well, the final scenes are being played out in the exit of Tony Blair as PM of the United Kingdom. Last evening, Gordon Brown was (S)elected as the leader of the British Labour Party, and the Blair years are finally coming to a close.
So, what was Tony Blair really? Was he a spin obsessed publicity mad crowd pleaser, or a man who followed whatever he believed in, and damn anyone for the consequences?
Tony Blair, at first glance did not seem to be a poster boy for the labour party. A son of a barrister, with a private school education, he certainly did not fit the breeding bill! A music enthusiast, he even had his own band, though he was more interested in managing a band than playing in one. From the very first, people remember him as having an image of cool, rather than just being cool.
The passing away of his mother from cancer made his interest in religion more than just a passing phase, and in a country where the Prime Minister is hardly ever questioned on his faith, Tony Blair has certainly not hidden his own Christian faith and his convictions.
Elected for the first time in 1983 after losing in 81, Blair was made MP of a newly made seat that was carved out of a labour stronghold. It was a bad time for England though, with unemployment soaring. Blair’s own constituency faced unemployment of over 20% and it is Blair was at the forefront of securing rights for his people.
But the writing was on the wall, and Blair recognized that the power of the unions was fading, and made a call in “The Northern Echo” to make the labour party more appealing to those who could afford their own houses, and were in the solid middle class, (conservatives, in other words).
Little did he imagine that these words were treasonous to the old labour way of thinking, with labour MP Davis Skinner calling him a traitor to socialism. The Blair — Brown Partnership
This partnership was initially formed with Gordon Brown being the more powerful person, who also shared Blair’s belief that in order to be electable, the labour party must be more middle class in its mentality. Soon, the trio of Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson began to take on the task of making labour more pretty than in its flag waving strike loving days.
How was this done? Old labour would have been scandalised. Focus groups, marketing campaigns, targeted leaks…all the tactics which they accused of the conservatives were now the tools that the trio used in order to make labour look better. In time, they became more and more powerful, moving rapidly through the shadow cabinet ranks within the opposition that they were forced to endure during the Thatcher Years.
The Leadership Deal–The seeds of Conflict The death of Labour leader John Smith of a heart attack in 1994 was the opportunity for the two upcoming leaders. It was widely expected that the elder Brown would be the candidate for party leadership, but in a closed doors meeting with Blair, a deal was thrashed out. Even today, nobody is sure of the contents. But what is clear is that Gordon Brown withdrew from the leadership race, but he did extract his pound of flesh. In return, he got control of the treasury and the right to advice on national policy that no chancellor before could have had. But this move was made in the background of the switch in loyalties displayed by Mandelson, the third of the trio. Abandoning the staid and “boring” Brown, he sided with the new labour that was represented by Tony Blair, with his ready smile, dialogue and expertise with making babies love him all over the country. There is little doubt that this switch was looked at with disfavour by the Brown Camp.
The Early Years– Everything goes right!
Tony Blair and Labour swept to a landslide victory in 1997, on the promise of nothing less than altering the entire civil society of Britain and the UK. But while his rhetoric was earth shaking, the reality was quite a bit less trailblazing. But nobody could deny the young prime ministers ability to connect with the people, through television, or in person. His smile may have been plastic, but it never wavered, and the grin on his face was a testament to his ability to manage events that surrounded him. Weeks after his election, his eulogy of Princess Diana was a masterpiece, and the phrase “People’s Princess” is one that will be remembered long after Tony himself hands over the reigns of power.
And When Cherie announced that she was pregnant and little baby Leo was born, it sent approval ratings through the roof. Nothing seemed to unite Britain quite like their Prime Ministers Fatherhood, and Tony was riding high with approval ratings of over 90%. And with successful NATO interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, it seemed as if Tony’s voice on the world stage was no longer that of a toothless old man, but a strong and dedicated leader.
Another huge change that was less talked about, but did happen partly due to labour rule and Blair was the rise of multicultural Britain. Not only was Chicken Tikka Masala displacing fish and chips and Yorkshire Pudding, but the captain was Nasser Hussein, and Bollywood dreams was the flavour of the month. (It bombed though)
Things Go Wrong– George Bush and Iraq
With the election of George W Bush Jr. to the White House, people expected the warm chemistry that had developed between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to dissipate, and a cooling off in relations to begin. Strangely enough, the barristors son and the oilman’s son hit it off brilliantly, linked by their strong faiths. The September 11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre were an opportunity for Tony Blair to stand shoulder to shoulder with Dubyaman in the lens of the TV cameras, and from that instant on, Tony’s downward spiral seemed to begin.
Before that itself, Tony wished to ring in the millennium by having Britain adopt the Euro…but that was effectively scuppered by Gordon Brown and his 5 point checklist. The Europhile Tony Blair was effectively snubbed by his chancellor, exposing rifts within the labour insider list.
The initial assault on Afghanistan was mostly welcomed (even by me…I am not a big Taliban fan). But after that, hanging on to Dubya’s coat-tails began to hurt. Dubya’s axis of evil speech did not have to be greeted with wild cheering by Tony, and the report to Parliament about Saddam Hussein and his 40 minute strike capability was a wild exaggeration at best, and blatant falsehood at worst.
As things turned out, Iraq is what Tony Blair will be remembered for. The Iraq disaster was looked at by the tabloids as a symptom of the spin obsession of the Blair Government, and finally led to Alistair Campbell, a long time insiders ousting from the inside advisers council. A cash for peerage scandal also loomed, and suddenly, the knives were out for this formerly Teflon PM. Now, nothing could go right. Even his deputy prime minister swinging a punch at a drunk heckler became a symptom of Blair’s failure. And the image of an easygoing youthfu prime minister has faded with time into a tired and image obsessed man, who has clung on to power far longer than he should have.
Epilogue
Can we write off Tony now? I fear we may have to. Sure, Bush wants him in a middle east role, but there is little trust in the middle east for the man who wanted to be deputy sheriff of the world. And a return to frontline British politics seems unlikely for the man who ruled for a decade. But as Tony’s speech announcing his departure demonstrated, this man still has the magic needed to manipulate his audience. Labour will miss his charisma, and his hand with babies. But I doubt they will miss his policies.
More than just paper money? Thursday, Jun 21 2007
Management 11:00 am
This is necessarily short because this is still work in progress. In economics, we learnt that people hold money for 3 reasons.
1) 1. To buy things with it (transaction motive)
2) 2. As a safety net (precautionary motive)
3) 3. To invest or speculate, so as to make more money (speculative motive)
Now, what if something else is used for any of these purposes? I am not talking of the barter economy in failed economies. Instead, look at today’s world of commodities trading. Here, people are supposed to buy steel or cement or sugar for the purpose of using it. Instead, today, the market for commodities is clearly dominated by speculators. These are people who try to make money by speculating that the price will move up or down…buy the commodity contract, only to sell it later. Thus, they never usually accept delivery of the commodity itself…just buy and sell contracts.
I think a case can be made that these commodity contracts are a new form of money. They can be freely traded, they have a fixed value that does not change with time, and are convenient. However, most people recognize that paper money is worthless unless you can trade with it (exchange or buy things with it). This is not the case with commodity contracts, where there is a value attached to them, which is equivalent to the value of the commodity.
But this does not detract from the essential case. Today’s commodity markets are just another form of money being traded around. But we all know about inflation and money. How does that work in the commodity markets? And does it work at all? Its something I have not got an answer to yet…but it makes for an interesting case.
Bande–From Black Friday Wednesday, Jun 20 2007
song review 2:55 pm
This is a song that really grows on you. The first time I heard it, I thought it was just about ok…but after a few dozen repetitions, its really quite a song. Some people might find its rhythms a bit discordant…but I just find it stunning!
My only problem is singing it…that does not seem to be working out very well .
Back To Management–Bottlenecks and Customers Friday, Jun 15 2007
Management 1:20 pm
Well, today I was thinking of touching upon a topic that has been done to death by the book “The Goal”. Written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who is known for his work on the Theory of Constraints, a cool management idea.
Of course, like most cool management ideas, this one is rather simple, and would be called common sense…but strangely enough, common sense is not really that common. Ok…enough digression, back to the topic itself.How is a product made?
A product is made by subjecting it to a series of processes, from raw material to finished goods. For example, You take some mud from a mine in Jharkhand, subject it to a series of processes, and a few hours/days/years later, out comes a sheet of rolled stainless steel.
The example that I gave was very limited indeed, where there was only one raw material, and one finished product. But a more realistic example would be a car industry, where the inputs would be numerous, from steel and plastic to rubber for the tyres. And there would be several types of cars being produced, from small cars right up to 18 wheeler trucks. Now then it becomes a bit tougher to document the processes.
In essence however, a product can be thought of as a series of inputs, which go through a process, which hopefully adds value at each step, so that you have a final product that can be sold.
What is a bottleneck?
A bottleneck is a process whose speed determines the rate at which your final product can be manufactured. hmm…now this is not as clear as I wanted it to be. So lets try that again with a simple example. I think we have talked about our potato farm. Now the farm sells its produce to the local factory which makes crackling chips out of it (with cheese and lime flavouring). Now, my potatoes now go through a process. First they are cleaned and peeled(by hand) and then there is this awesome set of machines that cut it, then an automatic weigher, then a drier, followed by a brief quality check instrument, the flavour mixer, and finally, the frier. Once the chips are fried, there is a secondary weigher, followed by a packager.
Now you can see how the process goes…raw potatoes go in one end, and chips that I can eat come out at the other.
So let us take a situation where I want to increase my plants capacity…so I buy a whole new set of funky machines expecting to double output. Two months later, nothing of that sort has happened. I wander down to the factory, and all is clear. The machines are idle, because there are only 2 people peeling the potatoes. Only if I increase the number of peelers, can I increase my output. Now, this shows that my peelers are my bottleneck process.
So, what should I do?
The answer is surprisingly easy, is it not? All you have to do is eliminate that bottleneck, and hire more peelers. This is all the theory of constraints advices, and has what made Mr. Goldratt so famous. Of course, an observant reader will ask, so then what, “Are all my problems solved?” Not really, because once you clear one bootleneck, another will appear, and you will then have to sort the new bottleneck out. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
So where does the customer come in all this?
After all, that was in the title of my blog, was it not? Well, I think Mr. Goldratt, or someone else has already thought of this, but in case they have not, here is my take on this. Even if you can solve all your bottlenecks, its really easy to see that it does not mean you can produce all that you want. At the end of the day, you can only produce as many chips as can be eaten. So the final bottleneck in this whole process is your customer. And this is the part that is most uncertain. We have all seen companies with good processes fail. They have finally failed because in spite of all their optimization, they never optimized for their bottleneck constraint, which was customer demand. Thus, any production guy should be given a clear picture of what his product mix demand is likely to be, or he/she is going to be making the wrong moves.
Well, that is it for now…any ideas, as always, comment away.
An Introduction to Science Friday, Jun 15 2007
Today, I decided to begin a new (and hopefully regular) section. As someone who has always been interested in Physics, I thought that my inimitable qualifications (ie: none at all) enabled me to give some gyan on things that I thought interesting.
Well, that is enough of an introduction. Now on to what I think is the fundamental principle of mechanics. Forces.
The first question to ask is, “What on earth is a force?” This is what my 8th standard Physics Book had to say on the subject.
“A force is anything that changes, or tends to change the state of rest or of uniform motion of a body in a straight line.” Hmm…fairly categorical that. But what does that statement actually say?
By using the Bala (tm) method of analysis (ie: reading the sentence), we can break it down to its bare meaning which every one of us has seen or felt. To move something you have to push!
Now consider the meaning of the statement in more detail. Newton (or whoever) says that for something to change its position, some effort (force) has to be applied. Why is this so? Now we come to the concept of Inertia.
“Inertia is a property of a body which resists its change from a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line” (Yes, you guessed it. Its from the same textbook!)
So, coming back to English, we can define Inertia as the tendency of a body to resist a change in its state, whatever it may be. Why should a body resist this? I don’t know. And I doubt too many people do. Anyone who claimed to know why a body resists change has invariably given up in despair or has stormed away after enough “But Why?” thrown in his direction. But the fact of the matter is that for some reason, nobody likes being moved. So there!
Now for a quick recap of what gyan I have given. Force is that which tries (successfully or not) to change a body’s current state (of rest or of motion). What this means in reality is that you need some force in order to start a body moving and you need some force to stop it from moving once you get it going.
This is seen in real life. To move a car, we need to use some force (whether from the petrol engine or from push-starting the dashed thing). And to stop it, we need to press the brakes, which in turn apply a force on the wheels. So that is the first fundamental concept.
Next time, I shall start giving gyan on momentum; after touching upon velocity, vectors, along with polysyllabic words like differentiation and conservation…And all with equations too.
Oh…and welcome to the blog! 
Nostalgia…and finding old blogs Friday, Jun 15 2007
General stuff and Poetry 9:44 am
Well, yesterday’s comment on Amulet of Samarkand prompted me to try finding one of my old blogs…and I was successful too. And I was impressed. The me of yesteryear was really quite a ways better writer than the me of today. Read this for yourself and confirm it!
Poetry…mostly!
Hmm, Nothing particularly eventful happened today. But I have this sort of urge to post something…so why not rummage through some memories of schooling?
This is about a poem which we were subjected to in 12th Standard. Its title was “Gerontium” (I think). As a poem, I don’t really recall much about it, except that there was a line about Jews…and this truly memorable verse which had “Christ on a tiger…and The word within a word, unable to speak a word”.
I could never pretend to be a big fan of poetry. Considering my favourite poems till then were “Ulysses” (Tennyson), and “Elegy on the death of a mad dog” (I dont remember the author), its not hard to see that poetry was not my strong suit. But when I read Eliots gyan, and heard my teacher trying to twist it into something that could fit it into a 10 mark answer, any spark of poetic appreciation that had lingered decided that the odds were just too tough and blew itself out!
I shall not subject you to “The broken tower”, and others of its ilk. Needless to say, I never did enjoy English Poetry class in 11th and 12th too much!
I believe that the least the dashed things can do is rhyme. So, if I choose to inflict “poetry” on you, poor reader, know this. At least it will rhyme!
p.s: There is another time when this classmate of mine set anothers pant on fire (mostly accidental)…but we can save that for a really slow day.
Book Review: Amulet of Samarkand Thursday, Jun 14 2007
Book Reviews 6:22 pm
It was a comment on my management blog that has prompted me to review this book…But first, a brief digression.
I remember reviewing Amulet of Samarkand a couple of years ago, but like most reviews, it has gone into the dustbin of one of my old blogs. But this blog shall be different!
Ok..back to the review
“Amulet of Samarkand” is the first book of the Bartimaeus trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud. It is set in an alternative universe where the world is ruled by magicians, who use daemons to dominate the world. The series follows the deeds of a young magician, named Nathanial, and a djinni named Bartimaeus. The book is so different primarily because of a neat split between first and third person narratives, with Bartimaeus telling his story in first person, while Nathanial’s story is told in the more traditional third person.
The explanations are given in neat little footnotes, which make the pace of the story much quicker.
Anyway, back to the review itself. This book might seem similar to Harry Potter, what with there being a young brilliant boy wizard, and a wizard government, and a story set in England. But perish the thought…that is where Harry and Nathanial part ways.
I will let you read the series and find out more for yourself, but will just say this. This series was one of the best I have ever read…and I have read a lot of fantasy novels.
A Very Side Note Indeed:
For those interested in philosophy, it has been pointed out that in the books, the daemons can be seen as a metaphor for the plight of refugees and migrants in Western Europe. It is pointed out that they are frequently the ones who do the work that lets the system function, and yet are the ones who bear the brunt of prejudice, and who do not have any rights to speak of. You are free to agree or disagree with this view. It just makes the books even more neat though, in my opinion!
Speaking Hindi in Chennai Wednesday, Jun 13 2007
General stuff 11:54 am
Yesterday, I had the somewhat surreal experience of engaging in a half an hour long conversation with a fellow bus passenger in Hindi.
That does not sound so surreal, you, casual reader might say. But let me assure you, Chennai is many things. Its large, Its hot, Its usually friendly. But one thing it does not have in abundance is a Hindi speaking populance. And secondly, the contents of the conversation.
But I get ahead of myself. The man himself was from UP, and has lived in Chennai for some years. His son is an MBA working with Accenture.
Following this brief intro, he then launched into socio-political analysis of the current societal situation in India and the growing inequality. After a side trip into Chinese competencies and a brief discussion on the north-south divide that afflicts the chinese economies, we then started discussing the dog menace in Bangalore. In between there were snippets about the various problems facing the agricultural sector, and the plight of rural farmers in Maharashtra.
Now, for those who know me well, you will know that my skills in Hindi only extend to singing Old Kishore Kumar songs badly…but one way or the other, i managed to speak in Hindi for a good half hour, though it took me several seconds to come up with खेती and i dearly hope that the hindi equivalent for productivity is प्रौध्योदिक capability!
Well, that is all for my first post. More details of my life and times continue!
