What do you do if your income is between 10 lakh and 10.3 lakh?

Indian Government applies a surcharge of 10% on the total tax if your taxable income crosses 10 lakh. So if your taxable income is 10,001, are you screwed?

Well, the answer is NO. And the government takes care of you. Even though this is a fact not known to many CAs (at-least two I talked to), this is how the calculation will work.

The surcharge cannot exceed the amount being the difference of the total income and ten lakh rupees. So if my income is 10,001 the surcharge cannot cross Re 1.

I was troubled by this for almost the whole of financial year, until I saw last year ITR form which tells how surcharge needs to be calculated and the RELIEF the government providers to corner cases like me.

WHAT A REAL RELIEF IT WAS to read it in the ITR form!

This is my interpretation of the ITR form along with help from a book my office CA was carrying, so I believe it is right. But life has no guarantees and so does this particular piece of information in the blog I shared.

Price of a guarantee

Post Office of India has a scheme where they give you around Rs. 1000 a month if you deposit with them Rs. 1,50,000. It is around 8.5% interest per year. If you put the same money in the stocks at the same time as you hand it over to the post office, the worst of mutual funds nowdays give 15% returns in an year i.e. around Rs. 1800 per month instead of Rs. 1000.

Why does the Post Office do this?

Its the price of a guarantee. Post Office pledges you that they will keep your money safe and give you 1000 per month irrespective of the market conditions. Thats their Price of a Guarantee.

White Coat Hypertension

Wikipedia gives the following definition of White Coat Hypertension:

White coat hypertension is a phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in a clinical setting but not when recorded by themselves at home. It is believed that this is due to the anxiety some people experience during a clinic visit.

I got to know this phenomenon when my wife and myself went to the doctor to get my BP checked. The first time the doctor checked it came out as 140 / 87. The doctor then asked me to rest of 5 minutes. The second time the doctor checked it came as 120/84 and the third time too it came almost the same.

The medical reason for the above behavior, as the doctor explained is White Coat Hypertension (even though she was wearing a black jacket at that time, but still I knew she was a doctor).

My wife asked the doctor why her comes 120/80 the first time if there is really something like White Coat Hypertension. It is because this is individual to individual.

And as my wife had said just before we went to the doctor: It just happens that the Doctor has done his / her MBBS and is sitting there to give you proper advice. Take it or leave it.

Thats why her BP is 120/80 the first time and mine is 120/80 the second time.

OneFamily and Google Earth

A friend of mine has joined an Internet startup. One of their websites OneFamily allows you to create family trees. You can neatly arrange all the members of your family and add their snaps to the tree.

Now Google Earth allows you to create Placemarks. Placemarks is a technique to mark the place where you live on this Earth.

If OneFamily and GoogleEarth can combine the two features together, you should be able to associate the family tree with a map created through GoogleEarth and where different leaves of the tree are residing.

Sounds cool when you need to send invitations out to all the people in the family where the latest information would be placed at one place.

Google Earth and Making your Mark on the Earth

Google Earth guys call the process of Making your Mark on the Earth as Placemark. To get started visit this link: How to put Placemarks on Google Earth?

I also managed to mark our Home on Google Earth and save it. I am not sure how to post it but I have it in my collection now. Google Earth creates a file with the KMZ extension. If you have Google Earth installed, then you should be able to view this file anywhere and get to the saved location.

Business Models

While reading about WiMAX (technology I am working on currently), I came upon many posts which said that one major factor favoring Sprint is that it is open to embracing an open business model unlike traditional cellular companies which embrace a closed walled business model. This led me to do a little Googling and find out what these business models are.

Closed Business Model:

You buy a product at a discounted price and you sign a deal that you would use that product for at-least some time during which the company would recover much more than the discounted amount. For ex. For ex. I buy a Mobile connection from a company where I get a SIM for Rs. 1000 and a number. If after 6 months I find company is NOT GOOD, I cannot SWITCH easily as I have given the number to almost everyone. Cool for them but I AM STUCK.

Open Business Model:

You buy a product at a price from the market with no strings attached. You are free to go anywhere, as and when you desire. For ex. I buy a Mobile connection from a company where I get a SIM for Rs. 1000 and a number. If after 6 months I find company is NOT GOOD and other companies support NUMBER PORTABILITY, then I can go to a vendor whom I find is good. Cool for me as I AM NOT STUCK.

Open Business Model is the best for customers. They owe their allegiance to anyone who provides the best services according to them and encourages COMPETITION. It gives them the freedom to try out different options before freezing their likes and dislikes. I would hate it if a company told me before recruiting me that I would need to sign a bond to stay with it for 2 years. Chey......... They are themselves laying the foundation for me to resign sooner than later!

Things that have all right answers

How many times have you come across debates where everyone is right? Many. Just today morning, I was having a debate with a colleague on what is the right way of distributing work among the people by a manager. There were two approaches which we debated on:

a) Give all the features to the individual and let the individual decide how he wants to plan.
b) Give a single feature to the individual and after he has finished with it, give him second and so on.

Approach A: If someone loves to plan for himself, then he would love approach one. He would be interested in knowing what is expected of him for the next three months and he plans it accordingly. This has a good advantage in projects involving peoples brains as the brain might not be working every hour at the same efficiency. Also, you might want to balance your work with other personal things and so on. As long as you can commit that in three months work would be done, the manager would (or rather should) not be concerned whats going on in your life. This has lots of assumptions:
a) People commit and meet their commitments
b) Manager does not like to interfere a lot
c) Manager has faith in the employees
d) People raise concerns whenever they see them, instead of waiting for three months.

Approach B: The other approach is nice if you do not know how much time the different features will take. In this case, if you are giving multiple features to an individual, then instead you can ask him to work on one feature. If another individual becomes free, then he can pick up the second features instead of the first individual. It helps in delaying decisions till the right moment comes. This is also helpful because normally individuals finish the study phase for each feature before starting work on them.

We had lots of discussion on which approach is better. Finally it boiled down that there is NO SINGLE RIGHT ANSWER to this. Instead, it depends on the Manager-Individual chemistry and what suits a combination of them.

Following are the different options that can follow depending on the Manager-Individual chemistry:

Manager: Plans
Individual: Does not plan

Approach B

Manager: Gives Freedom
Individual: Plans

Approach A

Manager: Does not give freedom
Individual: Plans

Approach: ???? Will be cat and mouse where the manager will always try to pounce upon the individual.

Manager: Does not plan
Individual: Does not matter

Approach: Does not matter because your team is anyways screwed in this case.

Thing of the day

While going to my office in the morning, a policeman standing at a traffic light asked me if I was going straight. I said Yes and he asked me for a lift. I welcomed him in and we started talking (rather he started talking :)). As soon as I mentioned that weather has become old and in the newspaper there was a report yesterday that it was the coldest day for the past 5 years, his stories about the press began. These guys need to fill in all the pages. They need some stuff to write. Some of them just call the policemen and ask them about what happened and they would get a story sitting at home. They ask for a Crime Report which is published by the police everyday and make their stories out of it.

This reminds me of the famous saying:

Is duniya ka kya hai sabse bada gam
Ki uska gam hai mere gam se kam

Even if half of this negative energy could be converted into positive, India would march ahead at double its current speed.

Thing of the day

I had gone for the monthly hair-cutting ritual to my nearby barber shop. After the usual wait for a few minutes and enjoying the sun for the first time this winter, my turn came to get the hair cut. As I was getting it done, a young man was getting a massage done on the nearby seat. It was an interesting process. The person doing the massage took a machine, put it across his hands (like a glove which is open at the fingers) and plugged it into a socket. When he switched on the power, the machine started vibrating and so did his hand. He then used that vibration to do the massage on different parts of the body of the person. Saw such a machine for the first time....

Thing of the day

While watching Navjot Singh Sidhu on Aap Ki Adalat, I was amazed by the changes he has gone through his life. If he really changed the way he portrays, then he has done a great job. One incidence, about his meeting with Shahrukh 25 years back when Shahrukh was not a super-star, which was striking was:

I do not compete with anyone. I compete only with myself.

Call this comment arrogance of Shahrukh or his supreme belief in his abilities, the place where he sits today is really appreciable.

It also completely cuts the negative energy that might be present in your life totally.

As Sidhu puts it aptly in his own style:

Duniya ka sabse bada kya hai rog,
yeh soch ke mere baare mein kya kahenge log

Thing of the day

While coming back from our walk after lunch, I noticed a person having a Tata Indigo get out of his car. When he got out of this car, the windows of the driver seat were half open. After he was out, he started walking towards a shop nearby. Then he pressed the Auto Lock button on the keys. As soon as he pressed that, the windows also closed. This was something I did not know. I always need to check manually the windows of the car when I go back home. Sometimes I need to come back at mid-night to confirm that windows are closed.